question
stringlengths 18
1.2k
| facts
stringlengths 44
500k
| answer
stringlengths 1
147
|
|---|---|---|
What common item, which most adults would have in their pocket or bag, has a bow, blade, and bittings?
|
Most Wanted Stuff | Uncrate
Backyard Room
Make more use of your home's lot with a Backyard Room . Ranging in size from just over 5 to nearly 23 square meters, they can be configured as offices, pool houses, studios, or even full-featured dwellings. Each one is made primarily using wood from renewable, certified sources, and has other earth-friendly features like high-insulation floors, walls, and roofs, optional solar panels, and optional garden roofs. Best of all, they typically don't require a permit, can be designed and built in just six weeks, and can be installed in under a week. The bad news? If you live outside of Australia, you're probably out of luck.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The power of positive thinking might be overrated, at least according to Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life . Manson's argument is that improving our day to day lives is less about smiling through our fears and faults, and more about learning to become better at handling adversity. Told through a lens of humor, it's sometimes profane yet often thought-provoking and might serve as the ideal alternative to a spoiled generation and a society that is quick to apply deodorant to a problem that needs a thorough cleaning.
Nintendo Switch
We can't decide whether to call it a console or a portable. Honestly, the Nintendo Switch is a little of both. Dock its 6.2-inch, 720p touchscreen and it lets you play in HD on your TV. Grab it up, attach the Joy-Con controllers, and you've got a portable. Those same controllers can detach for multiplayer gaming, or just for wireless play when you flip out the screen's kickstand. It's powered by a custom Nvidia chip, has 32 GB of internal storage that's expandable via MicroSD, promises up to six hours of play per charge, and gets the highly-anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a launch title. Arriving in stores March 3rd.
Mack Weldon Ace Crew Sweatshirt
For maximum comfort, it's hard to beat some sweats. The Mack Weldon Ace Crew Sweatshirt combines coziness of these lazy day staples with surprising style. It's made from a lightweight French Terry material that's micro-sanded for a soft finish and blended with a hint of Lycra for a bit of stretch. A versatile staple, it dresses up well when pulled over a button-down, or can keep you comfortable when paired with a tee in a more casual ensemble. The tailored fit ensures you look your best, and three available colors means there's one to match your look.
Three Jerks Filet Mignon Teriyaki Jerky
Filet Mignon is typically the most expensive cut of steak, and for good reason: it's widely considered the best. Three Jerks already made their jerky from 100% filet, resulting in a tender, flavorful treat. Three Jerks Filet Mignon Teriyaki Jerky raises the stakes by introducing Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki to the mix. The resulting snack is gluten, nitrate, and preservative free, with flavors of garlic, ginger, and sesame to go with the rich beef. And since Three Jerks got their start on Kickstarter, they're matching 5% of the funds raised and personally contributing to five other KS campaigns, helping to pay it forward for other entrepreneurs.
The Barn
Resembling the classic farmstead outbuilding on the outside, The Barn uses a mix of rustic finishes and modern updates for a one-of-a-kind guesthouse. Clad in reclaimed barnwood and cedar shake shingles, the exterior gives the appearance of a structure that has weathered overtime, while the interior tells another story. The ground floor acts as a garage for the owners to work on motorcycles, bicycles, and vintage cars. Above, the hayloft consists of a guest room, kitchenette, and gym, keeping the barn aesthetic with reclaimed oak floors, a plank ceiling, exposed trusses, and sliding doors. On one end of the loft, a glazed wall floods the interior with natural light, while framing in dramatic views of the surrounding meadow and Teton Range.
Photos: Audrey Hall / Carney Logan Burke Architects
Tombow Airpress Pen
Having a great pen you can rely on no matter where you take it isn't as common as you might think. That's why the reliability of pens like this Tombow Airpress Pen are so amazing. It's a pressure-refill pen that gives you the ability to toss it in your bag and be sure it will write consistently each time you reach for it thanks to the patented pressurized technology it employs. You also get a comfortable rubberized grip and a metal clip to attach it wherever you want it to stay. One click pressurizes the refill for 492 feet of upside-down writing, making it a great choice for folks that work outdoors, write on wet paper, or just need a tough lightweight pen to get their thoughts on paper at a moment's notice.
AirTV Player
Televisions used to be simple. Just flip on the set and channel surf. And while it's great to have loads of options, switching inputs and remotes can be a real chore. AirTV Player aims to bring back the simplicity of the past while providing all the channels and services you already enjoy. Ideal for cord cutters, it allows you to get local channels without an input switch thanks to OTA antenna integration. It also won't require any contracts or commitments, and is a great alternative to the restrictions you experience as a cable subscriber. Download apps and integrate content sources for an easier, option-packed viewing experience.
Tiger Siberian Adventure Vehicle
Designed to support long-term camping in remote locations, the Tiger Siberian Adventure Vehicle can get you nearly anywhere you want and keep you comfortable once you arrive. Set atop either a 4x4 Ford F550 or Ram 5500 chassis, the coach is built from aluminum, with a three-point mounting system for added comfort. The open layout includes a dry bath, a king- or queen-sized elevated bed, a sink, LED lighting, an entertainment system, and integrated bamboo cabinetry. It's powered by 900 amp-hours of batteries, kept charged by solar panels and powerful alternators, and the diesel-powered furnace, water heater, and stove top ensure you stay warm for as long as you have fuel.
Hellwig x Lance Nissan Titan XD Camper Rig
Forget what you know about truck campers and take a long look at this Nissan Titan XD Camper Rig . Hellwig Products teamed up with Lance Campers and added a 2017 Lance 650 to this 2016 Nissan Titan XD diesel overland truck to create this visually stunning beast. Chosen for its powerful build that features a Cummins diesel engine and a towing and payload capacity between a half-ton and a three-quarter ton, the new Titan XD was more than up to the challenge. And while it might look like something you'll only see on the floor of SEMA, it's a fully functional rig that can be built fully using off-the-shelf products.
Motiv Activity Tracking Ring
Many of us already wear a ring — and when unlike a watch, we leave it on all the time. That's why the Motiv Activity Tracking Ring sits on your finger instead of your wrist. Inside its unassuming waterproof case is a trio of sensors that let it keep tabs on your heart rate, calories burned, active minutes, sleep duration, distance, and steps, all without pinging you every time you get an email. It comes with both keychain and desk chargers, gets up to five days of battery life, and is available in rose gold or slate gray titanium.
Book By Cadillac
You have subscriptions for lots of things: music, TV, maybe even magazines. So why not your car? Book By Cadillac is a new service that gives you access to top-tier vehicles for a flat monthly fee. Using an app, you select which model you want to drive — Platinum-trim Cadillacs like the XT5, CT6, Escalade and V Series are available — and it will be delivered via white-glove concierge. When you're ready to switch, they'll bring your new ride and pick the old one up. That means you can get a sporty CTS-V for a trip to the shoreline, then ditch it for an Escalade when it's time for your ski trip. And since you don't have to worry about things like maintenance, insurance, or a long-term agreement, you can simply sit back and enjoy the drive.
Darkr
This isn't your normal filter app. The hint's right there in the icon. Instead, Darkr tries to recreate the process of using a real-life darkroom to develop your photos. For starters, your camera roll appears as a bin of negatives. Select one, and it gives you a digital test strip to find the correct look, then takes you into an editor where you can crop, rotate, dodge, burn, blur, and tone the image. It has several built-in camera modes, including one that mimics a large-format camera, and as you might expect with a past-obsessed app, it only produces results in black and white.
|
Key
|
In chemistry a hypothetical substance whose molecules occupy negligible space and have no interactions is called a?
|
Leathercraft kits, Leather Kits, Leather craft Kits,
Changer Coin Purse Kit 4072-00
Kit has pre-punched natural tooling leather sides, pre-attached zipper, needle, thread and instructions.
$ 7.99
Small Change Coin Purse Kit 4107-00
Tuck your coins and bills into this soft 3" x 3-1/4" leather pouch. Lace and pattern included. Snap is pre-attached
$ 6.99
Tom Thumb Purse Kit 4109-00
Kit includes pre-punched tooling leather, pre-attached zipper, vinyl lace, two-prong needle and instructions. 4" long.
$ 10.99
Pocket Leather Coin Holder Kit 4111-00
This hand size coin purse is perfect for all those loose coins. Keep it in your handbag or in your front pocket. Snap on flap is pre-set. Includes pre-punched parts, lace, needle, pattern and instructions. 3-3/4" x 3"
$ 9.99
Key Koin Kup Kit 4113-00
Pre-punched tooling leather, waxed thread, needle, key chain, patterns and instructions. 2-1/2" x 3-1/2".
$ 6.99
Check Book Cover Kit 4179-00
Brown interior. Keep your checkbook in a real leather cover! Kit includes pre-punched tooling leather back, leather lining, pockets, patterns, leather lace and waxed thread so you can assemble it either way. (Craft Glue needed to complete.) 6-3/4" x 3-5/8" closed.
$ 19.99
Phoenix Clutch Purse Kit 4301-00
Keeps everything at your fingertips! Features a roomy bill compartment, coin purse, credit card and photo pockets, convenient pen holder; plus, room for your checkbook and register. (Craft Glue and pliers needed to complete.)
$ 49.99
Countess Clutch Purse Kit Brown 4318-02 DISCONTINUED
Brown interior. Snap-closed interior with two compartments. Holds checkbook, register and pen. Pre-punched leather parts, calf lace, patterns, and instructions. Holds 6" x 2 3/4" checks.
DISCONTINUED
Ashley Clutch Purse Kit 44015-00
Use as a clutch purse or attach the removeable strap and use as a shoulder bag. Includes checkbook and register holder, 2-pocket zippered coin holder, six slots for credit cards, 3 photo slots and many pockets for currency and other items. Kit contains pre-punched tooling leather back, pre-assembled leather interior, removable strap, hardware, leather lace, needle, patterns and instructions. 8" x 4-1/4" x 1-1/2" closed. (Line 20 Snap Setter #8057-00, Anvil #8056-00 and Craft Glue needed to complete.)
$69.99
Two Pocket Coin Purse Kit 44102-00
Keep coins and bills separate. Includes pre-punched tooling leather, pre-set snaps, thread, needle and instructions. (Craft Glue needed to complete.)
$8.99
$29.99
Vista Handbag Kit #44303-00
This petite handbag easily keeps everything at hand's reach with a comfortable shoulder strap. Kit is completely pre-cut and pre-punched; ready to be tooled. Bold side lacing beautifully accents your tooled design. Has a top flap that secures with an easy turn gilt clasp. Lace, hardware, instructions & patterns included. (Perma-Lok Needle #1193-05 needed to complete.) Measures 8-1/4" x 5-1/4" x 3-1/4".
$44.99
44310-00
Eva Handbag Kit
Small Leather handbag/belt bag for those that prefer a compact bag. Removable strap converts this into a belt bag with
the reinforced belt slot on the backside. Flap stays secure with magnetic bag clasp. All parts are pre-cut and pre-punched from durable, milled vegetable tanned cowhide. Kit includes all hardware, thread, stitching needle, patterns and instructions.
Finished bag is 7-1/4" x 5-1/2" with a 2" gusset. You will need a Jumbo Perma-Lok Needle, Thonging Chisel 5/32" and leather adhesive to complete.
$49.99
Milled veg tan leather belt bag kit.
Has a collapsible gusset and adjustable flap
with a tiedown over a leather button on the flap
which eliminates the need for any additional
hardware. Great for Ren Faire and other time
period events.
Kit includes pre-punched parts, thread, needle, lace, patterns and instructions. Measures 4-1/2" x 6"
$34.99
44347-00
Victory Belt Bag Kit
Leather Belt Bag Kit with pointed bottom shape giving it a unique look. Popular with women involved in Steampunk and many men and women in other time period events.
Kit includes pre-cut and pre-punched leather parts, hardware, waxed thread, needle, patterns and instructions. Finished size measures 6-1/8" x 7-1/2"
$39.99
$34.99
Dasher Handbag Kit 44365-00
Ideal for the little student. Perfect for quick trips requiring only the necessities for anyone, and a young lady's delight. This bag is 4" x 5-1/2" x 2-1/2". Pre-cut, pre-punched tooling leather parts, lace, hardware, carving pattern and instructions are included. (Perma-Lok Needle #113902 and Lacing Pliers #3179800 needed to complete.)
$29.99
Revival Shoulder Bag Kit 44373-00
This classic design features a large interior compartment with a zippered inside pocket to carry your most needed items. Kit includes pre-cut and pre-punched leather parts, pre-assembled zipper pocket, hardware, lace, needles, patterns and instructions. Measures 12" x 8-1/2" x 4-1/2". (3/32" Drive Punch #3777-01, Rivet Setter #8100-00 and Craft Glue needed to complete.)
$99.99
Bullseye Leather Holster Belt Kit 44448-01
$39.99
Durango Leather Cartridge Belt Kit 44449-01
This cartridge belt makes it easy for you to carry your shells on your belt and not in your pockets. Belt is 2-1/4" (57 mm) wide, 50" (1.2 m) in length and will fit up to a 46" (1.1 m) waist. It can be used with most of the holster kits we have available
Kit includes pre-cut, pre-punched leather
parts, hardware, buckle, instructions and patterns.
$54.99
Bullseye Holster Kits
Our line of holster kits is designed for easy assembly for leathercrafters at any level of experience. Decorate it with a fancy design or simply dye the holster and sew. It’s that easy! Available for revolvers or semi-automatics, there are several sizes to choose from. Adjustable strap design
makes it a cinch to keep any pistol secure in the holster. All kits come with pre-cut, pre-punched parts, thread, needles, plastic slide snap, pre-attached snap, instructions and patterns. All holster kits are for right-handed* use and are considered a “medium high ride design”. They will fit belts up to 2-1/4" (57 mm) wide by using the secure belt loop that stitches on the backside of the holster. Team the holster kits up with the Durango Cartridge Belt Kit or Bullseye Holster Belt Kit for a perfect combination. Firearms not included.
Bullseye Leather Holster Kit Revolver Small/Medium 44450-01
For medium and large frame revolvers. Fits 3" to 4" (76 x 102 mm) barrels.
$39.99
Bullseye Leather Holster Kit Revolver Medium 44450-02
For medium to large frame revolvers. Fits 5" to 6-1/2" (127 x 165 mm) barrels.
$39.99
Bullseye Leather Holster Kit Revolver Large 44450-03
For medium and large frame revolvers. Fits
7" to 8-1/2" (177 x 215 mm) barrels.
$39.99
Bullseye Semi-Automatic Leather Holster Kit - Medium 44450-06
For semi-automatics. Fits 3-1/2" to 4-1/2"
(89 to 114 mm) barrels.
$39.99
Bullseye Semi-Automatic Leather Holster Kit - Large 44450-07
For semi-automatics. Fits 4-1/2" to 5"
(114 to 127 mm) barrels.
$39.99
Bullseye Leather Shoulder Holster Kit Attachment 44450-10
Perfect for law enforcement and
citizens with concealed handgun licenses.
Adjustable straps make sure that this rig fits you snug and comfortable. This
shoulder rig will accommodate most of the holster kits "Bullseye" line of holsters or your custom made holsters that have a belt loop.
This kit cannot be used with our
Bullseye Minimal and Concealed Holster Kits. One side of the rig
is for the holster and the other is for the Magazine Pouch.
Kit includes pre-cut leather parts, hardware and instructions.
$39.99
Cheyenne Holster Kits
Whether you are an Old West enthusiast or just like the look of that era, this holster will make a great choice for your time period pistol. A popular western design from the 1800’s, this kit will fit the Colt, Single Action Army, New Frontier and similar sized revolvers by other manufacturers. Holster can be tooled with an Old West design or simply dyed and laced. All kits come with pre-cut, pre-punched parts, leather lace, instructions and patterns. Holster kits are cut for right-handed* use. Team the holster kits up with the Durango Cartridge Belt Kit for a perfect combination. Firearms not included.
Cheyenne Leather Holster Kit Revolver Medium 44451-01
Fits 4-5/8" to 6-1/2" (117 x 16 mm) barrels.
$59.99
Cheyenne Leather Holster Kit Revolver Large 44451-02
Fits 7-1/2" (191 mm) barrels.
$64.99
Magazine -Autoclip Pouch Kit
Keep an extra clip at your reach.
Designed to fit a Shoulder Holster, this pouch can also be worn on your belt. Fits magazines up to 5-1/2" (139 mm) long. Kit includes pre-cut, leather parts, hook & loop attachment, thread, needle, patterns and instructions.
$9.99
Bullseye Minimal Semi-Automatic Leather Pancake Style Holster Kit 44454-00
Popular among law enforcement and citizens with concealed handgun licenses, this compact design keeps your pistol high on your waist and very snug against your body. Kit includes pre-cut leather parts, safety loop, needle, thread, patterns and instructions. Fits up to 1-3/4" (44 mm) belts.
Fits most large semiautomatics.
$34.99
Bullseye Minimal Revolver Leather Pancake Style Holster Kit 44454-01
Popular among law enforcement and citizens with concealed handgun licenses, this compact design keeps your pistol high on your waist and very snug against your body. Kit includes pre-cut leather parts, safety loop, needle, thread, patterns and instructions. Fits up to 1-3/4" (44 mm) belts
Fits most medium and large frame
revolvers.
$34.99
Bullseye Concealed Weapon Leather Holster Kit - Small Auto 44455-00
The growing interest in handgun ownership has created a growing demand for holsters designed to comfortably carry a weapon. The Bullseye Concealed Auto Holster Kits will help fill that need. Cut from premium 6 to 7 oz. (2.4 to 2.8 mm) milled double shoulders, these kits are designed to be worn inside the belt using a belt clip. Kits include pre-cut, pre-punched leather parts, hardware, needle & thread, instructions and patterns.
Fits most small frame, semiautomatics.
$24.99
Bullseye Concealed Weapon Leather Holster Kit - Med/Large Auto 44455-01
The growing interest in handgun ownership has created a growing demand for holsters designed to comfortably carry a weapon. The Bullseye Concealed Auto Holster Kits will help fill that need. Cut from premium 6 to 7 oz. (2.4 to 2.8 mm) milled double shoulders, these kits are designed to be worn inside the belt using a belt clip. Kits include pre-cut, pre-punched leather parts, hardware, needle & thread, instructions and patterns.
Fits most medium and large frame semiautomatics.
$29.99
4104-00
Small Folding Knife Pouch Kit
Make it either of two ways! Make it with a snap flap to carry 3" to 4" folding knives or with a snap strap for pliers.
$8.49
4105-00
Small Knife Sheath Kit
Fits up to 5" long blades. Kit includes pre-punched tooling leather parts, pre-attached snap, patterns, thread, needle, hardware and instructions. (Rivet Setter #810000 needed to complete.)
$8.99
4106-00
Large Folding Knife Pouch Kit
Carry your folding knife on your belt. Pouch fits knives up to 4 3/4" long. With pre-punched tooling leather, rivets, snap, thread, needles, patterns and instructions. (Rivet Setter #810000 needed to complete.)
$8.99
Leatherwork and Leathercraft Kits
Butterfly Barrette Kit #4232-00 $3.99
Easy-to-complete kit includes a pre-cut tooling leather shape with pre-punched holes for holder, tooling patterns, a wooden barrette holder and instructions.
Bow Barrette Kit #44236-00 $3.99
Easy-to-complete kit includes a pre-cut tooling leather shape with pre-punched holes for holder, tooling patterns, a wooden barrette holder and instructions.
Guitar Strap Kit #44421-00 $39.99
Tooling leather strap is 2-1/2" wide and adjusts from 45" to 58". Attaches to guitar two different ways. Kit includes leather, three tooling patterns and instructions.
Cigarette Case Kit #4119-00
DISCONTINUED
A deck of playing cards will fit into this case instead of cigarettes, if desired. Fits up to 100mm cigarettes. Pre-punched tooling leather, patterns and lace. Modeling Tool #803100 and Perma-Lok Needle #119301 needed to complete.
44710-01 Dog Collar Kit 5/8in $10.99
The natural leather leaves you the option to personalize and finish as you wish. Kit includes roller buckle, solid dee ring, rivets and assembly instructions. Fits up to 18-5/8" neck circumference. (Rivet Setter #8100-00 and 1/8" (0,3 cm) hole punch needed to complete.)
44710-03 Dog Collar Kit 1in $12.99
The natural leather leaves you the option to personalize and finish as you wish. Kit includes roller buckle, solid dee ring, rivets and assembly instructions. Fits up to 26" neck circumference. (Rivet Setter #8100-00 and 1/8" (0,3 cm) hole punch needed to complete.)
Half-Pint Roper Saddle Kit #44166-00 $39.99
Styled like a real saddle! Display it on your desk or turn it into a unique lamp. 5"-tall saddle makes a great conversation piece at home or at the office.
Book Cover Kit #4181-00 $24.99
Protect your Bible, paperback books, Scout manuals & other books up to 5" x 8". Pre-assembled natural cowhide is ready to tool and finish, patterns included.
To order or inquire about our Leatherwork supplies please e-mail us at [email protected]
or Call us at 818-342-9120 Mon - Sat 10am - 6pm (PST)
VEST KITS
|
i don't know
|
A fabled medieval torture instrument is a?
|
The 25 Most Unimaginable Medieval Torture Devices! — moviepilot.com
The 25 Most Unimaginable Medieval Torture Devices!
March 30, 2015 at 09:10AM
By Anna Olvera , writer at Creators.co
Writer, Filmmaker and Horror Geek at MoviePilot. Like and Follow me at Screaming for Horror on Facebook and @Raging_Rain on Twitter.
During the Medieval Ages mainly nobles and royalty had pretty much power over society. Although when it came to "justice" it wasn't any different. Most people with low resources such as peasants, labor workers and farmers, had little to no rights, when it came down to the "law". The dark age torturers and executioners that created these devices, were really imaginative when it came down to torturing others and apparently it payed off because millions of people suffered the unimaginable when it came to their deaths. Most of them highly painful and very slow, while others were used as means of interrogation. Unfortunately many people died when these devices were used, but the ones that didn't still suffered a great amount of pain and were scarred for life. Next I've put together a list of the 25 worst medieval torture devices.
NOTE: NOT ALL torture devices are listed here.
1.- SAW TORTURE
In this method, the victim is hung upside down, so that the blood will rush to their heads and keep them conscious during the long torture. The torturer would then saw through the victims’ bodies until they were completely sawed in half. Most were cut up only in their abdomen to prolong their agony.
2.- THE CHAIR OF TORTURE
Also known as the Judas Chair, it was a terrible, intimidating torture device that was added to dungeons in the Middle Ages. Used until the 1800′s in Europe, this chair was layered with 500 to 1,500 spikes on every surface with tight straps to restrain its victim. Made of iron, it can also contain spaces for heating elements beneath the seat. It was often used to scare people into giving confessions as they watched others being tortured on the device.
3.- THE RACK
Is a torture device consisting of a rectangular, usually wooden frame, slightly raised from the ground, with a roller at one or both ends. The victim's ankles are fastened to one roller and the wrists are chained to the other. As the interrogation progresses, a handle and ratchet mechanism attached to the top roller are used to very gradually increase the tension on the chains, inducing excruciating pain. By means of pulleys and levers this roller could be rotated on its own axis, thus straining the ropes until the sufferer's joints were dislocated and eventually separated. Additionally, if muscle are stretched excessively, they lose their ability to contract, rendering them ineffective. One gruesome aspect of being stretched too far on the rack is the loud popping noises made by snapping cartilage, ligaments or bones.
4.- BREAST RIPPER
Known in another form as the Iron Spider or simply the spider, was a torture instrument mainly used on women who were accused of adultery, or self-abortion. The instrument was designed to rip the breasts from a woman and was made from iron, which was usually heated. The tool was used popularly in the Free State of Bavaria, a state in Germany, in 1599, and in parts of Germany and France until the nineteenth century.
5.- TONGUE TEARER
Looking like an over sized pair of scissors, it could effortlessly cut the victim’s tongue. Their mouth would be forced opened with a device called a mouth opener, and then the iron tongue tearer would uncomfortably twitch the tongue with its rough grippers. Once a firm hold was maintained, the screw would be firmly tightened and the victim’s tongue would roughly be torn out.
6.- IRON MAIDEN
This torture device consisted of an iron cabinet with a hinged front and spike-covered interior, sufficient enough to enclose a human being. Once inside its conical frame, the victim would be unable to move due to the great number of steel spikes impaling them from every direction. The interrogator would scream questions at the victim while poking them with jagged edges.
7.- GUILLOTINE
One of the most notorious forms of executions, the guillotine was made of a razor sharp blade attached to a rope. The victim’s head was placed in the middle of the frame as the blade dropped, severing the victim’s head from the body. Since the decapitation was considered to be an instant and painless event (at least less painful than the other torture methods), it was often considered the most humane method of execution.
8.- THE BRAZEN BULL
Also known as the Sicilian Bull, it was designed in ancient Greece. A solid piece of brass was cast with a door on the side that could be opened and latched. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire set underneath it until the metal became literally yellow as it was heated. The victim would then be slowly roasted to death all while screaming in agonizing pain. The bull was purposely designed to amplify these screams and make them sound like the bellowing of a bull.
9.- BOOT
The term boot refers to a family of instruments of torture and interrogation variously designed to cause crushing injuries to the foot and/or leg. The boot has taken many forms in various places and times. Common varieties include the Spanish boot and the Malay boot. One type was made of four pieces of narrow wooden board nailed together. The boards were measured to fit the victim's leg. Once the leg was enclosed, wedges would be hammered between the boards, creating pressure. The pressure would be increased until the victim confessed or lost consciousness. Newer variants have included iron vises,sometimes armed with spikes that squeezed feet and metal frames employed red hot.
10.- HANGED, DRAWN AND QUARTERED
During medieval times, the penalty for high treason in England was to be hanged, drawn and quartered in public and though it was abolished in 1814, it has been responsible for the death of thousands of people. In this torture technique, the victim is dragged in a wooden frame called a hurdle to the place of execution. They would then be hanged by the neck for a short period of time until they are near-death (hanged), followed by disembowelment and castration where the entrails and genitalia are burned in front of the victim (drawn). The victim would then be divided into four separate parts and beheaded (quartered).
11.- STRAPPADO
The Strappado is a form of torture in which the victim's hands are first tied behind his or her back and suspended in the air by means of a rope attached to wrists, which most likely dislocates both arms. Weights may be added to the body to intensify the effect and increase the pain. Other names for strappado include "reverse hanging" and "Palestinian hanging" (although it is not used by the Palestinian Authority) It is best known for its use in the torture chambers of the medieval Inquisition.
12.- WOODEN HORSE/SPANISH DONKEY
One of the torture devices during the Spanish Inquisition and medieval ages, this is probably one of the most gruesome of them all. The victim is put astride, naked, on a donkey-like apparatus, which is actually a vertical wooden board with a sharp V-wedge on top of it. After that, the torturer would add varying weights to the victim’s feet until finally the wedge sliced through the victim’s body.
13.- PEAR OF ANGUISH/CHOKE PEAR
The pear of anguish or choke pear is the modern name for a type of instrument displayed in some museums, consisting of a metal body (usually pear-shaped) divided into spoon-like segments that could be spread apart by turning a screw. The museum descriptions and some recent sources assert that the devices were used either as a gag, to prevent people from speaking, or internally as an instrument of torture.
14.- JUDAS CRADLE
The victim would presumably be placed in the waist harness above the pyramid-shaped seat, with the point inserted into their an*s or v*gin*, then very slowly lowered by ropes. The subject is tortured by intense pressure and stretching of the orifice, eventually succumbing to tears in muscle tissue that could turn septic and kill from infection, or simply being impaled.
15.- CRUCIFIXION
Principally practiced in antiquity, though it remains practiced in some countries today; it is one of the most well-known execution methods due to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It is a deliberately slow and painful execution where the condemned person is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross and left to hang until they die, which usually takes days.
16.- NECK TORTURE
Humiliating and painful, this punishment was something of an endurance test where the victim would be hooked into a neck device, either made of metal or wood, which prevented the victim from adjusting into a comfortable position. The cruelty of this punishment lie within the fact that they were unable to lie down, eat, or lower their head for days.
17.- HERETIC'S FORK
The device was placed between the breast bone and throat just under the chin and secured with a leather strap around the neck, while the victim was hung from the ceiling or otherwise suspended in a way so that they could not lie down.Usually the Heretic's fork was given to people who spoke the lord's name in vain, blasphemers, or liars. This way, the punishment made it nearly impossible for them to talk. Also, a person wearing it couldn't fall asleep. The moment their head dropped with fatigue, the prongs pierced their throat or chest, causing great pain. This very simple instrument created long periods of sleep deprivation. People were awake for days, which made confessions more likely.
18.- BREAKING WHEEL/ CATHERINE WHEEL
Was a torture device used for capital punishment from Antiquity into early modern times for public execution by breaking the criminal's bones/bludgeoning him to death. As a form of execution, it was used from "Classical" times into the 18th century; as a form of post mortem punishment of the criminal, the wheel was still in use into 19th century Germany.
19.- SHREW'S FIDDLE/ NECK VIOLIN
is a form of rigid irons whereby the wrists are locked in front of the bound person by a hinged board or steel bar. It was originally used in the 18th century as a way of punishing women who were caught bickering or fighting.
20.- COFFIN TORTURE
The most preferred torture technique in the Middle Ages was known as coffin torture. This method involved placing the victim inside a metal cage roughly the size of the human body; hence the name. The torturers also forced overweight victims into smaller cages to heighten their discomfort as they hung from a tree or gallows. Generally, they would be left there until the crows came to feed on their remains.
21.- SPANISH TICKLER/ CAT'S PAW
Is a type of torture instrument, consisting of long, sharp iron spikes curved so as to resemble claws. It was often attached to a handle, or else used as an extension of the torturer's hand. In this way it was used to rip and tear flesh away from the bone, from any part of the body. It was also used as a weapon. This device was commonly used on thieves and unfaithful wives. Most who were tortured in this manner died not at the time, but afterwards. Especially with the Cat’s Paw, the device would cause infections as the device would cut so deep. The prongs were nearly never washed, so the chances of these infections were very high.
22.- KNEE SPLITTER
The knee splitter was a form of torture used mainly during the inquisition. It was created from two spiked wood blocks, placed in front of, and behind the knee. The blocks were connected with two large screws. When turned, the blocks would close towards each other, destroying the knee underneath them. This method was used to render the knees useless. The number of spikes on the blocks would range from three to twenty, depending on the captive.
23.- HEAD CRUSHER
This metal device featured a plate that sat below the victim's jaw, which was connected by a frame to the head cap. As the torturer slowly twisted the handle, the gap between the head cap and plate decreased in width, causing crushing of the skull and facial bones, including teeth and jaws, and ultimately inducing death; even if the torturer stopped before death, permanent damage to the facial muscles and structure would occur. The victim's head would slowly be crushed, killing the victim, but not before the victim's jaw had been crushed, and their eyes had popped from their socket.
24.- THUMBSCREW/ PILLYWINKS
Is a torture instrument which was first used in medieval Europe. It is a simple vice, sometimes with protruding studs on the interior surfaces. The victim's thumbs or fingers were placed in the vice and slowly crushed. The thumbscrew was also applied to crush prisoners' big toes. The crushing bars were sometimes lined with sharp metal points to puncture the thumbs and inflict greater pain in the nail beds. Larger, heavier devices based on the same design principle were applied to crush feet and ears.
25.- IMPALEMENT
Given his name, it should come as no surprise that this was the most favored method of execution by Vlad the Impaler. In 15th century Romania; the victim was forced to sit on a sharp and thick pole. When the pole was then raised upright, the victim was left to slide down the pole with their own weight. It could take the victim 3 days to die using this method and it has been said that Vlad once did this to 20,000 people all while enjoying a meal.
Did these devices give you chills just thinking about them? Thank goodness we don't live in those ages anymore, although, some of these torture methods are said that they STILL occur in some places around the world. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave some below, don't forget to Follow Me, for more awesome content and remember... Sweet Screams.
Poll
Do You Think Some of These Methods Were Too Barbaric?
Yes... Some of These Punishments Were Way Too Harsh
No.. They Fit the Crime Perfect and Deserved It
I'm Still in Pain Myself, I Can't Imagine Someone Going Thru This
Sources: Wikipedia & List25
|
Iron Maiden
|
The hot condiment wasabi is generally from what part of the plant?
|
Why Medieval Torture Devices are Not Medieval - Medievalists.net
Medievalists.net
Why Medieval Torture Devices are Not Medieval
March 20, 2016 by Medievalists.net
By Peter Konieczny
When many people think about the Middle Ages they see it as a time when people were tortured by a wide collection of diabolical instruments. Whether it is the Pear of Anguish or the Iron Maiden, these torture devices are portrayed as medieval. The reality, however, is that many of these devices never existed in the Middle Ages.
The supposedly medieval torture device, the Pear of Anguish, displayed at the Museum der Festung Salzburg, Austria – photo by Klaus D. Peter, Wiehl, Germany / Wikipedia
You can find many examples of popular websites making lists of medieval torture devices – here , here , here and here – and for a video list see here . Movies and television shows will dramatically portray their use, museums will prominently display examples of them, and you can read countless books that tell us about the history of torture, all of them offering at least a chapter dedicated to the Middle Ages. A typical example can be found in L.A.Parry’s book The History of Torture in England:
And what strikes us most in considering the mediaeval tortures, is not so much their diabolical barbarity, which it is indeed impossible to exaggerate, as the extraordinary variety, and what may have be termed the artistic skill, they displayed. They represent a condition of thought in which men had pondered long and carefully on all the forms of suffering, had compared and combined different kinds of torture, till they had become the most consummate masters of their art, had expended on the subject all the resources of the utmost ingenuity, and had pursued it with the ardour of a passion.
However, when one takes a close look at books like these, it soon becomes obvious that very little of the tortures they describe took place in the Middle Ages. Instead, they recount various events from the 17th to 19th centuries, with perhaps a few anecdotes from previous eras (and in some recent books, noting the use of modern tactics like waterboarding). The authors will mention various torture devices, and usually add in some statement that while we first hear about it in the 17th century, it was ‘undoubtedly’ or ‘would have been’ also seen in medieval times. These statements never include any evidence to back up such assertions. Today historians are starting to take a look at these medieval torture devices, and are realizing that they are not only not medieval, but might not even have been torture devices at all. For example, Australian historian Chris Bishop took a look the so-called ‘Pear of Anguish’. The metallic device can be found in several museums, which will note that it is from the Middle Ages despite having little idea where their particular item comes from. Typically, this pear-shaped item has a latch at its tip, which when triggered will open the spring-loaded lobes. The lobes can then be screwed back together with a key.
19th century depiction of the Pear of Anguish
The idea behind the Pear of Anguish was that it be inserted into the mouth of the victim (or into the vagina or anus) and then opened up. Supposedly, the device would cause immense pain and tearing, which could only be eased by screwing the lobes back down. Bishop’s research reveals that objects calling themselves the Pear of Anguish first start appearing around the middle of the 19th century. There is a reference to a ‘pear’ type object that was used by a well-known criminal in Paris at the turn of the 17th-century: he apparently had a device designed for him that allow him to gag his victims. But beyond that there is no mention of such a torture device from the Middle Ages. In fact, a careful examination of these devices show that it could never have been used to torture people. Not only would have the springs been too weak to open up a bodily orifice, but the way the latch was designed meant that it could not be opened at all if it was inside something. Bishop offers some suggestions on what this device could have been:
One could imagine them as surgical instruments – some sort of speculum perhaps, or a device for levering open the mouth in order that a dentist might operate. But then they could just as easily be shoe-extenders, or sock-stretchers, or glove-wideners.
However, it seems that once the idea that it was some sort of torture instrument, it became very popular, with museums in Europe needing to have one. The myth of the Pear of Anguish was thus born. Bishop explains:
This is the point, then, at which a curiosity is being transformed into something much more nefarious. No longer the unique prototype of a singularly depraved mind, by the 1860s the ‘pear’ has become a member of a darker taxon. By misconstruing the function of the device itself and by mistaking the key that unlocks it for a screw to manipulate it, the emphasis of operation has shifted away from a purely mechanical function to the slow and deliberate application of pain. In this taxonomy, the ‘pear’ can only be used to torture.
While the Pear of Anguish may have become a torture device by people not knowing what it was really intended to be, the famous Iron Maiden seems to be a deliberate phoney invention from a more modern mind. We actually first hear about it around the end of the 18th century, when a writer named Johann Philipp Siebenkees described one in a guide-book to the city of Nuremberg. He described how in the year 1515 the German city executed a criminal with a device that resembled an Egyptian mummy case, but had doors on it to allow a person to be put inside, where sharp spikes would pierce him. Siebenkees wrote:
Slowly, so that the very sharp points penetrated his arms, and his legs in several places, and his belly and chest, and his bladder and the root of his member, and his eyes, and his shoulder, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him, and so he remained making great cry and lament for two days, after which he died.
The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg – this artefact was destroyed during the Second World War, but by then historians knew it was a fake.
It is likely that Siebenkees just invented this story, but by the early 19th century the Iron Maiden was being displayed in Nuremberg and other places. One of them was even exhibited at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, which furthered its reputation. Even though the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg was deemed a fake, it still has a reputation of being a real medieval torture device, one that some books claim was used as far back as the 12th century.
As one takes a look at the real history of these so-called torture devices, it becomes clear that few had anything to do with the Middle Ages. In some cases they were inventions from more recent times, and others are actually from the ancient world. The Brazen Bull is commonly included in lists of medieval torture devices, despite the fact that it was reportedly created in the 6th century B.C. The Rack also was well-attested in ancient times, but it has now become synonymous with the Middle Ages, where some imagine that every castle had one in their own dungeons. You can see one of these specimens at the Tower of London (where it is displayed with other torture devices ) and there is a reference to one being there in the year 1447. However, we have no other references to its use during the Middle Ages, nor of anything similar to it in the rest of medieval England.
The Rack in the Tower of London – photo by Dark Dwarf / Flickr
This does not mean that torture did not exist in the Middle Ages – it certainly did, and by the later medieval period was considered a legal practice for obtaining a confession. However, medieval people were just not as imaginative and creative as modern day people believe. Instead what little we know about torture methods suggests that fairly simple methods were used, such as binding people very tightly with ropes. Some so-called torture devices, like the Pillory , actually did little to harm individuals. It was used by city authorities in medieval London, for instance, to punish various criminals. For example, several bakers who committed fraud were sentenced to spend a few hours bound up in the pillory, where they had their fake bread burnt under them. This punishment was intended to humiliate and expose the wrongdoer – physically they received little harm, perhaps some sore muscles and a bit of smoke inhalation (depending how much smoke a loaf of bread could create). Convicted women also had the benefit of being able to use a stool when they were sent to the pillory.
Medieval torture scene depicted in a 15th century manuscript – British Library Harley 4375 f. 140
Our modern notions about medieval torture devices reflects other misconceptions we have about how torture was used in the Middle Ages and how widespread it was during that period. Perhaps, because we want to see ourselves as more civilized and intelligent than people who live hundreds of years ago, we will imagine that they were more eager to torture people and do it in a more cruel fashion. Therefore it allowed us to be convinced that devices like the Rack, the Iron Maiden, and the Pear of Anguish were somehow everyday objects of the Middle Ages. It might say more about us than about our medieval ancestors.
|
i don't know
|
A foundry is specifically involved in what metal process?
|
Casting Manufacturing Process, Basic Steps in the Casting Process, Metal Casting Process Steps
Home » Casting Process » Casting Process: Basic Steps
Casting Process: Basic Steps
Industrial Process Description The metal casting process has been divided into the following five major operations:
Obtaining the Casting Geometry : The process is referred as the study of the geometry of parts and plans, so as to improve the life and quality of casting.
Casting Patternmaking : In pattern making, a physical model of casting, i.e. a pattern is used to make the mold. The mold is made by packing some readily formed aggregated materials, like molding sand, around the pattern. After the pattern is withdrawn, its imprint leaves the mold cavity that is ultimately filled with metal to become the casting. n case, the castings is required to be hollow, such as in the case of pipe fittings, additional patterns, known as cores, are used to develop these cavities.
Coremaking & Molding : In core making, cores are formed, (usually of sand) that are placed into a mold cavity to form the interior surface of the casting. Thus the annul space between the mold-cavity surface and the core is what finally becomes the casting.
Molding is a process that consists of different operations essential to develop a mold for receiving molten metal.
Alloy Melting and Pouring : Melting is a process of preparing the molten material for casting. It is generally done in a specifically designated part of foundry, and the molten metal is transported to the pouring area wherein the molds are filled.
Casting Cleaning : Cleaning is a process that refers to the different activities performed for the removal of sand, scale, and excess metal from the casting. However, all the operations may not apply to each casting method but such processes play an important role to comply with environmental guidelines.
Casting Process
|
Casting
|
The Taj Mahal in India was constructed as a?
|
FOUNDRY AND CASTING OPERATION PPT | Casting (Metalworking) | Casting
FOUNDRY AND CASTING OPERATION PPT
A inside view into the world of foundry and casting.
A inside view into the world of foundry and casting.
Read on Scribd mobile: iPhone , iPad and Android .
Copyright: Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
CANCEL
We've moved you to where you read on your other device.
Get the full title to continue
Get the full title to continue reading from where you left off, or restart the preview.
Restart preview
|
i don't know
|
The most popular 20th-century Indian car and famous taxi, based virtually unchanged from 1958-2014 on a 1950s Morris Oxford, is the?
|
Abandoned Cars I | MotorwayAmerica
Your highway to automotive information in North America
Abandoned Cars I
See more Abandoned Cars at Abandoned Cars II
Contributing photographers: Jim Meachen, Ralph Gable, Jerry Brown, John Harper, Jeffrey Ross, Jim Prueter, B.J. Overbee, Charles Skaggs. For more abandoned cars go to Abandoned Cars and Trucks
This 1946 Chevrolet sits in a salvage yard, perhaps waiting for a new owner. The '46 Chevrolet was basically a carryover from the 1942 model after production of new cars ceased during the World War II years. All 1946 models relied on a 6-cylinder, 90 horsepower engine carried over from the pre-war years. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
There were critics who joked about Studebaker's post-World War II styling adventures, but the Studebakers of that era have stood the test of time from their rounded slopping rear end with wrap-around window to their "spinner" grille. This 1950 four-door, that featured suicide doors, watches as life goes by on a North Carolina highway. Above, a magazine advertisement for the 1950 Studebaker. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This post-WWII Willys Jeep found in eastern North Carolina has become a trash depository, its useful life long gone. The Army Jeep was transformed for civilian use after the war in 1945 and was particularly popular with servicemen who had driven the military variety. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1963 Ford Galaxie was found in South Carolina in retirement in someone's yard. The Galaxie was a full-sized car built in the U.S. between 1959 and 1974. The name was used for the top models in Ford's lineup through 1961. The '63 model was essentially unchanged from the 1961-62 models except for some freshening and added trim. Also pictured, an advertisement for the '63 Galaxie. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Packard was one of the premier luxury cars in the U.S. prior to World War II although it was losing some of its luster in the late '30s by building several more affordable models. In 1937, Packard re-introduced a six-cylinder engine, its first since 1928 when it went exclusively to eight-cylinder powerplants. This 1941 Packard sedan was discovered in Holbrook, Ariz. (Photo by Ted Biederman)
The first post-World War II Ford came off the assembly line in July 1945 as a 1946 model. Ford was throughly updated in 1941 before production was halted in 1942 for the war, and the 1946 was a continuation of the '41 model. An all-new Ford was introduced in 1949. This 1946 Ford was found in North Dakota. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This circa 1930 Chevrolet truck has survived its "beast of burden" lifestyle in Utah — at least for now. The first Chevrolet trucks went on sale in 1918, the same year that the Chevrolet Motor Company became part of GM, called the Model 490 Light Delivery. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
The Chevrolet Impala was introduced for the 1958 model year as top of the line Bel Air hardtops and convertibles. The third generation 1962-1964 featured new "C" pillar styling for all models except the 4-door hardtop. This style proved extremely popular, and contributed to the desirability of the 1962–1964 Impalas as collectibles. These two 1964 Impala SS models found in eastern North Carolina look as if they are ready for restoration. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Ford designed the Edsel to be a cut above the Ford to compete with models from GM's Oldsmobile and Pontiac brands and Chrysler's DeSoto. But the Edsel, manufactured for just three model years (1958-1960), never caught on with the public, and was labeled "the wrong car for the wrong time." This 1959 station wagon was found languishing in Santa Rosa, N.M. (Photos by Jim Meachen and Ted Biederman)
Like its competitors, Dodge came out with an all-new pickup truck design for the 1948 model year, which remained basically unchanged through 1953. This example of a Dodge pickup from the 1948-1950 model years — based on the grille design — was found in New Mexico. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
In 1962, the full-sized Oldsmobile 88 was in its fifth generation (1961-1964). The base Dynamic 88 was powered by the 280-horsepower Jetfire Rocket V-8 while the Super 88 received the 394 Skyrocket V-8 making 330-horsepower. Both models were outfitted with a 3-speed Roto Hydra-Matic transmission. This 1962 model was found enjoying retirement in Munger, Mich. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
This 1946 or '47 Diamond T tractor was discovered in a backyard in North Dakota. Diamond T was well known for its reliable military trucks during World War II and it continued to build work trucks and pickups after the war. The owner of this truck has kept it in very restorable condition. At bottom is an advertisement for a 1947 truck. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The 1963 Buick Skylark and Special was a "compact" car (193 inches long) sharing the same chassis, engines and basic sheet metal with the Pontiac Tempest and Oldsmobile F-85. Engine choices included a 3.2-liter V-6 and a 3.5-liter V-8. Transmission choices were a three on the tree manual, a four-speed floor-shifted manual and a two-speed "Dual Path Turbine Drive" automatic. This copy was found in a barn in eastern North Carolina. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The redesigned 1949 Buick was the first to use "VentiPorts" that became a trademark of the Buick brand. The top line Roadmaster received four ports while the remaining Buick lineup got three. The ports actually corresponded to the displacement of the straight-eight engine installed. This rustic Buick is on display at the Cow Canyon Trading Post in Bluff, Utah. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
These interesting International tow trucks from the 1950s were found on the lot of Troublemaker Film Studio in Austin, Texas. Apparently the 1950-era trucks were used as props in the film studio movies. The studio has a very very cool collection of old trucks. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Ford was thoroughly updated for 1941 with a new look including a three-piece grille. There were three car lines — Special, De Luxe and Super De Luxe. A new entry-level engine was added to the lineup, a 3.7-liter straight 6 developing 90 horsepower. The popular 2.2-liter flathead V-8 continued as the top-line engine. This used-up 1941 Ford was found in South Carolina. (Photo by Ralph Gable}
A 1951/52 Cadillac is flanked by post-war 1946/47 models living in retirement in the southwestern U.S. These cars were the luxury class of North America after World War II. Post-war Cadillacs introduced many of the styling features that came to be synonymous with the late 1940s and 1950s American automobiles, incorporating many of the ideas of General Motors styling chief Harley J. Earl. (Photo by Jim Prueter)
This 1940 Pontiac sedan was discovered in a barn in eastern North Carolina. The '40 had a handsome well-designed dashboard with radio controls in easy reach — a feature that has become scarce these days. Pontiac sold 217,101 units in 1940, a big jump from 1939 when 137,249 units were sold. Above is a restored dashboard from a 1940 car. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Ford received a new body style for 1955 and a new top-of-the-line model, the Crown Victoria, replacing the Crestline. The Crown Victoria featured a chrome "basket handle" across the hardtop roof. This styling feature was used to visually separate the front of the passenger compartment from the rear. This 1955 or 56 Crown Vic — with its signature chrome warp-around feature — was discovered in a truly abandoned state of decay in eastern North Carolina. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The Jeep Willys became popular after World War II and was sold in a variety of formats. This early 1950s model Jeep pickup proclaims its 4-wheel-drive configuration on the side of the hood. It was found in retirement on Highway 82 near the Continental Divide in Colorado. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
In 1949, Chevrolet presented its first "all new" model since the end of World War II. A lower, sleeker profile, with the lines of the front fenders smoothly blending into the doors to be countered by the rear fenders that continued to "bulge" out of the sides of the car. This slightly updated 1950 Chevrolet sedan was found at the Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba, Mo. Depending on model, the 1950 sedan sold for $1,450 for the Styleline Special to $1,529 for the Fleetline DeLuxe. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This early 1960s Ford Econoline pickup truck was spotted in Cuba, Mo. Based on the compact Ford Falcon, the first Ford Econoline utility van and pickup was introduced to the public on Sept. 21, 1960 for the 1961 model year. The design put the driver on top of the front axle with the engine near the front wheels, called "cab over." Early models sported a 144 cubic inch (2.4 L) inline 6 engine with a three-speed manual transmission. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Dodge started selling "Job Rated" trucks in 1939, aimed at getting the customer the truck that fit the job for which it was purchased. The Job Rated designation carried through to the mid-50s when it was dropped. This early '50s Dodge "Job Rated" truck was discovered in Utah by Jim Prueter, its job apparently at an end.
Plymouth jumped on the compact-sized sporty car craze in 1964 with the Barracuda, which was produced through the 1974 model year. This 1966 first-generation Barracuda has suffered considerable abuse as it rests in a North Carolina lot of used-up cars. The Barracuda actually pre-dates the Mustang by two weeks. Three engines were offered in the first three years — a 2.8-liter inline 6, a 3.7-liter inline 6 and a 4.5 liter V-8. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1955 Dodge Coronet was spotted in Santa Rosa, N.M., perhaps awaiting some restoration. The Dodge lineup was all-new for 1955 with a longer 120-inch wheelbase and a 212.1 inch overall length. There were six body styles including a wagon and convertible. It could be purchased with either a 4.8-liter inline six or a 4.4-liter V-8. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
The McCormick-Deering was a tractor built by the International Harvester Company from the mid-20s until the Deering name was dropped some time in 1948 or 1949 when the tractor became the McCormick. This tractor, probably from the '40s, was found in retirement in Hosmer, S.D., next to a vintage gas pump and travel trailer. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1953 Willys Jeep station wagon was found in good condition in Door County, Wis. The Willys Jeep wagon was the first mass-produced all-steel station wagon designed as a passenger vehicle. It was built in the United States from 1946 to 1965 with more than 300,000 sold. (Photo by Ed Meachen)
Following World War II, the first all-new Chevrolet pickup and the rebadged GMC edition entered the marketplace in June 1947 as 1948 models, labeled the Advance Design series. The series was built through the mid-50s with only minor design tweaks. This GMC truck from the 1948-53 period lives in retirement in Bluff, Utah. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
Ford has built the F-Series pickup truck since 1948, the first generation produced from 1948 through 1952. It was the first post-war truck design from Ford and marked a big change from a pickup based on a car chassis to a pickup built on a dedicated truck platform. This example of the first F-Series (circa 1948-50) is still in use — as yard art at a home near Seattle, Wash. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A once-vibrant 1969 Ford Mustang has been cannibalized and left to be slowly dissolved into the weeds and scrub bushes. The1969 edition was the first model to use quad headlamps placed both inside and outside the grille opening. Ford offered a variety of engines in the '69 from the 3.3-liter I6 to the rumbling 429 cubic inch Boss V-8. Nearly 300,000 Mustangs were manufactured in 1969, a steep drop off from the 607,558 built for the peak year of 1966. Above, an advertisement for the '69 Mustang. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1954 Chevrolet panel truck was spotted in Bluff, Utah, its service as a laundry company delivery vehicle long past. But with a good cleaning and perhaps a little service, it looks as if it could spring back into action. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
This ragged-out Morris Minor convertible — used as yard art — was found near Boone, N.C. The diminutive Morris Minor was built in Great Britain from 1948 through 1972 with more than 1.3 million manufactured in various configurations including a two-door sedan, convertible, wagon and panel van. Engine horsepower through the years ranged from 27 to 48. Some of the earliest models took a glacier-like 50 seconds to go from 0-to-60. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
An old Jeep looks rather forlorn as it endures the hardship of Colorado weather in its retirement from active duty. MotorwayAmerica contributor Jim Prueter found the Jeep near Gateway, Col.
This 1968 Mercury Cyclone has been stripped of all its important parts, some of which have probably been transplanted in other Cyclones of the same age. The Cyclone started life in 1964 as a sporty option for the Mercury Comet. In 1968 the Comet name was dropped, and the Cyclone gained several engine options including the high-performance 427 cubic inch V-8 with four-barrel carburetor generating as much as 425 horsepower used mainly for drag racing, according to How Stuff Works. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This old Willys Jeep faces the ravages of a Wisconsin winter. We figure it probably looks better in snow. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
The Buick Century name was first used by General Motors in 1936. A new Century came into the picture in 1973, and in 1982 the Century was built on a mid-sized platform. It got a facelift for 1989 and minor design changes in the following years. The last Century was built in 2005. This abandoned Buick residing next to an equally abandoned house in southeastern North Carolina appears to be a 1991 model. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1960s-era Freightliner cabover is slowly being overtaken by bushes as it rests in retirement. Freightliner trucks have been built since the 1940s and are currently owned by Daimler Trucks North America. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
The Honda Prelude is a sports coupe that spanned five generations from 1978 until 2001. This first-generation Prelude (1978-1982) was photographed in abandoned condition in front of an abandoned house in northern Vermont. It is powered by a 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine and came with the choice of a three-speed automatic or a five-speed manual transmission. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1989/1990 model Mercury Cougar has seen better days and might be hoping for a good home. But chances are good it will continue to be relegated to neglected and abandoned status. The Cougar is a nameplate applied to a diverse series of automobiles sold by Mercury from 1967 through 2002. The seventh-generation Cougar got a new body and chassis in 1989 and was built through 1997. The standard engine in 1989 was a 3.8-liter V-6 making 140 horsepower mated to a four-speed automatic. The 1989-90 models can be differentiated from the later seventh-generation models because of their slightly larger grille. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Ford retained the basic design of its 1942 model when it got back into production in 1946 following the end of World War II. One of the few changes was to the grille, a series of horizontal bars. The 1942 Ford had a vertical bar design. And Ford eliminated its low-priced Special sixes, which left it with six- and eight-cylinder DeLuxe and Super DeLuxe models. This 1946 Ford two-door patiently waits beside a road for someone to rescue it from abandonment and neglect. Notice someone has changed out the original hood ornament for a 1950's model. (Photos By Ralph Gable)
This van was spotted buried in vegetation in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. We don't know if anyone checked to see what or whom was inside — other than more plant life. (Photo contributed by Susan Skaggs)
This early '90s model Ford F-150 may be gratified that it has been put out to pasture, stripped of most of its necessary parts, after it was horribly desecrated in the last years of its useful road life. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This mid-60s C10 Chevrolet pickup was discovered rusting away in a small eastern North Carolina town. The 1960 model year introduced the third generation pickup that went through the 1966 model year. The base engine introduced in 1963 was a 3.8-liter140-horsepower inline 6. An optional 165-horsepower 4.8-liter six was available. Chevrolet did away with the curved windshield in 1963, making it easier to differentiate the 1964 through 1966 models. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1956 Chevrolet needs some love to get it out of the neglected and abandoned category. It was spotted in eastern North Carolina behind a body shop garage. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This early 1950s Ford pickup was found in an abandoned condition enjoying retirement in the beautiful North Carolina mountains. Above, a magazine ad for the new 1951 Ford pickup touting its gas mileage. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This neglected 1956 Buick appears to be in restorable condition. Buick sold 153,627 copies in '56 with two V8 engine options making 225 horsepower and 255 hp. Prices ranged from $2,416 to $3,704. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This mid-1980s Lincoln Town Car watches another season change from fall to winter in rural northern Vermont. The Town Car, built from 1981 to 2011, was Lincoln's most popular nameplate. The first generation from 1981 through 1989, came in two-door and four-door formats. The first generation was powered by a 302-cubic inch, 4.9-liter V-8. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
Three generations of the compact Ford Falcon were built from 1960 through 1970. The Falcon was given a more squared-off appearance for the second generation (1964-65). This second generation Falcon was found in neglected condition in North Carolina. The new Mustang was based heavily on the Falcon's unitized frame design. It could be ordered with three variations of the inline 6 and with three V-8 engines, the biggest a 302 cubic inch (4.9 liter). (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This sixth generation (1973-1979) Ford F-350 tow truck has apparently seen its final duties as it sinks into the ground in eastern North Carolina. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
What looks like a mid-70s Ford Mustang lives in the Wisconsin snow stripped of most of its exterior features including the doors. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
The 1960 Chevrolet Corvair was a revolutionary new design from General Motors, the only mass-produced American car to feature a rear-mounted air-cooled engine. The Corvair was produced from 1960 through 1969 and included a two-door coupe, convertible, four-door sedan and four-door station wagon. This forsaken copy was discovered living among trash and debris in a junk yard. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
The weeds have growen so high around this 1977 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL that they appear to be an untrimmed hedge. The 450SEL designates a 4.5 cubic inch 8-cylinder engine, which made 180 horsepower mated to a four-speed automatic transmission. This series of S Class, manufactured from 1972 through 1980, was judged one of the safest cars on the road in that decade. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1936 Ford four-door sedan has been picked clean with just the shell and the remnants of its V8 engine block remaining. The V8 was the standard engine offering for Ford cars in 1936. The mid-30s Fords were very popular and ran neck-and-neck with Chevrolet for the title of "best selling car." Above is a rather interesting magazine ad for the '36 Ford. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The Jaguar XJ series was first sold in 1968 with the second generation Series 2 produced from 1973-1979. Pictured is a second-generation Jaguar, with a 5.3-liter V-12 — according to the emblem on the rear. It was found in retirement in North Carolina. The big engine — making 265 horsepower — was first used in 1972 with a top speed of 140 mph. It was billed as the "fastest full four-seater available in the world." (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This 1971 Saab 96 wagon was discovered in Louisiana in what appears to be restorable condition. The standard 4-cylinder engine in the Saab 96 from 1967 to 1976 made 65 horsepower and was timed in an excruciating turtle-like 15 seconds from 0-to-60. The Saab 96 was built from 1960 through 1980 and underwent incremental changes and updates through the years. (Photo by Jim Prueter)
The Volkswagen bus was extremely popular in the United States in the late 60s and through the 1970s. The second-generation bus was built from 1967 through 1979 with gradual changes over the years. This circa 1975 bus was discovered in retirement — and in decent shape — in northern Vermont. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1970s era Volkswagen Beetle was discovered living with an attractive growth of weeds in eastern North Carolina. The Beetle was enormously popular in the U.S. through more than three decades reaching 15 million sales in 1972 setting an all-time sales record surpassing the previous record holder, the Ford Model T. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This1952 Buick two-door coupe, discovered in Wisconsin, sports a two-tone yellow and rust look. Buick was one of the most popular nameplates in 1952 with total U.S. production of 303,745 with the four-door Deluxe Sedan leading with 63,346 sold. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This post-war circa 1946 Dodge Power Wagon was used — as indicated by its markings — as a utility truck for a volunteer fire department. It was discovered along the side of the road in western North Carolina. Derived from the Dodge military trucks used in World War II, it was the first civilian 4X4. It was produced in various model series from 1945 to 1981. Dodge resurrected the name in 2005 for a series of Ram Trucks. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The Dodge lineup was completely redesigned for the 1955 model year, and the new Dodge lineup consisting of the Coronet, Royal and Custom Royal helped revive Chrysler Corp.'s fortunes. This base model 1956 Coronet two-door was discovered in eastern North Carolina. It appears ready for restoration. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This 1959 Edsel sedan was discovered languishing among other used up vehicles in a North Carolina junkyard. The Edsel was developed as an upscale brand sandwiched between Ford and Mercury in the Ford Motor Company lineup. But it never caught on selling less than 120,000 copies in three model and was a multimillion dollar failure for Ford. Pictured directly above, an ad for the '59 model. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This circa 1949-1952 International Harvester L-Series truck cab was found rusting away in an eastern North Carolina field.The L-Series was introduced in 1949 as a replacement for the KB-Series and was available as everything from light pickup trucks and delivery vehicles to full-size tractor-trailers. Electric wipers, a radio, and a clock were optional. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1955 Oldsmobile, resting in a Wisconsin field, looks ready for restoration. Oldsmobiles were completely restyled for the 1954 model year with new longer and lower body shells and wrap-around windshields and rear windows. The 1955 models were heavily face-lifted with new grillework, taillights and body-side chrome. Horsepower for the 324-cubic-inch Rocket V8 increased to 185 for 88s and 202 for Super 88s. Above, a magazine ad for the 1955 Olds. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This 1937 Chevrolet one-and-a-half ton work truck was spotted serving as yard art near Santa Fe, N.M. In 1937, Chevrolet introduced new trucks with streamlined styling that many still consider the best designs of the era. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1966 Chevrolet Impala has been the object of cannibalization with its engine bay completely gutted. The Impala was redesigned in 1965 and set an annual sales record of more than one million in the U.S. There were some minor styling modifications for 1966 including new horizontal taillights, which replaced two sets of three round lights. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1950 Chevrolet was discovered in rather good condition living in a field in New Mexico. In 1950 the Chevrolet two-door Styleline Special started at $1,390 and came with an inline six-cylinder engine making 92 horsepower. (Photo by Jim Prueter)
McLaughlin Automobile Company under the guidance of Sam McLaughlin formed a 15-year alliance with Buick under the direction of William Durant near the turn of the 20th Century. For the first few years cars produced by the alliance were known as McLaughlins. Then the name was changed to McLaughlin-Buick. Our photographer, Jerry Brown, discovered this circa 1914 McLaughlin-Buick living in Canada. Notice that it sports very aggressive tires that probably weren't found on the car when it was new.
This mid-1950s Mack B Model truck was discovered in retirement along the side of a highway in south-central Virginia. The B Model was manufactured from 1953 through 1966. Above is a magazine advertisement for the 1955 Mack. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1967 Ford Fairlane looks restorable. The fifth generation Fairlane was revised in 1966 to match the full-sized Ford, which was restyled in 1965. The front end was highlighted by vertically stacked headlights. The Fairlane received a minor facelift in 1967. The top-selling engine both years was the 289 cubic inch V-8, referred to as the 289. The GT model, such as the one pictured, had a more muscular 390 cubic inch V-8 making 335 horsepower.1966-67 were the only two models years of the fifth generation before another redesign ushered in the sixth generation. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This Morris Minor 1000 2-door from the 1950s lives among the trash of a junkyard. It probably was once a proud family car. The Morris Minor 1000 was produced from 1956 through 1971 in Oxford and Birmingham, England. Nearly 850,000 copies were sold. The car had limited sales in North America. (Photo by John Harper)
A 1940 Chevrolet coupe has been abandoned on a flatbed in eastern North Carolina, perhaps ready for shipment to a junkyard. Chevrolet was restyled for the '40 model year and the changes resonated with the public with 760,000 produced — 38 percent more than 1939 — in three "series" starting at $659 and ranging up to $934 for the top end Special DeLuxe. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Jim Prueter found this rather attractive but decaying 1961 Chevrolet Biscayne in a New Mexico field. The Biscayne, built from 1958 through 1972, was the least expensive model in the Chevrolet full-size range. Although the Biscayne was generally a no-frills car, it could be purchased with a big-block V-8. (Photos by Jim Prueter)
This Peterbilt cab, probably from the late '70s to mid '80s — we admit no expertise when it comes to large trucks — is resting (perhaps permanently) in some eastern North Carolina weeds. Peterbilt Motors was founded in 1939 and continues to be a builder of Class 5 through Class 8 trucks, headquartered in Denton, Texas. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
Frazer, which was built from 1946 through 1951, was the upper-medium priced luxury car from the Kaiser-Frazer Corp. It was restyled for 1951 and included a four-door convertible, a hardtop sedan and a unique hatchback sedan. This 1951 example was found in restorable condition. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1959 Chevrolet Apache pickup was spotted in a wooded junkyard of old, worn out vehicles. It is one of the Task Force line of pickups built from 1955 through 1959 for Chevrolet and GMC. Chevrolet introduced its innovative small block 265 cubic-inch V-8 in the Task Force series. The new modern styling as well as the innovative V-8 made Chevrolet the best selling truck brand for the second half of the 1950s. (Photo by John Harper)
Ford was restyled for the 1961 model year with a new grille, a squared off roofline and new round taillights. This example was found in Florida in a deteriorating condition. Above in an ad for the 1961 Galaxie. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This rare Datsun 1000 four-door sedan was spotted returning to nature in a wooded junk yard by photographer John Harper. The little Nissan would be classified as a sub-compact (city car) in today's market with a length of 152 inches and a wheelbase of 87.4 inches. Curb weight was just 2,039 pounds. It was powered by a small inline four-cylinder making 34 horsepower and 48 foot-pounds of torque mated to a four-speed manual transmission. The 1958 sedan was the first Nissan offered in the United States retailing for $1,695. A magazine advertisement touted the 1958 model. (Photo by John Harper)
This 1961 Chevrolet Impala bears the inscription "Jim Rathman Chevrolet" with the number 11. Rathman was a well-known race car driver and the winner of the 1960 Indy 500. A native of Florida, Rathman opened a Chevrolet dealership with his winnings. This rare Chevy was spotted in Stark, Fla. The Chevy was restyled for 1961 with a trimmer, more flowing design. (Photo By Ralph Gable)
This late 1960s or early 1970s Volkswagen Beetle was found enveloped in weeds near White Lake, N.C. The original Beetle was first sold in the U.S. in 1949 and sales continued into 1979 before the car was discontinued in North America. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
We like this unique display some enterprising home owner erected in their yard near Newton, Iowa. We call it a very good use of a neglected Model T Ford. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This rather dilapidated 1951 Ford was found by the side of a North Carolina highway. In 1949, Ford came out with its first all-new design since World War I, and the first all-new design by the so-called Big Three U.S. auto companies. Notice the 1952 taillight not so artfully installed. The new streamlined design, which was produced through the 1951 model year, featured such changes as integrated rear fenders. In 1951 Ford offered an automatic transmission for the first time, the Ford-O-Matic. The '51 Fords were powered by either a 3.7-liter inline 6 or a 3.9-liter flathead V-8 making 100 horsepower. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A beaten and battered 1953 Chevrolet was found peering out of heavy overgrowth in Wilson County, North Carolina. The Chevy got a new design for '53 including the debut of a one-piece windshield. Total car production that year was 398,028. Prices started at $1,524 for a business coupe and topped out at $2,273 for a Townsman eight-passenger wagon. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This Oldsmobile Omega coupe was found looking rather well for its age resting in a field of weeds in Tennessee. The Oldsmobile Omega, largely unloved during its 12-year run, was a compact car sold from 1973 through 1984. It faced a host of reliability problems through its cycle. There were two generations of Omegas, both badge engineered on Chevrolet models, and both using the GM X platform architecture. The Omega shared the same engines as the Chevrolet Citation, the Pontiac Phoenix and the Buick Skylark — the so-called "Iron Duke" I4 and a 2.8-liter V6. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This abandoned bakery truck, which presumedly had a Ford Model T front end, made its last bread delivery decades ago and looks as if it is awaiting restoration. Photographer Jerry Brown discovered the ancient Anaconda Bakery delivery truck near Wales, Wis.
A mid-1980s Ford F-150 pickup rests nose-to-nose with a late 1970s Lincoln Continental. Both are in the process of being overrun by trees and underbrush. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This 1957 Ford has probably been for sale for a considerable amount of time based on its condition. The Ford sedan was spotted along the side of a road in rural Kentucky south of Cincinnati. The full-size Ford was restyled for 1957 and came with six engine choices — a 3.7-liter inline 6, and 4.5-liter, 4.8-liter, 5.1-liter, 5.4-liter and 5.8-liter V-8s. Transmission choices were a three-speed manual or a two-speed or three-speed automatic. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1955 Mercury sedan (left) and a 1951 Ford appear to be carrying on an abandoned car conversation in eastern North Carolina. Mercury shared much of its styling with the standard Lincoln in 1955. And for the first time, Ford featured an optional Ford-O-Matic 3-speed automatic transmission. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
Buick reworked and renamed its entire lineup for the 1936 model year to celebrate the engineering improvements and design advancements over the 1935 models. This is an example of a post-1935 Buick, late '30s model, which was found parked along the side of a highway in central Florida. Below, an advertisement for the 1928 Buick. (Photo by Jeffrey Ross)
It appears that someone "abandoned" this restoration of what looks like a 1955 Buick in stripped down guise . Note it has four VentiPorts, which denotes either the larger V-8 engine or higher trim level. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1968 Plymouth Satellite, discovered in Tennessee, appears to have been stripped of most of its essential parts. The Satellite, built from 1965 through 1974, started out as the top trim model for the Plymouth Belvedere and was available only with a V-8 engine. The second-generation Satellite was restyled for 1968 and the lineup was expanded beyond a two-door hardtop and convertible to include a four-door sedan and station wagon. It was restyled again for the 1971 model year. Below is infromation on the Satellite from a 1968 Plymouth brochure. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Flying A gasoline became the primary brand of Tidewater Oil Company in 1936 and was used on the East Coast through 1970 when it was permanently discontinued. Phillips Petroleum purchased Tidewater's western refining, distribution and retailing network in 1966 and dropped the brand name on the West Coast. The Flying A continued to be used on the East Coast until 1970 when it was discontinued by Getty Oil Company, which in 1966 merged with Tidewater. This remnant of days gone by was photographed near Bailey, N.C. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This copy of a ninth-generation (1983-1988) Ford Thunderbird seems to be in restorable condition. After lackluster sales of the eighth generation, Ford designed a sleeker Bird for the mid '80s. Two engines were carried over from the eighth generation, a 3.8-liter V-6 and a 4.9-liter V-8. A 2.3-liter 4-cylinder turbo was added to the lineup in 1983. Below, a page from a 1984 Thunderbird brochure. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
The Chrysler Windsor was a full-sized sedan built by the Chrysler Corporation in the U.S. from 1939 through 1961. The 1942 Windsor under went a refreshening after the war for the 1946 through 1948 model years. It came with a four-speed manual transmission and a 114-horsepower inline 6-cylinder engine. This example of the 1946-48 models seems to be in restorable condition getting some protection from the elements inside a shed. Below frrom a 1946 Chrysler brochure. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A first-generation Ford Mustang sits in abandonment in North Carolina perhaps awaiting rescue by someone looking for a good restoration project. Ford sold nearly 419,000 Mustangs in its first year of production from April 17, 1964, through April 17, 1965 — and the rest is history. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
For the first time in several years, Buick offered an Estate Wagon on the B-body LeSabre platform in 1970. The only engine available was a Buick 7.5-liter V-8 making 360 horsepower mated to a three-speed automatic transmission. It was a heavy car by today's standards weighing in at about 5,000 pounds. This 1970 example seems to be in drivable and restorable condition. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A 1952 Cadillac and a mid-1980s Lincoln Continental share space in a yard littered with old motorized stuff in North Carolina. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
A 1946 Ford that once served as a roadside advertisement for a business lies in decay in eastern North Carolina. The '46 was basically a carryover from the 1942 model, the last made before production stopped for World War II. Outside trim was nearly identical to the 1942 except for the new horizontal grille consisting of three stainless steel bars. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This relatively well preserved 1938 Chevrolet two-door sedan, minus a rear window and sporting a smashed-up grille, was discovered in Ellendale, N.D. The Chevrolet was redesigned for the 1937 model year, so styling changes were few for 1938, but did include a reworking of the grille. The volume-leader in 1938 was the Master DeLuxe Town Sedan, which sold for $750. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Like counting rings in a stump to determine a tree's age, you might be able to count how many inches the tires of this1964 Dodge Dart, discovered in southern Virginia, have sunk into the dirt to determine how long it has languished in the same location. Keeping it company is an old Chevrolet Suburban. Chrysler built the Dart from 1960 to 1976, first as a full-sized car in 1960-61. After one year as a mid-sizer in 1962, it was given compact car dimensions in 1963. Three engines were available in 1964, a 2.8-liter slant-6, a 3.7-liter slant six and a 4.5-liter V-8. Horsepower ratings were 101, 145 and 180 respectively. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
Three early 1960s Cadillacs, including one presumably ready to haul off a dilapidated travel trailer, reside near two 1950s era pickup trucks in this Arizona scene shot by automotive journalist Jim Prueter. A shame to see vintage American automotive history rusting away.
A lineup of Toyotas from about nearly three decades ago resides in the Wisconsin snow, perhaps part of a new-new car lot that time left behind. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A mid-60s Ford F-850 commercial truck is camouflaged in the woods near Chapel Hill, N.C., its work life long over. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This 1950 Pontiac two-door Streamliner discovered in eastern North Carolina appears to be in restorable condition. It was the second year of an all-new post-war design under the styling direction of famed GM designer Harley Earl. Several models were built including the Chieftain, Streamliner, Catalina, business coupe and convertible. Pontiac sold 450,000 Pontiacs in 1950, the most in the brand's history up to that point, trailing only Chevrolet, Ford, Plymouth, Buick and Dodge in domestic sales. A 268 cubic inch straight-8 Silver Streak was the top engine that year making 108 horsepower and 208 pound-feet of torque. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This Leyland tractor appears in the early stages of abandonment. Leyland Tractors was created after the merger of British Motor Corp. and Leyland Motors to form British Leyland in 1968. Leyland built tractors through 1982 in Bathgate, Scotland, before the company was sold to Marshall, Sons & Co. Marshall continued to build tractors until 1992 when production was stopped. We have no idea as to the model year of this used-up Leyland example. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
A Texas farmyard in the San Antonio area sports at least two vintage and no longer used cars — a 1956 Chevrolet (left) and a 1958 Ford Thunderbird. The used-up tractor in the foreground has us stumped as to make and model. (Photo by Jeffrey Ross)
This early 1980s Jeep Wagoneer lives in retirement in the weeds. The Wagoneer was built from 1963 through 1991, a sport utility vehicle (SUV) before the term was even coined. The wagon received only minor styling changes through the years. The Wagoneer was moved upmarket in its later years by AMC before Chrysler acquired AMC in 1987. The Wagoneer could be purchased with either a six-cylinder or V-8 engine in the early '80s and with a four-speed automatic transmission. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A mid-1960s GMC pickup — decorated with a set of antlers — sits next to a vintage gas pump in the Yukon in northwest Canada. Some enterprising landowner apparently decided to set up this nostalgic display. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible rests in the North Carolina sunshine missing its top, a wheel, and taillights. The Galaxie was Ford's top-of-the line full-sized model from 1959 through 1974. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The most interesting aspect of the 1959 Chevrolet was its "bat wing" fins, which took the popular late-50s tail fin design in a slightly new direction. This copy is slowly rusting away in a western North Carolina yard. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Practical perhaps, but weird looking in our estimation, the AMC Pacer hit the market in 1975. It was designed, according to AMC, to offer the interior room and feel of a big car in a small-car package with its extraordinarily wide stance and enormous glass area. Despite good reviews from the automotive press, the Pacer never really caught on with the public and was discontinued in 1980. This abandoned early-model Pacer appears in restorable condition. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1963 Chevrolet Impala looks in restorable condition as it deteriorates in a North Carolina yard. Chevrolet's advertising catch phrase for 1963 was "Jet Smooth," perhaps because the popular full-sized Chevy wasrestyled with a new grille, bumpers, hood, sculptured side panels, and rear deck contours. The Impala was Chevy's top-of-the-line with the most popular engine choices the small-block 283-and-327-cubic-inch (4.6 and 5.4 L) V8s. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This old bus has eluded the scrap yard by hiding in overgrown bushes and a couple of trees felled by storms over the years in eastern North Carolina. We were not able to determine the vintage of the destroyed people hauler — perhaps a school bus — but we do know it has come to an inglorious end. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1957 Chevrolet station wagon has been stripped of its manhood (i.e. engine) and has been left to rust into oblivion behind an auto repair shop. The '57 Chevy is one of the most sought-after classic cars. It was available in two-and four-door sedan formats, two- and four-door hardtop, convertible, station wagon and delivery vehicle. It came with a choice of an inline 6 and two V-8 engines making 140, 162 and 185 horsepower respectively. More than 1.5 million copes were sold. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This rare find of a 1947 Kaiser (left) and Frazer were found in a yard in Wayne, Alberta, Canada. The Kaiser-Frazer car company was founded on July 25, 1945, and displayed prototypes of their two new cars in New York in 1946. Kaiser and Frazer shared bodies and powertrains. The cars, the first all-new sedans in the U.S. following the end of World War II, were powered by a 226-cubic-inch L-head six making 100 horsepower mated to a three-speed transmission with optional overdrive. (Photo by Susan Skaggs)
|
This abandoned 1967 Dodge Dart was discovered near Winchester, Tenn. The original Dodge Dart, which was built from 1960 through 1976, was on a compact car platform from 1963 onward after starting life as a full-sized car. The Dart was completely restyled in 1967 with a 115-horsepower slant six as the standard engine. In 1967, Dart came in two- and four-door sedans, a hardtop and a convertible. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1980s era Ford F-150 has become a planter of sorts with a tree growing out of what once was the bed of the truck. Seems the tree, along with other vegetation, has grown quite attached to the retired pickup. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Ford built the Ranchero from 1957 through 1979, a vehicle with a cargo bed integrated into a car body combining the looks of a sedan and the utility of a light duty pickup. This 1965 model was based on the compact Ford Falcon. The 1957 through 1959 models were based on the full-sized Ford platform before Ford moved the Ranchero to the smaller Falcon platform in 1960. This 1965 model was spotted along with a multitude of other used up cars in the hill country of Texas. (Photo by Jeffery Ross)
This 1956 GMC pickup, once used as a tow truck, could stand some tender, loving care. It is living the old Biblical saying, dust to dust, and ashes to ashes; and perhaps we can add, rust to rust. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Following World War II International truck production began with a slightly new design in 1947 highlighted by the barrel-shaped grille sprouting little "wings," which are mostly gone from this 1948 model truck discovered in North Carolina. International stuck with the front-end design until 1950. This truck apparently hauled heavy farm equipment in its working life. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
It appears the "for sale fresh date" has long expired on this 1951 or 1952 Ford F-5 work truck discovered rusting away in Trapper Creek, Alaska. The truck was restyled for 1951 and received only a few minor changes for the 1952 model year. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
Oldsmobile was endowed with a new exterior design for the 1948 model year based on General Motors' newly developed C-Body, but clung to its pre-war flathead straight-eight engine. For 1948, the compression ratio was increased from 6.5:1 to 7.0:1 and horsepower was nudged upward from 110 to 115. Customers who waited until 1949 were rewarded with an all-new overhead valve V8 engine. This '48 model, discovered in Ellendale, N.D., is outfitted with a 4-speed Hydramatic automatic transmission. A three-speed manual was also available. It also appears that its owner outfitted it with an add-on air conditioner. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1956 S-line International pickup truck has been retired by Larry's Wrecking Service in Hosmer, S.D. The International Harvester company built pickup trucks from 1907 through 1975. The standard Black Diamond 240 six-cylinder engine in the 1956 truck made 131 horsepower and 208.5 pound-feet of torque. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Its work years long past, this rather bedraggled 1956 Ford F-300 lives in retirement beside a barn in North Carolina. Ford completely redesigned its lineup of trucks in 1953 and added "00" to the end of the existing monikers, thus the F-1 became the F-100, etc. One of the biggest changes was a new "full wrap windshield" extending over to the vertical door post. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1969 Mercury Monterey is nearly swallowed up by weeds in eastern North Carolina. The large Monterey was introduced in 1952 and built through the mid '70s, the last generation running from 1969 to 1974. Four V8 engines were available for the last generation ranging in size from a 6.5-liter to a 7.5-liter. A three-speed automatic was the transmission of choice. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Studebaker was on its last legs when these two 1965 sedans hit showrooms. About 20,000 Studebaker cars were sold in 1965, not enough to keep the struggling company afloat. The last sedan came off the assembly line in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on March 16, 1966. The third member of this all-Studebaker lineup is a 1960 pickup truck. Above is a 1965 ad for the Studebaker commander. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This used up 1941 International pickup truck was found near Trapper Creek, Alaska, its bed now used for growing weeds — or perhaps flowers of some variety. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
The grille from this1954 Buick Roadmaster has probably been transplanted in another Buick. But this car seems still relatively intact despite the organ donation. The 1954 was an all-new model, significantly bigger than the model it replaced, growing nine inches in length and more than five inches in wheelbase. The standard Roadmaster engine was a 5.3-liter Nailhead V-8 mated to a two-speed Dynaflow automatic transmission. The1954 Roadmaster engine came in two horsepower variants,164 and 188. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1938 Nash Ambassador business coupe has seen much better days. While Nash offered a full range of cars from coupes to sedans and with a choice of six and eight-cylinder engines, sales sagged to 41,543. The Nash lineup was completely revised for 1939 with sharper, more modern styling and sales surged to 60,348. One interesting feature that could be ordered for the first time in 1938 was the Nash Weather Eye, which directed fresh, outside air into the car's fan-boosted, filtered ventilation system, where it was warmed (or cooled), and then removed through rearward placed vents. The process also helped to reduce humidity and equalize the slight pressure differential between the outside and inside of a moving vehicle. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1965 Ford Thunderbird could stand some tender, loving care, and might still be restorable. The '65 was the second year of the fourth-generation Bird, which ran from 1964 through 1966. It gained a more squared-off appearance from the third generation (1961-63). The standard engine was a 300-horsepower 6.4-liter V-8 mated to a three-speed automatic transmission. Standard front disc brakes were offered for the first time in '65. After record Thunderbird sales in 1964 of 92,000, volume eased off to 75,000 for the 1965 model year. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1967 Buick LeSabre enjoys nice surroundings in its abandoned retirement. The LeSabre entered its third generation in 1965 and continued through 1970 with incremental styling updates. The '67 LeSabre received a slightly updated grille treatment. The first three generations of LeSabres were full-sized six-passenger body-on-frame cars. Engine options included four V-8s ranging in size from a 300-cubic-inch 4.9-liter to a 455-cubic-inch 7.5-liter. The standard transmission was a three-speed automatic. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This shell of a 60s-something Corvette was spotted in a grove of trees outside San Diego. Perhaps someone had plans for it that never materialized. And we figure it might still be resurrected into a useful commodity. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1963 Ford Galaxie was discovered rusting away in some North Carolina weeds among other discarded equipment. The first generation of the Galaxie was produced from 1959 through 1964 with minor mechanical changes each year, but with noticeable styling updates. The '63 was arguably the best looking of the group. 1963 production for all Galaxie styles and engine sizes (V-6 and V-8) totaled 679,652. Horsepower ranged from 85 with the smallest V-6 to 425 with the largest V-8. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Both Ford and General Motors played catch up after Chrysler found instant success with its first minivan introduced in November 1983 as a 1984 model. Ford's answer to the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager was called the Aerostar and was introduced nearly two yeas later in the summer of 1985 as a 1986 model. The standard engine in early versions was a 2.3-liter 4-cylinder. A 2.8-liter V-6 was optional. In 1988, the 4-cylinder was dropped and the Aerostar became the first minivan with a V-6 as standard equipment. This first-generation minivan (1986-1991) was found behind a garage in eastern North Carolina apparently done with the chores of driving life. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1949-50 Chevrolet work truck has been stored away, it's useful life long ended. This style Chevy came with several straight six engine configurations in three-quarter ton format and commanded new-vehicle prices ranging from $1,060 to $1,435. The Chevrolet truck was restyled in 1947, the first all-new truck since before World War II. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This vintage 1972-73 Volvo 1800ES "coupe station wagon" appears abandoned but ready for action outfitted for summer fun in the middle of winter with a boat and tricycle secured to the top. This style of the sporty 1800 Volvo was produced for only two years reaching showrooms in 1971 as a 1972 model. The rear seat could be folded down to create a long, flat loading area. Only 8,700 copies of the 1800ES were built. (Photo by Jeffrey Ross)
The Chevy II/Nova compact car was first built from 1962 through 1979. The Nova was the top model in the Chevy II lineup through 1968 when the Chevy II nameplate was dropped in favor of Nova. This 1968 model rests in retirement in the weeds of an abandoned farmyard in eastern North Carolina. The Chevy II was popular in 1968 with 201,000 sold with a price range of $2,222 to $2,419. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1970 era Volkswagen convertible is suffering from neglect. The popular Beetle was sold in the U.S. for three decades before production ended in the late '70s. It was revived with an all-new and modern rendition in 1999. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
The Chevrolet Suburban has the distinction of being the longest continuous nameplate in the world. The first model hit the market in 1934 as a 1935 model. This fixer-upper is a seventh-generation1969 model and the last generation of the three-door Suburbans. A second door was added to the passenger side with the first eighth-generation Suburban in 1973. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Even the For Sale sign appears abandoned on what's left of this late '60s Chevrolet C/K pickup. Two inline 6-cylinder engines and a variety of V-8 engines were available in the late '60s. Manual transmission were of three or four gears and automatics were of either two-speed or three-speed configurations. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
We think this rather imposing tow truck is a Mack from the mid-50s. Looking as if it was designed for heavy-duty hauling, it rests in retirement near Saratoga, N.C. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1963 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon has lost its luster because of neglect. The third-generation Bonneville covered the 1961 through 1964 model years and was Pontiac's costliest and most luxurious model. Three V-8 engines were offered as well as standard automatic transmission, and numerous options including power steering, air conditioning, cruise control, power windows, power seats and a radio. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1972 Pontiac LeMans was spotted in a field, perhaps ready to be adopted by someone interested in restoration. The Le Mans was a model name applied to compact and intermediate-sized cars marketed by the Pontiac division of General Motors from 1962 to 1981. The third generation built from 1968 through 1972 included coupe, sedan, station wagon and convertible styles. A four-door sedan such as the one pictured started at $2,932. About 170,000 LeMans models were produced in 1972 with the hardtop coupe leading sales at 80,383 according to OldRide.com. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1973/74 Chevrolet Nova was found in a state of retirement in a North Carolina weed field. The Nova was built from 1962 through 1979 and again in a different format from 1985 through 1988. It went through four generations before ending production in 1979. Four engines were available in 1973 including two 350-cubic-inch V-8s, one of which was under the hood of the pictured model. A two-barrel carburetor version made 145 horsepower and 255 foot-pounds of torque. A bigger four-barrel carburetor version pumped out 175 horsepower and 260 foot-pounds of torque. The car proved popular in the '70s with 369,509 copies sold in 1973 and 390,536 in 1974, the peak year of its 18-year production run. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This early model Mazda Miata has not only suffered the indignity of being abandoned, but it has been thoroughly burned as well. It was discovered along a wooded stretch of road in the hills surrounding Louisville, Ky. The Miata, now known as the MX-5 Miata, was launched in 1989 and since then nearly one million of the little roadsters have been sold worldwide. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Chevrolet restyled its pickup truck in 1947, the first all-new truck since before World War II. The truck was an immediate success and remained relatively unchanged until 1954 when it got its first front-end restyling. Styling cues tell us this truck is either a 1949 or 1950 model. Over one million Chevy pickups were built from 1947 to 1955, which is one reason they are easy to spot rusting away behind a barn or garage. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Research has discovered that this Danville, Va., bus, built by General Motors and belonging to the Danville Traction and Power Co., is of the same design and vintage as the famous segregated bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Ala. The Alabama bus was built in March 1948. Danville Traction and Power Co. was a public transportation system prior to the current Danville Transit System. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This early '70s model Fiat 124 Spider was discovered infested by eastern North Carolina weeds at the back of a lot. Introduced in 1967 as a 2+2 convertible, nearly 200,000 were built through the 1985 model year with about 120,000 sold in the U.S. Four-cylinder horsepower ratings ranged from 90 to 102 through the '70s. Zero to 60 times were around 11.5 seconds, acceptable for roadsters of the era. The Fiat competed with such nameplates as MG and Triumph. Above, a 1970s magazine ad for the Fiat 124 that included a cutout of the car. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
An excellent example of a 1941 notchback Pontiac Torpedo sedan was discovered in a North Carolina farmyard by photographer Ralph Gable. Pontiac introduced the Torpedo in 1940 on the General Motors C-body. The Torpedo shared the body with the Cadillac Series 62, Buick Roadmaster and Super and the Oldsmobile Series 90. The Torpedo had larger windows and wider seats than other Pontiacs, and the hood ornament was a plastic Indian head mounted in a metal base. Available engines were a 3.9-liter Flathead inline 6 and a 4.1-liter Silver Streak inline 8, both mated to a 3-speed synchromesh manual transmission. Above, the Torpedo living area as depicted in a 1941 advertisement. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This Georiga "yard art" was spotted near Albany, Ga., by automotive writer and photographer Jeffrey Ross. On the left is a 1941 Chevrolet pickup, dramatically restyled for 1941 with combination horizontal and vertical grille bars. One new feature of the Chevrolet pickups was a crank-open windshield for ventilation. We are not sure of the car brand, but it was from the late '30s. (Photos by Jeffrey Ross)
Pontiac was the sixth best selling brand in 1954 — but only the fourth best seller at General Motors behind Chevrolet, Buick and Oldsmobile — with 287,744 units sold. The Pontiac was sold as the Star Chief and Chieftain in numerous configurations. Two engines were offered, a 127 horsepower straight eight and a 118 horsepower inline six. This two-door Chieftain found in eastern North Carolina has seen better days. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1991 Pontiac Sunbird convertible has been literally "put out to pasture" on an eastern North Carolina farm, although it looks as if it could easily be revitalized into a running machine. The Sunbird was produced from 1975 through 1994 and was available through the years as a notchback coupe, sedan, hatchback, convertible and station wagon. For the '91 model year a 2.0-liter 4-cylinder making 110 horsepower and a 3.1-liter V-6 making 140 horsepower were available. The Sunbird shared a platform with the Chevrolet Cavalier, Buick Skylark and Cadillac Cimarron. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A GMC truck has come to an inglorious end in the weeds of a company's back lot. We can't determine the exact age of the GMC, which we assume served its masters well over the years, but we figure it's from the early seventies based on the dashboard layout. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1939 Chevrolet rests in the Wisconsin snow minus its headlights . The 1939 Chevrolet was a continuation of a new generation that hit the showrooms as a 1937 model. Styling changes for '39 included a revised grille treatment . Prices started at $628 for the Master 85 coupe and ranged up to $883 for a Master DeLuxe station wagon. Chevrolet sold 577,278 copies in 1939, down significantly from 1937 sales of 815,420, but more than the 1938 total of 465,156. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
MotorwayAmerica contributing photographer John Harper found this circa 1950 Jaguar XK120 roadster, apparently at one time undergoing restoration, in a garage near Charlotte, N.C. Just over 12,000 were built from 1948 through 1954. The XK120 was motivated by an 3.4-liter inline six making 160 horsepower. The roadster's lightweight canvas top and detachable side windows stowed out of sight behind the seats. (Photos by John Harper)
A 1991 Dodge Daytona and a late-70s model Ford Pinto wagon appear ready for launch. They were discovered in this "blast off" position near Winchester, Tenn. The Daytona two-door hatchback was built from 1984 through 1993. The standard engine in 1991 was a 2.5-liter turbo four making 150 horsepower. The Pinto was built by Ford from 1971 through 1980 and included a two-door sedan, hatchback and wagon. Its peak sales year was 1974 when an astounding 544,209 were produced. Sales had fallen off to 185,054 in its last year in 1980. Only four-cylinder engines were offered and from 1975 through 1979 there were two choices, a 2.3-liter and a 2.8-liter. Horsepower ratings ranged from 82 to 102. Above, an advertisement for a 1977 Pinto wagon. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1967-1972 era GMC truck has come to an inglorious end under a tree in a North Carolina back yard. GMC redesigned its light duty trucks in 1967 and the sheetmetal remained unchanged through the 1972 model year. GMC ranked third in U.S. truck sales in 1968, but slipped to fourth by 1972. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Resting in retirement are two 1955 or 1956 Packard 400s produced in the waning years of the once-proud luxury brand. The Packards of this era were built by the Studebaker-Packard Corp. of South Bend, Ind. Production of the 400 was 7,206 units in 1955 and 3,224 in 1956. The last Packard was produced for the 1958 model year. At right, is an early 1980s model Lincoln . (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This circa 1990-1992 Cadillac Brougham, stretched into a limo, has apparently been permanently parked in a grassy field in eastern North Carolina , its service no longer needed — or wanted. We are sure New Year's Eve partiers and young and excited high school prom participants spent many happy hours inside. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1968 AMC Ambassador SST trim line hardtop coupe rests comfortably in a field of eastern North Carolina weeds. It was one of the first mainstream cars in North America to get air conditioning as standard equipment. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This equipment-loaded 1970 era Mack truck is nearly enveloped by weeds in southeastern North Carolia. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This 1980 Ford F-350 tow truck rests in eastern North Carolina weeds, its days of duty apparently at an end. 1980 marked the beginning of the seventh generation Ford truck, the first ground-up remake of the popular F-Series since 1965. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
These 1949-1953-era Studebaker pickups were discovered in retirement in Indiana. The 1949 model was the first all-new post-war pickup from Studebaker, introduced in May 1948. Little was changed over the five-model-year run with the exception of a horsepower boost in the six-cylinder engine from 85 to 102 in 1950. The truck came with a three-speed manual transmission and ahead-of-its-time doubled-walled cargo bed. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
This 1953 Buick Special — notice the three fender portholes — was spotted in a southeastern North Carolina field. The Special was Buick's lowest priced model, below the mid-level Super and the top-of-the-line Roadmaster in 1953. General Motors renamed the Special the LeSabre for the 1959 model year. The 1953 Special was powered by the Fireball straight eight. The Special got the more powerful Nailhead V-8 in 1954. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
The Chevrolet Corvair, built from 1960 through 1969, was a unique car for its time. It was the only American-designed mass-produced passenger car to feature a rear-mounted air-cooled engine. This 1960 example of a Corvair coupe still looks restorable. The Corvair also came in three other body styles — a convertible, sedan and station wagon. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
These rusting Chevrolet trucks, a 1962 model on the left and a 1963 on the right, were found deteriorating in an eastern North Carolina field. The 1963 can be identified with its egg-crate grille appearance. Chevrolet was king of the hill in the early '60s with 483,119 pickups built in 1963, one-third of all the light-duty trucks produced in the U.S. that year. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
A 1946 International Harvester truck is found resting in the corner of a Wisconsin parking lot. It was the last year for the K Series introduced in 1940 and built through 1946 with several years of war interruption. There were 42 K-Series models with142 different wheelbase lengths and load ratings ranging from one-half ton to 90,000 pounds. The K-Series styling included headlamps integrated into the fenders. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1940-era sedan is covered in pine straw in a western North Carolina woods preventing us from determining the exact make and model. But it looks like the big sedan has become a permanent resident. (Photo by John Harper)
A Mack B-60 Thermodyne wrecker lives in retirement near Saratoga, N.C. The B-Series trucks were introduced in 1953 and were built through 1966. It was one of Mack's most successful products with 127,786 sold, some of which are still in use. The Thermodyne open chamber, direct-injection diesel engine established Mack's leadership in diesel performance and fuel efficiency. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1940 DeSoto sedan, in rather good condition, was spotted in a Wisconsin field. Horsepower from a 228 cubic-inch inline six was increased to 100 at 3,600 rpm for the 1940 model year. Optional equipment raised the horsepower to 105. DeSoto had a banner year in '40 with more than 65,000 sold. DeSoto's pre-war peak was reached in 1941 with more than 97,000 sales. Above, a page from a 1940 brochure shows the car's seating. Note the sofa-like rear seat complete with arm rests. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This vintage Jeep is but a shell of its former self resting in a western Virginia yard. At some point in its life it probably provided good service in a variety of roles including possibly the military. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A new Chevrolet pickup body style was introduced in 1960 and was built through 1966. This 1964 example, complete with a couple of engines stored in the bed and resting in the tall grass in eastern North Carolina, is a stepside model. The pickup came with a base 3.8-liter 140-horsepower inline 6. An optional 165-horsepower 4.8-liter six was available. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The cab of a pickup truck from the '40s sits beside a truck frame on a farm near Mitchell, S.D. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This neglected 1956 Chevrolet was found behind a storage shed in western Virginia. "The Hot One is Even Hotter" was the advertising slogan that Chevrolet boasted for its 150, 210 and Bel Air series in 1956. With a new Super Turbo Fire V8, the 1956 promised a friskier, sweeter ride with safer passing. Five engines were available including a 140-horsepower inline six and four V-8 engines topping out at 225 horsepower. Chevrolet was the best selling car in the U.S. that year with 1,567,117 sales, topping Ford by 150,000 units. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
The hulk of a rare circa 1939 Lincoln Continental settles in for a winter's rest. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A deteriorating 1948-1953 era Chevrolet half-ton pickup was discovered in "retirement" beside a barn in South Dakota. Chevrolet's post-war restyled "Advance Design" truck was introduced in 1947 as a 1948 model and was little changed in appearance through 1953. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
A stripped-out 1961 Ford Galaxie rests in the grass in Virginia. Ford began selling performance in 1961 with a 6.4-liter V-8 available with either a four-barrel carburetor or with three two-barrel carburetors making 401 horsepower. Can't tell what once was under the hood of this coupe. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This mid-60s Volvo PV544 photographed in eastern North Carolina seems restorable. The PV544 was built from 1962 through 1966 with the B18 engine (note emblem on grille), a 1.8-liter straight four. Most copies sold in the U.S. came with dual carburetors making 90 horsepower mated to a four-speed manual transmission. A November 1963 issue of Road & Track magazine clocked the Volvo from 0 to 60 in 14 seconds, fairly quick for the time. The quarter mile was recorded in 19.1 seconds at 70 mph with a top speed of 92 mph. Gas mileage for the 2,100-pound coupe was excellent, rated at between 25 and 29 mpg. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
Auto journalist Jeffrey Ross discovered this Pontiac Fiero graveyard recently near Huntsville, Ala. The mid-engined sports car was built by the Pontiac division of General Motors from 1984 to 1988. The Fiero was the first two-seater for the Pontiac brand since the 1926 to 1938 coupes, and also the first and only mass-produced mid-engine sports car by a U.S. manufacturer. A total of 370,168 Fieros were produced over the relatively short production run of five years. (Photo by Jeffrey Ross)
This 1947 or '48 Ford is rusting into oblivion in a western Virginia yard. It is one of nearly 860,000 Fords that were sold during the two model years. The 1948s were virtually identical to the 1947s, though the early 1947s were really 1946s, while the freshened "1947-1/2" models went on to become 1948s. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A 1953 Dodge Coronet deteriorates in a field in North Carolina. The Coronet was built from 1949 through 1976. The 1953 model was the first of the second generation Coronets and was sold as a four-door sedan, a coupe and a convertible. Engine choices were a 3.9-liter V-8 making 140 horsepower and a 3.8-liter inline six. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
What looks to be a late '30s model ton-and-a-half Chevrolet work truck rests in the desert near Lee's Ferry, Ariz. (Photos by Charles Skaggs)
This third-generation circa 1986 Subaru GL wagon was found nearly obliterated by weeds. Like today, it was sold with full-time four-wheel drive. The 1.8-liter flat four was mated to either a four-speed automatic or a five-speed manual. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
This copy of an MG 1100 was found deteriorating in a wooded area. The MG 1100 was built from 1962 through 1968 with 124,860 units sold over that time frame. Several other small English cars were built off that platform including the MG 1300, Austin 1100 and 1300, Morris 1100 and 1300, and Woleseley 1100, 1275 and 1300. (Photo by John Harper)
No wonder it's easy spot a 1963 Chevrolet still on the road, in a junkyard, or rusting away in a field. More than 1.3 million Chevrolet sedans, coupes and convertibles were sold in 1963, which dwarfs today's cars when the "best-selling" title usually goes to a model that can rack up 400,000 sales. These three 1963 Chevys were found near Havelock, N.C. The 1963 model lineup was Biscayne, Bel Air and Impala with prices ranging from $2,322 to $3,170. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Abandoned early-model Ford Mustangs are relatively easy to find. Here's another example of a 1965 or 1966 Mustang that someone chose to abandon rather than keep in running condition. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
A 1948 or 49 Dodge pickup looks longingly at the outside world through a broken fence in a yard in southwestern Wyoming. The 1948 pickup was an all new model replacing the pre-war trucks. The new half-ton pickups originally came with a 95-horsepower flathead straight six. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This fourth generation Honda Accord (1990-1993) was found abandoned to the grass and weeds in a North Carolina field. You are more likely to see an Accord of this vintage still on the street and not in the weeds. But the owner of this particular two-door had apparently had enough of its troubles. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
A well-used 1947 or 48 Chevrolet pickup truck was discovered in underbrush near Jacksonville, N.C. The 1947 model was the first all-new Chevrolet truck after the end of World War II and pushed the Chevy to the forefront in the pickup truck wars. Chevrolet was the best-selling pickup in the U.S. from 1947 through 1955. The 1946 pickup was a carryover from pre-war years. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This circa early 1960s first-generation Plymouth Valiant was spotted sitting in the yard of an old house in Ely, Nev. The Valiant was developed by Chrysler as an answer to the smaller cars coming into the market at the time including the Chevrolet Corvair and Ford Falcon from General Motors and Ford respectively. The Valiant was built from 1960 through 1976 and was marketed worldwide. Two engines were available in the early years — a 2.8-liter and a 3.7-liter Slant 6. (Photo by Charles Skaggs)
A 1975 Chrysler Newport rests in a field of weeds in Tennessee. This iteration of the Newport, a full-sized sedan, was made from 1974 through 1978. The 227-inch-long car was outfitted with a 400 cubic inch V-8 making 175 horsepower mated to a three-speed automatic transmission. Published 0-to-60 time was just over 12 seconds. Fuel economy was around 10 mpg. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1957 Oldsmobile 88 appears ready to charge out of the woods, sans a headlight. Under the hood is a 372 cubic-inch V-8 (6.1 liters) making 277 horsepower. Oldsmobile built 384,390 cars in 1957, the fifth-ranking nameplate in the U.S. (Photo by John Harper)
A first-generation Mercury Cougar, built from 1967 through 1970, sits next to a Ford Mustang, its platform mate. The Cougar was developed off the Mustang platform to give the Mercury brand its own pony car and siphon off some of the Mustang's incredible success. And the early Cougar was a success with 364,719 sold through the first three years (1967-1969). (Photo by Ralph Gable)
This 1950 Mercury "sport sedan" looks as if it still possesses the ability to drive out of its junky retirement home. Mercury was a big hit from 1949 through 1951 with more than 900,000 sold during those three years. 1951 was the last year of the "inverted bathtub" style and the first year for the optional Merc-O-Matic three-speed automatic transmission. (Photo by John Harper)
This early 1950s Chevrolet is decaying in a Colorado car graveyard. In 1950 the Chevrolet two-door Styleline Special started at $1,390. The upscale Bel Air hardtop moved the price up to $1,740. The two available inline six-cylinder engines came with 92 and 105 horsepower and with a three-speed manual or an optional two-speed Powerglide automatic. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 has been unceremoniously crowned with a "new top." 1964 was the fourth and final year of this body style. The big car came with three V-8 engine choices in 1964 ranging from 220 horsepower up to 425 horsepower. More than 88,000 two-door hardtops, convertibles and sedans were built that year. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
These three early 1950s Packard speciality vehicles are gathered presumably to discus family genealogy. The vehicle in back, left, served as an ambulance. The other two could have spent their active days as either ambulances or hearses. Sad to see these once-great cars in such disrepair. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
A 1975 Chrysler Cordoba and a circa 1981-1985 Chevrolet Caprice Classic live side by side next to an abandoned mobile home in Tennessee. The Cordoba was introduced by Chrysler for the 1975 model year as an upscale personal luxury car to compete with the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Pontiac Grand Prix, two popular GM coupes. The Caprice Classic was an upscale version of the Chevrolet Impala. The nameplate was used from 1965 to 1996. Above is the cover of a Chrysler brochure depiciting the 1975 Cordoba. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
These four friends — two early 1950's model Hudson Hornets and two early 1950's model Chevrolets — look as if they are ready to audition for the next "Cars" movie. They are spending their retirement days near Cortez, Col. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
Dodge underwent a major restyling for the 25th anniversary 1939 models. The top trim level was dubbed the Luxury Liner. This 1939 Luxury Liner, found in South Carolina, is missing various parts including its grille, front bumper and windshield. And a detached door rests against the car. Dodge was apparently not content with the new design, because the front end was reworked in 1940, and again in 1941. The car got a minor refresh for 1942, but just after the '42 models were introduced, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor forced the shutdown of Dodge’s passenger car assembly lines in favor of war production in February 1942. At top is a page from a 1939 Dodge brochure. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A forlorn 1955 Chevrolet 6500 Series truck lives in some South Carolina undergrowth, its service long finished. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
A mid-60s model Chevrolet Malibu suffers the ravages of wind, weather and vandals in a North Carolina field. The Malibu name was first used by General Motors in 1964 as a top-line sub-series of the mid-sized Chevrolet Chevelle. The first generation was produced from 1964 through 1967. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This out-of-work 1970s International Loadstar endures a North Carolina ice storm.
(Photos by Jim Meachen)
Minus its wheels, this Jaguar XJ6, circa 1985, has become a prop for a couple of windows as it rests on concrete blocks behind an abandoned building in eastern North Carolina. This Series III XJ came with a 4.2-liter inline six-cylinder engine making 176 horsepower with a 0-60 speed of 9.6 seconds. Average price for a mid-80s model XJ6 was about $32,000. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This mid-1960s Dodge pickup has become part of the landscape as it rests on the side of a rural road in Tennessee. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
The Edsel was an automobile nameplate that was built by Ford during the 1958, 1959, and 1960 model years. it was designed to compete with mid-level GM and Chrysler nameplates such as Oldsmobile, Pontiac and DeSoto. But it never got off the ground, selling poorly especially in '59 and '60. This example of a 1959 model appears ready for the crushers. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
The 1953 Chevrolet came in three basic body styles — the base 150, the mid-level 210 and the more upscale Bel Air. The 210 was the sales leader with a base 108-horsepower 6-cylinder engine. The Powerglide automatic transmission added seven horsepower. This 210 series Chevy is rusting away, but still appears restorable. Above is a magazine ad for the '53 Chevy. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1964 Chevrolet Biscayne was at the bottom of a four-model lineup in 1964 with a price range of $3,230 to $3,820. Nearly 175,000 Biscaynes were sold that year. The most popular Chevy model was the more upscale Impala with more than 700,000 leaving dealerships. This battered example was discovered near Winchester, Tenn. Above, a magazine ad for the '64 Chevy. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Multi-stop trucks — also known as step vans — are a type of light-duty and medium-duty truck created for local deliveries to residences and businesses. This 1970s-era Chevrolet van has probably seen its last duty delivering whatever it delivered in its day. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This copy of either a 1974 or 1975 Volvo 164 was found in an eastern North Carolina farm field. The 164 is a 4-door, 6-cylinder sedan sold by the Swedish car maker from 1968 through 1975. It came with either a three-speed automatic or a four-speed manual transmission. There were 46,008 164s built before the car was superseded by the 264 for the 1976 model year. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This restorable example of the 1950 Packard four-door sedan rests in a residential yard in Tucumcari, N.M. The sedan came with a straight-eight developing 135 horsepower and sold for around $3,500. 1950 was the last year for the bathtub-style Packard as sales sank from 116,000 in 1949 to 42,000 in 1950. As the above ad shows, the 1949-1950 Packard was not without innovation. All 1950 models came with the two-speed plus reverse Ultramatic automatic transmission as standard equipment. (Photo by B.J. Overbee)
Abandoned Mustangs are popular, especially, it seems, the 1967 version. At least that seems to be the case in eastern North Carolina. This example, which is sinking into the ground, seems to be in restorable condition. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
This 1937 Chevrolet Master Business Coupe was photographed rusting away in a residential section of Savanah, Ill. The business coupe through the '30s, '40s and '50s was a popular model for Chevrolet. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
A 1950 Chevrolet, minus its wheels, rests in front of a lineup of equally rusting and stripped-down vehicles on Route 66 at the Arizona-New Mexico border. The 1950 Chevrolet was the most popular vehicle in America that year, with more than 1 million cars and trucks sold. 1950 was a record-setting year for auto sales as the industry was finally in full swing after civilian production had gone on hiatus during World War II. (Photo by B.J. Overbee)
The 1955 Chevrolet was a turning point for the manufacturer, the first successful Chevrolet with a V8 engine. Though Chevrolet had produced another car with a V-8, the 1938, it had remained in production for only a year. The '55's looks, power and engineering made it a critical success. This copy lives in an overgrown field in eastern North Carolina. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The Chevrolet Lumina sedan was built from 1990 through 2001. This is an example of the second generation built from 1995 through 2001. The second-generation Lumina was a popular model with more than 200,000 sold each year from 1995 through 1998 before sales went south. (Photo by Jim Meachen)
The Ford Mustang was introduced in 1964 and was an immediate overwhelming success. It remained on the same platform, but received styling upgrades inside and out for the 1967 model year. This example has been stripped of almost all meaningful parts including the engine. An advertisement for the '67 Mustang is below. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The four-wheel drive Subaru BRAT was sold in the U.S. from 1978 through 1987 mimicking the Chevrolet El Camino and Ford Ranchero. BRAT is an acronym for Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter. This abandoned example looks to still be in decent shape. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom was found near Winchester, Tenn. Chrysler revived the Newport name in 1961 to fill the price gap between Chrysler and Dodge that was created when DeSoto was discontinued. New to the Newport line for 1967 was a more luxurious Newport Custom series available in four-door pillared and hardtop sedans, along with the two-door hardtop. The Newport was available with a 270-horsepower V-8 or an optional 440-cubic-inch V-8 making 325 horsepower. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1982 or '83 Chevrolet Monte Carlo rests in retirement next to a first-generation circa 1983 Ford Ranger. The Monte Carlo was in its fourth generation in the mid-80s. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This circa 1970 c70 Chevrolet truck was found living in a field in eastern North Carolina. It appears to have lived its life as tow truck. The badge on the side of the truck proclaims V-8 power. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
The large and popular Chevrolet Suburban lived as a three-door passenger truck until the introduction of the eighth-generation vehicle in 1973 when it finally received a fourth door (on the driver's side). This Suburban, circa 1970, has lost a door, its engine and its wheels as it slowly deteriorates. A spider has also taken up residence, weaving a web over the dashboard. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
A 1937 Ford has been striped to a skeleton. It might have been in the early stages of restoration before it was left to decay in a field. Ford did some redesign work on the 1937 Ford, creating a V-shaped grille and incorporating the headlights into the fenders. The new headlight treatment was found on the Standard and DeLuxe trim versions. Slantback sedans gained a rear trunk door. For 1937 an entry-level 2.2-liter V-8 was added. The popular 3.6-liter flathead V-8 was still the best seller. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1963 or 1964 Ford pickup lives in the rainforest in Olympic National Park in Washington state. Photo courtesy of Rob Van Esch. Additional abandoned car photos can be found at Rob Van Esch Photography.
This 1969 Chevrolet C/K pickup truck needs some tender, loving care. The second-generation C/K came in two inline 6-cylinder and three V-8 configurations for 1969, the top engine the 396-cubic-inch. It was in the late '60s that General Motors began to add comfort and convenience items to the vehicle line that before had been built just for work purposes. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
Plymouth became one of the best selling cars in the U.S. after World War II. There was very little styling and mechanical changes between the 1946, 1947 and 1948 models. To differentiate model years, a check of the VIN was necessary in many cases. The post-WWII facelift involved a more modest grille with alternating thick/thin horizontal bars, rectangular parking lights beneath the headlamps, wide front-fender moldings, a new hood ornament, and reworked rear fenders. This example of a post-war Plymouth coupe was found in Colorado. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
The Z-Car was a popular roadster of the early '70s manufactured by Datsun, now Nissan. An early model Z (either a 240Z or a 260Z) keeps a 1975 280Z company. The 280Z made 149 horsepower from its fuel-injected inline six-cylinder engine. The interior shot is of the 280Z. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1986 Pontiac Parisienne is in its last days missing an engine, fender, grille and other assorted pieces. The top-line rear-wheel-drive Pontiac Parisienne was sold in the U.S. from 1983 through 1986 after the Bonneville was down-sized on a front-wheel drive platform. Traditional Pontiac luxury buyers still had an option — at least for a few years. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This 1949 Chrysler, despite being left to deteriorate in an unused parking lot, still appears restorable. The Chrysler line was one of the more popular "luxury" brands in 1949 with sales of 124,218. A Chrysler New Yorker four-door sold for $2,726. There were two engines options, a 250 cubic inch inline six making 116 horsepower and a 323 cubic inch inline eight-cylinder making 135 horsepower. (Photos by Jim Meachen)
This well-preserved 1947 De Soto Suburban has been put out to pasture. The long-wheelbase Suburban was built from 1946 through 1954 and arrived from the factory with seating for eight. The two-ton car was powered by Chrysler's inline six-cylinder engine. The luggage rack on top of this car was optional equipment. The Suburban was popular with taxi firms and could be manufactured as a limousine.
(Photos by Ralph Gable)
Abandoned cars will probably feel right at home at this abandoned gas station on U.S. 301 in North Carolina. Gas stations and motels along 301 have been boarding up their doors for two or three decades since the competition of Interstate 95 in the '70s. This Exxon station probably saw its last customer in the late '90s based on the $1.22 pump price for 87 octane regular. Exxon became Exxon-Mobile in November 1999. Before I95, U.S. 301 was the major north-south highway from Miami to New York. Happy Motoring!
(Photos by Jim Meachen)
The remains of a 1941 Chevrolet pickup were found discarded in an East Coast field.
The redesigned '41 Chevrolet pickup stood out because of its unusual bright chrome grille with horizontal bars over top and vertical bars below. The truck's entire front end: hood, louvers, fenders, bumpers, headlights, parking lights and grille were all new. The 1942 Chevrolet pickups were essentially unchanged from 1941. Because America entered World War II in December 1941 the government halted all civilian truck production on Jan. 30, 1942. The six-cylinder engine remained at 216.5 cubic inches from 1940 while horsepower was increased by five to 90 and torque by four to 174 pound-feet at 1,200 to 2,000 rpm.
(Photos by Ralph Gable)
The Ford Thunderbird entered the marketplace in 1955 as sporty two-seat convertible. In 1958, the second-generation Thunderbird gained a second row of seats and was transformed from a roadster into a personal luxury coupe and convertible. Powering the Thunderbird was a new 5.8-liter 300-horsepower V-8, available with either a 3-speed manual or automatic transmission. It was a rousing success selling nearly 38,000 copies. This example of the 1958 coupe has been plundered almost to the point of extinction.
(Photos by Jim Meachen)
A 1940 Plymouth sedan discovered in Colorado is suffering from broken windows and a detached hood and fender. The 1940 Plymouth was an all-new design receiving the new body the other Chrysler lines had received in 1939. The new body, mounted on the 117-inch wheelbase, was lower, wider, and longer than any Plymouth in past history. The 1940 model was powered by the familiar "L" head 6-cylinder engine, displacing 201.3 cubic inches. Horsepower was upped to 84 for the 1940 models (up two from '39), this figure reached at a speed of 3,600 rpm. Below is a picture of the '40 Plymout sedan from a Plymouth sales brochure.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1953 Ford Mainline, one of the most popular Ford models of that year, looks totally used up sitting in a field. The Mainline was the base model in 1953 with the Customline the mid-level trim and the Crestline at the top of the lineup. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
Magazine ad for the 1953 Ford
A 1954 Chevrolet two-door has found its final resting place in a field of cars.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
A late '40s model Chevrolet pickup (left) rests beside a post-World War II Dodge pickup in a North Carolina field.
Dodge hubcap and engine
Old Dodge pickup dashboard above; when new, at right
Chevrolet pickup dashboard
The rear of the Chevy truck with the grille laying behind the cab
(Photos by Jim Meachen)
This huge Autocar Integral Sleeper Cab appears to be an early 1950s model. Indentification supplied by a reader. (Photo by Ralph Gable)
The sounds of the old tune, "Working on the Railroad," are just a
fading memory for this decaying railroad trouble shooter.
(Photo by Ralph Gable)
A 1958 or '59 Ford Thunderbird resides next to a 1960-1962 Chevrolet Covair Rampside.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
The 1962 Corvair Rampside is depicited in this ad for the Corvair van and pickup
One of the most luxurious cars of the late '50s was the Chrysler Imperial. Only the back two-thirds of one of those Imperials remains in a Colorado field. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
The glorious Imperial, from a 1959 Chrysler brochure
Automotive cousins live side by side is this picturesque yard in North Carolina. From
left are a 1968 Dodge Dart and a 1970 Plymouth Duster. (Photos by Ralph Gable)
The magazine ad below tells people to "See the USA in your Chevrolet" and this 1951 Chevy's journey has apparently come to an end in Cortez, Colorado. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This 1964 or 1965 Ford truck, spotted in Lenoir County, N.C., has probably seen its last
duty as a hauler. (Jim Meachen)
A 1947 Cadillac spotted in a North Carolina field looks very restoreable
(Jim Meachen)
This 1952 Packard looks as if it's ready to hit the streets. It was found in eastern N.C.
(Photo by Ralph Gable)
You were still being requested to "ask the man who owns one" 60 years ago as
depicted in this 1952 magazine advertisement
We think this is what's left of a late 1930s Chevrolet Suburban (Jim Meachen)
An abandoned 1966 Ford was found in an abandoned barn in eastern North Carolina.
(Jim Meachen)
The 1951 Chrysler was the first to be powered by the Hemi V-8, although
it was known as the Fire Power V-8 as depicted in the 1951 magazine
advertisement below. The 331-cubic-inch engine made 181 horsepower.
This abandoned Chrysler, still looking in good form, was found in
eastern North Carolina. (Jim Meachen)
The old and the restored —1941 Chevrolet dashboards
A 1941 or 1942 Pontiac Streamliner Torpedo four-door sedan has worn well in retirement
(Jim Meachen)
What the 1941 Pontiac Torpedo looked like as depicted in a Pontiac brochure
A 1963 Mercury Comet convertible has seen better days, but might be revived in the right hands. (Jim Meachen)
In a barn — A Hupmobile from the early '30s
This 1941 or 1942 Chevrolet truck was found residing in
a state park in Northern California.
We could not come to a firm conclusion as to the nameplate of this two-door
sedan of late 1930's vintage. But we did conclude that the hood resting on
the car is from a 1948 Ford truck.
(Jim Meachen)
A 1941 Studebaker has seen much better days. The magazine ad below shows what the Studebacker might have looked like some 70 years ago. (Jim Meachen)
(From Hiat "old abandoned cars" )
Above, a 1940 DeSoto slowly sinks into the soft earth. At right, the DeSoto is the object of attention in this magazine advertisement from 1939 or 1940. The car's wheelbase is a massive 122.5 inches and the engine made 100 horsepower.
(Jim Meachen)
Buy this hulk and they may throw in tires and doors. Found in Port Angeles, Wash.
Best guess — a late '30s model two-door Chevrolet. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1939 Ford Tudor Sedan decays in its final resting place in eastern North Carolina. At left, what the popular model looked like as depicted in a 1939 Ford magazine advertisement.
(Jim Meachen)
What looks like a 1936 Ford complete with a tree or shrub growing out of its roof was found retired in a pasture near West Yellowstone, Montana. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1956 DeSoto Firedome lives in the shade of North Carolina pine trees.
(Jim Meachen)
A 1940 Dodge truck has become integrated into the landscape foliage
Can this 1950/1951 Chevrolet truck be considered abandoned? In very good shape, it was
sitting off old Route 66 apparently abandoned, at least for the time being.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
A 1950/1951 Dodge coupe is still in decent shape. Behind it is a 1947 Chevrolet pickup
at an abandoned gas station in northern California.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
There may be some restorable hope left for this 1952 Ford pickup found in eastern N.C.
(Jim Meachen)
It appears the 101 Speed Shop, Akins, Okla., on state highway 101 has ceased to exist as a speed shop and all that remains are some rusting hulks and a 1940 Ford Deluxe that appears to be in good shape despite being abandoned. Veteran automotive writer and photographer Mike Parris captured these images during a recent trip through Atkins. Included are a 1956 Ford F-100, a 1949 Oldsmobile 88, a 1949 Ford Deluxe and the 1940 Ford. Samples of Parris' work can be found at www.mikeparris.net .
This 1960 Buick has been put out to pasture in eastern North Carolina
(Jim Meachen)
This Pontiac lineup, from left, includes a 1950 Studebaker pickup, a mid-60s Bonneville coupe, two copies of a1965 Pontiac Grand Prix and two copies of a 1964 Grand Prix. Shot in Tijeras, N.M. (Photo by Jerry Brown)
This abandoned 1957 Lincoln's interior is rotting away, but was once extremely attractive as attested to by the nicely restored Lincoln at right.
(Top picture by Jim Meachen)
A rusty hulk rests off Old Route 66 west of Kingman, Arizona.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
A lineup of worn out trucks in Tijeras, N.M. A circa 1946 International is on the right and
a post-WW II Dodge on the left. Second from right appears to be a '37 International pickup.
The truck with the white fenders, third from right, looks to be a 1947 Ford.
(Photo by Jerry Brown)
We're guessing about a 1957 Chevrolet pickup, shot near the Texas Motor
Speedway in Fort Worth. (Jim Meachen)
The remains of a 1940 Mercury interior. At right, what it may have looked like just after leaving the showroom more than 70 years ago.
(Jim Meachen)
This junked car in Washington state could be an early '50s DeSoto
A 1952 or 1953 Ford hulk is burdened with a door. It might be its own?
(Jim Meachen)
This 1951 Ford rests peacefully in eastern North Carolina
(Jim Meachen)
1957 Chevy ready to charge out of the weeds
This bus has been left to decay in Russia
An Oldsmobile and Ford rest side by side. From VW Vortex
This vintage Chrysler product has been shot up and left for
dead somewhere in Wyoming. Found at SprayGraphic .
This motorcycle has seen its last rider
An abandoned bus in Phoenix, left, and a rusting bus/delivery vehicle
Decaying 1962 Chevrolet work truck (Photo by Steven Bond)
Moss-covered truck in Washington state (Photo by Jen Owen)
Dashboards of dead cars — A Chevy Impala, left, and a 1973 Chevy Camaro
A Metro van and an old school bus rest in an abandoned farm yard in eastern North Carolina. (Jim Meachen)
Could this be Chevrolet's new wood-powered hybrid?
A sea of used-up Volkswagens in Moab, Utah. (Photos by Jerry Brown)
Austin A40 van is just a hulk
A Rolls Royce deteriorates in this photo by Joe Steinbring
Remains of a pre-WWII car in the woods
This 1958 Chevy is history
A 1950s-era Ford graveyard. From StreetFire.net
Work trucks must rest at some point,
and these Virginia specimens have apparently
reached retirement age. Photos by David St. Lawrence
Rusting hulks in Panamint Valley, Calif. From Panoramio
Skeletal remains of a 1957 Ford in Washington state
Fill it up, please
The lineup — Abandoned car lineup includes, from left, 1960 Buick, 1957 Lincoln and 1957 Chevrolet. (Jim Meachen)
Can a car be "abandoned" if it's on display in the trees?
This car didn't make it across the prairie
A 60s-era Cadillac rests in retirement
A Texas hulk
This Plymouth has probably reached its final resting place.
It won't be long and this abandoned Jeep-like vehicle
will become a permanent part of the landscape.
A winged Mopar has gone to its final resting place
These tow trucks probably aren't "abandoned." But they are old and rusty and interesting.
(Jim Meachen)
Abandoned but looking pretty good (Jim Meachen)
A once-luxury late-40s-model Packard has seen better days (Jim Meachen)
If you have a picture to share, please send it to [email protected]
with a line or two of information. You will receive full credit for your photograph
|
Ambassador
|
Bungo, Mungo, Laura Grubb and Belladonna Took are which leading literary character's ancestors?
|
Cuba facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Cuba
República de Cuba
CAPITAL: Havana (La Habana)
FLAG: The flag consists of five alternating blue and white horizontal stripes penetrated from the hoist side by a red triangle containing a white five-pointed star.
ANTHEM: Himno de Bayamo (Hymn of Bayamo), beginning "Al combate corred bayameses" ("March to the battle, people of Bayamo").
MONETARY UNIT: The Cuban peso (c$) of 100 centavos is a paper currency with one exchange rate. There are coins of 1, 2, 3, 5, 20, 40, and 100 centavos and notes of 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 pesos. c$1 = us$1.07527 (or us$1 = c$0.93) as of 2005.
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: The metric system is the legal standard, but older Spanish units and the imperial system are still employed. The standard unit of land measure is the caballería (13.4 hectares/133.1 acres).
HOLIDAYS: Day of the Revolution, Liberation Day, 1 January; Labor Day, 1 May; Anniversary of the Revolution, 25–27 July; Proclamation of Yara, 10 October. Celebration of religious holidays falling during the work-week was prohibited by a 1972 law.
TIME: 7 am = noon GMT.
LOCATION, SIZE, AND EXTENT
The Republic of Cuba consists of one large island and several small ones situated on the northern rim of the Caribbean Sea , about 160 km (100 mi) south of Florida . With an area of 110,860 sq km (42,803 sq mi), it extends 1,223 km (760 mi) e–w and about 89 km (55 mi) n–s. Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean, accounting for more than one-half of West Indian land area. Comparatively, the area occupied by Cuba is slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania . It is separated from Florida by the Straits of Florida, from the Bahamas and Jamaica by various channels, from Haiti by the Windward Passage, and from Mexico by the Yucatán Channel and the Gulf of Mexico. Cuba's total coastline is 3,735 km (2,316 mi). The largest offshore island, the Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud), formerly known as the Isle of Pines (Isla de Pinos), lies southwest of the main island and has an area of 2,200 sq km (849 sq mi); the other islands have a combined area of 3,715 sq km (1,434 sq mi).
Cuba's capital city, Havana, is located on its north coast.
TOPOGRAPHY
Cuba's spectacular natural beauty has earned it the name Pearl of the Antilles. The coastline is marked by bays, reefs, keys, and islets. Along the southern coast are long stretches of lowlands and swamps, including the great Zapata Swamp (Ciénaga de Zapata). Slightly more than half the island consists of flat or rolling terrain, and the remainder is hilly or mountainous, with mountains covering about a quarter of its total area. In general, eastern Cuba is dominated by the Sierra Maestra, culminating in Pico Real del Turquino (2,005 m/6,578 ft); around Camagüey are rolling plains and low mountains; central Cuba contains the Trinidad (Escambray) Mountains in addition to flat or rolling land; and the west is dominated by the Sierra de los Órganos. The largest river, the Cauto, flows westward for 249 km (155 mi) north of the Sierra Maestra but is little used for commercial navigation purposes.
CLIMATE
Except in the mountains, the climate of Cuba is semitropical or temperate. The average minimum temperature is 21°c (70°f), the average maximum 27°c (81°f). The mean temperature at Havana is about 25°c (77°f). The trade winds and sea breezes make coastal areas more habitable than temperature alone would indicate. Cuba has a rainy season from May to October. The mountain areas have an average precipitation of more than 180 cm (70 in); most of the lowland area has from 90 to 140 cm (35–55 in) annually; and the area around Guantánamo Bay has less than 65 cm (26 in). Droughts are common. Cuba's eastern coast is often hit by hurricanes from August to October, resulting in great economic loss.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Cuba has a flora of striking richness, with the total number of native flowering species estimated at nearly 6,000. The mountainous areas are covered by tropical forest, but Cuba is essentially a palm-studded grassland. The royal palm, reaching heights of 15–23 m (50–75 ft), is the national tree. Pines like those in the southeastern United States grow on the slopes of the Sierra de los Órganos and on the Isla de Juventud (Isle of Youth). The lower coastal areas, especially in the south, have mangrove swamps. There is a small area around Guantánamo Bay where desert plants grow.
Only small animals inhabit Cuba. These include tropical bats, rodents, birds, and many species of reptiles and insects. As of 2002, there were at least 31 species of mammals and 86 species of birds throughout the country.
ENVIRONMENT
The Cuban government has formed several agencies to protect the environment. Among them are the National Parks Service, the National Commission of Environmental Protection and Rational Use of Natural Resources (1977), the National Environmental Education Program, the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, and the National Commission for the Protection of the Environment and for Conservation of Natural Resources. In 2003, about 69% of the land was protected by the government. There are two natural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and six Ramsar wetland sites.
As of 2000, Cuba's most pressing environmental problems were deforestation and the preservation of its wildlife. The government has sponsored a successful reforestation program aimed at replacing forests that had gradually decreased to a total of 17% of the land area by the mid-1990s. In 2000, about 21% of the total land area was forested.
Another major environmental problem is the pollution of Havana Bay. In 1994, Cuba had the seventh-largest mangrove area in the world. Altogether, 51% of the country's renewable water sources are used for agricultural purposes. About 95% of Cuba's city dwellers and 77% of its rural people have pure drinking water. In 1996 Cuban industries emitted 31.1 million metric tons of industrial carbon dioxide.
According to a 2006 report issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), threatened species included 11 types of mammals, 18 species of birds, 7 types of reptiles, 47 species of amphibians, 23 species of fish, 3 species of invertebrates, and 163 species of plants. Endangered species in Cuba include the Cuban solenodon, four species of hutia (dwarf, Cabera's, large-eared, and little earth), two species of crocodile (American and Cuban), and the Cuban tree boa. The ivory-billed woodpecker, Cuban red macaw, Caribbean monk seal, and Torre's cave rat have become extinct.
POPULATION
The population of Cuba in 2005 was estimated by the United Nations (UN) at 11,275,000, which placed it at number 72 in population among the 193 nations of the world. In 2005, approximately 10% of the population was over 65 years of age, with another 21% of the population under 15 years of age. There were 100 males for every 100 females in the country. According to the UN, the annual population rate of change for 2005–10 was expected to be 0.4%, a rate the government viewed as satisfactory. To inhibit further growth, the government has put restrictions on migration to Havana. The projected population for the year 2025 was 11,824,000. The population density was 102 per sq km (263 per sq mi).
The UN estimated that 76% of the population lived in urban areas in 2005, and that urban areas were growing at an annual rate of 0.44%. The capital city, Havana (La Habana), had a population of 2,189,000 in that year, accounting for about 20% of the total population. Other important cities and their estimated populations are Santiago de Cuba (554,400), Camagüey (354,400), Holguín (319,300), Guantánamo (274,300), and Santa Clara (251,800).
MIGRATION
Before independence, there was a large migration from Spain ; the 1899 census reported 129,000 Spanish-born persons living in Cuba. The 1953 census reported about 150,000 persons of foreign birth, of whom 74,000 were Spaniards. From 1959 through 1978, Cuba's net loss from migration, according to official estimates, was 582,742; US figures indicate that during the same period a total of 669,151 Cubans arrived in the United States.
During the 1960s, Cuban emigrants were predominantly of the upper and middle classes, but in the 1970s emigrants were urban blue-collar workers and other less-educated and less-wealthy Cubans. The flow of emigrants declined in the late 1970s, but beginning in April 1980, Cubans were allowed to depart from Mariel harbor; by the end of September, when the harbor was closed, some 125,000 Cubans in small boats (the "freedom flotilla") had landed in the United States. Of that number, 2,746 were classified as "excludable aliens" and were being held in prisons or mental institutions. According to an agreement of December 1984, Cuba agreed to accept the 2,746 back; repatriation began in February 1985, but in May, Cuba suspended the agreement. By the mid-1980s, well over 500,000 Cuban exiles were living in the Miami , Florida, area. In 1990 there were 751,000 Cuban-born persons in the United States. Large numbers have also settled in Puerto Rico , Spain, and Mexico.
Since 1979, the Cuban government has been providing education to a number of students from developing countries. Due to events making return to their homelands difficult, many have become refugees. Sporadically, Cuba receives groups of Haitians who generally return to their homeland voluntarily. Between 1991 and 1994, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) worked with the government to protect and assist more than 1,500 Haitians during a temporary stay in Cuba. In 1995, Cuba was harboring 1,500 refugees from the Western Sahara; in 1999, the government was still working with UNHCR to return them to their country of first asylum. In 2000 there was a total of 82,000 migrants living in Cuba. UNHCR assisted a total of 802 people in Cuba in 2004; 795 were refugees, 5 were asylum seekers, and 2 were returned refugees.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimated that remittances to Cuba in 2000 amounted to $750 million, 90% from Cubans living in the United States. By 2003, remittances to Cuba were $1.2 billion. In 2004, the United States revised its regulations restricting cash remittances to Cuba by restricting remittances to members of the remitter's immediate family. In addition, the amount of remittance that an authorized traveler may carry was reduced from $3000 to $300. The Cuban government takes 20% of US remittances.
In 2004, 11,821 Cubans sought asylum in the United States. The net migration rate for Cuba in 2005 was estimated as -1.58 migrants per 1,000 population. The government views the migration levels as satisfactory.
RELIGIONS
The Roman Catholic Church has never been as influential in Cuba as in other Latin American countries. In the 1950s, approximately 85% of all Cubans were nominally Roman Catholic, but the Church itself conceded that only about 10% were active members. From the early 1980s into the 1990s, Roman Catholics represented about 40% of the population. A 2004 report indicated that only about 40–45% of the population were nominally Catholic. Some sources indicate that a large number of the population adhere to varying degrees of syncretic Afro-Caribbean, such as Santería. The Baptists are believed to be the largest Protestant denomination. Other denominations include Jehovah 's Witnesses, Methodists, Episcopalians, the Assembly of God , and Presbyterians. There is a very small Jewish population.
Fidel Castro originally established an atheist state in accordance with the beliefs of the Communist Party. As a result, his government has closed more than 400 Catholic schools, claiming that they taught dangerous beliefs, and the number of people who attend churches has diminished during Castro's reign since many churches are closely monitored by the state and church members face harassment. In 1992, the constitution was amended to label the state as secular rather than atheist. However, according to a 2004 report, Christian churches, particularly the Catholic Church , have still been viewed suspiciously by members of the Communist Party who have claimed that the organizations are undermining public policies and laws. Separate religious schools are forbidden, though churches can provide religious instruction to their members.
There are 22 denominations that are members of the Cuban Council of Churches. Membership in the Council means that the religion is officially recognized by the government and so is shown a higher degree of tolerance by the government. All registered denominations must report to the Ministry of Interior's Office of Religious Affairs. Nonregistered groups face various degrees of government harassment and repression.
TRANSPORTATION
In 2002, Cuba had about 60,858 km (37,817 mi) of roads, of which 29,820 km (18,530 mi) were paved, including 638 km (396 mi) of expressways. The first-class Central Highway extends for 1,223 km (760 mi) from Pinar del Río to Guantánamo, connecting all major cities. An extensive truck and bus network transports passengers and freight. In 2003, there were 184,980 registered motor vehicles, of which 210,300 were passenger vehicles.
Nationalized railways connect the east and west extremities of the island by 4,807 km (2,986 mi) of standard-gauge track, of which 140 km (87 mi) were electrified as of 2004. In addition, large sugar estates have 7,162 km (4,451 mi) of lines of various gauges.
Cuba first began to develop a merchant marine under the revolutionary government. The USSR had supplied oceangoing vessels and fishing boats and, in the mid-1960s, built a huge fishing port in Havana Bay to service Cuban and Soviet vessels. By 2005, the Cuban merchant fleet had 15 vessels of at least 1,000 GRT, totaling 54,818 GRT. Cuba's major ports—Havana, Cienfuegos, Mariel, Santiago de Cuba, Nuevitas, and Matanzas—are serviced mainly by ships of the former Soviet republics, with ships from Spain, the United Kingdom , and Eastern Europe making up the bulk of the remainder. Cuba also has 240 km (140 mi) of navigable inland waterways.
In 2004 there were an estimated 170 airports, 78 of which had paved runways as of 2005. The principal airport is José Martí at Havana. There are daily flights between Havana and the major Cuban cities, and weekly flights to Spain, Mexico, Moscow , Prague , and Jamaica. Cubana Airlines is the national air carrier. The number of air passengers increased from 140,000 in 1960 to 1,117,000 in 1997. However, by 2003 passenger traffic declined to around 611,000. Between 1975 and 1980, airports at Havana and Camagüey were renovated, and new airports were built at Bayamo, Manzanillo, and Las Tunas.
HISTORY
Cuba was originally inhabited by about 50,000 Ciboney and Taíno Amerindians who are related to the Arawak peoples; they were hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies. Christopher Columbus made the European discovery of Cuba in 1492 on his first voyage to the Americas. Many died from disease and maltreatment soon after. The African slave trade began about 1523 as the Amerindian population declined, and grew thereafter, especially with the development of coffee and sugar on the island. During the early colonial years, Cuba served primarily as an embarkation point for such explorers as Hernán Cortés and Hernando de Soto. As treasure began to flow out of Mexico, Havana became a last port of call and a target for French and English pirates. In 1762, the English captured Havana, holding Cuba for almost a year. It was ceded to Spain in exchange for Florida territory in the Treaty of Paris (1763). Spanish rule was harsh, and intermittent rebellions over the next century all ended in failure.
Cuba's first important independence movement came in 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy planter, freed his slaves and called for a revolution against Spain. For the next 10 years, guerrillas (mambises ), mainly in eastern Cuba, fought in vain against the Spanish colonial government and army. Although eventually subdued, Céspedes is nevertheless viewed as the father of Cuban independence. A second hero was added in the 1890s when poet and journalist José Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party during exile in the United States. The call to arms (Grito de Baire) on 24 February 1895 initiated a new war. After landing with a group of recruits gathered from throughout the region, Martí was killed at Dos Ríos, in eastern Cuba. The Spanish had the insurrection under control within a year.
In the end, the Cubans had to rely on the United States to defeat the Spanish. Anti-Spanish sentiment, fueled by US newspapers, erupted after the battleship Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor on 15 February 1898. The United States declared war on Spain on 25 April, and in a few months, the Spanish-American War was over. The Treaty of Paris (10 December 1898), established Cuban independence. During the interim period 1899–1902, the US army occupied Cuba. It instituted a program that brought about the eradication of yellow fever, but it was more fundamentally concerned with the establishment of US political and commercial dominance over the island.
On 21 February 1901, a constitution was adopted, and Cuba was nominally a free nation. But the United States insisted that Cuba include in its constitution the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and maintain a naval base at Guantánamo.
For the next 30 years, Cuba lived through a succession of governments, constitutional and otherwise, all under the watchful eye of the United States. American companies owned or controlled about half of Cuba's cultivated land, its utilities and mines, and other natural resources. The US Marines intervened in 1906–9, in 1912, and again in 1920. The period culminated in the brutal dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925–33).
Cuba entered another unstable phase in 1933. A nationalist uprising chased Machado from office. After the United States attempted to install a regime, a "sergeants' revolt" headed by 32-year-old Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar assumed power and named Ramón Grau San Martín provisional president. Grau, a physician and university professor noted for his nationalist zeal, was never recognized by the United States, and his regime lasted only four months. From 1934 until 1940, Batista ruled through a series of puppet presidents. During these years, Batista made two major contributions to Cuba. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed Cuba to abrogate the Platt Amendment, although the United States did retain its naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Batista also allowed the drafting of a new constitution, passed in 1940, under which he became president. In 1944, Batista permitted Grau San Martín, now his political enemy, to take office. The eight years of rule by Grau and his ally, Carlos Prío Socarrás, were ineffective and corrupt, and in 1952, a reform party was expected to win the election.
That election was subverted, however, on 10 March 1952, when Batista seized power in a military coup. During the seven years of Batista's second administration, he used increasingly savage suppressive measures to keep himself in office. Under the Batista regime, the United States dominated the economy, social services suffered, poverty, and illiteracy were widespread, and the bureaucracy was flagrantly corrupt. It was at this point that Fidel Castro came on the scene.
Castro's insurrection began inauspiciously on 26 July 1953 with an abortive raid on the Moncada Army Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Captured, jailed, and then exiled, Castro collected supporters in Mexico, and in 1956 landed in Cuba. Routed by Batista's troops, Castro escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains with a mere dozen supporters. The force never grew to more than a few thousand, but clever use of guerrilla tactics evened the score with Batista's poorly trained army. Moreover, there was almost no popular support for Batista, and in 1958 the United States ended its military aid to the falling government. On 1 January 1959, the Batista regime collapsed, and Batista and many of his supporters fled the country. Castro's 26th of July Movement took control of the government, and began to rule by decree. The revolutionary government confiscated property that had been dishonestly acquired, instituted large-scale land reforms, and sought to solve Cuba's desperate financial and economic problems by means of a bold revolutionary program.
After June 1960, Cuban-US relations deteriorated at an accelerated pace. Largely in retaliation for the nationalization of about $2 billion in US-owned property in Cuba, the United States severed diplomatic relations with the Castro government. Tensions increased when the revolutionary regime nationalized US oil refinery companies after they refused to process Soviet crude oil. The United States response was to eliminate Cuba's sugar quota. In April 1961, a group of 1,500 Cuban exiles—financed, trained, organized, and equipped by the CIA —invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. The brigade was defeated within 72 hours, and the 1,200 surviving invaders were captured. They were eventually released after US officials and private sources arranged for a ransom of $50 million in food and medical supplies.
However, the United States did continue its attempt, through the OAS and other international forums, to isolate Cuba politically and economically from Latin America and the rest of the non-Communist world. All Latin American governments were pressured to break off diplomatic relations with Cuba. Castro responded with an attempt to destabilize certain Central and South American governments. Inspired by the Sierra Maestra campaign, guerrilla movements became active throughout the region, often with Cuban support. However, by 1967, when Ché Guevara (an Argentinean collaborator of Castro), was killed in Bolivia , these movements had collapsed. The United States was only slightly more successful in its campaign of isolation. The OAS suspended Cuba in 1962, but in July 1975 passed the "freedom of action" resolution allowing countries to deal with Cuba as they pleased. Meanwhile, Communist influence was growing in the Cuban government. Castro declared Cuba to be a Socialist country in late 1960, and the following year declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist and a part of the Socialist world. All major means of production, distribution, communication, and services were nationalized. Soviet-style planning was introduced in 1962, and Cuba's trade and other relations turned from West to East. In October 1962, US planes photographed Soviet long-range-missile installations in Cuba. The United States blockaded Cuba until the USSR agreed to withdraw the missiles, in exchange for a US government pledge to launch no more offensive operations against the island.
During the Carter administration, there were moves to normalize relations with Cuba. In 1977, the United States and Cuba resumed diplomatic contacts (but not full relations) and concluded fishing and maritime rights agreements. However, the advent of the Reagan administration brought increased tensions between the two countries. Citing Cuban involvement in Angola , Ethiopia , Nicaragua , and Grenada, the United States took up a more intransigent stance toward Cuba.
Domestically, Castro's administration has had its successes and failures. A strong social welfare system, including free health care and subsidized housing, was implemented in the 1960s and 1970s. However, an attempt to produce 10 million metric tons of sugar by 1970 seriously crippled the island's economy. Other mismanaged projects have led to economic stagnation or chaos. Cubans live frugally under a highly controlled system of rationing.
Cuba was dealt a serious blow in the late 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Union , which meant a cutoff of economic and military aid on which Cuba had come to rely heavily over the years. The USSR had been Cuba's most important trading partner and provided the major market for Cuban sugar. The few consumer goods the USSR had supplied in the past were no longer available.
Most Cubans that fled since Castro came to power settled in southern Florida, and many have had hope of returning to a Castro-free Cuba. There have been sporadic attempts to reunite families broken up by the emigration, but political circumstances often curtail these programs. For example, in February 1985 the repatriation of 2,746 "undesirables" from the United States began, but after Radio Martí (sponsored by Voice of America) began broadcasting in Spanish in May 1985, Cuba abrogated the agreement.
Just as the Cuban economy began to show signs of a rebound from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States tightened its embargo with the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. This led to another wave of emigration in 1994, as thousands of Cubans left the island on rafts and other small vessels bound for Florida. To stem this tide of illegal immigration, the United States in 1995 reached an agreement with Cuba under which the United States would admit 20,000 Cuban immigrants per year. Cuba, in turn, was to take steps to prevent future "boat lifts."
US-Cuba relations deteriorated further, and Cuba's weakened economy was hampered anew in 1996 when the US Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, another embargo-strengthening measure. The act met with harsh international criticism, and Canada and the World Trade Organization moved to fortify trade ties with the Castro government as a rebuff to the United States. Prior to the passage of Helms-Burton, Cuba had renewed its crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. In February 1996, Cuban air force planes shot down two civilian aircraft over international waters, killing the four persons aboard. The planes had left the United States carrying computer and medical supplies.
In late 1999 and early 2000, tensions between Cuba and the United States returned to the international spotlight with the highly publicized custody dispute surrounding Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old Cuban boy who was the sole survivor of an attempted boat crossing to the United States in which his mother and 10 other Cuban refugees drowned. The dispute between the boy's father in Cuba and his expatriate relatives in Florida, who wanted him to stay in the United States, became a rallying point for both the Castro regime in Cuba and the anti-Castro Cuban community in southern Florida.
Despite its acquiescence starting in the 1990s to some economic reforms, dollar transactions and limited self-employment in agriculture, crafts and vending, the Castro regime retains its commitment to socialism. Its economy, still recovering from the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been buoyed by increased tourism, mining, and cigar and fish exports. But economic growth has not translated into an improved quality of life for most Cubans, and Castro has continued to blame poverty and harsh living conditions on the US embargo. After the United States declared war on terrorism, Castro accused Washington of planning to invade the island; he has increased his prosecution of political opponents. Critics observed that, during the time that world attention was focused on the US invasion of Iraq , Castro took the opportunity to increase pressure on opposition by executing political dissidents.
In January 2003 Cuba held its third direct election for the National Assembly. Participation was limited to a "yes" or "no" vote for a list of candidates approved by the Communist Party. A month later, the Assembly appointed Fidel Castro chairman of the Council of State for five more years. As of 2005, Castro had ruled Cuba for 46 years, the longest tenure in recent Latin American history.
In the period leading up to the 2004 US presidential elections, the United States limited cash transfers to Cuba and reduced the number of trips Cuban-Americans could make to visit family in Cuba. Since then, Castro rolled back many of the self-employment freedoms and forbid previously accepted US dollars, making the only accepted currency for foreigners the Cuban convertible peso. Further discouraging the use of US currency, there exchange rate for euros and Canadian dollars was more favorable. However, the island's dual economy continued. Criminal penalties for possession of foreign currency (repealed in 1993) were not reinstated. Cubans were able to continue to hold dollars in cash and in bank accounts.
GOVERNMENT
After he became premier on 16 February 1959, Fidel Castro was the effective source of governmental power. The juridical basis for this power rested on the Fundamental Law of the Revolution, which was promulgated on 8 February 1959 and was based on Cuba's 1940 constitution. To regularize government functions, a 10-member Executive Committee, with Castro as premier, was formed on 24 November 1972.
A new constitution, first published on 10 April 1975, then approved by the first congress of the Cuban Communist party in December, and ratified by a 97.7% vote in a special referendum in February 1976, established the National Assembly of People's Power as the supreme state organ. The deputies, originally elected by municipal assemblies and directly elected in national elections since 1993, serve five-year terms. The National Assembly elects the Council of State, whose president is both head of state and head of government. There are six vice presidents in the Council of State, and 23 other members.
In January 2003, the third direct election to the National Assembly took place; all 601 candidates approved by the Communist Party received more than the required 50% of the vote necessary for election to the Assembly. One month later, the Assembly reelected Castro as president of the state council. He remains the key figure in domestic and foreign policy making. The constitution recognizes the Communist party as the "highest leading force of the society and of the state," which effectively outlaws other political parties.
Suffrage is universal for citizens age 16 and over, excluding those who have applied for permanent emigration.
POLITICAL PARTIES
Fidel Castro came to power through a coalition group known as the 26th of July Movement. Along with it, in 1959, the Student Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) and the Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular—PSP) were permitted to function.
Castro's relationship with the PSP was at first uneasy. The PSP condemned his early attempts at insurrection as "putschism," and did not support the 26th of July Movement until it had reached its final stages in 1958. After June 1959, Castro began to refer to antiCommunists as counterrevolutionaries, and used the PSP as an organizational base and as a link to the USSR. In December 1961, Castro declared his complete allegiance to Marxism-Leninism.
By 1962, the 26th of July Movement, the Student Revolutionary Directorate, and the PSP had merged into the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (Organización Revolucionaria Integrada), which, in turn, gave way to the United Party of the Socialist Revolution (Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista) and, in 1965, to the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista Cubano—PCC).
On 17 December 1975, the PCC convened its first congress, which ratified a 13-member Politburo; Fidel Castro was reelected first secretary of the PCC. The second congress of the PCC took place in December 1980. The third congress, in February and November-December 1986, witnessed a massive personnel change when one-third of the 225-member Central Committee and 10 of 24 Politburo members were replaced, with Fidel Castro reelected first secretary. The Young Communist League and the José Martí Pioneer Organization for children up to 15 years of age are mass political organizations closely affiliated with the PCC. As of 2005, the PCC remained Cuba's only authorized political party.
However, political dissidence continued to occur in Cuba. Members of unauthorized groups such as the Dissident Liberal Party, the Cuban Orthodox Renovation Party, the Independent Option Movement and others have faced prosecution and harassment. The Ladies in White Movement is comprised of the mothers, wives, and daughters of political prisoners in Cuba. The Varela Project is a proposal from the populace to amend the Cuban constitution to include changes such as free speech, free enterprise, amnesty to political prisoners, and electoral reform.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
The country is divided into 14 provinces and 169 municipalities. The Isla de la Juventud is a special municipality. The 1976 constitution provides for a system of municipal assemblies to be elected for 2-year terms by direct universal suffrage at age 16. Municipal assemblies choose delegates to provincial assemblies and deputies to the National Assembly. The most recent municipal elections were held in April 2005.
JUDICIAL SYSTEM
The 1976 constitution established the People's Supreme Court, consisting of a president, vice president, and other judges, as the highest judicial tribunal. All members of the court are elected by the National Assembly, as are the attorney general and deputy attorneys general. Through its Governing Council, the court proposes laws, issues regulations, and makes decisions that must be implemented by the people's courts, whose judges are elected by the municipal assemblies. There are also seven regional courts of appeal, as well as district courts with civil and criminal jurisdiction. Military tribunals assume jurisdiction for certain counter-revolutionary cases.
Although the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, the courts are subordinate to the National Assembly and the Council of State.
There are no jury trials. Most trials are public. The legal system is based on Spanish and American law influenced by communist legal theory.
ARMED FORCES
Total armed strength in 2005 came to 49,000 active duty personnel, with 39,000 reservists. The Army had an estimated 38,000 personnel, whose equipment included around 900 main battle tanks, an undisclosed number of light tanks, reconnaissance and armored infantry fighting vehicles, an estimated 700 armored personnel carriers and over 1,715 artillery pieces. The navy had an estimated 3,000 personnel including more than 550 Naval Infantry members. Major naval units included five patrol/coastal vessels and six mine warfare ships. The air force had around 8,000 personnel and 125 combat capable aircraft, of which only 25 are known to be operable. The service also has around 40 attack helicopters. Paramilitary forces included 20,000 State Security troops, 6,500 border guards, 50,000 Civil Defense Force members, the 70,000-member Youth Labor Army, and the million-member Territorial Militia. Cuba's key military ally and supporter for decades, Russia had cut off nearly all military assistance by 1993. In 2004, defense spending was estimated at $1.3 billion.
The US maintains a naval base at Guantánamo Bay in southeastern Cuba, under a 1934 leasing treaty. The US government considers the base to be of some strategic and training significance in the Caribbean and has refused to give it up, despite demands by the Castro regime that it do so. About 2,000 military personnel are stationed at Guantánamo.
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
Cuba is a member of the United Nations, having joined on 24 October 1945; it belongs to ECLAC and several specialized agencies, such as the FAO, IAEA, IFAD, ILO, UNESCO, UNIDO, and WHO. Cuba is a part of the ACP Group, G-77, the Latin American Economic System (LAES), the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), and the Latin American Integration Association (LAIA). Cuba's charter membership in the OAS was suspended at the second Punta del Este meeting, in February 1962, through US initiative. The isolation of Cuba from the inter-American community was made almost complete when, at Caracas , on 26 July 1964, the OAS voted 15–4 for mandatory termination of all trade with the Castro government. Cuba has been very active in the Nonaligned Movement, and held its chairmanship between 1979 and 1983. The nation is also part of the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In environmental cooperation, Cuba is part of the Antarctic treaty, the Basel Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Ramsar, CITES, the London Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, the Montréal Protocol, MARPOL, and the UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea, Climate Change, and Desertification.
ECONOMY
Traditionally, one of the world's leading cane sugar producers, Cuba has been primarily an agricultural nation. Sugar was the leading earner of foreign exchange until 1992, when tourism revenues outstripped sugar revenues. Agriculture's contribution to GDP has decreased from 24% in 1965 to 10% in 1985, to 7% in 2000. Manufacturing increased from 23% of GDP in 1965 to 36% by 1985. In 2000, the contribution of the industrial sector fell to 34.5% as services, including tourism, became more dominant.
After 1959, the revolutionary government, following policies espoused by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, attempted to liberalize the sugar economy in order to achieve agricultural diversification and industrialization. When this policy proved disastrous to the sugar crop, Castro reversed the Guevara program in 1962 and announced a goal of 10-million-ton crop by 1970. Despite a severe drought in 1968–69, Cuba did achieve a record 7.6-million-ton output of refined sugar in 1970. Efforts to diversify foreign trade during the early 1970s were aided by record high prices for sugar. Between 1971 and 1975, the Cuban economy grew by about 10% annually, and moderate growth averaging about 4.4% per year continued through most of the 1980s. The special relationship with the Soviet Union, whereby it supplied Cuba with oil below market prices and bought its sugar at above market prices, insulated the Cuban economy from the vagaries of the two oil shocks of the 1970s and the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s. However, commercial agreements with Argentina , Canada, Spain, France , the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany indicated Cuba's keen desire to move away from nearly exclusive reliance on the Socialist countries for both imports and exports. Trade with the then-USSR and other CMEA members, nevertheless, made up the bulk of Cuba's foreign commerce, and Soviet aid remained essential to the economy.
From 1981 to 1985, Cuba's GDP growth averaged 7.3% due mainly to increased sugar production. In 1986 and 1987, however, GDP growth dropped to approximately 1.7% due mainly to the collapse of oil prices, a depressed world sugar market, prolonged drought in Cuba, and the fall in the value of the dollar. The situation worsened when the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, eliminating its assistance and subsidized markets. Cuban GDP fell 35% between 1989 and 1993. The Castro government restricted public expenditure and in 1993–94 introduced a series of market-oriented reforms. It legalized the dollar, allowed trading with market economies and developed new sources of foreign currency. The government placed special emphasis on the promotion of foreign investment and the development of sugar and tourism. About 150 occupations were opened up for self-employment. The economy began to expand again in 1994, and by 1996 GDP growth was at 7.8%. Tourism established new records in 1996, with arrivals increasing by 35% to 1,001,739, and gross revenues rising by 18% to $1.3 billion. The number of self-employed rose to over 200,000, but after income taxes were introduced, fell to an estimated 100,000 by 2001. By the end of 2000, nearly 400 joint ventures with foreign companies had been established representing a total investment of $4.2–4.5 billion.
In 1997, growth fell to 2.5% and then to 1.2% in 1998. Annual inflation was almost nonexistent in 1998, down from 19.0% in 1995. Growth increased to 6.2% in 1999 and 5.6% in 2000 as tourist arrivals rose to 1.7 million in 2000, and gross receipts to about $1.9 billion. In 2001, in the context of a global economic slowdown, the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, and a devastating hurricane in November, tourist arrivals increased only marginally and gross receipts remained unchanged. Tourism was estimated to have declined in 2002.
In 2002, the government introduced a comprehensive restructuring of the sugar sector. Over half of Cuba's 156 mills were to be closed, leaving only the 71 most efficient. 100,000 of the 400,000 employed in the mills were to be retrained for other jobs. More rice and other crops were to be grown. Sugar production, at 8 million tons a year in 1989, had fallen to 3.2 million tons a year by 2003.
Between 75–90% of adult Cubans are employed by the state in relatively low-payingjobs. However, education, medical care, housing, and other public services are free or highly subsidized, and there are no taxes on public jobs. Although there has been an increasing infusion of dollars and other hard currencies into the economy, the society still faces a painful transition out of its isolated socialism.
In 2004, the economy expanded by 4.2%, up from 2.9% in 2003; in 2005, the GDP growth rate was estimated at an impressive 8.0%, while the GDP per capita, at purchasing power parity, was $3,300. The standard of living in Cuba continues to hover at levels lower than before the downturn of the 1990s. The inflation rate was insignificant in 2003 and 2004, but by 2005 it was estimated to have risen to 4.2%. As a result, the government strengthened its control over inflowing currencies (which are mainly provided by tourism, remittances, and trade).
INCOME
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports that in 2005 Cuba's gross domestic product (GDP) was estimated at $37.1 billion. The CIA defines GDP as the value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year and computed on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP) rather than value as measured on the basis of the rate of exchange based on current dollars. The per capita GDP was estimated at $3,300. The annual growth rate of GDP was estimated at 5.2%. It was estimated that agriculture accounted for 5.5% of GDP, industry 26.1%, and services 68.4%.
LABOR
As of 2005, Cuba's workforce was estimated at 4.6 million, of which the nonstate sector accounted for 22% and the state sector 78%. In 2004, the Cuban workforce by occupation was distributed as follows: industry 14.4%; agriculture 21.2%; and services 64.4%. The unemployment rate in 2005 was estimated at 1.9%. However, underemployment is a chronic problem, and has been exacerbated by the idling of thousands of industrial workers whose jobs rely on foreign imports. Labor has been shifted to agriculture to compensate for fuel and machinery shortages affecting food and production.
All Cuban workers belong to a trade union, under the central control of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CUTC), which is affiliated with the Communist-oriented World Federation of Trade Unions. Independent unions are explicitly prohibited. Those who attempt to engage in independent union activities face government persecution and harassment. Strikes and collective bargaining are not legally permitted.
The minimum wage varies, depending on the type of employment. As of 2005, the average monthly wage was $9. The minimum wage is supplemented by social security consisting of free medical care and education, and subsidized housing and food. However, a worker must still earn significantly more than minimum wage to support a family. The eight-hour workday, a weekly rest period, an annual paid vacation of one month, and workers' compensation are guaranteed by the constitution. The standard work week is 44 hours, with shorter workdays for hazardous occupations. Although the legal minimum working age is 17, the employment of minors 15 and 16 years of age is permitted as a way to offset labor shortages or to obtain training. Teenagers can only work 7 hours per day or 40 hours per week or only on holidays.
AGRICULTURE
The state owns about 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of arable land, and 750,000 hectares (1.8 million) of permanent crops. About 13.1% of the economically active population was engaged in the agricultural sector in 2003. An agrarian reform law of June 1959 made the government proprietor of all land in Cuba, created the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) as administrator, and set a general limit of 30 caballerías (400 hectares/990 acres) of farmland to be held by any one owner. A second agrarian reform, of October 1963, expropriated medium-size private holdings; there remained about 170,000 small private farms, with average holdings of over 16 hectares (40 acres). By 1985 there were 1,378 farm cooperatives. Almost a third of cultivated land is irrigated.
Sugarcane, Cuba's most vital crop and its largest export, is grown throughout the island, but mainly in the eastern half. The government regulates sugar production and prices. Sugar output reached 7.6 million tons in 1970, but that fell short of the 10 million tons projected. Subsequent targets were lowered, and the output was 7.9 million tons in 1979, 6.7 million in 1980 (when crop disease reduced production), 8 million in 1985, and 3.5 million in 1999. In 2004, exports of raw sugar amounted to 1.9 million tons, valued at $348.8 million. Cuba has pioneered the introduction of mechanical cane harvesters, and by 2002 there were 7,400 harvester-threshers (up from 5,717 in the early 1980s). Cuba and Russia signed several finance and investment accords in 1992 and 1993 whereby Russia will supply fuel, spare parts, fertilizer, and herbicide in exchange for Cuba's sugar harvest, with Russia annually importing a minimum of two million tons of Cuban sugar. The sugar industry also has diversified into exporting molasses, ethyl alcohol, rum and liquor, bagasse chipboard, torula yeast, dextran, and furfural. Tobacco, the second most important crop, is grown on small farms requiring intensive cultivation. In the late 1970s, the average annual production was about 35,000 tons, but crop disease in 1979 resulted in a drop in production to 8,200 tons in 1980; production was 34,494 tons in 2004. Other crops in 2004 included (in tons) oranges, 490,000; lemons and limes, 26,000; grapefruit, 225,000; rice, 610,000; plantains, 790,000; bananas, 310,000; potatoes, 300,000; sweet potatoes, 490,000; and coffee, 12,900. Other Cuban products with export potential include mangoes, pineapples, ginger, papayas, and seeds.
ANIMAL HUSBANDRY
In the state sector, milk production in 2004 amounted to 610,700 tons (up from 431,000 during 1989–91) and egg production reached 79,000 tons (120,000 tons during 1989–91). Livestock in 2004 included an estimated 4,050,000 head of cattle, 1.7 million hogs, 400,000 horses, 3.2 million sheep, 425,000 goats, and 18.4 million chickens. The populations of most livestock species have declined since 1990, as a result of input shortages from the worsening economy. Honey production in 2004 was an estimated 7,200 tons, the highest in the Caribbean.
FISHING
The territorial waters of Cuba support more than 500 varieties of edible fish. The catch in 2003 was 68,420 tons, compared with 244,673 tons in 1986. Tuna, lobster, and shellfish are the main species caught. The Cuban Fishing Fleet, a government enterprise, supervises the industry.
The former USSR aided in the construction of a fishing port in Havana. Seafood exports are an important source of foreign exchange; in 2003, fish and fish products exports amounted to $64.4 million.
FORESTRY
Much of the natural forest cover was removed in colonial times, and cutting between the end of World War I and the late 1950s reduced Cuba's woodland to about 14% of the total area and led to soil erosion. Between 1959 and 1985, about 1.8 billion seedlings were planted, including eucalyptus, pine, majagua, mahogany, cedar, and casuarina. State forests cover 2,348,000 hectares (5,802,000 acres), or about 21.4% of the total land area. Roundwood production in 2003 amounted to 2.6 million cu m (93 million cu ft), with 69% used for fuel.
MINING
Nickel was Cuba's leading mineral commodity, second to sugar in export earnings. The country produced 74,018 metric tons of mined nickel in 2003, up from 71,342 metric tons in 2002. Cuba's nickel reserves were the world's fourth-largest and the reserves base was the largest. Recent changes in investment and mining laws have increased foreign trade. Production has been boosted by a joint venture formed in 1994 between Sherritt International of Canada, and the Cuban government. Nickel deposits and plants were located in eastern Cuba at Nicaro, Moa, and Punta Gorda, all in Holguín Province. Production of cobalt (oxide, oxide sinter, sulfide, and ammonical liquor precipitate), a by-product of nickel operations, totaled 3,982 metric tons in 2004. In 2004, Cuba also produced ammonia, chromite, gold, gypsum, salt from seawater (180,000 metric tons), and silica sand. Production of copper has declined substantially from pre-Revolutionary times.
ENERGY AND POWER
Cuba is the second-largest producer of electric power in the Caribbean region, exceeded only by Puerto Rico. In 2002, Cuba's electrical generating capacity stood at 4.411 million kW, of which 4.354 million kW, was dedicated to conventional thermal sources and 0.057 million kW to hydropower. Output in 2002 stood at 14.771 billion kWh, with 13.920 kWh produced by fossil fuels, 0.105 billion kWh generated by hydropower, and 0.746 billion kWh generated by geothermal or other sources. Demand for electric power in 2002 totaled 13.737 billion kWh.
Cuba has the second-largest proven hydrocarbon reserves in the Caribbean area, surpassed only by those of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2005, according to the Oil and Gas Journal, Cuba's proven reserves of oil stood at 750 million barrels. Over the previous two decades the production of crude oil has risen noticeably, going from 16,000 barrels per day in 1984 to 67,000 barrels per day in 2004. The majority of the country's production is centered in the northern Matanzas province. However, the oil produced is a sour, heavy type of crude that requires special processing. There is interest in offshore production, and it has been reported by industry analysts that Cuba's offshore basins may hold at least 1.6 billion barrels of crude oil. Cuba has a refining capacity, consisting of four facilities operated by state-owned Cubapetroleo (Cupet) totaling 301,000 barrels per day, as of July 2005.
Cuba's consumption of oil in 2004 amounted to 211,000 barrels per day, far outpacing the country's production capabilities. While Cuba has had to import the difference, it has also taken measures to offset the cost of imported oil. In 2000, Cuba signed a five-year agreement to import crude oil and refined oil products from Venezuela , paying for the oil via a barter arrangement that has seen Cuban teachers and doctors sent to Venezuela to promote literacy and provide medical help to Venezuela's poor. In addition Cuba has offered offshore exploration rights in its territorial waters in the Gulf of Mexico to international oil companies. Among them are two Canadian companies—Sherritt International; and Pebercan—both of which are producing oil in conjunction with Cupet, under joint venture agreements.
Cuba had proven natural gas reserves of 2,500 billion cu ft in 2005, according to the Oil and Gas Journal. Gross natural gas production in 2002 amounted to 19.42 billion cu ft, with 3.53 billion cu ft vented or flared and 15.89 billion cu ft marketed. Dry production and consumption for 2002 each stood at 12.36 billion cu ft.
Cuba has no known coal production so the country must import what it uses. In 2002, Cuba imported a total of 44,000 tons of coal and related products, which consisted of 29,000 tons of hard coal and 15,000 tons of coke. Coal product demand in that year amounted to 30,000 tons, with 14,000 tons stockpiled.
INDUSTRY
All Cuban industrial production was nationalized by March 1968. Industry accounts for approximately 35% of GDP.
Cuba had 156 sugar mills in 1985, and at that time, about 10% of exports from the then-USSR to Cuba consisted of machinery for the sugar industry. Other food processing plants produced cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, wheat flour, pasta, preserved fruits and vegetables, alcoholic beverages, and soft drinks. Light industry comprises textiles, shoes, soap, toothpaste, and corrugated cardboard boxes. Other industries are petroleum products (Cuba has four oil refineries with a total production capacity of 301,000 barrels per day), tobacco, chemicals, construction, cement, agricultural machinery, nickel, and steel production. In the mid-1990s, tourism surpassed sugar processing as the main source of foreign exchange, although the government in 2002 announced plans to implement a "comprehensive transformation" of the sugar industry, including the closing of almost half the existing sugar mills. Although 1.7 million tourists visited the country in 2000, bringing in $1.9 billion, the global economic slowdown in 2001 and the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States negatively impacted Cuba's tourism industry.
In 2005, industry accounted for 26.1% of the GDP and it employed 14.4% of the labor force. The industrial production growth rate in the same year was 3.5%, less than the overall GDP growth rate. Services were by far the largest economic engine, with a 68.4% share of the economy, and the largest employer, with 64.4% of the labor force engaged in this sector. Agriculture was the smallest economic sector (5.5% of the GDP), but a significant employer (21.2% of the work force). Financing from abroad has contributed to positive developments in the mining, oil, and construction sectors.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
In 2002, total expenditures for research and development (R&D) amounted to 189.6 million Cuban pesos, or 0.62% of GDP. Of that amount in 2002, 60% came from government sources, with 35% from business and 5% from foreign sources. For that same year, there were 2,510 technicians and 538 researchers per million people that were engaged in R&D. High technology exports in 2002 totaled $48 million, or 29% of manufactured exports.
The Academy of Sciences of Cuba, founded in 1962, is Cuba's principal scientific institution; it, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, operates numerous research centers throughout Cuba. Institutions offering higher education in science and engineering include the University of Havana (founded in 1928), the University of Oriente at Santiago de Cuba (founded in 1947), the Central University of Las Villas in Villa Clara (founded in 1952), the University of Camagüey (founded in 1967), and the University Center of Pinar del Río (founded in 1972). In 1987–97, science and engineering students accounted for 16% of college and university enrollments.
DOMESTIC TRADE
Havana is Cuba's commercial center. Provincial capitals are marketing and distribution centers of lesser importance. Camaguey is a cattle and sugar center, Santa Clara lies in the tobacco belt, and Santiago is a major seaport and mining city. Holguín has been transformed into a major agricultural and industrial center.
By May 1960, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform was operating about 2,000 "people stores" (tiendas del pueblo), and by the end of 1962 all retail and wholesale businesses dealing in consumer essentials had been nationalized. In 1984 there were 27,301 retail establishments in Cuba. As of 2002, there were only about 200,000 independent farmers and only 100,000 private business owners. These private businesses are strictly controlled by the government.
Due to the US-organized trade boycott and the inability of production in the then-USSR and Cuba to meet Cuban demands, rationing was applied to many consumer goods in the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1980s, rationing had been reduced and accounted for about 25% of individual consumption. Allocation of major consumer items after 1971 was by the "just class" principle, with the best workers receiving priority. The availability of basic consumer items increased noticeably after 1980, when the smallholder's free market (mercado libre campesino) was introduced. Under this system, small-scale private producers and cooperatives could sell their surplus commodities directly to consumers once their quotas had been filled. However, the peasant markets were abolished in May 1986, allegedly because they led to widespread speculation and profiteering. It has been estimated that nearly 40% of the domestic economy operates in the "informal" sector, or black market.
Between $800 million and $1 billion per year is added to the domestic economy in the form of remittances from expatriates. Much of this comes from families residing in the United States, who are permitted to send a total of $1,200 per year. The Cuban government acquires these funds by allowing consumers to purchase products in state-run "dollar stores."
FOREIGN TRADE
Cuba has established or reestablished trade relations with many countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia , and Europe . The sudden rupture of trade with the former Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations in 1989 after 30 years of interrelationship caused severe trauma to the Cuban economy. However, there remains a clear political will on the part of the former Soviet republics to maintain economic relations with Cuba with a certain degree of preference. Nevertheless, Cuba has diversified its trading partners in recent years.
Almost half of Cuba's commodity export market (53%) is taken up by sugar and honey, representing 5.7% of the world's export sales in these commodities. Nickel is the second most lucrative exported commodity (23%), followed by fish (6.8%). Other exports include tobacco (5.6%) and medicinal and pharmaceutical products (2.8%). Primary imports include petroleum, food, machinery, and chemicals.
In 2005, exports reached $2.4 billion (FOB—Free on Board), while imports grew to $6.9 billion (FOB). In 2004, the bulk of exports went to the Netherlands (22.7%), Canada (20.6%), China (7.7%), Russia (7.5%), Spain (6.4%), and Venezuela (4.4%). Imports mainly came from Spain (14.7%), Venezuela (13.5%), the
Country
(…) data not available or not significant.
United States (11%), China (8.9%), Canada (6.4%), Italy (6.2%), and Mexico (4.9%).
BALANCE OF PAYMENTS
Since the United States stopped trading with Cuba in 1963, Cuba's dollar reserves have dropped to virtually nothing, and most trade is conducted through barter agreements. In 1997, Cuba's debt to the former Soviet Union was estimated at $20 billion. With the demise of the USSR, Cuba has focused on trading with market-oriented countries in order to increase foreign currency reserves, notably by promoting sugar exports and foreign investment in industry. Remittances from Cuban workers in the United States (totaling approximately $800 million annually), tourism dollars, and foreign aid help to cover the trade deficit.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported that in 2001 the purchasing power parity of Cuba's exports was $1.8 billion while imports totaled $4.8 billion resulting in a trade deficit of $3 billion.
Exports of goods reached $2.2 billion in 2004, up from $1.7 billion in 2003. Imports increased from $4.6 billion in 2003, to $5.3 billion in 2004. The resource balance was consequently negative in both years, deteriorating from -$2.9 billion in 2003, to -$3.1 billion in 2004. The current account balance followed a similar path, worsening from -$130 million in 2003, to -$177 million in 2004. Foreign exchange reserves (including gold) reached $2.5 billion in 2005, covering less than five months of imports.
BANKING AND SECURITIES
All banks in Cuba were nationalized in 1960. The National Bank of Cuba, established in 1948, was restructured in 1967. Commercial banks include Banco Financiero International (1984). Savings banks include Banco Popular dul Ahorro. A number of foreign banks offer limited services in Cuba. The Grupo Nuevo Banco was set up in 1996.
There are no securities exchanges.
Hard-currency reserves have been depleted by import growth in excess of export growth. In the domestic economy, the attempt to reduce enterprise subsidies caused an increase in demand for working capital that the state was unable to meet. A combination of price and direct rationing systems is operating.
INSURANCE
All insurance enterprises were nationalized by January 1964. Although insurance never accounted for more than 1% of national income, new opportunities began to emerge throughout the insurance sector as a result of the changes in economic structure. Seven insurance companies and two reinsurers had offices in Cuba in 1997. They concentrated on freight insurance, but there was interest in development and diversification.
Cuba's domestic state insurance company, Esen, appeared to be preparing to compete with foreign companies in the domestic market in 1997. It launched a major marketing drive with an expanded sales force of 3,500 to persuade Cubans to take out new personal insurance policies. Apparently, they were having some success, despite the lack of a private insurance tradition. The volume of premiums was 30% higher in 1995 than in 1990. New products include not only travel and medical insurance, but also pensions and life insurance policies. In 1997, a new insurance law was passed to permit the establishment of private insurers to compete with the state-owned companies. Although limited foreign penetration into the Cuban market will help to develop the sector, the authorities will continue to foster the development of Cuban insurers before the sector is fully opened. Private insurance schemes will not replace state social security provision.
Third-party automobile liability for foreign residents (including diplomats) and for vehicles carrying either freight or people are compulsory.
PUBLIC FINANCE
Under the Economic Management System, developed during the 1970s and approved by the PCC Congress in 1975, state committees for statistics and finances have been established, and formal state budgets, abandoned in 1967, have been reintroduced. State revenues come from the nationalized enterprises, income tax, social security contributions, and foreign aid.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated that in 2005 Cuba's central government took in revenues of approximately $22.1 billion and had expenditures of $23.6 billion. Revenues minus expenditures totaled approximately -$1.5 billio. Total external debt was $13.1 billion.
CUSTOMS AND DUTIES
Cuba's average weighted tariff in 1997 (the most recent year the World Bank could gather statistics) was 8.1%. However, Cuba also maintains significant nontariff barriers to trade. Required government inspection of imports and corrupt customs officials are among the worst factors.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
In February 1960, Fidel Castro announced that foreign investment in Cuba would be accepted only if delivered to the government to be used as it saw fit. The enterprises in which this capital would be invested were to be "national enterprises," so that Cuba would not be dependent on foreigners. Any new foreign investments were to be controlled by the Central Planning Board. From mid-1960s, US holdings in Cuba were systematically seized, partly for political reasons and partly because US corporations refused to accept Cuba's terms of nationalism. Some of the investments of other foreign nationals were left operating under stringent governmental regulation.
Between 1960 and the early 1970s, foreign investment activities were restricted to limited technical and economic assistance from East European countries and the then-USSR, with which Cuba concluded over 40 cooperation agreements between 1963 and 1983. Limited investments from the noncommunist world were sought with some success in the mid-1970s. In 1982, in a further effort to attract investors from Western Europe, Canada, and Japan, Cuba passed its first foreign investment law, permitting foreign companies to form joint ventures with the Cuban government, but to own no more than 49% of the stock. In 1985, however, direct investment in Cuba by OECD countries totaled only $200,000.
Since 1990, the Cuban government has seen the necessity to open its recessed economy to foreign investment, either via joint ventures or other forms of association. In 1992, Cuba further intensified its efforts to attract foreign investment in several key areas of its economy, including sugar, tourism, textiles, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, nickel, and shipping. In 1995, full repatriation of profits and 100% foreign ownership was allowed in Cuba.
As of 1998, there were 322 joint ventures in force, with partners from over fifty different countries. In addition, many foreign contracts were being sought for oil drilling. The annual inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the more liberalized Cuba reached a peak of $15.2 million in 1998. FDI inflow dropped, to $9 million in 2000 and further, to $4.6 million in 2001. Principal sources of foreign investment include Canada, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Latin America.
In April 2002, after President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was returned to power, oil shipments to Cuba on concessional terms were cut off. In April 2003, there appeared to be a decisive shift away from further opening of the economy as the Castro regime rounded up dissidents and executed by firing squad three men who attempted to hijack a passenger ferry to take them to Florida, accusing the US Mission Chief of trying to organize political opposition to the regime.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Until 1959, the Cuban government followed a policy of free enterprise; government ownership was largely limited to local utilities. When the Castro government came to power in 1959, it proceeded to create a centrally planned economy. By means of nationalization and expropriation, all producer industries, mines, refineries, communications, and export-import concerns were brought under government control by 1968.
Planning in the 1960s vacillated on the question of whether Cuba should concentrate on the production of sugar, on industrialization, or on a balance between the two. After 1963, sugar predominated. But the effort that went into the 1970 harvest diverted enormous resources from other sectors of the economy. At the same time, there was growing absenteeism and low productivity in the labor force, attributed to the policy of eliminating material incentives. Under the Economic Management System, pay was again tied to production though the introduction of a system akin to piecework.
The 1975–80 development plan, approved by at the PCC Congress in December 1975, set specific production goals for Cuban industry and projected an overall economic growth rate of 6% annually; it was announced in 1980 that the actual growth rate was 4%. The 1981–85 plan introduced new incentive schemes and gave more freedom to market forces; it also eased restrictive hiring regulation. One of the major aims of the plan was to increase industry's share of gross social product to 50%, but industry accounted for only 45.3% in 1985. The 1986–90 plan envisioned a 5% annual growth and aimed particularly at an increase in exports. In December 1986, 28 austerity measures were approved by the National Assembly, including increases in transport and electricity prices and rationing of kerosene.
Under several finance and investment accords signed by Cuba and Russia in 1992 and 1993, Russia agreed to supply fuel, tires, and spare parts for mechanical harvesters and other vehicles, in addition to fertilizers and herbicides, all for Cuba's sugar harvest. In addition, Russia agreed to import a minimum of 2 million tons of Cuban sugar. Russia also agreed to extend a $350 million credit to Cuba to complete and further develop a number of oil, energy, and nickel mining projects that had previously been backed by the Soviet Union.
Since 1998, Cuba has sat as an observer at International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank meetings. Cuba's economic planners predicted a 1.5% growth rate for 2003, as tourism declined following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, sugar prices were low, hurricanes damaged the island, and external financing was lacking. The Central Bank reported a $12.2 billion hard-currency foreign debt by late 2002. Unemployment stands at approximately 12%, but close to 30% of workers have been displaced or underemployed. Castro in 2003 replaced at least five officials in economy-related government positions in an effort to combat a faltering economy. Cubans increasingly turn to the black market for food, clothing, and household goods. Cuba continued to apply timid market reforms while actively seeking foreign investment. Economic growth in the late 1990s came from an expansion of manufacturing, tourism, mining, and services. Other positive factors included the improved tourist industry and a sharp recovery of the cigar industry. Indeed, during the 1990s, tourism replaced sugar exports as Cuba's primary source of foreign exchange. The creation of a new Central Bank completed financial sector reforms begun in 1995. These reflected the increased role of the private sector in financial transactions. In 2000, the Cuban economy continued its growth through the generous investment of foreign countries, but the US trade embargo held fast in the face of opposition from key US political leaders.
The main impediment to growth in 1990s Cuba was the restricted access to external financing. As a response, in 2005 the government strengthened its control over capital flows—especially from tourism, oil, mining, and construction. New trade agreements and investment commitments from China and Venezuela will likely give a boost to the Cuban economy in the years to come. Positive developments in the tourism, nickel, and oil sectors will also contribute to the overall growth trend. However, if President Hugo Chavez were to lose power in Venezuela or if the Chinese economy were to face a downturn, Cuba wwould suffer the repercussions.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
A single system of social security covering almost all workers and protecting them against the risks of old age, disability, and survivorship was enacted in 1963. Contributions to pension programs are made by employers (10% of earnings for self-employed persons), with the government making up the deficit. These contributions also fund maternity, sickness, and work-injury programs. Pensions are set at a rate of 50% of average earnings. The national health care system covers all citizens. The Maternity Law provides up to one year of maternity leave.
The Family Code proscribes all sex discrimination. Women receive equal access to education and are found in most professions. Legislation provides for the equal rights of illegitimate and legitimate children, and specifies the obligations of parents. Crime is not reported in the media, and there are no reliable data regarding the prevalence of violence against women and domestic abuse. Prostitution is legal for those over 17 years of age, but the government has been curtailing activity to combat the perception that sex tourism is endorsed.
Human rights activists have been targeted for arbitrary arrest and detention. Prison conditions are harsh: medical care is inadequate and abusive treatment is not uncommon. The government does not allow international organizations to operate in the country.
HEALTH
Sanitation is generally good and health conditions greatly improved after the 1959 revolution. However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba no longer receives the same level of foreign support and has fallen behind in many of its social services. In spite of this, in 1993 100% of the population was reported to have access to health care. In 2000, 95% of the population had access to safe drinking water and 95% had adequate sanitation.
Infant mortality declined from more than 60 per 1,000 live births before 1959 to 6.33 in 2005. About 8% of babies born in 1999 were considered low birth weight. Approximately 79% of married women (ages 15 to 49) used contraception. The government claims to have eradicated malaria, diphtheria, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, and tetanus. Children up to one year of age were immunized as follows: tuberculosis, 99%; diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, 99%; polio, 97%; and measles, 99%.
Life expectancy was an average of 77.23 years in 2005. Major causes of death were circulatory system diseases, cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases. There were 15 reported cases of tuberculosis per 100,000 in 2001. The HIV/AIDS prevalence was 0.10 per 100 adults in 2003. As of 2004, there were approximately 3,300 people living with HIV/AIDS in the country. There were an estimated 200 deaths from AIDS in 2003.
As of 2004, there were an estimated 591 physicians, 744 nurses, and 87 dentists per 100,000 people. Medical services are now more widely distributed in rural as well as urban areas. All doctors are obliged to work for the rural medical service in needy areas for two years after graduation. All health services are provided free of charge. Health care expenditure was estimated at 6.1% of GDP.
HOUSING
Within the past few years decades, Cuban housing has begun to catch up to population demand. Nearly 1.3 million housing units were built between 1959 and 1993. In the 1980s, over half of all housing units were detached houses. The remainder were apartments, palm huts called hohios, and cuarterias, housing units in buildings composed of a number of detached rooms where occupants share some or all facilities. More than half of all dwellings were concrete and brick, about one-third were solid wood, and a smaller number were constructed with palm planks. Water was piped indoors to roughly half of all homes and outside to one-fifth; about half had private bath facilities.
Housing conditions have generally improved over the past few years. By 1998, about 87% of urban dwellings were graded as good or fair, as were 68% of rural dwellings. From 1998–2001, some 800,212 housing conservation and rehabilitation projects were completed; about 51% were initiated by the government and 49% by residents.
Though most dwellings are built by the state, there are a few cooperative and individual concerns represented in the market. Habitat-Cuba, a nongovernment organization, has been working with local architects and low-income families to provide quality, low-cost housing. Part of this program involves using indigenous and more easily renewable materials for construction, such as clay and bamboo.
EDUCATION
Education has been a high priority of the Castro government. In 1959 there were at least one million illiterates and many more were only semiliterate. An extensive literacy campaign was inaugurated in 1961, when 100,000 teachers went out into the countryside.
Education is free and compulsory for six years (6–11 years of age) of primary school. Basic secondary studies last for three years, after which students may then choose to pursue a three-year course of university prep studies or a three-year technical school course. The addition of agricultural and technical programs to the secondary-school curriculum was an innovation of the Castro government; the work-study principle is now integral to Cuban secondary education. Students in urban secondary schools must spend at least seven weeks annually in rural labor. The first junior high schools, based on the work-study concept, were introduced in 1968. Catholic parochial schools were nationalized in 1961.
In 2001, nearly all children between the ages of three and five were enrolled in some type of preschool program. Primary school enrollment in 2003 was estimated at about 95.7% of age-eligible students. The same year, secondary school enrollment was about 86% of age-eligible students. It is estimated that about 94% of all students complete their primary education. The student-to-teacher ratio for primary school was at about 11:1 in 2003; the ratio for secondary school was about 12:1.
Cuba has five universities: the University of Havana (founded 1728), Oriente University at Santiago de Cuba (1947), the University of Las Villas at Santa Clara (1952), University of Camagüey (1974), and the University of Pinar Del-Rio. Workers' improvement courses (superación obrera ), to raise adults to the sixth-grade level, and technical training schools (mínimo técnico ), to develop unskilled workers' potentials and retrain other workers for new jobs, were instituted after 1961. Special worker-farmer schools prepare workers and peasants for enrollment at the universities and for skilled positions in industrial and agricultural enterprises. In 2003, about 34% of the tertiary age population were enrolled in some type of higher education program. The adult literacy rate for 2004 was estimated at about 99.8%.
As of 2003, public expenditure on education was estimated at 9% of GDP, or 18.7% of total government expenditures.
LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS
The José Martí National Library in Havana, founded in 1901, had a collection of two million volumes in 2002. Besides acting as the National Library, it provides lending, reference, and children's services to the public. Other sizable collections in Havana are found at the Havana University Library (203,000 volumes), the Library of the Institute of Literature and Linguistics (1 million), the José Antonio Echevarría Library of the House of the Americas (150,000), and the University of the East in Santiago (535,000 volumes).
Although libraries of private institutions disappeared in the 1960s and many collections were transferred to the National Library, the number of special and research libraries increased, especially with the creation of many departments of the Academy of Sciences. A national library network was established by the Department of Libraries of the National Cultural Council.
The National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana contains classical and modern art from around the world as well as Cuban art from the colonial period to the present day. The Colonial Municipal Museum and the Felipe Poey Natural History Museum in Havana, the Bacardi Municipal Museum in Santiago, the Oscar Rojas Museum in Cárdenas, and the Ignacio Agramonte Museum in Camagüey are also noteworthy. There is a Naval Museum at Cienfuegos and a Museum of Archaeology in Sancti Spiritus.
MEDIA
All telephone service is free; about 95% of the telephones are automatic. In 2003, there were an estimated 51 mainline telephones for every 1,000 people. The same year, there were approximately two mobile phones in use for every 1,000 people.
As of 1999 there were 150 AM and 5 FM radio broadcasting stations and 58 television stations operating throughout the country. All stations are owned and operated by the government. In 2003, there were an estimated 185 radios and 251 television sets for every 1,000 people. The same year, there were 31.8 personal computers for every 1,000 people and 11 of every 1,000 people had access to the Internet . There was one secure Internet server in the country in 2004.
Like the radio and television stations, the press is entirely controlled and owned by the government. Cuba's major newspapers are all published in Havana and include Granma, established in 1965 (with an estimated 2002 circulation of 400,000) as the official organ of the Communist party. The party also publishes weekly editions in Spanish, English, and French. The weekly Juventud Rebelde is the publication of the Union of Young Communists, and had a 2002 circulation of 250,000.
Magazines published in Havana include Bohemia (weekly, 20,000, general articles and news) and Mujeres (monthly, 250,000, women's-interest news). Prensa Latina, the Cuban wire service, covers international affairs and distributes its coverage throughout Latin America.
The constitution states that print and electronic media are state property and cannot be made private. Media operate under strict guidelines and reflect government views. The government is said to intimidate journalists through the penal system and the threatening of jobs.
ORGANIZATIONS
Most of the leading mass organizations in Cuba were founded shortly after the revolution. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were founded on 28 September 1960 to combat counterrevolutionary activities. The Federation of Cuban Women was established 23 August 1960. The National Association of Small Farmers, the leading peasants' organization, was established 17 May 1961; in 1989 it had 167,461 members, both private farmers and members of cooperatives. The Confederation of Cuban Workers, the principal trade union federation, antedates the revolution. Founded in 1939, it had a total membership of 3,060,838 workers in 1990.
The Union of Young Communists of Cuba (UJC), founded in 1962, has reported over 500,000 members. The Federation of Cuban University Students (FEU), founded in 1922, consists of students from all major universities, colleges, and secondary schools. There are a number of sports organizations in the country and an active organization of the Special Olympics.
There are national chapters of the Red Cross Society and Caritas.
TOURISM, TRAVEL, AND RECREATION
Before 1959, tourism, especially from the United States, was a major source of revenue. Foreign tourism declined in the 1960s, and Cuba's ornate and expensive hotels were used mainly by visiting delegations of workers and students. Renewed emphasis on international tourism characterized the 1976–80 development plan, under which 25 new hotels were opened. The Cuban government actively promotes tourism as a means of offsetting the financial decline brought on by the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Among Cuba's attractions are fine beaches; magnificent coral reefs, especially around the Isle of Youth; and historic sites in Old Havana (where some buildings date from the 17th century), Trinidad, and Santiago de Cuba. Passports and visas are required for nationals of countries that do not have visa-free agreements with Cuba. In June 1992, Cuba was admitted to the Caribbean Tourism Organization.
There were 1,905,682 foreign visitors who arrived in Cuba in 2003. Hotel rooms numbered 43,696 with 84,200 beds and a 62% occupancy rate. Tourism receipts reached $1.8 billion.
In 2004, the US Department of State estimated the cost of staying in Havana at $167 per day, and in Guantánamo Bay, $78 per day.
FAMOUS CUBANS
José Martí (1853–95), poet, journalist, and patriot, was the moving spirit behind the revolution that liberated Cuba from Spain. Antonio Maceo (1848–96), the mulatto general known as the "Titan of Bronze," became famous both as a guerrilla fighter and as an uncompromising advocate of independence. Carlos J. Finlay (1833–1915) gained lasting recognition for his theory regarding the transmission of yellow fever.
Cuban literature is most famous for its poetry and essays. The influential Afro-Cuban tradition has been explored by Cuban scholars, most notably by Fernando Ortiz (1881–1916), jurist and ethnographer. Another leading writer was José Antonio Saco (1797–1879), author of a six-volume history of slavery. Ernesto Lecuona (1896–1963) was a composer of popular music, and Juan José Sicre (1898–1974) is Cuba's outstanding sculptor.
The major heroes of the revolution against Batista are Fidel Castro Ruz (b.1926); his brother, Gen. Raúl Castro Ruz (b.1931); Argentine-born Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–67), who was killed while engaged in revolutionary activities in Bolivia; and Camilo Cienfuegos (d.1959). Cubans notable in literature include poet Nicolás Guillén (1902–89) and playwright and novelist Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (1904–80). Cuban-American writer Cristina Garcia (b.1958), made her debut as a novelist with Dreaming in Cuban (1992); she was a Guggenheim Fellow. Alicia Alonso (b.1921), a noted ballerina, founded the National Ballet of Cuba.
Calvert, Peter. A Political and Economic Dictionary of Latin America. Philadelphia: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2004.
Cardoso, Eliana A. Cuba After Communism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
Cuba After the Cold War. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
Cuba and the Caribbean: Regional Issues and Trends in the PostCold War Era. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1997.
Cuba and the Future. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Gomez, Mayra. Human Rights in Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: A Sociological Perspective on Human Rights Abuse. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Health in the Americas, 2002 edition. Washington, D.C.: Pan American Health Organization, Pan American Sanitary Bureau, Regional Office of the World Health Organization, 2002.
Hudson, Rex A. (ed.). Cuba: A Country Study. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 2002.
Luis, William. Culture and Customs of Cuba. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Simons, Geoffrey Leslie. Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Macmillan Press, 1996.
Suchlicki, Jaime. Historical Dictionary of Cuba. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001.
Toward a New Cuba?: Legacies of a Revolution. Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1997.
Cite this article
Background & General Characteristics
General Description
The press situation in Cuba ranks as one of the most complicated in the world due to the political and physical distribution of the Cuban people. Since the victory of the Castro-led forces in 1959, a significant Cuban exile community has flourished in the United States , especially in South Florida . This offshore Cuban community has generated a significant volume of information during its decades of exile. Part of their output has been in English, designed for the audience in the United States, while the remainder has been in Spanish, aimed at consumption by the population of Cuba. Similarly, the press offerings on the island, including both the government-sponsored media and those of the opposition, have been divided between those aimed at domestic and international audiences.
The press situation in Cuba is one of the most restrictive in Latin America . Over the more than four decades since the accession of the Castro government, neither freedom of expression nor freedom of the press have existed on the island. The Castro regime maintains a monopoly on information throughout the nation, confiscating the property of independent media and maintaining a policy of constant repression.
The Nature of the Audience: Literacy, Affluence, Population Distribution, Language Distribution
In 2001, the U.S. government estimated the population of Cuba at just over 11 million. Of these, 21 percent were aged 0-14, 69 percent were aged 15-64, and 10 percent were over age 65. The population was estimated to be growing at a rate of .37 percent annually. The ethnic mix of the nation includes 37 percent persons of European descent, 11 percent persons of African descent, and 51 percent people of mixed races. Despite its history of slavery, the significance of race is less of an issue in Cuban society than it is in the United States. Eighty-five percent of Cubans were nominally Roman Catholic prior to Castro coming into power. The remaining religiously identified Cubans included Protestants, Jehovah 's Witnesses, Jews , and Santeria.
The government's figure for overall literacy is 95.7 percent of all persons aged 15 and older, although this figure is based on the unique Cuban definition of literacy. In 1961, the Castro-led government initiated a Literacy Campaign that claimed remarkable results, dropping the nation's illiteracy rate from nearly 40 percent to below 4 percent in a single year. In the years since the revolution, Cuban officials have consistently placed the nation's illiteracy rate at figures of three or four percent, a rate better than that in Switzerland . However, the Cuban definition does not conform to world standards for measuring literacy. In the Cuban model, the literacy rate describes the proportion of those persons between the ages of 14 and 44, whom the government believes capable of learning how to read, who could read and write according to a standardized Cuban test. In the early 1980s, when the Mariel boatlift refugees came into the United States, many of them were tested for literacy in Spanish by local school districts for the purpose of placement in the second language programs of American public schools. The results of these tests placed their literacy rate at more plausible levels of between 70 and 80 percent. These and other objective measures of Cuban literacy demonstrate that the efforts of the Cuban government to improve literacy have been effective, although not nearly as effective as Cuban propaganda and UNESCO sources would suggest.
Quality of Journalism: General Comments
The state-employed journalists of Cuba are very literally the voice of the Cuban government. Because of the severe restrictions in content as well as in style that are placed upon these writers and editors, the work is described as "a very somber and unimaginative journalism" by Dr. José Alberto Hernández. Hernández, president of Cuba-Net, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in the United States that works to foster press freedom in Cuba, points out that upon separation from the government-controlled media, an independent journalist, while achieving some freedom of expression, loses access to both ends of the journalistic process. Sources that were once openly available become utterly unapproachable to the independent. Likewise, publication proves elusive to the independent journalist. Therefore the choice for the Cuban journalist is between a dull and highly controlled career within the state-sponsored media or a precarious and difficult one outside of that media.
The most noticeable trait in journalism concerning Cuba is the omnipresent bias. On one side the bias is the pro-government slant found in the government-controlled press organs that flourish on the island and in the scattered press organs around the world that sympathize strongly enough with the Castro regime to overlook its cavalier treatment of press freedom. These press outlets serve effectively as apologists for all Cuban government activities and sounding boards for Cuban-based criticism of the West, especially the United States. However, the bias on the other side of the divide is equally severe. Given the difficulty of serving as an independent journalist inside Cuba, only those with powerful and typically anti-Castro agendas tend to endure the hardships associated with this career. Similarly, a huge amount of writing originating outside of Cuba flows from the exile community in South Florida, from the Radio Martí air-waves and from other anti-Castro activists.
Those who would serve as impartial observers face difficulties from both directions. The Cuban government, while extremely accommodating to those members of the foreign press who they perceive as representing the "reality of Cuba," provide virtually no real access to journalists whom they do not feel they can utilize. Political and bureaucratic opposition to objective coverage of Cuba for American journalists can make the endeavor seem not worth the effort.
Historical Traditions
Cuban journalism traces its history to an early beginning during the Spanish colonial rule, with the first Cuban press put into operation by 1723. The history of the nation's press can be divided into five periods. The first period, the Colonial, reaches from the earliest days until 1868. The second period, the time of the Independence Revolution, spans the period from 1868 to 1902. A third period, the Republican period, runs from 1902 until the overthrow of the dictator Machado in 1930. The third period, the Batista era, lasts from 1930 until 1959. The final and current epoch of the Castro era runs from the triumph of the communist revolution in 1959 up to the present.
In comparison with Spanish colonies in other parts of the world, Cuba developed a printing press at a rather late date. However, compared to the rest of the Caribbean and Central America, the Cuban press came early. The nation's first newspaper, Gazeta de la Habana, began publication in 1782, followed in 1790 by the colony's first magazine, Papel Periódico de la Habana. These early publications and those that came into being over the following century operated under Spanish press laws that had been in place in Spanish America since the late sixteenth century. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Spanish regulations on the press became relaxed, partly due to the decreasing power of Madrid on its distant colonies and partly in response to the political currents flowing from the French Revolution .
The second phase of the Cuban press began in 1869 with the first war of independence, when the colonial government issued a press freedom decree with the aim of gaining favor from the reformist circles. In the months following this decree, a series of reform-minded periodicals began publication, of which the most important was El Cubano Libre, appearing on the war's first day. Other new periodicals included Estrella Solitaria, El Mambi and El Boletín de la Guerra.
In 1895, at the outset of the second war of independence, the most important newspaper of the reform party was Patria, which had been founded in 1892. Providing the spark that began Patria was José Martí, who had earlier written for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including La Nación of Buenos Aires and the New York Sun. Journalism provided Martí with his most direct, immediate, and constant form of expression. Martí, who served as the inspiration and organizer of the War of Independence in Cuba, saw newspaper essays as a key force in the development of modernism and the inspiration of his fellow revolutionaries as they struggled to free themselves from Spanish rule.
With the establishment of the Republic of Cuba on May 20, 1902, the history of the Cuban press entered its third period, which lasted until 1930 when the dictator Gerardo Machado was overthrown. During this period Cuban journalism enjoyed a time of prosperity in which at least a dozen dailies flourished in Havana . In the opinion of Jorge Martí, this large number arose due to the ease with which one could start a newspaper or magazine, the willingness of political parties to serve as sponsors, and an overall strong economy. Faced with increasing political opposition and an often-hostile press, in 1928 Machado attempted to co-opt the press by providing significant government subsidies to periodicals in exchange for support. This move prefigured the difficult times to follow.
Machado's fall began in 1930, brought about by earlier economic difficulties and aggravated by the 1933 political instability. With this, the golden days of Cuban journalism faded, brought to an end by the combination of labor unrest from within and the increased government attempts at control from without. The declining state of the Cuban press might have been much worse had it not been for the improvements brought by twentieth-century technological advances. The arrival of steam-powered printing presses and the increased commercial sophistication of the publishers served to expand the journalist's audience and prestige across the country. During this period, a succession of authoritarian regimes which culminated in that of Batista in 1952, exerted increasing control over the nation's press.
In 1959, with the victory of the Castro-led communists, the history of the Cuban press entered its current phase. This phase might be described as simply a continuation of the movement toward government domination and control of the press that began in 1930. The four decades following the Cuban revolution have been marked by very tight government authority over all press outlets. Although opposition has worked throughout this period to counter the government's propagandistic journalism program, only in the 1990s with the emergence of the Internet as a new medium has independent journalism began to pose a significant challenge to the government control of information.
Although often castigated by the Castro regime, the American press played a vital role in the establishment of an independent Cuba by leading the charge toward America's entry into a war with Spain . At the forefront of this effort stood two giants of American journalism, publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Both men saw in the conflict with Spain a rare opportunity for increased circulation of their newspapers. Correctly perceiving in the spirit of the day an increased patriotic sense, the two publishers directed their newspapers to publish sensational anti-Spanish stories. These stories were often illustrated graphically by some of the most gifted artists of the day, including Frederic Remington, and written by top quality writers such as Stephen Crane. Working in competition with each other, Hearst and Pulitzer ironically worked together in creating a war frenzy among the American people as they reported the alleged brutality of the Spanish toward the Cuban rebels. At the same time, the violent acts committed by the Cuban rebels were rarely mentioned in the papers' coverage. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, the pro-war coverage instigated by Hearst and Pulitzer had sufficiently built national war sentiment that President McKinley felt it a political necessity to bow to pressure and enter into a war with Spain.
While the press under the Castro-led government from 1959 to the present has received significant criticism from world press organizations and advocates of a free and open press, it should not be forgotten that a history of free expression is not found in years before 1959. Where the Castro regime has used direct state control of media outlets since the 1960s, the previous governments exercised control of a privately owned media through frequent closures of newspapers and censorship. The nation's 1940 Constitution reacted against the censorship that had plagued the Cuban press since 1925, providing strong protections for the press and free expression. Despite these provisions, ensuing rulers returned to the censorship practices of their predecessors, effectively ignoring the law. Fulgencio Batista, who came to power in a coup on March 10, 1952 established very strong censorship during his nine years of leadership. Censorship under Batista was explained as a response to the threats posed by the rebel movement that would eventually un-seat him. The Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), in discussing the issue of press freedom, asserted that "press freedom only existed in the colonial and republican life of Cuba for the powerful ones and rulers."
During the difficult economic times of the 1990s, significant problems afflicted the Cuban press as a result of the ongoing financial distress of the nation. Budgetary shortages brought about drastic consequences, including a 40 percent reduction in hours of radio and television programming and an 80 percent reduction in the budget of the print media.
Foreign Language Press
Although many of the national press services in print, broadcast, and digital media are published with English-language counterparts aimed primarily at international consumption, no significant non-Spanish press exists on the island.
Leading Newspapers
Three national periodicals circulate in Cuba. The newspaper with the largest circulation is Granma, which since its founding in 1965 has served as the official news organ of the Communist Party. The other two national publications are Juventud Rebelde andTrabajadores. Regional newspapers are published in each of the fourteen provinces of the island. Also, the nation boasts various cultural, scientific, technical, social science, and tourism magazines, which appear at various intervals.
The most important newspaper in Cuba is Granma. In 1998, Editors and Publishers International Yearbook placed the circulation of the daily at 675,000, which ranked it as the 88th most widely circulated newspaper in the world. The international reach of Granma expanded significantly with the advent of the Internet. The website Digital Granma Internacional brings much of the print edition's content to the web, presenting it in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and German. In all of its incarnations, the propaganda role of Granma is impossible to avoid. Typical front-page headlines include roughly equal numbers of stories vindicating and celebrating government policies and position along with frequent stories censuring the political leadership of the United States for perceived abuses. In both its print edition and Internet counterpart, this daily newspaper contains national and international news, cultural reporting, letters, sports, and special thematic features.
Juventud Rebelde, the nation's newspaper with the second highest circulation is, as all professionally produced publications on the island, controlled and created by the government. Under the editorial leadership of Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, the newspaper has maintained a focus on news about and for Cuban youth culture. In pursuing this aim, Juventud covers many of the same stories as the more adult-oriented Granma. Comparisons between the coverage of stories in these two leading newspapers show that the Juventud articles tend to be briefer, composed of shorter sentences, and drafted with a less challenging vocabulary. The daily runs a regular feature entitled "Curiosidades," in which brief, peculiar news stories of the sort that the U.S.'s National Public Radio Morning Edition runs at half past the hour are related. Juventud, like its adult-oriented counterpart Granma, also covers cultural and sporting events but from a more youth-focused angle. The focus on popular music, nearly nonexistent in Granma, is a prominent example of this contrast. However, rather than pandering to a youth culture, Juventud actively works to indoctrinate the young people of Cuba into a belief system that serves the state's interests. The newspaper runs regular articles celebrating the heroes of the revolution and frames pieces in such a way as to encourage its young readers to identify with these heroes.
A prime example of the journalism of identification practiced by Juventud Rebelde can be seen in the ongoing coverage throughout late 2001 and 2002 of the incarceration within the United States of the so-called "Cuban Five." Rene Gonzalez Sehwerert, Ramón Labanino Salazar, Fernando Gonzalez Llort, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, and Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, were arrested in the United States on charges of espionage against South Florida military bases. The Cuban government and the five men themselves have claimed since their arrest in September 1998 and throughout their trial and imprisonment that they were merely attempting to monitor the activities of right-wing anti-Cuban groups in Florida. The five were convicted in June 2001. Since that time, the Cuban press has provided daily focus on these men, branding them the "five innocents" and portraying them, after September 11, 2001, as fighters against terrorism.
The differing coverage of this issue between Granma and Juventud Rebelde is illustrative of the audience differences between the two dailies. In Granma, the focus of the stories regarding these five prisoners has been in placing them into a larger context of both history and world politics. The five are compared favorably with Cuban heroes of old and their actions are portrayed within the context of a longer struggle against the imperialist forces of the United States. In Juventud Rebelde, the political and historical context is less important. Instead, readers are urged to identify with these young men. In fact, the young age of the prisoners is a regular focus in Juventud, despite the fact that, in their mid-to late thirties, most of these men are considerably older than the readership of this newspaper. Juventud also places much more emphasis on the families of the prisoners.
The third national publication in Cuba is Trabajadores (Workers), which is much more political and polemical than either Granma or Juventud Rebelde. As the official organ of the government-controlled national trade union, Trabajadores also is the most noticeably and consistently Marxist in orientation of the three.
Economic Framework
All of the official media outlets on the island of Cuba are controlled by and almost exclusively funded by the government. The nominal subscription fees charged to Cuban nationals for the three major print media fail to cover the marginal production costs of the publication. Since the advertising carried within the newspapers is essentially all purchased by the state, the subsidies provided to cover the shortfall in the publications' budgets take the form of inter-agency transfer payments. Subscription rates for a weekly edition of Granma Internacional cost US$50 per year, again an amount insufficient to cover the cost of production. Broadcast media are similarly supported by government funds. The amount of the subsidies paid to the various press organs is not public knowledge.
The government controls some 70 percent of all farmland on the island as well as 90 percent of production industries. Although the government brings in considerable revenue from exports, especially sugar, Cuba's economy has been in deep difficulty since the early 1990s. Credits and subsidies from the Soviet Union totaled an estimated US$38 billion between the years 1961 and 1984. As much as US$4 billion was transferred from the Soviet coffers to those of Cuba during the late 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet bloc, which deprived Cuba of both its leading aid donor and trade partner, severely damaged the nation's economy. During the early 1990s the annual gross national product was about US$1,370 per capita. The annual government budget included approximately US$14.5 billion in expenditures, offset by only US$12.5 billion in revenues.
A journalist can earn a respectable income by Cuban standards; however, the salaries paid to all Cuban workers are problematic. Wages have not risen markedly over the 40 years since the revolution. In addition, wages paid in Cuban pesos are of questionable value as shortages of goods in the nation's stores leaves consumers with no use for their earnings. Since the peso is not a widely recognized currency, even those workers with access to external markets find themselves unable to participate.
The economic structure of the non-governmental press is even more difficult. Since the independent journalists working on the island are not able to sell their work in any form that could provide sufficient income for personal support, most of the independent journalists work out of a sense of devotion to their profession rather than for hope of material gain. Those independents who do sell their work to paying markets abroad run the risk of imprisonment.
The anti-Castro press/propaganda structure centered in South Florida, while carrying advertisements, is largely a political construct. Advertisers support these media not because of the benefit that the advertisement promises to their businesses but because of their devotion to the anti-Castro cause.
Press Laws
Constitutional Provisions & Guarantees Relating to Media
Article 53 of the 1976 Cuban constitution recognizes freedom of both expression and the press, but subordinates and limits those freedoms to the "ends of the socialist society." Constitutional Article 62 limits press freedoms further, and Article 5 grants to the Communist Party on behalf of the society and the state the duty to organize and control all of the resources for communication in order to realize the benefit of state.
Summary of Press Laws in Force
There is no formal press law in Cuba, and aside from the vague statements in the constitution, press freedom is not guaranteed legally. The Communist Party, according to a resolution approved by the first party congress in 1975, regulates the role and function of the press. In 1997, the state passed Resolution Number 44/97, which regulated the activities of the foreign press. In the stipulations of this resolution there was established a Center of International Press to provide oversight to foreign journalists. This resolution, composed of three chapters and 26 articles, established that no foreign press agency could contract directly with a Cuban journalist to serve as a correspondent without the permission of the state. Law 80, approved in December 1997 under the title of the "Law of Reaffirmation of National Dignity and Sovereignty," stipulates in Article 8 that no journalist may in any way, directly or indirectly, collaborate with the journalists of the enemy. The 1999 Law 88, called the "Law of Protection of National Independence and the Economy of Cuba" provides more specific limits to the rights of free expression and the press with the nation in the law's Article 7. Part of this act provides a prison term of up to 15 years to anyone that directly or indirectly provides information to the United States, its dependents or agents, in order to facilitate the objectives of the U.S. Helms-Burton Act. The law also prescribes an eight-year prison term to those who reproduce or distribute material deemed to be subversive propaganda from the U.S. government. Specifically, the law forbids collaboration "in any way with foreign radio or television stations, newspapers, magazines or other mass media with the purpose of … destabilizing the country and destroying the socialist state." Other provisions of the law create further penalties for press activities considered detrimental to the state or the communist party or beneficial to the nation's enemies.
At the passage of Law 88, the communist youth daily Juventud Rebelde ran stories that demonstrated the government's propaganda position. "Independent journalists are mercenaries: The [U.S.] Empire pays, organizes, teaches, trains, arms and camouflages them and orders them to shoot at their own people," they wrote. Castro, in public speeches, denounced the independent journalists, branding them as counterrevolutionaries. The government has long claimed that the independent journalists receive considerable funding from anti-Castro forces, especially those in the large Cuban exile community in Miami . Naturally, the independent journalists deny such charges.
Censorship
In Cuba, no law exists that either establishes or prohibits censorship. The role of censor is carried out by the Department of Revolutionary Orientation, which answers to the Ideology Secretary of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party. This department was created in the mid-1960s, first bearing the name of Commission of Revolutionary Orientation, and was charged with creating propaganda and propagating the government ideology. The department is also responsible for the design and creation of all official political communications.
Independent Press
The most pressing issue related to censorship in any study of the Cuban press is the treatment by the authorities of those who attempt to create an independent press. In the late twentieth century, as the number of these independent reporters mushroomed, the reaction of the government was forceful. The policy of official repression, which had been allowed to relax in previous years, returned powerfully in the 1990s. The government's actions included imprisonment, physical violence, and house arrest.
Only those journalists that are members of the state-controlled UPEC are allowed accreditation to practice their trade in Cuba. UPEC does not function in the manner of a press organization in a free country but instead serves as an extension of the government, assisting in their control and prior approval of the information allowed in the press. A 1997 Communist Party publication stated overtly that UPEC serves as an ideological organ of the party and that they are charged with spreading the thoughts of the revolution. Not all journalists belong to UPEC, however. In reality various independent organizations exist, though banned by the government. These groups are typically formed by dissident and opposition journalists, indisposed to undergo the control of the government. In many cases the government has removed accreditation from journalists involved with these unofficial groups.
State-Press Relations
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has, since the early 1990s, included Fidel Castro on its annual "Ten Worst Enemies of the Press" list, a distinction that he shares with such regulars as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran , President Jiang Zemin of China and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia . In 2002, the CPJ named Cuba as one of the 10 worst places in the world to be a journalist, noting that "The Cuban government is determined to crush independent journalism on the island but has not yet succeeded…." Journalists are constantly followed, harassed, intimidated, and sometimes jailed.
In early 2002, the CPJ noted with approval the recent release from prison of two journalists, but lamented the continued detention of Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, jailed since 1997. Arévalo is serving a six-year sentence imposed for "disrespecting" President Fidel Castro. The exact nature of Arévalo's offense was to refer to Castro as a "liar" when the president failed to enact democratic reforms that he had promised. Previously, the journalist had garnered ill will from the government when he made public the members of the Communist Central Committee who appropriated cattle for their own use at a time of food shortage. As of August 2002, he held the distinction as the lone journalist in the Americas behind bars for his work.
While some independent journalists find outlets in America and Europe in both Spanish and English language venues, others attempt to publish as best they can in Cuba itself. One such independent publisher, Adolfo Fernandez, creates his own quarterly newsletter with a production run of roughly 1,000 on a photocopier. He then passes these newsletters out to friends and acquaintances. Fernandez admits to withholding some criticism in his stories, preferring to moderate his tone and avoid government clampdowns. Fernandez also gets his message off of the island through radio communications and occasional offshore publication. He has taken on the role of a watchdog over the two most important government publications, Granma and Juventud Rebelde. Fernandez is typical of the independent journalists, many of whom formerly worked within the government information apparatus and who found the censorship and propaganda that rule those outlets unbearable.
The police in Cuba perpetuate violence and harassment against the independent press operatives. Their actions include constant surveillance, late-night visits, and the confiscation of the tools of their trade. Another favorite method of the revolutionary government is to make an accusation of injury or slander against the independent journalists, as in the case of Bernardo Arévalo Padrón.
The Right to Criticize Government: Theory & Practice
Reporters who work outside the state-sanctioned press system are forced to meet informally, often in the homes of individuals, to discuss ideas and utilize fax and telephone services to convey uncensored articles to editors of Spanish-language newspapers, radio and Internet news services located across Europe and the United States.
These journalists complain of abuse and persecution at the hands of the authorities. In some cases the telephone company cuts off service to homes from which these independent journalists work, and the police routinely maintain surveillance on these buildings and the reporters. Journalists report that relatives have been deprived of jobs in state-run businesses and that they are followed by the agents of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Another frequent complaint is that the police routinely place these reporters under house arrest in response to events featuring the political opposition. Another tactic involves rounding up opposition reporters and driving them into remote parts of the country in order to keep them out of circulation temporarily. According to the French group Reporters sans Frontiéres, in 2001 a total of 19 of these harassed Cuban journalists chose to continue their work from exile rather than submitting to the continued persecution.
Although harassment of both low and high intensity has greeted opposition journalists throughout the years of the Castro regime, the government has not succeeded in stemming the flow of reporting from risk-taking reporters working throughout the island. Instead, the latter half of the 1990s saw an explosion in this activity. As recently as 1995, these journalists amounted to some twenty individuals working for five separate organizations. Estimates in 2002 placed the number of unofficial news agencies currently operating from within the island's shores at around twenty, representing a staff of some 100 journalists.
While some of this increase in numbers of opposition reporters might be attributed to the end of the Cold War and an increasing sense that the Castro government is nearing its twilight, it must not be ignored that the government itself, notwithstanding its continued harassment, has become more open to the idea of an independent press system. In May 2001, a group of 40 journalists banded together to effect the formation of the first independent association for journalists recognized under the Castro government. They were spearheaded by Raul Rivero, the former Moscow correspondent for Prensa Latina, the Cuban government's official news agency.
In 2001, three journalists were released from prison. Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández, the executive director of Cooperativa Avileña de Periodistas Independientes, obtained his release after serving two years of a four year sentence for "dangerousness." No explanation accompanied his release, except the warning that he could be jailed again if he returned to work as an independent journalist. Díaz Hernández, arrested on January 18, 1999, in the central province of Ciego de Avila, was sentenced the next day to a four-year prison term. The charge against Hernández was that he had six times been warned about "dangerousness." The second released journalist, Manuel Antonio González Castellanos, who served as correspondent for the independent news agency Cuba Press, obtained his release in February 2001. His October 1998 arrest had been based upon charges of insulting Castro while being detained by state security agents. The final freed reporter was José Orlando González Bridón, who had been imprisoned since December 2000 serving a two-year term for "false information" and "enemy propaganda."
González Bridón, the head of the small opposition group the Cuban Democratic Workers' Confederation, was the first opposition journalist to receive a prison sentence arising from an Internet publication. Writing since the fall of 1999 for the Miami-based Cuba Free Press, Bridón's arrest followed an August 5, 2000 article that alleged police negligence in the death of an activist killed by her ex-husband. The trial, held in a single day and not open to the public, ended with a guilty verdict and a two-year sentence, although the prosecution had only requested a one-year sentence.
Throughout the year 2001, state security agents continually harassed independent journalists and their families. In January, Antonio Femenías and Roberto Valdivia, both of whom worked for the independent news organization Patria, were detained and interrogated for three hours by state security agents after they met with two Czech nationals. The Czech representatives, accused of holding "subversive talks" and conveying "resources" to dissidents, were detained for nearly a month, a move that worsened already strained relations between Cuba and the Czech Republic .
One of Cuba's most widely known dissident journalists, Raúl Rivero, has for many years served as the unofficial leader of the nation's independent press movement. Throughout that time, Rivero has faced constant harassment from the Castro government and its security agency. Born in 1945, Rivero graduated from Havana University's School of Journalism in the early 1960s as one of the first in a group of journalists to be trained after the 1959 revolution. In 1966 he co-founded the satirical magazine Caián Barbudo and from 1973 until 1976 he served as the Moscow correspondent for the government news agency, Prensa Latina. In 1976, Rivero returned to Cuba to assume leadership of the Prensa Latina science and culture desk, a post that he held until his break with the agency in 1988. In 1989, Rivero resigned from the government's National Union of Cuban Writers and sealed his status as an opposition leader in 1991 when he became one of ten journalists, and the only one to remain in Cuba, who signed the Carta de los Intelectuales (Intellectuals' Letter), which called for the government to free all prisoners of conscience. The same year, Rivero declared official journalism to be a "fiction about a country that does not exist."
Since 1995 Rivero has headed CubaPress, one of the nation's leading independent news agencies. Viewed as a dissident for his independent work, Rivero, like all independent journalists, is prohibited from publishing on the island. His only outlets for publication are on the Internet and abroad, although in publishing internationally he runs the risk of a jail term for disseminating "enemy propaganda." He has been notified that while he is free to leave Cuba, his re-entry to the country will be denied. Rivero's celebrated February 1999 article, "Journalism Belongs to Us All," reflected on the efforts of Cuban journalists attempting to freely report the news from that nation. In this article he proclaims that no law can make him feel like a criminal for reporting the truth about his homeland. "I am merely a man who writes," he asserts. "One who writes in the country where I was born."
Attitude toward Foreign Media
The relationship between the Castro government and the foreign press has long been troubled as the government attempts to provide some access to foreign news organizations in order to serve their own ends while also attempting to effect control of the material flowing out of the country. A constant refrain in the speeches of the president is the unfair and negative tone so often evident in foreign accounts of Cuba. British journalist Pascal Fletcher, Reuter's news agency correspondent assigned to Cuba, has received especially severe attacks in the government-controlled press. In January 2001, Granma described Fletcher as being "full of venom against the Cuban revolution," while a television program aired three days later complained of the journalist's "provocative, tendentious and perfidious attitude."
President Castro, in a televised speech broadcast on January 17 and 18, 2001, complained of the foreign press and described their stance as "completely unobjective." While not mentioning any media or journalists in particular, he struck out at journalists "who dedicate themselves to defaming the revolution" or who "transmit not only lies, but gross insults against the revolution and against myself in particular." In the speech, Castro threatened to cancel the operating permits of foreign media, noting that it would be effective to remove permission to report from Cuba from an agency instead of simply deporting a single reporter.
Foreign journalists also suffer from the repressive actions of the Cuban government. In August 2000, three Swedish reporters were detained, ostensibly for immigration violations, after having conducted interviews with various independent journalists.
Foreign Propaganda & its Impact on Domestic Media
The most significant foreign broadcast presence in Cuba comes through the expense and effort of the United States government and their Radio Martí and TV Martí programs. In 1985, Ronald Reagan signed the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act, which established a nine-member advisory board to oversee the expansion of Voice of America services to include specifically Cuban broadcasts. The administrators of this service describe themselves as follows: "The Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) was established in 1990 to oversee all programming broadcast to Cuba on the Voice of America's Radio and TV Martí. In keeping with the principles of the Voice of America Charter, both stations broadcast accurate and objective news and information on issues of interest to the people of Cuba."
Radio Martí initiated programming from studios in Washington, D.C. in May 1985. Their programming runs seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day over AM and short-wave frequencies. The broadcast schedule includes news, news analysis, and music programming. Roughly half of the Radio Martí broadcast day is composed of news-related programs. Besides traditional news coverage, the broadcasts include live interviews and discussions with experts and correspondents around the world. The station also carries live coverage of congressional hearings of import to Cuba as well as speeches by Latin American leaders. The fiscal year 1998 budget for Radio Martí was US$13.9 million. According to the OCB, Cuban arrivals in the United States indicate that Radio Martí is the most popular of Cuban radio stations, although the Cuban government goes to great expense and effort to jam the broadcasts. In 2002, in response to increasingly effective Cuban efforts to jam the Radio Martí signals, the broadcaster requested that the government of Belize allow them to use the transmitters located in that country, which were already used to broadcast Voice of America programming throughout Central America, for Cuban transmissions. The government of Belize declined this request, attempting to avoid involvement in worsening U.S.-Cuban relations. Radio Martí transmits over the air and also provides a streaming audio version of both their live programming and periodic news reports over the Internet.
Television Martí joined its radio counterpart on March 27, 1990. The programming for TV Martí originates from studios in Miami and is then transmitted to the Florida Keys via satellite. The antenna and transmitter for the station are mounted onto a balloon that is tethered 10,000 feet above Cudjoe Key, Florida. Cuban government jamming of the TV Martí signal has proven far more successful than the radio-jamming efforts, partly due to the highly directional broadcast signal used to target the broadcast into the Havana area. Because of this jamming, the signal is randomly moved to regions east and west of the capital in order to reach Cuban televisions without jamming.
News Agencies
The main internal Cuban news agency is AIN, Agencia Cubana de Noticias (Cuban News Agency). Founded in May 1974, AIN operates from Havana under the direction of Esteban Ramírez Alonso. As a key organ in the promulgation of government information, AIN predictably carries key stories that support government policies and reinforce the regime's interpretation of world affairs. For example, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, AIN condemned the actions of Al Qaeda but spent considerably more time castigating the United States for its responses in Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, not all AIN coverage can be dismissed as propaganda. Presented in both English and Spanish, the news stories on any given day include speeches and comments by Castro and coverage of world events from a pro-government point of view, as well as less politically charged stories regarding scientific advances, cultural events, and other ordinary stories.
The Cuban government also supports and controls Prensa Latina (Latin Press), which they refer to as a Latin American Press Information Agency. While attempting to appear in the guise of an Associated Press-style news agency, the propaganda function of this service is apparent to any attentive observer. Describing themselves as the "Premier News Agency in the Republic of Cuba," Prensa Latina provides a daily news service including synthesis of materials regarding Cuba; a daily section containing the principal Cuban news stories; a Cuban economic bulletin (in Spanish and English); and a summary of vital Cuban economic, commercial, and financial news. They also publish a daily English-language "Cuba News in Brief," and the English-language "Cuba Direct," which provide translations of articles regarding Cuban news, politics, sports, culture, and art. Other occasional features include tourism news, medical news, women's issues, and coverage of Cuban and Caribbean science and medicine.
While a number of news organizations from the United States, including CNN, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News maintain permanent bureaus in Havana, foreign reporters visiting the nation are frequently harassed, threatened or even expelled.
Broadcast Media
The government maintains 5 national and 65 regional radio broadcast stations along with the international service of Radio Habana Cuba. Along with the radio services, the government supports 2 national and 11 regional television stations. The most important of these is Cubavisión, which is tightly controlled by the government. In September 2001, the government announced the establishment of a third television channel dedicated to educational and cultural programming at a cost of $3.7 million. In 1998, the nation supported 225 radio broadcast stations, 169 AM, 55 FM, and 1 short-wave. Four Internet Service Providers were in operation in 2001, although access to Internet services remained closely restricted.
A 1997 estimate set the number of radio receivers in the nation at 3.9 million, or roughly one for every three persons. The number of television sets stood at 2.6 million, or one for every four persons.
The most significant domestic television news provider in Cuba is Cubavisión Internacional. Like virtually all of the media outlets on the island, Cubavisión Internacional is controlled completely by the government.
A recent addition to the services offered by Cubavisión is a streaming Internet feed, TV en Vivo, through which the current programming on the network is available internationally. Again, in view of the tiny proportion of Cubans who possess any Internet service whatsoever (roughly half of one percent in 2000), this service must be considered as an offering for those in other parts of the world and not for the inhabitants of the island. In 2002, the broadcast day on Televisión Cubana ran from 6:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. A 90-minute, light news program began the day. A one-hour news show and several brief news updates provided the main news coverage. Typical news coverage included political and economic coverage, stories on science, culture, society, and sports. The network also broadcast more developed special reports, some of which were considered to be propaganda pieces.
Despite the government control of the television news, the voice projected is not a completely monolithic one. One popular segment of the news is Preguntas y Respuestas (Questions and Answers) in which listeners are allowed to pose a question for the reporters to answer. The network's web site provides a feedback option as well, allowing a newsgroup-style threaded discussion of selected topics. Both of these features, while allowing a certain amount of openness, either demonstrate a lack of true dissent or are censored before they appear publicly.
CHtv represents itself as the channel of the capital, focusing its news broadcasts on the local news of Havana. CHtv has been serving Havana since 1991, and presents a two-hour-per day news program six days a week.
The other television outlet in Cuba is Telecristal, broadcasting from Holguín. The first broadcast from Telecristal was transmitted in December 1976. Along with running news broadcasts from the central government, Telecristal 's reporters provide periodic regional news and generally benign editorial comments.
Electronic News Media
Only 60,000 Cubans had access to the Internet in 2000, a figure that represented one-half of one percent of the population. At the center of the Cuban Internet presence is CubaWeb (www.cubaweb.cu), a large directory of government and government-controlled web sites. The main CubaWeb site appears in both Spanish and English versions and many of the subsidiary sites are available in languages beyond Spanish, suggesting that the target audience for the site is not on the island where Spanish is the primary language. Aside from links to news stories, CubaWeb provides links to media organizations, political and government entities, technology providers, cultural and arts organizations, non-governmental organizations, tourism bureaus, business groups, and health care providers.
While access to email and the Internet is not permitted to the independent press, the Cuban government maintains more than 300 websites dedicated to the press and official institutions. The government's monopolistic control of the Internet has become extreme. For more than a year, journalist and writer Amir Valle edited an online periodical about Cuban literature titled "Letras de Cuba." Although Valle was not collaborating with foreign journalists and had demonstrated no political dissent, his site was suddenly suspended because, according to the authorities, no independent publications were allowed.
Although the severely curtailed press freedom for non-government-affiliated media makes the printing of independent newspapers virtually impossible, the Internet has allowed an expanded voice for the independent press voices of the nation. The most prominent web-based newspaper in operation currently is La Nueva Cuba, which has been in operation since 1997. Under the guidance of Director General Alex Picarq, La Nueva Cuba provides coverage of international and national news, culture and economic events, sports, and editorials. The editorial slant of the publication, both on its opinion page and in its reporting, is decidedly anti-Castro, the content proving to be as far toward propaganda for the opposition as is the content of Granma for the government. While the web site lists addresses for correspondents in New York, Madrid, and Rome , no addresses are found referring to Havana or elsewhere on the island. In fact, on close examination, La Nueva Cuba proves far more oriented to the expatriate population of South Florida than to the inhabitants of the island. The advertisements on the site, mostly for businesses from the United States, suggest a mainland audience. Given the fact that a very small percentage of Cubans enjoy access to the Internet and that those who do are overwhelmingly affiliated with the government, the penetration of the content of this site to the population may be slight.
Education & TRAINING
Review of Education in Journalism: Degrees Granted
The leading journalism school in Cuba is the University of Havana. The typical journalism student there will earn a bachelor's degree in communication specializing in journalism. The bachelor's degree is a five-year course of study that includes a wide range of courses drawn from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as more traditionally journalistic studies. The degree also requires six semesters of English. Students may elect courses in new media, photojournalism, and other specialties in addition to their required studies. After completion of a bachelor's degree, the journalism student may proceed to a master of science degree in communications, a program that begins in January of each year and generally requires two and a half years of study. Two of the three specializations offered for the master of science degree are related to journalism. Students may specialize in journalism, public relations, or communications science.
Similar undergraduate degrees are offered at most of the regional universities throughout the island. Graduate studies in journalism are available at the University of Holguín and the University of the Orient in Santiago .
In 1996, the Jose Martí International Institute of Journalism, founded in 1983 by the UPEC, resumed operations after a brief hiatus. Officially this interruption of services came as the result of "an obligatory recess brought on by the current economic difficulty in Cuba." The institute fashions itself as an "Institute of the South" and attempts to foster the continued education of Cuban journalists as well as allowing them to interact with their peers in other countries. The institute offers a variety of workshops, seminars, training programs, and other courses of a postgraduate as well as adult education nature. They also fund a selection of research projects concerning social communication on the national and international levels.
Journalistic Awards & Prizes
The highest award in journalism given in Cuba is the "José Martí National Award of Journalism." Established in 1987 by the UPEC, the Martí Award is granted in honor of a lifetime body of work. The first award was made in 1991. In 1999, in honor of the seventh UPEC Congress, 15 journalists were given the award.
In 1989, the UPEC established an award recognizing exceptional work over a year of journalism. This award is named in honor of Juan Gualberto Gómez, an exceptional nineteenth-century Cuban journalist. Each year, Gómez awards are granted in four categories: print journalism, radio, television, and graphic design.
A third award, the Félix Elmuza Distinction, is also granted to journalists, both domestic and foreign, who have earned renown through one or more of several avenues. Among the merits warranting the Elmuza Distinction are a career of 15 or more years of meritorious service, exceptional contributions to journalism, promotion of journalistic collegiality, foreign journalistic work that "reflects the reality of Cuba," or establishment of goodwill between the press and government or society.
Major Journalistic Associations & Organizations
The Unión de Periodistas de Cuba (Union of Cuban Journalists) serves as the journalists' professional organization for anyone who wishes to work in the recognized media in Cuba. Formed on July 15, 1963 from several pre-revolution organizations, UPEC is ostensibly a nongovernmental organization, although membership in this union is required for professional employment in the government-controlled media and the organization's direction is in line with government policies.
In their own documents, the UPEC states its primary obligations as the assistance of journalists in the "legal and ethical exercise of the profession," in achieving the proper access to sources, and in the general support of reporting. The organization also describes itself as being charged with "contributing to the formation of journalists in the best traditions in Cuban political thought, and in the high patriotic, ethical and democratic principles that inspire the Cuban society." The reader can see how such objectives can be read to support the government.
The UPEC code of ethics contains many statements that would seem familiar to journalists in other parts of the world. Reporters are charged with the protection of sources and with the obligation to go to multiple sources in order to ensure an accurate report. Reporters are also said to have a right to access all information of public utility. What constitutes useful information, however, is not defined. Most problematic among the ethics code provisions is Article 12, which states that "The journalist has the duty of following the editorial line and informative politics of the press organ in which he works." Since all of the press organs represented have their editorial lines prescribed by the government, this article essentially dictates that all reporters must follow the government line. The ethics code provides disciplinary sanctions for violations ranging from private admonishment to expulsion from the organization and, hence, the profession.
Summary
Conclusions
Cuban media speaks in several voices, yet this polyphony is different than in most countries. Rather than supporting an array of media outlets that span a spectrum of viewpoints, Cuba possesses a large, relatively well-funded, and monolithic state-controlled media engine paired with a small and struggling independent press. Added to these two voices are the propaganda efforts of expatriate Cubans publishing from abroad and targeting both Cuban and international audiences. Finally, the government adds an international voice as it directs a great deal of its news output toward an international audience. This cluster of voices makes a full understanding of the Cuban media more complex than it might seem on the surface.
Trends & Prospects for the Media: Outlook for the Twenty-first Century
The 1990s were a difficult period for Cuba. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost the considerable subsidies that flowed into the nation each year. The ensuing economic hardships are only lessening 10 years after they began. Just as the first 30 years of the Cuban revolution's history cannot be separated from the Superpower relations of the Cold War, the history of the 1990s and any future events cannot be separated from Cuban relations with the United States. The continuation of the American economic boycott effectively caps the potential for Cuba's economic prosperity. Without economic dealings with the United States, it is hard to imagine the future holding a great deal of promise for Cuban journalists. Recent years have seen budgetary cutbacks expressed in reduced sizes of newspapers and a reduction in the broadcast hours of radio and television. Continued economic privation would promise more of this sort of contraction.
Just as important over the last decade has been the development of the Internet and its consequent opening of potential modes of publication for dissident journalists. As personal publishing power expands through the spread of the Internet and other media, one can expect an increase in the number and effectiveness of independent journalists in Cuba. How the government will react to such an increase, however, is not at all certain. In recent years, the Castro government has shown no interest in relaxing their stranglehold on information. While it is conceivable that the government will relax their restrictions in the face of public pressure, it is just as likely that they will redouble their efforts toward maintaining control and increase the level of harassment directed at the independent press.
Perhaps the single most important issue for the future of the Cuban media is found in Fidel Castro. After more than four decades in control of the nation, it is difficult to envision a Cuba without Castro. In the spring of 2002, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Cuba and encouraged a relaxation of tensions and the policies of both nations. The Bush administration has demonstrated no interest in pursuing such a relaxation, leaving Castro isolated but in firm control.
Significant Dates
1990: Economic subsidies from the Soviet Union valued at US$4 to US$6 billion annually are ended, plunging Cuba into a lengthy recession.
1997: The government sentences Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, founder of the independent news agency Linea Sur Press, to a sentence of six years for insulting President Fidel Castro and Vice President Carols Lage.
1997: Resolution 44/97 is passed, establishing the Center for International Press, a government-controlled group tasked with providing oversight and direction to foreign journalists.
1997: Law 80, the "Law of Reaffirmation of National Dignity and Sovereignty," is passed, making journalistic collaboration with "the enemy" a criminal offense.
1999: Law 88, the "Law of Protection of National Independence and the Economy of Cuba," creates a wide range of penalties for journalistic activities deemed to be contrary to the benefit of the state.
1999: Six-year-old Elian Gonzalez is rescued after his mother's death as they, along with others, attempt to raft to the United States. A heated legal and journalistic battle rages for months before the boy is returned to his father in Cuba in April 2000.
2000: Three Swedish journalists are detained briefly after interviewing independent journalists.
2000: 3,000 Cubans seek to escape Cuba on homemade rafts and boats. The United States Coast Guard intercepts roughly 35 percent of these.
Bibliography
Anuario Estadístico de Cuba. Havana, published annually.
CubaWeb: Cuban Directory. Available from http://www.cubaweb.cu .
Elliston, Jon. Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999.
Franklin, Jane. Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1997.
Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC). Available from http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/.
Lent, John A. "Cuban Mass Media After 25 Years of Revolution". Journalism Quarterly. Columbia, SC:AEJMC, 1999.
Perez-Stable. The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Salwen, Michael B. Radio and Television in Cuba: The Pre-Castro Era. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1994.
Mark Browning
Bayamo, Camagüey, Cárdenas, Ciego de Ávila, Cienfuegos, Guantánamo, Holguín, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Trinidad
EDITOR'S NOTE
This chapter was adapted from the Department of State Post Report dated October 1994. Supplemental material has been added to increase coverage of minor cities, facts have been updated, and some material has been condensed. Readers are encouraged to visit the Department of State's web site at http://travel.state.gov/ for the most recent information available on travel to this country.
INTRODUCTION
The island that is now the Republic of CUBA was discovered and claimed for Spain by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World in 1492. Except for a brief period of British occupation soon after the middle of the 18th century, it remained under Spanish control for nearly 400 years. The Cuban struggle for independence, born out of discontent with a failing economy, broke into open rebellion in 1868, and peaked 30 years later when the United States battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor, thus igniting the Spanish-American War . Spain lost the war and relinquished its rights to Cuba in the Treaty of Paris .
Three years of U.S. administration followed before independence was proclaimed on May 20, 1902. Cuba's history since then has been one of dictatorships and revolutions, the most dramatic of which was in 1959 when Fidel Castro overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship with promises for a return to democratic rule. Lands and businesses were nationalized, and the economy came under the direction of the state. All political activity remains under the authority of Castro's ruling Communist Party.
Although the United States Embassy in Cuba was closed in 1961, there has been a U.S. Interests Section here since September 1977, subject to a bilateral agreement with the Cuban Government, and under the aegis of the Embassy of Switzerland .
MAJOR CITIES
Havana
Havana is a capital rich in history, architecture, and culture. Old Havana, characterized by narrow, cobbled streets, El Morro Castle dominating the harbor entrance, stately buildings, and beautiful wrought-ironwork, evokes its Spanish colonial origin. The United Nations has designated virtually all of that area as a World Heritage Site, in an effort to stave off its demise and destruction.
The Riviera Hotel, Hemingway haunts like La Bodeguita Restaurant (where everyone adds their name to the graffiti-filled walls), the once-dizzy but now more worn Tropicana Nightclub, crumbling yet still beautiful former private residences, the number of mid-century American cars… all combine to reflect Havana's heyday as a 1940s and 50s gambling and vacation hotspot.
In the years following the Revolution, much of the government's energy and revenue went into rural improvements in the country's infrastructure. Schools, roads, electricity, and health clinics helped widen Cuba's pro-revolutionary advances in terms of Latin American literacy and health indices. Since the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union , economic support and subsidies have collapsed, compelling far fewer expenditures in those areas in the 1990s, and laying clear the inefficiencies and poor management resulting from a generous subsidy.
Clothing
Standards of dress in Cuba for most occasions are informal. Summer weight clothing is appropriate year-round. Women find dresses or skirts a good choice. Men wear guayaberas or short-sleeved shirts. Light jackets or sweaters are useful during the winter months (November-February) and in the office building.
Clothing is available in some diplotiendas, but the variety is limited and generally quite expensive. You can have some clothing items made locally, and seamstress work is quite good.
Children's clothes are not available in any abundance or reasonable price range.
Supplies and Services
Dry-cleaning and shoe repair services are virtually nonexistent. The casual and tropical climate encourages more wash-and-wear clothing. Beauty parlors and barber shops offer acceptable services at an inexpensive price.
Religious Activities
From its Spanish legacy, Cuba developed an adherence to Roman Catholicism. From its African slave trade, Cuba absorbed tribal rituals and beliefs of ancestral gods. That vibrant mix, known today as Santeria, remains a widely-believed and practiced religion. Of course, more traditional services are conducted, virtually all in Spanish. More churches appear open to worship than in previous years, as the Cuban Government alternately tightens and loosens its control over the faithful. A few Protestant churches and Havana's diminishing Jewish community offer services, too.
Education
There are three international schools in Havana. L'école Francaise provides instruction in French for nursery school (age 2 and-a-half) through the fifth grade. Secondary courses (grades 6 through 8) are provided via correspondence courses graded in France . The Centro Educativo Espanol offers Spanish-language programs for children starting at age 2. Secondary courses are graded via testing reports from Spain. The International School of Havana (ISH) offers instruction in English from preschool through the high school level.
USINT children historically have attended ISH. The school is headed by an English-speaking principal (currently a citizen of the U.K.). All the teachers are Cubans and employees of Cubalse. Few have any formal training as educators. The Office of Overseas Schools (A/OS) rates the school as adequate through grade 6, yet parents of several children in the upper elementary grades (4-6) have been dissatisfied with the school's program. Still, with a new principal (1993) ISH is trying to move beyond past problems.
The few secondary educational courses offered operate under a University of Nebraska correspondence program or Mercer College (a British program. The International School currently follows a curriculum loosely based on the Fairfax County standard. All primary school textbooks are from the U.S.
Special Educational Opportunities
The International School of Havana is in the process of expanding its Adult Education Program (now limited to English as a Second Language), and has offered workshops on stress reduction and a Cuban Cinema Seminar. Casa de las Americas, an institute which studies the American continent, offers special seminars in literature. All instruction is in Spanish. There are no special facilities for those with physical, developmental, or learning handicaps.
Sports
Tennis, golf, horseback riding, swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving, wind surfing, water skiing, and fishing are year-round sports in Cuba Tennis courts can be rented or booked at several hotels.
Cuba has wonderful, unspoiled beaches, particularly at Varadero, two hours' east of Havana. That beautiful stretch of white sand beach ranks as one of the Caribbean's finest. Excellent beaches lie within 15 miles from Havana, while Herradura, the nearest coral reef for snorkeling or diving, is only an hour's drive west.
Cuba's coastal waters and coral reefs attract many fishermen and divers. You can charter deep-sea fishing boats at Marina Hemingway. Freshwater bass fishing is good at Hannabanilla, (called Treasure Lake on old maps of Cuba), a 5-hour drive into the mountains southeast of Havana. Scuba diving requires certification, which you preferably should have before arriving, along with your own equipment. Tanks can be recharged without problem.
The Havana Golf Club offers a nine-hole course, tennis courts, a squash court, bowling alley, pool and restaurant for a monthly fee. The Club Hipico Iberoamericano offers both Western and English-style horseback riding lessons and outings into Lenin Park. Some Americans enjoy bowling at the 24-lane alley built for the 1991 Pan-American Games, still in very good condition, and there is an outdoor roller-skating rink for rollerbladers of any age. Biking also remains a popular activity.
Touring and Outdoor Activities
Cuba's economic disintegration, reflected by its difficulty in sustaining consistent oil deliveries, has limited touring into the far reaches of the island. Gasoline may not always be available, and the quality of much of it is suspect. Still, oneday and one-tank drives afford an opportunity to enjoy a change of scenery from the city.
Beginning in 1994, however, the Foreign Ministry requires that all trips outside of Havana Province be reported to it in advance of the trip. There is no need to wait for authorization; only to inform MINREX of travel plans beyond the province borders.
Heading west from Havana into Pinar del Rio province, two areas attract interest. The waterfall and nearby orchid gardens at Soroa are just an hour's drive west of Havana. Running adjacent to the ridge of mountains known as Cordillera de los Organos, the highway to Soroa passes through large tracts of sugarcane and cattle-grazing pasture land.
Another hour brings you to Valle de Vinales, where the combination of soil and climate produce the best tobacco for Cuban cigars. These western mountains also offer rather dramatic contrasts to the agricultural lowlands, attractive vistas and cave exploration. Two hours east of Havana, in the province of Matanzas, visitors to Las Cuevas de Bellamar are guided through a small part of the extensive underground caverns.
Other more distant places of interest include Guama (a commercial crocodile farm), the cities of Trinidad and Cienfuegos (Spanish colonial architecture), and Santiago de Cuba (Cuba's second-largest and most important city, which sits close to Spanish-American War sites). Playa Giron, better known outside Cuba as the Bay of Pigs, is a three-hour drive southeast and worth an occasional weekend for snorkeling. Cayo Largo and Cayo Coco, island resorts being developed for Cuba's tourism industry, can be reached via small aircraft. All overnight travel outside of Havana should be arranged in advance in order to ensure accommodations, which can range from rustic to comfortable.
Entertainment
Frequent power outages may contribute to fewer performances of cultural events, but they have not diminished Cubans' interest in the arts. The National Ballet continues to stage various productions at the famous and still-lovely Garcia Lorca Theater. Jazz remains quite popular, and a yearly festival features local and international artists. Cuba has annually sponsored the Latin-American Film Festival—a Cuban film won Best Picture and critical acclaim in 1994—and a number of theaters show Spanish and American films.
Museums and art galleries provide occasional hours of enjoyable relief. The Museum of Colonial Art, Hemingway Museum, Museum of the Revolution, Museum of the City, and the Museum of Natural Science are worth visiting. Museo Historico in the nearby town of Guanabacoa displays extensive information on Santeria and other Afro-Cuban religions deriving from ancestral and spiritual worship.
Walking through parts of Old Havana is pleasurable. The beautiful and graceful Spanish Colonial architecture of the Havana Cathedral, its cobble-stoned plaza and adjacent buildings, evokes the grandeur of colonial Cuba. Stain glass windows, richly-detailed stucco and moldings, elegant doorways and window treatments, complement the historic if faded ambience of this U.N.-designated World Heritage site. Some caution is required, however, as purse snatchings have increased in recent years.
For nightlife, some hotels offer cabaret shows and discos, and of course, the famous Tropicana Nightclub continues its half-century plus reputation for dinner, drinks, and a dizzying floor show. Cuba's strong push to promote its tourism facilities and industry likely will result in more nightclubs, restaurants, and evening entertainment opening in the future.
Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba, a port on the southern coast of the island, is the capital of Oriente Province. With a population of over 405,350 (2000 est.), it is the nation's second largest city. It was founded in 1514, and was the capital of Cuba until 1589. Santiago, its more commonly used name, was once a center for brisk smuggling trade with the British West Indies , but is probably better known as the scene of military activity during the Spanish-American War. U.S. ships established a blockade here in the harbor and, on July 3, 1898, in the final major battle of the war, destroyed the Spanish fleet led by Pascual Cervera y Topete. There also was heavy land fighting near the city when San Juan Hill was taken two days before the successful blockade.
The Spanish-American battles were not to be the final military struggles at Santiago—the city was once again the scene of heavy fighting in July 1953, when Fidel Castro (Ruz) led his first armed revolt against the government in power.
Santiago has many famous landmarks, among them the old cathedral in the city and the crumbling forts on towering cliffs above the harbor. Interesting old colonial buildings add to the charm of Santiago. Two major libraries, one central and one provincial, are maintained here, as is the 30-year-old Universidad de Oriente, which has facilities in several disciplines and a student body now numbering 12,000.
Wood, minerals, and agricultural products are Santiago's major exports. Iron, copper, and manganese are mined in the area. A new textile factory was opened here in 1984.
OTHER CITIES
Founded in 1513, BAYAMO is in eastern Cuba, 60 miles northwest of Santiago, on Cuba's longest river, Río Bayamo. The city is commercially active, manufacturing sugar, coffee, tobacco, and rice. There is a major condensed milk plant here. Copper and manganese are mixed in the area. The city is a patriotic favorite of Cubans. The Ten Years' War, 1868-1878, and the revolt of 1895 began in Bayamo. The population is about 141,000 (1995 est.).
CAMAGÜEY , with a population of almost 283,000 (2000 est.), is located in east-central Cuba. It is connected with Santiago and Havana by the Central Highway. Founded in 1515, the city prospered illegally by trading with the English and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. Camagüey resisted Cuba's independence and several battles were fought nearby. The city maintains vestiges of its colonial architecture. Older parts of the city exhibit narrow, irregular streets and small plazas. Industries here include sawmilling, tanning, and dairying. The city is near major highways and railways, and has an international airport.
The port city of CÁRDENAS , on Cuba's north coast, is known as an important fishing port. The city's industries include rum distilleries, and sugar refineries. Cárdenas is 75 miles east of Havana and about 15 miles southwest of a fashionable spa, featuring white sulfur springs, in San Miguel de los Baños. A popular beach at Varadero is also nearby. Cárdenas has a population over 66,000.
CIEGO DE ÁVILA is in central Cuba, about 65 miles northwest of Camagüey. Situated in a fertile region, the city produces sugarcane, cattle, and tropical fruit. The population here is over 80,000.
The sugar port, CIENFUEGOS , is located about 140 miles southeast of Havana, on the south-central coast. Areas surrounding the city produce cattle, tobacco, coffee, rice, and sugarcane. Cienfuegos is home to several industries, among them are distilleries, coffee-and tobacco-processing plants. From May through November, the weather in Cienfuegos is hot and humid; winter temperatures are milder, with warm days and cool nights. The city is lovely—it boasts wide streets, numerous parks and promenades, a fine plaza, and interesting architecture. Visited by Columbus in 1494, Cienfuegos' port began operation in the early 1800s. Cienfuegos, site of Cuba's largest cement works, has a population of approximately 195,000.
GUANTÁNAMO , a city of 200,400 residents (2000 est.), is a major sugar-producing center in southeastern Cuba. Its history dates to the early 19th century when French colonists, fleeing the slave uprising in Haiti , established a settlement here. The area is probably best known to Americans because of the U.S. Navy base which has been in operation since 1903 at nearby Guantánamo Bay. The city's port is at Caimanera, on the west side of the bay. The city's chief industrial activities are sugar milling, coffee roasting, and the processing of chocolate, salt, and liqueurs. Guantánamo is accessible by railroad and highway.
HOLGUÍN , which lies in the fertile hill country of northeastern Cuba 70 miles north of Santiago, has twice been a rallying spot for insurgents—the first time during the Ten Years War (1868-78), and again in the period preceding the outbreak of the Spanish-American War (1898). Holguín was founded in 1720. It is one of the country's major commercial centers, and products grown in the region (sugar, coffee, tobacco) are shipped from its port, Gibara. The city, whose population was 243,000 in 2000, supports a university extension institute, with schools of engineering and economics.
MATANZAS , situated in western Cuba, on the road between Havana and beautiful Varadero, is known for its fine, deep-water harbor. The lush Yumurí valley in which it lies, and the fascinating caves in the area, have become tourist attractions. Known as the " Athens of Cuba," Matanzas has a public library, active cultural institutions, and numerous scholars and artists. The city offers beautiful monuments, plazas, and scenic drives. Among Matanzas' industries are sugar refineries, textile plants, fertilizer, and shoe factories. The city, founded in 1693, has a current population of about 123,000. A municipal museum is established here.
The 300-year-old city of SANTA CLARA , in the west-central part of the country, made its mark in recent history as the scene of a decisive battle in 1959, when Castro's guerilla forces overthrew the Batista government. This attractive city, nestled among the hills of Villa Clara Province, is the site of the Universidad de Las Villas, one of Cuba's three major institutes of higher learning; the school was founded in 1948, and currently has a student body of 8,500. Sugar and tobacco are the principal products of the area. The city is situated near the geographic center of the island and is a major junction for Cuba's railroads. Santa Clara has a population of 194,350.
Founded in 1514, and once Cuba's wealthiest city, TRINIDAD is situated in central Cuba, about 75 miles southwest of Havana. In order to maintain its colonial atmosphere and to celebrate famous former residents—including Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés—Trinidad has been declared a national monument. The city has numerous and varied industries, including sugar refineries, dairies, sawmills, and cigar and cigarette factories. Tourists enjoy its cool climate and mountainous landscape. Gold, amianthus, and copper deposits are found nearby. Trinidad has an airport railway that links with Cienfuegos, and good highways.
COUNTRY PROFILE
Geography and Climate
With more than 44,000 square miles (114,447 sq. km.) of land and 2,500 miles (4,000 km.) of coastline, Cuba rightfully lays claim to being the largest island in the West Indies, accounting for more than one-half of the total land area. The island stretches more than 745 miles (1200 km.) in latitude, yet only ranges from 20 to 125 miles (35-200 km) in longitude, lying about 90 miles (145 km.) south of Key West, Florida .
No larger than the state of Pennsylvania but contoured much differently, Cuba's coastline constantly breaks into literally hundreds of bays, inlets, and narrow, shallow rivers. The Isle of Youth (known as the Isle of Pines in pre-Revolution days), and some 1,600 keys and islets lie offshore. The deep-water harbors of Havana, Guantanamo, and Bahia Honda rank among the world's finest.
Topographically, three-fifths of Cuba displays flat or gently rolling fields and wide, fertile valleys-ideal for the sugarcane and tobacco crops which are the backbone and most recognizable symbols of the Cuban economy. The northern coast is low and marshy. Most of what remains, particularly at the southeastern end of the island, forms steep and at times formidable mountains. Three mountain ranges dominate the Cuban terrain, but by far the best-known and most rugged is the eastern Sierra Maestra, where peaks rise to almost 6,000 feet (1,829 m.) above sea level. Fidel Castro began his struggle there in the 1950s, and still today in speeches alludes to its historical significance in the Revolution.
Cuba is bordered on the north by the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida and on the south by the Caribbean Ocean. Prevailing trade winds combine with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream to produce a mild and semitropical climate. Cuba's mean temperature is about 77°F (25°C) in winter and only slightly more, perhaps 80°F to 85°F (26°C), in summer. Averages range only between 70°F (21°C) and 82°F (27°C) for the coldest and warmest months. Summer readings of as high as 100°F (37°C) have been recorded. Occasional near-freezing temperatures occur only in mountain areas.
Relative humidity varies from 60 to 70% in the daytime and from 80 to 90% during the night, regardless of the season, of which there are only two. The dry season lasts from November to April. During the May through October rainy season, Cuba receives up to 75% of its yearly rainfall, which averages 54 inches (137 cm.).
Population
Cuba's population is over 11 million, with an annual growth rate of 1.1% and a density of 200 persons per square mile. Most of the population is of Spanish and African origin. Spanish, the official language, has particularly Cuban traits in its spoken form.
About 70% of the population is urban. Havana, the capital, is Cuba's principal port and city, and has a population of 2.3 million. Other major cities include Santiago de Cuba, Camaguey, Santa Clara, Holguin, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, and Pinar del Rio.
Before 1959, Roman Catholicism was observed by about 85% of the population. The 1976 Cuban Constitution nominally protects freedom of religion. In practice, however, church attendance has only begun to grow in recent years, following years of official persecution of religious institutions. Various religions are sometimes permitted to publish literature for use within their churches. Religious public demonstrations or radio/television programming are not permitted.
Public Institutions
Under that same 1976 Constitution, Cuba is organized with a party-government-state structure. The Communist Party, described in the Constitution as "the highest force of the society and state," is headed by a Politburo. The Communist Party, Cuba's only legal political party, is the focus of power in the state.
Executive power within the government is vested in the Council of Ministers, which heads the government. Legislative power allegedly rests with the National Assembly of People's Power, which elects the Council of State, but in fact is a rubber-stamp body with no independent power. All courts, including the People's Supreme Court, are subordinated to the National Assembly of People's Power (and thus to the Council of State).
Administratively, Cuba is divided into 14 Provinces plus the Isle of Youth.
Arts, Science, and Education
Except for their enormous state of flux, few agree today on how to characterize the status of the arts and education in Cuba. One of the leitmotif's of the prize winning film, "Fresas y Chocolate", is derision of the low quality of popular education in Cuba. On the other hand, a long-time American admirer of the revolution, Carol Brightman, has written that:
The so-called achievements of the revolution—lifelong health care, free and universal education, generous social security payments, free housing—have materially raised the standard of living of the vast majority of the population to levels undreamed of before 1959. (The Nation, v. 258,9: p. 299)
The strategy for long term economic recovery, emphasizing biotechnology, tourism development, and related fields such as medicine and English teaching, and the stringencies of special period cutbacks, i.e., the reduction of Cuban book publishing from about 20 million volumes to 250,000, are forcing momentous changes, though few are discussed very openly. The enormous subsidies paid through the Ministry of Culture that kept tens of thousands of Cuban artists and intellectuals on the state's payroll have been reduced dramatically since members of the Union of Artists and Intellectuals (UNEAC) and the Union of Journalists (UPEC) were first allowed to work independently in 1992 and retain some or all of their hard currency earnings in 1993.
The Ministry remains the central authority for most museums and galleries, ballet and theater companies, musical groups, publishing houses, and the motion picture industry, but the ministry's personnel and activities have been cut back so far that it runs very little any more. Independent entities, such as the Pablo Milanes Foundation, have arisen as cultural impresarios and musical groups are increasingly arranging their own contracts with record companies and tourist hotels where they can be paid in dollars.
Museums now often depend on the revenue they can generate from tourists and international donors. Artisans sell their wares through co-ops and tourist stalls. The only Cuban films made in recent years have been foreign co-productions. The Ministry also retains responsibility for the "culturalization" of the people, but the legendary popular concerts and live performances of yesteryear are now generally restricted to TV appearances during rare home visits by big name performers.
The legendary cultural exports of the revolution, ranging from Alicia Alonso's ballet to a panorama of revolutionary films and Milanes' ballads, have decreased to a trickle. The 1993 Latin American Film Festival almost recouped some of the past glory by attracting a large number of films from other countries, but "Fresas y Chocolate" was the only Cuban film exhibited. The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (INCAIC) and the film institute that Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez helped found in 1986 continue to promote "Latin American film consciousness," just with much less Cuban content.
There are lots of cinemas, theaters and concert halls in Havana and spread around Cuba, but performances as advertised are much less reliable than in the past. Concertgoers are rarely surprised to hear a number not on the program, and having tickets for a performance of a particular opera or ballet does not insure that the performance will occur as scheduled. The Cuban National Ballet, founded by the "primissima" ballerina, Alicia Alonso, performs periodically, but performances are limited between foreign tours. Camaguey's dance company now rivals that of Havana, but it, too, is mostly on the road outside Cuba. Notable visiting artists from around the world occasionally visit Cuba, but in recent years they have come more to show solidarity than to perform.
Education is a pillar of the revolution, and teachers, after medical cadres and the military, have been among its most faithful. The independent employment allowed to artists and intellectuals remains unavailable to teachers. The regime maintains its claim of 96% literacy despite some evidence of functional illiteracy and criticisms of the educational system. Control of reading material has loosened greatly in recent years as the means to acquire it have diminished. In 1992-94 several Cuban universities and the National Library started accepting materials from the USIS book program. The pace of requests for more publications has now far outstripped the capacity to supply them. USIS also has distributed post-produced publications and donated newspapers and magazines, especially to support English teaching programs.
Cuban self criticisms of the waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency of their economy has rarely been applied to the educational system. The revolution succeeded in widespread school construction, especially in provincial areas, and in establishing a large-scale system of technical and normal education and the expansion of the country's public universities.
However, the well-endowed schools of the past are now all-but-forgotten when each new school year opens with a drive to raise funds to buy pencils and paper. During the prolonged blackouts of the special period, most schools lack electricity and all that goes with it, and water supplies and sanitary conditions are unreliable.
Despite all these problems, classes go on at all levels of the system amid the reductions, especially at the higher levels. Cuba's six universities and other centers of higher education appear to be losing enrollment, and concerns about the furloughing of faculty and other changes of status are mounting.
The big challenge for the universities in Pinar del Rio, Havana, Matanzas, Villa Clara, Camaguey and Santiago, as well as in the twenty or so other institutes of higher education is the lack of access to dollars. In 1993 these institutions were allowed to develop self-financing programs for the first time. Despite seemingly endless numbers of special courses, seminars and conferences for foreign students and academics, earnings appear limited.
Beside the lack of funds, many Cuban scholars trained in the former Soviet bloc now are without means of maintaining their scientific and professional development with respect to any international standard. In some faculties large-scale English programs have been started to retool the language capacities of the staff, and professional contact with visiting American scholars is eagerly sought out where it was once avoided. Professors are encouraged to participate in internationally-funded programs and to accept teaching opportunities in other countries that may generate some funds.
Academic and cultural contact with the United States is growing rapidly, largely at the initiative of U.S. institutions, but Cuban counterparts are quick to go along and often to take control of programs. From a low point during the mid-1980s when only a handful of academics traveled each year, today there are scores of U.S. visitors each month at the University of Havana, and several hundred Cubans visit the U.S. each year. The provincial educational centers are far less involved, especially in allowing faculty to travel, but U.S. institutions are beginning to focus their attention beyond Havana.
Commerce and Industry
Since the late 18th century, the Cuban economy has been dominated by sugar production and has prospered or suffered due to fluctuations in sugar prices. Sugar still accounts for about three-quarters of export earnings. Cuba has never diversified from its basic monocultural economy despite some development of tourism, nickel mining, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology.
For almost 30 years, the defects in Cuba's economy and the effects of the economic embargo imposed by the U.S. in 1962 were partially offset by heavy subsidies from the former Soviet Union. But those supports ended with the collapse of COMECON in the late 1980s and with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba's break with its former patron and failure to undertake needed reforms combined to produce an unprecedented economic crisis. Its economy is estimated to have declined 40% from 1989 through 1992.
The economic prospects are not good, largely because of the Castro regime's decision to maintain the state's highly-centralized control over economic decision-making, the lack of energy supplies, and inputs for industry. The "Special Period in Peacetime" relies upon strict rationing of food, fuel, and electricity, and gives priority to domestic food production, development of tourism, and biotechnology production.
Basic public services are provided by the state, either free of charge or for minimal fees. Access to education through high school is still generally available, but urban housing and medical care have deteriorated, as have communications and transportation.
The state owns and operates most of Cuba's farms and all industrial enterprises. State farms occupy about 70% of farmland, while peasant cooperatives account for about 20%. Private farms account for about 10% of Cuba's agriculture. Cuba's manufacturing sector emphasizes import substitution and provision of basic industrial materials. In recent years, many Cuban firms have closed or reduced production because of shortages of foreign exchange and limited access to spare parts and imported components.
The U.S. has a comprehensive trade embargo on Cuba. The Cuban Democracy Act, signed into law in October 1992, revoked Treasury authority to issue licenses for most U.S. subsidiary trade with Cuba and bans for 180 days vessels which have entered a Cuban port from loading or unloading in U.S. ports. The legislation provides support for the Cuban people by permitting licensing for "efficient and adequate" telecommunications and for humanitarian donations to non-governmental organizations in Cuba.
With the loss of trade and aid from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Cuba has attempted to attract foreign investment and Western buyers for its nickel, petroleum, biotechnology, and other sectors. Except in tourism, minerals and mining, Cuba has had limited success in that effort because of the deterioration of the economy, its unpaid debt to Western countries, and the lack of clear title to expropriated property.
In 1993, the Cuban Government introduced measures to help revive the economy, including allowing more exiles from the U.S. to visit Cuba, expanding the permission for self-employment, and decriminalizing hard currency possession. In addition, Cuba also established the Basic Units of Collective Production (UBPCs), which allow greater control over the farms' administration and division of any profits with the farms' workers. However, concerned by the specter of a renascent capitalism and the possibility of corruption, the government already has limited the scope of such measures as self-employment.
Transportation
Local
Travel within and between Cuban cities is complicated by a dearth of reliable road maps, and signs or markers which are infrequently posted and poorly visible. Cuba's economic disintegration, after years of Soviet and Eastern Bloc support, has clearly manifested itself in gasoline shortages. Vehicle traffic in Havana is light, relative to past years when traffic jams and heavy pollution ringed the city. Yet if the volume of vehicular traffic is down, heavy bicycle traffic compensates, posing the latest and constant road hazard.
Driving is hazardous also due to potholes, obscure traffic signals, and parked or stalled cars in lanes of traffic. Dwindling revenue and central planning have contributed to the diversion of resources away from road repair and other infrastructural improvements. Power outages make signal intersections dangerous and leave many other streets in total darkness.
Rainy season flooding forces traffic off some streets, and it is not uncommon to encounter stalled cars and buses on the road even under good driving conditions. Vehicle inspection regulations are sporadically enforced at best. Spare parts, supplies, motor oil, etc. for privately-owned vehicles are seldom available, making maintenance and safety problematical. Indeed, the only thing keeping so many cars, including many vintage American models, running along Havana's boulevards is creativity and ingenuity.
Cuba's promotion of tourism has resulted in far more taxis plying the streets, although generally you can flag one only in front of tourist hotels and other hard currency locations. It is difficult to hail one on the street, but you can call for one. Bus transportation is erratic, unreliable, overcrowded, and not recommended.
Regional
Increasingly, even within Cuba's major cities, the road system reflects poor and infrequent maintenance. Secondary roads and more rural highways suffer from severe neglect, with little or no grass-cutting, no fencing to keep animals from wandering into traffic, few signs or other distance and safety markers, and crumbling pavement. Gasoline stations which are open, have fuel, and accept dollars are almost nonexistent in many outlying areas. The quality of refined petroleum in Cuba is questionable, and bad fuel has damaged or destroyed more than one fuel injector system. At $3.50 a gallon, the availability and price of gasoline confine most Americans to Havana or trips which can be achieved with one tankful.
Cubana de Aviacion serves Cuba's major cities but has limited international routes, which Americans are prohibited from using anyway. For domestic routes Cubana is the only airline from which to choose. There are a number of other international airlines and flights. Overnight train service, with a special car for dollar customers, transits Cuba from Havana to Santiago regularly.
Communications
Telephone and Telegraph
International telephone service is fair to acceptable, but frequently poor for local calls. Calls from Cuba to the States are subject to disconnection or dropped lines. It is virtually impossible to call Cuba from the States, and is getting more difficult.
Telephone rates vary based on the location called. Calls to the U.S. cost about $2.50 per minute, regardless of the time, distance or day of week. Calls to all other overseas destinations cost much more. Cellular telephone technology exists in Cuba, but rates are higher still. The quality of phone service discourages use of fax machines. Indeed, the quality of office and residential telephone service is questionable, as bills periodically reflect hundreds of dollars in calls never made. Radio and TV
For a large part of the population, radio and TV provide access to entertainment and information. Radio stations throughout the country offer programming varying from news and public affairs to sports, music, and soap operas. Western music is very popular in Cuba, and classical music programs are broadcast most of the day. Of course, some stations air programs with a more political orientation. Close proximity to the U.S. and favorable weather conditions permit some Florida radio signals to penetrate Cuban airwaves. Major shortwave radio signals from the VOA, BBC, and Armed Forces radio also can be picked up. USIA's Radio Marti' is easily received, but TV Marti' is actively jammed by Cuba.
The Cuban government maintains two TV stations which broadcast a variety of news, sports, political events and speeches, musical variety shows, soap operas, dramatic productions, cartoons and feature films from the U.S., Europe , Japan and the former Soviet Union, all but a few in Spanish. In recent years there has been a proliferation of privately-owned satellite dishes.
Health and Medicine
Medical Facilities
The quality of medical and dental care available in Havana has deteriorated. Hospitals designated to care for tourists and diplomats with relatively modern, imported equipment appear suitable for routine outpatient cases; but, pharmaceuticals are in short supply. A hospital's ability to provide a required medication on demand is open to question. A full range of medical specialists is available but secondary and follow-up care is not up to U.S. standards. Patients requiring evaluation or treatment of more complex cases are evacuated to Miami .
Community Health
Community public health and sanitation programs are collapsing. Mosquito bites and insect-borne diseases are common in Cuba. Garbage collection and disposal equipment is limited. Pick-up schedules are random and haphazard. Air pollution is common during sugarcane harvesting months (December through June). Trash burning in some residential neighborhoods adds to the problem.
Rain produces sewage backups jeopardizing public water supplies. While city water is adequately treated as it enters the municipal water system, tap water is not considered safe for internal consumption due to the deteriorated water distribution system. Sanitation during food preparation may be adequate, yet standards of cleanliness in food processing factories, markets and restaurants are marginal.
Upper respiratory and sinus problems are common in the Cuban climate. There are frequent flu outbreaks in the Fall and Winter (September through March) USINT personnel have experienced various minor ailments such as diarrhea, intestinal parasites, fungal infections, and conjunctivitis. With the breakdown of preventive public health programs and with periodic torrential rains and flooding, serious illnesses such as hepatitis, dengue fever, typhoid are a threat. The last major typhoid outbreak occurred in 1977. The last dengue fever epidemic was in 1981.
In 1993, an outbreak of optical neuritis affected about 50,000 Cubans, some seriously. Apparently in part the result of vitamin deficiencies, the outbreak subsided later in the year. No U.S. citizens were affected.
Preventive Measures
Boil all water. Raw fruits and vegetables should be scrubbed, soaked in a chlorine solution and rinsed in drinking water.
There is a shortage of medication in Cuba. U.S.-brand drugs are not available. You should bring a generous supply of mosquito repellent, sunscreen lotion, first-aid items, prescription drugs, and a full range of medicine cabinet drugs. If you wear eyeglasses or contact lens, bring a second pair.
There are no mandatory immunizations. Typhoid, influenza, hepatitis B, gamma globuli, and, for travel to Central America , yellow fever shots are recommended. Cuban authorities do not require any particular inoculations for persons coming from the U.S.
NOTES FOR TRAVELERS
Passage, Customs & Duties
The Cuban Assets Control Regulations of the U.S. Treasury Department require that persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction be licensed to engage in any transaction related to travel to, from and within Cuba. Transactions related to tourist travel are not licensable. This restriction includes tourist travel to Cuba from or through a third country such as Mexico or Canada .
The following categories of travelers are permitted to spend money for Cuban travel and to engage in other transactions directly incident to the purpose of their travel under a general license, without the need to obtain special permission from the U.S. Treasury Department:
U.S. and foreign government officials traveling on official business, including representatives of international organizations of which the U.S. is a member.
Journalists and supporting broadcasting or technical personnel regularly employed by a news reporting organization.
Persons making a once-a-year visit to close family relatives in circumstances of humanitarian need.
Full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related to professional research in their professional areas, provided that their research: (1) is of a noncommercial academic nature; (2) comprises a full work schedule in Cuba, and (3) has a substantial likelihood of public dissemination.
Full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related o attendance at professional meetings or conferences in Cuba organized by an international professional organization, institution, or association that regularly sponsors such meetings or conferences in other countries.
Amateur or semi-professional athletes or teams traveling to Cuba to participate in an athletic competition held under the auspices of the relevant international sports federation.
The Department of the Treasury may issue licenses on a case-by-case basis authorizing Cuba travel-related transactions directly incident to marketing, sales negotiation, accompanied delivery, and servicing of exports and reexports that appear consistent with the licensing policy of the Department of Commerce. The sectors in which U.S. citizens may sell and service products to Cuba include agricultural commodities, telecommunications activities, medicine, and medical devices. The Treasury Department will also consider requests for specific licenses for humanitarian travel not covered by the general license, educational exchanges, and religious activities by individuals or groups affiliated with a religious organization.
Unless otherwise exempted or authorized, any person subject to U.S. jurisdiction who engages in any travel-related transaction in Cuba violates the regulations. Persons not licensed to engage in travel-related transactions may travel to Cuba without violating the regulations only if all Cuba-related expenses are covered by a person not subject to U.S. jurisdiction and provided that the traveler does not provide any service to Cuba or a Cuban national. Such travel is called "fully-hosted" travel. Such travel may not by made on a Cuban carrier or aboard a direct flight between the United States and Cuba.
Failure to comply with Department of Treasury regulations may result in civil penalties and criminal prosecution upon return to the United States.
Additional information may be obtained by contacting the Licensing Division, Office of Foreign Assets Control, U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Treasury Annex, Washington, DC 20220, telephone (202) 622-2480; fax (202) 622-1657. Internet users can log on to the web site through http://www.treas.gov/ofac/ .
Should a traveler receive a license, a valid passport is required for entry into Cuba. The Cuban government requires that the traveler obtain a visa prior to arrival. Attempts to enter or exit Cuba illegally, or to aid the irregular exit of Cuban nationals or other persons, are contrary to Cuban law and are punishable by jail terms. Entering Cuban territory, territorial waters or airspace (within 12 miles of the Cuban coast) without prior authorization from the Cuban government may result in arrest or other enforcement action by Cuban authorities. Immigration violators are subject to prison terms ranging from four years for illegal entry or exit to as many as 30 years for aggravated cases of alien smuggling. For current information on Cuban entry and customs requirements, travelers may contact the Cuban Interests Section, an office of the Cuban government, located at 2630 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20009, telephone (202) 797-8518.
U.S. citizens are encouraged to carry a copy of their U.S. passport with them at all times, so that, if questioned by local officials, proof of identity and U.S. citizenship are readily available.
The U.S. Interests Section (USINT) represents American citizens and the U.S. Government in Cuba, and operates under the legal protection of the Swiss government. The Interests Section staff provides the full range of American citizen and other consular services. U.S. citizens who travel to Cuba are encouraged to contact and register with the American Citizen Services section. USINT staff provide briefings on U.S.-Cuba policy to American individuals and groups visiting Cuba. These briefings or meetings can be arranged through USINT's Public Diplomacy office.
The Interests Section is located in Havana at Calzada between L and M Streets, Vedado; telephone (537) 33-3551 through 33-3559. Hours are Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. After hours and on weekends, the number is 33-3026 or 66-2302. Should you encounter an emergency after normal duty hours, call these numbers and request to speak with the duty officer.
U.S. citizens who register at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana may obtain updated information on travel and security within the country. There is no access to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay from within Cuba. Consular issues for Guantanamo Bay are handled by the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica. For further information on Guantanamo Bay, please contact the U.S. Embassy in Kingston at telephone (876) 929-5374.
Pets
Cuba imposes no quarantine on arriving pets. However, all pets must have a certificate of good health signed by a veterinarian and dated within 10 days from the date of the animal's arrival in Cuba. Dogs and cats must have a veterinary certification showing the date of the last rabies vaccination. And all animals must be taken to a Cuban veterinarian shortly after arrival for a checkup.
Currency, Banking and Weights and Measures
Since the Cuban government legalized the use of dollars in July 1993, U.S. dollars are accepted for all transactions.
U.S. citizens and residents traveling under a general or specific license from the U.S. Treasury Department may spend money on travel in Cuba; such expenditures may only be for travel-related expenses at a rate not to exceed the U.S. Government's per diem rate. U.S. Treasury regulations authorize any U.S. resident to send up to $300 per calendar quarter to any Cuban family (except families of senior government and Communist party leaders) without a specific license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Treasury Department regulations also authorize the transfer of up to $1,000 (without specific license) to pay travel and other expenses for a Cuban national who has been granted a migration document by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. For further information, travelers should contact the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens are prohibited from using credit cards in Cuba. U.S. credit card companies do not accept vouchers from Cuba, and Cuban shops, hotels and other places of business do not accept U.S. credit cards. Neither personal checks nor travelers checks drawn on U.S. banks are accepted in Cuba.
Both English and metric systems of weights and measures are used in Cuba, although the metric system predominates.
LOCAL HOLIDAYS
May 1…Cuba Labor Day
July 25-27 …Cuban National Revolutionary Festival
Oct. 10 …Cuba Independence Day
Dec. 25…Christmas Day
RECOMMENDED READING
These titles are provided as a general indication of the material published on this country. The Department of State does not endorse unofficial publications.
Azicri, Max. Cuba: Politics, Economics, & Society. New York : St. Martin, 1988.
Balfour, Sebastian. Castro. New York: Longman, 1990.
Bentley, Judith. Fidel Castro of Cuba. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: J. Messner, 1991.
Bernthal, Ron. Saturday Night in Havana. Thompsonville, NY: Mariposa Press, 1992.
Bonsal, Philip W. Cuba, Castro and the United States. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1971.
Crouch, Cifford W. Cuba. New York:Chelsea House, 1991.
Cuba: A Country Study. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1988.
Cummins, Ronald. Cuba. Milwaukee , WI: Gareth Stevens Children's Books, 1991.
Del Aguila, Juan M. Cuba: Dilemmas of a Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.
Draper, Theodore. Castroism: Theory and Practice. Praeger: New York, 1965.
Erisman, H. Michael, and John M. Kirk, eds. Cuban Foreign Policy Confronts a New International Order. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1992.
Gebler, Carlos. Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugarcane and Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Geldof, Lynn. The Cubans: Voices of Change. New York: St. Martin, 1992.
Geyer, Georgie Anne. Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro. Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1991.
Graetz, Rick. Cuba: The Land, the People. Helena, MT: American World Geographic Publishing, 1990.
Graetz, Rick. Havana: The City, the People. Helena, MT: American World Geographic Publishing, 1991.
Habel, Janette. Cuba: The Revolution in Peril. Translated by Jon Barnes. New York: Verso, 1991.
Halebsky, Sandor, and John M. Kirk, eds. Transformation and Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990s. New York: Praeger, 1990.
Horowitz, Irving Louis, ed. Cuban Communism. 7th ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989.
Jacobsen, Karen. Cuba. Chicago :Childrens Press, 1990.
Kirk, John M. Between God & the Party: Religion & Politics in Revolutionary Cuba. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1989.
Levine, Robert M. Cuba in the 1850s: Through the Lens of Charles De Forest Fredericks. Tampa , FL: University of South Florida Press, 1990.
Lockwood, Lee. Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel. rev. ed., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
McManus, Jane. Getting to Know Cuba. New York: St. Martin, 1989.
Martin, Lionel. Early Fidel. LyleStuart & Co.: Syracuse, N.Y., 1978.
Meduin, Tzvi. Cuba, the Shaping of Revolutionary Consciousness. Translated by Martha Grenz-back. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.
Mesa-Lago, Carmel, ed. Revolutionary Change in Cuba. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1971.
Miller, Tom. Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
Montaner, Carlos Alberto. Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution: Age, Position, Character, Destiny, Personality, and Ambition. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989.
Morris, Emily. Cuba. Austin, TX:Steck-Vaughn, 1991.
Oppenheimer, Andres. Castro's Final Hour. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1992.
Perez, Jr., Louis A. Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy. The University of Georgia Press: Athens, Georgia , 1990.
Quirk, Robert E. Fidel Castro. W. W. Norton & Company: New York 1993.
Rabkin, Rhoda Pearl. Cuban Politics: the Revolutionary Experiment. New York: Praeger, 1991.
Smith, Wayne. The Closest of Enemies. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1987.
Stewart, Gail. Cuba. New York:Crestwood House, 1991.
Suchlicki, Jaime. Cuba: From Columbus to Castro. 3rd ed., Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon Press, 1990.
Szulc, Tad. Fidel: A Critical Portrait. William Morrow & Co.: New York, 1986.
Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. Harper & Row: New York, 1971.
Timerman, Jacobo. Cuba: A Journey. Translated by Toby Talbot. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1990.
Tulchin, Joseph S., and Rafael Hernandez, eds. Cuba & the United States: Will the Cold War in the Caribbean End? Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.
Valladares, Armando. Against All Hope. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1985.
Cite this article
CAPITAL: Havana (La Habana).
MONETARY UNIT:
Cuban peso (C$). One peso equals 100 centavos. Coin denominations include 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 40, and 100 centavos. Paper-bill denominations include 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 pesos. The U.S. dollar is an important monetary unit in Cuba, owing to the Pesos Convertibles (convertible pesos) that are also in circulation in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 dollars. The dollar and the Peso Convertible are used for most transactions. Cuban pesos, often called Moneda Nacional, have fallen into disuse, except for a few government-subsidized businesses, like bodegas (small grocery stores) selling rationed foods, public transportation, movie theaters, and peso taxis.
CHIEF EXPORTS:
Sugar, nickel, tobacco, shellfish, medical products, citrus fruits, coffee.
CHIEF IMPORTS:
US$18.6 billion (purchasing power parity, 1999 est.).
BALANCE OF TRADE:
Exports: US$1.4 billion (f.o.b., 1999 est.). Imports: US$3.2 billion (c.i.f., 1999 est.).
COUNTRY OVERVIEW
LOCATION AND SIZE.
An island located 208 kilometers (129 miles) south of Florida , Cuba is washed by the Caribbean Sea on the south, the Gulf of Mexico on the northwest, and the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast. Its westernmost point is separated from Mexico by the Straits of Yucatan. With 110,860 square kilometers (42,803 square miles) of total surface area, Cuba, the largest island in the Antilles archipelago, is about the size of Pennsylvania . It is 1,199 kilometers (745 miles) long, but averages only 97 kilometers (60 miles) in width. Its coastline is 3,764 kilometers (2,339 miles) long with several excellent harbors. The capital city, Havana, is located in the northwest of Cuba, almost directly south of Key West across the Straits of Florida. The second largest city in Cuba is Santiago de Cuba. Located in the eastern end of the island, Santiago was the island's first colonial-era capital (1522-89).
POPULATION.
The population of Cuba was 11,131,000 in 2000, and is projected to grow to 11,481,000 by 2010. Although the population has doubled since 1950, the growth rate has slowed down considerably, and is now the lowest in Latin America . Population density is 101 people per square kilometer. Cuba is ethnically diverse; about 51 percent of the people are mulatto, 37 percent are white, 11 percent are black, and 1 percent are Chinese. The evidence of miscegenation (mating across racial lines) is prevalent, and it is easy to identify the mixing of white, black, and Chinese features. The population has increasingly darkened due to the exodus of large numbers of whites following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which installed a socialist government led by Fidel Castro. Even though Cuba is a poor country, the literacy rate is high (estimated at 95.7 percent in 1995 compared to 76 percent before the revolution) thanks to the government's strong emphasis on education.
Migration to the United States has had a great effect on Cuba since 1959. Beginning immediately after the revolution, large numbers of middle-class Cubans left the island, settling largely in Miami , Florida, and other U.S. cities. As the Cuban economy worsened in the 1980s, people fled the country any way they could, many in small boats or makeshift rafts. In an incident known as the Mariel Boatlift, President Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 people to leave the island for the United States, thereby reducing the population of Cuba by 1 percent in a single day.
OVERVIEW OF ECONOMY
The Cuban economy has endured a number of upheavals over the past century. In the early 1900s approximately two-thirds of the businesses in Cuba were owned by U.S. citizens, and around 80 percent of the country's trade was with the United States. In 1959, when Fidel Castro seized the country through revolution, the reforms enacted by the socialist government confiscated most of the privately-held property in Cuba. Relations with the United States became strained, and eventually ended in 1962 when the United States placed an embargo (prohibition) on trade with Cuba, which continues to this day. Cuba turned to the former Soviet Union for help, and soon introduced long-range socialist state-managed planning that followed Soviet models. The Soviet Union effectively subsidized the Cuban economy by repeatedly postponing debt payment schedules, creating new credit lines, paying high prices for Cuban exports, and offering military assistance. As a result, many Cuban economic problems did not manifest themselves until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost more than 85 percent of its trade and once again had to search for other markets to replace this loss. The 1990s were marked by a period of economic hardship; from 1990 to 1993, Cuba's economy declined by 35 percent, causing the nation to fall into what Castro called "The Special Period in a Time of Peace." The living situation of the Cuban people became very difficult. Because the Soviets had been a source of much of the country's fuel supplies, Cuban homes and businesses suffered daily power blackouts, and the public transportation system all but stopped. Bicycles and horse-drawn carts and tractors had to substitute for motorized transport. Food became scarce, and many Cubans found themselves standing in long lines to procure rationed items or buy them from black-market (illegal) sources.
The inability of the state-controlled system to provide scarce consumer goods enabled the black market to assume a prominent role in the Cuban economy. During the 1990s, workers commonly stole goods from the state-run factories they worked in to use in their homes or to sell on the streets. As a result, the government was forced to make some drastic changes in policy. Many small in-home restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, repair shops, etc. that had previously been considered "black market" were legalized. State control was somewhat reduced. The government divided many large state-run farms into smaller cooperatives called Basic Units of Production Cooperatives (UBPC). While the farmers who worked for them still had to sell a certain amount of their produce to the government at set prices, they were now permitted to sell their surplus goods on the free market via agropecuarios (farmers' markets). The government also began to require state-run enterprises to be more efficient; any enterprise not showing a profit would be eliminated. The government also began to allow more foreign investment, creating joint ventures with foreign companies and eventually allowing a foreign firm to own 100 percent of an enterprise. The U.S. dollar was legalized and, by 2000, became the most commonly used currency. In 1994 Cuba reported economic growth again for the first time since 1989, a situation that has continued into the new century. It is estimated that the continuation of these reforms should contribute to a growth of 4-5 percent in the year 2001. Still, the economy is in a difficult situation, and life for the average Cuban is not easy.
An important contribution to the improvement of the Cuban economy has been the tourist industry, which was the sector reporting the greatest growth in the 1990s. In the years immediately following the revolution in the late 1950s, the Cuban government discouraged tourism, which was viewed as a source of corruption of the Cuban people and a return to what it considered the decadent years of U.S. control (1898-1958). Beginning with some changes in the mid-1980s, the tourist industry is now viewed as an important way for Cuba to support itself while maintaining many of the reforms that had been instituted under the socialist system.
Besides tourism, important export sectors of the Cuban economy are agriculture, especially sugar, coffee, and tobacco crops, and nickel mining. Because of its long-term reliance on a single crop—sugar—the economy has often suffered when world sugar prices have been low. Petroleum is Cuba's most important import. In the 1980s, Cuba received most of its oil from the Soviet Union, a supply that dropped by 50 percent between 1990 and 1992, causing widespread energy problems that severely stunted Cuba's agricultural and industrial production. Cuba responded by reducing its energy use, as by cutting back on gasoline-powered vehicles and by imposing daily blackouts throughout the island. Cuba continued to get much of its reduced oil supplies from Russia , but was required to pay market prices instead of the lower prices that the USSR had traditionally charged Cuba as a gesture of solidarity. By 2000, Cuba was buying its oil at market prices from Venezuela , Russia, and Mexico.
Cuba had an enormous burden of unpaid external debt totaling more than US$10 billion by 1999. Cuba has repeatedly refinanced these debts but was forced to suspend interest payments in 1990 due to extreme economic conditions. Because of its poor credit, Cuba has been unable to obtain international loans that would enable it to buy many of the imports it needs. As the Cuban economy improved into the late 1990s, the country did receive more foreign aid. Although Cuba has not yet been approved to receive funds from either the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, it has received money from various United Nations organizations, but the amounts have been low in comparison to those received by other Latin American countries: US$44 million ($4 per person) in 1993, and US$80 million ($7 per person) in 1998.
POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND TAXATION
According to the Cuban constitution, Cuba is an independent socialist republic that is controlled by 1 party: the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), of which Fidel Castro is the head, with his brother, Raul Castro as vice-president. The Communist Party is led by a group of 25 individuals chosen by its head. Molded by this elite group of communists are organizations that encompass every facet of society, including youth, women, workers, and small farmers, among others. Around 80 percent of the population has membership in at least one of these organizations. This network ensures that the agenda of the Communist Party is disseminated (communicated) to the masses.
Fidel Castro, the commander-in-chief of the Cuban Republic, heads both executive bodies of the nation's government, the Council of Ministers, and a Council of State. His brother, Raul Castro, serves as first vice-president of these 2 bodies. The members of the Council of Ministers are proposed by the president of the Council of State and ratified by the National Assembly. The members of the Council of State and its president and vice-president are elected by the National Assembly. At the last election in 1998, Fidel Castro and Raul Castro were elected unanimously. The next elections have not been scheduled.
The National Assembly is the legislative body of the Cuban government. The Assembly is composed of 601 members whose terms last 5 years. For these positions, the Council of State nominates candidates, who are then subject to a direct vote by the Cuban people. The National Assembly also elects the Judicial Branch. On the local level, members of Municipal Assemblies are chosen by direct local election. Local government is closely over-seen by the Communist Party. As is evidenced by Fidel Castro's almost complete control over decision-making, most policies are the direct result of his personal desires.
The Cuban governmental structure is heavily bureaucratic (organized into many agencies). Until 1993, the Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN, or Junta de Planificación Central), was responsible for economic planning. After 1993, in a move to create greater efficiency and to decentralize, different sectors of the economy became the responsibility of various ministerial bodies, including the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Sugar Planning, and the Ministry of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation, among others.
The economy is largely state-controlled, with 75 percent of the labor force employed by the government. Therefore decisions that are made within each of these state-run ministries have a great impact on the economy and on the individual. The Cuban people have very little influence over government policies, most of which are directly handed down from the upper echelons of government. Over the years, Fidel Castro has proved himself somewhat whimsical in his approach to long-term economic planning. Many economic policies are the direct result of his attempts to maintain his tight control on the Cuban population through economic means.
Interestingly, the military has been on the cutting edge of the restructuring of Cuba's economy. Since the 1980s, the government has been unable to support the armed forces, forcing the Ministry of the Armed Forces (MINFAR) to become almost completely self-supporting. MINFAR started a tourist company, a construction company, and an agricultural project to grow its own food. The CIA estimated that military expenditures constituted only 4 percent of the gross domestic product ( GDP ) by 1995.
Taxes do not constitute a large part of the govern-ment's revenues. Taxes were first introduced in 1994 as a method of controlling earnings from the burgeoning small-business sector. It was based on a flat-tax system with rates fixed at different levels for different businesses. By 2001, a more formalized system of income taxation was in the planning stages, one that might provide a large share of federal revenues in the future.
INFRASTRUCTURE, POWER, AND COMMUNICATIONS
Cuba's infrastructure , power system, and communications are all in need of improvement. In 1959 Cuba was one of the most advanced countries in Latin America, but much of the infrastructure has not been updated since the revolution. For example, many of the 29,800 kilometers (18,476 miles) of roads that were listed as paved in 1996 were done so before 1959, and have not been maintained. The original pre-Revolutionary water and sewerage systems were installed using U.S.-made equipment, for which replacement parts are unavailable due to the U.S. trade embargo. Of the 170 airports in Cuba, only 77 had paved runways.
As an island Cuba's ports and harbors are especially important. Cuba's 7 main ports and harbors included Cienfuegos, Havana, Manzanillo, Mariel, Matanzas, Nuevitas, and Santiago de Cuba. The country's merchant marine fleet comprised 15 ships: 1 bulk, 7 cargo, 1 liquefied gas, 1 petroleum tanker, and 5 refrigerated cargo.
Communications systems have seen little change. In 2000 Cuba had about the same number of phone lines as in 1959. There were 353,000 main lines in use and 1,939 cellular phone contracts in 1995. At the same time, Cuba had only slightly more electrical lines, and fewer automobiles on the road (24 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 1959 as opposed to 23 per 1,000 in 1988) than it did before the revolution. Many of the cars on the road in 2000 dated back to the 1950s. Public transportation was inefficient and overcrowded, and private transportation was difficult because of the lack of available spare parts and the general lack of fuel. Vehicle owners regularly used their cars as a taxi service, commonly charging a small fee to people who need rides. Very few people had access to computers. There were some in government offices
Communications
aData are from International Telecommunication Union, World Telecommunication Development Report 1999 and are per 1,000 people.
bData are from the Internet Software Consortium ( http://www.isc.org ) and are per 10,000 people.
SOURCE: World Bank. World Development Indicators 2000.
and few in the universities. By 1999 Cuba had 1 Internet service provider.
Cuba produced 15 billion kWh of electricity in 1998 and consumed 14 billion kWh. Cuba did not use nuclear plants to generate any of its power, but was working toward that goal, and is predicted to have the ability in 2005, according to the Energy Information Administration of the United States.
ECONOMIC SECTORS
Cuba's important economic sectors are related to its tropical climate, island location, and fertile soils. The sectors that annually contribute the most to the Cuban GDP are tourism (30 percent, US$5.6 billion), construction (20 percent, US$3.7 billion), agriculture, hunting, and fishing (17 percent, US$3.16 billion), and industry (37 percent, US$6.9 billion), according to Cuba: Informe Económico in 1996. All of these sectors experienced considerable growth in the latter part of the 1990s as a result of a restructuring of the economy, foreign investment, and new trading partners. Tourism is slated for the most growth in the coming years because it is one of the most attractive sectors for foreign investment.
Compared to worldwide production, Cuba's output of its most important products is relatively small. World production of sugar is 130 million metric tons, and Cuba produces only 3 to 5 million metric tons, still a considerable amount for the size of the island. Cuba experienced a 50 percent drop in sugar production between 1993 and 1994 due to the inability to procure the necessary fuel, fertilizers, and other agricultural products, and bad weather. Again in 1997 and 1998, lack of capital and inefficiencies caused the harvest to suffer, which barely reached the 50-year low of 3.3 million tons. Other countries that produce more sugar are the United States, Brazil , Mexico, India , and Australia .
AGRICULTURE
Agriculture has always played a very important role in Cuba's economy. The country's fertile plains and tropical climate are excellent for citrus, tobacco, and sugar production. Cuba also has fertile, mountainous zones where coffee is produced. Some 2,600,000 people, or 23 percent of the labor force, are employed in agriculture. The most important crops have always been sugar and tobacco, but Cuba also produces coffee, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, beans, onions, and citrus fruits, though not in exportable quantities. Still, Cuba imports more than 60 percent of its agricultural food products.
SUGAR.
Sugar is Cuba's most important agricultural product. Cuba's economy has always been linked to the world price of sugar. After the Revolution of 1959, the Castro government unsuccessfully tried to change Cuba's monoculture (dependence on a single crop). When the United States revoked its annual sugar quota, the Soviet Union assumed the shortfall and the makeup of Cuba's exports did not change. In 1959, 75 percent of Cuba's export dollars came from sugar, a proportion that had increased to 80 percent by 1989. Production rose from an average of 5 million tons per year in the 1970s to an average of 7.5 million tons per year in the 1980s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban sugar harvest fell to a 50-year low of 3.3 million tons as a result of a loss of fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, and machinery imports. In 1993, the Cuban government began to reorganize the industry. Traditional agricultural methods were encouraged, large farms were broken up into smaller cooperatives, and foreign investment was courted. Difficulty obtaining needed resources caused sugar production to remain low at the end of the century.
TOBACCO.
Tobacco is an important Cuban product, and Cuban cigars have long been highly esteemed around the world for their excellence. With the exception of Greece , Cuba dedicates more land to tobacco production than any other country in the world. Cuba also has the lowest yield per hectare than any other country because of its inefficient agricultural sector. Despite this, Cuba's tobacco production is growing. In 1 year alone (from 1994 to 1995), production grew by 52 percent, a trend that continues as a result of foreign investment from Spain , the distribution of lands to small farmers, and increased international marketing.
INDUSTRY
In total, industrial production accounted for almost 37 percent of the Cuban GDP, or US$6.9 billion, and employs 24 percent of the population, or 2,671,440 people, in 1996. Cuban industry encompasses sugar, petroleum, and food processing; the manufacturing of textiles, chemicals, wood, paper and tobacco products, cement, fertilizers, and agricultural machinery; and the extraction of metals. Only in mining and sugar processing does Cuba contribute a noteworthy portion of the world's production.
SUGAR PROCESSING.
Although productive and profitable until the early 1990s, the sugar milling and refining industry faced difficult times after the decline of the Soviet Union. By 1999, 50 of the 156 sugar mills in Cuba were closed due to their inability to obtain needed cane to process or because they could not repair their aging machines.
MINING.
Cuba has 25 percent of the world's high-quality nickel deposits located on its northeastern coast, the highest concentration in the world. Cuban nickel is inexpensive to extract because there are few environmental controls and wages are low. In 1997 nickel and cobalt brought US$350 million into the Cuban economy. Nickel production grew from 25,787 metric tons in 1994 to 65,300 metric tons in 1998. The increase has been substantial as a result of joint ventures between Cuba and foreign governments. Mining has played an important part in the recovery of the Cuban economy in the second half of the 1990s, although the world price of nickel has dropped.
MANUFACTURING.
Cuba manufactures a variety of industrial goods including televisions, refrigerators, pharmaceuticals, and cell phones. This does not contribute a large portion of the GDP, and Cuba is forced to import most of its manufactured products.
BIOTECHNOLOGY.
Cuba has prioritized biotechnology over the past 40 years and, due to a highly educated population, has been able to focus on research in a relatively inexpensive manner. This industry has produced approximately 200 pharmaceuticals, including a drug used to treat AIDS and the hepatitis B vaccine. In 1996, the value of Cuban pharmaceutical production was US$4.25 million, and the value of pharmaceutical exports was US$2.5 million. In the late 1990s this sector accounted for only 5 percent of Cuba's earnings, but the Cuban government hoped to further penetrate the world market.
SERVICES
TOURISM.
Tourism has recently become Cuba's biggest growth industry. Having produced US$5.6 billion in 1996, it topped sugar as the country's greatest hard-currency earner. The tourist industry employs 1,109,000 people, or 10 percent of the population. Cuba's pristine, white-sand beaches and tropical climate make it a vacation paradise. Cuban tourism officials estimate the number of available rooms in Cuba reached 50,000 in 2000, bringing the island's annual capacity for tourists to 2.5 million. Since Cuba has only prioritized the tourist industry for the last fifteen years, it is lacking in the efficiency and comforts that many tourists expect, but is working to improve its services.
RETAIL.
Cuba has a very poorly developed retail sector. There are no large shopping centers and the commercial districts that existed before the revolution are largely shut down. Those that remain carry few and poorly made products that are priced in dollars and are too expensive for the average Cuban to purchase. The majority of the stores are small dollar stores, bodegas, agro-mercados (farmers' markets), and street stands.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
Before 1959, the United States was Cuba's most important trading partner, a natural development due to its geographic proximity. That relationship ended in 1960 with the U.S. trade embargo. Cuba then courted the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies to become its primary trading partners. Due to the strict economic organization of the Communist system, only 50 Cuban companies were allowed to participate in foreign trade until 1987. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba was soon trading with a number of countries, including Spain, France , Italy, Mexico, Canada , Russia, the Netherlands , and Venezuela. About 40 percent of Cuba's trade is within the Americas and 50 percent is with Europe . Main imports include fuel, food, semi-finished goods, wheat, vegetables, machinery, feed, and corn. Main exports are sugar, fish, nickel, medicinal products, and fruit. Cuba has consistently faced an unfavorable balance of trade ; in 1999 imports were valued at US$3.2 billion and exports at US$1.4 billion. This situation places Cuba in a dependent position, unable to earn hard currency and reliant on other countries for vital goods.
MONEY
As the Cuban state has experienced a growth in demand for wages, social security, and subsidies , there has been a severe shortage of imported products, food, and other goods. Cubans often had to stand in long lines to procure a limited supply of food products. Many necessary items could not be obtained with pesos and were available only on the black market with U.S. dollars. Inflation resulted because the government kept printing more pesos though there were few goods available. In order to restore the value of the peso, a program was initiated to reduce the excessive amount of money in circulation. As part of this program, the government increased the prices of many consumer goods and services, enacted a new tax law, and ended subsidies to businesses that were not viable (economically successful). While these measures increased the difficulty of daily living for the average Cuban, they have gradually restored the value of the peso. Though the official exchange rate of the Cuban peso to the U.S. dollar is 1:1, the real exchange rate within the country has dropped from 120 pesos to the dollar in 1994 to 20 to the dollar in 1998.
Before 1993, the U.S. dollar, although illegal, was used widely on the black market. In 1993, the dollar was legalized and Casas de Cambio, (houses of exchange) were established to exchange pesos and dollars. Cuba has created a dual system—a dollar economy and a peso economy—that has certain places where pesos can be used and others where dollars only are accepted.
Exchange rates: Cuba
1996
N/A
Note: Nonconvertible, official rate, for international transactions, pegged to the US dollar; convertible peso sold for domestic use at a rate of 1.00 US dollar per 22 pesos by the Government of Cuba (January 2001).
SOURCE: CIA World Factbook 2001 [ONLINE].
Since 1993, foreign banks had been allowed to do business in Cuba to supply such financial services as insurance, foreign commercial investments, and savings accounts. In 1997, a new central bank, the Banco Central de Cuba, was created to supervise and regulate Cuba's growing banking sector. The old bank, Banco Nacional de Cuba, had performed both the roles of central bank and state-owned commercial bank, but would now operate only as a commercial bank. Nevertheless, a very narrow sector of the Cuban population requires banking services. Very few people earn enough money to be able to invest or save. Those who do are able to earn dollars or receive money from family members in other countries. Cuba has no stock exchange.
POVERTY AND WEALTH
By some measures, Cuba is the most socially egalitarian of the world's nations. Apart from some governmental and military officials, the highest salaries in the country are only 4 times the amount of the lowest salaries. This situation is changing rapidly toward greater inequality; although definitive statistics are not available, there is a great discrepancy between the earning capacity of those in contact with dollars and those without. When Fidel Castro's socialist government came into power, it inherited a social situation similar to most other Latin American countries. There was a small but very wealthy class of landowners and government officials, and large numbers of impoverished peasants in the countryside and poorly-paid urban workers. Havana, on the western end of the island was a wealthy, developed urban center while most of the island was undeveloped, rural, and poor. Most Cubans were uneducated (3 out of 4 were illiterate), and modern health care was not available to them. Castro focused his policies on destroying the middle and upper classes and eliminating the abject poverty of the lowest classes. In some ways he was successful. He confiscated the large landholdings and companies of the very wealthy, causing much of the upper class to flee the country. In nationalizing most of the
GDP per Capita (US$)
3,700
Note: Data are estimates.
SOURCE: Handbook of the Nations, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th editions for 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 data; CIA World Factbook 2001 [Online] for 2000 data.
businesses in Cuba he placed the state in control of the economy, thus allowing it to control wages for all positions. A wage scale was established that had only 4 levels from top to bottom. In 1960, rent prices were established at 10 percent of one's salary. State funds were diverted away from Havana and funneled into the countryside. The state provided or subsidized food, medical care, funerals, transportation, vacations, and other consumer goods.
During the period from 1959 to 1989, the state was also relying heavily on assistance from the Soviet Union (see Overview of Economy). When the Soviet Union was no longer able to help, the recession of the early 1990s forced Cuba to change its policies. It loosened control of the markets, allowed people to own their own businesses, allowed foreign ownership within Cuba, encouraged tourism, created a tax system, and legalized U.S. currency. Income inequality has resulted; those who are on a fixed income from the Cuban state are earning far less than those who have contact with U.S. dollars. For example, a doctor might earn 40 dollars a month, while a taxi driver might receive 40 dollars a week in tips.
The Cuban state still provides free education from primary school through the university level, an ironic situation given the difficulties of finding employment after graduation. If a job is available, it will pay less than a job as a waiter or taxi driver. Medical care is also free, and Cuban hospitals do remarkable work considering the available resources; however, people often die from curable diseases simply because the medicines required are unavailable.
While traditionally the rural poor have struggled more than the urban poor, it was easier for the rural poor to maintain a healthy diet during the economic difficulties of the 1990s because of their proximity to farms and their ability to plant small plots of land with fruits and vegetables.
Housing has been a particularly difficult situation in Havana under the Castro government. In the 1990s, the housing deficit grew by 20 percent per year. Out of 2.6 million units of housing in Havana, almost 1 million are in a substandard condition. Most buildings in the city have not been properly maintained since 1959, and little new construction has taken place.
WORKING CONDITIONS
In the early 1900s Cuba experienced a great deal of labor unrest, with strikes and labor slowdowns being commonplace. When Fidel Castro's revolutionary government came into power in 1959 there was great pressure for change from Cuban workers, some 2 million in number, most of whom were living in difficult conditions due to low wages that made it impossible for them to afford expensive consumer goods and high rents. Workers also lacked health care, access to education, retirement benefits, and vacations. The government complied with the workers' demands; labor contracts were renegotiated, wages were raised, rents were lowered, and the unemployed were given jobs. Many of the most marginalized (poorest) people saw immediate and real benefits giving them a sense of security, gratitude toward the revolution, and hope for the future.
These changes were short-lived, however. Many of the laws that were enacted in 1959 to benefit workers were repealed as early as 1961. Since that year, the revolutionary government fixed wages at a low level, which today are the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, averaging 100-400 pesos (US$5-$20) a month. The worker has been constantly asked to sacrifice for the survival of the revolution. Cuba has a workweek of 48 hours, and workers have been asked to give volunteer time to building projects, education, and harvesting. The only legal workers' union in Cuba, the CTC, is an arm of the Communist Party. It is not legal to strike, and there is no collective bargaining. As a result, the International Labor Organization has condemned Cuba for violations of human rights.
Some Cubans depend on the security net of health care, free education, and social security as motivation to work hard in government-run enterprises, but large numbers of Cubans are unhappy with the difficult conditions. Due to the fact that Cuban workers have had no legal recourse to address the work conditions, many have reacted by decreasing their productivity, sabotaging production, or by stealing products to sell on the black market.
Since the beginning of the revolution, the stated goal of the Cuban socialist state has been full employment . It has been relatively successful only on a superficial level. Because the Cuban state has owned almost every enterprise on the island, it has been nearly the sole employer. Even foreign companies that operate in Cuba are required to pay Cuban workers' salaries in dollars to a state organization called CUBALSE (Cubans at the Service of Foreigners). The Cuban state then pays its workers in pesos, at a rate that shortchanges the employee.
In order to keep low unemployment rates, in the past, the Cuban state did not require businesses to earn a profit. Many employees were kept on the payroll even though they were unnecessary to the business. Because of this, a high percentage of the companies in Cuba were continually losing money. The state continued to subsidize those businesses, keeping them functioning at a loss. In the economic crisis of the early 1990s, the Cuban leadership was forced to rethink these practices. Downsizing of these bloated enterprises was one of the first policies enacted to restructure the Cuban economy. Employees who were unnecessary were dismissed, and companies were required to earn a profit. Unemployment increased, but the levels are uncertain because there are no reliable unemployment statistics available for Cuba. However, due to the legalization of the dollar combined with the growth of tourism, and the fact that it is difficult to live on the official government salaries, many people are choosing to work in the informal economy or start their own small enterprises. Positions that bring an individual in contact with tourists can often yield far greater monetary rewards.
COUNTRY HISTORY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
1492. Christopher Columbus claims Cuba as a Spanish possession.
1538-60. Cuba is constantly under attack by French and English smugglers and pirates. The Spanish authorities create the flota system; a group of armed ships that made each voyage to and from Spain in order to protect their imports and exports.
1717. Spain establishes a tobacco monopoly called a Factoría, which incites rebellions of tobacco farmers against the Crown.
1740. Spain establishes the Real Compañía de Comer-cio in order to control and monopolize Cuban trade and commerce.
1762-63. The English occupy Havana for 10 months and change the laws in order to allow Cuba to enter the international market instead of being controlled by the Spanish Crown's monopoly.
1776. As a result of the American Revolution , trade increases between the United States and Cuba.
1778. A free-trade decree by the Spanish Crown gives Cuba open access to trade with Spain and Spanish colonies.
1789. A Spanish royal decree authorizes a free trade in slaves.
1791. Due to a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, many coffee and sugar planters move to Cuba and greatly expand Cuba's production in these areas.
1817. Spain and England agree to end the legal slave trade in Spanish colonies by 1820.
1837. A railroad is built in Cuba, which reduces the cost of transporting sugar.
1868-78. The Ten Years' War, with the goal of freeing Cuba from Spain, breaks out in the eastern part of Cuba. The revolt fails when the rebels are unable to seize power in the western portion of the island.
1895-97. The Cuban War for Independence succeeds when Spain grants the island autonomy in October of 1897.
1898. After the U.S. intervention in the Spanish-American War , the Treaty of Paris is signed, which transfers sovereignty over Cuba to the United States. The United States occupies Cuba militarily until 1902, at which point Cuba is granted autonomy and becomes the Republic of Cuba. This begins a period of heavy commerce between Cuba and the United States.
1920. The price of sugar jumps to 22.5 cents per pound, and then collapses to 3.7 cents. The Cuban economy enters a period of depression and chaos.
1953-59. Fidel Castro leads a revolution that ousts the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who flees Cuba for Miami with considerable wealth. Upon his departure, Castro installs a socialist government.
1960. Cuba and the Soviet Union re-establish relations. Cuba begins to nationalize U.S. properties. In retaliation, the United States cuts the amount of sugar it will buy from Cuba. In October, the United States imposes a trade embargo on Cuba that remains in force as of 2001.
1961. The United States and Cuba terminate diplomatic relations. The United States is embarrassed over its failure to offer effective support to Cuban exiles attempting to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
1962. Tensions rise as the United States confronts the Soviet Union over its installation of missile sites in Cuba.
1990-91. With the fall of the Soviet Union, which had accounted for 85 percent of its trade, Cuba enters the "Special Period in a Time of Peace," a period of economic restructuring marked by food and fuel shortages and energy blackouts.
1992. The U.S. Congress passes the so-called Torricelli Bill, which encourages people-to-people exchange between Cuba and the United States. The United States hopes to encourage dissent by putting the Cuban populace into contact with democratic ideas.
1993. Cuba legalizes the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange, and permits Cubans to engage in some forms of self-employment.
1994. Cuba adopts a new system of taxation and opens all sectors of its economy to foreign investment except public health, education, and national security.
1995. The Cuban National Assembly allows foreign investors to wholly own businesses in Cuba.
1996. The U.S. Congress passes the Helms-Burton law, strengthening its embargo by allowing prosecution of foreign businesses for doing business with Cuban businesses that were previously owned by the United States.
FUTURE TRENDS
The future of the Cuban economy is not easy to predict. The government of Cuba has no clear-cut long-term plan. While the reforms and restructurings of the 1990s have been thought to indicate a desire to slowly restore capitalism , the Cuban government insists that these changes are only survival techniques and that they have not given up on the socialist project begun more than 40 years ago. Questions remain whether Cuban leaders will resign themselves to becoming a capitalist economy or, if not, what new forms its economy might take. If present trends continue, the Cuban economy will continue to grow steadily.
For the Cuban people, the dream of total socialism can no longer be sustained. It is apparent that most Cubans do not want a society that has a completely market economy. The majority of Cubans would like to keep alive the social goals of the revolution: free or inexpensive health care for everyone, education, and social security, while allowing market forces to have a greater role in the economy, allow more private property, encourage self-employment, and change the Cuban system to allow it to interact more easily within the international marketplace.
In terms of the future of political leadership, it is likely that Fidel Castro will be succeeded by someone from the upper echelon of leadership closest to him. It is therefore unlikely that Cuban policies will change in the near future, and it is likely that relations with the United States will remain hostile through the transition of power to a new generation of leaders.
DEPENDENCIES
Cuba has no territories or colonies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Azicri, Max. Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Córdova, Efren, and Eduardo García Moure. Modern Slavery: Labor Conditions in Cuba. Miami: Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies Occasional Paper Series, 2000.
Del Aguila, Juan M. Cuba: Dilemmas of a Revolution. Boulder, San Francisco , and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994.
Economist Intelligence Unit. Country Profile: Cuba. London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2000.
"International Development Options. USA." Global Development Studies. Winter-Spring 1999.
Journal of Commerce. "JOC Trade News." <http://www.joc.com> . Accessed January 2001.
Naciones Unidas, CEPAL. Anuario Estadístico de América Latina y el Caribe. United Nations, 1999.
Pérez, Louis A. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Water and Earth Science Associates, Ltd. "Clean Technologies inCuba's Sugar Industry 1999." <http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/ea01833e.html?he=y>. Accessed April 2001.
Wilkie, James W. Statistical Abstract of Latin America, Volume 36. Los Angeles : UCLA Press, 2000.
World Development Indicators. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2000.
—Amy Lang-Tigchelaar
Higher: 15%
History & Background
From the first Spanish settlements in 1511 through 1898, Cuban education was typical of Spanish-speaking Latin America : a combination of parochial and secular institutions supporting and supported by the affluent Roman Catholic Spanish colonial elite. The first institution of higher education, the University of Havana , was established in 1728. However, as the Royal Economic Society reported in 1793, learning was confined to private tutoring (for elite families) and church-based schools with limited curriculum and poorly-trained teachers (de Varona 1993). The Society called for a secondary education curriculum that included mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural science, botany, anatomy, and drawing; this sparked the founding of the first secular schools in Havana.
Nineteenth Century Government & Colonial Church: In 1816 the government created an agency that introduced new methods, selected texts, created standards, and employed school inspectors. More than 90 secular schools existed in 1820, but these elite institutions relied on student fees and patron donations. By 1833, Cuba had 210 schools for whites with 8,460 students but only 12 schools for 486 black students. Few poor or minority students received free instruction in public or religious schools. An 1842 law required the construction of public primary and secondary schools on the same site, mandatory attendance for children aged 7 to 10, and control by provincial committees, a seeming democratization of learning (de Verona 1993). However, home-tutored students of the affluent were exempted from sharing facilities and conditions with the children of small business owners, workers, and peasants.
An 1863 law enabled the government to operate public schools and to oversee private schools, obligated attendance by children aged 6 to 9, and specified fines to be paid by parents who failed to comply (de Varona 1993). Major upheavals of this period—freeing of slaves in 1868 and the Ten Years War, the first War for Independence—rendered these decrees moot. These conditions ripped social life asunder, impoverished the nation, and left minimal funding for education. For example, only $1800 was budgeted for all school inspectors in 1880 to travel throughout the country to enforce compulsory attendance. Also, schools averaged only about 1 teacher per school and approximately 34 and 40 students per class in private and public schools, respectively (Perez 1945).
During the 1890s, calls for reform of the corrupt education system and for "educational emphasis on practical, utilitarian instruction instead of classical studies" became major issues for Cuban nationalists (Paulston and Kaufman 1992). As a result, dissent was especially strong on university campuses and support for educational investment was minimal.
Equally as important was the Roman Catholic Church . It controlled about 46 percent of Cuba's schools, but its influence and the larger imprint of colonial domination extended to the public schools. Local priests held seats on school boards, were legally entitled to review and approve the hire of teachers, and were legally entitled to provide weekly religious instruction in the public schools. They used this "second pulpit" to promote religious orthodoxy, stereotypical gender and racial hierarchies, and to sanctify the dominant means and relations of production. Thus, poor and minority students had a curriculum that stressed morality and religion, but were not provided with a means to rise above their economic status (Paulston and Kaufman 1992). As a result, few students remained in public school beyond age 10. In sum, the segregated system established by locally unaccountable colonial elites was reflective and supportive of the slave and hacienda system of Cuba's sugar economy.
U.S. Intervention: The ostensible motive for U.S. intervention on the side of the dissidents in 1898 was to free Cuba from Spain and to create democratic, locally controlled institutions. However, the U.S. government established military control in 1899, followed by a pseudo-independence that veiled U.S. control. The Platt Amendment, creating a permanent U.S. military presence in Cuba, solidified that control in 1901. While the rationale for intervention was a facade, the United States did succeed in transforming a marginal education system.
Cuba's educational system included 541 primary and 400 private schools. About 60 percent of the population was illiterate, and only one percent of the literate population had attained higher levels of education. Only about 90,000 out of 550,000 Cuban children attended school. In the five largest cities, about 30 percent of children attended school—elsewhere, only 11 percent attended (Thomas 1998).
An overarching administrative structure was established when U.S. military governor John Brooke issued Order No. 297, series 1900, and modified Order No. 368 in 1900. It included a Commissioner of Education, a Board of Superintendents (comprised of a general and provincial superintendents for each province), and local education districts with separate school boards (Turosienski 1943). The law also mandated schooling for children aged 6 to 14.
Governor General Leonard Wood, who succeeded Brooke, initiated programmatic reform. Wood augmented Brooke's efforts by giving substance to the Spanish reforms—creating a nationwide system of primary schools, training teachers, and instituting changes identified by dissidents. He reorganized secondary and vocational schools and promoted practical knowledge in universities by introducing engineering and architecture. Seeking to infuse attributes of the American educational system into Cuba, Wood hired Cuban educators and administrators versed in the U.S. model of education. Access to education increased across racial and class lines, and attendance rose—a seeming realization of the dissidents' goals.
Despite these educational advances, general dissatisfaction with the government led to instability and, in 1906, the United States dispatched additional personnel to establish order. Among those dispatched was Judge Charles Magoon who directed efforts in Cuba until 1909. Magoon's educational accomplishments were "less sensational than Wood's, but in some ways more effective" (Thomas 1998). Sharp penalties were established for violations of mandatory education; school-age children found in the street during school hours were arrested, and factory owners employing child laborers were fined. In 1908, the school enrollment was reported to be 200,000 pupils in the public system and 15,000 pupils in the private system. However, problems remained as Magoon ignored complaints of corruption and nepotism in the educational system.
Batista Period: Under dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, roughly 50 percent of the school-aged population did not attend school, and expenditures were concentrated in urban areas to the exclusion of rural provinces (MacDonald 1985). The average child progressed only to the second grade, and only 17 percent of students attended high school. More than 1,000,000 people—half the adult population—were illiterate. The curriculum had regressed to a "classic Hispanic education with a great emphasis on memorization" while ignoring practical issues and modern conditions (Padula and Smith 1988). As Arthur Gillette discussed in his book Cuba's Educational Revolution, reaction against the inadequacies of pre-Revolutionary education (a dynamic of class inequity and reproduction, a labor force unsuited to the modern economy, and societal alienation) shaped the revolution's educational goals.
Castro Period: Educational reform in Cuba took root following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, though Castro had called for educational reform as early as 1953. As Castro's supporters won control of various regions of the country, they taught peasants to read as part of the revolutionary strategy. After the 1959 Revolution, two major education-related goals emerged: making education available to all and connecting this new educational system to socioeconomic development (Gillette 1972). Achieving these goals required a new national educational system that could educate a largely illiterate population.
The Great Literacy Campaign of 1961 sought to instill basic literacy skills to citizens in the poorest and most remote regions of the country. Junior and senior high schools were closed for an entire year as the campaign mobilized an unprecedented 274,000 volunteer literacy workers, including students, workers, women not in the workforce, and trained teachers, who taught an identified 979,000 illiterate people. Of the 979,000 illiterate individuals, 707,200 gained basic skills of reading and writing (MacDonald 1985). Tutors used manuals designed to teach subjects related to the Revolution; Alfabeticemos, the instructor's manual, was composed of lessons dealing with "such subjects as the revolution, Castro, land reform, nationalization of foreign property, industrialization, and imperialism" (Padula and Smith 1988). Similar topics were included in the student text, providing both a point of departure for literacy instruction and educating the masses about the foundations of the new social order. Volunteers worked individually with learners using progressively more challenging reading and writing exercises. This campaign brought a new sense of unity to the country.
Following the 1961 campaign, illiteracy fell from 25 percent to 4 percent and, unlike other Third World efforts that rendered short-term benefits before reversing, have remained low. While curriculum and methodology are set nationally, local councils, teachers, administrators, and parents contribute to policies within particular schools. Many parents support the school by volunteering at extracurricular events.
Cuba remains an outpost of socialism in a "nonsocialist world" (Lutjens 1998). The nature of its socialism has changed, but the commitment to universal education remains a point of national pride. With a literacy rate of approximately 99 percent, Cuba is unique within Latin America and the Third World in general (UNESCO 1995).
Constitutional & Legal Foundations
Beginning in 1842, education policy emerged as a paradox between the poles of legal mandates and a policy of benign neglect. While compulsory schooling, free instruction, and integration laws were passed, they languished, unenforced by colonial officials. Much of the formal education occurred outside the purview of public officials, overseen only by parents and religious leaders. After 1898 the United States imposed its own model of system structure, methodology, and governance starting with Military Orders No. 297 and Order No. 368 in 1900. When this system was later transferred to Cuban bureaucrats, funding and enforcement backslid and became increasingly corrupt through 1958.
Education in post-Revolutionary Cuba is guaranteed and obligatory as noted in Article 39B of the Constitution. Laws number 76 and number 367, combined with decree number 2099, decentralized schools, and number 680 revised the structure of education itself. The Declaration of Havana in September 1960 declared that every child had the right to a free education; the Law of General Nationalization and Free instruction, passed in June 1961, suspended private education and made the state officially responsible for all education (Epstein 1988).
Educational System—Overview
Hallmarks of Cuban education have been reorganization and adaptation to changing social needs and social conditions. There have been three major periods of Cuban education: mass education (1959-1962), education for economic development (1962-1968), and "creating the new man" (1965-1990). To this we might add a fourth period—the "special period," an era of post-Soviet adaptation after 1990 (Gillette 1972).
The goals of this changing system have been constant: to provide improved educational opportunities for all persons, to develop skills necessary to improve the industrial and agricultural output, and to promote collective responsibility. Education is compulsory for students through the ninth grade. The school year is roughly 200 days per year, organized in four 10-week terms. The language of instruction is Spanish. Schools place heavy emphasis on Cuban history, mathematics, practical and applied knowledge, community service, and problem solving. A close relationship exists between education, daily life, and work.
Following the literacy campaign, Cuba created a two-pronged, multi-faceted, but complex educational structure. However, in the last 15 years, they have streamlined the structure while allowing a small series of highly specialized institutions with very limited foci for students with special abilities, interests, or needs.
Preprimary & Primary Education
Cuba's preschool educational structure enrolls about 145,000 students from age 6 months to 5 years, more than twice the number before the revolution. The curriculum is based on the child's age; it emphasizes group play; seeks to assure the physical, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic development of the child; and establishes the basis for future learning.
The academic year extends from September to June, with July and August devoted to recreation. Preprimary education grew after the Revolution as women entered the workforce. The Federation of Cuban Women initially directed preschools, which later fell under Ministry of Education control. Attendance is optional and home education is common. Home-educated preschoolers often attend nonformal groups that meet in parks and neighborhood centers twice a week. A kindergarten year offered for children aged 5 to 6 may either be taken in a daycare or a primary school.
The primary education sequence consists of two levels. The first cycle includes grades one through four, and the second cycle grades five and six. Most schools are located in the students' community, and attendance is mandatory. The number of teachers has fluctuated during the last 40 years, but the pupil-teacher ratio has continually decreased during the period. From grades one through four, classes are 30 minutes in duration. The curriculum focuses on Spanish language (reading, writing, and oral expression) and mathematics. These two subjects together account for 57 percent of classroom time. Scientific approach, life training, economics, labor, artistic topics, and physical education are other subjects. A new topic was introduced in the mid-1990s, the "World in Which We Live"—a blend of natural and social ecology, health, and morality (Ministry of Education 1996). The curriculum emphasizes basic education, productive activity, and social benefit and responsibility. Classroom learning is often integrated with basic skills, such as gardening, pruning, wood and metal crafts, and handicrafts. The boundary between classroom and practical learning is blurred into a holistic learning environment.
Evaluation is a continuous process. Tests are administered at the end of the second and fourth grades, with results categorized as excellent, very well, good, regular, and poor, instead of numerical grades. Testing, like instruction, combines formal learning and practical application, and students advance when they receive a satisfactory grade.
In grades five and six, classes include Cuban history, natural science, geography, aesthetics, civil education (to convey political, ideological, moral, and judicial information), economics, and labor education, which is an initial linkage of classroom learning to productive work. The behavioral goal is to encourage independent working habits and cooperative learning skills. The students are again expected to demonstrate competence in each discipline. All students must complete the sixth grade, and those who fail may retake examinations. Less than 1.0 percent of students drop out of primary education, and 98.2 percent continue their studies after the sixth grade (Ministry of Education 1996).
Special education is a sub-system of the primary schools designed to provide appropriate training and instruction to develop the intellectual and vocational abilities of "special needs" children. These children are initially evaluated by specialists in one of Cuba's Diagnosis and Guidance Centers that refer them to an appropriate school. There are schools providing specialized instruction for students with mental disabilities, blindness, visual handicaps, amblyopia, physical disabilities, deafness, speech impediments, behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and language disorders. Often these schools have relationships with local schools, which allows for mainstreaming of students where appropriate (Ministry of Education 1996).
Secondary Education
Cuba's secondary education system generally has two components: compulsory and non-compulsory. The compulsory basic secondary education system includes grades 7 through 9. There are two different forms of secondary schools: urban and rural. Urban schools have 35 weeks of class and require 7 weeks of work in the countryside. Rural schools have 37 weeks of class and require 5 weeks of work in the countryside. Each has approximately three weeks of testing.
In 1966, the "Schools to the Countryside Program" started when 20,000 basic secondary education students and their teachers moved to the country to work with farmers and agricultural workers. In 1971, this practice was institutionalized as the "schools in the countryside," which are boarding schools that operate during the work-week on a year round basis. Boarding schools divide their students; while half tend crops in the morning, the remainder learns in the classroom, and in the afternoon the groups exchange tasks. Again, practical knowledge and classroom materials are integrated into a single curriculum focused on observation and problem solving. During the summers, the schools are vacation centers where students are joined by their families. Families receive free room and board and participate in various recreational programs, including trips to beaches and parks, but they are expected to work two hours per day (Carnoy and Werthein 1983).
Only 3.3 percent of students drop out of basic secondary, and 92.8 percent continue their studies after the 9th grade. Following completion of the basic secondary curriculum, students seeking additional education can pursue one of several options: pre-university, polytechnical training, or vocational/trade school education. The attendance at this level is free, but is not compulsory.
The course content in pre-university education is more evenly distributed across the curriculum. Mathematics and Spanish comprise only 42 percent of the course contact hours; natural science is about 20 percent. History, geography, art, and physical education constitute about 18 percent. Labor education, civics, military preparation, and fundamentals of Marxist-Leninism constitute about 10 percent of the curriculum and occur in a patterned manner—labor and civics in the seventh through ninth grades and military and Marxist-Leninist studies in the tenth through twelfth grades (Ministry of Education 1996).
Pre-universities are divided between urban and rural locations. They operate in a fashion similar to basic secondary education. Significant emphasis is placed on study of the environment, especially the interplay between ecological and social problems. Classes last 41 weeks. The twelfth and final year has two main goals: completing the pre-university courses and strengthening knowledge to prepare for university entry.
The other two options following basic secondary are poly-technical institutes, where students can delve deeper into scientific and technical subjects while gaining vocational and professional guidance, and vocational/trade schools, which offer specialized technical curriculum for students and for workers seeking skill enhancement.
Universities: Between 1962 and 1964, following a period of upheaval, efforts to reorganize the university system were initiated by the government, students, faculty, and party officials. By 1964, a multi-tiered system had been created with campus-based participation by the above noted groups, answering to the Centralized National Council of Universities and responsible to the Ministry of Education.
For a decade after the Revolution, higher education was not a major concern, as emphasis was placed on literacy and basic education. Equally as important, the pre-Revolutionary professorate had been hired by, and had trained, the children of the privileged elite. Many retained their positions. For many years, university faculty were a source of anti-Revolutionary ideas and mobilization, a condition that discouraged social investment in these institutions.
By 1970, a shift in curricular focus from humanities to medicine and applied sciences was implemented at three universities: Universidad de la Habana, Universidad Central de Las Villas (Santa Clara), and Universidad de Oriente ( Santiago ). Problems within universities, including poor pay and resource shortages, were addressed in 1975 as part of a renewed emphasis on university learning; also the University of Camaguey was established and the Ministry of Higher Education was created (MacDonald 1996).
Since 1982, the Ministry of Higher Education has overseen diplomas and degrees granted by the 47 Cuban institutions of higher education. Administratively some are subordinate to other Ministries, including Public Health, Center State, and Education proper (Ministry of Education 1996). Cuba has four universities, each of which has departments of engineering, sciences, agriculture, humanities (including law), medicine, education, and economics. These four universities, three university branch campuses, and 40 specialized institutes collectively constitute the higher education system of Cuba (Mac-Donald 1996).
By 1975 "New Man" graduates of post-Revolutionary institutions of higher education populated industrial, cultural, social, and governmental institutions as employees and managers. Yet with the humanitiesfocused training still in place within universities, product development, technical innovation, and bureaucratic efficiency lagged. With pressing social and economic needs, Cuban officials started emphasizing the importance of higher education as a revolutionary tool in transforming the economy. The end result of this effort was the coordination of universities with national economic agencies, better aligning the needs of society with the expertise of university graduates.
In the immediate post-Revolutionary era, Cuba placed emphasis on agricultural self-sufficiency. By 1980 a shift in the focus, composition, clientele, and outcomes of higher education emerged as part of a larger social transformation (MacDonald 1996). This shift toward increased education and technology, evident from 1970 to 1995, resulted in a tight coordination of national need and educational preparation. The emphasis on mass participation in higher education increased university attendance by farmers and workers. Additionally, a strong indicator of the importance of higher education was its expansion. Student attendance changed from 24,300 pupils (per 100,000 population) in 1958; to 20,600 by 1965; and to 26,300 by 1975.
From 1980 through 1992, higher education flourished in Cuba. In 1980 Cuba had 151,700 students enrolled in higher education. Enrollment declined during the crisis of the mid-1990s, as total enrollment fell from 165,891 in 1993-1994; to 140,815 in 1994-1995; to 134,100 in 1995-1996. Despite these declines, Cuba's rate of higher education enrollment per 100,000 population has, since 1978, exceeded the Latin American and world average (Epstein 1988; Ministry of Education 1996). There were approximately 23,000 faculty members in higher education in 1995, which resulted in an extremely low faculty to student ratio, a condition conducive to effective pedagogy.
Requirements for university attendance include graduation from high school, passage of a specialty examination, a personal interview, and letters from a local "people's organization" or other indicators of revolutionary attitude. Education is free and available to all interested and qualified individuals. There are three kinds of programs available: daytime, worker in-service, and distance learning courses, with the latter two providing courses for non-traditional students—farmers and workers seeking to pursue interests and/or upgrade their skills. This student base differs greatly from the pre-Revolutionary days of students from privileged upper class status. Clearly, universities will move the Revolution to its next stage.
Administration, Finance, & Educational Research
The Ministry of Education oversaw the operation of 13,340 schools and 270,100 teachers (including daycare) in 1995-1996. Consistent with Article 39B of the Constitution of the Republic, responsibility for education rests with the state. The Ministry guides, performs, and implements state and government policy in education, except for higher education. The National Education System is composed of a central authority, provincial and municipal organs, and several administrative bodies that answer only to the National Assembly of People's Power, the legislative structure of the Republic of Cuba.
The Ministry of Education, provincial and local educational officials, and teachers and professors periodically propose changes that are consistent with their charge to conduct, organize, and manage educational services in their respective territories. The local education authorities are subject to the principle of double subordination: to the Ministry and to local councils. A total of 2,173,000 students were in the formal education system (excluding universities), and an additional 145,000 children were in daycare centers in 1995-1996. The Ministry of Higher Education is charged with overseeing universities and various institutes and is distinct from the Ministry of Education.
Following the "Nationalization of Education" in July 1961, all educational expenses are covered by public funds from the state budget. The Ministry of Finances controls expenditures and auditing, and the Ministry of Education is accountable for spending. Cuba's support for education is remarkable, rising from about 3.4 percent of GNP before the Revolution, to 7.0 percent by 1965, to 7.2 percent in 1980, to 11.0 percent in 1994. Yet, the impacts of the "Special Period" are such that actual expenditures have fallen from 1853.9 million pesos in 1990 to 1430 million pesos in 1995-1996 (Ministry of Education 1996).
Nonformal Education
Nonformal education is an integral part of Cuban society at the national, provincial, and municipal levels and is strongly linked to the education system. Contributing sectors include Public Health, Culture, and Sports, as well as organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women, neighborhood watch Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, People's Councils, Pioneer Youth groups (similar to Boy and Girl Scouts), and the National Commission for Prevention and Social Care (Ministry of Education 1996).
Another nonformal sphere is adult education, which provides learning opportunities for workers, farmers, housewives, and undereducated adults at three levels: Educacion Obrera y Campesina or EOC (a four-semester basic instruction course sequence); Secundaria Obrera y Campesina or SOC (a four-semester mid-level course); and Facultad Obrera y Campesina or FOC (a six-semester higher level instruction) (Ministry of Education 1999). The matriculation rate of these programs has remained high, and course materials are frequently refined. From 1962 to 1974 about 650,000 adults graduated from these adult education programs, with a record number of 95,000 matriculating in 1974 (Paulston 1976). Participation remains high (Ministry of Education 1999).
The Cuban government has been a leader in the use of media for nonformal education. Starting in the 1960s, radio has served an important function in making education available to all citizens. As of 1996, eleven of the fourteen provinces offered local radio instruction at important work centers. Increased use of television has also offered opportunities for distance learning. For example, in 2000, "University for All" was introduced on state television, offering telecourses in English, Spanish, and other topics. Distance learning is offered through institutions of higher education, with periodic meetings held between students and professors; approximately 25,000 participants were involved as of 1996. The use of computers and Internet technology is limited, although Cuba is working to increase this resource for its populace.
Teaching Profession
Education of teachers is a strong priority in Cuba, and teacher preparation programs are invariably joined with the political and cultural transitions of the country. Teachers are trained in one of 13 teaching (pedagogical) universities and programs in several methods of instruction. Entry is based upon test scores and analysis of one's aptitude and interpersonal qualities specific to teaching. The training program lasts for five years, with students beginning their studies in their pre-university year of school. During the first two years of the program, emphasis is placed on general studies, emphasizing political and cultural topics. During the third year of instruction, educational psychology is introduced, while in the fourth and fifth year of study, practice teaching is emphasized under the direction of experienced teachers. Practicing teachers can also attain advanced degrees from these institutions.
Teachers are evaluated for performance effectiveness based on qualitative evaluations by peers and administrators, as well as comparison to National Education Quality Control criteria. Salaries are paid on a wage scale initially established in 1975, and professors are paid wages similar to that of doctors and engineers. Teachers are encouraged to continue their education and are given leave from their positions to attend classes.
Summary
Cuba's position in the world has changed dramatically in the years since the Revolution, and its educational system has continually met the needs of its people. Change has been so constant that one might argue paradoxically that Cuba's future emerges as its past. Cuba has a highly literate population and a technologically trained workforce, yet it has limited venues for utilizing the talent of its populace because of its difficult economic circumstances.
Cuba remains on the edge of the digital divide. While it is gradually increasing its ability to provide computer technology for its people, information technology resources are limited. For Cuba to enter the twenty-first century, those resources must increase; there is little doubt that Cuba's educational system will embrace the changes that technology brings.
One of Cuba's strengths is its integration of culture, social order, and education. Especially noteworthy has been its integration of formal education, practical arts, and problem-solving applications outside of the classroom. Ironically, that same path is now being promoted worldwide by major corporations and conservative education policy experts who seek to promote problem solving and teamwork. The developed nations have much to learn from Cuba's ability to integrate education into all aspects of its culture. It is also clear that this innovative synthesis of learning activities is not exclusively socialist or liberal.
Another irony involves Cuba's preparation to deal with change. The rigid structure and technology for learning has created for its people a framework for self-discovery and an intrinsic application of knowledge. Times are changing in Cuba, especially with its increased reliance on a tourist economy. Educators are leaving the profession to work in tourism, and this is yet another challenge to be faced. Cuba is again required to create new innovations to maintain its revolutionary vision but, with change as its strength, Cuban education is well positioned to further its transformation and to meet its people's needs.
Bibliography
Berube, Maurice. Education and Poverty: Effective Schooling in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.
Carnoy, Martin, and Jorge Werthein. "Cuba: Training and Mobilization." In Better Schools: International Lessons for Reform. Praeger Special Studies Series in Comparative Education, 1983.
Castro, Fidel. History Will Absolve Me. Havana: Radio Havana Cuba, 1953.
de Varona, Frank. "Perspectiva Historica de la Educacion en Cuba." In el Comite de Estudios para la Reforma Educacional en Cuba, La Educacion en Cuba: Pasado, Presente y Futuro. The Endowment for Cuban American Studies of the Cuban American National Foundation, 1993.
Gillette, Arthur. Cuba's Educational Revolution, London: Fabian Society, 1972.
Lutjens, Sheryl. "Education and the Cuban Revolution: A Selected Bibliography." Comparative Education Review 42, 1998: 197-224.
——. The State, Bureaucracy, and Cuban Schools: Power and Participation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
MacDonald, Theodore. Schooling the Revolution: An Analysis of Developments in Cuban Education Since 1959. London: Carlyon Printers, 1996.
——. Making a New People: Education in Revolutionary Cuba. Vancouver, BC: New Star Books, 1985.
Ministry of Education, Republic of Cuba, Organization of Education 1994-1996. Report of the Republic to Cuba to the 45th International Conference on Public Education. Havana: Ministry of Education, 1996.
Ministry of Education, Republic of Cuba, Pedagogia 1999. "Encuentro por la Unidad de los Educadores Latinoamericanos." Report of the Republic of Cuba to the Congreso Internacional Pedagogia 1999. Havana: Ministry of Education, 1999.
Padula, Alfred, and Lois M. Smith. "The Revolutionary Transformation of Cuban Education, 1959-1987." In
Making the Future: Politics and Educational Reform in the United States, England, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Atlanta: Center for Cross Cultural Education, College of Education, Georgia State University, 1988.
Paulston, Rolland. The Educational System of Cuba. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1976.
Paulston, R., and C.C. Kaufman. "Cuba." In International Handbook of Educational Reform. Westport, CT: Westview, 1992.
Perez, Emma. Historia de la Pedagogia en Cuba: Desde los Origenes Hasta la Guerra de Independencia Havana, 1945.
Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
UNESCO. Compendium of Statistics on Illiteracy. Paris: UNESCO, 1995.
—Patrick McGuire and Karen Vocke
Cite this article
ETHNONYMS: none
Orientation
Identification and Location. Cuba is the largest of the Caribbean islands in the West Indies . Situated between 19°40′ and 23°30′ N and 74° to 85° W, the Antillean nation of Cuba comprises approximately 120,000 square kilometers of land, including over 1,500 islets and keys and the Isle of Pines southwest of the Gulf of Batabanó. Cuba measures 200 kilometers at its widest, southernmost point and under 35 kilometers at its narrowest point. Natural harbors and ports dot the northern coast's low marshlands, swamps, and bluffs, and mountain ranges define the southern coast.
Elevations of the Maestra, Escambray, and Guaniguanico mountain ranges—located in southeast Santiago de Cuba, south-central Villa Clara, and Pinar del Río provinces respectively—vary from 2,000 meters in the Sierra Maestra to 600 meters in Guaniguanico. Between these chains, which cover 35 percent of the island land mass, are hills and sea-level plains suitable for a wide variety of tropical agricultural cultivation, ranching, and forestry. The stable climate, with temperatures that seldom drop below 21° C and average rainfall of 137 centimeters a year, contributes to the production of tropical crops. Cuba has often been in the path of devastating tropical storms and hurricanes that negatively affect production.
Linguistic Affiliation. Cuba's earliest inhabitants were the seminomadic Ciboney, and little information on their language remains. Their successors, the Arawak, dominated the island at the time of Spanish exploration and occupation. Terms taken from the Arawak language became incorporated into the major language of Cuba, which continues to be Spanish. By the end of the sixteenth century, most of the native population had ceased to exist, further homogenizing language, but African slaves from Bantu-language groups of West Africa have contributed many terms to Spanish as spoken in Cuba.
Other permanent immigrants from China , Germany , Great Britain , and the United States tended to adopt the Spanish language. After Cuba's separation from Spain in 1898, the English language was incorporated into school curricula and North American terms and commodity trademarks infiltrated Cuban speech. Beginning in 1961, as a consequence of closer ties with the Soviet Union , the government promoted learning Russian and Eastern European languages to facilitate business and diplomatic communication.
Before the 1959 Revolution, the urban literacy rate was high by Latin American standards, but the literacy rate in the countryside was particularly low. An intensive literacy campaign focused first on teaching the rural population the fundamentals of reading and writing Spanish, then on gradually improving levels of literacy. Cuba's accomplishment in this regard has gained universal recognition.
Demography. In 1991 more than half of the Cuban population of 10.7 million was under the age of 30. This pattern is related in part to the emigration of over 1 million Cubans to other countries following the 1959 Revolution. The Cuban population is 51 percent mulatto, 37 percent White, 11 percent Black, and 1 percent Chinese. Forty percent of the population resides in the western provinces and the major urban areas of Havana , Matanzas, and Pinar del Río. Another 20 percent of the population resides in the provinces of Villa Clara and part of western Camagüey. Twenty percent resides in northwestern Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey, and the final 20 percent in the easternmost area of Santiago de Cuba. The eastern naval base of Guantánamo, leased to the United States in 1903, houses 6,000 U.S. military personnel and their families and is effectively separated from Cuba.
Since the late Spanish colonial period, the rural population has migrated to the major cities of Havana, Matanzas, and Santiago de Cuba. Following the 1959 Revolution, efforts have been made to emphasize services to the countryside and slow down the migration to cities. Although population growth has declined in Havana, the trend toward urbanization has continued: in the late twentieth century 62 percent of women and 58 percent of men reside in cities. In contrast to pre-1959 conditions, however, the rural population has enjoyed improved provision of health care, education, housing, and other basic needs.
History and Cultural Relations
The earliest known settlers in Cuba, the Ciboney (1000 b.c.) were joined by Arawaks from a.d. 1100 to 1450. From Christopher Columbus 's first landing in 1492 to U.S. troop landings in 1898 during the final stages of the war for Cuban independence, the island was integrated into the Spanish colonial structure, producing as major export crops sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. The island also served as an administrative center for Spanish political and economic control of the region and was therefore a significant arena of international rivalry over Spanish control of the Western Hemisphere. Population growth and economic and political activity centered on the Havana environs, marginalizing authority and economic growth in the eastern regions and restraining opportunities there even in the postcolonial period. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Spanish government proved incapable of resolving conflicts over its policies, resulting in the Ten Years War (1868-1878) and the war for Cuban independence, which began in 1895.
Between 1899 and 1902 the United States occupied Cuba and appointed military governors as administrators; the republic was not formally established until a president was elected in 1902. The Cuban constitutional convention reluctantly incorporated the Platt Amendment (to a U.S. army appropriation bill of March 1901), which became the legal justification for U.S. control of the naval base at Guantánamo, ownership of Cuban land, and intervention in Cuba's internal affairs until the abrogation of the amendment in 1934. Between 1934 and 1959 the Cuban economy strengthened its economic and political ties with the United States. Persistent national conflicts generated the formation of various opposition movements. After the success of the July 26th movement in 1959, Cuba built a socialist system; even after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Cuba's government continued to be a rather stalwart adherent.
Revolutionary Cuban society has attempted to eliminate traditional vestiges of both racism and sexism. With a heritage combining descendants of Spaniards and other western Europeans, African slaves, and Chinese indentured laborers and immigrants, Cuba's Latin African mulatto culture manifests fewer racial tensions than more racially separated societies. The revolutionary government continues to make structural attempts to fully integrate and empower women and Afro-Cubans and to publicly address the foundations of bias.
Settlements
During the colonial period and prior to 1959, the major urban centers of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Santiago de Cuba displayed patterns of growth associated with emphasis on the agro-export economy. Towns and villages organized around production of sugar, coffee, and tobacco exports expanded with markets. Migration of seasonal workers and subsistence farmers exerted strong pressures on urban centers as the concentration of landownership proceeded. Since 1959, the revolutionary government has attempted to reduce this migration in keeping with its agenda of providing more social services to rural areas and small cities and towns, radically reforming land-tenure patterns, and diversifying the economy.
As before the Revolution, rural dwellings of the poor, particularly in the mountainous regions, are constructed from palm thatch, cane, and mud with dirt floors. These bohios traditionally dominated the countryside around sugarcane fields and areas where family subsistence plots persisted; they are only gradually being replaced with dweller-constructed, partially prefabricated cement multifamily housing. Cycles of increased construction have occurred from 1959 to 1963, in the mid-1970s, in 1980, and from 1988 to 1989 but have not kept pace with housing needs. In urban centers, housing combines single-family Spanish-style architecture, low-rise apartment units, single-story apartments joined in rows, and, in the oldest cities, some former single-family homes converted into multiple units. The Spanish patio arrangement is more predominant in the older dwellings. Construction of single-family housing has received less priority from the revolutionary government.
Economy
Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Since 1959, the Cuban government has endeavored to provide food security to its population and increase access to basic needs in housing, education, and medical care. Programs have been implemented to diversify and decentralize agricultural production, exploit nickel reserves, develop light industries, expand the fishing and tourist industries, and increase export earnings to provide for other development needs.
Before the collapse of the socialist bloc, over 40 percent of Cuba's food supply was imported. The National Rationing Board attempted to assure distribution of minimum basic food needs based on demographics. The island suffered severe food shortages in 1993 and 1994, following climatic disasters and the loss of most of its oil imports and 30 percent of its agrochemical, machinery, and parts imports. Attempts to address the crisis included the transformation of state farms into worker-owned enterprises or cooperatives, the reintroduction of farmers' markets, and new trade arrangements for food imports from other countries. The government also legalized private markets and private vendors and suppliers of services in many industries.
Industrial Arts. Cuba is well known for its production of handcrafted wood and cane furniture as well as folk-music instruments.
Trade. Until the 1990s, government-owned food stores set uniform prices for rationed foods. Prices remained fixed from the early 1960s to 1981, when they were increased slightly. Government nonrationed food markets were expanded in 1983 and 1994 to provide greater supplies and varieties of foods and to end black marketeering. Consumer goods remained under government ownership and control until 1994, when the government legalized the taxable, direct sale, without price controls, of crafts and surplus industrial goods by licensed private vendors. Price increases on services and some products followed the 1994 decriminalization of the dollar. Taxes were introduced in select areas.
Division of Labor. The traditional division of labor by gender—casa (home) and calle (street)—ascribed to urban, upper-class Latin American societies began to change significantly during World War II , as more middle-class women entered professional fields. In the postrevolutionary period, transference between gender-traditional occupations has made limited strides. Although women have become more educated, have entered new job fields, and play a greater role in political organizations, they continue to be concentrated in the traditional fields of education and public health and remain underrepresented in politics. The labor force of 3 million presently includes 30 percent engaged exclusively in agriculture, 20 percent in industry, 20 percent in services, 11 percent in construction, 10 percent in commerce, and 5 percent in government.
Land Tenure. Since eliminating foreign ownership and large private estates, which were legacies of the colonial system, agrarian reform has gone through several stages. By the mid-1980s, 80 percent of land had come under state ownership, 11 percent was organized into cooperatives, and 9 percent was held by private owners. Food crises forced alteration of this system in 1994. State farms were replaced by Basic Units of Cooperative Production, which are allowed to sell in farmers' markets any food they produce in excess of government requirements. To diversify the economy further and earn foreign exchange, the government entered into investment contracts with foreign enterprises in the fields of construction technology, consumer goods, mining, biotechnology, oil, sugar, and tourism.
Kinship, Marriage, and Family
Kinship. Prerevolutionary kinship ties and social ties of the Cuban upper class were based in part on patrilineal descent from the Spanish colonial aristocracy. The ability to trace family backgrounds sharing common names and patron saints became somewhat less significant in the decades following establishment of the republic and declined even more significantly after the 1959 Revolution and the exodus of large numbers of the upper class. Lower-class Cubans demonstrated much less regard for lineage than had the middle class but continued the Latin tradition of godparenting and maintaining close relationships with and responsibility for the extended family.
Marriage. In the prerevolutionary period, within the framework of a Catholic-Latin society and rural/urban economic polarization, church-sanctioned marriage and baptisms assumed more importance in the cities than in the countryside. A relatively low marriage rate, cited as less than 5 per 1,000 in the late colonial period, reflected emphasis on common-law marriages in the countryside. Since the 1959 Revolution, rates of both marriage and divorce have tended to increase and become more similar for rural and urban areas. The marriage rate declined somewhat in the late 1970s, however, as the housing shortage limited the establishment of separate households. Postmarital residence tends to be patrilocal and has at times required doubling up of families. In 1979 extended families resided in 40 percent of Cuban households. Various types of birth control, including abortion, are available.
Domestic Unit. Efforts to strengthen family solidarity, stability, and female equality include the enactment of the 1975 Family Code, which identifies the nuclear family as the essential social unit responsible for improving the health and welfare of society. The code calls for equal sharing of responsibilities in household work, maintenance, and child rearing, as well as equal commitment to respect and loyalty in marriage. Legally mandated child-care centers and maternity leaves are among the projects and policies intended to reduce gender inequality and modify traditional gender-defined roles.
Inheritance. The Rent Reform and Agrarian Reform Laws of 1959 and subsequent legislation aimed at redistribution of wealth focused on limiting rent charges, foreign ownership of property, and private landownership, as well as nationalizing rural property, establishing cooperatives, and transferring land to sharecroppers and tenants. Legislation enacted with the objective of progressing toward abolition of private property has restricted the sale, mortgaging, and inheritance of land and has successfully increased state purchases of land. Other personal property assets may be inherited with some restrictions.
Socialization. In addition to social conformity reinforced by traditional family relationships, Cubans find both overt and subtle pressures to conform to the values of revolutionary socialist ideology.
Sociopolitical Organization
Cuba is organized politically into fourteen provinces and 169 municipalities. Its socialist system is hierarchical and bureaucratic. The 525,000-member vanguard or cadre party, the Cuban Communist party (PCC) is led by Fidel Castro, the first party secretary, and his brother Raúl Castro, the second party secretary. The Political Bureau has responsibility for supervising economic, political, and military activities. In 1991 the 1,667 delegates to the Fourth Party Congress, acting on recommendations at local meetings attended by some 3.5 million people throughout the island, cut the staff of the 225-member Central Committee by one-half and reduced the number of departments by more than one-half. Alternates in the Political Bureau were abolished, and the Secretariat was terminated. The congress also called for increased review and recall of party officials and special sessions to deal with the economic crises at the provincial and municipal levels.
Secret-ballot elections to the municipal assemblies in 1992 and elections to the provincial and national assemblies in 1993 significantly reduced the number of incumbents who had been part of the decision-making bodies for decades. Membership in the Communist party was no longer a requirement in selecting delegates. By 1993, half of the members of the National Assembly were directly elected municipal-assembly delegates; more and younger delegates represented the trades, medicine, and culture.
Social Organization. In contrast to the prerevolutionary years, Cuba is attempting to create a society in which neither class nor circumstances of occupation, income, race, or sex define social opportunities and rewards. The most significant challenges for the Revolution since the collapse of the Eastern bloc are providing equal access to political and economic opportunities without creating a privileged group in society or loss of conscious socialist goals, and simultaneously moving the economy toward diversification and industrialization.
Political Organization. Prior to 1959, participation in the national and local political processes was limited. Between 1959 and 1970, the revolutionary government largely centralized authority and provided limited representative or direct access to decision making. Reorganization of the political system in 1970 was designed to allow greater input into policy formation at all levels. Legislative reforms in 1976 and again in 1992 and 1993 were illustrative of a trend toward increasing participation in economic decision making at all levels. To ensure wider input and greater understanding of the potential effects of change prior to policy formation, it was required that meetings be held with mass organizations and constituencies.
Most citizens belong to at least one of the mass organizations (committees for the defense of the Revolution, the Confederation of Cuban Workers, the Federation of Cuban Women, the National Association of Small Farmers) or to specific professional or student associations. Several human-rights organizations, founded outside the established political process, are not recognized by the government. In 1994 the government announced the visit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the creation of an ad hoc committee within the National Assembly to review and report on political, social, economic, cultural, and individual rights.
Conflict. From 1898 to 1959, Cuba experienced several political and economic crises that resulted in armed revolts against government officials and in military and political intervention by the United States. Between 1953 and 1959, armed struggle in the cities and countryside culminated in a successful revolution. Subsequently, more than 200,000 mainly upper- and middle-class Cubans left the island. A small percentage of the exiles in the United States has established organizations that have actively sought the overthrow and/or destabilization of the Cuban government and have resisted U.S. rapproachment with Cuba.
U.S. opposition to Cuban expropriation of U.S. businesses, implementation of a socialist agenda, and relations with the Soviet Union strained U.S.-Cuban relations early in the revolutionary struggle. Immediate consequences included U.S. training and equipping of Cuban exiles in the Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) invasion of 1961, attempts to isolate Cuba economically and diplomatically in the Western Hemisphere, and a U.S. trade embargo. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Cuban support of revolutions and anticolonial movements in Latin America and Africa contributed to further tensions between the United States and Cuba.
Dependence on Soviet support and trade with Eastern Europe complicated Cuban-Eastern bloc relations in the late 1980s as those nations disavowed socialism. Cuba has made substantive efforts to rebuild diplomatic and trade relations with Latin America and increase trade with other nonsocialist nations. Despite three separate votes in the United Nations condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba as a violation of international law, the United States has determinedly continued the embargo.
Within Cuba, the most significant political conflicts center around perceptions of counterrevolutionary activity. Although criticism is encouraged within the socialist-revolutionary framework, individuals and organizations attempting to operate actively outside this framework or perceived as opponents of the socialist system are subject to legal proceedings that typically result in incarceration. Internal conflict in the 1980s was exemplified by the exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States from Mariel, the growth of various human-rights organizations, and the trials of high-echelon political and military leaders on drug-trafficking and other counterrevolutionary charges. The collapse of the Soviet bloc contributed to shortages of consumer goods, food, and medicine, as well as to blackouts and transportation and production problems resulting from fuel shortages. Emphasis on tourism to earn necessary foreign exchange and the decriminalization of the dollar were increasingly criticized for creating a dual standard of living and social problems such as prostitution. The economic decline resulted in heretofore rare public demonstrations against the government.
U.S. determination to see the Cuban government overthrown was reflected in the tightening of the embargo in 1992. An immigration policy that denied Cubans legal visas while allowing them entry through illegal means created an immigration crisis in the summer of 1994. Ultimately, the United States reversed its policy of preferential treatment for Cubans and sent those attempting to enter the United States illegally to camps at Guantanamo Naval Base and elsewhere. It also entered into new discussions with the Cuban government on immigration but rescinded many travel opportunities and tightened controls on dollar transfers.
Religion and Expressive Culture
Religious Beliefs and Practices. Catholicism has been the principal religion of Cuba, although Methodist, Baptist , and Presbyterian schools, churches, and missions and a number of other religious groups also thrived in the prerevolutionary period. Researchers contend that the Catholic church had less influence and significance in Cuban society than in many other Latin American countries, which in part accounts for reduced hostilities during the period of strong separation between religion and the revolutionary government (1959-1983). The emergence of liberation theology and Cuban government recognition of a role for religion in revolutionary society resulted in improved relations between the churches and the Cuban government in the latter part of the 1980s.
Afro-Cuban Santería, a syncretic religion that draws on both the Yoruba and Catholic cultural heritages, is deeply engrained in Cuban culture and has at least the tacit respect of practitioners of other religions.
Arts. Under the revolutionary government, Cuba has expanded the number of libraries from 100 to 2,000 and of museums from 6 to 250. Workshops and institutes in music, dance, theater, art, ceramics, lithography, photography, and film are available to amateurs and professionals in the 200 casas de cultura, A new film industry and film school have produced internationally acclaimed works, and several publishing houses, of which the Casa de las Américas is the best known, have produced and reproduced an unprecedented number of publications. Political poster art, street theater, and experimental workplace theaters have been distinctive contributions of the revolutionary period. The rich Afro-Hispanic culture, including the traditional guajiro (folk) songs and dances, have been emphasized with new vigor since 1959.
Medicine. Between 1959 and 1964, almost one-half of Cuba's 6,300 physicians left the island, and the United States imposed a trade embargo that cut off essential medicines. As part of its campaign to increase the availability of medical care, Cuba has since trained more than 16,000 doctors. Medical care is completely free and available to all; Cuba has also sent many physicians and other healthcare workers to more than twenty-six countries to provide care, training, and biomedical research. Using the medicalteam approach and emphasizing preventative health care, the government expanded the former mutualistas (health-maintenance organizations) to include urban and rural polyclinics, more rural hospitals, and extensive neighborhood health-education and disease-prevention programs. Modern techniques and equipment available from the socialist bloc improved health-care delivery dramatically.
The rapid decline in the importation of medicine, equipment, and pharmaceutical-industry supplies from the former socialist bloc, and the limited availability of hard currency for purchases created a medical crisis in 19931994. Shortages of food and chemicals for water treatment led to outbreaks of diseases, including an optic and paralytic epidemic that was stemmed only with the help of the international community. Emphasis on herbal and traditionalist methods of treatment has increased with the loss of manufactured medications.
Death and Afterlife. Funeral rituals and beliefs regarding death and afterlife continue to reflect the combined Santería and Roman Catholic heritage.
Bibliography
Bremer, Philip, William LeoGrande, Donna Rich, and Daniel Siegel, eds. (1989). The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society. New York: Grove Press.
Halebsky, Sandor, and John Kirk, eds. (1985). Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 1959-1984. New York: Praeger Special Studies.
Perez, Louis A. (1988). Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, Hugh (1971). Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row.
SUSAN J. FERNÁNDEZ
Crème de Vie (Cuban Eggnog).................................. 120
1 GEOGRAPHIC SETTING AND ENVIRONMENT
The Republic of Cuba consists of one large island and several small ones situated on the northern rim of the Caribbean Sea , about 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Florida . With an area of 110,860 square kilometers (42,803 square miles), Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean. The area occupied by Cuba is slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania .
Cuba's coastline is marked by bays, reefs, keys, and islets. Along the southern coast are long stretches of lowlands and swamps. Slightly more than half the island consists of flat or rolling terrain, and the remainder is hilly or mountainous. Eastern Cuba is dominated by the Sierra Maestra mountains, whose highest peak is Pico Real del Turquino. Central Cuba contains the Trinidad (Escambray) Mountains, and the Sierra de los Órganos is located in the west. The largest river is the Cauto.
Except in the mountains, the climate of Cuba is semitropical or temperate.
2 HISTORY OF FOOD
Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Cuba on October 28, 1492, claiming it in honor of Spain . As colonies were established, the Spanish began mistreating and exploiting the native inhabitants of the island until they were nearly extinct. The colonists resorted to importing black slaves from Africa to operate mines and plantations. As a result, both Spanish and African cultures formed the foundation of Cuban cuisine.
Spanish colonists brought with them citrus fruits, such as oranges and lemons, as well as rice and vegetables. They also grew sugar cane, a major Cuban crop. African slaves were unable to bring any items along with them on their journey to Cuba. They were, however, able to introduce their African culture. The slaves developed a taste for fruits and vegetables such as maize (corn), okra, and cassava. In time, Spanish and African cultures joined together to create several popular dishes, including arroz congri (rice and beans, often known as Moors and Christians ) and tostones (pieces of lightly fried fruit, similar to the banana).
Cuban cuisine, however, drastically changed after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Fidel Castro overthrew the government. Cubans who opposed him began to flee the island, including chefs and restaurant owners. As a result, food shortages became frequent, and food that was still available was of poor quality. As of 2001, Castro was still in power and because of political disagreements with other countries, trade restrictions imposed on Cuba remain, so living conditions and shortages of food have improved little.
Moors and Christians (Black Beans and Rice)
Ingredients
1 cup long-grain white rice
Salt and pepper, to taste
Procedure
If you are using canned beans, drain the water from them and set them aside.
If you are using dry beans, cover them with water. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, and let stand 1 hour. Drain the beans.
Use a large, covered cooking pot and sauté the onion, garlic, and green pepper in the olive oil until tender.
Add the tomato paste, black beans, cumin, and chicken broth.
Add rice, cover and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until rice if fully cooked (about 30 minutes).
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 4 to 6.
Fried Plantains
Note: Ripe plantains have peels that are almost completely black. However, the firm, ripe ones called for in this recipe are black and yellow.
Ingredients
Vegetable oil for frying
Procedure
With a small, sharp knife, cut ends from each plantain. Slice through the peel and remove it.
Cut the fruit into very thin slices, about ⅛-inch thick.
In a large, deep skillet, heat oil (about ¼-inch deep) and fry 12 to 15 plantain slices at a time for 2 to 3 minutes, or until golden, turning them over once.
Use a slotted spoon or spatula to remove cooked slices and place them on paper towels to drain. Season the slices with salt. Plantain slices should be slightly crisp on outside but soft on inside.
The slices are best served immediately; however, they may be made 1 day ahead, cooled completely, and kept in an airtight container.
Reheat plantain slices on a rack in a shallow baking pan in a preheated 350°F oven for 5 minutes, or until heated through.
Serves 8.
3 FOODS OF THE CUBANS
Although Spain and Africa contributed most to Cuban cuisine, the French, Arabic, Chinese, and Portuguese cultures were also influential. Traditional Cuban dishes generally lack seasonings and sauces. Black beans, stews, and meats are the most popular foods. Root vegetables are most often flavored with mojo, a combination of olive oil, lemon juice, onions, garlic, and cumin.
Middle and upper class Cubans, including tourists, usually consume a wider variety of foods, if available. The most common meals include those made with pork, chicken, rice, beans, tomatoes, and lettuce. Hot spices are rarely used in Cuban cooking. Fried (pollo frito ) or grilled (pollo asado ) chicken and grilled pork chops are typically eaten. Beef and seafood are rarely prepared, with the exception of lobster (which is so popular that it is becoming endangered in Cuba). Rabbit (conejo ), when available, is also eaten.
Other common dishes in Cuba are ajiaco (a typical meat, garlic, and vegetable stew), fufú (boiled green bananas mashed into a paste) which is often eaten alongside meat, empanadas de carne (meat-filled pies or pancakes), and piccadillo (a snack of spiced beef, onion, and tomato). Ham and cheese is a common stuffing for fish and steaks, or is eaten alone. The best place to find the freshest fruits and vegetables on the island is at a farmers market. Popular desserts include helado (ice cream), flan (a baked custard), chu (bite-sized puff pastries filled with meringue), churrizo (deep-fried doughnut rings), and galletas (sweet biscuits).
Constant food shortages make finding or ordering certain foods nearly impossible. Economic hardship is another reason for poor food conditions. Cuba often trades its fresh produce, such as cassava, for money from other countries. This leaves a shortage of cassava and other produce in Cuba itself.
Tuna in Sauce
Procedure
Caramel Coating:
Measure sugar, butter, and water into a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring until bubbly and caramel brown. Be careful not to burn the mixture.
Pour into a warm baking dish, reserving a small amount to drizzle on top of finished flan. Roll dish to coat the sides completely with the caramel.
Flan:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Mix all flan ingredients and pour into a 2-quart baking dish that has been lined with a caramel coating (procedure above).
Place pan in a larger pan that contains water. Bake 55 to 65 minutes, or until pudding is soft set.
Chill. Drizzle caramel on top when serving.
Helado de Mango (Tropical Mango Sherbet)
Ingredients
¼ cup sugar
Procedure
In a saucepan, make syrup by combining the water, ½ cup of sugar, and dash of salt. Cook for 5 minutes on medium heat. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
In blender, combine mangoes and cream and blend until smooth and creamy. (If you do not own a blender, you can mash the mangoes with a fork and stir in the cream).
Stir in cooled syrup and lemon juice. Pour the mixture into one 6-cup or two 3-cup shallow pans and freeze until mixture is partially frozen (slushy).
Separate egg whites from eggs one at a time. Discard the yolks, or reserve for use in another recipe.
Beat egg whites to soft foamy peaks and gradually add the remaining ¼ cup sugar.
Place frozen mixture into a chilled mixer bowl, breaking partially frozen mixture into chunks. Beat until smooth.
Carefully mix in the beaten egg whites. Return mixture to freezing container and freeze until firm.
Serves 6 to 8.
4 FOOD FOR RELIGIOUS AND HOLIDAY CELEBRATIONS
Cuba is officially an atheist country (denies the existence of God or a higher being). However, it is estimated that about half of all Cubans are believers of a particular faith.
There are three general faiths that religious Cubans tend to follow: Afro-Cuban religions (saint worship), Judaism , and Christianity . For Christians, celebrating Christmas during the second half of the 1900s was often difficult. For years the government, ruled by Fidel Castro, did not encourage the celebration of a Christian holiday. However, the holiday of Christmas has been making a comeback since the end of the 1990s. Those who celebrate Christmas prepare a large meal on Christmas Eve.
A typical Christmas menu in Cuba might include aceitunas alinadas (marinated olives), ham spread, or ham croquettes (a ham-filled fried cake) for appetizers. Cuban salad, black beans, mashed plantains (fufu ), Cuban bread, Spanish potatoes, white rice, yucca with garlic, and roasted pig may be a typical dinner. For dessert, rice pudding, mango bars, coconut flan, rum cake, Three Milks Cake, or Cuban Christmas cookies may be served. To accompany their meal, Cubans might drink Cuban eggnog, Spanish sparkling hard apple cider, or a Cuban rum and mint drink.
Some Cuban public holidays are January 1 (triumph of the Revolution in 1959); April 4 (Children's Day); May 1 (Labor Day); and December 25 (Christmas Day). During these days, grocery stores are usually closed and people often head for the island's warm beaches to celebrate, often packing food for the trip. On New Year's Eve, a small feast is prepared. At the stroke of midnight, twelve grapes are often eaten (in memory of each month) and cider is served.
Aceitunas Alinadas (Marinated Olives)
Cut the tomatoes into wedges.
Cut the onion in thin slices.
Break up the lettuce by hand.
Toss all the ingredients together with the radishes. Place all the vegetables in the refrigerator to chill.
In a separate bowl, mash the garlic with the salt and pepper.
Add the olive oil, vinegar, and lemon juice to the crushed garlic. Whisk together thoroughly.
Just before serving, gradually add the dressing, a little at a time, while you toss the salad with a large salad fork.
Add just enough dressing to cover the salad. Add more dressing, to taste.
Arroz Con Leche (Rice Pudding)
Ingredients
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Procedure
Before you begin, have a large bowl ready to fill with ice at the end of the cooking time.
Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites one at a time.
Combine the water and sugar and boil until it becomes syrupy.
Let cool.
In another saucepan, heat the evaporated and condensed milk and vanilla over low heat; do not let the mixture boil (if it starts to boil, take the pan off the heat right away.)
Add a little of the hot milk to the egg yolks to warm them.
Then very gradually add the egg yolks to the hot milk mixture.
Heat for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly with a wire whisk.
Remove pan from heat and put pan into large bowl filled with ice to chill the mixture.
While the mixture is cooling, add the syrup and mix well.
Strain the mixture through a coffee filter or a sieve lined with cheesecloth.
Pour into a pitcher or bottle, cover, and refrigerate until ready to serve. (Note: In Cuba, the egg yolks are added to cold milk and are not heated. Heating the yolk mixture thoroughly is recommended.)
5 MEALTIME CUSTOMS
A typical Cuban breakfast, normally served between 7 and 10 a.m., may include a tostada (grilled Cuban bread) and café con leche (espresso coffee with warm milk). The tostada is often broken into pieces and dipped into the coffee. Lunch often consists of empanadas (Cuban sandwiches containing chicken or another meat, topped with pickles and mustard). Pan con bistec, a thin slice of steak on Cuban bread with lettuce, tomatoes, and fried potato sticks, is also popular. Finger foods are popular snacks eaten throughout the day. Pastelitos, small, flaky turnovers (in various shapes) filled with meat, cheese, or fruit (such as guava), are also common snacks. Because Cubans are meat eaters, meat, chicken, or fish will normally be the main dish at dinner. It is almost always served with white rice, black beans, and fried plantains. A small salad of sliced tomatoes and lettuce may also be served.
Fast food establishments exist in Cuba, though popular U.S. chains, such as McDonald's or Burger King, have not yet set up restaurants on the island. However, a chain similar to KFC, called El Rápido, opened in 1995. Burgui, a chain similar to McDonald's, has restaurants throughout major Cuban cities and is open twenty-four hours.
Cuban restaurants are almost entirely government-owned. They have a reputation for providing slow service and bland meals. Privately owned restaurants, called paladares, normally serve a better meal, but are under strict government guidelines. Paladares are not allowed to sell shrimp or lobster, and are only allowed to serve up to twelve people at one table. However, most paladares serve these dishes anyway. Government-owned restaurants often try to disguise themselves as being privately owned to attract more customers. In Cuban restaurants it is common to have several menu items unavailable due to shortages of food. Some of the highest quality of food on the island is often found at expensive hotels that mostly serve tourists.
6 POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND NUTRITION
About 19 percent of the population of Cuba is classified as undernourished by the World Bank. This means they do not receive adequate nutrition in their diet. About 9 percent of babies born in 1993 were considered to have low birth weight, a possible sign of inadequate prenatal (pregnancy) care. After the 1959 Cuban revolution and a decreased level of support from outside countries, some areas of social and health services began to fall behind.
Despite almost one-fifth of the population being undernourished, and a continuously unsettled economy, Cubans are in relatively good health. In 1993, nearly 100 percent of the population had access to free health care, and safe water was available to nearly all (95 percent) in 1995. Almost all doctors work for rural medical services after graduation, allowing rural Cubans to have nearly equal health care services as those who live in Cuba's larger cities. Having access to doctors and various health care services may help to reduce the cases of malnourishment in children.
7 FURTHER STUDY
Allan Amsel Publishing. Traveler's Cuba Companion. Saybrook, CT: The Globe Pequot Press, 1999.
Baker, Christopher P. Moon Handbooks: Cuba. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Travel Publishing, 2000.
Fallon, Stephen. Guide to Cuba, 2nd ed. England : Bradt Publications, 1997.
Lonely Planet: Cuba, 2nd ed. Victoria, Australia : Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd., 2000.
Web Sites
Cuba Cultural Travel. [Online] Available http://www.cubaculturaltravel.com/religion.html (accessed February 22, 2001).
Cuban Food Recipes. [Online] Available http://icuban.com/food/ (accessed February 21, 2001).
CUBAVIP.COM. [Online] Available http://www.cubanculture.com/english/cocina.htm/ (accessed February 21, 2001).
Facts About Cuba: Cuba's History. [Online] Available http://icuban.com/facts/history.html/ (accessed February 21, 2001).
Three Guys from Miami : The Traditional Cuban Christmas. [Online] Available http://icuban.com/3guys/xmas.html/ (accessed February 21, 2001).
Cite this article
RELIGION: Discouraged by the communist government, but Roman Catholicism and Santeria are practiced.
1 • INTRODUCTION
Cuba was discovered and claimed for Spain by Christopher Columbus during his first voyage to the New World in 1492. Columbus did not realize that Cuba was an island. Except for a brief occupation by the English, Cuba remained a Spanish colony until the end of the nineteenth century.
Cuban patriarch, José Marti (1853–95), along with key military figures Antonio Maceo (1845–96), Máximo Gomez (1836–1905), and Calixto Garcia (1839–98), led a historic War of Independence against the Spanish in 1895. In 1898 a U.S. battleship, the Maine , was blown up in the Havana harbor, resulting in the United States declaring war on Spain. Then a colonel, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was among the Americans who defeated the Spanish. As a result of losing this Spanish-American War , Spain gave Cuba to the United States under the Treaty of Paris . On May 20, 1902, the United States ended its military occupation of Cuba, and the Cuban republic was created under its first president, Tomas Estrada Palma (1835–1908). The United States and Cuba maintained close ties, and Cuba leased naval bases at Rio Hondo and Guantanamo Bay to the United States.
Governments in Cuba during the early and mid-twentieth century were often corrupt and changed frequently. In spite of an unsettled political climate, Cuba's natural beauty made it a popular vacation spot for Americans and people from all over the world. In 1959, Fidel Castro's (1926–) guerrilla movement, that is warfare carried on by small forces of soldiers making surprise raids, successfully overthrew the existing corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1901–73). Castro established a long-standing relationship with the Soviet Union and led Cuba into communism. Over the next few years, approximately 1 million Cubans left home, most fleeing to the United States. In January 1961, the United States declared an economic blockade of Cuba, halting the export of American goods to the island. In April of that year, CIA-trained Cuban exiles staged the Bay of Pigs invasion. The attempt failed to collapse the Castro regime. Perhaps the most tense period of the Cold War occurred when the United States discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba. This Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved in 1962 when the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles and the United States promised never to invade Cuba. Cuba has remained the only communist government in the Western hemisphere.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba has continued to experience political and economic unrest. Tens of thousands of Cubans have left the country, even risking their lives in makeshift rafts in an effort to flee.
2 • LOCATION
A country of approximately 11 million people, Cuba is the largest island in the Antilles archipelago (chain of islands) in the Caribbean Sea . It is approximately 90 miles south of Florida . The island's terrain is very diverse. Approximately one-third of the island consists of three extensive mountain systems: the Sierra Maestra (where Castro formulated his guerrilla-style revolution), the Guamuhaya, and the Guaniguanico. There are nearly 200 rivers; mostly short, narrow, and shallow. Two wide-ranging plains account for the remaining two-thirds of the island and these plains are where most of the population lives. The combination of trade winds, warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and sea breezes gives Cuba a moderate and stable climate. Sugar is the island's key export. Nickel is the main mineral found on the island, making Cuba the fourth largest exporter of nickel in the world. Cuba is home to a number of rare birds and animals, many found nowhere else. The island's Bee hummingbird is the world's smallest bird, measuring just two inches in length.
3 • LANGUAGE
Cubans speak Spanish. Their names are composed of three parts: first (given) name, father's surname, and mother's maiden name; for example, Jose Garcia Fernandez.
4 • FOLKLORE
One of the better-known examples of Cuban folklore is El Bizarron, the story of a man who outsmarts the devil. Most of Cuba's heroes, however, come not from folklore but from real life. José Marti, who masterminded the War of Independence, is without a doubt Cuba's national hero. Marti is also known for his inspiring prose and poetry. The verses of his most famous poem, "The White Rose," have been set to music in what is Cuba's most poignant song, La Guantanamera.
Fidel Castro is the modern idol in Cuba. He stands for all that is the Revolution and for this he is honored by some and despised by others. He is known for delivering long and dramatic speeches. In 1956, Castro, Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–67), Castro's younger brother, Raul (1931–), and other revolutionaries were on a yacht traveling from Mexico to Cuba, when the yacht was captured by Batista. Castro and the others headed for the hills of the Sierra Maestra where they began the three-year revolution that ended the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in 1959. At one point, their invasion force consisted of only twelve men.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara's picture can be found throughout Cuba on murals and billboards. A key person in Castro's revolution, Guevara has been elevated to a stature usually reserved in other cultures for martyrs and saints. Cuban schoolchildren begin their day by reciting the patriotic slogan, "Pioneers of communism, we shall be like Che." Originally a medical doctor from Argentina , after the revolution in Cuba, Guevara served as president of the National Bank of Cuba. He resigned that post in 1965 and went to Bolivia to join the revolutionary movement in that country. He was killed by the Bolivian army in 1967. Castro declared a three-day period of national mourning in Cuba, and even now the government sponsors campaigns with themes of "Let's Be Like Che."
5 • RELIGION
As a communist country, Cuba has officially condemned participation in religion. Nonetheless, many Cubans maintain a Catholic tradition, although they do so secretly for fear of punishment. Much more openly practiced is Santeria, an African-based religion introduced into Cuba by slaves brought in from Africa in the late 1700s. The rough equivalent of a priest in Santeria is known as a babalao. When one is initiated into Santeria, he or she dresses completely in white clothing for one year.
6 • MAJOR HOLIDAYS
Major holidays in Cuba mark significant events in the revolution: January 1 and July 26. May Day, a communist holiday worldwide, is an official holiday, as is October10 which marks the historic revolt against Spain that began in 1868. Catholics honor Three Kings Day on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany.
7 • RITES OF PASSAGE
Girls in Cuba sometimes celebrate turning fifteen years old with los quince (literally, "the 15"), the Latin American version of a "sweet sixteen" party. Often los quince is celebrated as festively as a wedding. The young lady will usually wear an extravagant gown made especially for the occasion.
8 • RELATIONSHIPS
Cubans are known for their warmth, wit, sense of humor, and resilience. They greet each other by shaking hands and by saying hola (hello). Like other Latin peoples, Cubans are known for using very expressive body language—wrinkling one's nose, for instance, means "What?" Traditionally, when young women went on dates, they brought along a chaperona (chaperone), although this has recently gone out of fashion.
9 • LIVING CONDITIONS
The Soviet Union sent aid to the island nation of Cuba. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba has gone through what it calls the "Special Period"—a mandatory belt-tightening, or cutting back on its standard of living. Energy consumption has been drastically reduced, food rations are low, and people get around on bicycles. Patients must bring their own bed-sheets to the hospital, and surgeons are given one bar of soap per month with which to wash their hands. Macetas are people who illegally buy and sell goods such as food, clothes, liquor, medicine cigarettes, and gasoline. In sharp contrast to the living conditions of the local people, tourists enjoy the best accommodations, food, and drink that Cuba can offer.
10 • FAMILY LIFE
Extended families often live together for traditional and economic reasons. Often one or more grandparent lives with a married couple and their children. For economic reasons, children also tend to live at home until they marry.
Women are expected to work outside the home and are also expected to cook, clean, and take care of the home.
11 • CLOTHING
People normally wear casual Western-style clothing. As in so many parts of the world, blue jeans from the United States are a popular commodity. The guayabera, an embroidered man's shirt, is a traditional and elegant article of clothing that is still worn today for both formal and informal occasions.
12 • FOOD
Like other aspects of Cuban culture, traditional Cuban foods are rich in both Spanish and African influences. Pork, the meat of choice in a traditional meal, is almost always accompanied by rice and beans. When white rice and black beans are cooked together, they are called arroz congri, which literally means "rice with gray." Black beans, prepared many different ways, are a Cuban specialty.
Fried green plantains, called tostones or mariquitas, and ripe plantains, or maduros, round out the meal. Yuca (cassava), malanga (taro), and boniato (sweet potato) are also commonly served in traditional meals. Typical fruits include avocados, mangoes, guavas, and papayas. Customary beverages include guarapo (sugarcane juice) and rum.
Poor economic conditions that resulted in reduced food rations have made the traditional meal a thing of the past. Rations under the Special Period consist of a piece of bread per person per day, three eggs per week, and a portion of fish or chicken per month. Milk is available only for children under the age of eight. Rice and beans are hard to get and many Cubans have not had beef or pork in years. On the black market, a piece of beef can cost as much as a month's wages.
13 • EDUCATION
Education is free and compulsory up to the age of seventeen. There are more than four hundred schools and colleges in rural areas where students divide their time between working in agriculture and the classroom. Shortages have made it necessary for textbooks to be shared and workbooks to be erased and passed along to the next class. Higher education is also free. Scientific and technical fields are emphasized. The University of Havana, founded in 1728, is the leading institution of higher education on the island. Cuba's government initiated a campaign to wipe out illiteracy in 1961 and now has one of the highest literacy rates, at 94 percent, in all of Latin America .
14 • CULTURAL HERITAGE
Music is probably the most important aspect of Cuba's popular culture. Cuban music combines Spanish and African influences. Typical music styles include charanga, son, rumba, mambo, cha-cha-cha, and danzon. From a blend of these rhythms evolved salsa which literally means "sauce." Celia Cruz, known all over the world as the Queen of Salsa, began her career in Havana in the late 1940s with a group named Sonora Matanzera. In addition to traditional music, Cubans teenagers enjoy rock and roll, both Cuban and American versions.
In Cuba, ballet is to the fine arts what baseball is to sports: the top. The Cuban National Ballet Company, founded by its leader and star performer, Alicia Alonso, has performed all over the world. She is considered one of the best ballet dancers of all time.
Several Cuban writers and poets, including José Marti and Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), have left their mark upon Latin American literature. A notable poet, Herberto Padilla, whose collection of poems, Out of the Game, received praise worldwide but was banned in Cuba, was even arrested.
Before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Cuban painters and sculptors demonstrated European influences. Postrevolutionary artists like Manuel Mendive (1944–) have incorporated Afro-Cuban mythology and folklore into their work. Many artists have produced works that protest government policies, although artists who disagree with the Revolution may be persecuted.
15 • EMPLOYMENT
The labor force in Cuba is divided almost evenly among service-related jobs, agriculture, trade, manufacturing and mining, and utilities. Jobs in tourism are highly desirable because of their access to U.S. dollars and foreign goods. Even teachers, doctors, and engineers have left their professions to work in tourism jobs because they can earn more money.
16 • SPORTS
Sports are a very important part of Cuban life and identity. "Sports is a right of the people," reads a banner inside the arena in the athletic complex in Havana. Castro, himself an athlete and sports enthusiast, was once offered a contract to pitch on a baseball team in the United States. At the age of eight or nine, outstanding young Cuban athletes are selected to attend a boarding school where they take academic courses and play various sports.
Cuba has been referred to as "the best little sports machine in the world," consistently turning out champion Olympic athletes. In 1992, Cuba won more Olympic medals per capita than any other country. Cubans excel in baseball, boxing, track and field, and volleyball. Top Cuban athletes are heroes in their society, but unlike the highly paid athletes in the United States, they only earn about two to four times the salary of the average Cuban.
17 • RECREATION
Cuba's state-run television stations are on the air from six to twelve hours a day broadcasting sports programs, novelas (soap operas from Latin America), and some recent American movies. Young Cubans rarely sit home watching television. When they are not playing sports, young people are often involved in government youth programs, some of which operate computer instruction centers. Older Cubans enjoy playing dominoes and chess, sitting in ice cream parlors, and strolling along the water-front.
18 • CRAFTS AND HOBBIES
Handmade Cuban cigars, considered the finest in the world, are as much a craft as they are an important export. More than three million are produced each year, one at a time. An experienced worker can make a cigar from start to finish in just two minutes.
19 • SOCIAL PROBLEMS
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, an already struggling Cuban economy took a turn for the worse. Many of the social problems in Cuba can be related to its poverty.
The Cuban government is often accused of violating human rights. Members of neighborhood watch groups report nonconformist behavior to the government. Paramilitary agents deal harshly with protesters.
Tourism has been good for the economy, but locals are not allowed into the resorts unless accompanied by foreign tourists. Very few blacks are in the upper levels of government. Banned from membership in the Communist party, gays and lesbians are openly discriminated against, and AIDS sufferers are quarantined.
20 • BIBLIOGRAPHY
Oppenheimer, Andres. Castro's Final Hour. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Perez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Suchlicki, Jaime. Cuba from Columbus to Castro. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974.
WEBSITES
Internet Factory. Cuba. [Online] Available http://www.cubaweb.com/eng/index.html , 1998.
Ruiz-Garcia, Pedro. The Latino Connection. [Online] Available http://www.ascinsa.com/LATINOCONNECTION/cuba.html, 1998.
World Travel Guide, Cuba. [Online] Available http://www.wtgonline.com/country/cu/gen.html, 1998.
Cite this article
Official name: Republic of Cuba
Area: 110,860 square kilometers (42,803 square miles)
Highest point on mainland : Pico Turquino (2,005 meters/6,578 feet)
Lowest point on land: Sea level
Hemispheres : Northern and Western
Time zone: 7 a.m. = noon GMT
Longest distances: 89 kilometers (55 miles) from north to south; 1,223 kilometers (760 miles) from east to west
Land boundaries : None
Coastline: 3,735 kilometers (2,017 miles)
Territorial sea limits: 22 kilometers (12 nautical miles)
1 LOCATION AND SIZE
The long, narrow island of Cuba has a shape that has been compared to a cigar caught between the fingers of Florida and the Yucatán Peninsula. It is flanked by Jamaica on the south, Hispaniola on the southeast, and the Bahamas on the northeast. Slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania , Cuba extends some 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from Cape Maisí on the east to Cape San Antonio on the west, about the distance from New York to Chicago . The largest of the West Indian islands, its territory almost equals that of all the other islands combined. In addition to the main island, the Cuban archipelago includes the Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Pines) near the south coast in the Gulf of Batabanó plus over one thousand coastal cays and islets.
2 TERRITORIES AND DEPENDENCIES
Cuba has no territories or dependencies.
3 CLIMATE
Cuba has a pleasant subtropical climate strongly influenced by gentle northeast trade winds, which shift slightly to the east in the summer. The island's long, tapered shape allows the moderating sea breezes to cool all regions, and there are no pronounced seasonal variations in temperature. July and August are the warmest months, and February is the coolest. The wet summer season is between May and October, and the drier winter season runs from November through April. Annual rainfall averages over 180 centimeters (70 inches) in the mountains, 90 to 140 centimeters (35 to 55 inches) in the lowlands, and 65 centimeters (26 inches) at Guantanamo Bay. On average, rain falls on Cuba 85 to 100 days per year with three-quarters of it falling during the wet season. The humidity varies between 75 percent and 95 percent year-round. The eastern coast is subject to hurricanes from August to October, and the country averages about one hurricane every year. Droughts are also common.
Season
22°C (72°F)
4 TOPOGRAPHIC REGIONS
Well over half of the terrain consists of flat or rolling plains with a great deal of rich soil well suited to the cultivation of sugarcane, the dominant crop. There are rugged hills and mountains in the southeast, and the most extensive mountainous zone of Cuba lies near its eastern extremity. Smaller mountain zones with lower elevations occur near the midsection and in the far west.
5 OCEANS AND SEAS
Cuba is cradled between the Caribbean Sea to its south, the North Atlantic Ocean to its northeast, and the Gulf of Mexico to its northwest.
Seacoast and Undersea Features
Cuba is surrounded by coral reefs.
Sea Inlets and Straits
Cuba is separated from Florida to the north by the Straits of Florida, and from Hispaniola to the southeast by the narrow Windward Passage. Off the central northern coast, the sea-lane of the Old Bahama Channel at some points is only ten miles wide as it passes between the Cuban shelf and the shallows of the Great Bahama Bank. The Gulf of Batabanó borders the northwestern end of Cuba's Caribbean coast.
Islands and Archipelagos
The 220-square-kilometer (570-square-mile) Isla de la Juventud is the westernmost island in a chain of smaller islands, the Archipiélago de los Canarreos, which extends 110 kilometers (68 miles) across the Gulf of Batabanó. The extreme northwestern coast of Cuba is flanked by the Archipiélago de los Colorados. Offshore to the north of Sagua la Grande lie the islands of the Archipiélago de Sabana. East of those islands, stretching around the coast from Morón to Neuyitas, is the Archipiélago de Camagüey, the largest of the archipelagos that surround Cuba. Overall, about 4,200 coral cays and islets surround Cuba, most of them low-lying and uninhabited.
Coastal Features
Except for near its western tip, a wealth of excellent harbors indent Cuba's shoreline. The coastline includes more than 289 natural beaches. In the north, the beaches tend to be longer and whiter with rolling surf and undertow, while the southern beaches are darker, feature sea urchins, and are rockier or more swampy. While rugged beaches comprise most of the northern coast, swamps still occur there, as well as on the Isla de la Juventud.
Cuba's coastline is indented by some of the world's finest natural harbors. There are about two hundred in all, and many are shaped like pouches or bottlenecks, with narrow entrances that broaden into spacious deepwater anchorages. Ports on the north coast with these kinds of harbors include Mariel, Havana , and Nueyitas. South coast bottleneck ports include Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, and Crenfuegos. The principal open bay ports, Cárdenas and Matanzas, are located on the north coast.
6 INLAND LAKES
There are no large lakes in Cuba, but many coastal swamplands extend throughout the country. Zapata Swamp, the largest on the island, covers more than 4,403 square kilometers (1,700 square miles) on the Zapata Peninsula.
7 RIVERS AND WATERFALLS
About two hundred rivers run northward or southward from an interior watershed and are predominantly short and rapid. They provide good drainage but are not generally suitable for navigation.
8 DESERTS
There are no deserts on Cuba.
9 FLAT AND ROLLING TERRAIN
Almost two-thirds of the Cuban landscape consists of flatlands and rolling plains. Cattle graze on these fertile flatlands, and sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco are grown there. Three-fourths of the national territory consists of grasslands, hills, and the lower and gentler mountain slopes.
10 MOUNTAINS AND VOLCANOES
The Oriental, Central, and Occidental Mountains cover 25 percent of the country. The loftiest mountain system is the Sierra Maestra; it is the steepest of the Cuban ranges, and its peaks include the country's highest summit: Pico Turquino, at 2,005 meters (6,578 feet). The southeastern tip of the island is mostly mountainous and includes such ranges as the Sierra de Nipe, the Sierra de Nicaro, the Sierra del Cristal, and the Cuchillas de Toa. The Escam-bray Mountains are the principal mountains of central Cuba. They are located in the southern part of that region, and are separated by the Agabama River into two ranges: the Sierra de Trinidad in the west and the Sierra de Sancti Spíritus in the east. The principal ranges of the western highlands are the Sierra del Rosario and the Sierra de los Organos.
11 CANYONS AND CAVES
The limestone formations known as karst are most characteristic of the western highlands, where they form numerous sinkholes and underground caverns.
12 PLATEAUS AND MONOLITHS
Situated in Cuba's western highlands, known collectively as the Cordillera de Guaniguanico, are limestone formations weathered into strange shapes. Ranks of tall, erosion-resistant limestone columns resembling organ pipes gave the Sierra de los Organos its name.
13 MAN-MADE FEATURES
Cuba's infrastructure includes such impressive engineering feats as: the Havana Sewer Tunnel (1912); the Carretera Central (Central Road) (1931), a 1,139-kilometer (708-mile) thoroughfare that spans the island from west to east; the Bay Tunnel (1958), which expanded access to eastern Havana by allowing travel under Havana Bay; and the Viaducto de La Farola (La Farola Viaduct) (1965) connecting Guantánamo and Baracoa.
DID YOU KNOW?
Desembarco del Granma National Park, a park in southwest Cuba near Cabo Cruz, features dramatic cliffs lining the shore of the Atlantic Ocean , as well as limestone terraces uplifted by geological forces.
14 FURTHER READING
Baker, Christopher. Moon Handbooks: Cuba. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Travel Publishing, 2000.
Coe, Andrew. Cuba. Lincolnwood, IL: Passport Books, 1997.
Stanley, David. Cuba. Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet, 2000.
Web Sites
About Cuba. http://www.culturecuba.com/cuba/ (accessed June 13, 2003).
Directorio Turistico de Cuba. http://www.dtcuba.com/eng/default.asp (accessed June 13, 2003).
Cite this article
Republic of Cuba
Orientation
Identification. Christopher Columbus landed on the island in 1492 and named it Juana after Prince Juan, the heir apparent to the throne of Castille. The name "Cuba," an abbreviation of the indigenous word Cubanacán, held sway.
Location and Geography. The island lies about ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. Its western tip begins about 125 miles (210 kilometers) from Cancún and extends 750 miles (1,207 kilometers) east-southeast. The area of the country is 48,800 square miles (110,860 square kilometers). About a third of the island is mountainous, consisting of the Guaniguanco chain in the western province of Pinar del Rio, the Escambrey in the south-central province of Las Villas, and the largest system, the Sierra Maestra, in the western province of Oriente. Between these mountain systems is a large plain in the western province of Matanzas and another in the eastern province of Camaguëy. Since the European conquest, the western third of the island has exercised military, political, economic, and cultural dominance.
The capital is Havana on the northern coast of the western third of the island. The second largest city is Santiago de Cuba in the province of Oriente, where the Roman Catholic archbishopric was established in the colonial era. Although Santiago sometimes is called the "second capital," the economic importance of the port of Havana has given it a hugely disproportionate role in the definition of the national culture.
Demography. Recent population estimates range from 11.06 million to 11.17 million. At least 50 percent of the population is classified as mulatto (mixed African and European descent), although the cultural privilege assigned to whiteness probably causes many mulattos to minimize their African heritage. Thirty-seven percent of the population claims to be exclusively white, and 11 percent is classified as "negro." The remaining 1 percent is Chinese, the result of the importation of 132,000 Chinese indentured laborers between 1853 and 1872 to replace the loss of labor caused by the impending end of African slavery. In 1862 the African population was larger than that of whites. Although the larger slave-holding plantations were in the west, escaped and emancipated slaves often fled east, where they could more easily hide or establish themselves on small unclaimed plots of land in Oriente. Thus, it is there that Afrocuban art, religion, and music were most strongly expressed and the cultural movement "afrocubanismo" began.
Linguistic Affiliation. Nearly all Cubans speak Spanish exclusively. The dialect is similar to that in the other Hispanic Caribbean islands, although the rhythmic speaking and the use of highly expressive hand gestures are distinctly Cuban. Languages spoken by the indigenous population are extinct. French was spoken for a short time by slave-holding European refugees from the 1791 Haitian revolution but this has since died out.
Symbolism. The three major symbols of national identity have arisen from the three struggles for independence. The national anthem was composed at the start of the first war for independence, the Ten Years War (1868-1878). It is a call to arms that evokes the image of the peasants of the town of Bayamo in the eastern heartland. The second national symbol is the flag. It has a white star imposed on a red triangle, modeled on the triangular symbol of the Masonic lodges in which the struggle against Spain was organized. The triangle is imposed on three blue stripes alternating with two white stripes. The third symbol of national pride and independence is the flag of the 26th July Movement, which contains the black initials M26J (Movimiento 26 de Julio) on a field of red. The M26J flag commemorates Castro's attack on the army barracks at Moncada and served as a symbol of resistance to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the imperialism of the United States , which openly supported him. Afrocuban music and dance were also appropriated as symbols of the nation beginning in 1898, when the United States invaded the island, and especially after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.
History and Ethnic Relations
Emergence of the Nation. The Cuban nation has arisen from a history of colonial and imperial domination. Formal colonial status under Spain was ended only by the invasion by the United States in 1898, when military and corporate interests made the island a de facto colony of the United States.
After the triumph of the Revolution on 1 January 1959, Cuba became truly independent for the first time since the colonial invasion of 1511.
The Pre-Columbian population was about 112,000, consisting mostly of Arawak (Taino and Sub-Taino) in the central and eastern region and a few Ciboneys (also called Guanahacabibes) who had fled the advance of the Arawak and moved west to Pinar del Rio. Indigenous lands were quickly distributed to European conquistadors and gold prospectors, and indigenous persons were enslaved and given to Europeans for use in mining and agricultural projects (a system called the encomienda ). Indigenous people who resisted were murdered. Malnutrition, overwork, suicide, and brutality made the indigenous population virtually extinct within fifty years of the conquest.
The indigenous past was largely abandoned and forgotten, save only a few cultural survivals in language and architecture. The only people left on the island were peninsulares (those born in Spain), creoles (colonists of European decent who were born on the island), and African slaves. The struggle between these three groups determined the character of the colony and the meaning of Cuban-ness (cubanidad ). Peninsulares came to earn their fortunes and return to Spain. Their privileged status as colonizers depended on the maintenance of colonial structures; thus, their loyalty was to Spain even if they were lifelong residents of the colony. Peninsulares had an almost exclusive claim to administrative (governmental) offices and ecclesiastical appointments and a near monopoly on much trade with Spain and other nations.
The peninsulares' privileges and wealth evoked the resentment of the creoles, who outnumbered them. There were creole elites, especially merchants in Havana, whose privilege was dependent on the colonial status of the island, but most eastern creoles increasingly saw their interests as opposed to those of Spain. Their emerging nationalist sentiment was countered by increasing anxiety among the African majority. After the British occupation of Havana in 1752, slaves who had been stolen from Africa comprised the majority of the population. After the Haitian revolution of 1791, creoles and peninsulares thought that only the presence of the Spanish army could maintain order and their privilege. This fear added to the reluctance of the slave-holding creole elite to support the movement for independence. But the eastern planters had less to fear from a slave revolt, since their farms were much smaller and had far fewer slaves.
Hence, the contestation over the meaning of Cubanness was between eastern planters, African slaves, freed blacks, impoverished white farmers, and urban workers one the one side, and peninsulares and western creole elites on the other side. Planters in Oriente organized for revolution in Masonic lodges, since the Catholic churches were staffed by Spanish clergy. In 1868, the eastern planters, loosely organized into a Liberation Army, declared war on Spain by issuing the "Shout from Yara," which called for complete freedom from colonialism, declaring gradual and indemnified emancipation of slavery, and imploring western planters to join the struggle for independence. This "Ten Years War" failed, but not before causing economic ruin, especially in Oriente and Camagüey. The Pact of Zanjón in 1878 ended the war and promised reform, but many of the surviving belligerents were dissatisfied with the maintenance of colonial authority, and the reforms were not forthcoming. The Afrocuban General Antonio Maceo continued skirmishing but finally conceded defeat in 1880.
Over the next seventeen years, the efforts of the poet and statesman José Martí, "Father of the Cuban Nation," gave the independence cause a cohesive political ideology which the first insurrection had lacked. Working from the United States, he formed the Revolutionary Junta to raise money and awareness. United States capitalists largely favored independence, since the removal of Spain would leave the island defenseless against an economic invasion; using "freedom" and "democracy" as the ideological excuse, they asked the United States government to intervene on behalf of the independence movement.
That movement had become stronger economically and militarily, and even some western planters began to favor independence. When war broke out in Oriente in 1895, the belligerents had a better organized civil organization and a more aggressive military strategy. Indeed, the war was almost won by 1898, and Spain was ready to negotiate independence. However, when an explosion sank the USS Maine in Havana harbor, U.S. businessmen and war-hungry Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt seized on the excuse to invade Cuba. The United States blamed Spain for the explosion and declared war on it. Spain was quickly defeated, and in the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the United States claimed ownership of the remaining Spanish colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico , and the Philippines ).
Imminent victory for Cuban independence fighters had been stolen by another colonial power, the United States. Cubans protested. In 1901, the United States agreed to withdraw from Cuba militarily, but only under extreme conditions, including a ninety-nine year lease to a naval base at Guantánamo in Oriente, veto power over trade and military treaties, and the right to intervene in the island's internal affairs. The legislation containing these conditions, the Platt Amendment, was drafted in Washington and inserted verbatim into the first Cuban constitution of 1902.
In 1906, Cubans again protested United States intervention, prompting another military occupation that lasted until 1909. The United States ambassador became the de facto head of state by virtue of his ability to command another invasion. The Cuba Colonizing Company, a U.S. corporation, sold land to any United States citizen who wished to profit from cheap lands, gradually transforming ownership of the island to non-Cubans. Some Cubans benefitted from this arrangement, but most resented it to no small extent. When the United States allowed President Gerado Machado y Morales to make himself a dictator (1924–1933) and ignore civil law in favor of violence and corruption, Cubans promulgated a new constitution that abnegated the hated Platt Amendment, although it left the Guantánamo naval base intact. But hopes for independence were again dashed when Fulgencio Batista, who had in 1934 staged a coup to install himself as a military dictator, seized power again in 1952 and removed the elected president. United States support of the Batista dictatorship enraged the majority of Cubans.
One year later in 1953 a small group of independence fighters attacked the Moncada army barracks in Oriente. They were quickly defeated, and most were summarily executed. The leader of the attack, a lawyer named Fidel Castro Ruz, was saved by the intervention of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Santiago de Cuba. At his trial, Castro delivered a five-hour speech entitled "History Will Absolve Me," the publication of which disseminated his message of true independence. The date of the attack became the name of a national revolutionary movement, the Movimiento 26 de Julio.
When Castro was released from jail, he, along with his brother Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and a small group of revolutionaries fled to Mexico to plan another military attack. Castro himself traveled to New York and Miami to raise funds. On 2 December 1956, the small group landed about one hundred miles west of Santiago in a small ship named "Granma." Nearly all were captured, but the three leaders and a few others fled into the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they were joined by thousands of Cubans. The guerillas were supported with food, water, and shelter by the peasants of Oriente, nearly all of whom wanted an end to not only the Batista dictatorship but also to its chief sponsor, the United States military.
The guerillas were vastly outgunned by Batista's U. S. army-trained and equipped military forces, but they had the support of the population, knowledge of the terrain, the cooperation of some army deserters, and the work of nonmilitary revolutionaries in other parts of the island. The "Revolutionary Directorate" of University of Havana students, the Communist Party, and the 26 July Movement had been sabotaging Batista since the Moncada attack. With such a cooperative effort, it took only three years to topple the dictator.
When they entered Havana in tanks at the end of December 1958, the guerrillas were greeted by millions of ebullient Cubans. Batista had fled to Miami with $300 million (U.S.) of embezzled funds, soon to be joined by other wealthy Cubans who had profited from his dictatorship. For the first time since the European conquest, Cuba was free. When on 8 January 1959 Castro spoke to the masses in Havana, a white dove is said to have alighted on his shoulder, proving to many Cubans that the Revolution had indeed been an act of God .
National Identity. There are several ways in which the development of a national culture can be traced. Afrocuban cultural forms, particularly music and dance, were crucial to the definition of the new nation during the neocolonial republic. Afrocubanismo, the syncretic result of the African majority's culture and that of the dominant European minority, was the "conceptual framework of modern Cuban culture." African rhythms were inserted into popular music, and the Eurocuban dances "danza" and "contra-danza" and the Afrocuban dances "son" and rhumba became popular. When Cuba was threatened with a diminution of its national identity because of the U.S. economic colonialism beginning in 1898, nationalist sentiment found in the Afrocuban music and dance of Oriente province a unique Cubanness free of foreign cultural and ideological influence. For a time, Afrocubanismo was the centerpiece of nationalist representation.
But a different political/ideological agenda stresses the appropriation of United States cultural, ideological, and political ideas in the development of the Cuban character. Though products and ideas did flow from north to south and back again, this argument contains an extreme privileging of the upper classes and white Cubans over the majority, reducing all of culture to the materialism of the rich, who bought American fashion, Cadillacs, and appliances, and sent their children to expensive North American private schools. But there was a world of cultural production which had nothing at all to do with North America and was quite independent of its influences, such as Afrocubanism in Oriente. Probably since 1898 and certainly since 1959, Cubanness has been informed by a proud nationalism, and Cuban nationalism is configured as precisely the opposite of everything "American." Resentment over the two military invasions of 1898 and 1906, the suffocating economic imperialism from 1902-1959, and the internationally-censured economic embargo has caused most Cubans to reject everything North American. Indeed, the more the United States government tries to strangle the Cuban people with its clearly unsuccessful embargo, and the more right-wing the Cuban American Foundation becomes, the stronger Cubans' commitment to the Revolution grows. Even those who might otherwise resist the Castro government are moved to defend the ideal of Cuba Libre. And since the most vehement opponent of the Revolution is the United States, a country which attempted to colonize Cuba just 50 years ago, the Revolution can convincingly claim to be the sole option for freedom.
Ethnic Relations. Martídeclared in the 1890s that there were no blacks or whites in Cuba, only Cubans, but this was more an ideological call to unity against the colonial powers than a description of reality. Neither the gradual abolition of slavery from 1880 to 1886 nor the transfer of power from Spain to the United States alleviated the racial tension that was a heritage of slavery. After the abolition of slavery in 1886, Afro-Cubans organized in the Central Directorate of Societies of the Race of Color. Nine years later, as much as 85 percent of the rebel army was composed of black soldiers, who expected that when the war was won they would have an improved position in society. When that did not happen, Afro-Cubans founded the Independent Party of Color in 1908, but this was banned in 1910. In 1912, a protest of that ban led to a massacre of Afro-Cubans in Oriente. In the following years, the marginalization of darker mulattos and Afro-Cubans continued despite the popularity of Afrocuban music and dance.
The Revolution of 1952–1959 declared the establishment of an egalitarian society, and since racism was a product of capitalism it was assumed that it would disappear under socialism. But even today, Afro-Cubans are effectively absent in the highest levels of the government. Castro admitted in 1986 that more Afro-Cubans and women should be represented in the Central Committee, but racism is deeply embedded in the white Cuban ideology. Cubans are acutely aware of fine gradations in phenotypes and have words to describe every shade of brown and black.
Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space
In the colonial period, the port of Havana was strategically valuable as a military post, administrative center, and shipping port. For this reason, Havana has been privileged in terms of public expenditures, economic investment, health and educational institutions, and physical infrastructure. When the Revolution came to power, it faced the task of equalizing differential development within Havana and between it and the rest of the island. When the wealthiest Cubans fled to Miami, their mansions were distributed to poor working people. Unequal urban–rural development was dramatically transformed by the state's installation of plumbing and electricity in remote rural areas; the building of hospitals, schools, and day care centers in small towns; and a raising of the rural standard of living so that it was closer to that in Havana. Since 1990, the economic crisis has again so impoverished the countryside that rural people have poured into Havana to seek jobs in the tourism sector. To stem this tide, the regime has made it illegal for persons from other provinces to reside in the city.
Cubans are accustomed to being in close quarters both at home and in public; the culture does not value privacy and private space as highly as does United States culture. Socializing often takes place on the street or in line for food and goods. Cubans are not defensive even of bodily space: physical affection is commonly displayed, and physical contact among strangers is not problematic. Being in constant relation with others, socializing in groups, and sharing both social space and body space are the norm. In this way, the socialist preference of collectivity and community over individuality and privacy coincides with the Latin American tendency toward group cohesion and commitment.
But this closeness in Cuba is also a necessity, since new housing construction has been a failure of the Revolution. Construction materials have been in constant shortage because of the U.S. embargo and the need to concentrate construction efforts on Import Substitution Industrialization. To solve this problem, in the early 1970s, the Revolution tried a novel new approach to self-help: the microbrigades. Coworkers would build new housing together; in exchange, they would be supplied with material, granted paid leave from their jobs, and given ownership of the new housing. The microbrigades created not only new housing but also day care centers, schools, and other public buildings. Private construction using black market materials has also compensated somewhat for the housing shortage, but most people live in cramped quarters. This creates tremendous stress, especially for couples who are hard pressed to find privacy.
Food and Economy
Food in Daily Life. Normal daily diet in Cuba is rather simple. Rice and beans are a staple, supplemented by fried plantains, tubers, and vegetables. Cucumbers are a cheap and abundant vegetable complement. While beef once was eaten by all segments of the population, pork and chicken have overtaken it as a more economical alternative. Pork is made into a low-quality ham called jamon vikin, which cost about $2 (U.S.) per pound in Havana in the summer of 2000. Beef is virtually unavailable to city dwellers.
Historically, more than half the daily caloric intake has been imported. Despite efforts to reverse this situation, agriculture has been dedicated mostly to sugar. Both the United States, and later the Soviet Union , discouraged Cuba from diversifying agricultural production by penalizing it with negative terms of trade if it did not accept foreign imported grain. For this reason, the country has been unable to supply its citizens with adequate food since the collapse of the socialist trading network. Daily food rations have long been governed by the libretta, a booklet that rations monthly allowances of staples such as rice, oil, sugar, beans, and soap. Since the economic crisis of the 1990s (labeled "Special Period During Peacetime") caused the adoption of extreme austerity measures and a hugely diminished state sector, food allowances have been decreased to below-subsistence levels. Despite innovative attempts to feed themselves, many Cubans are going hungry. To improve food distribution and alleviate hunger, the free farmer's markets (MLCs), closed in 1986 because they had enabled some Cubans to become wealthy at the expense of others, have been reopened.
Food Customs at Ceremonial Occasions. Cubans are very fond of sweets, and a cake is a special treat normally reserved for birthdays. Ice cream is also a special treat and a national obsession; the national ice cream manufacturer "Copelia" is quite renowned for its very fine ice cream, and Cubans believe it is the best in the world. A "salad" of ice cream costs a Cuban 5 pesos, or twenty-three cents (U.S.).
Basic Economy. The economy is socialist, meaning that the population as a whole owns most of the means of production and collectively benefits from national economic activity. Private property is minimal, and private wealth is seen as a breach of the social contract by which all Cubans benefit equally from the resources of their island. Soon after the Revolution, most of the means of production were collectivized; agricultural plantations, industrial factories, and nickel mines were converted to "social property" of all Cubans collectively. The voluntary departure in the period 1960–1962 of many people who had become wealthy under the neocolonial dictators (1898-1959) facilitated this process as privileged Cubans fled to Miami and New Jersey . The state has used social property to pay for health care, social security, and education. Unfortunately, the state has reproduced the same two errors as have other socialist economies: first, a focus on production levels at the expense of efficiency; and second, an insistence on centralized planning in lieu of market forces. The first Revolutionary constitution established the "System of Direction and Planning of the Economy" (SDPE), a mechanism of centralized planning and establishment of production quotas. The mechanism of planning was the Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN). The SDPE was a slightly more flexible system than was the Soviet model, but ultimately it too stifled innovation. But since the Special Period, the state has shown some willingness to compromise, allowing a great deal of private economic initiative and requiring state ventures to be fully self-sufficient.
There is a tension in Cuba between ideological purity and economic exigency; this is especially visible in the tourism sector, which has been growing rapidly since 1990. In 1987, the state created the corporation Cubanacán to negotiate joint ventures between the state and foreign enterprises for the construction of new facilities for tourism. Foreign capital has boosted tourism and saved the economy but has created ideological problems for the socialist Revolution: foreign capitalists and tourists are exploiting resources that belong to Cubans and have brought a culture and ideology that may not be compatible with socialist egalitarianism. To protect against ideological corruption, the state has separated tourism from the general economy by making some resorts inclusive, and by banning Cubans from some tourist areas. Tourist dollars thus do not benefit the general economy, and this situation has caused resentment among citizens banned from parts of their own country.
Land Tenure and Property. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba was a highly stratified society in which 8 percent of the population held 79 percent of the arable land. Rural farm workers experienced extreme poverty and malnutrition, and almost no workers owned land. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 divided the largest estates and distributed land to two hundred thousand landless farm workers. In 1975, the National Association of Small Farmers led the effort to form agricultural cooperatives. By 1986, 72 percent of private farmers had chosen to participate in agricultural cooperatives. In exchange, the state provided them with seeds, fertilizer, mechanization, social security, modern housing, and lower income taxes. No small farmer was forced off his land against his will.
Commercial Activity. Under the extreme duress of the Special Period, the state has decentralized economic activity, allowing an explosion of private enterprise. In 1992, a constitutional amendment recognized the right to private ownership of the means of production. In 1993, President Castro announced one hundred new categories of authorized private economic activity. Commercial activity is now a mixture of social ownership of the major means of production, private ownership of some agricultural lands whose products are sold both to the state and in the free farmers' markets, small-scale artisans who sell to other Cubans and tourists, and the import of oil and other non-indigenous resources.
Major Industries. Tobacco and coffee have competed with sugar since the early nineteenth century, but land has always been most profitably used for sugar cultivation and external factors have discouraged crop diversification. Diversification of the economy has been hampered because first one superpower then another has traditionally used Cuba as nothing more than a sugar and citrus plantation. The revolutionary government has tried to engage in Import Substitution Industrialization to lessen its dependency on imported manufactured goods, but this effort has been hurt by a lack of fuel since Soviet and Russian oil subsidies ended in 1990. Much industrial equipment was of Soviet manufacture, and hence replacement parts are no longer available. Lack of fuel and replacement parts has led to the reintroduction of animal traction for agriculture in a retrenchment to a preindustrial past. Nickel is an abundant mineral resource, and its exportation was a major element of trade with the socialist states until 1989. The Revolution has had some success in developing biotechnology as an export sector, but there is has been hampered by a lack of bioindustrial inputs. Tourism has become the most promising new activity for the earning of hard currency. The most urgent need aside from food is petroleum, and the government is exploring offshore drilling.
Trade. The economic catastrophe that began in 1989 resulted from the collapse of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the trade network of socialist states. COMECON had facilitated the trading of sugar, citrus, and nickel at above-market prices in exchange for Soviet oil at below-market prices. Cuba was allowed to resell the Soviet oil and keep the profit. This advantageous arrangement allowed the country to construct an egalitarian society, but when the subsidy ended the economy was shown to be unstable. Cuba was suddenly forced to trade in a global capitalist market based on cash transactions and not on ideological compatibility.
The need to develop new trading partners is an urgent matter, and here again pragmatic exigency runs afoul of ideological coherence. Cuba can no longer afford to limit its trading partners to those who share its visions of justice and equality. It has been forced to cooperate economically with capitalist states whose political-economic ideologies are anathema to the socialist ideal. Spain is Cuba's leading trading partner, followed by Canada and Japan in volume of trading. Cuba has been aggressively pursuing an improvement in trade relations with Mexico, Brazil , and other Latin American states, and at least since 1991 has been seeking membership into CARICOM (Caribbean Common Market), which might partially replace the now-defunct COMECON.
Division of Labor. The Revolution was committed to offering higher education to all citizens who wanted partly it in order to replace the professionals who left in the early 1960s and partly to redress economic inequality. But the availability of a higher education has caused increasing numbers of young people to be dissatisfied with agricultural and industrial occupations, causing a chronic shortage of workers. Despite the efforts of the regime to reverse this situation, professional careers, including higher governmental positions, are disproportionately held by whiter Cubans, while Afro-Cubans are over-represented in agriculture and assembly line industry.
The austerity measures of the Special Period have caused massive worker displacement as lack of fuel, industrial inputs, and spare parts for machinery has forced the state to downsize or close many offices and factories. In 1991, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) confirmed that the opportunity to work is a fundamental human right of every citizen, and so people whose workplaces are closed or downsized are given a generous package of material support and the opportunity to be transferred to the agricultural sector.
Social Stratification
Classes and Castes. After 1959, class distinction became far less dramatic, so that occupation and class no longer determined access to health care, food, clothing, schooling, and shelter. Before the socialist revolution, only 45 percent of the population had completed primary education, 9 percent secondary, and 4 percent higher education. But by 1988, those numbers were 100 percent, 85 percent, and 21 percent respectively. The percentage of income earned by those in the lowest salary bracket rose dramatically, indicating a rapid and dramatic redistribution of wealth.
The reemergence of a privileged class in the Special Period is the direct result of capitalist "reform," as those who run the new private enterprises have access to imported luxury items while some of their fellow citizens starve. Those who live in a tourist area and have an extra room in their house or apartment are allowed to rent that room to tourists at market rates. Despite the heavy payments the state requires in return for authorization to do this, some citizens have amassed enormous material privileges in the midst of economic catastrophe for the majority. Throughout the Revolution, Cubans have accepted material hardship because, in a socialist country, everybody suffers equally when there are hard times. But now the poverty of the island is becoming increasingly distributed in a grossly inequitable manner. Capitalism assumes that wealth and poverty are not distributed equally, and the increasing presence of small pockets of wealth in a sea of poverty is rather distressing to most Cubans who were reared with socialist ideals of justice and equity in economic relations.
Symbols of Social Stratification. Along with capitalism and social stratification, commodification has begun to lay claim to the hearts and souls of Cubans who for 40 years have been shielded from the values of conspicuous consumption. For the young, who do not remember what capitalism was like before the Revolution, it is United States fashion which symbolize status. Anything with a label is in vogue, and a pair of Nike shoes or Levi's jeans are highly coveted. Material excess is increasingly embraced as indicative of social value.
Political Life
Government. The political system is termed "Democratic Centralism." Every citizen has the right to participate in discussions of political, social, and economic issues, but that participation is somewhat constrained by the hierarchical structure of society and government. Authority ultimately rests with the central executive branch; both the issues discussed and the decisions made are determined by the President of the Republic. The 1976 constitution established a system of representative legislative bodies called the Organs of People's Power (OPP). Municipal, provincial, and national levels of the Peoples' Power debate issues and send the results to the next level of the hierarchy. The National Assembly of the OPP elects from its ranks a Council of State that can act on its behalf when it is not in session. From the Council of State is chosen the Council of Ministers, who have direct administrative responsibility for the executive departments. This is but one example of the conflation of the executive and legislative functions of the revolutionary government so that a system of checks and balances does not exist.
Leadership and Political Officials. Although according to the Constitution the OPP is technically independent of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), in effect the party selects candidates for every level of the OPP, especially the National Assembly and the Councils of State and Ministers. In theory, the PCC only provides ideological guidance, but in practice, it exercises direct political power. While appointment or election to governmental posts does not require party membership, those who are not party members are far less likely to be approved as candidates for local OPP and therefore cannot easily begin a political career. The party is directed by its Central Committee, which is chosen every five years at a Party Congress. The First Secretary of the party chooses a smaller body of 25 persons called the Political Bureau that makes daily decisions. Since Fidel Castro is currently President of the Republic, First Secretary of the PCC, President of the Councils of State and the Council of Ministers, and Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), no decision can be made that does not meet with his approval. This limits citizens' abilities to genuinely participate in decision-making.
The ideals of the revolution are supported by a majority of the population, and even Cubans who do not support Castro recognize that the socialist government has vastly improved the standard of living of most Cubans. They do not want neocolonial status under the United States, nor do they long for the gulf between wealth and poverty that capitalism produces. Most Cubans probably will support the socialist project even after Castro is gone. To ensure continuity in leadership, Fidel has appointed his brother Raul to succeed him when he dies.
Social Problems and Control. The state has taken advantage of the propensity of Cubans to gossip and spy on their neighbors. Under the threats of invasion and internal turmoil, the government relied on an effective but potentially repressive mechanism for social control, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). These are groups of citizens who observe and document illegal, subversive, or terrorist activity and organize education, health, and community improvement projects. The CDRs were founded in September 1960 to discover and combat sabotage and internal terrorism. In April 1961, they were mobilized to fight against the invasion at the Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Once the invasion was defeated and the major counter revolutionary saboteurs and terrorists were expelled or fled, continuing external aggression from the United States provided an excuse to maintain the CDRs.
In their zeal to defend socialism, the CDRs have sometimes become oppressive organs of state police power. In the 1960s, social deviants denounced by the CDRs were sent to work camps under army supervision, called the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPS), that were designed to reeducate counter revolutionaries, gays, and other deviants in revolutionary ideology and behavior. Those camps lasted only for two years before being disbanded, but fear of the CDRs and the National Police still operates as a powerful force for social control.
Military Activity. Critics of the Revolution point to the CDRs and to teenagers' compulsory one-year military service to claim that Cuba is a highly militarized society. In fact this claim is not true, since the unarmed CDRs are more gossip mills than militia-like brigades, and since a year of agricultural service is an acceptable substitute for the military service. It is true that the Cuban military has historically been very active internationally and is well known for its role in supporting liberation movements worldwide. The Cuban army has traveled all over the world fighting with subaltern peoples in the third world as they struggle for independence from neo-colonial powers or liberation from oppressive dictators. The most renowned effort in this regard has been in Angola , where Cuban soldiers fought against (apartheid) South Africa when it invaded its northern neighbor. Indeed, Nelson Mandela has credited Cuban efforts with a major role in bringing an end to Apartheid. In the fiscal crisis of the 1990s, Cuba has been forced to retrench almost completely from its military and extensive humanitarian commitments around the world.
Social Welfare and Change Programs
Social change programs usually are instituted by a ministry or institute of the state. Changes initiated by citizens are channeled through five mass organizations: Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), Union of Cuban Youth (UJC), the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDC), and the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), through which the state both receives feedback from the people and implements its decisions. Aside from mass organizations and scholarly research institutes associated with a university, there is not much room for private initiative. The state claims that private-sphere movements for change are unnecessary, since the Revolution itself is deeply committed to the well-being of all citizens in the realms of employment, health care, education, housing, and food.
Nongovernmental Organizations and Other Associations
The state assumes full responsibility for all development projects and the well-being of its citizens and is reluctant the to admit need for external assistance. It is true that "freedom brigades" of supporters of socialism from North America and elsewhere have come to work during the sugar harvest, but these have been symbols of ideological support, not material charity. Another North American organization, Pastors for Peace, annually sends a shipment of medicine, food, and medical computers. Several agencies of the United Nations work in Cuba, including the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Population Fund, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. And the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO, (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) is involved in the architectural restoration of the colonial city of Trinidad and of Old Havana.
Gender Roles and Statuses
Division of Labor by Gender. As part of its commitment to constructing an egalitarian society, the Revolution has successfully incorporated women into agricultural, industrial, and professional occupations. By 1990, half the doctors and most of the dentists in the country were women.
In 1961, the Revolution began to construct day care centers to free women from constant child care long enough to develop a career or contribute to industrial, agricultural, or intellectual activity. Women's economically productive activity is thought to serve the country as a whole, and in fact women who choose not to work outside the home are sometimes subjects of censure for failing to contribute economically to the Revolution.
But men continue to expect women to perform housework and maintain child-rearing responsibilities even if they have full-time careers outside the home and participate in FMC and PCC activities. The People's Power attempted to address this recalcitrance by enacting a generous maternity law in 1974 and the "Family Code" in 1975. This code defined domestic chores as the responsibility of both partners and required husbands to do half the housework if their wives worked outside the home. This is ideologically consistent with socialism, but enforcement of the codes has been difficult, as men are reluctant to relinquish their privilege.
The Relative Status of Women and Men. As in the United States, despite women's formal legal equality, they are grossly under-represented in the highest levels of the party, the government, and the military. The resilience of Cuban gender norms is not only a matter of entrenched misogyny; it is encoded into the Revolution itself. Victorious guerillas entered Havana in tanks sporting machetes, machine guns, and long beards from their years in the jungle, having defended their women and motherland. A 1965 newspaper editorial declared that the Revolution is "a matter for men." Nonetheless, iniquitous gender relations have indeed been disrupted by the socialist revolution, and Cuban women are far better off than women in most of Latin America and the rest of the world in terms of education and career options, reproductive rights and health, formal legal protections against discrimination and domestic violence, social supports during child-rearing, and aggressive enforcement of paternity laws.
Marriage ,Family, and Kinship
Marriage. In the nineteenth century, anxiety about the Afrocuban majority gave rise to efforts to "whiten" the population. This agenda, combined with a chronic shortage of women, led to the development of both a legal code and an informal code which calculated not only ethnicity but also wealth, family reputation, and virginity status to determine which mixed-ethnicity marriages were permissible. The turning of illicit unions into acceptable marriages was part of a social agenda that sought to alleviate anxiety over race relations, illegitimacy, and the shortage of white women, especially in rural areas.
In the countryside, marriage, as with all civil institutions before the Revolution, was far less formal than it was in Havana province. Most rural areas in the east did not have the regular services of a priest, and colonial governmental institutions did not function well. The result was a tradition of marriages that followed regional customs but did not have the benefit of legal or ecclesiastical sanctioning.
In its early years, the Revolution made provisions to formalize "common-law" couplings. While some social-reproduction functions of the family were taken over by the revolutionary state, marriage itself has been encouraged. But the institution of marriage has suffered because of the new legal equality of women. Men have become resentful that their privilege has been disrupted, and women struggle to participate in the PCC and FMC, raise children, maintain their homes, and work full-time outside the home. Under these conditions, marriages are often strained, and the divorce rate is much higher than it was under the neocolonial dictators.
Domestic Unit. In addition to liberating women economically, the Revolution has attempted to liberate women's bodies and sexuality. Safe, legal, and free abortion is available on demand for any woman who has reached the age of majority (sixteen years). Contraceptives are widely available, even to young girls, along with effective sex education which is more progressive and honest than that in most other nations. However, the liberation of female sexuality, allowing young girls as well as boys to experiment sexually without social censure, has resulted in a high rate of pregnancy among girls under age sixteen. Adolescent boys have thus enjoyed increased sexual access but are not psychologically or economically prepared to participate in the care and upkeep of their children, resulting in a high number of very young single mothers. The state has exhorted men to take greater responsibility, and child support payments are extracted from some irresponsible men's salaries, but these efforts have met with only partial success. Hence a typical domestic unit includes a grandmother who is involved in the rearing of the youngest generation, often without the presence of the children's father. Ironically, the participation of grandmothers in child rearing allows men to ignore their parental responsibility and household chores. Domestic units are thus likely to be multigenerational and defined around women, while men come and go in search of work or extramarital recreations.
Inheritance. Inheritance is not a major issue in a poor socialist country where significant private property is an exception. Some houses and apartments are privately owned and can be inherited, but the state limits the freedom of an heir to dispose of an inherited housing unit if other Cubans live in it. Most agricultural land has been collectivized or is part of a cooperative and thus is not inheritable. Smaller private property such as heirlooms, clothing, and cars are inherited according to kinship lines without state intervention.
Kin Groups. The family has lost some of its importance as the Revolution has taken over some of its economic and social functions. Families are much smaller now and less likely to include wide horizontal connections (though vertical, intergenerational connections continue, and libretta combining is sometimes necessary). It may be, though, that as the state loses its ability to meet the basic material needs of its citizens in the current economic crisis, the family will again increase in prominence.
Socialization
Infant Care. Beginning in infancy, the government attempts to instill in citizens the values of socialism. For children, this means teaching the values of collective cohesion and self-forgetting in the interest of the group. Tendencies toward individualism and selfishness, including the use of favorite pacifiers and blankets, are discouraged. It is in the child care centers that this early socialization occurs.
Child Rearing and Education. Socialization for integration into the socialist project continues throughout childhood. The general lesson is that individual achievement should be harnessed for the good of the whole; children are encouraged to think about their classmates and have concern for other people's well-being. By the teenage years, high school education includes a year of socialization into the productive life of the nation, as children spend a year away from home in a combination boarding school with agricultural work. This gives the youth a chance to develop social skills with others from different areas, teaches the values of cooperative participation in a common project, gives parents a break from caring for teenagers, teaches agricultural skills to those who wish to make farming their career, and adds to the agricultural workforce.
Higher Education. All children receive a primary education. Youths who are preparing for college and pass the entrance examinations attend an academically-oriented school called pre-universitario. Those who are best suited for agricultural or industrial careers attend technical schools. Higher education is fully funded by the socialist government, and the state pays university and technical students a monthly stipend for food and lodging. Higher education is so accessible that more people attend universities than there are white-collar jobs available.
Etiquette
Being generous and hospitable is a highly valued quality. Unlike in Central America , houses are not protected by metal fences, doors are left open, and visitors are always welcomed. It is rude not to greet every man with a handshake and every woman with a kiss on the cheek. Touching as a demonstration of affection is not taboo and does not carry a sexual connotation. Cubans do like to complain and argue heatedly; it is said that an argument is not finished until everyone collapses from exhaustion. But this kind of argument is performative and relieves social tension. More intense interpersonal conflict requires a more subtle approach; Cubans loath open conflict, and so the social norm is to minimize interpersonal conflicts by expressing them through innuendo rather than direct accusation.
Religion
Religious Beliefs. Religious faith and practice have not been as influential in the culture of Cuba as in other Latin American nations, for two reasons: first, in the colonial period the Catholic clergy were almost entirely peninsular (born in Spain). They represented the external power of Spain, and hence Catholicism itself was suspect, especially with the population which supported independence. Secondly, there simply were not very many priests in the rural areas, especially in Oriente. Those Cubans who chose to maintain a faith practice were left to produce a religiosity of their own design. The popular religiosity which did develop among white and creole Cubans was a local version of Catholicism enriched with African influences.
Santería is a product of this religious syncretism. Because of the demographic history of the island, Santería—a religious system of the Yorubá people of Nigeria who were brought as slaves—is more prevalent in the eastern region. It is based on the maintenance of relationships, both among people and between people and deities called orishas. Since orishas were comparable to and interchangeable with Catholic saints, slaves could put on a face of Catholic piety while worshiping their own gods.
Since the relaxation of state censure in the 1990s there has been an increase of Protestant missionary activity on the island. Catholic church membership is on the rise, and Pope John Paul II was welcomed to the island in January 1998 to the cheering of crowds of both the faithful and the curious. Evangelical Protestantism is growing at an even faster rate, fed perhaps by the desperate material conditions prevalent on the island and the population's need for hope in a sea of poverty and despair.
Religious Practitioners. Many religious persons, including priests, participated in the Revolution and supported its ideals, but when it was discovered in 1961 that churches were being used as bases of counterrevolutionary plotting, all foreign priests were invited to leave the island. This hostility was cemented by the declaration of atheism in the first socialist constitution in 1976. Practicing religious leaders and the faithful were thereafter excluded from some professions and promotion to high governmental offices. However, Castro was impressed by the Liberation Theology of Latin America, which sided with the poor in their struggles against oppressive governments and neoliberal capitalism. The leading role of Christian religious leaders in the socialist Nicaraguan revolution was particularly noted by Castro, whose attitude toward religion softened considerably as a result. In the 1980s, more freedom was given to print religious materials and preach, and in 1991, faith was removed as an impediment to party membership.
Rituals and Holy Places. Because of the unpopularity and suppression of religion in the early revolutionary period, public Christian rituals are rare.
There are no holy sites to which pilgrimages are made, although the cathedrals in Santiago and Havana are symbolic and continue to offer Mass. More common is a home altar that may include both Catholic and African elements. Afrocuban religion is more likely to be celebrated publicly in Oriente. The churches continue to celebrate events on the Christian calendar, but these rituals do not generally spill out into the streets.
Death and the Afterlife. There is no common pattern of belief regarding the afterlife. Santería maintains a belief in the survival of ancestor spirits, and the Christian faithful have a theology of heaven. Funerals are celebrated and may invoke religious imagery, but more common is a secular ceremony in which the deceased is remembered for her contribution to the socialist project.
Medicine and Health Care
The Revolution's greatest success has been an astonishing improvement of the health of the population since 1959: Cubans have benefitted dramatically in the last forty years, with lower infant and maternal mortality rates, a higher average caloric consumption, and a vastly reduced number of persons served by each doctor. Cuba has joined the United States and Canada as the only three nations in the Western Hemisphere to have been granted "best health status" by the United Nations. Since health care is not a matter of profit, and there are no insurance companies in search of wealth, Cuba can provide high-quality health care at a reasonable cost.
Part of this success is due to an innovative system of distribution of health services and a focus on preventive medicine. "Polyclinics" in the municipalities have specialists who treat any number of illnesses. These specialists have been supplemented since 1985 with family physicians, who are even more widely distributed throughout the neighborhoods and focus on prevention and health maintenance.
There are rural areas in which alternative medical practitioners use traditional methods of healing, and there is an element of Santería that seeks spiritual aid to cure physical illness. However, the revolutionary government has great faith in biomedical science as the vehicle for modernization and has invested heavily in biotechnological research. Cuba has engaged in a massive program of humanitarian overseas aid, placing thousands of doctors, nurses, and public health technicians all over the second and third worlds.
Several factors threaten the stability and efficacy of Cuba's health care system. The worsening of the United States embargo as a result of congressional legislation means that not only can medical equipment and medicines not reach Cuban ports, but neither can the latest research reports and scholarly journals. Also, the hierarchical nature of government and society discourages popular participation. The result is a top-down approach to treatment with little patient-doctor consultation. Finally, in the severe spending restrictions of the Special Period, the state can not provide the same level of services it did when the economy was stable. Some health care professionals have been forced to abandon medical practice in favor of work in the more lucrative tourism industry.
Secular Celebrations
Two significant events in the history of Cuba are celebrated annually with great fanfare. The first is the symbolic date of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959, when Batista fled to Miami and the Sierra Maestra guerillas arrived in Havana. This celebration coincides neatly with New Year's. The second event is the attack on the Moncada barracks by Fidel and his fellow revolutionaries on 26 July 1953, symbolically beginning the final and triumphant Cuban Revolutionary movement. This celebration coincides with the annual "carnival" in both Santiago and Havana. Carnival, consisting of song and dace, outlandish costume, and much drinking and eating, has a history which far precedes the Revolution.
The Arts and Humanities
Support for the Arts. The Revolution's stated goal is to nurture the development of each citizen's abilities, even if those talents are not economically productive. The state supports promising artists and art schools, creating the Cuban Film Institute, the National Cultural Council, and the National School for the Arts. There has recently been some external funding as the international art world has taken great interest in Cuban artistic production.
Literature. Writers enjoy the privileged position of visionary thinkers, partly a result of the fact that the hero of Cuban nationalism was a poet, José Martí. In the early years of the Revolution, there was considerable censorship, but the state relaxed censorship in 1987 and now allows critical ideas to be debated openly as long as they do not incite treason.
Graphic Arts. Though artistic production is supported by the state, in the past it was also ideologically constrained by state censors. But now that Cuban art has become popular in the United States and Europe , it has become a potential source of external revenue from tourists and art dealers. The state has become more permissive toward protest art since it became financially lucrative.
Film has been a popular and successful form of art since 1959. Havana hosts the internationally renowned New Latin American Film Festival every year. Cubans love going to the cinema; it is a favored and inexpensive form of recreation, and since film production has been socialized, going to the movies only costs about fourteen cents.
Performance Arts. Expressive language, music, and dance are a cultural heritage that Cubans express frequently. Any Cuban can dance and enjoys performing at Carnival, for tourists, or at parties. Afrocuban music is performed on street corners and in living rooms all over the island. Cuba is also known worldwide for the National Ballet of Cuba, whose founder and artistic director, Alicia Alonso, continues to guide the company and attend performances. In keeping with the ideals of the socialist state, the ballet is supported by public funds, so that it is accessible to all citizens, costing only about twenty-five cents per performance.
The State of the Physical and Social Sciences
Scientists in all fields are supported by the state, which sees scientific advancement as the key to the success of the socialist project. Medical research has been especially successful. But in the current economic crisis, the state has been unable to maintain its scientists and laboratories as it did in the past. The United States embargo makes it difficult to obtain even basic laboratory supplies.
As to the social sciences, the government has supported thousands of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and economists. There is some limitation on social scientific research, since the state does not permit the publication of findings that suggest an abandonment of the socialist project or of the PCC. Within that constraint, any investigation or finding can be published and debated, even if it calls for reform.
Bibliography
Balari, Eugenio. "Agricultural Policy with Social Justice and Development." In Sandor Halebsky and John Kirk, eds., Transformation and Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990s, 1990.
Dilla, Haroldo. Comrades and Investors: The Uncertain Transition in Cuba, translated by Michael Gonzales, 1998.
Halebsky, Sandor, and John Kirk, eds. Transformation and Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990s, 1990.
Hatchwell, Emily, and Simon Calder. Cuba in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics, Culture, 2000.
Helg, Aline. Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912, 1995.
Monreal, P. "Sea Changes: The New Cuban Economy." Report on the Americas XXXII 5: 21–29, 1999.
Moore, Robin. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940, 1997.
Pérez-López, Jorge, ed. Cuba at a Crossroads: Politics and Economics after the Fourth Party Congress, 1994.
Pérez, Louis. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 1996.
——. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, 1999.
Peters, P. and J. Scarpaci, Cuba's New Entrepreneurs: Five Years of Small-Scale Capitalism, 1998.
Smith, Lois, and Alfred Padula. Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba, 1996.
Thomas, Hugh. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom, 1998.
—G. Derrick Hodge
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.
MLA
|
i don't know
|
When testing his sound equipment inventions, including the first ever recording (on phonograph cylinder in 1878), Thomas Edison often recited?
|
Edison: His Life and Inventions - a 1929 book by Dyer and Martin
EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE
OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS
Published in New York by Harper Brothers, 1929
THE PHONOGRAPH
AT the opening of the Electrical Show in New York City in October, 1908, to celebrate the jubilee of the Atlantic Cable and the first quarter century of lighting with the Edison service on Manhattan Island, the exercises were all conducted by means of the Edison phonograph. This included the dedicatory speech of Governor Hughes, of New York; the modest remarks of Mr. Edison, as president; the congratulations of the presidents of several national electric bodies, and a number of vocal and instrumental selections of operatic nature. All this was heard clearly by a very large audience, and was repeated on other evenings. The same speeches were used again phonographically at the Electrical Show in Chicago in 1909--and now the records are preserved for reproduction a hundred or a thousand years hence. This tour de force, never attempted before, was merely an exemplification of the value of the phonograph not only in establishing at first hand the facts of history, but in preserving the human voice. What would we not give to listen to the very accents and tones of the Sermon on the Mount, the orations of Demosthenes, the first Pitt's appeal for American liberty, the Farewell of Washington, or the Address at Gettysburg? Until Edison made his wonderful invention in 1877, the human race was entirely without means for preserving or passing on to posterity its own linguistic utterances or any other vocal sound. We have some idea how the ancients looked and felt and wrote; the abundant evidence takes us back to the cave-dwellers. But all the old languages are dead, and the literary form is their embalmment. We do not even know definitely how Shakespeare's and Goldsmith's plays were pronounced on the stage in the theatres of the time; while it is only a guess that perhaps Chaucer would sound much more modern than he scans.
The analysis of sound, which owes so much to Helmholtz, was one step toward recording; and the various means of illustrating the phenomena of sound to the eye and ear, prior to the phonograph, were all ingenious. One can watch the dancing little flames of Koenig, and see a voice expressed in tongues of fire; but the record can only be photographic. In like manner, the simple phonautograph of Leon Scott, invented about 1858, records on a revolving cylinder of blackened paper the sound vibrations transmitted through a membrane to which a tiny stylus is attached; so that a human mouth uses a pen and inscribes its sign vocal. Yet after all we are just as far away as ever from enabling the young actors at Harvard to give Aristophanes with all the true, subtle intonation and inflection of the Athens of 400 B.C. The instrument is dumb. Ingenuity has been shown also in the invention of "talking-machines," like Faber's, based on the reed organ pipe. These autom- ata can be made by dexterous manipulation to jabber a little, like a doll with its monotonous "ma-ma," or a cuckoo clock; but they lack even the sterile utility of the imitative art of ventriloquism. The real great invention lies in creating devices that shall be able to evoke from tinfoil, wax, or composition at any time to-day or in the future the sound that once was as evanescent as the vibrations it made on the air.
Contrary to the general notion, very few of the great modern inventions have been the result of a sudden inspiration by which, Minerva-like, they have sprung full-fledged from their creators' brain; but, on the contrary, they have been evolved by slow and gradual steps, so that frequently the final advance has been often almost imperceptible. The Edison phonograph is an important exception to the general rule; not, of course, the phonograph of the present day with all of its mechanical perfection, but as an instrument capable of recording and reproducing sound. Its invention has been frequently attributed to the discovery that a point attached to a telephone diaphragm would, under the effect of sound-waves, vibrate with sufficient force to prick the finger. The story, though interesting, is not founded on fact; but, if true, it is difficult to see how the discovery in question could have contributed materially to the ultimate accomplishment. To a man of Edison's perception it is absurd to suppose that the effect of the so-called discovery would not have been made as a matter of deduction long before the physical sensation was experienced. As a matter of fact, the invention of the phonograph was the result of pure reason. Some time prior to 1877, Edison had been experimenting on an automatic telegraph in which the letters were formed by embossing strips of paper with the proper arrangement of dots and dashes. By drawing this strip beneath a contact lever, the latter was actuated so as to control the circuits and send the desired signals over the line. It was observed that when the strip was moved very rapidly the vibration of the lever resulted in the production of an audible note. With these facts before him, Edison reasoned that if the paper strip could be imprinted with elevations and depressions representative of sound-waves, they might be caused to actuate a diaphragm so as to reproduce the corresponding sounds. The next step in the line of development was to form the necessary undulations on the strip, and it was then reasoned that original sounds themselves might be utilized to form a graphic record by actuating a diaphragm and causing a cutting or indenting point carried thereby to vibrate in contact with a moving surface, so as to cut or indent the record therein. Strange as it may seem, therefore, and contrary to the general belief, the phonograph was developed backward, the production of the sounds being of prior development to the idea of actually recording them.
Mr. Edison's own account of the invention of the phonograph is intensely interesting. "I was experimenting," he says, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm travelled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disk was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.
"From my experiments on the telephone I knew of the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations, as I had made a little toy which, when you recited loudly in the funnel, would work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet- wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: `Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such record to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.
"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted `Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of."
No wonder that honest John Kruesi, as he stood and listened to the marvellous performance of the simple little machine he had himself just finished, ejaculated in an awe-stricken tone: "Mein Gott im Himmel!" And yet he had already seen Edison do a few clever things. No wonder they sat up all night fixing and adjusting it so as to get better and better results--reciting and singing, trying each other's voices, and then listening with involuntary awe as the words came back again and again, just as long as they were willing to revolve the little cylinder with its dotted spiral indentations in the tinfoil under the vibrating stylus of the reproducing diaphragm. It took a little time to acquire the knack of turning the crank steadily while leaning over the recorder to talk into the machine; and there was some deftness required also in fastening down the tinfoil on the cylinder where it was held by a pin running in a longitudinal slot. Paraffined paper appears also to have been experimented with as an impressible material. It is said that Carman, the foreman of the machine shop, had gone the length of wagering Edison a box of cigars that the device would not work. All the world knows that he lost.
The original Edison phonograph thus built by Kruesi is preserved in the South Kensington Museum, London. That repository can certainly have no greater treasure of its kind. But as to its immediate use, the inventor says: "That morning I took it over to New York and walked into the office of the Scientific American, went up to Mr. Beach's desk, and said I had something to show him. He asked what it was. I told him I had a machine that would record and reproduce the human voice. I opened the package, set up the machine and recited, `Mary had a little lamb,' etc. Then I reproduced it so that it could be heard all over the room. They kept me at it until the crowd got so great Mr. Beach was afraid the floor would collapse; and we were compelled to stop. The papers next morning contained columns. None of the writers seemed to understand how it was done. I tried to explain, it was so very simple, but the results were so surprising they made up their minds probably that they never would understand it--and they didn't.
"I started immediately making several larger and better machines, which I exhibited at Menlo Park to crowds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran special trains. Washington people telegraphed me to come on. I took a phonograph to Washington and exhibited it in the room of James G. Blaine's niece (Gail Hamilton); and members of Congress and notable people of that city came all day long until late in the evening. I made one break. I recited `Mary,' etc., and another ditty:
`There was a little girl, who had a little curl Right in the middle of her forehead; And when she was good she was very, very good, But when she was bad she was horrid.'
It will be remembered that Senator Roscoe Conkling, then very prominent, had a curl of hair on his forehead; and all the caricaturists developed it abnormally. He was very sensitive about the subject. When he came in he was introduced; but being rather deaf, I didn't catch his name, but sat down and started the curl ditty. Everybody tittered, and I was told that Mr. Conkling was displeased. About 11 o'clock at night word was received from President Hayes that he would be very much pleased if I would come up to the White House. I was taken there, and found Mr. Hayes and several others waiting. Among them I remember Carl Schurz, who was playing the piano when I entered the room. The exhibition continued till about 12.30 A.M., when Mrs. Hayes and several other ladies, who had been induced to get up and dress, appeared. I left at 3.30 A,M,
"For a long time some people thought there was trickery. One morning at Menlo Park a gentleman came to the laboratory and asked to see the phonograph. It was Bishop Vincent, who helped Lewis Miller found the Chautauqua I exhibited it, and then he asked if he could speak a few words. I put on a fresh foil and told him to go ahead. He commenced to recite Biblical names with immense rapidity. On reproducing it he said: `I am satisfied, now. There isn't a man in the United States who could recite those names with the same rapidity.' "
The phonograph was now fairly launched as a world sensation, and a reference to the newspapers of 1878 will show the extent to which it and Edison were themes of universal discussion. Some of the press notices of the period were most amazing--and amusing. As though the real achievements of this young man, barely thirty, were not tangible and solid enough to justify admiration of his genius, the "yellow journalists" of the period began busily to create an "Edison myth," with gross absurdities of assertion and attribution from which the modest subject of it all has not yet ceased to suffer with unthinking people. A brilliantly vicious example of this method of treatment is to be found in the Paris Figaro of that year, which under the appropriate title of "This Astounding Eddison" lay bare before the French public the most startling revelations as to the inventor's life and character. "It should be understood," said this journal, "that Mr. Eddison does not belong to himself. He is the property of the telegraph company which lodges him in New York at a superb hotel; keeps him on a luxurious footing, and pays him a formidable salary so as to be the one to know of and profit by his discoveries. The company has, in the dwelling of Eddison, men in its employ who do not quit him for a moment, at the table, on the street, in the laboratory. So that this wretched man, watched more closely than ever was any malefactor, cannot even give a moment's thought to his own private affairs without one of his guards asking him what he is thinking about." This foolish "blague" was accompanied by a description of Edison's new "aerophone," a steam machine which carried the voice a distance of one and a half miles. "You speak to a jet of vapor. A friend previously advised can answer you by the same method." Nor were American journals backward in this wild exaggeration.
The furor had its effect in stimulating a desire everywhere on the part of everybody to see and hear the phonograph. A small commercial organization was formed to build and exploit the apparatus, and the shops at Menlo Park laboratory were assisted by the little Bergmann shop in New York. Offices were taken for the new enterprise at 203 Broadway, where the Mail and Express building now stands, and where, in a general way, under the auspices of a talented dwarf, C. A. Cheever, the embryonic phonograph and the crude telephone shared rooms and expenses. Gardiner G. Hubbard, father-in-law of Alex. Graham Bell, was one of the stockholders in the Phonograph Company, which paid Edison $10,000 cash and a 20 per cent. royalty. This curious part- nership was maintained for some time, even when the Bell Telephone offices were removed to Reade Street, New York, whither the phonograph went also; and was perhaps explained by the fact that just then the ability of the phonograph as a money-maker was much more easily demonstrated than was that of the telephone, still in its short range magneto stage and awaiting development with the aid of the carbon transmitter.
The earning capacity of the phonograph then, as largely now, lay in its exhibition qualities. The royalties from Boston, ever intellectually awake and ready for something new, ran as high as $1800 a week. In New York there was a ceaseless demand for it, and with the aid of Hilbourne L. Roosevelt, a famous organ builder, and uncle of ex-President Roosevelt, concerts were given at which the phonograph was "featured." To manage this novel show business the services of James Redpath were called into requisition with great success. Redpath, famous as a friend and biographer of John Brown, as a Civil War correspondent, and as founder of the celebrated Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Boston, divided the country into territories, each section being leased for exhibition purposes on a basis of a percentage of the "gate money." To 203 Broadway from all over the Union flocked a swarm of showmen, cranks, and particularly of old operators, who, the seedier they were in appearance, the more insistent they were that "Tom" should give them, for the sake of "Auld lang syne," this chance to make a fortune for him and for themselves. At the top of the building was a floor on which these novices were graduated in the use and care of the machine, and then, with an equipment of tinfoil and other supplies, they were sent out on the road. It was a diverting experience while it lasted. The excitement over the phonograph was maintained for many months, until a large proportion of the inhabitants of the country had seen it; and then the show receipts declined and dwindled away. Many of the old operators, taken on out of good-nature, were poor exhibitors and worse accountants, and at last they and the machines with which they had been intrusted faded from sight. But in the mean time Edison had learned many lessons as to this practical side of development that were not forgotten when the renascence of the phonograph began a few years later, leading up to the present enormous and steady demand for both machines and records.
It deserves to be pointed out that the phonograph has changed little in the intervening years from the first crude instruments of 1877-78. It has simply been refined and made more perfect in a mechanical sense. Edison was immensely impressed with its possibilities, and greatly inclined to work upon it, but the coming of the electric light compelled him to throw all his energies for a time into the vast new field awaiting conquest. The original phonograph, as briefly noted above, was rotated by hand, and the cylinder was fed slowly longitudinally by means of a nut engaging a screw thread on the cylinder shaft. Wrapped around the cylinder was a sheet of tinfoil, with which engaged a small chisel-like recording needle, connected adhesively with the centre of an iron diaphragm. Obviously, as the cylinder was turned, the needle followed a spiral path whose pitch depended upon that of the feed screw. Along this path a thread was cut in the cylinder so as to permit the needle to indent the foil readily as the diaphragm vibrated. By rotating the cylinder and by causing the diaphragm to vibrate under the effect of vocal or musical sounds, the needle-like point would form a series of indentations in the foil corresponding to and characteristic of the sound-waves. By now engaging the point with the beginning of the grooved record so formed, and by again rotating the cylinder, the undulations of the record would cause the needle and its attached diaphragm to vibrate so as to effect the reproduction. Such an apparatus was necessarily undeveloped, and was interesting only from a scientific point of view. It had many mechanical defects which prevented its use as a practical apparatus. Since the cylinder was rotated by hand, the speed at which the record was formed would vary considerably, even with the same manipulator, so that it would have been impossible to record and reproduce music satisfactorily; in doing which exact uniformity of speed is essential. The formation of the record in tinfoil was also objectionable from a practical standpoint, since such a record was faint and would be substantially obliterated after two or three reproductions. Furthermore, the foil could not be easily removed from and replaced upon the instrument, and consequently the reproduction had to follow the recording immediately, and the successive tinfoils were thrown away. The instrument was also heavy and bulky. Notwithstanding these objections the original phonograph created, as already remarked, an enormous popular excitement, and the exhibitions were considered by many sceptical persons as nothing more than clever ventriloquism. The possibilities of the instrument as a commercial apparatus were recognized from the very first, and some of the fields in which it was predicted that the phonograph would be used are now fully occupied. Some have not yet been realized. Writing in 1878 in the North American-Review, Mr. Edison thus summed up his own ideas as to the future applications of the new invention:
"Among the many uses to which the phonograph will be applied are the following:
1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The `Family Record'--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."
Of the above fields of usefulness in which it was expected that the phonograph might be applied, only three have been commercially realized--namely, the reproduction of musical, including vaudeville or talking selections, for which purpose a very large proportion of the phonographs now made is used; the employment of the machine as a mechanical stenographer, which field has been taken up actively only within the past few years; and the utilization of the device for the teaching of languages, for which purpose it has been successfully employed, for example, by the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania, for several years. The other uses, however, which were early predicted for the phonograph have not as yet been worked out practically, although the time seems not far distant when its general utility will be widely enlarged. Both dolls and clocks have been made, but thus far the world has not taken them seriously.
The original phonograph, as invented by Edison, remained in its crude and immature state for almost ten years--still the object of philosophical interest, and as a convenient text-book illustration of the effect of sound vibration. It continued to be a theme of curious interest to the imaginative, and the subject of much fiction, while its neglected commercial possibilities were still more or less vaguely referred to. During this period of arrested development, Edison was continuously working on the invention and commercial exploitation of the incandescent lamp. In 1887 his time was comparatively free, and the phonograph was then taken up with renewed energy, and the effort made to overcome its mechanical defects and to furnish a commercial instrument, so that its early promise might be realized. The important changes made from that time up to 1890 converted the phonograph from a scientific toy into a successful industrial apparatus. The idea of forming the record on tinfoil had been early abandoned, and in its stead was substituted a cylinder of wax-like material, in which the record was cut by a minute chisel-like gouging tool. Such a record or phonogram, as it was then called, could be removed from the machine or replaced at any time, many reproductions could be obtained without wearing out the record, and whenever desired the record could be shaved off by a turning-tool so as to present a fresh surface on which a new record could be formed, something like an ancient palimpsest. A wax cylinder having walls less than one-quarter of an inch in thickness could be used for receiving a large number of records, since the maximum depth of the record groove is hardly ever greater than one one-thousandth of an inch. Later on, and as the crowning achievement in the phonograph field, from a commercial point of view, came the duplication of records to the extent of many thousands from a single "master." This work was actively developed between the years 1890 and 1898, and its difficulties may be appreciated when the problem is stated; the copying from a single master of many millions of excessively minute sound-waves having a maximum width of one hundredth of an inch, and a maximum depth of one thousandth of an inch, or less than the thickness of a sheet of tissue-paper. Among the interesting developments of this process was the coating of the original or master record with a homogeneous film of gold so thin that three hundred thousand of these piled one on top of the other would present a thickness of only one inch!
Another important change was in the nature of a reversal of the original arrangement, the cylinder or mandrel carrying the record being mounted in fixed bearings, and the recording or reproducing device being fed lengthwise, like the cutting-tool of a lathe, as the blank or record was rotated. It was early recognized that a single needle for forming the record and the reproduction therefrom was an undesirable arrangement, since the formation of the record required a very sharp cutting-tool, while satisfactory and repeated reproduction suggested the use of a stylus which would result in the minimum wear. After many experiments and the production of a number of types of machines, the present recorders and reproducers were evolved, the former consisting of a very small cylindrical gouging tool having a diameter of about forty thousandths of an inch, and the latter a ball or button-shaped stylus with a diameter of about thirty-five thousandths of an inch. By using an incisor of this sort, the record is formed of a series of connected gouges with rounded sides, varying in depth and width, and with which the reproducer automatically engages and maintains its engagement. Another difficulty encountered in the commercial development of the phonograph was the adjustment of the recording stylus so as to enter the wax-like surface to a very slight depth, and of the reproducer so as to engage exactly the record when formed. The earlier types of machines were provided with separate screws for effecting these adjustments; but considerable skill was required to obtain good results, and great difficulty was experienced in meeting the variations in the wax-like cylinders, due to the warping under atmospheric changes. Consequently, with the early types of commercial phonographs, it was first necessary to shave off the blank accurately before a record was formed thereon, in order that an absolutely true surface might be presented. To overcome these troubles, the very ingenious suggestion was then made and adopted, of connecting the recording and reproducing styluses to their respective diaphragms through the instrumentality of a compensating weight, which acted practically as a fixed support under the very rapid sound vibrations, but which yielded readily to distortions or variations in the wax-like cylinders. By reason of this improvement, it became possible to do away with all adjustments, the mass of the compensating weight causing the recorder to engage the blank automatically to the required depth, and to maintain the reproducing stylus always with the desired pressure on the record when formed. These automatic adjustments were maintained even though the blank or record might be so much out of true as an eighth of an inch, equal to more than two hundred times the maximum depth of the record groove.
Another improvement that followed along the lines adopted by Edison for the commercial development of the phonograph was making the recording and reproducing styluses of sapphire, an extremely hard, non-oxidizable jewel, so that those tiny instruments would always retain their true form and effectively resist wear. Of course, in this work many other things were done that may still be found on the perfected phonograph as it stands to-day, and many other suggestions were made which were contemporaneously adopted, but which were later abandoned. For the curious-minded, reference is made to the records in the Patent Office, which will show that up to 1893 Edison had obtained upward of sixty-five patents in this art, from which his line of thought can be very closely traced. The phonograph of to-day, except for the perfection of its mechanical features, in its beauty of manufacture and design, and in small details, may be considered identical with the machine of 1889, with the exception that with the latter the rotation of the record cylinder was effected by an electric motor.
Its essential use as then contemplated was as a substitute for stenographers, and the most extravagant fancies were indulged in as to utility in that field. To exploit the device commercially, the patents were sold to Philadelphia capitalists, who organized the North American Phonograph Company, through which leases for limited periods were granted to local companies doing business in special territories, gen- erally within the confines of a single State. Under that plan, resembling the methods of 1878, the machines and blank cylinders were manufactured by the Edison Phonograph Works, which still retains its factories at Orange, New Jersey. The marketing enterprise was early doomed to failure, principally because the instruments were not well understood, and did not possess the necessary refinements that would fit them for the special field in which they were to be used. At first the instruments were leased; but it was found that the leases were seldom renewed. Efforts were then made to sell them, but the prices were high--from $100 to $150. In the midst of these difficulties, the chief promoter of the enterprise, Mr. Lippincott, died; and it was soon found that the roseate dreams of success entertained by the sanguine promoters were not to be realized. The North American Phonograph Company failed, its principal creditor being Mr. Edison, who, having acquired the assets of the defunct concern, organized the National Phonograph Company, to which he turned over the patents; and with characteristic energy he attempted again to build up a business with which his favorite and, to him, most interesting invention might be successfully identified. The National Phonograph Company from the very start determined to retire at least temporarily from the field of stenographic use, and to exploit the phonograph for musical purposes as a competitor of the music-box. Hence it was necessary that for such work the relatively heavy and expensive electric motor should be discarded, and a simple spring motor constructed with a sufficiently sensitive governor to permit accurate musical reproduction. Such a motor was designed, and is now used on all phonographs except on such special instruments as may be made with electric motors, as well as on the successful apparatus that has more recently been designed and introduced for stenographic use. Improved factory facilities were introduced; new tools were made, and various types of machines were designed so that phonographs can now be bought at prices ranging from $10 to $200. Even with the changes which were thus made in the two machines, the work of developing the business was slow, as a demand had to be created; and the early prejudice of the public against the phonograph, due to its failure as a stenographic apparatus, had to be overcome. The story of the phonograph as an industrial enterprise, from this point of departure, is itself full of interest, but embraces so many details that it is necessarily given in a separate later chapter. We must return to the days of 1878, when Edison, with at least three first-class inventions to his credit--the quadruplex, the carbon telephone, and the phonograph --had become a man of mark and a "world character."
The invention of the phonograph was immediately followed, as usual, by the appearance of several other incidental and auxiliary devices, some patented, and others remaining simply the application of the principles of apparatus that had been worked out. One of these was the telephonograph, a combination of a telephone at a distant station with a phonograph. The diaphragm of the phonograph mouthpiece is actuated by an electromagnet in the same way as that of an ordinary telephone receiver, and in this manner a record of the message spoken from a distance can be obtained and turned into sound at will. Evidently such a process is reversible, and the phonograph can send a message to the distant receiver.
This idea was brilliantly demonstrated in practice in February, 1889, by Mr. W. J. Hammer, one of Edison's earliest and most capable associates, who carried on telephonographic communication between New York and an audience in Philadelphia. The record made in New York on the Edison phonograph was repeated into an Edison carbon transmitter, sent over one hundred and three miles of circuit, including six miles of underground cable; received by an Edison motograph; repeated by that on to a phonograph; transferred from the phonograph to an Edison carbon transmitter, and by that delivered to the Edison motograph receiver in the enthusiastic lecture-hall, where every one could hear each sound and syllable distinctly. In real practice this spectacular playing with sound vibrations, as if they were lacrosse balls to toss around between the goals, could be materially simplified.
The modern megaphone, now used universally in making announcements to large crowds, particularly at sporting events, is also due to this period as a perfection by Edison of many antecedent devices going back, perhaps, much further than the legendary funnels through which Alexander the Great is said to have sent commands to his outlying forces. The improved Edison megaphone for long-distance work comprised two horns of wood or metal about six feet long, tapering from a diameter of two feet six inches at the mouth to a small aperture provided with ear- tubes. These converging horns or funnels, with a large speaking-trumpet in between them, are mounted on a tripod, and the megaphone is complete. Conversation can be carried on with this megaphone at a distance of over two miles, as with a ship or the balloon. The modern megaphone now employs the receiver form thus introduced as its very effective transmitter, with which the old-fashioned speaking- trumpet cannot possibly compete; and the word "megaphone" is universally applied to the single, side-flaring horn.
A further step in this line brought Edison to the "aerophone," around which the Figaro weaved its fanciful description. In the construction of the aerophone the same kind of tympanum is used as in the phonograph, but the imitation of the human voice, or the transmission of sound, is effected by the quick opening and closing of valves placed within a steam- whistle or an organ-pipe. The vibrations of the diaphragm communicated to the valves cause them to operate in synchronism, so that the vibrations are thrown upon the escaping air or steam; and the result is an instrument with a capacity of magnifying the sounds two hundred times, and of hurling them to great distances intelligibly, like a huge fog-siren, but with immense clearness and penetration. All this study of sound transmission over long distances without wires led up to the consideration and inven- tion of pioneer apparatus for wireless telegraphy-- but that also is another chapter.
Yet one more ingenious device of this period must be noted--Edison's vocal engine, the patent application for which was executed in August, 1878, the patent being granted the following December. Reference to this by Edison himself has already been quoted. The "voice-engine," or "phonomotor," converts the vibrations of the voice or of music, acting on the diaphragm, into motion which is utilized to drive some secondary appliance, whether as a toy or for some useful purpose. Thus a man can actually talk a hole through a board.
Somewhat weary of all this work and excitement, and not having enjoyed any cessation from toil, or period of rest, for ten years, Edison jumped eagerly at the opportunity afforded him in the summer of 1878 of making a westward trip. Just thirty years later, on a similar trip over the same ground, he jotted down for this volume some of his reminiscences. The lure of 1878 was the opportunity to try the ability of his delicate tasimeter during the total eclipse of the sun, July 29. His admiring friend, Prof. George F. Barker, of the University of Pennsylvania, with whom he had now been on terms of intimacy for some years, suggested the holiday, and was himself a member of the excursion party that made its rendezvous at Rawlins, Wyoming Territory. Edison had tested his tasimeter, and was satisfied that it would measure down to the millionth part of a degree Fahrenheit. It was just ten years since he had left the West in poverty and obscurity, a penni- less operator in search of a job; but now he was a great inventor and famous, a welcome addition to the band of astronomers and physicists assembled to observe the eclipse and the corona.
"There were astronomers from nearly every nation," says Mr. Edison. "We had a special car. The country at that time was rather new; game was in great abundance, and could be seen all day long from the car window, especially antelope. We arrived at Rawlins about 4 P.M. It had a small machine shop, and was the point where locomotives were changed for the next section. The hotel was a very small one, and by doubling up we were barely accommodated. My room-mate was Fox, the correspondent of the New York Herald. After we retired and were asleep a thundering knock on the door awakened us. Upon opening the door a tall, handsome man with flowing hair dressed in western style entered the room. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was somewhat inebriated. He introduced himself as `Texas Jack'--Joe Chromondo--and said he wanted to see Edison, as he had read about me in the newspapers. Both Fox and I were rather scared, and didn't know what was to be the result of the interview. The landlord requested him not to make so much noise, and was thrown out into the hall. Jack explained that he had just come in with a party which had been hunting, and that he felt fine. He explained, also, that he was the boss pistol-shot of the West; that it was he who taught the celebrated Doctor Carver how to shoot. Then suddenly pointing to a weather-vane on the freight depot, he pulled out a Colt revolver and fired through the window, hitting the vane. The shot awakened all the people, and they rushed in to see who was killed. It was only after I told him I was tired and would see him in the morning that he left. Both Fox and I were so nervous we didn't sleep any that night.
"We were told in the morning that Jack was a pretty good fellow, and was not one of the `bad men,' of whom they had a good supply. They had one in the jail, and Fox and I went over to see him. A few days before he had held up a Union Pacific train and robbed all the passengers. In the jail also was a half-breed horse-thief. We interviewed the bad man through bars as big as railroad rails. He looked like a `bad man.' The rim of his ear all around came to a sharp edge and was serrated. His eyes were nearly white, and appeared as if made of glass and set in wrong, like the life-size figures of Indians in the Smithsonian Institution. His face was also extremely irregular. He wouldn't answer a single question. I learned afterward that he got seven years in prison, while the horse-thief was hanged. As horses ran wild, and there was no protection, it meant death to steal one."
This was one interlude among others. "The first thing the astronomers did was to determine with precision their exact locality upon the earth. A number of observations were made, and Watson, of Michigan University, with two others, worked all night computing, until they agreed. They said they were not in error more than one hundred feet, and that the station was twelve miles out of the position given on the maps. It seemed to take an immense amount of mathematics. I preserved one of the sheets, which looked like the time-table of a Chinese railroad. The instruments of the various parties were then set up in different parts of the little town, and got ready for the eclipse which was to occur in three or four days. Two days before the event we all got together, and obtaining an engine and car, went twelve miles farther west to visit the United States Government astronomers at a place called Separation, the apex of the Great Divide, where the waters run east to the Mississippi and west to the Pacific. Fox and I took our Winchester rifles with an idea of doing a little shooting. After calling on the Government people we started to interview the telegraph operator at this most lonely and desolate spot. After talking over old acquaintances I asked him if there was any game around. He said, `Plenty of jack-rabbits.' These jack-rabbits are a very peculiar species. They have ears about six inches long and very slender legs, about three times as long as those of an ordinary rabbit, and travel at a great speed by a series of jumps, each about thirty feet long, as near as I could judge. The local people called them `narrow-gauge mules.' Asking the operator the best direction, he pointed west, and noticing a rabbit in a clear space in the sage bushes, I said, `There is one now.' I advanced cautiously to within one hundred feet and shot. The rabbit paid no attention. I then advanced to within ten feet and shot again--the rabbit was still immovable. On looking around, the whole crowd at the station were watching--and then I knew the rabbit was stuffed! However, we did shoot a number of live ones until Fox ran out of cartridges. On returning to the station I passed away the time shooting at cans set on a pile of tins. Finally the operator said to Fox: `I have a fine Springfield musket, suppose you try it!' So Fox took the musket and fired. It knocked him nearly over. It seems that the musket had been run over by a handcar, which slightly bent the long barrel, but not sufficiently for an amateur like Fox to notice. After Fox had his shoulder treated with arnica at the Government hospital tent, we returned to Rawlins."
The eclipse was, however, the prime consideration, and Edison followed the example of his colleagues in making ready. The place which he secured for setting up his tasimeter was an enclosure hardly suitable for the purpose, and he describes the results as follows:
"I had my apparatus in a small yard enclosed by a board fence six feet high, at one end there was a house for hens. I noticed that they all went to roost just before totality. At the same time a slight wind arose, and at the moment of totality the atmosphere was filled with thistle-down and other light articles. I noticed one feather, whose weight was at least one hundred and fifty milligrams, rise perpendicularly to the top of the fence, where it floated away on the wind. My apparatus was entirely too sensitive, and I got no results." It was found that the heat from the corona of the sun was ten times the index capacity of the instrument; but this result did not leave the value of the device in doubt. The Scientific American remarked;
"Seeing that the tasimeter is affected by a wider range of etheric undulations than the eye can take cognizance of, and is withal far more acutely sensitive, the probabilities are that it will open up hitherto inaccessible regions of space, and possibly extend the range of aerial knowledge as far beyond the limit obtained by the telescope as that is beyond the narrow reach of unaided vision."
The eclipse over, Edison, with Professor Barker, Major Thornberg, several soldiers, and a number of railroad officials, went hunting about one hundred miles south of the railroad in the Ute country. A few months later the Major and thirty soldiers were ambushed near the spot at which the hunting-party had camped, and all were killed. Through an introduction from Mr. Jay Gould, who then controlled the Union Pacific, Edison was allowed to ride on the cow-catchers of the locomotives. "The different engineers gave me a small cushion, and every day I rode in this manner, from Omaha to the Sacramento Valley, except through the snow-shed on the summit of the Sierras, without dust or anything else to obstruct the view. Only once was I in danger when the locomotive struck an animal about the size of a small cub bear--which I think was a badger. This animal struck the front of the locomotive just under the headlight with great violence, and was then thrown off by the rebound. I was sitting to one side grasping the angle brace, so no harm was done."
This welcome vacation lasted nearly two months; but Edison was back in his laboratory and hard at work before the end of August, gathering up many loose ends, and trying out many thoughts and ideas that had accumulated on the trip. One hot afternoon --August 30th, as shown by the document in the case--Mr. Edison was found by one of the authors of this biography employed most busily in making a mysterious series of tests on paper, using for ink acids that corrugated and blistered the paper where written upon. When interrogated as to his object, he stated that the plan was to afford blind people the means of writing directly to each other, especially if they were also deaf and could not hear a message on the phonograph. The characters which he was thus forming on the paper were high enough in relief to be legible to the delicate touch of a blind man's fingers, and with simple apparatus letters could be thus written, sent, and read. There was certainly no question as to the result obtained at the moment, which was all that was asked; but the Edison autograph thus and then written now shows the paper eaten out by the acid used, although covered with glass for many years. Mr. Edison does not remember that he ever recurred to this very interesting test.
He was, however, ready for anything new or novel, and no record can ever be made or presented that would do justice to a tithe of the thoughts and fancies daily and hourly put upon the rack. The famous note-books, to which reference will be made later, were not begun as a regular series, as it was only the profusion of these ideas that suggested the vital value of such systematic registration. Then as now, the propositions brought to Edison ranged over every conceivable subject, but the years have taught him caution in grappling with them. He tells an amusing story of one dilemma into which his good-nature led him at this period: "At Menlo Park one day, a farmer came in and asked if I knew any way to kill potato- bugs. He had twenty acres of potatoes, and the vines were being destroyed. I sent men out and culled two quarts of bugs, and tried every chemical I had to destroy them. Bisulphide of carbon was found to do it instantly. I got a drum and went over to the potato farm and sprinkled it on the vines with a pot. Every bug dropped dead. The next morning the farmer came in very excited and reported that the stuff had killed the vines as well. I had to pay $300 for not experimenting properly."
During this year, 1878, the phonograph made its way also to Europe, and various sums of money were paid there to secure the rights to its manufacture and exploitation. In England, for example, the Microscopic Company paid $7500 down and agreed to a royalty, while arrangements were effected also in France, Russia, and other countries. In every instance, as in this country, the commercial development had to wait several years, for in the mean time another great art had been brought into existence, demanding exclusive attention and exhaustive toil. And when the work was done the reward was a new heaven and a new earth--in the art of illumination.
|
Nativity of Jesus
|
Narendra Modi achieved what notable title in May 2014?
|
History of American Radio: Melodrama, Adaptation and Comedy
History of American Radio:
Melodrama, Adaptation and Comedy
1938- Two days before Halloween, Orson Welles broadcast a radio play based on H.G. Wells' science fiction classic "The War of the Worlds." Many listeners panicked, believing that the Martian invasion of New Jersey was real. The bidding war in Hollywood for Wells began the next day.
Primary Points on Radio-
Radio became the first Immediate massive media outlet for information and entertainment. Even larger audiences than Cinema
Radio technology develops from various 19th century experiments
Radios were first obtained by the public through kits that used razor blades and crystals as main components
Widespread by the late 30s and early 40s
Starts as a service medium
Farm reports
created by scientist that did not comprehend its possibilities
Usually live it had the spontaneity of theatre and vaudeville
Topical-
Radio unlike television is an active medium
Differed from current radio because it demanded attention
No mass media has ever been destroyed by another, the focus of the old medium changes to adapt. Rock and Roll reinvents radio programming.
Scientists had no grasp of the business aspects of radio
Business potential beginning to be realized by entrepreneurs
Westinghouse, AT&T, United Fruit Company pool resources and begin the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
First free access medium
Paid for by sponsorship of shows
Companies paid to have their name associated with the entertainment.
Ex. Texaco Star Theater
David Sarnoff would centralize 14 stations and form the first radio network. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC)
Soon thereafter William Paleys CBS would become the first network to allow direct fragmented advertising.
Self-censorship becomes mandatory because of the ubiquity of radio
Homogenized content because of mass appeal
Meant to reach the buying public, and therefore could not offend
Content broken along genre lines
it is on radio that all television genres begin, from the soap opera to the game show
Advertisers are able to reach dense demographics by sponsoring appropriate content Little Orphan Annie sponsored by Ovaltine
Minorities, poor, and women are not targeted
Four divisions of radio content
Informational - News, Sports, cooking shows
Melodrama - Adult and Juvenile
Adaptation - Novels and Classics
Comedy - Sketch, monologue, talk show
Because of the lack of visuals, radio relied heavily on stereotype for instant recognition of character type, 3d characters never exist on radio
Pre-1900 - The Theory and Foundation
1600 William Gilbert suggests a link between static electricity and magnetism.
William Gilbert 1544-1603
Born in England, he served Queen Elizabeth I as a physician. During his lifetime he performed many experiments on the nature of magnetism, and eventually offered the first comprehensive theories of magnetism, based on his assumption that the Earth itself was a large magnet.
Modern aircraft pilots are well aquatinted with at least two of his findings, Magnetic Dip, and Magnetic Variation of a compass.
1844
Samuel Finley Breese Morse 1791-1872
By the age of 21, Samuel Morse showed an interest in electrical experimentation. A shipboard conversation in 1832 planted the seed for a method of telegraphy, and by 1835 the basic physical elements of a relay system were in place. A patent was issued in 1840, and the U.S. Congress gave him a grant for $30,000 to construct a line between Washington and Baltimore. The first message on this line was sent on May 24th, 1844.
� The "Morse Code" was invented by Morse, and his assistant Alfred Vail about 1840. The original code was simplified in 1851, and is called the 'Continental', or 'International' Morse code.
� Samuel F.B. Morse sends the first message of any distance by Telegraph - about 40 miles. The message -"What hath God wrought!" The wired Telegraph and Morse Code are the first long distance, instant communication system the world has known.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell 1847-1922
Bell was born in Scottland, and was home schooled until the age of ten. As a boy, his experiments with speech and sound reproduction led to a lifelong interest in the field.
He was granted a patent in 1874 on a method of sending two or more telegraphic messages on the same wire, at the same time. The next year, as a result of an accident, words to the effect of "Watson - come here, I want you" were reproduced electronically by his 'telephone'. In August of 1876 the distance spanned by telephone was 8 miles, and 'long distance' became a reality by the end of that year, as he communicated over 143 miles.
In 1880 Bell achieved the first wireless transmission of speech - using his invention -- the 'photophone' -- to transmit words on a beam of light.
Alexander G. Bell demonstrates the telephone.
1877
Thomas Alva Edison 1847-1931
Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1847. A prolific inventor - in 1879 he developed the first commercially practical incandescent lamp. By 1882 he had developed a central power station for his lamps - necessary before they would become widely used. He invented the Stock Ticker, alkaline storage batteries, the carbon microphone and of course, the phonograph. In all, over 1000 of his inventions held patents - including a method of wireless telegraphy based on magnetic induction.
Thomas A. Edison records sound on cylinders. The first recording - "Mary had a little lamb."
1878
Edison begins work on the electric light.
1879
� The Berlin Academy of Sciences offers a prize to the scientist who can show experimentally that a changing electric field generates a transient electric field, and vice-versa. The challenge is taken up by, among others...Heinrich Hertz.
Pre-1900 - The Theory and Foundation
1883
The Edison Effect is discovered while Thomas Edison was trying to find a way to keep the inside of his electric lights free of soot. He actually placed a metal plate inside the bulb and connected a wire to it creating a diode! Unfortunately, he did not realize the implications - or did not take time to pursue them because of other interests at the time. Edison patents the Fuse.
1887
Radio Frequency and Wavelength Ranges
Radio waves have a wide range of applications, including communication during emergency rescues (transistor and shortwave radios), international broadcasts (satellites), and cooking food (microwaves). A radio wave is described by its wavelength, the distance from one crest to the next, or its frequency, the number of crests that move past a point in one second. Wavelengths of radio waves range from 100,000 m (270,000 ft) to 1 mm (.004 in). Frequencies range from 3 kilohertz to 300 gigahertz.
� Heinrich Hertz 1857-1894 proves Maxwell's theory that electricity can travel through space in waves. He went on to show that these waves shared the same physical properties as light.
� Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany and attended the University of Berlin. In 1883 he became an instructor at Kiel University - where he first studied the work of Maxwell.
� Maxwell had theorized that electric fields in the form of waves propagated at the speed of light rather than instantaneously. To prove this, Hertz conducted a series of experiments between 1886 and 1889 involving measuring the strength of oscillations at differing points along a sheet of zinc. These experiments confirmed the existence of waves, and that these waves acted identical to light in regards to refraction and polarization. In short, Hertz had proven the theory of Maxwell that light itself was a form of electromagnetic radiation.
1891
Edison receives a patent for wireless telegraphy.
1894 Guglielmo Marconi 1874-1937
Probably the name associated most with the invention of radio, Marconi was certainly a visionary of what it could become. Born into a very well-to-do family in Bologna, Italy, Marconi first read of the pioneering work in radio in 1894, in an obituary of Heinrich Hertz. He was the first to realized the possibility of using this new technology as a form of communication, and he began his life work. Within the year he was ringing a bell by wireless control a few yards away, and by 1897 the distance spanned by his wireless was nearly 10 miles.
Among his innovations were a greatly improved 'coherer' or detector, antenna work - including an earth ground which greatly increased his range, and the use of a high antenna. A vertical antenna with an earth ground is still referred to as a 'Marconi'. He also worked with directional antenna's.
At the age of 22 he filed for his first patent (#7777) for a system of radio communication. Five years later he succeeded in signaling across the Atlantic Ocean. Guglielmo Marconi reads about Heinrich Hertz's discovery of electro-magnetic waves.
1895
Marconi succeeds in signaling across the family estate by radio - a distance of about 1.2 miles.
1896
� Marconi transports his wireless invention to England. Upon entry to the country, nervous customs officials smash his apparatus under suspicion that it may be part of an Italian anarchist plot.
� Nikola Tesla introduces the use of a rotary gap for his spark transmitter .
� Marconi takes out patents in England for 'wireless telegraphy'.
1897
� Joseph John Thompson discovers the existence of the electron.
� The Marconi Company is formed in England.
1898
� Marconi installs the worlds first commercial radio service on Rathlin Island off the coast of Ireland.
1899
� Marconi installs wireless equipment on three British battleships.
� Nathan B. Stubblefield reportedly transmits voice messages by wireless.
� Marconi sends radio messages across the English Channel.
� Marconi arrives in New York with his wireless equipment to issue radio reports on a yacht race.
1900-1909 - Early Experiments
1900
Nikola Tesla 1856-1943
Tesla was born in Croatia, but moved to the United States in 1884. Following his move he worked for Thomas Edison designing dynamos, and then established his own laboratory in 1887.
Tesla's work laid the foundations for large scale electric power generation and transmission. Tesla experimented with high frequency alternators and invented the 'Tesla Coil' as a means for even higher voltages. His work included the for runner of the neon and fluorescent lights, he predicted radio as a means of communication in 1893, and spent a large amount of time in an effort to transmit electric power without wires. He built the largest Tesla coil ever made at Colorado Springs - a twelve million volt device which drew an arc up to 135 feet in length.
� Other predictions by Tesla included radar in 1917, and radio services of pictures, time, and weather information in 1900.
� Reginald Fessenden theorizes that an alternator, as developed by Tesla, could generate an electromagnetic wave able to carry voice and music. He uses a spark generator to send the human voice the distance of about one mile.
1901
� Marconi receives the letter "S" by Morse code (35 K Wav of a spark transmitter) in St. Johns, Newfoundland. John A. Fleming was at the transmitter in England.
� Canadian Marconi Stations
� Marconi's antenna farm at Poldhu, England.
� Karl Ferdinand Braun introduces the use of a crystal detector as part of a wireless receiver.
1902
� Reginald Fessenden invents the 'Electrolytic Detector'.
� The magnetic detector is invented by Marconi.
� Fessenden forms the National Electric Signaling Company.
� The DeForest Wireless Telegraph Company is formed.
1904
John Ambrose Fleming 1849-1945
Fleming was born in Lancaster, England and studied electricity and mathematics under James Clerk Maxwell. He served a number of electric lighting companies as advisor and engineer, and was a scientific consultant for the Marconi Company from 1899-1905. Besides his work in theory, he was also active in the practical application of his work. He made improvements in electric lamps, generators, and many pieces of radio-telegraph apparatus.
In 1904, while searching for a better detector for wireless signals he recalled his work for Edison in the early 1880's - and the phenomenon known as the Edison Effect. He fashioned a lamp with a metal cylinder surrounding the filament, ran wires to the outside of the envelope - and started the industry of electronics with his electrical 'valve'.
The Fleming Valve
� John Ambrose Fleming invents the first tube, the "Fleming Valve", or as he called it..an Oscillation Valve. His valve is a two element rectifier, made by inserting a metal plate in one of Edison's electric light bulbs.
� Fleming serves as a scientific consultant to the Marconi company, and designs many pieces of early wireless apparatus. He is charged to develop a new detector for wireless signals.
1900-1909 - Early Experiments
1906
� The 'Alexanderson Alternator' is delivered to Fessenden's station. On Christmas Eve, 1906 he broadcasts speech and music to surprised shipboard operators. He broadcasts on 42 Kilohertz at 1 kilowatt. The programming includes a female voice singing a Christmas carol, a violin solo by Fessenden, and an invitation to report on reception.
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden 1866-1932
� Fessenden, a Canadian born in East Bolton, Quebec worked as a tester and Chemist in the Edison Machine works of New York, and later at Edison's laboratory in New Jersey. Among his patents were the electrolytic detector - far more sensitive than other early methods of detection, and the process of 'heterodyning' a signal - mixing it with another frequency to create a 'sum' and 'difference' of the original frequency.
� Personally, he is said to have been a bit arrogant - using phrases such as 'Don't try to think - you haven't the brain for it'. He obtained over 500 patents in his lifetime, many for advances in the art of radio.
1906
� Henry H.C. Dunwoody patents the use of carborundum in detectors.
Lee DeForest 1873-1961
� Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa to a Congregational minister, Lee Deforest made his greatest contribution to radio and electronics with his invention of the Triode. Although he flooded the patent office with ideas, only a relative few of his over 300 patents proved important.
� In the early years of radio he installed many wireless transmitting stations, and his became one of the most famous of the early companies. His business sense however, was lacking, and he was taken advantage of by several associates.
� He concentrated his efforts on moving pictures in the 1920's - claiming the field of radio was getting too crowded. Later years found him suing other inventors - notably Howard Armstrong - for patent infringement.
� Lee DeForest patents the "Audion" as a "new receiver for wireless telegraphy." He added a 'Grid' to the Fleming Valve, creating the 'Triode'.
1907
� The first 'Broadcasts' of records are done to aid in testing, so the operator didn't have to talk.
� The worlds first Trans-Atlantic commercial wireless service is established by Marconi with stations at Clifden, Ireland and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.
1909
� Braun and Marconi share the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in the development of wireless telegraphy.
� Charles 'Doc' Herrold begins a regular schedule of broadcasts from his "Herrold College of Wireless and Engineering" at San Jose, CA.
� S.S. Republic sinks after a collision. All but two lives are saved with the help of wireless.
1910-1919 - Technical Advances
... or ..can you say, "Armstrong"?
1910
� DeForest broadcasts Enrico Caruso from the stage of the Metropolitan
1911
� Young radio amateurs are building receivers with whatever parts are available. Although headphones can be purchased...many public telephone booths become inoperative.
Armstrong Edwin Armstrong 1890-1954
� Born in New York City, Armstrong graduated from Columbia University in 1913, and received his first patent for his regenerative receiver in 1914.
� Without a doubt, Edwin Armstrong did more to advance the art of radio than any other inventor. Every radio and television receiver uses Armstrong's inventions. His list of patents and inventions includes regeneration, the superheterodyne receiver, and wide-band FM. During war time, Armstrong freely gave use of his patents to the military. From 1931 his efforts went into developing and promoting FM, and defending his inventions against suits by DeForest. Many years later almost every suit was decided in favor of Armstrong.
� Armstrong committed suicide in 1954.
1912
� Edwin Armstrong invents regeneration.
� "Edwin Armstrong found the radio telephone talking like a hair-lipped man and left it singing like a nightingale."
� The ocean liner, "Titanic" hits an iceberg and sinks. The wireless distress call was heard 58 miles away by the liner "Carpathia". Those who made it into lifeboats were rescued 3 1/2 hours later. There were 705 lives saved.
� Congress passes the Radio Act of 1912 to prevent amateur radio operators from interfering with government stations.
� John H. Hammond, Jr. develops equipment to remotely control vessels by radio up to three miles away. Later, many of his patents were sold to the U.S. military for use in radio guidance in weapons delivery systems.
1914
War breaks out in Europe, and Amateur licenses are suspended in almost all foreign countries.
1915
� Human voices are first broadcast across the Atlantic ocean, between Arlington, Virginia and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
1916
David Sarnoff 1891-1971
� Sarnoff was born in Russia, and moved to New York City as a boy. He worked as a telegraph operator in the Marconi company, and some accounts have him working at the key for three days straight during the Titanic disaster - although there is discussion of this being an exaggeration.
� There is no doubt that Sarnoff was a driven man, and he was a great figure in the growth of broadcasting. Sarnoff became the general manager of RCA in 1921, and quickly became its vice-president. He saw the company through the rise of radio broadcasting, supervised the creation of the first network (NBC) and the move into television. During World War II he was a communications consultant, and for his service was named as a Brigadier General.
� reportedly proposes 'radio music boxes' for the home as a potential business opportunity... and was ignored.
� Wireless is used by the New York city police department.
� Wireless telegraphy is made compulsory on all British vessels over 3,000 tons. ....25 minutes of scratching on a crystal with the cats-whisker to hear a station 50 miles away....Success!
1917
� America enters the First World War, and all patent protection is set aside for the duration. Many advances are made in manufacturing and design due to this measure.
� Amateur radio experimenters pull down their antennas and pack away their equipment by government order.
1918
� Radio technology is used in detection of submarines, and by the US Signal Corps in France.
� 5700 ships are now equipped with wireless telegraphy worldwide.
1919
� The War is over!
� Owen D. Young starts the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - an offshoot of General Electric. Within the year he has an agreement with GE, RCA, and AT&T for sharing all radio patents between themselves.
� Dr. Frank Conrad , a Westinghouse engineer, broadcasts a regular schedule of records from his garage in Pittsburgh, and begins to take requests from the avalanche of mail he receives. A local department store mentions those broadcasts in one of their newspaper advertisements, and promptly sells out of its radio equipment. Westinghouse takes notice, and begins to see the possibilities for broadcasting.
1920-1929 - Early Broadcasting
1920
� Between 1920 and 1925, radio broadcasters were unregulated, the airwaves were a mess. Although most experimenters and pioneers used the longer waves, Marconi never did fully abandon his efforts to use the short-wave bands.
� Westinghouse builds a 100 watt radio station in a little shack atop its nine story factory in Pittsburgh... KDKA. November 2, 1920, Frank Conrad and Donald Little broadcast election returns from 8:00PM till after Midnight- an event that is credited with starting a rush to build stations, and purchase receivers.
� The first commercial radio stations with regularly scheduled broadcasts were heard in 1920. WWJ (Detroit) (then known as "8MK") went on-air in August. KDKA (Pittsburgh) went on-air in November with the results of the 1920 Harding - Cox Presidential election. [Some sources claim KQW in San Jose, California deserves the title of "First Commercial Station" because of its broadcasting in 1912.]
� By late in the year, radio is being acclaimed as the newest form of entertainment for the home.
� The 'C' battery is introduced to provide bias voltage. This helps the 'B' battery last longer by reducing the amount of plate current needed on tubes.
� Radio experimenters spent over 2 Million dollars for radio parts in 1920.
1921
� A religious service was broadcast from Calvary Episcopal Church at Pittsburgh through KDKA. The engineers wore choir robes, as not to distract from the service.
� Station WJC (soon to become WABC) in Newark, NJ broadcasts regular bedtime stories.
� Station 9JR broadcasts grain quotations to grain elevator operators using a $5 Sears-Roebuck broadcasting set and a 10 watt transmitter.
� David Sarnoff is named General Manager of RCA.
� The Dempsey-Carpenter fight is broadcast on WJY. This fight is broadcast to an audience estimated at 300,000. At nearly the same time as the fight ended, the transmitter overloaded - and was described later as a 'molten mass'. (Dempsey knocked out Carpenter in the Fourth round)
� Westinghouse joins in the agreement with RCA, GE and AT&T. They share a pool of over 2000 radio patents.
� There are 5 broadcasting stations on the air in December of 1921.
� WJZ broadcasts a Baseball World series game, pitch by pitch, getting the information by telephone.
� President Woodrow Wilson used the radio during the latter part of his tenure (1913 - 1921).
1922
� The "Newark Sunday Call" newspaper installs a transmitter in an automobile. The antenna was strung between posts mounted on the front and rear bumpers.
� In September of 1922 there are 537 stations broadcasting.
� Approx. 100,000 radio sets are produced this year. Radio prices begin to fall, as competition to market radio's grows.
� WEAF (Owned by AT&T) in Albany, New York is the first to offer air time to advertisers. $9/30 seconds. It was August 28th, at 5:15 PM - an infomercial on the Hawthorne apartment complex in Queens.
� Edwin Armstrong invents the 'Super-Regenerative' receiver.
� The Marconi Company starts '2LO' in London - Britain's first broadcasting station.
� National political conventions were heard on a nationwide network during the 1922 nomination season.
1923
� Packaging-Sponsors begin to hire producers and produce content
� Ever-Ready hour is the first business sponsored program
� First Radio Broadcast of a World Series
� US President Harding has a radio installed at the White House.
� The first Network broadcast was made, as WEAF, WJAR and WMAF are linked by phone.
� New radios became obsolete in 3 to 6 months time.
� Approx. 500,000 radio sets are produced this year.
� Edwin Armstrong invents the first 'Portable' radio. A wedding gift to his wife.
1924
� In 1924, the A & P Gypsies appeared on WEAF (New York), and moved to NBC Red in 1926. For the next 10 years, this musical show (Harry Horlick and his orchestra) was heard nationally, on NBC Red or NBC Blue.
� The National Barn Dance first heard on WLS (Chicago). The show was broadcast between 4/19/24 and 4/30/60 (and only 14 recorded shows remain)
� The present A.M. band is assigned. It spans 550 - 1550 kilocycles.
� Over 1400 stations are now broadcasting.
� It is estimated that over 3 million radio sets are in use in the United States.
� Baseball games are broadcast almost daily.
� New radio's - superhets, reflex sets, TRF's, and neutrodynes are much more complex, so a new industry begins to take shape - the radio repairman.
1925
� The Grand Ol' Opry appeared, and was heard on various stations until 1941, when it was picked up by NBC. Grand Ol' Opry was heard on NBC on Saturday nights (at about 9:30 or 10:30 PM) through 1956, when it became syndicated, and was heard on various other stations. Among the shows broadcast that year were several orchestras, Ben Bernie, Will Rogers, Sam and Henry and Father Coughlin. The Betty Crocker Show started on NBC Red.
1926
� Sam & Henry making big splash on local Chicago station. NBC, unsuccessful in their attempt to lure Freeman and Gosden to their network buy the station and makes the renamed "Amos & Andy" a national half hour show in 1928.
� The first 'light socket' powered sets are marketed.
� To fight the competition from independently owned stations, Sarnoff gets 14 stations to pool resources and simultaneously broadcast the same professional content. This professional quality programming would knock out most of the independent stations in the coming years.
� RCA, Westinghouse and GE start a network...NBC, the National Broadcasting Corporation.
� A US court decides that the Secretary of Commerce has no power to regulate broadcasting - only to issue licenses, and the chaos on the broadcast bands grows as stations increase power to drown out the competition.
David Sarnoff is named vice president of RCA
� More About Sarnoff, Part One In November 1916, E.J. Nally, vice president of the American division of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, received an unusual memo from one of his young assistants. The memo depicted a future in which music, news, sports, and even lectures could be broadcast over the airwaves, with Marconi reaping millions of dollars in profits from the sale of "radio music boxes." Nally quickly rejected the idea. Marconi sold radios for naval communication; the idea of entertainment radio seemed wrongheaded, if not completely fantastic. At the time, Nally had no way of knowing that the memo's author, twenty-five year-old David Sarnoff, had successfully predicted the multimillion dollar future of radio. Nor did he know that Sarnoff would one day, through a combination of keen foresight, boundless ambition, public relations manipulation, and ruthless opposition to everyone who stood in his way, develop a worldwide communications empire called RCA.
� Sarnoff's optimistic predictions for the future of radio, and belief in his personal vision were largely the by-products of his own dogged determination. Born into appalling poverty in a Jewish settlement near the Russian city of Minsk, Sarnoff came to New York with his family in 1900. He was nine years old at the time. Within days of his arrival, the young immigrant found employment hawking Yiddish newspapers on the mean streets of New York's Lower East Side.
� By the time he was thirteen, he had saved enough cash to buy a newsstand for $200. Profits gained for this early business venture only whetted Sarnoff's appetite for further gain. One Saturday morning in 1906, young Davey, as he was known to his friends, set out to visit the offices of the Herald newspaper to inquire about available positions. Quite by accident, he wandered into the Commercial Cable Company telegraph office instead, where he was hired immediately as a messenger boy--and fired almost as quickly, for requesting time off for the Jewish holidays.
� Undeterred, Sarnoff found work as a messenger boy at Marconi Wireless. He had already begun to develop his skills with a telegraph key, as he read voraciously from any technical journals he could find. In his spare time, he followed Marconi's engineers into their workshops, where he absorbed every possible morsel of technical information. At age sixteen, his persistence paid off. Sarnoff was hired as a junior telegrapher, earning $7.50 per week. A lifetime of vocational improvement through self-education had begun.
� Unrelenting persistence provided David Sarnoff with entree into the practice of wireless telegraphy; tragic accident earned him recognition in the field. On April 14, 1912, the day the S.S. Titanic sank in the frozen North Atlantic, Sarnoff was working as a telegrapher at the Marconi Wireless station atop the Wanamaker Hardware building in New York. His actions at the telegrapher's station following the sinking earned him considerable cache within the confines of Marconi Wireless. The carefully manipulated Sarnoff legend places young Davey at the telegraph, the first to hear news of the Titanic's sinking. More likely, Sarnoff rushed to the telegraph after learning about the accident from newspaper vendors. But there is no disputing that he sent and received wireless messages for seventy-two straight hours, gathering names of survivors as anxious relatives of Titanic passengers congregated on the streets below.
� Sarnoff impressed his superiors with his persistence and ambition. A promotion soon followed. Shortly thereafter, Sarnoff decided to abandon his career as a telegrapher, pursuing instead the business end of the wireless industry. He goal now was to acquire both money and power.
� He decided to pitch his idea for the radio music box to his superiors at Marconi. They, too, turned it down. But their rejection failed to quell his faith in his vision--or his determination to see it realized.
� Sarnoff's next chance came in 1920, with the formation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Created to prevent domination of American strategic communications by a foreign company like the British-owned Marconi, RCA was controlled largely by General Electric, which provided the startup funds. So it was to GE that Sarnoff next pitched his radio music box idea. To his delight, GE agreed to front $2000 for RCA to develop a prototype.
� By 1920, entertainment broadcasting had made its debut on numerous amateur stations, and on KDKA in Pittsburgh, the nation's first licensed station. Still, radio had yet to make the leap from the realm of the hobbyist and into the average home. That was until a broadcast on the night of July 2, 1921, pushed radio forward with the force of a locomotive. And the man who brought America that broadcast was RCA's new general manager, David Sarnoff.
� Sarnoff had correctly gauged the public's huge interest in the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and George Carpenter. So he arranged for the fight to be broadcast live by RCA. The event drew hundreds of thousands of listeners. The public got its first real taste of what a radio broadcast could be. Sales soared and Sarnoff came off looking like a visionary.
� Centralization of networks
� "Pay Radio" makes its debut in Philadelphia - Placed in retail stores, these 5 foot high units charge a nickel for 5 minutes of radio. big flop
1927
� Philo T. Farnsworth makes his application for a patent to cover a complete electronic television system, including an "image dissector tube."
� Radio act of 1927 sought to regulate the 732 stations broadcasting across the US. Further regulation was needed and the Communications act of 1934 established the FCC.
� The FRC, Federal Radio Commission begins to regulate broadcasting. Their first act was to revoke all licenses, and then assign frequencies and power levels.
� Mechanical televisions are being sold in kit form.
The Columbia Broadcasting System - CBS - is started
� CBS Inc., American broadcasting company, with headquarters in New York City. Company operations are chiefly conducted through the CBS/Broadcast Group, which consists of eight divisions: television, radio, news, sports, entertainment, marketing, affiliates, and enterprises. The CBS Television Network distributes programming in news, entertainment, sports, and feature films to more than 200 independently owned and 7 CBS-owned television stations in the United States, as well as to foreign affiliates.
� The company was incorporated in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters, Incorporated. In 1928 the name was changed to Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., and in 1974 it officially became CBS Inc. American communications executive William Paley invested in Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. in 1928 when it was a fledgling radio network. Under his guidance the network expanded from 22 to 114 stations in his first decade with the company.
� With the advent of television in the 1940s, Paley raided rival National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to attract such stars as Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen. CBS became the most popular television network and remained at the top of the ratings through the late 1970s. During this period CBS stars such as Ed Sullivan, Lucille Ball, and news journalist Walter Cronkite became prominent personalities. In the early and mid-1980s, and again in the mid-1990s, CBS returned to the top of the network ratings.
� CBS first diversified in 1938 with the acquisition of the American Recording Corporation, which later became Columbia Records. Later interests included the newspaper and magazine businesses, the film business, and music publishing. In the late 1980s CBS consolidated into the core television and radio businesses, selling the music-publishing division in 1986, the magazine division in 1987, and the records division in 1988. By the early 1990s, profits had been reduced as a result of competition from cable companies, video rentals, and the high cost of programming.
1928
� The first experimental TV station begins broadcasting - WGY in Schenectady, NY.
� Independent stations must be located in large metropolitan areas to remain viable
� Sam and Henry became Amos and Andy in 1928 when the show moved to NBC. The Amos and Andy show was on the radio through 1960 - making it the longest-running series in radio history. One of the first comedy series on radio was Amos n' Andy. In fact, at the time, it was the most popular show on radio. Because of this series, sales of radio sets surged. Amos n' Andy was about the life of two black men and their friends. Played by two white men, Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, the series remained one of the most popular for years. The two actors first were heard on WGN radio as Sam and Henry and the series was an instant hit in the Chicago area. However, two years later the two moved to WMAQ which was becoming the CBS outlet. They could not get the rights to their characters, so they created two new ones they called Amos and Andy and the show premiered in January, 1926. The dramatic series lasted off and on until 1954 when sensitivity to race was becoming a major force in determining the show's popularity.
� The Guy Lombardo Show [1967] started this year, as did the
� The Voice of Firestone and
� Uncle Don [1949]
1929
� 16 independent stations backed by the Columbia record company form the Columbia Broadcasting System to compete with NBC.
� William Paley, Pres. of CBS opens radio for all advertisers and products
� Between 1930 and 1976 CBS is the dominant network in both radio and television.
� RCA gains control of several important radio patents, and begins to license manufacturers to use those designs. Prior to this, radio design was somewhat stifled because no one could legally use the designs of many important circuits.
� Amos 'n' Andy becomes a series on NBC
1930-1939 - The Golden Age
� 12 million homes equipped with radio
1930 New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Sherlock Holmes [1956]
� Believe it or Not [1948]
� Death Valley Days [1945]
� The First Nighter [1949]
� Rin-Tin-Tin [1955]
� Ben Bernie [1943]
� Grand Hotel [1945]
� The Shadow [1954]
� It is Thursday night, July 31,1930. The time is 9:40 PM. Radio listeners tuned to CBS hear the first appearance of "The Shadow" as James La Curto portrays the part in the Detective Story Hour. Street and Smith publishers sponsored this show (which lasted about a year), along with their magazine series The Shadow, A Detective Monthly.
� In September 1931, The Blue Coal Radio Revue, starring Frank Readick, Jr. (who was the star in the later Detective Story Hour shows), continued the adventures of "The Shadow". The show remained an hour long, but was heard on Sundays at 5:30 PM.
� For a short time, lucky CBS listeners were able to hear The Shadow on both Thursdays and Sundays. In October, 1931, the 9:30 Thursday slots were taken by Love Story Drama or Love Story Hour (sponsored by Street and Smith), which also had portrayals of The Shadow!
� Orson Welles was "The Shadow" through 1938, while the now syndicated program was sponsored by Goodrich. Blue Coal again became the sponsor in late 1938, and Bill Johnstone became the new voice. Here is a RA Bret Morrison was the voice of The Shadow for most of 1943, and John Archer took over near the end of 1944. Bret Morrison returned in September, 1945, and remained the voice through 1954, when the program ended. Blue Coal remained the sponsor until September, 1949, when Grove Labs sponsored the show for a year (The show remained on Mutual, but shifted a half hour earlier, to 5:00 PM, Sundays). In January 1951, the US Army/Air Force became The Shadow's sponsor, after it was "sustained" for a few months by Mutual. Wildroot was the sponsor from about September '51 to Sept. '53, when various sponsors began to appear. The program was again "sustained" by Mutual until the last show on the day after Christmas, 1954.
1931
� The radio building boom has begun to wane...as most consumers are now purchasing complete sets, rather than kits.
1931 New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Bing Crosby's first radio show [1956]
� March of Time [1945]
� Myrt and Marge [1946]
� Lum and Abner [1954]
� Walter Winchell [1957]
� The Eddie Cantor Show [1953]
� The Hedda Hopper Show [1951]
� Kate Smith (Various shows) [1959]
1932
� The first auto radios are sold. (you still had to stop and put up a antenna.)
New Shows [last broadcast date]
� Burns and Allen [1950]
� Jack Benny [1955]
� Fred Allen [1949]
� One Man's Family [1959]
� Tarzan [1953]
� Easy Aces [1945]
� The Adventures of Charlie Chan [1948]
� Vic and Sade [1946]
� Buck Rogers [1947]
� The Ed Sullivan Show [1946]
� The Fire Chief (The Ed Wynn Show) [1945]
� Shadow of Fu Manchu [1939]
� One Man's Family [1959]
�
� NBC expands the network across the country
� NBC blue network is east of Mississippi
� NBC red is west coast
� Several Phonograph companies start labeling records "not licensed for radio broadcast" as move to protect their alleged property rights.
� "Fireside Chats" President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcast between 1933 and 1945
1934
� 1934 Mutual Broadcasting System founded.
� Armstrong develops his theory to use FM.
Radio Modulation
� Audio-frequency waves must be combined with carrier waves in order to be transmitted over the radio. Either the frequency (rate of oscillation) or the amplitude (height) of the waves may be modified in a process called modulation. This accounts for the option on the radio dial for AM or FM stations; the signals are very different, so both kinds may not be received simultaneously.
� 'All-Wave' receivers are a hit this year, bringing in radio from foreign broadcasters.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Let's Pretend [1954]
� Lux Radio Theater [1955]
� Lights Out [1947]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is created by congress through the "Communications Act".
� Federal Communications Commission (FCC), independent agency of the United States government created in 1934, with jurisdiction over communications in the 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The function of the commission is to regulate interstate and foreign radio, television, wire, and cable communications; to provide for orderly development and operation of broadcasting services; to provide for rapid, efficient nationwide and worldwide telegraph and telephone service; to promote the safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications; and to employ communications facilities for strengthening national defense.
� In the field of radio, the FCC regulates amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting and other kinds of radio services. It issues construction permits and licenses for all non-governmental radio stations. It also assigns frequencies, operating power, and call signs; inspects transmitting equipment, and regulates the use of such equipment. Television broadcasting is regulated by the FCC in the same manner. The commission also regulates the use of cable channels and the quality of service delivered by cable television.
� In common-carrier operations, which include telephone, telegraph, radio, and satellite communications, the FCC issues regulations and supervises service. The FCC is responsible for domestic administration of the telecommunications provisions of treaties and international agreements, and licenses radio and cable circuits from the United States to foreign points. The Emergency Broadcast System, which alerts and instructs the public in the event of enemy attack, is supervised by the FCC; the system is regularly used for broadcasting weather warnings and may also be used in local emergencies.
� The FCC is administered by five commissioners appointed by the president, with approval of the Senate, to 7-year terms
1935
� Even during the depression radio sets in the home grew
now 22M homes have radio
� Over a million auto radios are installed this year.
� Armstrong demonstrates FM.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Bob Hope [1955]
� Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour [1946]
� Fibber McGee & Molly [1956]
� Cavalcade of America [1953]
� G-Men (later called Gangbusters) [1957]
� Your Hit Parade [1953]
1936
� Most radios sold now employ an AFC circuit - Automatic Frequency Control.
� 'Automatic Tuning' (pushbuttons) are the years big hit.
� Approx. 8 million sets are sold this year.
� 3 out of 4 families have a radio in the home.
1937
� The dirigible, Hindenburg crashes in flames at Lakehurst, N.J. May 6th, 1937 - and the tragedy was captured in an incredible live radio broadcast.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Baby Snooks Show [1951]
� Grand Central Station [1954]
� Hilltop House [1957]
� Hobby Lobby [1949]
� Mr Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons [1955]
� The Road of Life [1959]
� Terry and the Pirates [1948]
� The Green Hornet [1952]
� Bill Stern's / Colgate Sports Newsreel [1956]
� Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy [1956]
1938
� Howard Hughes flies around the world and keeps in touch by radio.
� Broadcasting standards for TV were announced, paving the way for commercial television stations.
� The power of radio is demonstrated by Orson Wells, and the "Mercury Theater of the Air" - Panic is reported to be widespread as people believe the earth has been invaded by "Martians",
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Guiding Light [1956]
� Edward R. Murrow from London
� "War of the Worlds"
� Information, Please! [1951]
� The Adventures of Superman [1951]
� Challenge of the Yukon (Sergeant Preston of the Canadian Mounted Police) [1955]
1939
� TV is demonstrated at the New York Worlds Fair.
� The first Television sets are sold by several manufacturers.
� The start of the European war renews interest in short-wave receivers.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� I Love A Mystery [1952]
� Blondie [1950]
� Against The Storm [1952]
� The Aldrich Family [1953]
� Captain Midnight [1949]
� The Dinah Shore Show [1955]
� The Red Skelton Show [1953]
� The Right To Happiness [1960]
� The Adventures of Ellery Queen [1948]
� Mr. District Attorney [1952]
1940-1949 - The War Years - Growth
1940
� Jacks are provided on the back of new radios to plug in your TV's sound.
� FM gains public interest as 'Noise Free', high fidelity broadcasting grows.
� Amateurs lose the right to communicate with foreign operators as the war in Europe builds.
� Abbott & Costello [1949]
� Bell Telephone Hour [1958]
� Can You Top This [1954]
� Gene Autry's Melody Ranch [1956]
� Truth or Consequences [1956]
1941
� FCC authorizes FM broadcasting on 42-50 MHz.
� 13 million radio sets are made this year, and 130 million tubes.
� Color TV was demonstrated for the first time.
� 30 commercial FM stations are now on the air.
� The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. 40 K Wav FDR speaks to the nation. That evening, Eleanor uses radio to speak to the women of the nation.
� All amateur radio communication is halted by the war.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Inner Sanctum Mysteries [1952]
� Bulldog Drummond [1954]
� The Adventures of The Thin Man [1950]
� A Date With Judy [1950]
� The Great Gildersleeve [1957]
� The Life of Riley [1951]
1942
� The manufacture of radio sets was stopped due to the war, and manufacturers switch to defense activities.
� British mathematician and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark suggests using satellites to relay radio signals about 20 years before the first satellite, Sputnik I was placed in orbit!
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Adventures of Mr and Mrs North [1955]
� The Whistler [1955]
� Red Ryder [1949]
� Counterspy [1957]
� Hop Harrigan [1948]
� People are Funny [1960]
� It Pays to be Ignorant [1951]
� The Frank Sinatra Show [1958]
� Suspense [1962]
� There were many anthology suspense series. The greatest was called Suspense and it ran on radio for about 20 years. Many of Hollywood's finest stars appeared on this series and some of its greatest episodes were positively chilling.
� One of the great fans of this series was the film director, Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted several of the stories from Suspense for his own film and television series. Beginning in June, 1942 the series strived for excellence in every aspect of its production. The stories came from some of the best mystery writers of the time including John Dickson Carr, Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy Sayers and others.
� The series was big budget featuring a major film star every week during the first half of its long run. Under the driving force of director/producer William Robeson, the series tried to "chill you a little, thrill you a little..." and almost always succeeded. One of the best known productions from the series was Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number" which starred Agnes Moorehead. But there were other great broadcasts from this wonderful suspense-filled program including the chilling "House in Cypress Canyon" and "Donovan's Brain."
� The series budget began to decrease in the fifties as did the power of the featured star. But the series hung on ending up as the last major dramatic series from the classic days of radio drama dying a quiet death in September, 1962.
1943
� Great strides are made in technology and manufacturing as radio is used in the war. Meanwhile at home, many receivers are remodeled with whatever parts are on hand - as wartime shortages and aging radio sets combine for some creative electronics repair.
� NBC Red & Blue split; ABC formed.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Mysterious Traveler [1952]
� Adventures of Nero Wolfe [1951]
� (Molle) Mystery Theater [1954]
� The Falcon [1954]
� Nick Carter, Master Detective [1955]
� Archie Andrews [1953]
1944
� Over 30 million U.S. homes now had 57 million radio sets.
� No receivers are being manufactured, although some spare parts are now becoming available.
� Germany makes use of short-wave radio for propaganda broadcasts.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet [1954]
� Boston Blackie [1950]
� FBI In Peace and War [1958]
� The Roy Rogers Show [1955]
� Smilin' Ed and His Buster Brown Gang [1953]
1945
� The FCC changes the FM band from near 50 Megacycles to the present 88 to 108 megacycles. This rendered many sets obsolete, and set back Armstrong's development of FM as an alternative to AM. This may (!) have been the plan all along by those involved with AM broadcasting.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� The Adventures of Monsieur Hercule Poirot
� Queen for a Day [1957]
� NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reads funny papers
1946
� Lee Deforest grows increasingly unhappy with the state of broadcasting. To him, radio had become 'a stench in the nostril of the gods of the ionosphere.' He addresses the National Association of Broadcasters at their annual meeting in Chicago.
� Table model radios are the big seller. Over 15 million sets are produced. About half a million of those were FM receivers.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts [1956] (Mr Godfrey was on various shows starting in 1933)
� Sam Spade [1951]
� A Day in the Life of Dennis Day [1951]
� Sky King [1954]
1947
� Radios are shrinking in size, and over 800 thousand FM receivers are produced.
New Shows [last broadcast date]:
� Adventures of Philip Marlowe [1951]
� The Big Story [1955]
� Official Detective [1957]
� Quiet, Please [1949]
Escape [1954]
� Radio produced many interesting adult adventure series. Perhaps one of the best came to radio near the end of the forties. Escape contained a great opening that put the listener in the mood for the wonderful adventure that was to follow. The series began its run with classic adventure stories from the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and F. Scott Fitzgerald (yes, he wrote a few adventures). But over time, original stories were written for the series some full of high adventure, others outright horror. One of the classic horror stories was first heard on this series - Three Skeleton Key told the story of three men trapped in a lighthouse overrun with rats. Some of the finest theatre of the mind came from this series. Beginning on CBS as a sustained program in July, 1947, some of early television's stars were heard on this series including Jack Webb and William Conrad. The producer/director for much of the series was the great Norman MacDonnell, who later created the radio series Gunsmoke. The series came to a close in September, 1954 as regular radio drama was winding to an untimely demise.
� You Bet Your Life [1956]
� The Brighter Day [1956]
� Hallmark Playhouse [1953]
� Life With Luigi [1953]
� Mr. Chamelion [1948]
1948
� The FCC announces a three month freeze on new TV station applications. It lasts nearly four years! TV picks up steam. 10 inch screens are the most common.
� The LP or Long Play phonograph was introduced.
� The first Transistor is introduced to the public.
Components in a Transistor Radio
� This circuit board illustrates the complexity of the modern radio receiver. The six black rectangular components are the Integrated Circuits (ICs) which contain hundreds of transistors. The remaining components are resistors (small flat round objects), capacitors (tall black cylinders), and inductors (coils of wire). Newer circuits have fewer parts, often only one IC and a few resistors. These improvements are due to the development of more advanced ICs and the shift from LC (inductor-capacitor) tuning to PLL (phase-locked loop) tuning. The latter, in addition to providing a digital display of the frequency, requires no discrete components.
1949
� 4 million TV sets are produced, far exceeding projections.
� 10 inch screen TV's have dropped in price by a third since 1947 - from $300 to $200.
� The 45 RPM record is introduced.
� By the end of the year, there are 98 television stations and 2021 radio stations on the air.
� $628 million dollars is spent on radio advertising this year.
1956
� Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount have moved into television ownership and production. 20th Century Fox also goes to TV.
Radio Content and Censorship
Immediacy of radio sets it apart from cinema
News from around the world becomes instantaneous
Immediacy of live theatre compared to the cinema
Radio content demanded attention unlike todays radio because of the narrative structure of many programs.
Extremely topical because it was immediate. Radio was never intended to be archived and listened to later.
Great emotional impact. Radio because of the lack of a visual component engaged the imagination.
Censorship of content by the producers is important because the radio is widely available to children. Radio depended on advertisers to sustain it as a business. Advertisers didnt want to offend any segment of its audience with radical or obscene programming.
Content began to fragment into genres and demographic groups were then targeted with specific shows.
These shows were created through the use of a formula and stereotype characters.
There were never any 3d characters because of the use of formula in storytelling.
All programming was tailored to the middle class sensibility.
Stereotypes that are considered extremely offensive in 1998 were quite common in the 30s through the late 40s.
Three types of radio content
Adaptations
Use of the catch phrase "vas you der (there) Charlie?"
Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen
Personality types
Audience had to imagine facial expressions
Guest stars on every show - Jimmy Stuart
� What would radio be with out The Charlie McCarthy Show? Here was a puzzling situation. How could one of the most popular shows on radio, a listeners' medium, feature a ventriloquist? This was due to the mastery of Bergen's dialogue capabilities. His interactions with his "dummies" was unbeatable.
� He sometimes brought irreverent humor to radio through his "dummies," Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Beginning as The Chase and Sanborn Hour, the name changed as Bergen emerged as the main star pushing out Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour.
� The ventriloquist got his start on Rudy Vallee's Royal Gelatin Hour but Chase and Sanborn knew a budding star when they saw one. The Chase and Sanborn Hour premiered in May, 1937 on NBC.
� Bergen closed the show in 1948, but returned again in 1949 on CBS. His final radio show ended in 1956, by then Bergen was appearing on television, a visual medium being better for his type of act.
Developmental
Fred Allan and Jack Benny create a running gag, their famous feud consisting of barbs and put-downs lasted for about seven years.
Fred Allan - Used both formless and developmental forms
professional name of JOHN FLORENCE SULLIVAN (1894-1956), American comedian, who made successful transitions from vaudeville and stage to radio, television, and film. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Boston University. His Broadway shows include The Passing Show of 1922 and The Greenwich Village Follies. He was producer, writer, and star of the Fred Allen Show on radio (1939-49) and starred on television in Judge for Yourself (1953-54). His humor combined sharp commentary, erudition, and faultless timing. Among his films (1932-54) are Thanks a Million, Love Thy Neighbor, We're Not Married, O'Henry's Full House, and Sally, Irene, and Mary. He wrote an autobiography, Treadmill to Oblivion (1954).
Allans Alley - ethnic personalities in formless dialogues
� Most unforgettable for all of the memorable characters he brought us, Fred Allen was perhaps one of the most dominant figures in radio comedy. His series had many titles, but this clip from Town Hall Tonight introduces the zaniness one came to expect from Allen and Company. There were both memorable characters and memorable lines. Some making their way into Warner Brothers Looney Tune Cartoons.
� Among some of them were Kenny Delmar's Senator Claghorn ("That's a joke, son"), and
� Parker Fennelly's Connecticut Yankee, Titus Moody ("Howdy, Bub").
� Jewish Woman, Miss Nussbaum
� Allen was sort of the facilitator of all of these characters. Most memorable was the Jack Benny-Allen "feud" which got lots of publicity and air play on both programs.
� Allen was more than a comedian, he was also a social satirist taking pot shots as the medium of radio and television.
1946 Breakfast show parodies the morning talk shows
Attacks consumerism and the commerciality of radio
Questions social values and parodied popular social figures
Topical
Limited success with mass audience
Mad Magazine - based on Fred Allans style
Benny, Jack (1894-1974)
American comedian, who hosted long-running shows on both radio and television. He was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago. Benny began a successful career in vaudeville at the age of 17 as a violinist, but he later became a monologist, having discovered that he could convulse an audience with his deadpan stare and elegant style. His first film was Hollywood Review of 1929; other films in which he appeared are To Be or Not to Be (1942) and A Guide for the Married Man (1968). It was as a radio performer, however, that Benny achieved his greatest fame. His enormously popular program, "The Jack Benny Show," was introduced in 1932; it was heard every week for 23 years thereafter. He first successfully transferred his well-loved characterization of the acerbic penny pincher to television in 1950. For the next 24 years he appeared frequently. "The Jack Benny Show" was seen on television from 1955 to 1964. Benny also appeared in theaters and nightclubs in the late 1950s and '60s, and after 1956 he appeared frequently as a comic violin soloist with major American symphony orchestras in fund-raising concerts.
Virtuoso of radio- used it to its potential
Seinfeld is heavily influenced by Bennys comedic style
Ultimate straight-man - always setup jokes for the guest to deliver the punchline
Look away tempo control
Moves away from visual cueing
Uses sound effects more effectively than visual cueing
Deliberate pacing
Post Mortem
� Television kills radio content. It sucks it all into its medium.
� By 1955 All of the major talent has left radio for television and as in the case of Fred Allan, many artists retired because of the difference between radio and tv.
� TV is just a better medium to sell products through.
� As with the studio system being ordered to sell one of its elements (exhibition) at the time when television was cutting into profits anyway, television was also taking the talent pool from radio.
� The medium was saved from obscurity by the rise of the new phenomenon of rock & roll music.
� Baby boomers, (those born immediately after the close of WW2) were being brought up in the most affluent society the planet has ever seen.
� Their disposable income was in large part spent on the music of the teen idols.
� Rock & Roll separated the family unit in terms of listening audiences. Until the early 50s kids listened to professional recordings in the home that their parents listened to.
� When Little Richard and then Elvis Presley exploded in popularity the rebellious soul of rock and roll was lost on those who thought Elvis was a menace to society.
Visit the Integrative Arts 110 page
All content is intended for academic study.
Commercial use of material on any page displaying this notice is forbidden.
All copyrights controlled by specific artists, companies and authors.
|
i don't know
|
What highly stigmatized human disease is alternatively named after Norwegian physicist GH Armauer Hansen, who in 1873 discovered its causal bacterium?
|
Fjordman Files - 2011
Fjordman Discusses the English Defence League
Critical comments have been published about the alleged extremism of the English Defence League (EDL), the anti-Jihadist street protest movement that is active in many English cities.
The origins of the EDL can be traced back to Luton, England in the spring of 2009, after British troops were harassed by militant Muslims. Scandinavian blogger Conservative Swede commented in April 2009 that “The police broke up a march on Monday 13/4/09 by British people wanting to reclaim their streets from Muslim fanatics. Officers said it was illegal to stage the protest in Luton where extremists were allowed only last month to shout abuse at troops home from Iraq. This is the first time I can remember seeing Westerners act morally. All morality is ultimately rooted in moral outrage. Without socially manifested moral outrage there can only be nihilism. All the priestly preachers of the all-encompassing Enlightenment tsunami, and their priestly institutions, have during the last centuries, and especially during the last decades, worked eagerly to deprive the Westerners of all sense of morality, all sense of honour, and left us with nothing but their cynical, destructive and cruel nihilism; which is in the process of killing us as a civilization. It’s good to see the goodness and honour of these young men. It shows the natural sense of morality that after all exists under the surface among the Westerners. Something we haven’t seen since the days of Enoch Powell. Something that has been utterly suppressed by the traitorous pharisees in our ruling classes.”
It is interesting to notice that persons who work for the other team can often see things more clearly than many of us do. Jon Cruddas, a Labour Party MP, wrote in an essay in the left-wing, pro-Islamic newspaper The Guardian that “What makes the EDL much more dangerous is how it reflects a wider political and cultural war. Across western Europe rightwing populist parties are achieving huge electoral success on the same anti-Islam platform.”
Yes. This happens because ordinary people now sense that we are being lied to. We are fed-up with seeing our so-called leaders appease organizations that have declared war against our societies, while our sons and daughters are being harassed in the streets by immigrant gangs.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” as Abraham Lincoln once allegedly stated. The number of people who truly believe that Islam is a religion of peace is rapidly declining in all Western countries, despite a concerted pro-Islamic propaganda campaign in our mass media that would have made Chairman Mao proud. The treasonous multicultural elites in our countries are losing this battle for the minds of their people and are finally getting nervous.
I notice that left-wing media such as the BBC and The Guardian, both notorious for their pro-Islamic, anti-Christian and anti-Western bias, are very concerned that the EDL might spread “Islamophobia” and critical comments about their country’s insane immigration policies to wider sections of the general public. As far as I am concerned, that’s the best possible recommendation the EDL could get. That alone is reason enough to support their efforts.
Islamic Jihad has declared an eternal war against all other cultures and religions on this planet. Promoting Islamic propaganda and viewpoints while harassing those who tell the truth about Islam for “Islamophobia and racism” makes you complicit in Islam’s war against humanity. This makes the BBC, The Guardian and their ilk throughout the Western world enemies of civilization. Not just enemies of Western civilization, which they surely are, but enemies of any civilization worthy of the name.
The left-wing organization Unite Against Fascism (UAF) has taken part in several counter demonstrations against the EDL in various cities. They denounce the EDL as “violent racists and fascists” and are planning a special conference titled “Celebrate diversity, defend multiculturalism, oppose Islamophobia and racism” on 15 October 2011. The conference has received the support of powerful Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
The current leader of UAF is Labour Party politician Ken Livingstone, who was Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008. He has also served as a Member of Parliament (MP). As mayor, Livingstone was notorious for his friendly relations with repressive Marxist leaders such as Fidel Castro, not to mention for extending official invitations to Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an “honoured guest.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi is widely recognized as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most dangerous totalitarian organizations in the world today, with branches in dozens of countries. Mr. Qaradawi has openly bragged about how Muslims will conquer Europe. Other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have also stated in public that their long-term goal is to smash Western civilization and replace it with Islamic sharia law.
According to Ken Livingstone’s world view, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others like him are “moderate” if they want to colonize our countries and wipe out our entire civilization; the EDL and groups like them are branded as “extremists” merely for resisting their own dispossession and destruction. I wish I could say that this is an exaggeration, but it’s not. It’s the actual situation throughout most of the Western world today, not just England or Britain. Livingstone gives a face to those who are betraying the greatest civilization that ever existed.
In addition to major trade unions and the Labour Party, the UAF receives support from most of the British political establishment. Apart from the loathsome Mr. Livingstone, other senior members of UAF include Weyman Bennett of the Socialist Workers Party, which is well-known for its “revolutionary Socialist” (read: Communist) sympathies. Communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million people in the last 80 years alone. It is a sick joke when individuals with Marxist sympathies are allowed to denounce others, with very little evidence, for having “totalitarian sympathies.” It’s time for that joke to end.
I hear claims about the supposedly “totalitarian” leanings of the English Defence League, but I have yet to see any real proof of these allegations. It is far easier to find people with such sympathies, or links to groups with such sympathies, among certain critics of the EDL like Unite Against Fascism (UAF) or even the BBC. If totalitarian groups exist within the EDL they should of course be denounced, but that is not what I see when I look at the EDL today.
I see brave people, ordinary men and women, who after years of humiliation and degradation are finally sick and tired of having to watch evil groups and organizations from other parts of the world being allowed to colonize their country and destroy their freedom, with barely a peep of protest from the local authorities. From that perspective, the EDL represents the only good news to come out of the repressive and dysfunctional country known as modern Britain in years. The organization has even inspired similar groups in other parts of Western Europe.
I don’t know what the EDL will amount to in the future, but right now it represents potential and hope. That’s why I support the efforts of the EDL, and that’s why you should do so, too.
Women, and Human Accomplishment
The book Human Accomplishment does not contain many female names. Has the author Charles Murray unfairly discriminated against women? I see little evidence of this. When reading the index for Western music I notice the absence of Hildegard von Bingen from the twelfth century, a German abbess and composer. She should perhaps have been included. Yet I also did not find the English composer and conductor Benjamin Britten, who was at least as prominent as her.
Of women authors renowned for writing about issues relating to Feminism, the highest-ranking one in Western literature is Virginia Woolf, with an index-score of 12 out of 100. Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is not listed, but her daughter Mary Shelley, remembered for the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), is.
Outside of Feminism and women’s issues, female contributions to the field of philosophy are quite tiny. Simone de Beauvoir receives a modest listing for The Second Sex (1949), but only in literature, not in Western philosophy. She receives a lower score there than the English sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë and significantly lower than Sappho of Lesbos, Jane Austen or Mary Ann Evans, also known as George Eliot. Since the book ends in 1950 it does not mention Atlas Shrugged, a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the USA, The Feminine Mystique, published by Betty Friedan in 1963, or Silent Spring (1962) by the American conservationist Rachel Carson, which helped inspire the environmental movement.
Especially after the Second World War, Feminist ideologies grew increasingly radical and often more or less inspired by certain strands of Marxist thought, be that economic or cultural Marxism. This is reflected in the writings of both Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. From a strictly literary point of view, I would agree with giving a higher ranking to Woolf than to Beauvoir simply because the former was a substantially better writer than the latter.
What about the scientific disciplines? Did Charles Murray leave out many great women scientists? A tiny handful of them, perhaps, but not very many from what I can judge.
Thanks to spectroscopy, it was possible for European astrophysicists to detect the presence of chemical elements such as hydrogen in the Sun’s spectrum, or even helium (He, atomic number 2) from the Greek helios for the Sun. Helium was discovered independently in 1868 by French astronomer Jules Janssen and the English scientist Norman Lockyer. It was, and remains, the only known chemical element detected in space before it was ever found on the Earth. But Western scientists did not yet know how big a percentage of the Sun’s mass was made up of hydrogen. In the 1920s, many of them assumed that it was rich in heavy elements.
This changed with the work of the English-born Cecilia Payne, later Payne-Gaposchkin after she married a Russian astronomer. Her interest in astronomy was triggered after she heard Arthur Eddington lecture on relativity. In 1925 her Stellar Atmospheres, labeled “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy,” showed that stars consist mainly of hydrogen and helium. The Irish astronomer William McCrea and the German astrophysicist Albrecht Unsöld independently established that the prominence of hydrogen in stellar spectra indicates that the presence of hydrogen in stars is greater than that of all other elements put together.
We know a lot more about the surface of other planets like Mars than about the interior of our own, but what little we think we know to a large extent derives from studying seismic waves. The Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snell in the 1600s described the bending of light, or refraction, which takes place when light travels from one medium to another with a different composition and density, for instance from air to water. This can be seen by anybody who puts a pencil into a glass of water and observes how it appears to be “bent.” This phenomenon is caused by the change in velocity that occurs when light waves pass from one medium to a different one. The same principle applies to other waves as well, for example seismic waves, shock waves generated by earthquakes or explosions that travel through the Earth’s interior.
The Irish geophysicist Richard Dixon Oldham discovered that seismic waves travel through the interior of the Earth in different directions and speeds. This insight was utilized by the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic, who taught geophysics at the University of Zagreb. By analyzing the data from a 1909 earthquake he realized that the velocity of a seismic wave is related to the density of the material that it is moving through. He interpreted the acceleration of seismic waves observed within Earth’s outer shell as a compositional change within the Earth itself. This Mohorovicic Discontinuity is thought to constitute the boundary between the Earth’s crust and mantle. It can be found at an average depth of 8 kilometers beneath the ocean basin and as much as 32 kilometers beneath the continents.
Beno Gutenberg was born in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1913 he became the first person to give a reasonable estimate of the size and properties of the Earth’s core. In 1930, Gutenberg became a professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the USA, where one of his colleagues was the American seismologist Charles Francis Richter.
They collaborated on the development of various scales using seismic waves so that observers could assign magnitudes to different earthquakes. In 1935 this work resulted in the creation of a logarithmic magnitude scale that came to be named after Richter alone. The alternative Moment Magnitude scale, now preferred by many, was introduced in 1979 at Caltech by the American scientist Thomas C. Hanks and the Japanese-born seismologist Hiroo Kanamori.
Seismologist Inge Lehmann from Denmark studied the shock waves of a large earthquake, some of which were reflected back. In a 1936 she theorized that the Earth’s center consists of two separate parts. The outer core lies below the mantle, ca. 2,900 km beneath the surface.
The inner core begins 5150 kilometers beneath the surface where the temperature is estimated to be perhaps 6000 °C, comparable to that of the Sun’s surface. In total, the Earth’s core is believed to be over 7,000 kilometers in diameter, making it slightly larger than the planet Mars. Yet like Payne-Gaposchkin, Lehmann is not mentioned in Human Accomplishment.
Hans Christian Ørsted in Denmark in 1820 found a connection between electrical and magnetic phenomena and opened up the study of electromagnetism. The French mathematical physicist and astronomer François Arago described the generation of magnetism by rotation in the 1820s, and his observations were expanded by Michael Faraday in England. The German-born physicist Walter M. Elsasser in 1946 published his theory that the Earth’s electromagnetic field is generated by an internal dynamo caused by currents in the liquid outer core. Yet Elsasser’s name is not mentioned by Charles Murray in his book, either.
Apart from Lehmann and Payne-Gaposchkin, both of whom objectively speaking deserve to be listed, one possible female name left out by Murray in the scientific disciplines is Ada King or Ada Lovelace, daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. In 1833 she met Charles Babbage and became interested in his work. She described how his Analytical Engine might be programmed and made what many historians consider to be the first computer program.
If I were to construct my own personal and highly subjective list over the greatest women scientists in recorded history, the top would look something like this:Marie Curie is the undisputed number one, Maria Goeppert-Mayer two and Lise Meitner three. After that it gets trickier. I would say Irène Joliot-Curie, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Vera Rubin, Margaret Burbidge, Emmy Noether, Rosalind Franklin, Antonia Maury, Chien-Shiung Wu, Annie Jump Cannon, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Marguerite Davis, Inge Lehmann, Caroline Herschel, Ada King and Florence Nightingale, in roughly that order.
There are other candidates, such as Barbara McClintock, Lene Hau, Jane Goodall, Marguerite Perey, Ida Noddack, Martha Chase, Mary Leakey, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Hypatia, Sonya Kovalevskaya, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Marie-Sophie Germain, Maria Mitchell, Ada Yonath, Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, Linda Buck, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gerty Cori, Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Gertrude Elion or Mary Anning.
I am willing to discuss some of the details here. Should Irène Joliot-Curie be ranked ahead of Goeppert-Mayer, for example? Or should others be pushed into the top twenty list? However, I would claim that if you make a ranking over the top fifty women in the history of science, all of the first twenty suggested by me should be there. Marie Curie should be number one.
By 2010, four individuals had received two Nobel Prizes. Maria Sklodowska-Curie shared the Physics Prize in 1903 for co-discovering radioactivity and received the Chemistry Prize in 1911. An entire century later she is the only person, man or woman, to have received Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, although they were admittedly closely related in this case.
Linus Pauling, a physical chemist from the USA, became the first and so far only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first Prize (for Chemistry, in 1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical bond and its use in elucidating molecular structure; the second (for Peace, in 1962) recognized his efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.
The American physicist and electrical engineer John Bardeen is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first shared in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for their invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John R. Schrieffer for their theory of superconductivity, which became known as the BCS theory.
Frederick Sanger is a leading English biochemist, a scientist who conducts research into the molecules that occur in the cells of animals, plants and other living organisms. He has twice received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the first one in 1958 for determining the structure of the insulin molecule, the hormone that regulates the level of sugar (glucose) in our blood. He shared another in 1980 for having developed a method of determining the chemical structure of large pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the substance that makes up our genes.
While a few women have won Nobel Prizes in medicine or chemistry, only two of them as of 2010 have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie Curie in 1903 and the second Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 for her work on the nuclear shell structure of atomic nuclei.
My suggested top twenty list of women extends nearly up until the present day (mid-2011) and includes Rosalind Franklin, Margaret Burbidge, Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Vera Rubin, who all made their scientific contributions in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. So did some of the other potential candidates such as Jane Goodall and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
Three of the first twenty are Ashkenazi Jews: Lise Meitner, Vera Rubin and Emmy Noether. This is consistent with the overall picture of the substantial minority contribution made by Jews. One came from Asia. The physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Shanghai but moved to the USA. There she came to know Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first individuals of Chinese descent to do so. Wu did not get a Nobel, although she did get the very first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978, an honor she shares with many Nobel laureates, and as of 2011 she still remains the only woman to have done so.
Many men from China, or from Vietnam in the case of Fields Medalist Ngô B?o Châu, who have won prestigious international awards in science and mathematics, belong to the Chinese diaspora in Western countries, for instance Shing-Tung Yau, Terence Tao or Charles K. Kao. Japan is without question the one Asian country with the highest number of Nobel Prizes.
Virtually all complex societies have been patriarchal to some extent, and the Confucian-influenced ones of East Asia have a reputation for being more than average so. However, by far the highest ranking woman in any of the disciplines in Human Accomplishment is the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, number three in Japanese literature with a score of 86 out of 100.
The most remarkable woman scientist is clearly Marie Curie. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie together with her French husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for work on artificial radioactivity, part of the history of nuclear fission.
Even so, it is hard to explain away the strong presence of the English-speaking countries, primarily Britain and the USA, on these lists. If we include German-born individuals such as Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Caroline Herschel plus Scandinavian ones like Inge Lehmann, the overall dominance of Germanic-speaking nations on my ranking becomes very strong. This is no doubt mainly due to the great scientific contributions of the Germanic-speaking nations in general and the English-speaking ones in particular. I would personally suggest that it is also partly due to the high degree of respect traditionally awarded to women in Germanic societies, despite what certain Marxist Feminists in these countries might claim today. I was slightly surprised, though, not to find any Dutch or Swedish women near the top, considering the strong scientific performance of these countries and the freedom enjoyed by women there.
In 1944 the Canadian-born researcher Oswald Avery and his co-workers had more or less demonstrated that DNA was the material behind inheritance. This was further established through experiments conducted by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in the USA in 1952. The structure of it was finally worked out in Britain in the early 1950s by Francis Crick, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins, who all shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. They were aided by images produced by the English woman biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
The period 1950-2010 can alternatively be labeled the space age, the DNA age or the computer age; the nuclear age had begun in the 1930s and 40s but continued to develop after that, for peaceful and non-peaceful purposes. Whereas the first electronic computers existed before 1950, the development of the microchip made them much smaller and more powerful.
DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is the molecule that contains the genetic code for all currently known life forms on Earth except for some RNA-based viruses. Whether viruses constitute life forms is debatable since they have no metabolism and cannot reproduce without infecting a host cell, but they are certainly important carriers of genetic material. Viruses are suspected by many biologists to have played an important role in evolution, human evolution included.
DNA consists of two long, twisted chains made up of nucleotides. Each nucleotide contains one base, one phosphate molecule and the sugar molecule deoxyribose. A gene is a segment of a DNA molecule that contains information for making a protein. Proteins perform the chemical reactions in our bodies and provide the body’s main building materials, forming the architecture of our cells. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Chromosomes are cellular structures containing genes. Humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Photography made it possible to preserve images of the spectra of stars. The Catholic priest and astrophysicist Pietro Angelo Secchi, born in northern Italy, is considered the discoverer of the principle of stellar classification. In the 1860s he began collecting the spectra of stars and classified them according to spectral characteristics, although his particular system didn’t last.
The Harvard system based on the star’s surface temperature was developed from the 1880s onward. Several of its creators were women. Edward CharlesPickering at the Harvard College Observatory hired female assistants such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon and Antonia Maury, who classified the prism spectra of thousands of stars. Another system was worked out in the 1940s by William Wilson Morgan and Philip Keenan, aided by Edith Kellman. This is known as the MK or Yerkes spectral classification system after Yerkes Observatory, the astronomical research center of the University of Chicago in the USA. William Wilson Morgan is not listed by Charles Murray. He probably should have been.
Ejnar Hertzsprung, a chemist and astronomer from Copenhagen, Denmark, worked for years at Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands, but made his most important contribution in 1911-13. He discovered the relationship between the brightness of a star and its color, but published his findings in a photographic journal which went largely unnoticed. The talented American astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who spent six decades at Princeton University, made essentially the same discovery, but published it in 1913 in a journal read by astronomers and presented the findings in a graph. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram helped give astronomers their first insight into the lifecycle of stars. It can be regarded as the Periodic Table of stars.
Changes in the structure of stars are reflected in changes in their temperatures, sizes and luminosities. The smallest ones, red dwarfs, may contain less than 10% the mass of the Sun and emit 0.01% as much energy. The minimum core temperature needed for regular hydrogen fusion and therefore the birth of a star is about 10 million degrees Celsius. Red dwarfs constitute by far the most numerous types of stars and have lifespans of tens or hundreds of billions of years, in other words, far longer than the currently estimated age of our universe.
Rare hypergiants may exceed 100 solar masses and emit hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the Sun. They have lifetimes of a few million years. Stars that are actively fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores are called main sequence stars and are in hydrostatic equilibrium: the outward radiation pressure is balanced by the inward gravitational force.
A common, medium-sized star like our Sun will remain on the main sequence for roughly 10 billion years. The Sun is currently in the middle of its lifespan as it formed 4.57 billion years ago. Even today it daily emits an estimated 30% more energy than it did when it was born. The faint young Sun paradox, proposed by the astronomer, planetary scientist and popular science writer Carl Sagan with his colleague George Mullen in the USA in 1972, refers to the fact that the Earth nevertheless apparently had liquid oceans, not frozen ones, for much its early existence. Scientists have not yet reached an agreement on why this was the case.
When the hydrogen fuel runs out, the core contracts and heats up. The star then brightens and expands, becoming a red giant. The Sun will enter its red giant phase in about 5 billion years. Helium fusion will begin when its core temperature reaches around 100 million K, hot enough to produce carbon. It will then greatly expand in volume and vaporize Mercury, Venus and maybe the Earth. Already now it is slowly growing more luminous. For this reason, in another billion plus years the Earth’s surface may be too hot to contain liquid water. The Sun is not massive enough to explode as a supernova and leave behind a neutron star or a black hole. It will eventually end up as a white dwarf billions of years from now when its active life ends.
The Greeks and other ancient peoples usually viewed stars as unchanging, and indeed they appear to be so within the space of a single human lifetime, or several human lifetimes. We now know that they come in many different sizes and colors, from those that are much bigger than the Sun to stars that are significantly smaller than it. We also know that they have different lifecycles depending upon their masses, and that large ones can “recycle” some of their material in giant explosions, which can in turn form the basis for new stars and planets.
The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky along with his German colleague Walter Baade – both eventually based in the USA – introduced the term “supernova” and suggested that these explosive events are very different from ordinary novae. They claimed that after the turbulent collapse of a massive star, the residue of which would be an extremely compact neutron star, there would still be a large amount of energy left over. We now know that when a big star explodes as a supernova it can briefly shine brighter than an entire galaxy containing tens or even hundreds of billions of stars. Zwicky and Baade suggested the possible existence of neutron stars in 1933, just a year after the neutron itself had been detected as a particle.
Many astronomers accepted supernovas, but were skeptical of the existence of neutron stars. These objects were first observed in the 1960s, following the development of non-optical astronomy. In 1967 the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the radio astronomer Antony Hewish at Cambridge University in England discovered the first pulsar, tiny, rapidly pulsating radio sources that turned out to be neutron stars with very powerful magnetic fields that sweep around many times per second as they rotate, making them appear as cosmic lighthouses. Hewish won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, although his graduate student Bell made the initial discovery. He shared the Nobel Prize with the English radio astronomer Martin Ryle.
Fritz Zwicky in 1933 stumbled upon observations indicating that there is more matter out there than what is visible to us and that this affects the behavior of galaxies. In the 1970s the American astrophysicist Jerry Ostriker along with James Peebles also discovered that the visible mass of a galaxy is not sufficient to keep it together. Vera Rubin soon after became a leading authority on the rotation of galaxies. Her calculations based on empirical evidence showed that galaxies must contain ten times as much mass as can be accounted for by visible stars. She realized that she had discovered evidence for Zwicky’s proposed “dark matter.” Vera Rubin is an observant Jew who sees no inherent conflict between science and religion.
The author Murray indicates that the number of women in his rankings can be increased if you relax the criteria for inclusion, but doing the same for men will dramatically increase the number of European men who might be included as well. At the end of the day, the smaller percentage of women in great human accomplishment cannot be changed to any great extent.
Excluded categories are educators who taught science, translators, pioneers (the first to get a degree in a given field etc.), amateurs who collected data that were used by scientists, activists in women’s rights and social reform, plus the wives, sisters and children of famous male scientist who had some involvement in the work of their husbands, brothers or fathers.
Examples of the latter would be Sarah Banks, Giuseppa Barbapiccola, Sophia Brahe or Mary Buckland. Finally, there are the women who did make some direct personal contributions within the confines of the scientific categories listed by Murray, but who were not substantial enough to make it to the inventory, for instance Mary Anning or Elizabeth Gertrude Britton.
Women support the daily social lives of their men, be that their sons or their husbands and fathers. Viewed from that angle, women are tremendously important for virtually all men, regardless of what they accomplish in life. Perhaps women don’t always receive the proper appreciation and recognition for that. Many great men have stated quite sincerely that they could never have achieved what they did without the loyalty and continuous support of their wives, and they have often been right. Unfair as this may be, here we track direct individual contributions to human accomplishment, not indirect ones, no matter how big they might be.
This leaves room for certain borderline categories. For instance, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, the young wife of Antoine Lavoisier, acted as the laboratory assistant of her chemist spouse and by so doing contributed to his work. She was also depicted as such by the French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1788. Emily Warren Roebling helped guide the construction of Brooklyn Bridge in New York City (1869-83) throughout the illness of its chief engineer, her husband. Both of these women, partly out of personal devotion to their husbands, made honorable contributions. Should they be credited independently? The question is debatable.
The English-born archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey worked very closely with her husband Louis Leakey in East Africa, uncovering fossils or traces of ancient hominids and by extension of human evolution. In her particular case, she made independent discoveries that were sometimes attributed to her husband. I think it would be fair to treat them as a pair of gifted and devoted scientists of which he was simply the most brilliant.
There are also a few documented cases of women who initially acted as research assistant to talented male family members, but later emerged as scientists in their own right. One of the most famous examples is Caroline Herschel. She started out in a manner similar to Mrs. Lavoisier in that she actively aided her exceptionally gifted older brother William Herschel in his astronomical work. Their story is portrayed in Richard Holmes’ book The Age of Wonder.
Unlike the wife of Lavoisier, though, Caroline Herschel eventually emerged as a scholar in her own right. She was given a telescope by her brother, who was an excellent maker of such devices, and proceeded to discover several comets entirely by herself between 1786 and 1797. Along with William she was granted an annual salary by King George III for their work. She could with some justification be called the first professional woman astronomer in history.
As I stated above, the distinction is tricky when it comes to women supporting their men’s work. All in all, however, I agree with Charles Murray’s conclusion in crediting mainly direct personal contributions, and therefore listing Caroline Herschel but not the wife of Lavoisier.
The author notes that women, contrary to what might have been expected, actually won a slightly smaller percentage (3% as opposed to 4%) of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Medicine, Physics or Literature from 1951-2000 than they did from 1901-1950. The Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded only since 1969. Despite the fact that many more women had higher education by the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning of it, their percentage at the very highest level of scientific achievement was still relatively small.
Larry Summers, President of the prestigious Harvard University in the USA, was forced to resign partly because of a 2005 speech where he suggested that women’s under-representation in the top levels of academia is due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” He dared to suggest that innate differences between men and women could explain why men hold more seats as top scientists than women do. This was deemed unacceptable in a society where differences between the sexes are said to be caused by “socially constructed” gender roles.
Yet according to Dr Paul Irwing at Manchester University, there are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, and a staggering 30 times as many with a genius-level IQ of 170-plus. Other studies have been made indicating a roughly similar, highly disproportionate number of men among individuals with unusually high intelligence.
Generally speaking, men are more “extreme” than women, for better or worse. It is for instance also true that most violent criminals are, always have been men and probably always will be men, and that there are powerful biological and as well as cultural reasons for this. Men are more restless than women. I personally never use the term “stronger” or “weaker” sex. This is not due to fear of social censorship, but simply because I honestly find the term factually incorrect and inappropriate. Women are not weak, nor are men always strong.
If anything, I would call men the restless sex. That would capture much of the good, plus some of the bad, that men do. Male energy is the driving force behind any dynamic culture. It is undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the scientific and technological progress that has made life more materially comfortable and lifted mankind to space was created by men. It is also undeniable that there is a potential for violent destructiveness inherent in human beings in general, but in men in particular. The key to success for any culture is to tap as much as possible into male creative dynamism while at the same time keeping it destructive potential under control. The battle between these two powerful forces has shaped all of human history.
According to Annica Dahlström, a Swedish expert in neuroscience, men are found more frequently than women at the extremes of both high and low intelligence, which is reflected in their socio-economic level. More men than women are multimillionaires, but more are also homeless, imprisoned or otherwise social losers. Men are more frequently killed or injured from dangerous work. Most traditional cultures usually try to put women out of harms way.
Female geniuses exist, but they are much less frequent than male ones. Dahlström says that “The difference between boys and girls, in terms of their biology and brain, is greater than we could ever have imagined.” We can now scan and follow human brain activity in real time. Differences between the sexes are clearly recognizable already at the young age of three, if not before. The centers of the brain dealing with verbal communication, interpretation of facial expressions and body language are more developed in girls even at this early stage. “Female intuition” exists if by that we mean to say that the average woman can sometimes pick up minor details from a conversation that the average man may not have noticed. Forcing boys to behave like girls are vice versa is unnatural and will inevitably hurt them. Such a policy could be viewed as “mental abuse” of children in Professor Dahlström’s view.
Personally, all cultures that I know of state that human beings were created as two distinct sexes, men and women. I have never heard of a single religious tradition anywhere claiming that we were created as a gender neutral entity with a socially constructed penis or vagina.
From the point of evolutionary biology, men and women have had different social functions for so many thousands of years that it would be very strange if this didn’t have a practical effect on the evolution of how the male and female brains are structured and work, which is precisely what modern brain research indicates. The bottom line is that whether from a religious or a non-religious perspective, absolute “gender equality” doesn’t make any sense.
That doesn’t at all mean that we should accept the sometimes very brutal treatment of women found in many cultures, which in some cases is a well-documented fact, not a Marxist myth. But it does mean that we have to deal rationally with the reality of biological inequality.
Women have played a minor part in the history of the arts and sciences. As of 2010, all winners of the Fields Medal have been men. The same goes for other mathematical awards such as the Abel Prize. The question is whether social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this fact or whether sex-specific characteristics are at work as well.
Girls earn better grades in mathematics than boys, but boys usually do better on standardized tests. The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In test scores, the male advantage is most pronounced in the most abstract items. In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy. So far, no woman has ever been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.
According to Murray, “In the sciences, the most abstract field is mathematics, where the number of great women mathematicians is approximately two (Emmy Noether definitely, Sonya Kovalevskaya maybe). In the other hard sciences, the contributions of great women scientists have usually been empirical rather than theoretical, with leading cases in point being Henrietta Leavitt, Dorothy Hodgkin, Lise Meitner, Irene Joliot-Curie, and Marie Curie herself. In the arts, literature is the least abstract and by far the most rooted in human interaction; visual art incorporates a greater admixture of the abstract; musical composition is the most abstract of all the arts, using neither words nor images. The role of women has varied accordingly. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning of literature, in East Asia and South Asia as well as in the West. Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank. No female composer is even close to the first rank. Social restrictions undoubtedly damped down women’s contributions in all of the arts, but the pattern of accomplishment that did break through is strikingly consistent with what we know about the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires.”
Men take more risks, and are also more competitive and are more aggressive than women. Turning to race, we must begin with the fraught question of whether it even exists, or whether it is instead a social construct. The Jewish biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould in the USA promoted the idea that race is “social constructed” from the 1970s onward, and the idea can be traced further back to such individuals as the highly influential Franz Boas, an anthropologist in the USA born to a family of non-practicing German Jews. Gould has later been accused of deliberately tampering with the data to support his view that there are no significant differences between ethnic groups. Murray calls this the Inequality Taboo:
“Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences. The taboo is not perfect–otherwise, I would not have been able to document this essay–but it is powerful. Witness how few of Harvard’s faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair….The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences.”
I showed my proposed top twenty list of women scientists to several persons with above average education, and none of them were able to recognize the majority of the names that I had suggested, exceptions being famous ones such as Marie Curie or Florence Nightingale. If we make a list in 2011 over the 100 most important and influential scientists in world history, Marie Curie is the only woman who might, objectively speaking, be included among them. Nobody else comes close to her level, a full century after Curie got her second Nobel Prize.
Out of the different categories of human accomplishment, women clearly have the strongest minority presence in literature. No surprise there. It is a minority presence there as well, though; the greatest writers have disproportionately been men. Literature implies verbal skills, psychological insight and talent for observing people and their relationships, all traditional feminine virtues. Women’s presence is modest, but not necessarily insignificant, in some of the sciences that require observational skills and patience, but it is very tiny and close to zero in disciplines such as mathematics, theoretical physics and philosophy. Generally speaking, the more logic is needed in a particular field, the fewer women you are likely to find there.
At the highest level of accomplishment, the differences between men and women are so large that they have to be partly caused by differences in extreme ability, not merely restrictions or social discrimination. After a great revolution where women now numerically dominate many universities, at least in the social sciences (not the hard sciences), Marie Curie still reigns supreme among women scientists, and she was never close to the level of Newton or Einstein.
Not only is science overwhelmingly created by men; it is usually created by relatively young men. The most extreme example of this would be mathematics. Many of the famous (male) mathematicians showed great aptitude already as a child. If a person has not demonstrated unusual mathematical abilities before the age of 30, it is very unlikely that he possesses such abilities at all. In literature and the visual arts, skills and wisdom can mature with age. It is not unusual for artists to make some of their best work late in life. This is not totally unheard of in the sciences, either, but it is less common there. One could almost claim that having too much experience can be an obstacle because you get mentally stuck in traditional ways of thinking.
“It is important to foster individuality,” Albert Einstein stated, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.” “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth,” he once lamented to a friend after finishing his work on general relativity and cosmology. “Later one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more blockheaded.” Great emphasis is placed on nonconformity in the biography about him written by Walter Isaacson. Einstein’s fundamental creed was that freedom is the lifeblood of creativity. “The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit,” he said, “requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.”
The English scholar Edmund Halley is most famous as a mathematical astronomer and for being the first person to calculate the orbit of a comet, the one later named after him. Yet he was also a talented geophysicist and meteorologist who found the time to participate in non-astronomical activities, too, created an improved diving bell, studied magnetic variation and served as a sea captain. He enhanced our understanding of trade winds, tides and navigation and even contributed to medicine and medical statistics by publishing mortality tables. Halley was clearly an unusually clever and prolific man. We still remember his name centuries later. He is also noted for his role in the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia and was in awe of Newton’s intellect. He allegedly stated that “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.”
Murray Gell-Mann, an Ashkenazi Jew from the USA, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on “quarks” and other elementary particles. Quarks are permanently trapped inside other particles like neutrons and protons under normal physical conditions. Gell-Mann worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago and debated passionately with renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman during his many years at Caltech.
Gell-Mann doesn’t put people on pedestals very much. Paul Dirac “was a remarkably eccentric person.” Feynman “was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations – every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank. He was talking a lot of nonsense.”
Critical words about some of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century. Does Gell-Mann believe there is such a thing as geniuses at all? “Einstein was very special – I mean, creating that theory, general relativity [which describes gravity as a product of the geometry of space and time]. To do it today or to do it 34 years ago would be striking, remarkable, an utterly remarkable achievement. But to do it when he did, in 1915, that’s just unbelievable.”
Edmund Halley was an unusually accomplished man who knew some of the leading scholars of his day, but he nevertheless considered Newton to be very special. Murray Gell-Mann won prestigious international awards and personally knew some of the most famous scientists of his age, yet he still thought that Einstein was “very special.” What we can deduce from these examples is that Newton and Einstein belonged to a very rare and extremely tiny group of people. Perhaps we can call them super-geniuses, individuals who are so intelligent that they appear as geniuses even to those who are themselves considered geniuses by regular people.
More than two hundred years passed between the birth of Isaac Newton and that of Albert Einstein. We cannot predict where the next super-genius à la these men will be born. It could be a European, especially a northern European like Newton, or it could be an Ashkenazi Jew like Einstein. Based on historical experience, those would be the two most likely groups. Asians have not produced many individuals of that stature before, but that might change in the future. Theoretically speaking, the next Newton could come from East Asia, or, less likely but not unthinkable, from India or another Asian nation. What we can say is that the next Newton or Einstein is overwhelmingly likely to be a man. Individuals with such an exceptionally high level of intelligence are rare among men, but they are practically non-existent among women.
The Flaws of Edward Said’s Orientalism
Salah al-Din or Saladin (ca. 1138-1193), the general loved by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned in Western history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to recall that his son and heir Al-Aziz Uthman tried to demolish the world-famous pyramids at Giza outside of Cairo, Egypt, just three years after his father’s death. The only reason why we can still visit them is because the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt. They were hard to build, and hard to destroy. The Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three major ones at Giza, was nevertheless visibly damaged on one side.
This detail is almost always left out when apologists write about how tolerant and enlightened Muslims supposedly were compared to the primitive Europeans. This attempted destruction was not carried out by Saladin himself, but it would not be unreasonable to mention when writing about him that his devout Muslim son did this shortly after he died. There are also indications that a process of pillaging ancient monuments had begun during Saladin’s reign.
Mark Lehner is an American archaeologist with decades of experience excavating in Egypt. He is widely considered to be one of the foremost living experts on the Giza Pyramids, having devoted his life to studying them, and has appeared on numerous television documentaries. Here is what Lehner says in his book The Complete Pyramids [1997, hardback], page 41:
“Abd al-Latif reports the destruction of a number of small pyramids by the Emir Karakoush during Saladin’s reign (AD 1138-93). It must have been Karakoush who removed the satellite pyramid south of Khafre’s pyramid, and who began dismantling Khufu’s subsidiary pyramids. Other stones, probably from the two larger pyramids, were used for walls in the growing city of Cairo. The plunder of casing stone from the Great Pyramid continued during succeeding generations until the outer mantle was finally stripped bare. Abd al-Latif also enthused about the Sphinx, already known by its modern Arabic name, Abu Hol, ‘Father of Terror’. He described its handsome face, ‘covered with a reddish tint, and a red varnish as bright as if freshly painted’. He specifically mentions the nose, which leads us to think that it was still intact, contrary to indications that it may have been missing as early as the 10th century. It is certain that someone removed it before the early 15th century when another Arab historian, al-Maqrizi, wrote about it. The nose was long gone, at any rate, by the time Napoleon visited Giza in 1798, although he is often blamed for its removal.”
A photo on page 41 of Lehner’s book shows damage done to the Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three large pyramids on the Giza Plateau. While it still stands, scars from the attempted destruction are still clearly visible to visitors today. Mark Lehner states that “In AD 1196, Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf, son of Saladin, mounted a concerted attack on the pyramid of Menkaure to dismantle it and remove its stone. Eight months’ work merely damaged the pyramid’s northern face. Such enormous – and unsuccessful – efforts increase our admiration for the skill of the ancient builders in creating such durable monuments.”
The great Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were demolished by the Taliban regime in 2001, who decreed that they would destroy images deemed “offensive to Islam.” The Taliban Information Minister complained that “The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can’t knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain.” The statues, 53 meters and 36 meters tall, the tallest standing Buddha statues in the world, turned out to be so hard to destroy that the Taliban needed help from Pakistani and Saudi Arabian engineers to finish the job. After almost a month of non-stop bombardment with dynamite and artillery, they succeeded.
Judging from the experiences with the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is tempting to conclude that the main reason why the pyramids of Egypt have survived to this day is because they were so big that it proved too complicated, costly and time-consuming for Muslims to destroy them. Had Saladin’s son Al-Aziz had modern technology and engineers at his disposal, they might well have ended up just like countless Hindu temples in India or Buddhist statues in Central Asia.
Human Accomplishment: Technology
In the technology ranking of Human Accomplishment, the instrument maker and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736-1819) of Scotland and the prolific inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) of the USA, who created an early research laboratory, are tied for the maximum score of 100. There is a large gap from them down to Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who is then followed by Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) from the Netherlands, one of the greatest polymaths in all history; Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 290-212 BC); the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937); the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – Vitruvius – from the first century BC, author of the celebrated multivolume work De Architectura (“On Architecture”); John Smeaton (1724-1792), a great civil engineer from Leeds, England and a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham; the English inventor and steel manufacturer Henry Bessemer (1813-1898); and Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729), an English ironmonger and creator of the atmospheric steam engine, the first version engine that did a useful work.
After them follows Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the English inventor of the mechanical computer; the innovative German-born inventor and engineer Carl Wilhelm Siemens (1823-1883), whose brother Werner von Siemens (1816-1892) founded the telecommunications company Siemens in Berlin in 1847; the dynamic English industrialist and ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728-1808); Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), the prolific scholar, writer, publisher, diplomat and statesman from North America who also invented the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses and the Franklin stove; the English physicist and inventor Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875); the industrial chemist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) from Sweden, who invented dynamite and used his wealth to found and fund the famous Nobel Prizes; the great English naturalist and electrical engineer Michael Faraday (1791-1867); Denis Papin (1647-1712), the French-born engineer who invented the steam digester and the pressure cooker in 1679, major stepping-stones in the evolution of the steam engine; the English civil engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848), who together with his son Robert built the world’s first inter-city public railway line employing steam locomotives between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830; and finally the American painter Samuel Morse (1791-1872), one of the main creators of the electric telegraph and co-inventor of Morse code.
Names such as Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, Jean Lenoir, Nikolaus Otto and Rudolf Diesel are listed for their contributions to the development of internal combustion engines and cars, the English entrepreneur Richard Arkwright for aiding the development of a modern factory system during the Industrial Revolution, and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox Talbot, George Eastman and others for the creation of photography. But why is a first-rate scientific instrument maker like Jesse Ramsden not mentioned at all?
The Montgolfier Brothers from France in the late 1700s with balloons and the Wright Brothers from the USA in the early 1900s with airplanes are credit for manned human flight. Robert H. Goddard of the USA gets a high ranking for pioneering liquid-fueled rocketry during the 1920s, which is richly deserved. The rocket engineers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergey Korolyov from the Russian Empire/the Soviet Union are briefly mentioned, but not Hermann Oberth or Wernher von Braun, despite the fact that von Braun’s work on very large and sophisticated rockets in Germany and eventually the USA had begun well before 1950.
A few other notable names in technology include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicolas Appert, Edwin Howard Armstrong, Leo Baekeland, Alexander Graham Bell, the Biro Brothers, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, Carl Bosch (but oddly enough not Fritz Haber), Matthew Boulton, Isambard Brunel, George Cayley, Claude Chappe, Samuel Colt, Ctesibius of Alexandria, Abraham Darby, Abraham Darby III, Humphry Davy, Lee De Forest, Cornelius Drebbel, John Boyd Dunlop, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, John Ericsson, Oliver Evans, Reginald Fessenden, John Ambrose Fleming, Henry Ford, Robert Fulton, Galileo Galilei, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Henri Giffard, Charles Goodyear, Zénobe Gramme, John Harrison, Joseph Henry, Hero of Alexandria, Jonathan Hornblower, Robert Hooke, David E. Hughes, John Wesley Hyatt, Joseph Marie Jacquard, John Kay, William Kelly, Edwin Herbert Land, Gustav de Laval, John Bennet Lawes, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Otto Lilienthal, the Lumière Brothers, John L. McAdam, Ottmar Mergenthaler, Thomas Midgley, William Murdoch, Alexander Parkes, Charles A. Parsons, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Popov, Valdemar Poulsen, John Roebuck, René A. F. de Réaumur, Thomas Savery, Marc Seguin, Alois Senefelder, Joseph Swan, Nikola Tesla, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Richard Trevithick, Jethro Tull, Jacques de Vaucanson, Felix Wankel, Robert Watson-Watt, Wilhelm Weber, Josiah Wedgwood, George Westinghouse, Eli Whitney, Ferdinand von Zeppelin and finally Vladimir K. Zworykin.
Once again, several individuals mentioned among central events in technology early in the book are left out from the final rankings. Murray writes about the evolution of batteries in the 1800s with figures such as Alessandro Volta, John Frederic Daniell, William Robert Grove, Gaston Planté and Georges Leclanché, but the first three are not listed in the index. Volta’s prototype was revolutionary and might have brought him near the top twenty in technology.
Frank Whittle of the British Royal Air Force and Hans von Ohain from Germany are correctly credited with independently inventing the jet engine in the 1930s, yet Ohain isn’t ranked. The Ukrainian-born American aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky and Henrich Focke in Germany had independently created practical helicopters by 1936, following up earlier advances made by the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva with his autogyro a few years before, yet Focke is not credited in the index. Finally, I cannot see the Romanian inventor and aerodynamics pioneer Henri Coandă mentioned by name anywhere in the book, which he perhaps deserves to be.
It is mentioned in the book that the French naval officer, explorer and prizewinning filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau, an ambassador for the European spirit of curiosity, exploration and innovation at its very finest, invented the aqualung together with Émile Gagnan in 1943 and donned the first autonomous diving gear, yet Mr. Cousteau is not rated in the technology index. This proved a decisive turning point in the centuries-long evolution toward what we now call scuba diving, an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
Freediving, that is, swimming underwater simply by holding your breath, has been done for thousands of years by pearl divers and sponge divers. Both Eastern and Western peoples made experiments with what can be dubbed primitive diving bells, but these had serious limitations. Experimentation finally accelerated in Europe and the West from the late 1500s to the 1900s, aided by new science and technology such as air pumps and later high-pressure air and gas cylinders for compressed air breathing sets. Diving helmets appeared in the 1800s. The great breakthrough came in the 1900s, and submarines were first extensively used in World War I.
The inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard from Basel, Switzerland, who served for years as a professor of physics in Brussels, designed the bathyscaphe or “deep boat” Trieste, with which his son Jacques was soon to explore the deepest reaches of the oceans. Jacques Piccard together with Don Walsh from the USA in 1960 used Trieste to travel 10,911 meters down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The pressure there was well over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, yet amazingly Piccard and Walsh spotted several flatfish living under these extreme conditions.
The mountaineer Edmund Hillary, born in Auckland, New Zealand to a family of British descent, together with Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, in 1953 became the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. By the mid-twentieth century Europeans had, as the first civilization in all of human history, explored and mapped every single corner of the Earth: from Antarctica via Australia to the interiors of Africa, from the North Pole to the South Pole and from the highest mountain peaks to the ocean floor. European man was now ready to leave our planet and start exploring space, which he also did.
For every individual who is credit with a particular breakthrough, you could often potentially list a handful of others who contributed to this development or made it independently at nearly the same time but who didn’t become equally famous. For example, most people have heard of Alexander Graham Bell from Edinburgh, Scotland as the “inventor of the telephone.” Fewer know about the US electrical engineer Elisha Gray, who submitted his application for a patent of a telephone just two hours later than Bell did in 1876. Still, the persons who are listed here do generally deserve much, if not necessarily all, of the credit for these inventions.
Moreover, since most scientific breakthroughs or technological innovations in the modern world were made by Europeans, those who almost made the same breakthroughs were usually also individuals of European descent. Including them would not affect the overall balance.
James Clerk Maxwell’s equations from the 1860s and 70s predicted the existence of radio waves. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz experimentally verified and demonstrated the reality of radio waves in 1887, but he died young. Marconi was an important and influential pioneer in the evolution of radio or “wireless telegraphy,” yet he wasn’t the only one.
Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest from the Balkans, made many contributions to the development of radio and electromagnetic research. He constructed an induction motor using alternating current in 1883 and immigrated to the USA from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1884. He began working for Thomas Edison’s company but switched to that of the US entrepreneur George Westinghouse. The alternating current (AC) preferred by them eventually prevailed over Edison’s direct current (DC) system, which flows continuously in one direction. AC typically changes direction 50 or 60 times per second.
Leonardo da Vinci has received a very high ranking in the technology index although rather few of his devices were actually built and used during his lifetime. Among those ranked below the top twenty in this discipline is Johannes Gutenberg. I find this a bit odd, given that his printing press before 1450 was arguably one of the most important inventions in all of European history. Frankly, some Western historians would want to place him at the very top of the technology index for the revolutionary impact his invention had on European societies.
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in The Coming of the Book estimate that at least “150-200 million copies were published in the 16th century.” This constituted an enormous change compared to the cumbersome process of scribes manually copying each individual book by hand. One could claim that “The invention of printing from movable type may have been the most important contribution to the advance of civilization made in the second millennium. The transition from hand-copied documents to printed documents was far more revolutionary than the transition from the typewriter to the computer.” David Crowley and Paul Heyer agree in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society: “Although we hesitate to argue for historical ‘prime-movers,’ certainly the printing press comes close to what is meant by this term. It was a technology that influenced other technologies – a prototype for mass production – and one that impacted directly on the world of ideas by making knowledge widely available, thereby creating a space in which new forms of expression could flourish.”
Gutenberg created his mechanical printing press in Mainz, Germany around 1440. His most celebrated work was the Forty-two-Line Bible, completed in 1455 at the latest. Gutenberg himself did not become rich by his invention, but it spread remarkably fast throughout the urban centers of Europe and triggered a veritable explosion in the number of books available at much lower prices than before. One unresolved question is just how much he knew about the printing traditions of China. It is conceivable that European traders had heard of the very concept of printed books in East Asia. We know that paper, a necessary component of the printing trade, was introduced to Europe from China via the Middle East. The traditional material – parchment – was expensive and not well suited for mass production. With the introduction of printing in the late 1400s, “Europe was becoming covered with paper mills.”
Parchment, processed skins of certain animals – especially sheep, goats and calves – prepared for the purpose of writing on them, was itself an innovation of the Roman era, then supplanting the rolled manuscript by the bound book (codex). It was intended as a supplement to the limited supply of Egyptian papyrus, from which our modern name “paper” is derived.
Charles Murray includes Bi Sheng as inventor of the first movable type printing technology in China just after the year 1040, plus the Chinese state bureaucrat Cai Lun for standardizing the papermaking process around AD 100, yet both of these men appear only as minor figures.
In Michael H. Hart’s popular book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History from 1978, Cai Lun was ranked 7 and Gutenberg 8. Just to put things in perspective, the other figures in the top ten were Muhammad ibn Abdullah, Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Saint Paul, Christopher Columbus and Albert Einstein. Cai Lun was also listed ahead of figures like Louis Pasteur, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Euclid, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Moses, Qin Shi Huang (China’s First Emperor), Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar and the first pro-Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great.
Frankly, I find this a bit excessive. Even if you believe that Lun created paper or standardized its manufacture (many scholars believe that paper was invented earlier in the Han period), it looks strange to rank him above Qin Shi Huang, the brutal ruler who became the First Emperor of a unified China in 221 BC and now rests in an enormous mausoleum guarded by a life-size Terracotta army near Xi’an. After all, the latter created a vast state that has endured for more than two thousand years. Nevertheless, I don’t think Murray’s lists properly reflect the tremendous historical importance of printed paper books for the progress of science.
The Antikythera Mechanism is a surprisingly sophisticated Greek mechanical calculator from ca. 100 BC, maybe used to track dates of the Ancient Olympic Games. Other devices such as the abacus have been used to aid computation for centuries. The German polymath Wilhelm Schickard built a calculating machine in 1623, but both the machine and its designer perished in the Thirty Years War. Schickard is not mentioned by Murray. Other machines by Blaise Pascal (1642) and Gottfried Leibniz (1671) followed but were not used to the extent that was hoped, partly because they provided little advantage in speed. Leibniz in 1679 realized that two digits – 1 and 0, or on and off in an electronic language – were all that were needed for a positional number system. This binary numeral system is now used in virtually all computers.
In the 1620s the English mathematicians Edmund Gunter and especially William Oughtred invented the slide rule, inspired by the logarithms introduced by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. Before electronic calculators and computers became widely available in the late twentieth century, tables of logarithms were commonly used in science and engineering. With slide rules, engineers could multiply, divide, find square roots and more in a few seconds. As writer Cliff Stoll reminds us, “Consider the engineering achievements that owe their existence to rubbing two sticks together: the Empire State Building; the Hoover Dam; the curves of the Golden Gate Bridge; hydrodynamic automobile transmissions, transistor radios; the Boeing 707 airliner.” The Apollo astronauts as late as the early 1970s kept slide rules as backups for their electronic calculators on their journeys to the Moon.
The English engineer Charles Babbage is rightfully named in Human Accomplishment as the inventor of the mechanical computer. The Jacquard system was developed in 1804-05 by the French silk weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard from Lyon. His punched-card idea was adopted by Babbage to control his Analytical Engine. John Mauchly, Vannevar Bush, George Stibitz and John von Neumann are credited for the development of the electronic computer, but not Konrad Zuse. John Vincent Atanasoff, son of a Bulgarian immigrant to the USA, is listed under physics. Also listed is Howard Aiken, plus Herman Hollerith for inventing the first workable electromechanical calculator in the late 1800s, which was used for the US census.
The gifted English mathematician and logician George Boole in the mid-1800s began the algebra of logic called which now finds application in computer construction. The American electronics engineer Claude Shannon in 1948 was the first person to grasp how Boolean algebra could be used to great advantage in the relay circuitry found in telephone routing switches, thus “laying the groundwork for the modern computer and other electronic devices.”
The English computer theorist Alan Turing in 1950 published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he studied problems which still lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. He proposed the Turing Test, which is applied in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent. In a landmark paper from 1936 he proved that Turing machines (abstract symbol-manipulating devices) would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem that is represented as an algorithm. He was involved during WW2 in breaking the codes used by Nazi Germany with their Enigma code machine, but in this he was aided by other cryptologists such as Marian Rejewski from Poland. While Turing is highlighted in the book text, he is strangely left out of the indexes for both mathematics and technology in HA.
The American physicists Walter Houser Brattain and John Bardeen together with the English-born engineer William Shockley in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor, the semiconductor underlying virtually all modern electronic devices. The transistor opened up great possibilities for the miniaturization and improvement of electronics. Though electrically similar to a vacuum tube, it was much smaller and more reliable. Many historians rank the transistor as one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. In 1958 and 1959 the engineers Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce in the USA independently developed the integrated circuit or microchip, a system of interconnected transistors where several could be made at the same time on the same piece of semiconductor.
The final decades of the twentieth century became known as the Digital Revolution or the Age of the Microchip. The introduction of small personal computers (PCs) into private homes from the 1980s onward was a revolution, and electronic computers greatly affected all the sciences by making possible calculations that were far too complex or time-consuming to be done by humans. The World Wide Web was created by the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee together with his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau at CERN in Western Europe in 1990. While the Internet itself dates back to the 1960s and 70s, partly due to military efforts in the USA during the Cold War, the WWW or “Web” in the 1990s turned the Internet into a true mass medium, connecting literally billions of people worldwide in less than 20 years.
Since I am Norwegian I was curious to see which individuals from my country were included in Murray’s book. Vilhelm Bjerknes is credited in the Earth sciences as a founder of modern weather forecasting. In mathematics, Niels Henrik Abel is the highest-ranking individual from the Nordic countries ahead of number two, Marius Sophus Lie. This is accurate in my view.
The painter and printmaker Edvard Munch is the highest-ranking Scandinavian person in Western art. Munch’s The Scream (“Skrik”) from 1893 is one of the most easily recognizable paintings in European art, and therefore sometimes used or misused for modern commercials.
Many European artists in the nineteenth century, especially those who did not have an independent nation state, took inspiration from the national traditions or folklore of their people. This would include Má vlast (“My Country”), the symphonic poems composed in the 1870s by the Czech composer Smetana. With the composer Edvard Grieg from Bergen, Norway, an ethnic character emerges most clearly in his songs based on Norwegian texts, especially his fine Peer Gynt Suites (1875), a successful marriage between music and text written to a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. He is the highest-ranking person from the Nordic countries under Western literature, substantially ahead of such Nobel Prize winners as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset. Peer Gynt is a rich drama in rhymed couplets. It was Ibsen’s last play to employ verse, and surprisingly joyful and creative for a man who earned himself a reputation for being a very serious radical thinker.
Murray did not rank explorers, of which there are many Europeans, for example Marco Polo, John Cabot, Bartolomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Willem Barentsz, Pedro Páez, Henry Hudson, Abel Tasman, Vitus Bering, James Cook, Joseph Banks, Alexander MacKenzie, Alexander von Humboldt, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, John Ross, James Clark Ross, William Edward Parry, David Livingstone, Richard Burton, Ernest Shackleton and Karl Weyprecht.
If he did, a few of them might have been from Norway, such as Fridtjof Nansen and above all Roald Amundsen. Amundsen in 1911 led the first expedition in history to reach the South Pole. His team also made it back alive, in contrast to the rivaling British team led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen later became the first person to reach both the North and South Poles. Leiv Eiriksson, who reached North America (Vinland) around AD 1000, was born on Iceland and brought up on the Norse colony on Greenland founded by his Norwegian father.
If I could add somebody else it would have to be the physicist Kristian Birkeland, whose geomagnetic research was generations ahead of its time. In the early 1900s he gave a correct explanation for auroras (polar lights), backed by careful experiments. A popular book on his life has been published by journalist Lucy Jago. Writers Alv Egeland and William J. Burke state in a biography of him that “He introduced basic concepts that are central to modern space physics.” He even contributed to the production of fertilizers with the Birkeland-Eyde process of fixing nitrogen from the air. Sydney Chapman is briefly mentioned in Human Accomplishment among minor names in astronomy, as is Anders Celsius, whereas Hannes Alfvén receives a low ranking in physics. Kristian Birkeland might have received a similar, modest ranking in either Earth sciences or physics, or perhaps more plausibly in astronomy.
One missing name is mathematician Atle Selberg, who was inspired by the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan from Tamil Nadu in India and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950. Selberg collaborated with the famously eccentric Hungarian-born Jew Paul Erdős, who was probably the most prolific mathematician in history measured in the number of papers; Euler is the record holder in the number of published pages. I cannot see Paul Erdős on these lists, either. He did most of his work after 1950, but he started before this and could have been mentioned.
Other potential candidates from Norway working before 1950 might be Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, a physician remembered for identifying the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 as the causative agent of leprosy, or perhaps Lars Onsager, a physical chemist from Kristiania (Oslo) who in 1968 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of a general theory of irreversible chemical processes, but they are less important than Birkeland.
All things considered and with the possible exception of the omission of Kristian Birkeland, Charles Murray’s rankings of personalities from my own country are largely correct in my view, which is yet another indication that he did a good job when preparing these indexes.
Human Accomplishment: Medicine and the Earth Sciences
The leading names in medicine are as follows: Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) of France; Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 460-375 BC);Robert Koch (1843-1910) of Germany (Prussia); Galen of Pergamum (ca. AD 129-200); Paracelsus (1493-1541) of Switzerland;Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) of Germany; René Laennec (1781-1826) of France; Elmer McCollum (1879-1967) of the USA; Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) of Scotland; Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) of France; Emil von Behring (1854-1917) of Germany;Joseph Lister (1827-1912) of England; Kitasato Shibasaburo (1853-1931) of Japan; Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) of England; the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564); Gerhard Domagk (1895-1964) of Germany; Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) of France; Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) of Austria; John Hunter (1728-1793) of Scotland; and finally Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) of Hungary.
Hunter and Semmelweis each have a score of 33, the same as Girolamo Fracastoro received. Hippocrates and Galen were founders of Western medicine as a profession although wrong in most of their medical pronouncements. Robert Koch, while less famous, was second only to Pasteur in establishing the germ theory of disease, the greatest revolution in medical history.
Just behind them follow the influential Greco-Roman pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides and the English immunologist Edward Jenner at 32 out of 100. Jenner’s work in the 1790s as the discoverer of vaccination for smallpox was so important that he deserves to be mentioned among the top twenty at least as much as Freud, although Freud here was ranked for purely medical contributions and the clinical description of mental illnesses, not for psychoanalysis.
Some other notable names in medicine are Thomas Addison, Leopold Auenbrugger, Thomas Beddoes, Claude Bernard, Herman Boerhaave, Daniel Bovet, Josef Breuer, Richard Bright, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Joseph Caventou and Pierre Joseph Pelletier, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Jean-Martin Charcot, Harvey Cushing, Pierre Fauchard, Werner Forssmann, William Halsted, Sahachiro Hata, Friedrich Henle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edwin Klebs, Friedrich Loeffler, Richard Lower, Patrick Manson, Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Philippe Pinel, Walter Reed, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes), Howard Taylor Ricketts, Ronald Ross, Pierre Roux, Santorio Santorio and Thomas Clifford Allbutt, John Snow, Max Theiler, Rudolf Virchow, Selman Waksman, Thomas Willis and William Withering.
Alexandre Yersin was a Swiss-born French physician and bacteriologist and one of the discoverers of the plague bacillus believed to have caused the Black Death in Eurasia in the 1300s, now called Yersinia pestis in his honor. He is given the lowest possible rating of 1 out of 100 in biology and is not mentioned at all in medicine, although the Japanese co-discoverer Kitasato Shibasaburo receives a very high ranking. This represents a rather strange omission.
The eminent British historian of medicine Roy Porter, author of the book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, explains that “The idea of probing into bodies, living and dead (and especially human bodies) with a view to improving medicine is more or less distinctive to the European medical tradition. For reasons technical, cultural, religious and personal, it was not done in China or India, Mesopotamia or pharaonic Egypt.”
After the Italian Renaissance period, the knowledge of human anatomy greatly improved in Europe, and only there, partly thanks to medical institutes at the rapidly expanding network of universities, where dissections of human corpses were sometimes performed to train students.
The Brussels-born physician Andreas Vesalius performed dissection demonstrations himself, thereby raising the status of surgery, which had previously been regarded as inferior medical practice. He employed artists to make illustrations for his On the Fabric of the Human Body from 1543. Science historian Toby E. Huff claims that Vesalius corrected many errors in Galen’s account of human anatomy and that the “illustrations are far superior to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the Chinese and (I presume) the Indian one.”
The use of systematic dissections for scientific purposes led to great advances. Nevertheless, until the late nineteenth century, Europeans did not necessarily have a better understanding of what actually caused diseases than Asian nations did, nor always more effective treatments.
At the beginning of the 1800s, surgery was still extremely painful and dangerous, conducted quickly and as a last resort, only when absolutely necessary. Some cultures like the Chinese one barely practiced it at all, with certain limited exceptions such as the castration of eunuchs. India had somewhat more promising beginnings in this field in ancient times, but progress eventually stagnated. This situation changed dramatically over the next 150 years, largely thanks to advances made in Europe and the wider Western world. Several of these were initially unrelated, but eventually merged to cause an unprecedented revolution in surgery.
Drugs such as opium, certain herbal remedies, alcoholic drinks or even tobacco among Native Americans had been used for millennia to reduce pain. Even though these drugs could be useful in a limited way they didn’t prevent most patients undergoing surgery from being fully conscious and feeling extreme pain, sometimes literally dying from the suffering associated with a major operation. This changed dramatically during the nineteenth century with the development of general anesthesia in the form of ether and chloroform. This was closely related to European advances in chemistry, for example the discovery of laughing gas.
These trends made surgery a lot less painful, but not necessarily less hazardous. What eventually made it so was the realization that microorganisms were directly related to infections and the subsequent adoption of efficient methods used to reduce this danger.
Thanks to advances in mathematics and medical statistics, it was clear to Enlightenment Europeans that there was a correlation between dirt and disease, but the specific nature of this was not yet understood; many scholars believed that diseases were transmitted through smells. The notion that microorganisms too small to be seen by the unaided human eye cause many common diseases met with surprisingly stubborn resistance, as the tragic fate of Semmelweis reminds us, until better microscopes and the careful work of such authorities as Louis Pasteur finally managed to convince most of the medical community in the late nineteenth century.
In Human Accomplishment, William T. G. Morton and Horace Wells are listed for anesthesia, as is James Young Simpson, but not Crawford Long, nor Hua Tuo or Hanaoka Seishu in East Asia. The latter two might be briefly mentioned although their line of research did not win out, in contrast to the general anesthesia developed in the West in the 1800s. And why isn’t the fine Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov mentioned at all? Ernst Chain and Howard Florey are listed for the introduction of penicillin in addition to Alexander Fleming; Frederick Banting and Charles Herbert Best for the discovery of insulin in Canada shortly after 1920, which revolutionized the lives of people suffering from diabetes, but not John James Macleod.
The Austrian-born Jewish physician Karl Landsteiner developed the ABO blood group system, the most important (but not the only) blood type system currently in use, in the early 1900s. Other pioneers include Alexander Wiener from the USA and the Czech serologist Jan Janský. The Czech experimental physiologist Jan (Johannes) Purkinje, a friend of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who also did valuable research into the human brain in the 1800s, introduced protoplasm and plasma (blood plasma, the clear, fluid portion of the blood in which the blood cells are suspended) as scientific terms. Important in classifying blood is also the Rhesus factor. It, too, was discovered by Landsteiner and colleagues before 1940.
Failed experiments with blood transfusions, the transfer of blood into a person’s blood stream, had been carried out for hundreds of years at the cost ofmany lives. Both the blood type and the Rhesus type must be matched in a transfusion, otherwise the patient may experience potentially lethal complications. The American surgeon William Halsted performed one of the first known human blood transfusions in the USA in 1881 by giving some of his blood to his sister save her life. Following the above mentioned breakthroughs, blood transfusion became a common medical practice worldwide. Millions of liters of blood are now donated from people around the world and used to replace blood lost through accidents or major surgery.
Coupled with other Western advances from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s in physiology, antiseptics, general anesthesia and antibiotics, this made possible a veritable revolution in surgery; what had previously been rare, painful and dangerous operations suddenly became safer, more widespread and comparatively painless, eventually involving transplants of vital organs such as kidneys. The first successful human-to-human heart transplant was achieved in 1967 in Cape Town by Christiaan Barnard, the son of a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. Since then, heart transplants – totally unthinkable merely a few generations ago – have become a routine operation in major hospitals around the world.
The German Jewish scientist Paul Ehrlich together with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata in 1909 discovered Salvarsan, an arsenical compound that proved to be an effective treatment for syphilis. Until then, mercury had been the primary choice for this disease, recommended by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century. Ehrlich effectively founded modern chemotherapy, thus realizing Paracelsus’ earlier vision of scientifically applying chemistry to medicine.
The German bacteriologist Gerhard Domagk in 1932 found the first effective drug against infections caused by bacteria, which was called prontosil. He tested it on his daughter to save her life and received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1939 for this magnificent breakthrough.
The first observation of penicillin was probably made by the physicist John Tyndall in 1875. He noticed that the fungus Penicillium notatum killed bacteria, but soon passed on to other matters. The credit for discovering penicillin is usually granted to the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming in 1928. It was a lucky find. Fleming published articles on the subject but then abandoned it. The German Jewish biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, a fugitive from the Nazis, went to the Australian-born pharmacologist Howard Florey with a suggestion that they investigated the anti-bacterial properties of Fleming’s discovery. In 1940 a report was issued describing how penicillin was capable of killing germs in the living body. Great efforts were soon made to enable significant quantities of the drug to be made for use during World War II. The Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1945 was awarded jointly to Fleming, Chain and Florey.
Another revolution in medicine in the early twentieth century was the realization that small traces of certain substances are vital to human health. A few illnesses are not caused by bacteria or germs, but by deficiencies of trace elements. Certain crucial substances cannot be manufactured by the body from other nutrients and need to be supplied through the diet.
The English biochemist Frederick Hopkins in the early 1900s discovered that food contains ingredients essential to life that are not proteins or carbohydrates. This led to the discovery of vitamins, a concept first formulated by the Polish Jewish biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912. Hopkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929 with the Dutch professor of physiology Christiaan Eijkman for this achievement. Eijkman had discovered that the illness known as Beriberi is caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, Takaki Kanehiro, a British-trained medical doctor working for the Japanese Navy, had found already in the 1880s that Beriberi was caused by malnutrition. His name is not mentioned in Charles Murray’s book.
Some notable figures in addition to the American biochemist Elmer McCollum, who participated in the discoveries of several vitamins such as A and D, are related to research on vitamins: Marguerite Davis, Christiaan Eijkman, Casimir Funk, Joseph Goldberger, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Charles Glen King, Edward Mellanby and James Lind, although Lind’s pioneering clinical trials with citrus fruits in the British Royal Navy regarding the cause of scurvy (a lack of vitamin C) around 1750 took place before this concept had been formulated.
The Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, although as often happens, others had aided in this breakthrough. The Swiss organic chemist Paul Karrerwon the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that same year together with Walter Haworth of Britain for research into vitamins.
The invention of the stethoscope by the French physician René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec revolutionized the diagnosis of lung disorders and gave unprecedented access to the internal organs of the human body. The most efficient way to do this, however, is by aiding our eyes rather than our ears, since vision is normally mankind’s most important sense for gathering information about our surroundings. When news spread in 1896 of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, this phenomenon was quickly adopted by physicians. Röntgen is ranked in physics, and his achievement earned him the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, but his discovery was to have tremendous implications in the medical field as well.
X-rays continue to be employed by physicians and dentists worldwide but were supplemented during the course of the twentieth century by ultrasound and other techniques for imaging in medicine and the life sciences. For instance, Godfrey Hounsfield, an English electrical engineer, shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine with physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack, born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Scottish parents, for developing the theoretical foundations for the diagnostic technique now known as X-ray computed tomography (CT).
The Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi in the 1930s developed a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nuclei. His method was soon independently improved upon by Edward Purcell from the USA and Felix Bloch from Switzerland, whose work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) garnered them the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics and laid the foundations for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The English physicist Peter Mansfield shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 with the American chemist Paul Lauterbur for contributions to making magnetic resonance imaging practical in the 1970s. Its use for medical imaging thereafter quickly spread around the world.
Virtually all cultures have had their versions of physicians or healers since all cultures have to deal with injuries and diseases. One possible objection to Murray’s work is that is does not credit non-European cultures in Australia, Africa, the Americas or the various regions of Asia for their intimate, ancient knowledge of many herbs and plants, some of which have later been scientifically demonstrated to possesses genuinely useful medical properties. For this reason, representatives of modern pharmaceutical companies occasionally follow native peoples to take notes of their comments about local plants and investigate their properties further.
Nevertheless, the empirical knowledge of plants, while undoubtedly very useful, does not alone establish true medical science, and traditional shamanist healers with their amulets and incantations to ward off evil spirits are very different from the practices of modern physicians.
Moreover, we should remember that European peoples in prehistoric times probably had an equally good understanding of useful plants and herbs in their local environment. For instance, Ötzi the Iceman, the well-preserved natural mummy who lived around 3,300 BC in the Alps, along with his tools carried a modest first-aid kit. His implements included the fruiting body of the birch polypore fungus, which is known to have antibacterial properties.
The Earth sciences category primarily includes geology, geophysics, meteorology and oceanography. The leading names here are, starting from the top down: Charles Lyell (1797-1875) of Scotland; James Hutton (1726-1797) of Scotland; William Smith (1769-1839) of England; Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) of Germany; Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) of Germany; Roderick Murchison (1792-1871) of Scotland; Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) of the USA; Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Switzerland; Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715-1786) of France; Carl Gustaf Mosander (1797-1858) of Sweden; Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) of Switzerland; Nicolas Desmarest (1725-1815) of France; Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) of Germany; Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) of France; Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) of England; Thomas Chamberlin (1843-1928) of the USA; Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951) of Norway; Eilhard Mitscherlich (1794-1863) of Germany; Per Teodor Cleve (1840-1905) of Sweden; and William Maurice Ewing (1906-1974) of the USA.
Modern geology can be said to have been born in the 1800s with Charles Lyell’s extension and popularization in his Principles of Geology of James Hutton’s uniformitarianism from the late 1700s. It emphasized that the most important forces shaping landforms, for instance erosion, are still ongoing today and happen at a very slow and gradual pace, not primarily through a few major upheavals or catastrophes. In order to account for the creation and destruction of entire mountain ranges, this view indirectly implied that the Earth had to be many millions of years old. Lyell’s book was a major influence on the young Charles Darwin.
The term “geology” was popularized in the late eighteenth century by the Swiss (Genevan) naturalists Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Jean-André Deluc. The aristocrat Saussure is often considered the founder of modern mountaineering and conquered Mont Blanc (4,810 m) in 1787. At the summit he tested the boiling point of water as well as the pulse of his guides.
Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart produced a geological map of the Paris region in 1812, thereby establishing a scientific approach to stratigraphy and demonstrating that strata could be recognized by the fossils found within them. The self-educated English surveyor, canal engineer and geologistWilliam Smith published his Geologic Map of England and Wales with Part of Scotland in 1815, which was the world’s first nationwide geological map.
Geologists knew that there was evidence of past upheavals, but many believed these had been caused by the alleged Biblical Flood of Noah. There were a few individuals who held that glaciation had been more extensive in the past than it is today. In Norway and the Alps there are still surviving glaciers, and the landscape was shaped by previous ones; the Norwegian fjords are valleys carved by glacial activity and now filled with seawater. These ideas of past “ice ages” were taken up by the Swiss glaciologist Louis Agassiz, who in 1840 published a major work entitled Etudes sur les glaciers (“Study on Glaciers”). Glaciology, the study of ice formations, has gained increased importance to planetary scientists and astrobiologists studying icy moons such as Europa and Enceladus elsewhere in our Solar System.
The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar suggested that ice ages were caused by astronomical forces. His theory was modified by the Scottish scientist James Croll and above all by the gifted Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, who taught physics and astronomy at the University of Belgrade. His complex work on what has become known as Milankovitch cycles – astronomical contributions to ice ages on our planet – took years to complete and was carried out only with brain power. It was published in a 1920 work that met with widespread acclaim, yet Milankovitch’s name is totally absent from Murray’s book.
By the early twentieth century it was known that surprisingly similar fossils and landforms could be found on opposite sides of major oceans. Based on these findings the German scientist Alfred Wegener proposed a theory of continental drift in 1915 in his masterpiece Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (“The Origin of Continents and Oceans”). He suggested that there was once a single giant continent which he named Pangaea (“All-Earth”).
When samples were finally obtained from the ocean beds it turned out that they were far younger than expected and that the youngest samples were found next to the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges. The existence of a “mountain range” in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean had been suspected since the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, but the global system of mid-ocean ridges was mapped after 1950. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter with less financial resources at their disposal than the former, needed to know more about the ocean environment to navigate with their nuclear submarines. The deep seas constituted an important frontline in their Cold War superpower rivalry.
Harry Hammond Hess in 1960 at Princeton University in the USA advanced the theory that the crust moves laterally from volcanically active oceanic ridges. The Earth’s crust and upper mantle form the lithosphere, broken up into giant plates that slowly move on top of the hotter mantle, which due to the temperature/pressure regime acts like warm wax. “Sea-floor spreading” helped to establish continental drift as scientifically respectable. The Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson created a synthesis which became known as plate tectonics. Fred Vine, Drummond Matthews and Xavier Le Pichon contributed to this transformation.
Ewing is followed on the Earth sciences ranking by Leopold von Buch, Clarence Dutton, Eduard Suess and the Swedish chemists Axel Cronstedt and Georg Brandt, both of whom might as well be listed under chemistry, along with Carl G. Mosander and Per Teodor Cleve, Eilhard Mitscherlich from Germany and Peter Waage from Norway. Among other names we find Jacob Bjerknes, James Dana, Gabriel Daubrée, Pentti Eskola and Johan Gadolin from Finland, Johan G. Gahn, Beno Gutenberg, James Hall, Harry H. Hess, Arthur Holmes, Gideon Mantell, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, John Milne, Andrija Mohorovicic, Charles Richter, Edward Sabine, Strabo of Amaseia, Léon Teisserenc de Bort and Felix Andries Vening Meinesz.
The Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart, who found a fossil of the extinct hominid Australopithecus africanus in South Africa in 1924, is listed under biology, as is Édouard Lartet of France, whereas the great British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey is listed under Earth sciences, which seems a bit arbitrary. The Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois, who found the first fossil of Homo erectus (the “Java Man”) in 1891, is left out entirely.
Paleontology, the systematic study of the remains of living organisms and their traces on rocks, emerged as a distinct area of investigation in Western Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Human beings had most likely encountered fossils earlier but had often connected them to dragons or other mythical creatures, not to extinct ancient animals. In the 1820s, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell separately discovered strange bones in English quarries and, crucially, came up with reasonably accurate, non-magical explanations for these creatures. The quarrelsome English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842. This means “terrible lizard” and is not scientifically accurate, but it stuck anyway.
The index prepared by Murray is a bit weak on meteorology. The Norwegian father-and-son team Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes from the scenic, but rainy city of Bergen developed meteorology into a branch of atmospheric physics. Francis Beaufort with his scale for indicating wind force is here, as is William Ferrel and Carl-Gustaf Rossby, but the English scholar Luke Howard is not mentioned for his nomenclature system for clouds, nor is the Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron listed for explaining physically how rain forms, or the climatologist Wladimir Köppen, whose climate classification systems are still widely used.
The English mathematical physicist Lewis Fry Richardson is ignored. This represents a rather serious oversight. Following up advances made by Bjerknes, Richardson in 1922 developed the first numerical weather prediction system, not merely to explain how the weather is today but to scientifically predict how it will be like tomorrow. The Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann in the USA in 1946, after the ENIAC electronic computer became operational, advocated the application of computers to weather prediction. The introduction of increasingly powerful computers was soon thereafter combined with weather satellites to develop weather forecasts of unprecedented accuracy.
One of the most curious aspects of Human Accomplishment is that it sometimes appears as if Charles Murray hasn’t read his own work. I have come across quite a few figures highlighted among central events in the various disciplines early in the book – Karl Jansky, Grote Reber, Christiaan Huygens, Bernard Lyot and Bernhard Schmidt in astronomy; Florence Nightingale and Willem Einthoven in medicine, Simon Stevin, Daniel Bernoulli and Joseph Fourier in physics, Regiomontanus, Alan Turing and Edmond Halley in mathematics or Fritz Haber in technology, to name a few prominent ones – who are then left out from the final indexes.
Among central events in the Earth sciences he states that Pythagoras in ancient Greece claimed that the Earth is spherical, that the geographer Pytheas of Massilia related the ocean tides to the Moon (although the nature of this correlation was not understood before Newton) and that Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated a good estimate for the circumference of the Earth, yet none of them are listed in the roster of significant figures. The same goes for the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator with his projection for maps, Jean Picard’s highly accurate calculations of the size of the Earth in the 1600s, Luigi Marsigli’s writings on oceanography in the 1720s and Benjamin Franklin’s scientific map of the Gulf Stream in the 1770s.
Gaspard de Coriolis discovered the Coriolis Effect, the deflection of a moving body caused by the Earth’s rotation. Charles Fabry discovered the ozone layer in 1913 and Oliver Heaviside, Arthur E. Kennelly and Edward V. Appleton the Earth’s ionosphere in the first decades of the twentieth century, yet all of these gentlemen are listed under the physics index. Jean Picard from France in the seventeenth century made a good estimate of the diameter of the Sun, too, but he is not credited for this in the astronomy section. This constitutes a mistake in my view.
The most serious omission in this section is Niels Stensen, or Nicolas Steno, from Copenhagen, Denmark, who lived for years in Italy. His law of superposition from 1669 concluded that layers of rock (strata) are arranged in a time sequence with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on top, unless later processes have disturbed this arrangement. He might have made it to the top twenty list in the Earth sciences, yet while he is highlighted among central events, for some reason his name is later left out entirely from the final index.
The discipline of Earth sciences was invented in the 1960s and 70s when it replaced geology as the major discipline for studying our planet, just as geology had once replaced mineralogy. Geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists began working on related problems using similar techniques. At the same time, the first space probes were sent to directly investigate other bodies in our Solar System, which meant that geologists could extend the scope of their investigations to the domain formerly dominated by astronomers. If Murray had updated his book until, say, the year 2000, this section would have to be renamed “planetary sciences.”
The American geologist Eugene Shoemaker arguably founded astrogeology in the 1960s and did much to bring attention to the significance of impacts from comets and asteroids in the Earth’s history. Many people believe that the mass extinction which ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was mainly caused by the impact of a large asteroid. The US physicist Luis Alvarez together with his son Walter Alvarez suggested this theory in 1980. It is now held to be correct by most scientists based on empirical evidence. A large impact crater from this time period has since been discovered outside of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
As Imke de Pater and Jack J. Lissauer state in their excellent book Planetary Sciences, “The Copernican-Keplerian-Galilean-Newtonian revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries completely changed humanity’s view of the dimensions and dynamics of the Solar System, including the relative sizes and masses of the bodies and the forces that make them orbit about one another. Gradual progress was made over the next few centuries, but the next revolution had to await the space age. In October of 1959, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 returned the first pictures of the farside of Earth’s Moon. The age of planetary exploration had begun. Over the next three decades, spacecraft visited all eight known terrestrial and giant planets in the Solar System, including our own. These spacecraft have returned data concerning the planets, their rings and moons. Spacecraft images of many objects showed details which could never have been guessed from previous Earth-based pictures. Spectra from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths revealed previously undetected gases and geological features on planets and moons, while radio detectors and magnetometers transected the giant magnetic fields surrounding many of the planets. The planets and their satellites have become familiar to us as individual bodies. The immense diversity of planetary and satellite surfaces, atmospheres and magnetic fields has surprised even the most imaginative researchers.”
Unmanned spacecraft, mainly North American, European and Russian ones but increasingly Japanese, Indian and Chinese ones as well, have visited comets and asteroids in addition to planets and moons. We have taken photos of volcanoes on Jupiter’s extremely active moon Io spewing out plumes of sulfur and sulfur dioxide to a height of many hundreds of kilometers.
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 during its brief flyby visit spotted geysers of nitrogen gas on Neptune’s large moon Triton. Its twin, the Voyager 1robotic space probe, as of early 2012 will be 120 Astronomical Units from the Sun, a staggering 120 times as distant from the Sun as is our planet, which also equals more than 17.95 billion kilometers or 1.795×1013 meters. It now takes radio waves, travelling at the speed of light, more than sixteen hours to send information back from Voyager 1 to the Earth. It is the farthest human-made object from the Earth. The Voyagers were then still within a huge bubble called the heliosphere, made of solar plasma and solar magnetic fields, but were expected to leave it in the near future. This structure is sometimes considered the limit of our Solar System and the beginning of interstellar space, although the influence of the Sun’s gravity stretches far beyond this point.
The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, named after the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens who explained Saturn’s rings and discovered its largest moon Titan, landed there in 2005, the first such undertaking in the Outer Solar System. Titan is the only moon known to possess a dense atmosphere and large amounts of liquid on its surface, in this case lakes of hydrocarbons (ethane and methane). NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, named of the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Cassini and the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, has also found geysers of water vapor and complex hydrocarbons venting from the surprisingly active moon Enceladus.
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft from the USA while orbiting the Jupiter system in the late 1990s found evidence indicating that the ice-crusted Galilean moon Europa could harbor an ocean of liquid salt water some kilometers beneath its frozen surface. Such an ocean, if it exists, might theoretically harbor primitive life-forms, a possibility that has made Europa one of the most intriguing objects of study for astrobiologists, next to the planet Mars and perhaps Enceladus.
From the 1990s on Western scientists have also discovered the first extrasolar planets or exoplanets, that is, planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun. These have substantially challenged some of our previous ideas about planet formation. Hundreds of them were found merely during the first generation of exoplanet research. Most of these were gas giants detected through indirect means by observing the tiny effects they have on the stars they orbit, but methods are rapidly improving and a few Earth-like planets have already been found.
Aleksander Wolszczan, a Polish-born USA-based radio astronomer, is credited as the co-discoverer of some of the first accepted exoplanets. In 1992, together with Canadian-born astronomer Dale Frail, he found evidence of planets orbiting around a pulsar (neutron star). 51 Pegasi b approximately 50 light-years away from us became the first planet found orbiting another Sun-like main sequence star. It was discovered in 1995 by Michel Mayor, a Swiss professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, together with his associate Didier Queloz. Mayor and his team have discovered many more extrasolar planets since then.
|
Leprosy
|
What is five-eighths of sixteen?
|
Fjordman Files
Islamophile Illusions
I have challenged Marie Simonsen, commentator in Dagbladet, to provide some concrete examples of places where Muslims have lived peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbors over longer periods of time. Personally, I don’t think any such place exists, which means that the term Islamophobia, so frequently used by her newspaper and others, is completely meaningless.
In an essay of 27 October, Rune Berglund Steen, head of communications at the Centre against Racism, claims that one can turn my original question on its head and ask whether Christians are able to live in harmony with their neighbors.
I am sure that is possible, although it is striking to notice that the Centre against Racism doesn’t even attempt to answer the original question. Some would speculate that this is because they cannot answer it. Islam’s bloody borders with other peoples, from Thailand to the Middle East, are well-known and well-documented.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen from the University of Oslo points out that Han Chinese commit atrocities against Tibetans, whites against blacks and blacks against whites. “The list of groups who cannot always live peacefully together would be a long one,” according to him.
Islam is not a completely necessary ingredient for creating conflicts, which we can see in Northern Ireland and other places. I have never been foolish enough to claim that this is the case; I am merely pointing out that Islam will dramatically increase the likelihood of serious conflicts. I am currently halfway through an English language book about how Islam in my view cannot be reformed. I would be happy to publish an essay about this topic under my real name if any newspaper dares to print it, which is doubtful.
It is true that the potential for conflict exists between closely related European and Asian nations even when Islam is not present. What does that mean? Ironically, it means that Hylland Eriksen, perhaps the country’s most prominent Multicultural ideologue, and the Centre against Racism have themselves smashed the foundations of their own ideology, apparently without realizing it. World history shows, unfortunately, that ethnic diversity strongly increases the risk of serious conflicts.
The Nordic countries’ greatest advantage, historically speaking, has been an ethnically homogeneous population. Our greatest competitive advantage is now being destroyed by state-sponsored politics. As an analogy, let’s say you had a big pile of gold and professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen told you to flush half of the gold down the toilet because this was supposed to be economically beneficial.
Hylland Eriksen said in an interview in 2008 that “The most important ‘blank spot’ now consists of deconstructing the majority so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority again”. If he had said that Somalis or Pakistanis should be deconstructed, this would have triggered strong reactions. Why is it always white Europeans, and only them, who are to be deconstructed and have their countries and cultural history taken away from them?
The political scientist Øystein Hetland described me on 31 October as an extremist, among other reasons because I am very critical towards Islam, and ask what it takes to make a democratic society work. I wrote the following on Gates of Vienna on the occasion of my fifth anniversary as Fjordman: “Are Islamic teachings inherently violent? Yes. Can Islam be reformed? No. Can Islam be reconciled with our way of life? No. Is there such as thing as a moderate Islam? No. Can we continue to allow Muslims to settle in our countries? No.”
These few sentences contain all the information about Islam you will ever need. Do I regret writing this? No. One ought to tell the truth, even when it is unpleasant.
In English:
I am still getting many emails from journalists. Yes, if you send emails to this website (Gates of Vienna) I do normally get them. I may choose to answer a few journalists directly and have already done so, but some others will be answered indirectly via this website. I hope you understand that I do not want to make my email address public.
I was not involved in these senseless murders in any way, and have nothing to hide, but I am so swamped right now that I cannot promise that I will answer everybody. It’s beyond my personal capacity to do so. I will answer as many as I can in English or in Norwegian, the only languages I know well enough to write in.
I would like to thank those who sent me so many support emails, from Australia to Israel. I greatly appreciate it, and I am sorry that I cannot thank all of you directly. I hope we can eventually return to doing what this website normally does, which is to post essays on important subjects, some of them controversial, others not so much. But for right now the attention focused on this website is so unusual that we have to deal with that issue first.
Comments will still be closed for the time being. We apologize to regular readers for this, but hope you understand the situation.
I want to emphasize a few important points. According to what has been reported in the mass media, Anders Behring Breivik started planning his barbaric attacks as far back as 2002. That was before Robert Spencer had started his website Jihad Watch.
The very first post I ever wrote under the name Fjordman was in February 2005. It is still available online on my old blog and can be easily verified by anybody who wants to. This also means that this horrible man had been planning mass murder for years before he had read even a single word I had ever written.
I’d just like to point that out.
I would also like to point out that hundreds of thousands of people from Canada to India have read my essays over the years, and to my knowledge not a single one of them has killed so much as a sparrow as a result of doing so.
I have read about the unspeakable things Anders Behring Breivik did at Utøya. Any person doing such a thing is a monster. He murdered dozens of people in cold blood and injured countless others, mentally or physically. That’s bad enough, and it will take years for those wounds to heal, if they ever do.
It is irresponsible in this situation to try to expand his list of victims even further, from hundreds to hundreds of millions of people, by exploiting this atrocity to shut down vital political debates about immigration, Multiculturalism, or Islam in multiple countries. It cannot be allowed to happen.
That monster has already executed many people. He should not be allowed to execute political freedom in the Western world as well.
På norsk:
Jeg får fremdeles mange eposter fra journalister. Ja, his dere sender eposter til denne nettsiden vil jeg som regel motta dem. Kanskje kan dere merke dem med noe på engelsk, for eksempel “Questions from Norwegian journalist” pluss navn. Jeg vil sannsynligvis velge å svare noen journalister direkte mens andre vil bli svart indirekte via denne nettsiden. Jeg håper dere skjønner at jeg ikke ønsker å gjøre min epostadresse offentlig på det nåværende tidspunkt.
Jeg var ikke involvert overhodet i de sanseløse massemordene og har ingenting å skjule, men jeg er såpass overveldet akkurat nå at jeg ikke kan love at jeg vil svare alle. Det er rett og slett mer enn jeg har personlig kapasitet til å gjøre.
Jeg har mottatt en forespørsel fra NRK Dagsrevyen om å gjøre et intervju med kamera. Det velger jeg dessverre å takke nei til på dette tidspunktet. Jeg er blitt spurt om det samme fra TV2 og sa nei også da, men sa ja til et intervju per epost. Dersom NRK vil ha dette vil jeg sannsynligvis akseptere. Jeg har også akseptert intervju per epost fra Adresseavisen og VG. Av utenlandske journalister har jeg takket ja til et engelskspråklig intervju med Der Spiegel.
Jeg vil gjerne benytte anledningen til å takke for alle støtteepostene jeg mottar, fra Australia til Israel. Det setter jeg stor pris på, og jeg er lei for at jeg ikke kan takke alle direkte. Jeg håper vi kan før eller siden gå tilbake til å gjøre det denne nettsiden vanligvis gjør, nemlig å poste essayer om viktige temaer, noen av dem kontroversielle, andre mindre så. Men akkurat nå er fokuset såpass uvanlig at vi må håndtere det først.
Kommentarer vil derfor være stengt inntil videre. Vi ber om unnskyldning til faste lesere for dette men håper at de forstår situasjonen.
Jeg vil legge vekt på noen viktige momenter. Ut ifra det som er blitt rapportert i massemediene startet Behring Breivik planleggingen av sine barbariske angrep så langt tilbake som i 2002. Dette var før Robert Spencer hadde startet sin nettside Jihad Watch.
Den absolutt første posten jeg gjorde under navnet Fjordman var i februar 2005. Den er fremdeles tilgjengelig online på min gamle blogg og kan enkelt verifiseres av hvem som helst. Dette betyr også at denne forferdelige mannen hadde planlagt massemord i årevis før han hadde lest ett eneste ord jeg noensinne hadde skrevet.
Jeg vil bare poengtere dette.
Jeg vil også gjerne påpeke at hundre tusenvis av mennesker fra Canada til India har lest mine tekster i løpet av årene. Så vidt meg bekjent har ingen av dem drept så mye som en spurv på grunn av det.
Jeg har lest om de unevnelige tingene som Behring Breivik gjorde på Utøya. En person som gjør noe slikt er et monster. Han myrdet dusinvis av mennesker med kaldt blod og skadet talløse andre, mentalt eller fysisk. Det er ille nok, og det vil ta mange år for disse sårene til å leges, om de noen gang gjør det.
Det er uansvarlig i denne situasjonen å forsøke å gjøre hans liste over ofre enda lengre, fra hundrevis til millioner av mennesker, ved å utnytte disse grusomhetene til å stenge av nødvendige debatter omkring innvandring, multikulturalisme og islam i ulike land. Det kan ikke tillates å skje.
Det monsteret har allerede henrettet mange mennesker. Han bør ikke få lov til å henrette politisk frihet i den vestlige verden også.
Monday, July 25, 2011
We have unusual traffic to this website right now because of the massacres that took place in the Oslo region this Friday, July 22. Apparently, the person who is currently suspected of having committed these atrocities and murdered nearly one hundred people in cold blood, Anders Behring Breivik, has quoted me and this website in a book he has published.
It is only fair in this situation that I publish some of my thoughts about this horrible weekend, one of the worst my small nation has experienced in a long time. I know there are journalists trying to get in touch with me at the moment, but I cannot answer everybody, nor do I want to. I may publish more texts in the coming week as well but let us start with this. I normally write for an international audience, but since this incident involved Norwegian victims and a Norwegian perpetrator I will also include the same text in Norwegian, after the English one.
In English:
No, I have never met Anders Behring Breivik in my life. He doesn’t even know what I look like.
No, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the massacres that took place on Friday in central Oslo and at Utøya. I was nowhere near the scene. I was planning to go and watch a movie at a local cinema with a family member when I got a message that a massive explosion had rocked central Oslo. From that moment on, I was liveblogging along with nearly a dozen different people at Gates of Vienna until after the assumed shooter had been caught at Utøya.
How did I react to the events I witnessed this afternoon? With absolute horror and disgust, just like everybody else did. I admit that I thought at first we were dealing with an Islamic Jihadist attack, which seemed to be confirmed by the claims of some Islamic organizations that they were behind it. But the shootings at Utøya did not seem to follow the usual Jihadist pattern, and as the evening went by it slowly became clear that we were dealing with something else, and possibly something even more horrifying. Whoever committed those unspeakable atrocities is a monster and deserves just as little pity as he gave to his innocent, unarmed victims.
How do I feel about knowing that the assumed perpetrator of these atrocities has quoted me in his much-talked about book? Absolutely terrible. What else can I say? I must stress that I have not yet read his very long book or manifest and I have neither the time nor the stomach to do so at the present time. I can only refer to the bits and pieces of it quoted in various news articles and what others keep telling me. He has apparently quoted a great many texts from a variety of public sources, one of them being me. His total lack of respect for human life is not, however, something he can have picked up from me, or from any of the other Islam-critical writers I know such as Robert Spencer or Bat Ye’or. Indeed, the lack of respect for human life is often one of the great shortcomings of Islamic culture that we have consistently pointed out.
I have also never called for violence in any of my essays, and I would estimate that I have published between one million and two million words under this name on the Internet. I honestly don’t know myself, I lost track years ago. These essays are not hidden. They are all out in the open on the Internet and can be found by anybody with access to a search engine. I have nothing to hide, as far as I am concerned. I write about subjects ranging from astrophysics to the history of chocolate and beer, but I also write about sensitive and controversial topics, and I know it. We cannot stop writing about charged but important issues. People like me have been warning against rising ethnic tensions for years, not creating them. They have been created by runaway mass immigration to Western countries, and as long as that runaway immigration continues, I fear that these tensions are going to continue to rise as well. I do not wish this; I am merely warning that this is likely to happen.
Am I an extremist? I admit that I have a strong dedication to truth. Of that, I am guilty. For instance, I notice that virtually nobody talked about “moderate Islam” versus “radical Islam” or “Islamism” until very recently. Why is that? And although nearly all the major newspapers, TV stations and leading politicians throughout the Western world assure us daily that there is a huge difference between moderate and radical Islam, few if any of them seem able to explain exactly what that difference consists of. I find that strange, and I’m not the only one.
Does pointing this out make me very extreme? Perhaps. But then how do you explain that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of NATO member state Turkey, has stated publicly that there is no such thing as a moderate Islam? After all, he’s a very, very moderate Muslim man in charge of a very, very moderate Muslim country where Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was a bestseller as late as in 2005. I know how moderate Erdogan is because Western leaders always remind us of this fact. So if this exceptionally moderate man says that there is no such thing as a moderate Islam, surely he is worth listening to?
The most extreme thing I did this weekend was sleep barely at all for two nights in a row, first of all because of the horrible events I had just witnessed, which deeply affected me, but also because of false rumors that circulated in several countries for days that this man who massacred nearly 100 persons was me. I have been in the blogging business for a few years now and have been through some public fights along the way, but I have never before been accused of being the worst mass murderer in Scandinavian history. That’s a first even for me, and I sincerely hope there won’t be a second time. I’m a normal human being and did not particularly enjoy this. The second-most extreme thing I have done this weekend is watching an old movie, drinking Pinot noir red wine from New Zealand and reading a book about medieval history. This happens to be the most extreme thing I do on any average weekend.
På norsk:
Nei, jeg har aldri i hele mitt liv møtt Anders Behring Breivik. Han vet ikke engang hvordan jeg ser ut.
Nei, jeg hadde absolutt ingenting å gjøre med massakrene som fant sted i Oslo sentrum og på Utøya nå på fredag. Jeg var overhodet ikke i nærheten av åstedet. Jeg planla et kinobesøk med et familiemedlem da jeg fikk melding om at en kraftig eksplosjon hadde rystet Oslo sentrum. Fra det øyeblikk av liveblogget jeg med nesten et dusin ulike personer på Gates of Vienna resten av kvelden, helt frem til etter at den antatte gjerningsmannen var tatt på Utøya.
Hvordan reagerte jeg på hendelsene denne fredagen? Med absolutt skrekk og forferdelse, som alle andre. Jeg innrømmer at jeg først trodde det handlet om et islamsk Jihadistisk angrep, men skytingen på Utøya så ikke ut til å følge det vanlige Jihadistiske mønsteret. Ettersom kvelden gikk ble det langsomt klart at vi hadde å gjøre med noe annet og kanskje enda mer forferdelig. Hvem som nå enn gjorde de fryktelige handlingene på Utøya er et monster som fortjener akkurat lite like sympati som han gav til sine uskyldige, ubevæpnede ofre.
Hvordan føles det å vite at den antatte gjerningsmannen bak disse fryktelige forbrytelsene siterer meg i sin mye omtalte bok? Aldeles forferdelig. Jeg vet ikke hva annet jeg kan si. Jeg må imidlertid legge vekt på at jeg ennå ikke har lest hans meget lange bok eller manifest, og jeg har hverken tid eller mage til å gjøre dette på det nåværende tidspunkt. Jeg kan i dag kun forholde meg til de bitene og utdragene som refereres i massemediene og som andre har fortalt meg. Det virker som om han har sitert en lang rekke ulike, offentlig tilgjengelige tekster, hvorav enkelte er mine. Hans totale mangel på respekt for menneskeliv er derimot ikke noe han kan ha plukket opp fra meg eller fra noen annen islam-kritisk skribent jeg kjenner, som Robert Spencer eller Bat Ye’or. Tvert imot er mangel på respekt for menneskeliv en av de store svakhetene i islamsk kultur som vi konsekvent har påpekt.
Jeg har heller aldri tatt til orde for vold i mine tekster, og jeg vil anslå at jeg har publisert mellom en og to millioner ord under dette navnet på internett. Jeg vet ærlig talt ikke selv, jeg mistet tellingen for lenge siden. Disse essayene er ikke skjulte. De er alle åpent tilgjengelige på internett for enhver person som har tilgang til en søkemotor. Jeg har ingenting å skjule fra mitt synspunkt. Jeg skriver om temaer som spenner fra astrofysikk til historien om sjokolade og øl, men jeg skriver også om følsomme og kontroversielle temaer og jeg vet det godt. Vi kan ikke slutte å skrive om viktige, men vanskelige temaer. Folk som meg har advart mot økte etniske spenninger i mange år, vi har ikke skapt dem. De er blitt skapt av en voldsom masseinnvandring til vestlige land. Så lenge denne masseinnvandringen fortsetter frykter jeg at de etniske spenningene også vil fortsette å øke. Jeg ønsker ikke dette, jeg advarer mot det.
Er jeg en ekstremist? Jeg innrømmer at jeg har en sterk trang til å søke sannhet. Det er jeg skyldig i. For eksempel har jeg lagt merke til at nesten ingen snakket om “moderat islam” mot “radikalt islam” eller “islamisme” inntil ganske nylig. Hvorfor ikke? Og selv om nesten samtlige av de store avisene, TV-stasjonene og ledende politikerne over hele den vestlige verden forsikrer oss daglig om at det er en enorm forskjell mellom moderat og radikalt islam er det få eller ingen av dem som ser ut til å kunne forklare nøyaktig hva den forskjellen består i. Jeg finner dette merkelig, og jeg er ikke den eneste.
Er jeg veldig ekstrem for å påpeke dette? Kanskje. Men hvordan forklarer du da at Recep Tayyip Erdogan, statsministeren i NATO-landet Tyrkia, har sagt offentlig at det ikke finnes noe moderat islam? Han er tross alt en veldig, veldig moderat muslimsk mann i et veldig, veldig moderat muslimsk land der Adolf Hitlers selvbiografi Mein Kampf var en bestselger så sent som i 2005. Jeg vet hvor moderat herr Erdogan er fordi vestlige ledere alltid minner oss på dette faktum. Dersom denne eksepsjonelt moderate mannen sier at det ikke finnes noe moderat islam sa kanskje han kan være verdt å lytte til?
Det mest ekstreme jeg har gjort denne helga er å knapt sove i to netter på rad, først og fremst på grunn av de fryktelige hendelsene jeg nettopp hadde vært vitne til, men også på grunn av falske rykter som sirkulerte i flere dager i flere land om at denne mannen som massakrerte nesten 100 personer var meg. Jeg har vært i bloggebransjen i noen år nå og har vært gjennom enkelte offentlige krangler på veien, men jeg er aldri før blitt beskyldt for å være den verste massemorderen i skandinavisk historie. Det er første gang selv for meg, og jeg håper inderlig at det ikke blir en andre gang. Jeg er et normalt menneske og satte ikke spesielt stort pris på dette. Det nest mest ekstreme jeg har gjort denne helga er å se en gammel film, drikke Pinot noir rødvin fra New Zealand og lese en bok om middelalderhistorie. Dette er også det mest ekstreme jeg gjør i en gjennomsnittlig helg.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
I notice that certain bloggers such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs keep spreading the utterly false rumor that I am the evil shooter from Utøya, the island just outside of Oslo.
I have absolutely no idea who planted that rumor or for what reason, but they obviously don’t wish me well. For the record, I was live-blogging about these horrible events the entire Friday evening, which can be confirmed by nearly a dozen different individuals.
I didn’t respond to these rumors earlier because I was too emotionally exhausted from yesterday’s events. It was hard to pay attention to such things, but now I feel that I must. Some people really do want to smear me that badly.
Fjordman Discusses the English Defence League
Critical comments have been published about the alleged extremism of the English Defence League (EDL), the anti-Jihadist street protest movement that is active in many English cities.
The origins of the EDL can be traced back to Luton, England in the spring of 2009, after British troops were harassed by militant Muslims. Scandinavian blogger Conservative Swede commented in April 2009 that “The police broke up a march on Monday 13/4/09 by British people wanting to reclaim their streets from Muslim fanatics. Officers said it was illegal to stage the protest in Luton where extremists were allowed only last month to shout abuse at troops home from Iraq. This is the first time I can remember seeing Westerners act morally. All morality is ultimately rooted in moral outrage. Without socially manifested moral outrage there can only be nihilism. All the priestly preachers of the all-encompassing Enlightenment tsunami, and their priestly institutions, have during the last centuries, and especially during the last decades, worked eagerly to deprive the Westerners of all sense of morality, all sense of honour, and left us with nothing but their cynical, destructive and cruel nihilism; which is in the process of killing us as a civilization. It’s good to see the goodness and honour of these young men. It shows the natural sense of morality that after all exists under the surface among the Westerners. Something we haven’t seen since the days of Enoch Powell. Something that has been utterly suppressed by the traitorous pharisees in our ruling classes.”
It is interesting to notice that persons who work for the other team can often see things more clearly than many of us do. Jon Cruddas, a Labour Party MP, wrote in an essay in the left-wing, pro-Islamic newspaper The Guardian that “What makes the EDL much more dangerous is how it reflects a wider political and cultural war. Across western Europe rightwing populist parties are achieving huge electoral success on the same anti-Islam platform.”
Yes. This happens because ordinary people now sense that we are being lied to. We are fed-up with seeing our so-called leaders appease organizations that have declared war against our societies, while our sons and daughters are being harassed in the streets by immigrant gangs.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” as Abraham Lincoln once allegedly stated. The number of people who truly believe that Islam is a religion of peace is rapidly declining in all Western countries, despite a concerted pro-Islamic propaganda campaign in our mass media that would have made Chairman Mao proud. The treasonous multicultural elites in our countries are losing this battle for the minds of their people and are finally getting nervous.
I notice that left-wing media such as the BBC and The Guardian, both notorious for their pro-Islamic, anti-Christian and anti-Western bias, are very concerned that the EDL might spread “Islamophobia” and critical comments about their country’s insane immigration policies to wider sections of the general public. As far as I am concerned, that’s the best possible recommendation the EDL could get. That alone is reason enough to support their efforts.
Islamic Jihad has declared an eternal war against all other cultures and religions on this planet. Promoting Islamic propaganda and viewpoints while harassing those who tell the truth about Islam for “Islamophobia and racism” makes you complicit in Islam’s war against humanity. This makes the BBC, The Guardian and their ilk throughout the Western world enemies of civilization. Not just enemies of Western civilization, which they surely are, but enemies of any civilization worthy of the name.
The left-wing organization Unite Against Fascism (UAF) has taken part in several counter demonstrations against the EDL in various cities. They denounce the EDL as “violent racists and fascists” and are planning a special conference titled “Celebrate diversity, defend multiculturalism, oppose Islamophobia and racism” on 15 October 2011. The conference has received the support of powerful Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
The current leader of UAF is Labour Party politician Ken Livingstone, who was Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008. He has also served as a Member of Parliament (MP). As mayor, Livingstone was notorious for his friendly relations with repressive Marxist leaders such as Fidel Castro, not to mention for extending official invitations to Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an “honoured guest.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi is widely recognized as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most dangerous totalitarian organizations in the world today, with branches in dozens of countries. Mr. Qaradawi has openly bragged about how Muslims will conquer Europe. Other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have also stated in public that their long-term goal is to smash Western civilization and replace it with Islamic sharia law.
According to Ken Livingstone’s world view, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others like him are “moderate” if they want to colonize our countries and wipe out our entire civilization; the EDL and groups like them are branded as “extremists” merely for resisting their own dispossession and destruction. I wish I could say that this is an exaggeration, but it’s not. It’s the actual situation throughout most of the Western world today, not just England or Britain. Livingstone gives a face to those who are betraying the greatest civilization that ever existed.
In addition to major trade unions and the Labour Party, the UAF receives support from most of the British political establishment. Apart from the loathsome Mr. Livingstone, other senior members of UAF include Weyman Bennett of the Socialist Workers Party, which is well-known for its “revolutionary Socialist” (read: Communist) sympathies. Communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million people in the last 80 years alone. It is a sick joke when individuals with Marxist sympathies are allowed to denounce others, with very little evidence, for having “totalitarian sympathies.” It’s time for that joke to end.
I hear claims about the supposedly “totalitarian” leanings of the English Defence League, but I have yet to see any real proof of these allegations. It is far easier to find people with such sympathies, or links to groups with such sympathies, among certain critics of the EDL like Unite Against Fascism (UAF) or even the BBC. If totalitarian groups exist within the EDL they should of course be denounced, but that is not what I see when I look at the EDL today.
I see brave people, ordinary men and women, who after years of humiliation and degradation are finally sick and tired of having to watch evil groups and organizations from other parts of the world being allowed to colonize their country and destroy their freedom, with barely a peep of protest from the local authorities. From that perspective, the EDL represents the only good news to come out of the repressive and dysfunctional country known as modern Britain in years. The organization has even inspired similar groups in other parts of Western Europe.
I don’t know what the EDL will amount to in the future, but right now it represents potential and hope. That’s why I support the efforts of the EDL, and that’s why you should do so, too.
Women, and Human Accomplishment
The book Human Accomplishment does not contain many female names. Has the author Charles Murray unfairly discriminated against women? I see little evidence of this. When reading the index for Western music I notice the absence of Hildegard von Bingen from the twelfth century, a German abbess and composer. She should perhaps have been included. Yet I also did not find the English composer and conductor Benjamin Britten, who was at least as prominent as her.
Of women authors renowned for writing about issues relating to Feminism, the highest-ranking one in Western literature is Virginia Woolf, with an index-score of 12 out of 100. Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is not listed, but her daughter Mary Shelley, remembered for the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), is.
Outside of Feminism and women’s issues, female contributions to the field of philosophy are quite tiny. Simone de Beauvoir receives a modest listing for The Second Sex (1949), but only in literature, not in Western philosophy. She receives a lower score there than the English sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë and significantly lower than Sappho of Lesbos, Jane Austen or Mary Ann Evans, also known as George Eliot. Since the book ends in 1950 it does not mention Atlas Shrugged, a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the USA, The Feminine Mystique, published by Betty Friedan in 1963, or Silent Spring (1962) by the American conservationist Rachel Carson, which helped inspire the environmental movement.
Especially after the Second World War, Feminist ideologies grew increasingly radical and often more or less inspired by certain strands of Marxist thought, be that economic or cultural Marxism. This is reflected in the writings of both Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. From a strictly literary point of view, I would agree with giving a higher ranking to Woolf than to Beauvoir simply because the former was a substantially better writer than the latter.
What about the scientific disciplines? Did Charles Murray leave out many great women scientists? A tiny handful of them, perhaps, but not very many from what I can judge.
Thanks to spectroscopy, it was possible for European astrophysicists to detect the presence of chemical elements such as hydrogen in the Sun’s spectrum, or even helium (He, atomic number 2) from the Greek helios for the Sun. Helium was discovered independently in 1868 by French astronomer Jules Janssen and the English scientist Norman Lockyer. It was, and remains, the only known chemical element detected in space before it was ever found on the Earth. But Western scientists did not yet know how big a percentage of the Sun’s mass was made up of hydrogen. In the 1920s, many of them assumed that it was rich in heavy elements.
This changed with the work of the English-born Cecilia Payne, later Payne-Gaposchkin after she married a Russian astronomer. Her interest in astronomy was triggered after she heard Arthur Eddington lecture on relativity. In 1925 her Stellar Atmospheres, labeled “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy,” showed that stars consist mainly of hydrogen and helium. The Irish astronomer William McCrea and the German astrophysicist Albrecht Unsöld independently established that the prominence of hydrogen in stellar spectra indicates that the presence of hydrogen in stars is greater than that of all other elements put together.
We know a lot more about the surface of other planets like Mars than about the interior of our own, but what little we think we know to a large extent derives from studying seismic waves. The Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snell in the 1600s described the bending of light, or refraction, which takes place when light travels from one medium to another with a different composition and density, for instance from air to water. This can be seen by anybody who puts a pencil into a glass of water and observes how it appears to be “bent.” This phenomenon is caused by the change in velocity that occurs when light waves pass from one medium to a different one. The same principle applies to other waves as well, for example seismic waves, shock waves generated by earthquakes or explosions that travel through the Earth’s interior.
The Irish geophysicist Richard Dixon Oldham discovered that seismic waves travel through the interior of the Earth in different directions and speeds. This insight was utilized by the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic, who taught geophysics at the University of Zagreb. By analyzing the data from a 1909 earthquake he realized that the velocity of a seismic wave is related to the density of the material that it is moving through. He interpreted the acceleration of seismic waves observed within Earth’s outer shell as a compositional change within the Earth itself. This Mohorovicic Discontinuity is thought to constitute the boundary between the Earth’s crust and mantle. It can be found at an average depth of 8 kilometers beneath the ocean basin and as much as 32 kilometers beneath the continents.
Beno Gutenberg was born in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1913 he became the first person to give a reasonable estimate of the size and properties of the Earth’s core. In 1930, Gutenberg became a professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the USA, where one of his colleagues was the American seismologist Charles Francis Richter.
They collaborated on the development of various scales using seismic waves so that observers could assign magnitudes to different earthquakes. In 1935 this work resulted in the creation of a logarithmic magnitude scale that came to be named after Richter alone. The alternative Moment Magnitude scale, now preferred by many, was introduced in 1979 at Caltech by the American scientist Thomas C. Hanks and the Japanese-born seismologist Hiroo Kanamori.
Seismologist Inge Lehmann from Denmark studied the shock waves of a large earthquake, some of which were reflected back. In a 1936 she theorized that the Earth’s center consists of two separate parts. The outer core lies below the mantle, ca. 2,900 km beneath the surface.
The inner core begins 5150 kilometers beneath the surface where the temperature is estimated to be perhaps 6000 °C, comparable to that of the Sun’s surface. In total, the Earth’s core is believed to be over 7,000 kilometers in diameter, making it slightly larger than the planet Mars. Yet like Payne-Gaposchkin, Lehmann is not mentioned in Human Accomplishment.
Hans Christian Ørsted in Denmark in 1820 found a connection between electrical and magnetic phenomena and opened up the study of electromagnetism. The French mathematical physicist and astronomer François Arago described the generation of magnetism by rotation in the 1820s, and his observations were expanded by Michael Faraday in England. The German-born physicist Walter M. Elsasser in 1946 published his theory that the Earth’s electromagnetic field is generated by an internal dynamo caused by currents in the liquid outer core. Yet Elsasser’s name is not mentioned by Charles Murray in his book, either.
Apart from Lehmann and Payne-Gaposchkin, both of whom objectively speaking deserve to be listed, one possible female name left out by Murray in the scientific disciplines is Ada King or Ada Lovelace, daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. In 1833 she met Charles Babbage and became interested in his work. She described how his Analytical Engine might be programmed and made what many historians consider to be the first computer program.
If I were to construct my own personal and highly subjective list over the greatest women scientists in recorded history, the top would look something like this:Marie Curie is the undisputed number one, Maria Goeppert-Mayer two and Lise Meitner three. After that it gets trickier. I would say Irène Joliot-Curie, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Vera Rubin, Margaret Burbidge, Emmy Noether, Rosalind Franklin, Antonia Maury, Chien-Shiung Wu, Annie Jump Cannon, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Marguerite Davis, Inge Lehmann, Caroline Herschel, Ada King and Florence Nightingale, in roughly that order.
There are other candidates, such as Barbara McClintock, Lene Hau, Jane Goodall, Marguerite Perey, Ida Noddack, Martha Chase, Mary Leakey, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Hypatia, Sonya Kovalevskaya, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Marie-Sophie Germain, Maria Mitchell, Ada Yonath, Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, Linda Buck, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gerty Cori, Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Gertrude Elion or Mary Anning.
I am willing to discuss some of the details here. Should Irène Joliot-Curie be ranked ahead of Goeppert-Mayer, for example? Or should others be pushed into the top twenty list? However, I would claim that if you make a ranking over the top fifty women in the history of science, all of the first twenty suggested by me should be there. Marie Curie should be number one.
By 2010, four individuals had received two Nobel Prizes. Maria Sklodowska-Curie shared the Physics Prize in 1903 for co-discovering radioactivity and received the Chemistry Prize in 1911. An entire century later she is the only person, man or woman, to have received Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, although they were admittedly closely related in this case.
Linus Pauling, a physical chemist from the USA, became the first and so far only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first Prize (for Chemistry, in 1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical bond and its use in elucidating molecular structure; the second (for Peace, in 1962) recognized his efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.
The American physicist and electrical engineer John Bardeen is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first shared in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for their invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John R. Schrieffer for their theory of superconductivity, which became known as the BCS theory.
Frederick Sanger is a leading English biochemist, a scientist who conducts research into the molecules that occur in the cells of animals, plants and other living organisms. He has twice received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the first one in 1958 for determining the structure of the insulin molecule, the hormone that regulates the level of sugar (glucose) in our blood. He shared another in 1980 for having developed a method of determining the chemical structure of large pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the substance that makes up our genes.
While a few women have won Nobel Prizes in medicine or chemistry, only two of them as of 2010 have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie Curie in 1903 and the second Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 for her work on the nuclear shell structure of atomic nuclei.
My suggested top twenty list of women extends nearly up until the present day (mid-2011) and includes Rosalind Franklin, Margaret Burbidge, Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Vera Rubin, who all made their scientific contributions in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. So did some of the other potential candidates such as Jane Goodall and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
Three of the first twenty are Ashkenazi Jews: Lise Meitner, Vera Rubin and Emmy Noether. This is consistent with the overall picture of the substantial minority contribution made by Jews. One came from Asia. The physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Shanghai but moved to the USA. There she came to know Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first individuals of Chinese descent to do so. Wu did not get a Nobel, although she did get the very first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978, an honor she shares with many Nobel laureates, and as of 2011 she still remains the only woman to have done so.
Many men from China, or from Vietnam in the case of Fields Medalist Ngô B?o Châu, who have won prestigious international awards in science and mathematics, belong to the Chinese diaspora in Western countries, for instance Shing-Tung Yau, Terence Tao or Charles K. Kao. Japan is without question the one Asian country with the highest number of Nobel Prizes.
Virtually all complex societies have been patriarchal to some extent, and the Confucian-influenced ones of East Asia have a reputation for being more than average so. However, by far the highest ranking woman in any of the disciplines in Human Accomplishment is the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, number three in Japanese literature with a score of 86 out of 100.
The most remarkable woman scientist is clearly Marie Curie. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie together with her French husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for work on artificial radioactivity, part of the history of nuclear fission.
Even so, it is hard to explain away the strong presence of the English-speaking countries, primarily Britain and the USA, on these lists. If we include German-born individuals such as Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Caroline Herschel plus Scandinavian ones like Inge Lehmann, the overall dominance of Germanic-speaking nations on my ranking becomes very strong. This is no doubt mainly due to the great scientific contributions of the Germanic-speaking nations in general and the English-speaking ones in particular. I would personally suggest that it is also partly due to the high degree of respect traditionally awarded to women in Germanic societies, despite what certain Marxist Feminists in these countries might claim today. I was slightly surprised, though, not to find any Dutch or Swedish women near the top, considering the strong scientific performance of these countries and the freedom enjoyed by women there.
In 1944 the Canadian-born researcher Oswald Avery and his co-workers had more or less demonstrated that DNA was the material behind inheritance. This was further established through experiments conducted by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in the USA in 1952. The structure of it was finally worked out in Britain in the early 1950s by Francis Crick, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins, who all shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. They were aided by images produced by the English woman biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
The period 1950-2010 can alternatively be labeled the space age, the DNA age or the computer age; the nuclear age had begun in the 1930s and 40s but continued to develop after that, for peaceful and non-peaceful purposes. Whereas the first electronic computers existed before 1950, the development of the microchip made them much smaller and more powerful.
DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is the molecule that contains the genetic code for all currently known life forms on Earth except for some RNA-based viruses. Whether viruses constitute life forms is debatable since they have no metabolism and cannot reproduce without infecting a host cell, but they are certainly important carriers of genetic material. Viruses are suspected by many biologists to have played an important role in evolution, human evolution included.
DNA consists of two long, twisted chains made up of nucleotides. Each nucleotide contains one base, one phosphate molecule and the sugar molecule deoxyribose. A gene is a segment of a DNA molecule that contains information for making a protein. Proteins perform the chemical reactions in our bodies and provide the body’s main building materials, forming the architecture of our cells. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Chromosomes are cellular structures containing genes. Humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Photography made it possible to preserve images of the spectra of stars. The Catholic priest and astrophysicist Pietro Angelo Secchi, born in northern Italy, is considered the discoverer of the principle of stellar classification. In the 1860s he began collecting the spectra of stars and classified them according to spectral characteristics, although his particular system didn’t last.
The Harvard system based on the star’s surface temperature was developed from the 1880s onward. Several of its creators were women. Edward CharlesPickering at the Harvard College Observatory hired female assistants such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon and Antonia Maury, who classified the prism spectra of thousands of stars. Another system was worked out in the 1940s by William Wilson Morgan and Philip Keenan, aided by Edith Kellman. This is known as the MK or Yerkes spectral classification system after Yerkes Observatory, the astronomical research center of the University of Chicago in the USA. William Wilson Morgan is not listed by Charles Murray. He probably should have been.
Ejnar Hertzsprung, a chemist and astronomer from Copenhagen, Denmark, worked for years at Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands, but made his most important contribution in 1911-13. He discovered the relationship between the brightness of a star and its color, but published his findings in a photographic journal which went largely unnoticed. The talented American astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who spent six decades at Princeton University, made essentially the same discovery, but published it in 1913 in a journal read by astronomers and presented the findings in a graph. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram helped give astronomers their first insight into the lifecycle of stars. It can be regarded as the Periodic Table of stars.
Changes in the structure of stars are reflected in changes in their temperatures, sizes and luminosities. The smallest ones, red dwarfs, may contain less than 10% the mass of the Sun and emit 0.01% as much energy. The minimum core temperature needed for regular hydrogen fusion and therefore the birth of a star is about 10 million degrees Celsius. Red dwarfs constitute by far the most numerous types of stars and have lifespans of tens or hundreds of billions of years, in other words, far longer than the currently estimated age of our universe.
Rare hypergiants may exceed 100 solar masses and emit hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the Sun. They have lifetimes of a few million years. Stars that are actively fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores are called main sequence stars and are in hydrostatic equilibrium: the outward radiation pressure is balanced by the inward gravitational force.
A common, medium-sized star like our Sun will remain on the main sequence for roughly 10 billion years. The Sun is currently in the middle of its lifespan as it formed 4.57 billion years ago. Even today it daily emits an estimated 30% more energy than it did when it was born. The faint young Sun paradox, proposed by the astronomer, planetary scientist and popular science writer Carl Sagan with his colleague George Mullen in the USA in 1972, refers to the fact that the Earth nevertheless apparently had liquid oceans, not frozen ones, for much its early existence. Scientists have not yet reached an agreement on why this was the case.
When the hydrogen fuel runs out, the core contracts and heats up. The star then brightens and expands, becoming a red giant. The Sun will enter its red giant phase in about 5 billion years. Helium fusion will begin when its core temperature reaches around 100 million K, hot enough to produce carbon. It will then greatly expand in volume and vaporize Mercury, Venus and maybe the Earth. Already now it is slowly growing more luminous. For this reason, in another billion plus years the Earth’s surface may be too hot to contain liquid water. The Sun is not massive enough to explode as a supernova and leave behind a neutron star or a black hole. It will eventually end up as a white dwarf billions of years from now when its active life ends.
The Greeks and other ancient peoples usually viewed stars as unchanging, and indeed they appear to be so within the space of a single human lifetime, or several human lifetimes. We now know that they come in many different sizes and colors, from those that are much bigger than the Sun to stars that are significantly smaller than it. We also know that they have different lifecycles depending upon their masses, and that large ones can “recycle” some of their material in giant explosions, which can in turn form the basis for new stars and planets.
The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky along with his German colleague Walter Baade – both eventually based in the USA – introduced the term “supernova” and suggested that these explosive events are very different from ordinary novae. They claimed that after the turbulent collapse of a massive star, the residue of which would be an extremely compact neutron star, there would still be a large amount of energy left over. We now know that when a big star explodes as a supernova it can briefly shine brighter than an entire galaxy containing tens or even hundreds of billions of stars. Zwicky and Baade suggested the possible existence of neutron stars in 1933, just a year after the neutron itself had been detected as a particle.
Many astronomers accepted supernovas, but were skeptical of the existence of neutron stars. These objects were first observed in the 1960s, following the development of non-optical astronomy. In 1967 the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the radio astronomer Antony Hewish at Cambridge University in England discovered the first pulsar, tiny, rapidly pulsating radio sources that turned out to be neutron stars with very powerful magnetic fields that sweep around many times per second as they rotate, making them appear as cosmic lighthouses. Hewish won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, although his graduate student Bell made the initial discovery. He shared the Nobel Prize with the English radio astronomer Martin Ryle.
Fritz Zwicky in 1933 stumbled upon observations indicating that there is more matter out there than what is visible to us and that this affects the behavior of galaxies. In the 1970s the American astrophysicist Jerry Ostriker along with James Peebles also discovered that the visible mass of a galaxy is not sufficient to keep it together. Vera Rubin soon after became a leading authority on the rotation of galaxies. Her calculations based on empirical evidence showed that galaxies must contain ten times as much mass as can be accounted for by visible stars. She realized that she had discovered evidence for Zwicky’s proposed “dark matter.” Vera Rubin is an observant Jew who sees no inherent conflict between science and religion.
The author Murray indicates that the number of women in his rankings can be increased if you relax the criteria for inclusion, but doing the same for men will dramatically increase the number of European men who might be included as well. At the end of the day, the smaller percentage of women in great human accomplishment cannot be changed to any great extent.
Excluded categories are educators who taught science, translators, pioneers (the first to get a degree in a given field etc.), amateurs who collected data that were used by scientists, activists in women’s rights and social reform, plus the wives, sisters and children of famous male scientist who had some involvement in the work of their husbands, brothers or fathers.
Examples of the latter would be Sarah Banks, Giuseppa Barbapiccola, Sophia Brahe or Mary Buckland. Finally, there are the women who did make some direct personal contributions within the confines of the scientific categories listed by Murray, but who were not substantial enough to make it to the inventory, for instance Mary Anning or Elizabeth Gertrude Britton.
Women support the daily social lives of their men, be that their sons or their husbands and fathers. Viewed from that angle, women are tremendously important for virtually all men, regardless of what they accomplish in life. Perhaps women don’t always receive the proper appreciation and recognition for that. Many great men have stated quite sincerely that they could never have achieved what they did without the loyalty and continuous support of their wives, and they have often been right. Unfair as this may be, here we track direct individual contributions to human accomplishment, not indirect ones, no matter how big they might be.
This leaves room for certain borderline categories. For instance, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, the young wife of Antoine Lavoisier, acted as the laboratory assistant of her chemist spouse and by so doing contributed to his work. She was also depicted as such by the French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1788. Emily Warren Roebling helped guide the construction of Brooklyn Bridge in New York City (1869-83) throughout the illness of its chief engineer, her husband. Both of these women, partly out of personal devotion to their husbands, made honorable contributions. Should they be credited independently? The question is debatable.
The English-born archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey worked very closely with her husband Louis Leakey in East Africa, uncovering fossils or traces of ancient hominids and by extension of human evolution. In her particular case, she made independent discoveries that were sometimes attributed to her husband. I think it would be fair to treat them as a pair of gifted and devoted scientists of which he was simply the most brilliant.
There are also a few documented cases of women who initially acted as research assistant to talented male family members, but later emerged as scientists in their own right. One of the most famous examples is Caroline Herschel. She started out in a manner similar to Mrs. Lavoisier in that she actively aided her exceptionally gifted older brother William Herschel in his astronomical work. Their story is portrayed in Richard Holmes’ book The Age of Wonder.
Unlike the wife of Lavoisier, though, Caroline Herschel eventually emerged as a scholar in her own right. She was given a telescope by her brother, who was an excellent maker of such devices, and proceeded to discover several comets entirely by herself between 1786 and 1797. Along with William she was granted an annual salary by King George III for their work. She could with some justification be called the first professional woman astronomer in history.
As I stated above, the distinction is tricky when it comes to women supporting their men’s work. All in all, however, I agree with Charles Murray’s conclusion in crediting mainly direct personal contributions, and therefore listing Caroline Herschel but not the wife of Lavoisier.
The author notes that women, contrary to what might have been expected, actually won a slightly smaller percentage (3% as opposed to 4%) of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Medicine, Physics or Literature from 1951-2000 than they did from 1901-1950. The Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded only since 1969. Despite the fact that many more women had higher education by the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning of it, their percentage at the very highest level of scientific achievement was still relatively small.
Larry Summers, President of the prestigious Harvard University in the USA, was forced to resign partly because of a 2005 speech where he suggested that women’s under-representation in the top levels of academia is due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” He dared to suggest that innate differences between men and women could explain why men hold more seats as top scientists than women do. This was deemed unacceptable in a society where differences between the sexes are said to be caused by “socially constructed” gender roles.
Yet according to Dr Paul Irwing at Manchester University, there are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, and a staggering 30 times as many with a genius-level IQ of 170-plus. Other studies have been made indicating a roughly similar, highly disproportionate number of men among individuals with unusually high intelligence.
Generally speaking, men are more “extreme” than women, for better or worse. It is for instance also true that most violent criminals are, always have been men and probably always will be men, and that there are powerful biological and as well as cultural reasons for this. Men are more restless than women. I personally never use the term “stronger” or “weaker” sex. This is not due to fear of social censorship, but simply because I honestly find the term factually incorrect and inappropriate. Women are not weak, nor are men always strong.
If anything, I would call men the restless sex. That would capture much of the good, plus some of the bad, that men do. Male energy is the driving force behind any dynamic culture. It is undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the scientific and technological progress that has made life more materially comfortable and lifted mankind to space was created by men. It is also undeniable that there is a potential for violent destructiveness inherent in human beings in general, but in men in particular. The key to success for any culture is to tap as much as possible into male creative dynamism while at the same time keeping it destructive potential under control. The battle between these two powerful forces has shaped all of human history.
According to Annica Dahlström, a Swedish expert in neuroscience, men are found more frequently than women at the extremes of both high and low intelligence, which is reflected in their socio-economic level. More men than women are multimillionaires, but more are also homeless, imprisoned or otherwise social losers. Men are more frequently killed or injured from dangerous work. Most traditional cultures usually try to put women out of harms way.
Female geniuses exist, but they are much less frequent than male ones. Dahlström says that “The difference between boys and girls, in terms of their biology and brain, is greater than we could ever have imagined.” We can now scan and follow human brain activity in real time. Differences between the sexes are clearly recognizable already at the young age of three, if not before. The centers of the brain dealing with verbal communication, interpretation of facial expressions and body language are more developed in girls even at this early stage. “Female intuition” exists if by that we mean to say that the average woman can sometimes pick up minor details from a conversation that the average man may not have noticed. Forcing boys to behave like girls are vice versa is unnatural and will inevitably hurt them. Such a policy could be viewed as “mental abuse” of children in Professor Dahlström’s view.
Personally, all cultures that I know of state that human beings were created as two distinct sexes, men and women. I have never heard of a single religious tradition anywhere claiming that we were created as a gender neutral entity with a socially constructed penis or vagina.
From the point of evolutionary biology, men and women have had different social functions for so many thousands of years that it would be very strange if this didn’t have a practical effect on the evolution of how the male and female brains are structured and work, which is precisely what modern brain research indicates. The bottom line is that whether from a religious or a non-religious perspective, absolute “gender equality” doesn’t make any sense.
That doesn’t at all mean that we should accept the sometimes very brutal treatment of women found in many cultures, which in some cases is a well-documented fact, not a Marxist myth. But it does mean that we have to deal rationally with the reality of biological inequality.
Women have played a minor part in the history of the arts and sciences. As of 2010, all winners of the Fields Medal have been men. The same goes for other mathematical awards such as the Abel Prize. The question is whether social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this fact or whether sex-specific characteristics are at work as well.
Girls earn better grades in mathematics than boys, but boys usually do better on standardized tests. The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In test scores, the male advantage is most pronounced in the most abstract items. In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy. So far, no woman has ever been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.
According to Murray, “In the sciences, the most abstract field is mathematics, where the number of great women mathematicians is approximately two (Emmy Noether definitely, Sonya Kovalevskaya maybe). In the other hard sciences, the contributions of great women scientists have usually been empirical rather than theoretical, with leading cases in point being Henrietta Leavitt, Dorothy Hodgkin, Lise Meitner, Irene Joliot-Curie, and Marie Curie herself. In the arts, literature is the least abstract and by far the most rooted in human interaction; visual art incorporates a greater admixture of the abstract; musical composition is the most abstract of all the arts, using neither words nor images. The role of women has varied accordingly. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning of literature, in East Asia and South Asia as well as in the West. Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank. No female composer is even close to the first rank. Social restrictions undoubtedly damped down women’s contributions in all of the arts, but the pattern of accomplishment that did break through is strikingly consistent with what we know about the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires.”
Men take more risks, and are also more competitive and are more aggressive than women. Turning to race, we must begin with the fraught question of whether it even exists, or whether it is instead a social construct. The Jewish biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould in the USA promoted the idea that race is “social constructed” from the 1970s onward, and the idea can be traced further back to such individuals as the highly influential Franz Boas, an anthropologist in the USA born to a family of non-practicing German Jews. Gould has later been accused of deliberately tampering with the data to support his view that there are no significant differences between ethnic groups. Murray calls this the Inequality Taboo:
“Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences. The taboo is not perfect–otherwise, I would not have been able to document this essay–but it is powerful. Witness how few of Harvard’s faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair….The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences.”
I showed my proposed top twenty list of women scientists to several persons with above average education, and none of them were able to recognize the majority of the names that I had suggested, exceptions being famous ones such as Marie Curie or Florence Nightingale. If we make a list in 2011 over the 100 most important and influential scientists in world history, Marie Curie is the only woman who might, objectively speaking, be included among them. Nobody else comes close to her level, a full century after Curie got her second Nobel Prize.
Out of the different categories of human accomplishment, women clearly have the strongest minority presence in literature. No surprise there. It is a minority presence there as well, though; the greatest writers have disproportionately been men. Literature implies verbal skills, psychological insight and talent for observing people and their relationships, all traditional feminine virtues. Women’s presence is modest, but not necessarily insignificant, in some of the sciences that require observational skills and patience, but it is very tiny and close to zero in disciplines such as mathematics, theoretical physics and philosophy. Generally speaking, the more logic is needed in a particular field, the fewer women you are likely to find there.
At the highest level of accomplishment, the differences between men and women are so large that they have to be partly caused by differences in extreme ability, not merely restrictions or social discrimination. After a great revolution where women now numerically dominate many universities, at least in the social sciences (not the hard sciences), Marie Curie still reigns supreme among women scientists, and she was never close to the level of Newton or Einstein.
Not only is science overwhelmingly created by men; it is usually created by relatively young men. The most extreme example of this would be mathematics. Many of the famous (male) mathematicians showed great aptitude already as a child. If a person has not demonstrated unusual mathematical abilities before the age of 30, it is very unlikely that he possesses such abilities at all. In literature and the visual arts, skills and wisdom can mature with age. It is not unusual for artists to make some of their best work late in life. This is not totally unheard of in the sciences, either, but it is less common there. One could almost claim that having too much experience can be an obstacle because you get mentally stuck in traditional ways of thinking.
“It is important to foster individuality,” Albert Einstein stated, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.” “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth,” he once lamented to a friend after finishing his work on general relativity and cosmology. “Later one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more blockheaded.” Great emphasis is placed on nonconformity in the biography about him written by Walter Isaacson. Einstein’s fundamental creed was that freedom is the lifeblood of creativity. “The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit,” he said, “requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.”
The English scholar Edmund Halley is most famous as a mathematical astronomer and for being the first person to calculate the orbit of a comet, the one later named after him. Yet he was also a talented geophysicist and meteorologist who found the time to participate in non-astronomical activities, too, created an improved diving bell, studied magnetic variation and served as a sea captain. He enhanced our understanding of trade winds, tides and navigation and even contributed to medicine and medical statistics by publishing mortality tables. Halley was clearly an unusually clever and prolific man. We still remember his name centuries later. He is also noted for his role in the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia and was in awe of Newton’s intellect. He allegedly stated that “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.”
Murray Gell-Mann, an Ashkenazi Jew from the USA, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on “quarks” and other elementary particles. Quarks are permanently trapped inside other particles like neutrons and protons under normal physical conditions. Gell-Mann worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago and debated passionately with renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman during his many years at Caltech.
Gell-Mann doesn’t put people on pedestals very much. Paul Dirac “was a remarkably eccentric person.” Feynman “was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations – every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank. He was talking a lot of nonsense.”
Critical words about some of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century. Does Gell-Mann believe there is such a thing as geniuses at all? “Einstein was very special – I mean, creating that theory, general relativity [which describes gravity as a product of the geometry of space and time]. To do it today or to do it 34 years ago would be striking, remarkable, an utterly remarkable achievement. But to do it when he did, in 1915, that’s just unbelievable.”
Edmund Halley was an unusually accomplished man who knew some of the leading scholars of his day, but he nevertheless considered Newton to be very special. Murray Gell-Mann won prestigious international awards and personally knew some of the most famous scientists of his age, yet he still thought that Einstein was “very special.” What we can deduce from these examples is that Newton and Einstein belonged to a very rare and extremely tiny group of people. Perhaps we can call them super-geniuses, individuals who are so intelligent that they appear as geniuses even to those who are themselves considered geniuses by regular people.
More than two hundred years passed between the birth of Isaac Newton and that of Albert Einstein. We cannot predict where the next super-genius à la these men will be born. It could be a European, especially a northern European like Newton, or it could be an Ashkenazi Jew like Einstein. Based on historical experience, those would be the two most likely groups. Asians have not produced many individuals of that stature before, but that might change in the future. Theoretically speaking, the next Newton could come from East Asia, or, less likely but not unthinkable, from India or another Asian nation. What we can say is that the next Newton or Einstein is overwhelmingly likely to be a man. Individuals with such an exceptionally high level of intelligence are rare among men, but they are practically non-existent among women.
The Flaws of Edward Said’s Orientalism
Salah al-Din or Saladin (ca. 1138-1193), the general loved by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned in Western history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to recall that his son and heir Al-Aziz Uthman tried to demolish the world-famous pyramids at Giza outside of Cairo, Egypt, just three years after his father’s death. The only reason why we can still visit them is because the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt. They were hard to build, and hard to destroy. The Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three major ones at Giza, was nevertheless visibly damaged on one side.
This detail is almost always left out when apologists write about how tolerant and enlightened Muslims supposedly were compared to the primitive Europeans. This attempted destruction was not carried out by Saladin himself, but it would not be unreasonable to mention when writing about him that his devout Muslim son did this shortly after he died. There are also indications that a process of pillaging ancient monuments had begun during Saladin’s reign.
Mark Lehner is an American archaeologist with decades of experience excavating in Egypt. He is widely considered to be one of the foremost living experts on the Giza Pyramids, having devoted his life to studying them, and has appeared on numerous television documentaries. Here is what Lehner says in his book The Complete Pyramids [1997, hardback], page 41:
“Abd al-Latif reports the destruction of a number of small pyramids by the Emir Karakoush during Saladin’s reign (AD 1138-93). It must have been Karakoush who removed the satellite pyramid south of Khafre’s pyramid, and who began dismantling Khufu’s subsidiary pyramids. Other stones, probably from the two larger pyramids, were used for walls in the growing city of Cairo. The plunder of casing stone from the Great Pyramid continued during succeeding generations until the outer mantle was finally stripped bare. Abd al-Latif also enthused about the Sphinx, already known by its modern Arabic name, Abu Hol, ‘Father of Terror’. He described its handsome face, ‘covered with a reddish tint, and a red varnish as bright as if freshly painted’. He specifically mentions the nose, which leads us to think that it was still intact, contrary to indications that it may have been missing as early as the 10th century. It is certain that someone removed it before the early 15th century when another Arab historian, al-Maqrizi, wrote about it. The nose was long gone, at any rate, by the time Napoleon visited Giza in 1798, although he is often blamed for its removal.”
A photo on page 41 of Lehner’s book shows damage done to the Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three large pyramids on the Giza Plateau. While it still stands, scars from the attempted destruction are still clearly visible to visitors today. Mark Lehner states that “In AD 1196, Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf, son of Saladin, mounted a concerted attack on the pyramid of Menkaure to dismantle it and remove its stone. Eight months’ work merely damaged the pyramid’s northern face. Such enormous – and unsuccessful – efforts increase our admiration for the skill of the ancient builders in creating such durable monuments.”
The great Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were demolished by the Taliban regime in 2001, who decreed that they would destroy images deemed “offensive to Islam.” The Taliban Information Minister complained that “The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can’t knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain.” The statues, 53 meters and 36 meters tall, the tallest standing Buddha statues in the world, turned out to be so hard to destroy that the Taliban needed help from Pakistani and Saudi Arabian engineers to finish the job. After almost a month of non-stop bombardment with dynamite and artillery, they succeeded.
Judging from the experiences with the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is tempting to conclude that the main reason why the pyramids of Egypt have survived to this day is because they were so big that it proved too complicated, costly and time-consuming for Muslims to destroy them. Had Saladin’s son Al-Aziz had modern technology and engineers at his disposal, they might well have ended up just like countless Hindu temples in India or Buddhist statues in Central Asia.
Human Accomplishment: Technology
In the technology ranking of Human Accomplishment, the instrument maker and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736-1819) of Scotland and the prolific inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) of the USA, who created an early research laboratory, are tied for the maximum score of 100. There is a large gap from them down to Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who is then followed by Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) from the Netherlands, one of the greatest polymaths in all history; Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 290-212 BC); the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937); the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – Vitruvius – from the first century BC, author of the celebrated multivolume work De Architectura (“On Architecture”); John Smeaton (1724-1792), a great civil engineer from Leeds, England and a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham; the English inventor and steel manufacturer Henry Bessemer (1813-1898); and Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729), an English ironmonger and creator of the atmospheric steam engine, the first version engine that did a useful work.
After them follows Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the English inventor of the mechanical computer; the innovative German-born inventor and engineer Carl Wilhelm Siemens (1823-1883), whose brother Werner von Siemens (1816-1892) founded the telecommunications company Siemens in Berlin in 1847; the dynamic English industrialist and ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728-1808); Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), the prolific scholar, writer, publisher, diplomat and statesman from North America who also invented the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses and the Franklin stove; the English physicist and inventor Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875); the industrial chemist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) from Sweden, who invented dynamite and used his wealth to found and fund the famous Nobel Prizes; the great English naturalist and electrical engineer Michael Faraday (1791-1867); Denis Papin (1647-1712), the French-born engineer who invented the steam digester and the pressure cooker in 1679, major stepping-stones in the evolution of the steam engine; the English civil engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848), who together with his son Robert built the world’s first inter-city public railway line employing steam locomotives between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830; and finally the American painter Samuel Morse (1791-1872), one of the main creators of the electric telegraph and co-inventor of Morse code.
Names such as Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, Jean Lenoir, Nikolaus Otto and Rudolf Diesel are listed for their contributions to the development of internal combustion engines and cars, the English entrepreneur Richard Arkwright for aiding the development of a modern factory system during the Industrial Revolution, and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox Talbot, George Eastman and others for the creation of photography. But why is a first-rate scientific instrument maker like Jesse Ramsden not mentioned at all?
The Montgolfier Brothers from France in the late 1700s with balloons and the Wright Brothers from the USA in the early 1900s with airplanes are credit for manned human flight. Robert H. Goddard of the USA gets a high ranking for pioneering liquid-fueled rocketry during the 1920s, which is richly deserved. The rocket engineers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergey Korolyov from the Russian Empire/the Soviet Union are briefly mentioned, but not Hermann Oberth or Wernher von Braun, despite the fact that von Braun’s work on very large and sophisticated rockets in Germany and eventually the USA had begun well before 1950.
A few other notable names in technology include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicolas Appert, Edwin Howard Armstrong, Leo Baekeland, Alexander Graham Bell, the Biro Brothers, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, Carl Bosch (but oddly enough not Fritz Haber), Matthew Boulton, Isambard Brunel, George Cayley, Claude Chappe, Samuel Colt, Ctesibius of Alexandria, Abraham Darby, Abraham Darby III, Humphry Davy, Lee De Forest, Cornelius Drebbel, John Boyd Dunlop, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, John Ericsson, Oliver Evans, Reginald Fessenden, John Ambrose Fleming, Henry Ford, Robert Fulton, Galileo Galilei, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Henri Giffard, Charles Goodyear, Zénobe Gramme, John Harrison, Joseph Henry, Hero of Alexandria, Jonathan Hornblower, Robert Hooke, David E. Hughes, John Wesley Hyatt, Joseph Marie Jacquard, John Kay, William Kelly, Edwin Herbert Land, Gustav de Laval, John Bennet Lawes, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Otto Lilienthal, the Lumière Brothers, John L. McAdam, Ottmar Mergenthaler, Thomas Midgley, William Murdoch, Alexander Parkes, Charles A. Parsons, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Popov, Valdemar Poulsen, John Roebuck, René A. F. de Réaumur, Thomas Savery, Marc Seguin, Alois Senefelder, Joseph Swan, Nikola Tesla, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Richard Trevithick, Jethro Tull, Jacques de Vaucanson, Felix Wankel, Robert Watson-Watt, Wilhelm Weber, Josiah Wedgwood, George Westinghouse, Eli Whitney, Ferdinand von Zeppelin and finally Vladimir K. Zworykin.
Once again, several individuals mentioned among central events in technology early in the book are left out from the final rankings. Murray writes about the evolution of batteries in the 1800s with figures such as Alessandro Volta, John Frederic Daniell, William Robert Grove, Gaston Planté and Georges Leclanché, but the first three are not listed in the index. Volta’s prototype was revolutionary and might have brought him near the top twenty in technology.
Frank Whittle of the British Royal Air Force and Hans von Ohain from Germany are correctly credited with independently inventing the jet engine in the 1930s, yet Ohain isn’t ranked. The Ukrainian-born American aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky and Henrich Focke in Germany had independently created practical helicopters by 1936, following up earlier advances made by the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva with his autogyro a few years before, yet Focke is not credited in the index. Finally, I cannot see the Romanian inventor and aerodynamics pioneer Henri Coandă mentioned by name anywhere in the book, which he perhaps deserves to be.
It is mentioned in the book that the French naval officer, explorer and prizewinning filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau, an ambassador for the European spirit of curiosity, exploration and innovation at its very finest, invented the aqualung together with Émile Gagnan in 1943 and donned the first autonomous diving gear, yet Mr. Cousteau is not rated in the technology index. This proved a decisive turning point in the centuries-long evolution toward what we now call scuba diving, an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
Freediving, that is, swimming underwater simply by holding your breath, has been done for thousands of years by pearl divers and sponge divers. Both Eastern and Western peoples made experiments with what can be dubbed primitive diving bells, but these had serious limitations. Experimentation finally accelerated in Europe and the West from the late 1500s to the 1900s, aided by new science and technology such as air pumps and later high-pressure air and gas cylinders for compressed air breathing sets. Diving helmets appeared in the 1800s. The great breakthrough came in the 1900s, and submarines were first extensively used in World War I.
The inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard from Basel, Switzerland, who served for years as a professor of physics in Brussels, designed the bathyscaphe or “deep boat” Trieste, with which his son Jacques was soon to explore the deepest reaches of the oceans. Jacques Piccard together with Don Walsh from the USA in 1960 used Trieste to travel 10,911 meters down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The pressure there was well over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, yet amazingly Piccard and Walsh spotted several flatfish living under these extreme conditions.
The mountaineer Edmund Hillary, born in Auckland, New Zealand to a family of British descent, together with Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, in 1953 became the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. By the mid-twentieth century Europeans had, as the first civilization in all of human history, explored and mapped every single corner of the Earth: from Antarctica via Australia to the interiors of Africa, from the North Pole to the South Pole and from the highest mountain peaks to the ocean floor. European man was now ready to leave our planet and start exploring space, which he also did.
For every individual who is credit with a particular breakthrough, you could often potentially list a handful of others who contributed to this development or made it independently at nearly the same time but who didn’t become equally famous. For example, most people have heard of Alexander Graham Bell from Edinburgh, Scotland as the “inventor of the telephone.” Fewer know about the US electrical engineer Elisha Gray, who submitted his application for a patent of a telephone just two hours later than Bell did in 1876. Still, the persons who are listed here do generally deserve much, if not necessarily all, of the credit for these inventions.
Moreover, since most scientific breakthroughs or technological innovations in the modern world were made by Europeans, those who almost made the same breakthroughs were usually also individuals of European descent. Including them would not affect the overall balance.
James Clerk Maxwell’s equations from the 1860s and 70s predicted the existence of radio waves. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz experimentally verified and demonstrated the reality of radio waves in 1887, but he died young. Marconi was an important and influential pioneer in the evolution of radio or “wireless telegraphy,” yet he wasn’t the only one.
Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest from the Balkans, made many contributions to the development of radio and electromagnetic research. He constructed an induction motor using alternating current in 1883 and immigrated to the USA from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1884. He began working for Thomas Edison’s company but switched to that of the US entrepreneur George Westinghouse. The alternating current (AC) preferred by them eventually prevailed over Edison’s direct current (DC) system, which flows continuously in one direction. AC typically changes direction 50 or 60 times per second.
Leonardo da Vinci has received a very high ranking in the technology index although rather few of his devices were actually built and used during his lifetime. Among those ranked below the top twenty in this discipline is Johannes Gutenberg. I find this a bit odd, given that his printing press before 1450 was arguably one of the most important inventions in all of European history. Frankly, some Western historians would want to place him at the very top of the technology index for the revolutionary impact his invention had on European societies.
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in The Coming of the Book estimate that at least “150-200 million copies were published in the 16th century.” This constituted an enormous change compared to the cumbersome process of scribes manually copying each individual book by hand. One could claim that “The invention of printing from movable type may have been the most important contribution to the advance of civilization made in the second millennium. The transition from hand-copied documents to printed documents was far more revolutionary than the transition from the typewriter to the computer.” David Crowley and Paul Heyer agree in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society: “Although we hesitate to argue for historical ‘prime-movers,’ certainly the printing press comes close to what is meant by this term. It was a technology that influenced other technologies – a prototype for mass production – and one that impacted directly on the world of ideas by making knowledge widely available, thereby creating a space in which new forms of expression could flourish.”
Gutenberg created his mechanical printing press in Mainz, Germany around 1440. His most celebrated work was the Forty-two-Line Bible, completed in 1455 at the latest. Gutenberg himself did not become rich by his invention, but it spread remarkably fast throughout the urban centers of Europe and triggered a veritable explosion in the number of books available at much lower prices than before. One unresolved question is just how much he knew about the printing traditions of China. It is conceivable that European traders had heard of the very concept of printed books in East Asia. We know that paper, a necessary component of the printing trade, was introduced to Europe from China via the Middle East. The traditional material – parchment – was expensive and not well suited for mass production. With the introduction of printing in the late 1400s, “Europe was becoming covered with paper mills.”
Parchment, processed skins of certain animals – especially sheep, goats and calves – prepared for the purpose of writing on them, was itself an innovation of the Roman era, then supplanting the rolled manuscript by the bound book (codex). It was intended as a supplement to the limited supply of Egyptian papyrus, from which our modern name “paper” is derived.
Charles Murray includes Bi Sheng as inventor of the first movable type printing technology in China just after the year 1040, plus the Chinese state bureaucrat Cai Lun for standardizing the papermaking process around AD 100, yet both of these men appear only as minor figures.
In Michael H. Hart’s popular book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History from 1978, Cai Lun was ranked 7 and Gutenberg 8. Just to put things in perspective, the other figures in the top ten were Muhammad ibn Abdullah, Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Saint Paul, Christopher Columbus and Albert Einstein. Cai Lun was also listed ahead of figures like Louis Pasteur, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Euclid, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Moses, Qin Shi Huang (China’s First Emperor), Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar and the first pro-Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great.
Frankly, I find this a bit excessive. Even if you believe that Lun created paper or standardized its manufacture (many scholars believe that paper was invented earlier in the Han period), it looks strange to rank him above Qin Shi Huang, the brutal ruler who became the First Emperor of a unified China in 221 BC and now rests in an enormous mausoleum guarded by a life-size Terracotta army near Xi’an. After all, the latter created a vast state that has endured for more than two thousand years. Nevertheless, I don’t think Murray’s lists properly reflect the tremendous historical importance of printed paper books for the progress of science.
The Antikythera Mechanism is a surprisingly sophisticated Greek mechanical calculator from ca. 100 BC, maybe used to track dates of the Ancient Olympic Games. Other devices such as the abacus have been used to aid computation for centuries. The German polymath Wilhelm Schickard built a calculating machine in 1623, but both the machine and its designer perished in the Thirty Years War. Schickard is not mentioned by Murray. Other machines by Blaise Pascal (1642) and Gottfried Leibniz (1671) followed but were not used to the extent that was hoped, partly because they provided little advantage in speed. Leibniz in 1679 realized that two digits – 1 and 0, or on and off in an electronic language – were all that were needed for a positional number system. This binary numeral system is now used in virtually all computers.
In the 1620s the English mathematicians Edmund Gunter and especially William Oughtred invented the slide rule, inspired by the logarithms introduced by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. Before electronic calculators and computers became widely available in the late twentieth century, tables of logarithms were commonly used in science and engineering. With slide rules, engineers could multiply, divide, find square roots and more in a few seconds. As writer Cliff Stoll reminds us, “Consider the engineering achievements that owe their existence to rubbing two sticks together: the Empire State Building; the Hoover Dam; the curves of the Golden Gate Bridge; hydrodynamic automobile transmissions, transistor radios; the Boeing 707 airliner.” The Apollo astronauts as late as the early 1970s kept slide rules as backups for their electronic calculators on their journeys to the Moon.
The English engineer Charles Babbage is rightfully named in Human Accomplishment as the inventor of the mechanical computer. The Jacquard system was developed in 1804-05 by the French silk weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard from Lyon. His punched-card idea was adopted by Babbage to control his Analytical Engine. John Mauchly, Vannevar Bush, George Stibitz and John von Neumann are credited for the development of the electronic computer, but not Konrad Zuse. John Vincent Atanasoff, son of a Bulgarian immigrant to the USA, is listed under physics. Also listed is Howard Aiken, plus Herman Hollerith for inventing the first workable electromechanical calculator in the late 1800s, which was used for the US census.
The gifted English mathematician and logician George Boole in the mid-1800s began the algebra of logic called which now finds application in computer construction. The American electronics engineer Claude Shannon in 1948 was the first person to grasp how Boolean algebra could be used to great advantage in the relay circuitry found in telephone routing switches, thus “laying the groundwork for the modern computer and other electronic devices.”
The English computer theorist Alan Turing in 1950 published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he studied problems which still lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. He proposed the Turing Test, which is applied in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent. In a landmark paper from 1936 he proved that Turing machines (abstract symbol-manipulating devices) would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem that is represented as an algorithm. He was involved during WW2 in breaking the codes used by Nazi Germany with their Enigma code machine, but in this he was aided by other cryptologists such as Marian Rejewski from Poland. While Turing is highlighted in the book text, he is strangely left out of the indexes for both mathematics and technology in HA.
The American physicists Walter Houser Brattain and John Bardeen together with the English-born engineer William Shockley in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor, the semiconductor underlying virtually all modern electronic devices. The transistor opened up great possibilities for the miniaturization and improvement of electronics. Though electrically similar to a vacuum tube, it was much smaller and more reliable. Many historians rank the transistor as one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. In 1958 and 1959 the engineers Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce in the USA independently developed the integrated circuit or microchip, a system of interconnected transistors where several could be made at the same time on the same piece of semiconductor.
The final decades of the twentieth century became known as the Digital Revolution or the Age of the Microchip. The introduction of small personal computers (PCs) into private homes from the 1980s onward was a revolution, and electronic computers greatly affected all the sciences by making possible calculations that were far too complex or time-consuming to be done by humans. The World Wide Web was created by the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee together with his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau at CERN in Western Europe in 1990. While the Internet itself dates back to the 1960s and 70s, partly due to military efforts in the USA during the Cold War, the WWW or “Web” in the 1990s turned the Internet into a true mass medium, connecting literally billions of people worldwide in less than 20 years.
Since I am Norwegian I was curious to see which individuals from my country were included in Murray’s book. Vilhelm Bjerknes is credited in the Earth sciences as a founder of modern weather forecasting. In mathematics, Niels Henrik Abel is the highest-ranking individual from the Nordic countries ahead of number two, Marius Sophus Lie. This is accurate in my view.
The painter and printmaker Edvard Munch is the highest-ranking Scandinavian person in Western art. Munch’s The Scream (“Skrik”) from 1893 is one of the most easily recognizable paintings in European art, and therefore sometimes used or misused for modern commercials.
Many European artists in the nineteenth century, especially those who did not have an independent nation state, took inspiration from the national traditions or folklore of their people. This would include Má vlast (“My Country”), the symphonic poems composed in the 1870s by the Czech composer Smetana. With the composer Edvard Grieg from Bergen, Norway, an ethnic character emerges most clearly in his songs based on Norwegian texts, especially his fine Peer Gynt Suites (1875), a successful marriage between music and text written to a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. He is the highest-ranking person from the Nordic countries under Western literature, substantially ahead of such Nobel Prize winners as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset. Peer Gynt is a rich drama in rhymed couplets. It was Ibsen’s last play to employ verse, and surprisingly joyful and creative for a man who earned himself a reputation for being a very serious radical thinker.
Murray did not rank explorers, of which there are many Europeans, for example Marco Polo, John Cabot, Bartolomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Willem Barentsz, Pedro Páez, Henry Hudson, Abel Tasman, Vitus Bering, James Cook, Joseph Banks, Alexander MacKenzie, Alexander von Humboldt, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, John Ross, James Clark Ross, William Edward Parry, David Livingstone, Richard Burton, Ernest Shackleton and Karl Weyprecht.
If he did, a few of them might have been from Norway, such as Fridtjof Nansen and above all Roald Amundsen. Amundsen in 1911 led the first expedition in history to reach the South Pole. His team also made it back alive, in contrast to the rivaling British team led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen later became the first person to reach both the North and South Poles. Leiv Eiriksson, who reached North America (Vinland) around AD 1000, was born on Iceland and brought up on the Norse colony on Greenland founded by his Norwegian father.
If I could add somebody else it would have to be the physicist Kristian Birkeland, whose geomagnetic research was generations ahead of its time. In the early 1900s he gave a correct explanation for auroras (polar lights), backed by careful experiments. A popular book on his life has been published by journalist Lucy Jago. Writers Alv Egeland and William J. Burke state in a biography of him that “He introduced basic concepts that are central to modern space physics.” He even contributed to the production of fertilizers with the Birkeland-Eyde process of fixing nitrogen from the air. Sydney Chapman is briefly mentioned in Human Accomplishment among minor names in astronomy, as is Anders Celsius, whereas Hannes Alfvén receives a low ranking in physics. Kristian Birkeland might have received a similar, modest ranking in either Earth sciences or physics, or perhaps more plausibly in astronomy.
One missing name is mathematician Atle Selberg, who was inspired by the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan from Tamil Nadu in India and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950. Selberg collaborated with the famously eccentric Hungarian-born Jew Paul Erdős, who was probably the most prolific mathematician in history measured in the number of papers; Euler is the record holder in the number of published pages. I cannot see Paul Erdős on these lists, either. He did most of his work after 1950, but he started before this and could have been mentioned.
Other potential candidates from Norway working before 1950 might be Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, a physician remembered for identifying the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 as the causative agent of leprosy, or perhaps Lars Onsager, a physical chemist from Kristiania (Oslo) who in 1968 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of a general theory of irreversible chemical processes, but they are less important than Birkeland.
All things considered and with the possible exception of the omission of Kristian Birkeland, Charles Murray’s rankings of personalities from my own country are largely correct in my view, which is yet another indication that he did a good job when preparing these indexes.
Human Accomplishment: Medicine and the Earth Sciences
The leading names in medicine are as follows: Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) of France; Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 460-375 BC);Robert Koch (1843-1910) of Germany (Prussia); Galen of Pergamum (ca. AD 129-200); Paracelsus (1493-1541) of Switzerland;Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) of Germany; René Laennec (1781-1826) of France; Elmer McCollum (1879-1967) of the USA; Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) of Scotland; Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) of France; Emil von Behring (1854-1917) of Germany;Joseph Lister (1827-1912) of England; Kitasato Shibasaburo (1853-1931) of Japan; Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) of England; the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564); Gerhard Domagk (1895-1964) of Germany; Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) of France; Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) of Austria; John Hunter (1728-1793) of Scotland; and finally Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) of Hungary.
Hunter and Semmelweis each have a score of 33, the same as Girolamo Fracastoro received. Hippocrates and Galen were founders of Western medicine as a profession although wrong in most of their medical pronouncements. Robert Koch, while less famous, was second only to Pasteur in establishing the germ theory of disease, the greatest revolution in medical history.
Just behind them follow the influential Greco-Roman pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides and the English immunologist Edward Jenner at 32 out of 100. Jenner’s work in the 1790s as the discoverer of vaccination for smallpox was so important that he deserves to be mentioned among the top twenty at least as much as Freud, although Freud here was ranked for purely medical contributions and the clinical description of mental illnesses, not for psychoanalysis.
Some other notable names in medicine are Thomas Addison, Leopold Auenbrugger, Thomas Beddoes, Claude Bernard, Herman Boerhaave, Daniel Bovet, Josef Breuer, Richard Bright, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Joseph Caventou and Pierre Joseph Pelletier, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Jean-Martin Charcot, Harvey Cushing, Pierre Fauchard, Werner Forssmann, William Halsted, Sahachiro Hata, Friedrich Henle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edwin Klebs, Friedrich Loeffler, Richard Lower, Patrick Manson, Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Philippe Pinel, Walter Reed, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes), Howard Taylor Ricketts, Ronald Ross, Pierre Roux, Santorio Santorio and Thomas Clifford Allbutt, John Snow, Max Theiler, Rudolf Virchow, Selman Waksman, Thomas Willis and William Withering.
Alexandre Yersin was a Swiss-born French physician and bacteriologist and one of the discoverers of the plague bacillus believed to have caused the Black Death in Eurasia in the 1300s, now called Yersinia pestis in his honor. He is given the lowest possible rating of 1 out of 100 in biology and is not mentioned at all in medicine, although the Japanese co-discoverer Kitasato Shibasaburo receives a very high ranking. This represents a rather strange omission.
The eminent British historian of medicine Roy Porter, author of the book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, explains that “The idea of probing into bodies, living and dead (and especially human bodies) with a view to improving medicine is more or less distinctive to the European medical tradition. For reasons technical, cultural, religious and personal, it was not done in China or India, Mesopotamia or pharaonic Egypt.”
After the Italian Renaissance period, the knowledge of human anatomy greatly improved in Europe, and only there, partly thanks to medical institutes at the rapidly expanding network of universities, where dissections of human corpses were sometimes performed to train students.
The Brussels-born physician Andreas Vesalius performed dissection demonstrations himself, thereby raising the status of surgery, which had previously been regarded as inferior medical practice. He employed artists to make illustrations for his On the Fabric of the Human Body from 1543. Science historian Toby E. Huff claims that Vesalius corrected many errors in Galen’s account of human anatomy and that the “illustrations are far superior to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the Chinese and (I presume) the Indian one.”
The use of systematic dissections for scientific purposes led to great advances. Nevertheless, until the late nineteenth century, Europeans did not necessarily have a better understanding of what actually caused diseases than Asian nations did, nor always more effective treatments.
At the beginning of the 1800s, surgery was still extremely painful and dangerous, conducted quickly and as a last resort, only when absolutely necessary. Some cultures like the Chinese one barely practiced it at all, with certain limited exceptions such as the castration of eunuchs. India had somewhat more promising beginnings in this field in ancient times, but progress eventually stagnated. This situation changed dramatically over the next 150 years, largely thanks to advances made in Europe and the wider Western world. Several of these were initially unrelated, but eventually merged to cause an unprecedented revolution in surgery.
Drugs such as opium, certain herbal remedies, alcoholic drinks or even tobacco among Native Americans had been used for millennia to reduce pain. Even though these drugs could be useful in a limited way they didn’t prevent most patients undergoing surgery from being fully conscious and feeling extreme pain, sometimes literally dying from the suffering associated with a major operation. This changed dramatically during the nineteenth century with the development of general anesthesia in the form of ether and chloroform. This was closely related to European advances in chemistry, for example the discovery of laughing gas.
These trends made surgery a lot less painful, but not necessarily less hazardous. What eventually made it so was the realization that microorganisms were directly related to infections and the subsequent adoption of efficient methods used to reduce this danger.
Thanks to advances in mathematics and medical statistics, it was clear to Enlightenment Europeans that there was a correlation between dirt and disease, but the specific nature of this was not yet understood; many scholars believed that diseases were transmitted through smells. The notion that microorganisms too small to be seen by the unaided human eye cause many common diseases met with surprisingly stubborn resistance, as the tragic fate of Semmelweis reminds us, until better microscopes and the careful work of such authorities as Louis Pasteur finally managed to convince most of the medical community in the late nineteenth century.
In Human Accomplishment, William T. G. Morton and Horace Wells are listed for anesthesia, as is James Young Simpson, but not Crawford Long, nor Hua Tuo or Hanaoka Seishu in East Asia. The latter two might be briefly mentioned although their line of research did not win out, in contrast to the general anesthesia developed in the West in the 1800s. And why isn’t the fine Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov mentioned at all? Ernst Chain and Howard Florey are listed for the introduction of penicillin in addition to Alexander Fleming; Frederick Banting and Charles Herbert Best for the discovery of insulin in Canada shortly after 1920, which revolutionized the lives of people suffering from diabetes, but not John James Macleod.
The Austrian-born Jewish physician Karl Landsteiner developed the ABO blood group system, the most important (but not the only) blood type system currently in use, in the early 1900s. Other pioneers include Alexander Wiener from the USA and the Czech serologist Jan Janský. The Czech experimental physiologist Jan (Johannes) Purkinje, a friend of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who also did valuable research into the human brain in the 1800s, introduced protoplasm and plasma (blood plasma, the clear, fluid portion of the blood in which the blood cells are suspended) as scientific terms. Important in classifying blood is also the Rhesus factor. It, too, was discovered by Landsteiner and colleagues before 1940.
Failed experiments with blood transfusions, the transfer of blood into a person’s blood stream, had been carried out for hundreds of years at the cost ofmany lives. Both the blood type and the Rhesus type must be matched in a transfusion, otherwise the patient may experience potentially lethal complications. The American surgeon William Halsted performed one of the first known human blood transfusions in the USA in 1881 by giving some of his blood to his sister save her life. Following the above mentioned breakthroughs, blood transfusion became a common medical practice worldwide. Millions of liters of blood are now donated from people around the world and used to replace blood lost through accidents or major surgery.
Coupled with other Western advances from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s in physiology, antiseptics, general anesthesia and antibiotics, this made possible a veritable revolution in surgery; what had previously been rare, painful and dangerous operations suddenly became safer, more widespread and comparatively painless, eventually involving transplants of vital organs such as kidneys. The first successful human-to-human heart transplant was achieved in 1967 in Cape Town by Christiaan Barnard, the son of a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. Since then, heart transplants – totally unthinkable merely a few generations ago – have become a routine operation in major hospitals around the world.
The German Jewish scientist Paul Ehrlich together with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata in 1909 discovered Salvarsan, an arsenical compound that proved to be an effective treatment for syphilis. Until then, mercury had been the primary choice for this disease, recommended by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century. Ehrlich effectively founded modern chemotherapy, thus realizing Paracelsus’ earlier vision of scientifically applying chemistry to medicine.
The German bacteriologist Gerhard Domagk in 1932 found the first effective drug against infections caused by bacteria, which was called prontosil. He tested it on his daughter to save her life and received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1939 for this magnificent breakthrough.
The first observation of penicillin was probably made by the physicist John Tyndall in 1875. He noticed that the fungus Penicillium notatum killed bacteria, but soon passed on to other matters. The credit for discovering penicillin is usually granted to the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming in 1928. It was a lucky find. Fleming published articles on the subject but then abandoned it. The German Jewish biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, a fugitive from the Nazis, went to the Australian-born pharmacologist Howard Florey with a suggestion that they investigated the anti-bacterial properties of Fleming’s discovery. In 1940 a report was issued describing how penicillin was capable of killing germs in the living body. Great efforts were soon made to enable significant quantities of the drug to be made for use during World War II. The Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1945 was awarded jointly to Fleming, Chain and Florey.
Another revolution in medicine in the early twentieth century was the realization that small traces of certain substances are vital to human health. A few illnesses are not caused by bacteria or germs, but by deficiencies of trace elements. Certain crucial substances cannot be manufactured by the body from other nutrients and need to be supplied through the diet.
The English biochemist Frederick Hopkins in the early 1900s discovered that food contains ingredients essential to life that are not proteins or carbohydrates. This led to the discovery of vitamins, a concept first formulated by the Polish Jewish biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912. Hopkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929 with the Dutch professor of physiology Christiaan Eijkman for this achievement. Eijkman had discovered that the illness known as Beriberi is caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, Takaki Kanehiro, a British-trained medical doctor working for the Japanese Navy, had found already in the 1880s that Beriberi was caused by malnutrition. His name is not mentioned in Charles Murray’s book.
Some notable figures in addition to the American biochemist Elmer McCollum, who participated in the discoveries of several vitamins such as A and D, are related to research on vitamins: Marguerite Davis, Christiaan Eijkman, Casimir Funk, Joseph Goldberger, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Charles Glen King, Edward Mellanby and James Lind, although Lind’s pioneering clinical trials with citrus fruits in the British Royal Navy regarding the cause of scurvy (a lack of vitamin C) around 1750 took place before this concept had been formulated.
The Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, although as often happens, others had aided in this breakthrough. The Swiss organic chemist Paul Karrerwon the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that same year together with Walter Haworth of Britain for research into vitamins.
The invention of the stethoscope by the French physician René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec revolutionized the diagnosis of lung disorders and gave unprecedented access to the internal organs of the human body. The most efficient way to do this, however, is by aiding our eyes rather than our ears, since vision is normally mankind’s most important sense for gathering information about our surroundings. When news spread in 1896 of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, this phenomenon was quickly adopted by physicians. Röntgen is ranked in physics, and his achievement earned him the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, but his discovery was to have tremendous implications in the medical field as well.
X-rays continue to be employed by physicians and dentists worldwide but were supplemented during the course of the twentieth century by ultrasound and other techniques for imaging in medicine and the life sciences. For instance, Godfrey Hounsfield, an English electrical engineer, shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine with physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack, born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Scottish parents, for developing the theoretical foundations for the diagnostic technique now known as X-ray computed tomography (CT).
The Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi in the 1930s developed a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nuclei. His method was soon independently improved upon by Edward Purcell from the USA and Felix Bloch from Switzerland, whose work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) garnered them the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics and laid the foundations for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The English physicist Peter Mansfield shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 with the American chemist Paul Lauterbur for contributions to making magnetic resonance imaging practical in the 1970s. Its use for medical imaging thereafter quickly spread around the world.
Virtually all cultures have had their versions of physicians or healers since all cultures have to deal with injuries and diseases. One possible objection to Murray’s work is that is does not credit non-European cultures in Australia, Africa, the Americas or the various regions of Asia for their intimate, ancient knowledge of many herbs and plants, some of which have later been scientifically demonstrated to possesses genuinely useful medical properties. For this reason, representatives of modern pharmaceutical companies occasionally follow native peoples to take notes of their comments about local plants and investigate their properties further.
Nevertheless, the empirical knowledge of plants, while undoubtedly very useful, does not alone establish true medical science, and traditional shamanist healers with their amulets and incantations to ward off evil spirits are very different from the practices of modern physicians.
Moreover, we should remember that European peoples in prehistoric times probably had an equally good understanding of useful plants and herbs in their local environment. For instance, Ötzi the Iceman, the well-preserved natural mummy who lived around 3,300 BC in the Alps, along with his tools carried a modest first-aid kit. His implements included the fruiting body of the birch polypore fungus, which is known to have antibacterial properties.
The Earth sciences category primarily includes geology, geophysics, meteorology and oceanography. The leading names here are, starting from the top down: Charles Lyell (1797-1875) of Scotland; James Hutton (1726-1797) of Scotland; William Smith (1769-1839) of England; Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) of Germany; Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) of Germany; Roderick Murchison (1792-1871) of Scotland; Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) of the USA; Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Switzerland; Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715-1786) of France; Carl Gustaf Mosander (1797-1858) of Sweden; Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) of Switzerland; Nicolas Desmarest (1725-1815) of France; Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) of Germany; Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) of France; Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) of England; Thomas Chamberlin (1843-1928) of the USA; Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951) of Norway; Eilhard Mitscherlich (1794-1863) of Germany; Per Teodor Cleve (1840-1905) of Sweden; and William Maurice Ewing (1906-1974) of the USA.
Modern geology can be said to have been born in the 1800s with Charles Lyell’s extension and popularization in his Principles of Geology of James Hutton’s uniformitarianism from the late 1700s. It emphasized that the most important forces shaping landforms, for instance erosion, are still ongoing today and happen at a very slow and gradual pace, not primarily through a few major upheavals or catastrophes. In order to account for the creation and destruction of entire mountain ranges, this view indirectly implied that the Earth had to be many millions of years old. Lyell’s book was a major influence on the young Charles Darwin.
The term “geology” was popularized in the late eighteenth century by the Swiss (Genevan) naturalists Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Jean-André Deluc. The aristocrat Saussure is often considered the founder of modern mountaineering and conquered Mont Blanc (4,810 m) in 1787. At the summit he tested the boiling point of water as well as the pulse of his guides.
Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart produced a geological map of the Paris region in 1812, thereby establishing a scientific approach to stratigraphy and demonstrating that strata could be recognized by the fossils found within them. The self-educated English surveyor, canal engineer and geologistWilliam Smith published his Geologic Map of England and Wales with Part of Scotland in 1815, which was the world’s first nationwide geological map.
Geologists knew that there was evidence of past upheavals, but many believed these had been caused by the alleged Biblical Flood of Noah. There were a few individuals who held that glaciation had been more extensive in the past than it is today. In Norway and the Alps there are still surviving glaciers, and the landscape was shaped by previous ones; the Norwegian fjords are valleys carved by glacial activity and now filled with seawater. These ideas of past “ice ages” were taken up by the Swiss glaciologist Louis Agassiz, who in 1840 published a major work entitled Etudes sur les glaciers (“Study on Glaciers”). Glaciology, the study of ice formations, has gained increased importance to planetary scientists and astrobiologists studying icy moons such as Europa and Enceladus elsewhere in our Solar System.
The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar suggested that ice ages were caused by astronomical forces. His theory was modified by the Scottish scientist James Croll and above all by the gifted Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, who taught physics and astronomy at the University of Belgrade. His complex work on what has become known as Milankovitch cycles – astronomical contributions to ice ages on our planet – took years to complete and was carried out only with brain power. It was published in a 1920 work that met with widespread acclaim, yet Milankovitch’s name is totally absent from Murray’s book.
By the early twentieth century it was known that surprisingly similar fossils and landforms could be found on opposite sides of major oceans. Based on these findings the German scientist Alfred Wegener proposed a theory of continental drift in 1915 in his masterpiece Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (“The Origin of Continents and Oceans”). He suggested that there was once a single giant continent which he named Pangaea (“All-Earth”).
When samples were finally obtained from the ocean beds it turned out that they were far younger than expected and that the youngest samples were found next to the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges. The existence of a “mountain range” in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean had been suspected since the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, but the global system of mid-ocean ridges was mapped after 1950. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter with less financial resources at their disposal than the former, needed to know more about the ocean environment to navigate with their nuclear submarines. The deep seas constituted an important frontline in their Cold War superpower rivalry.
Harry Hammond Hess in 1960 at Princeton University in the USA advanced the theory that the crust moves laterally from volcanically active oceanic ridges. The Earth’s crust and upper mantle form the lithosphere, broken up into giant plates that slowly move on top of the hotter mantle, which due to the temperature/pressure regime acts like warm wax. “Sea-floor spreading” helped to establish continental drift as scientifically respectable. The Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson created a synthesis which became known as plate tectonics. Fred Vine, Drummond Matthews and Xavier Le Pichon contributed to this transformation.
Ewing is followed on the Earth sciences ranking by Leopold von Buch, Clarence Dutton, Eduard Suess and the Swedish chemists Axel Cronstedt and Georg Brandt, both of whom might as well be listed under chemistry, along with Carl G. Mosander and Per Teodor Cleve, Eilhard Mitscherlich from Germany and Peter Waage from Norway. Among other names we find Jacob Bjerknes, James Dana, Gabriel Daubrée, Pentti Eskola and Johan Gadolin from Finland, Johan G. Gahn, Beno Gutenberg, James Hall, Harry H. Hess, Arthur Holmes, Gideon Mantell, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, John Milne, Andrija Mohorovicic, Charles Richter, Edward Sabine, Strabo of Amaseia, Léon Teisserenc de Bort and Felix Andries Vening Meinesz.
The Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart, who found a fossil of the extinct hominid Australopithecus africanus in South Africa in 1924, is listed under biology, as is Édouard Lartet of France, whereas the great British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey is listed under Earth sciences, which seems a bit arbitrary. The Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois, who found the first fossil of Homo erectus (the “Java Man”) in 1891, is left out entirely.
Paleontology, the systematic study of the remains of living organisms and their traces on rocks, emerged as a distinct area of investigation in Western Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Human beings had most likely encountered fossils earlier but had often connected them to dragons or other mythical creatures, not to extinct ancient animals. In the 1820s, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell separately discovered strange bones in English quarries and, crucially, came up with reasonably accurate, non-magical explanations for these creatures. The quarrelsome English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842. This means “terrible lizard” and is not scientifically accurate, but it stuck anyway.
The index prepared by Murray is a bit weak on meteorology. The Norwegian father-and-son team Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes from the scenic, but rainy city of Bergen developed meteorology into a branch of atmospheric physics. Francis Beaufort with his scale for indicating wind force is here, as is William Ferrel and Carl-Gustaf Rossby, but the English scholar Luke Howard is not mentioned for his nomenclature system for clouds, nor is the Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron listed for explaining physically how rain forms, or the climatologist Wladimir Köppen, whose climate classification systems are still widely used.
The English mathematical physicist Lewis Fry Richardson is ignored. This represents a rather serious oversight. Following up advances made by Bjerknes, Richardson in 1922 developed the first numerical weather prediction system, not merely to explain how the weather is today but to scientifically predict how it will be like tomorrow. The Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann in the USA in 1946, after the ENIAC electronic computer became operational, advocated the application of computers to weather prediction. The introduction of increasingly powerful computers was soon thereafter combined with weather satellites to develop weather forecasts of unprecedented accuracy.
One of the most curious aspects of Human Accomplishment is that it sometimes appears as if Charles Murray hasn’t read his own work. I have come across quite a few figures highlighted among central events in the various disciplines early in the book – Karl Jansky, Grote Reber, Christiaan Huygens, Bernard Lyot and Bernhard Schmidt in astronomy; Florence Nightingale and Willem Einthoven in medicine, Simon Stevin, Daniel Bernoulli and Joseph Fourier in physics, Regiomontanus, Alan Turing and Edmond Halley in mathematics or Fritz Haber in technology, to name a few prominent ones – who are then left out from the final indexes.
Among central events in the Earth sciences he states that Pythagoras in ancient Greece claimed that the Earth is spherical, that the geographer Pytheas of Massilia related the ocean tides to the Moon (although the nature of this correlation was not understood before Newton) and that Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated a good estimate for the circumference of the Earth, yet none of them are listed in the roster of significant figures. The same goes for the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator with his projection for maps, Jean Picard’s highly accurate calculations of the size of the Earth in the 1600s, Luigi Marsigli’s writings on oceanography in the 1720s and Benjamin Franklin’s scientific map of the Gulf Stream in the 1770s.
Gaspard de Coriolis discovered the Coriolis Effect, the deflection of a moving body caused by the Earth’s rotation. Charles Fabry discovered the ozone layer in 1913 and Oliver Heaviside, Arthur E. Kennelly and Edward V. Appleton the Earth’s ionosphere in the first decades of the twentieth century, yet all of these gentlemen are listed under the physics index. Jean Picard from France in the seventeenth century made a good estimate of the diameter of the Sun, too, but he is not credited for this in the astronomy section. This constitutes a mistake in my view.
The most serious omission in this section is Niels Stensen, or Nicolas Steno, from Copenhagen, Denmark, who lived for years in Italy. His law of superposition from 1669 concluded that layers of rock (strata) are arranged in a time sequence with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on top, unless later processes have disturbed this arrangement. He might have made it to the top twenty list in the Earth sciences, yet while he is highlighted among central events, for some reason his name is later left out entirely from the final index.
The discipline of Earth sciences was invented in the 1960s and 70s when it replaced geology as the major discipline for studying our planet, just as geology had once replaced mineralogy. Geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists began working on related problems using similar techniques. At the same time, the first space probes were sent to directly investigate other bodies in our Solar System, which meant that geologists could extend the scope of their investigations to the domain formerly dominated by astronomers. If Murray had updated his book until, say, the year 2000, this section would have to be renamed “planetary sciences.”
The American geologist Eugene Shoemaker arguably founded astrogeology in the 1960s and did much to bring attention to the significance of impacts from comets and asteroids in the Earth’s history. Many people believe that the mass extinction which ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was mainly caused by the impact of a large asteroid. The US physicist Luis Alvarez together with his son Walter Alvarez suggested this theory in 1980. It is now held to be correct by most scientists based on empirical evidence. A large impact crater from this time period has since been discovered outside of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
As Imke de Pater and Jack J. Lissauer state in their excellent book Planetary Sciences, “The Copernican-Keplerian-Galilean-Newtonian revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries completely changed humanity’s view of the dimensions and dynamics of the Solar System, including the relative sizes and masses of the bodies and the forces that make them orbit about one another. Gradual progress was made over the next few centuries, but the next revolution had to await the space age. In October of 1959, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 returned the first pictures of the farside of Earth’s Moon. The age of planetary exploration had begun. Over the next three decades, spacecraft visited all eight known terrestrial and giant planets in the Solar System, including our own. These spacecraft have returned data concerning the planets, their rings and moons. Spacecraft images of many objects showed details which could never have been guessed from previous Earth-based pictures. Spectra from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths revealed previously undetected gases and geological features on planets and moons, while radio detectors and magnetometers transected the giant magnetic fields surrounding many of the planets. The planets and their satellites have become familiar to us as individual bodies. The immense diversity of planetary and satellite surfaces, atmospheres and magnetic fields has surprised even the most imaginative researchers.”
Unmanned spacecraft, mainly North American, European and Russian ones but increasingly Japanese, Indian and Chinese ones as well, have visited comets and asteroids in addition to planets and moons. We have taken photos of volcanoes on Jupiter’s extremely active moon Io spewing out plumes of sulfur and sulfur dioxide to a height of many hundreds of kilometers.
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 during its brief flyby visit spotted geysers of nitrogen gas on Neptune’s large moon Triton. Its twin, the Voyager 1robotic space probe, as of early 2012 will be 120 Astronomical Units from the Sun, a staggering 120 times as distant from the Sun as is our planet, which also equals more than 17.95 billion kilometers or 1.795×1013 meters. It now takes radio waves, travelling at the speed of light, more than sixteen hours to send information back from Voyager 1 to the Earth. It is the farthest human-made object from the Earth. The Voyagers were then still within a huge bubble called the heliosphere, made of solar plasma and solar magnetic fields, but were expected to leave it in the near future. This structure is sometimes considered the limit of our Solar System and the beginning of interstellar space, although the influence of the Sun’s gravity stretches far beyond this point.
The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, named after the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens who explained Saturn’s rings and discovered its largest moon Titan, landed there in 2005, the first such undertaking in the Outer Solar System. Titan is the only moon known to possess a dense atmosphere and large amounts of liquid on its surface, in this case lakes of hydrocarbons (ethane and methane). NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, named of the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Cassini and the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, has also found geysers of water vapor and complex hydrocarbons venting from the surprisingly active moon Enceladus.
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft from the USA while orbiting the Jupiter system in the late 1990s found evidence indicating that the ice-crusted Galilean moon Europa could harbor an ocean of liquid salt water some kilometers beneath its frozen surface. Such an ocean, if it exists, might theoretically harbor primitive life-forms, a possibility that has made Europa one of the most intriguing objects of study for astrobiologists, next to the planet Mars and perhaps Enceladus.
From the 1990s on Western scientists have also discovered the first extrasolar planets or exoplanets, that is, planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun. These have substantially challenged some of our previous ideas about planet formation. Hundreds of them were found merely during the first generation of exoplanet research. Most of these were gas giants detected through indirect means by observing the tiny effects they have on the stars they orbit, but methods are rapidly improving and a few Earth-like planets have already been found.
Aleksander Wolszczan, a Polish-born USA-based radio astronomer, is credited as the co-discoverer of some of the first accepted exoplanets. In 1992, together with Canadian-born astronomer Dale Frail, he found evidence of planets orbiting around a pulsar (neutron star). 51 Pegasi b approximately 50 light-years away from us became the first planet found orbiting another Sun-like main sequence star. It was discovered in 1995 by Michel Mayor, a Swiss professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, together with his associate Didier Queloz. Mayor and his team have discovered many more extrasolar planets since then.
Edward Said and the Myth of Eurocentrism
In his book Orientalism from 1978, Edward Said slammed what he considered to be the “racist ethnocentrism” of Europeans. Said argued that Western stereotypes of the “Orient” and Asia date back to ancient Greece. The only problem with Said’s claim is that it is utterly false, as is the entire basic premise of his book.
Probably all nations in the world are “ethnocentric” to some degree. This is not a specifically “European” quality; it is a human one. If anything, Europeans have not infrequently proved to be less ethnocentric than many other cultures.
As far as we know, it was Herodotus who first used the term historia (inquiry) for what we call “history.” John Burrow traces this concept in his excellent work A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century:
History – the elaborated, secular, prose narrative (all these qualifications are necessary) of public events, based on inquiry – was born, we can claim with confidence, in Greece between roughly 450 and 430 BC. If we want to add Thucydides’ very different kind of history to that of Herodotus, who is sometimes spoken of as ‘the father of history’, then we must speak instead of the second half of the fifth century BC.
Even with this extension, and with the qualifications built into the description of the genre, it is extraordinary that we can speak of so short a period for its abrupt genesis, yet it appears to be justified. It is equally astonishing that we can plausibly claim that neither historian was to be excelled for over two thousand years subsequently – until, in fact, changes in methods and types of history begin to make comparison unrealistic.
He distinguishes between certain Greek writers versus the “proto-history” we may find in other ancient civilizations, for instance those of Mesopotamia or Egypt. The latter could produce good record-keepers, a practice closely tied to bureaucracy and commerce, but one of the key differences between them and the Greeks lies in the emphasis on critical inquiry, for instance in Herodotus on the Greco-Persian wars. Burrow again, in A History of Histories:
We are still reading his account of his great theme, the invasion of Greece two and a half thousand years ago, and a mere half century before he wrote it, by the Persian Great King and the immense polyglot army drawn from all parts of his empire. Herodotus also promises a little later (Histories, I.95) to tell us how the Persians under their ruler Cyrus (the Great) won their predominant position in Asia, and this promise too he fulfils before going on to his account of the invasion of Greece.
One point in his initial statement which is worth pausing on is the reference to recording the great deeds of barbarians (i.e. non-Greeks) as well as Greeks. We should look in vain in the Egyptian and Babylonian records for such even-handedness. What we are reminded of is Homer, who, as Herodotus soon reminds us, had written of an earlier conflict between Greeks and an Asiatic people. Homer allows his readers/hearers to sympathize with Trojans as well as Greeks, and as much or more with Priam and Hector as with Achilles and Agamemnon. Herodotus does not comment on this feature in Homer, but seems to take it for granted.
This is an authentic and distinctly European character trait, which as we can see was already evident in pre-Christian times. In the Middle Eastern environment described in the Hebrew Bible this mentality is nowhere to be found. Nobody is interested in the motivations of the opponents of Joshua and his Israelite troops when they took Jericho during their conquest of Canaan, and “utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” (Joshua 6:21) Likewise, nobody cares much about how Goliath’s family reacted to the news of his death at the hands of David.
The Parthenon in Athens, completed in the 430s BC, is the most famous surviving building of Classical Greece. Yet it was not the first large structure on the Athenian Acropolis, where other constructions had existed at least since Mycenaean times. An older building on the same spot was destroyed by the Persians when they invaded and sacked the city in 480 BC. The structure we see today was built under the enlightened rule of the statesman Pericles. You can detect hostility to Persians in the writings of some Greek authors, yes, but it is normal that people are unhappy when somebody within living memory invaded their land and destroyed their monuments. It is far more unusual that they give them a balanced historical treatment.
Thucydides identified himself as an Athenian, but acknowledged that Athens was unpopular. A champion of political liberty at home, the city could sometimes bully its smaller neighbors. Thucydides had seen warfare for himself as a general and was acutely aware of military techniques. For this reason, his descriptions of siege engines, earthworks and sea battles are quite precise. He was a realist who left less room for divine intervention than did Herodotus:
Thucydides seems to embody all the qualities that Nietzsche admired and did not always manage to embody himself. It is easy to understand the admiration. Almost all historians except the very dullest have some characteristic weakness: some complicity, idealization, identification; some impulse to indignation, to right wrongs, to deliver a message. It is often the source of their most interesting writing. But Thucydides seems immune. Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history.
In the modern age, the English scholar William Jones (1746-94) is said to have known thirteen languages well, and twenty-eight fairly well, at the time of his death, among them Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit. In 1783 he was appointed to a judgeship at Calcutta. Jones was to stay there until his death. He transformed the intellectual life of India when he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the associated journal, Asiatick Researches, dedicated to the scientific study of Indian literature, history and philosophy.
In 1786, the linguist William Jones elaborated a theory of the common origins of most European languages and those found in many parts of India, an intuition that marks the beginning of Indo-European comparative grammar and comparative-historical linguistics, a great scholarly breakthrough which the ancient Greeks at their best had never quite achieved:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic [Germanic] and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.
If you believe Nicholas Ostler in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, “This was the origin of historical comparative linguistics. Applying it to languages all over the world was one of the great intellectual adventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and as a direct result we now know much of the flow of human languages, and so of human history, well before the start of the written documents.
To give just three examples, this is how we know that the Hungarians came from northern Siberia, that Madagascar was colonised from Borneo, and that the European Gypsies originated as far away as India. For all the self-generated excellence of Sanskrit’s own tradition in linguistics, it could never have gone off in this new direction on its own: what was needed was confrontation with other languages, far beyond the Indian ken, but also the ability to view these languages as somehow on a par with Sanskrit, something else that the tradition would have found simply inconceivable.”
Sanskrit managed to achieve a status within Indian civilization as a quasi-universal language. Pali, its younger sister language, has occasionally enjoyed something of the same status, though only among Buddhists, and mostly outside India itself. “We have noted the characteristic distrust of writing in Indian culture. This in fact applies not just to these Aryan languages, but more generally: in fact, the first sacred written text anywhere in India is the Sikhs’ Guru Granth Sahib, produced in the seventeenth century. (And Sikhism explicitly takes Islam, with its adoration of the written text of the Koran, as a major inspiration.)”
India could produce some fine grammarians, for example Panini in the fifth century BC who contributed to a comprehensive theory of phonetics, phonology and morphology, but he studied Sanskrit, specifically, and did not put it on the same level as other, foreign languages.
The book Indo-Aryan Controversy, edited by Edwin Bryant, is dedicated to the controversy, which exists mainly in India, of whether or not there was an invasion of India from the northwest of peoples speaking a language from the Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European tree. Some Indian nationalists will passionately argue that Sanskrit, and perhaps the entire Indo-European language family, was native to India. The problem with their position is that they have, objectively speaking, very few arguments in their favor.
The only argument I am willing to seriously consider is a negative one: The written language of the Indus Valley Civilization, which existed well before 2000 BC, has not yet been fully deciphered. This is correct. Theoretically speaking, this could be an Indo-European language, but most scholars today find this unlikely. Virtually everything that we do know indicates that the Indo-European language family, and probably also the Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan branch of that family, originated in the cooler regions of northern Eurasia, probably in northeastern Europe. Those supporting this position in the debate include Asko Parpola and Christian Carpelan from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Asko Parpola is a Finnish professor emeritus of Indology and widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on the Indus script.
Personally, what struck me the most when reading the various positions is that many Indian nationalists are not really interested in an honest debate of these issues; they merely want to preserve the “purity” of their beautiful Sanskrit and present “Mother India” as the cradle of civilization. Apart from claiming that Sanskrit is native to India they simply don’t care very much about the origins and evolution of Tocharian in Central Asia, certainly not the Slavic or Celtic tongues in Europe. This is largely left to Western scholars. In this exchange of opinion it was the Indian writers, not the European ones, who came off as being most “ethnocentric.”
Regarding the history of linguistics, the Encyclopædia Britannica online states that
To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so enmeshed in the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world until recently that they have had virtually no impact on Western linguistic tradition.
Chinese philological scholarship stretches back for more than two millennia, but the interest of those thinkers was concentrated largely on the phonetics, writing and lexicography of Chinese. A partial exception can be seen when a few scholars went to India to obtain Buddhist texts. This triggered some analyses of the peculiarities of spoken Chinese vs. Pali or Sanskrit, but it didn’t lead to the development of anything resembling comparative linguistics in China.
The same case can be made even more forcefully when it comes to the Islamic world. Some Muslims did of course speak other languages such as Persian or Turkish, but Arabic always carried a special prestige within that cultural sphere as the language of the Koran and the vehicle which Allah himself had chosen to reveal His message to mankind. Muslim students studied grammar, but only for use in religious studies of Arabic texts. It would have been inconceivable, not to mention downright insulting and probably outright blasphemous, to suggest that the language of Allah and his Prophet should be treated on the same level as the Hebrew of the Jewish scriptures or the Coptic of the Egyptian Christians, not to mention the many tongues of the worthless infidels elsewhere in Asia or Europe. Before the European colonial period, most Muslims found it beneath their dignity to study non-Muslim languages.
The conclusion we can draw from these examples is this: Most Asian nations, and probably most nations elsewhere in the world, too, were simply too subjective and too ethnocentric to invent comparative linguistics. Treating their own language on the same level as those of alien peoples was mentally impossible and just wasn’t done. Contrast this with the genuine curiosity, openness and much more objective attitude displayed by linguists such as William Jones and we realize that Europeans invented comparative linguistics because they were the least ethnocentric of the major civilizations. It is likely that this heritage of greater scholarly objectivity was a major contributing factor to the emergence of modern science in Europe.
Needless to say, this insight completely blows away the main arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism. The entire basic premise of his book is wrong and can easily be shown to be so. It is unfortunate that he and his disciples have been allowed to spread demonization and falsehoods against European and Western scholars for so many years relatively unchallenged.
The in-depth evaluation of Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment continues.
In physics we find the English mathematician, astronomer, theologian and alchemist Isaac Newton (1643-1727) in first place, tied with Albert Einstein (1879-1955), born in Germany to a Jewish family, later becoming a Swiss as well as an American citizen. Behind them follow the prolific New Zealand-born British nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937); the English naturalist Michael Faraday (1791-1867), a great pioneer in the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry; the brilliant Italian naturalist, mathematician and experimentalist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); the gifted and highly eccentric English experimental and theoretical physicist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810); the quantum and nuclear physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) from Denmark, known for his contributions to atomic theory; the English physicist Joseph John “J. J.” Thomson (1856-1940) who discovered the electron, the first subatomic particle; the Scottish mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), whose insights into electromagnetism and light were of fundamental importance for modern science and technology; the French physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906), a pioneer in the study of crystallography, piezoelectricity and radioactivity.
After them comes Gustav Robert Kirchhoff of Germany (1824-1887), who developed spectroscopy for chemical analysis of the Sun and coined the term “blackbody” radiation, later used by fellow German physicist Max Planck; the Italian-born scientist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), who made many contributions to nuclear and particle physics; the German scientist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), remembered for his work in the field of quantum mechanics and the formulation of his famous uncertainty principle in 1927; the Polish-born France-based physicist and chemist Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934), known especially for her studies together with her husband Pierre of radioactivity, a term she coined; the English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), who made great contributions to quantum mechanics and electrodynamics and predicted the existence of antimatter; the English scientific brewer James Prescott Joule (1818-1889), who studied the nature of heat and helped establish the conservation of energy principle and the First Law of Thermodynamics; the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), who among many other things developed a wave theory of light; the English physician and natural philosopher William Gilbert (1544-1603), who introduced the term and concept “electricity” and whose work De Magnete described experimental studies of magnetism; the English physician and physicist Thomas Young (1773-1829), whose double-slit experiments conducted around the year 1800 converted many European naturalists to a wave theory of light; and finally the dynamic English natural philosopher and instrument maker Robert Hooke (1635-1703).
Newton’s and Einstein’s top position in this category should surprise nobody. Galileo’s ranking, based exclusively on his status as a founder of modern physics, not his contributions to astronomy, is uncontroversial. Rutherford discovered two types of radioactivity, described the nucleus of the atom and helped to develop our understanding of the subatomic world, bombarded atomic nuclei to change their composition and made many other valuable contributions. Faraday’s work on induction and on electricity and magnetism in general was of fundamental importance to the development of electrical generators and engines.
Other prominent physicists are Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Christian Ørsted, Antoine Henri Becquerel, Ludwig Boltzmann, Heinrich Hertz, John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), Evangelista Torricelli, Carl David Anderson , Hans Geiger, René Descartes, Otto von Guericke, Guillaume Amontons, George Gabriel Stokes, Archimedes, Amedeo Avogadro, Jacques Charles, Democritus, Hendrik Lorentz, George FitzGerald, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Ernst Mach, Thales of Miletus, Johannes Diderik van der Waals and Charles T. Wilson.
Some lesser, but still significant names are Victor Hess, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Loránd Eötvös, Pyotr Kapitsa, Leonardo da Vinci, Pierre Prévost, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, Joseph Sauveur, Charles Cagniard de la Tour, Carl von Linde, Louis Paul Cailletet and Raoul Pictet.
Among those who studied electricity in addition to Faraday, Cavendish, Gilbert and Ørsted we find François Arago, André-Marie Ampère, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Charles du Fay, Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Gray, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Henry, Ewald Georg von Kleist, Pieter van Musschenbroek, Jean-Antoine Nollet, Georg Ohm, William Sturgeon, Alessandro Volta, Wilhelm Weber, Charles Wheatstone, Jean Peltier and Thomas Johann Seebeck. It is in my opinion wrong not to mention the German naturalist Franz Aepinus, who published the first mathematical theory of electric and magnetic phenomena in 1759. He was at least as important in this field as was his Swedish-born student Johan Wilcke, who is listed.
Another group of people besides James Joule and Ludwig Boltzmann were associated with the emergence of what we now know as thermodynamics: Nicolas Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Hermann von Helmholtz, Julius Robert von Mayer, Leopoldo Nobili, Alexis Petit, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).
Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault in France measured the speed of light with great accuracy in the mid-1800s, followed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in the USA. Many names in addition to Maxwell, Huygens and Young are related to studies of the properties of light in the widest possible sense: Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Johann J. Balmer, Anders J. Ångström and Henry A. Rowland, Erasmus Bartholin, Jean-Baptiste Biot, David Brewster, Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm, Christian Doppler, Joseph von Fraunhofer, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Dennis Gabor, Francesco Grimaldi, Pyotr Lebedev, Étienne-Louis Malus, Chandrasekhara V. Raman, Willebrord Snell, Johannes Stark, Josef Stefan, Paul Villard, Wilhelm Wien and Pieter Zeeman. After their discovery in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen, X-rays were used for fundamental scientific research by Max von Laue, Henry Moseley, Charles Barkla, William H. Bragg and William L. Bragg, Arthur Compton and many others. William D. Coolidge in the USA invented an improved X-ray tube in 1913.
Many individuals mentioned in the index of Human Accomplishment are remembered for studies of the subatomic world, quantum physics and nuclear fission, among them Max Born, Walther Bothe, Louis de Broglie, James Chadwick, John Cockcroft, Ernest Walton, Clinton Davisson, Johann Geissler, Eugen Goldstein, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie, Ernest Lawrence, Philipp Lenard, Fritz London, Heinz London, Ernest Marsden, Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen, Edwin McMillan, Vladimir Veksler, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Robert Millikan, Erwin Schrödinger, Emilio G. Segrè, Arnold Sommerfeld, Fritz Strassmann, Leó Szilárd and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, George P. Thomson, Ida Noddack, Walter Zinn, Hideki Yukawa and Cecil Frank Powell (but not César Lattes).
Following Paul Dirac’s lead, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga from Japan developed quantum electrodynamics and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for this. Why is Glenn T. Seaborg not ranked in either physics or chemistry for his involvement in the discovery of a number of transuranium elements, among them plutonium?
The Hungarian-born Jew Leó Szilárd was partly responsible for initiating the Manhattan Project through writing the Einstein-Szilard letter sent by the famous scientist Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939, urging the USA to study the use of nuclear fission for weapons before Nazi Germany could make such devices. Another Hungarian Jew who became a key person in the American nuclear program was Edward Teller. He was to play a central role in the development of thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs.
zilárd also helped the great Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi construct the first nuclear reactor. Fermi’s group, which included the Canadian physicist Walter Zinn, achieved the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in December 1942 in Chicago in the USA.
In astronomy, the leading names are: the Italian natural philosopher, experimentalist, instrument maker and pioneer of telescopic astronomy Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); the brilliant German mathematical astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630); the prolific German-born English observer and telescope maker Wilhelm Herschel (1738-1822); the French mathematical astronomer and naturalist Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827); Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) from Poland, who successfully promoted heliocentric cosmology; Claudius Ptolemy (ca. AD 100-170), who culminated ancient Greek geocentric (Earth-centered) astronomy; Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) of Denmark, who made the most accurate astronomical observations possible before the introduction of the telescope; the English astronomer, mathematician, naturalist and meteorologist Edmond Halley (1656-1742); the Italian-born later French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712); the brilliant Greek mathematical astronomer Hipparchus (died after 127 BC), a founder of trigonometry.
After the first ten we find the German-born astronomer Walter Baade (1893-1960); the American observational cosmologist Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), who proved that the universe is expanding; the German mathematician and astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846); the English amateur pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy William Huggins (1824-1910); the great astrophysicist and telescope promoter George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) from the USA; the leading English astronomer and astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944); the astronomer and astrophysicist Ejnar Hertzsprung (1873-1967) from Denmark; the German physician and astronomer Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840); the prominent Dutch-born astronomer and planetary scientist Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973); and finally the lunar astronomer Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) from present-day Poland.
Murray comments that Laplace was a pivotal figure after Newton in applying mathematics to astronomy, contributed to the nebular hypothesis for star formation and even anticipated the existence of black holes. There is a difference between “system builders” and “brick layers,” with William Herschel being the latter and Copernicus the former. Herschel laid many “bricks” to our astronomical knowledge, discovered the first new planet since prehistoric times (Uranus), studied binary stars and nebulae, outlined the shape of the Milky Way and discovered infrared radiation, the first type of “light” not visible to human eyes. His scientific contributions were quite numerous. By contrast, Copernicus made just one, the Sun-centered model, yet his single contribution ultimately altered humanity’s view of the universe forever.
Other major names include Aristarchus of Samos, Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller), John Herschel, Walter Sydney Adams, Edward Barnard, Henry Russell, Fritz Zwicky, John Flamsteed, Urbain Le Verrier, Jan Oort, Harlow Shapley, William Lassell, Giovanni Schiaparelli, Immanuel Kant, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Pietro Angelo Secchi, Karl Schwarzschild, Simon Mayr, Christoph Scheiner, Georges Lemaître, Pierre Gassendi, Robert Hooke, Edward Pickering, Giuseppe Piazzi, John Couch Adams, Norman Lockyer, William Parsons, James Bradley, Johann Galle, Heraclides Ponticus, Mikhail Lomonosov and Georg von Peuerbach.
Quite a few individuals who made their mark in this field have an index score from 13 to 10: Johann Elert Bode, George Phillips Bond, Richard Carrington, Alexis Clairaut, Warren De la Rue, Henry Draper, Johann Franz Encke, John Goodricke, Asaph Hall, Hermann von Helmholtz, Thomas Henderson, James Jeans, Johann Lambert, Henrietta Leavitt, Antonia Maury, Charles Messier, Edward Milne, Giovanni Riccioli, Ole Rømer, Samuel Schwabe, Clyde Tombaugh, Ulugh Beg, Hermann Carl Vogel, Fred Whipple and Max Wolf.
Additional names in astronomical research listed before 1950 are Anaximander of Miletus, Peter Apian, William Bond, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, David Fabricius, Jacobus Kapteyn, Forest Ray Moulton, Charles Perrine, William Henry Pickering, Erasmus Reinhold, Sosigenes of Alexandria, Johann Daniel Titius, Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, William Wallace Campbell, Heber Curtis, Jeremiah Horrocks, Philolaus, Édouard Roche, Ibn Yunus, Bertil Lindblad, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, al-Zarqali (Arzachel), Francis Baily, Ludwig Biermann, Annie Jump Cannon, John Dreyer, Caroline Herschel, Maria Mitchell, Jean-Louis Pons, Willem de Sitter, Robert Julius Trumpler, Viktor Ambartsumian, Pierre Janssen, Daniel Kirkwood, Meton of Athens, John Plaskett, Chang Heng, Percival Lowell, Nevil Maskelyne, John Michell, Simon Newcomb, Georg Rheticus and Thomas Wright.
The author does not mention the American astronomer Vesto M. Slipher, who had measured the radial velocities of some spiral nebulae before Hubble in the 1920s proved that the universe is expanding; nor the English-born woman astronomer Cecilia Payne who showed in 1925 that the stars are composed mainly of hydrogen. Karl Jansky and Grote Reber from the USA are not listed, although both are mentioned among central events for founding radio astronomy in the 1930s. Likewise, Murray credits the Dutch lens makers Zacharias Jansen and Hans Lippershey with having independently invented a crude telescope shortly after the year 1600, a very important event, yet their names are not listed in the astronomy index.
Emanuel Swedenborg is not credited for introducing the nebular hypothesis for the formation of our Solar System, although Immanuel Kant and Laplace are both credited for this.
He also does not list the English mathematician Thomas Harriot, who drew the Moon after watching it through his telescope in July 1609, several months before Galileo did the same. I do not dispute Galileo’s top ranking. Harriot did not publish his observations, and his impact on the future course of astronomy was practically zero. Nevertheless, he might deserve a brief mention. Several individuals in Western Europe between 1608 and 1610 may have aimed a telescope at the night sky, but the studies made by Galileo were particularly energetic. His influential book Sidereus Nuncius (“Sidereal Messenger” or “Starry Messenger” in English), published in early 1610, for all practical purposes marks the birth of telescopic astronomy.
Charles Murray’s worst mistake in this section is arguably his failure to rank the American Jewish cosmologist Ralph Asher Alpher. Together with George Gamow, Alpher in 1948 introduced the concept of Big Bang nucleosynthesis to explain how the first elements were created in the early universe. Later that same year, along with Robert Herman, he predicted the existence of a cosmic background radiation as an echo from this event. In many ways the modern Big Bang theory starts with these two papers, which extended the less sophisticated model introduced by Georges Lemaître before. Yet Alpher is not mentioned at all in either the astronomy or in the physics index, and Gamow receives only a modest listing in physics.
Among central events in astronomy is mentioned that Hans Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker by 1938 had independently worked out the basics of hydrogen fusion in stars such as the Sun. This constitutes one of the greatest triumphs of science in all history, yet they are not listed in the inventory. Weizsäcker is ignored in all of the rosters of significant figures. Bethe has a score of 3 out of 100 in physics, curiously low for one of the great astrophysicists of the twentieth century. Bethe and Weizsäcker are possible contenders for the top twenty list in astronomy, as is Ralph Alpher, where they deserve to be at least as much as Hevelius does.
The major names in mathematics are heavily dominated by men from the ancient Greek or especially modern European traditions. At the top we find Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) from Basel, Switzerland, who spent many years in Berlin and Saint Petersburg, worked in nearly all fields of mathematics then existing and established much of today’s mathematical notation; the English mathematical physicist and astronomer Isaac Newton (1643-1727); the Greek geometer Euclid, who worked in Alexandria around 300 BC; the great scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), originally a child prodigy from a poor family in Brunswick, Germany; Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665), a brilliant amateur mathematician working as a lawyer in of Toulouse, France; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the great polymath from Leipzig, Germany; the French-born military man and natural philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), who lived for many years in the Dutch Republic; the German scholar Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the inventor of set theory; the great French natural and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662); and the brilliant German geometer Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866).
Next comes David Hilbert (1862-1943), an influential teacher at the University of Göttingen in Germany who stressed mathematical logic; Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705), the greatest from the Swiss Bernoulli family; Diophantus of Alexandria (third century AD), the most innovative pre-modern algebraist we know by name; the Italian Renaissance scholar Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576); the French lawyer and innovative algebraist François Viète (1540-1603); Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833) of France; John Wallis (1616-1703) of England; Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857), a prolific French pioneer of analysis; Leonardo of Pisa (ca. 1170-1250) or Fibonacci, the Italian who spread the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in Europe; and finally the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 290-212 BC).
The author indicates that the ordering at the top of the mathematics list could easily be shifted according to what you emphasize. Euler was brilliant, but his top rank owes much to the fact that he was also immensely productive. Gauss was a genius, but he was more reluctant to publish. If the main criteria were fame, Newton would win. If the emphasis is influence, Euclid’s synthesis of ancient geometry in his highly influential Elements might be on top.
Other great mathematicians with an index score of 20 or more are: Arthur Cayley, Niccolò Tartaglia, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Apollonius of Perga, William R. Hamilton, Ptolemy, Henri Poincaré, Colin Maclaurin, Gaspard Monge, Jean-Victor Poncelet, Nicole Oresme, Giuseppe Peano, Niels Henrik Abel, Joseph Fourier, Pythagoras of Samos, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Richard Dedekind, James Gregory, Christiaan Huygens, Felix Klein, Luca Pacioli, George Boole, Hermann Grassmann, Simon Stevin and Karl Weierstrass.
Among other leading international mathematical names can be mentioned Aryabhata, Johann Bernoulli, Bhaskara II, János Bolyai, Bernard Bolzano, Rafael Bombelli, Brahmagupta, Henry Briggs, Luitzen Brouwer, Jost Bürgi, Lazare Carnot, Gérard Desargues, Gustav Dirichlet, Maurice René Fréchet, Évariste Galois, Joseph Gergonne, Kurt Gödel, Jacques Hadamard, Hero of Alexandria, Hippocrates of Chios, Carl Jacobi, Marie Jordan, Omar Khayyám, Leopold Kronecker, Johann Lambert, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Henri Lebesgue, Marius Sophus Lie, Carl von Lindemann, Joseph Liouville, Nikolai Lobachevsky, Menaechmus, Menelaus of Alexandria, Hermann Minkowski, August Ferdinand Möbius, Abraham de Moivre, John Napier, Emmy Noether, William Oughtred, Pappus of Alexandria, Julius Plücker, Siméon Denis Poisson, Robert Recorde, Bertrand Russell, Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, Michael Stifel, Brook Taylor, John von Neumann and Alfred North Whitehead.
Some additional mathematical names with an index score of less than 10 include Abul Wafa, Adelhard of Bath, Albategnius (al-Battani), Archytas of Tarentum, Jean Argand, Stefan Banach, Eugenio Beltrami, Felix Borel, Christoph Clavius, Augustus De Morgan, Ludovico Ferrari, Scipione Ferro, Friedrich Frege, Aleksander Gelfond, Sophie Germain, Albert Girard, Godfrey Hardy, Felix Hausdorff, Charles Hermite, Jan Hudde, Hypatia of Alexandria, Andrey Kolmogorov, Sonya Kovalevskaya, Tullio Levi-Civita, Liu Hui, Andrei Markov, Nicolaus Mercator, Marin Mersenne, Oskar Morgenstern, George Peacock, Karl Pearson, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Christoff Rudolff, Paolo Ruffini, Jakob Steiner, James Sylvester, Vito Volterra, Hermann Weyl, Johannes Widman, Ernst Zermelo, Zhu Shijie and Zu Chongzhi.
In chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) of France has no close competitor with his score of 100. He had “major accomplishments in theory (Traité Élémentaire de Chemie stated the law of conservation of matter and is generally accepted as the founding text of quantitative chemistry), experimentation (he deciphered the process of combustion, found that diamond consists of carbon, and discovered the composition of air), and practice (he developed the first list of known elements and established a system of chemical nomenclature).”
Next comes Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848) of Sweden; Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) of Sweden; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) of England; Humphry Davy (1778-1829) of England; Robert Boyle (1627-1691) of England; John Dalton (1766-1844) of England; Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) of France; Joseph Black (1728-1799) of Scotland (although he was born in Bordeaux, France as the son of a wine trader); William Ramsay (1852-1916) of Scotland; Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) of Germany; William Crookes (1832-1919) of England; Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748-1822) of France; Linus Pauling (1901-1994) of the USA; August Kekulé (1829-1896) of Germany; Dimitri Mendeleyev (1834-1907) of Russia; the Flemish naturalist Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580-1644); Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) of England; plus Martin Klaproth (1743-1817) and Robert Bunsen (1811-1899), both Germans.
Murray warns that while Berzelius, Scheele and Davy were all fine chemists, their ranking is slightly inflated by sheer luck: They happened to have access to powerful new tools for isolating chemical elements; electrolysis in the case of Davy. Being at the right place at the right time is always a factor in accomplishment, but it was especially important in chemistry.
Bunsen is followed closely by William Wollaston, Francis William Aston, Walther Nernst, Jacobus van ‘t Hoff and Friedrich Wöhler, all of whom definitely deserve their high ranking.
With a score from 18 to 10 we find Otto Hahn, Louis Vauquelin, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Albertus Magnus, Hermann Emil Fischer, Torbern Bergman, Stanislao Cannizzaro, Jean Perrin, Peter Debye, Gilbert N. Lewis, Svante Arrhenius, James Dewar, Kasimir Fajans, Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan), George de Hevesy, Wilhelm Ostwald, Joseph Proust, Smithson Tennant, Louis Thénard, Morris Travers, Richard Willstätter, Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Thomas Graham, Edward Morley, Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot, Antoine-François Fourcroy, Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Paul Karrer, John Mayow, Julius Lothar Meyer, Johann J. Becher, Tadeus Reichstein, Harold Urey, Eduard Buchner, William Giauque, Johann Rudolf Glauber, Irving Langmuir, Johann Ritter and Theodor Svedberg.
The high ranking of Albertus Magnus from the thirteenth century is somewhat surprising. He was a naturalist and alchemist in addition to being a theologian and has presumably been credited here with the discovery of arsenic (As, atomic number 33). Most of the naturally occurring elements were identified in the European chemical revolution, from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. Henry Cavendish did fundamental research in both physics and chemistry and discovered hydrogen (“inflammable air”) in 1766, yet he is left out of the final ranking.
A number of fine chemists receive a score of less than 10: Thomas Andrews, Carl Auer von Welsbach, Antoine Jérôme Balard and Carl Jacob Löwig, Bertram Boltwood, Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted, Aleksandr Butlerov, André-Louis Debierne, Friedrich Ernst Dorn, Pierre-Louis Dulong, Edward Frankland, Walter Haworth, René Just Haüy, the Czech Nobel laureate Jaroslav Heyrovský, the Croatian Nobel laureate Leopold Ruzicka, the English woman Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, and the French Nobel laureate Henri Moissan, who isolated fluorine (F, atomic number 9; the most reactive and electronegative of all chemical elements due to its extreme ability to attract electrons) in 1886 after generations of failed efforts by others. Willard Frank Libby, a Nobel Prize winning chemist from the USA, developed radiocarbon dating in 1949. This caused a revolution in archaeology. A few additional names:
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (made an attempt in the 1820s to create a classification of the chemical elements), John Newlands (whose Law of Octaves from 1863 stimulated work on the table of elements), Nicolas Leblanc and Ernest Solvay, Andreas Libavius, Johann Josef Loschmidt, Johann Friedrich Miescher (found deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA – in 1869 but didn’t understand its full significance), Karl Friedrich Mohr (in 1837 one of the first to enunciate the doctrine of the conservation of energy), August Wilhelm von Hofmann and William Perkin, Daniel Rutherford (isolated nitrogen – symbol N, atomic number 7 – in 1772), Christian Friedrich Schönbein (discovered ozone – triatomic oxygen, O3 – in 1840 and was the first to describe guncotton) and Hermann Staudinger (demonstrated that polymers are long-chain molecules and laid the foundation for a great expansion of the plastics industry).
There is some overlapping between physics and chemistry. During the nineteenth century, European scientists worked out the reality of atoms and molecules. Amedeo Avogadro was important in this process, yet he has received a high ranking in physics, not in chemistry, while the physicist Jean Perrin, who in the early 1900s conclusively proved the existence of atoms, is ranked in chemistry. Otto Hahn is listed in chemistry whereas his associates in achieving nuclear fission, Fritz Strassmann and Lise Meitner, are ranked in physics.
The Scottish physical chemist William Ramsay collaborated with John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) on discovering an entire new family of elements, the noble gases; the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy investigated radioactivity with Ernest Rutherford at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; Robert Bunsen pioneered spectroscopy together with Gustav Kirchhoff. In all of these cases, the former is listed in chemistry, the latter in physics. This isn’t necessarily wrong; it merely reminds us how closely the two disciplines are intertwined.
The leading figures in the history of biology are, starting from the top down: Charles Darwin (1809-1882) of England; Aristotle (384-322 BC) of ancient Greece; Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) of France; Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) of France; Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) of the USA; Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), or Carl von Linné, of Sweden; William Harvey (1578-1657) of England; Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) of Germany; Stephen Hales (1677-1761) of England; Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) of the Netherlands; Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) of Italy; Claude Bernard (1813-1878) of France; Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) of the Netherlands; the Baltic German biologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876); John Ray (1627-1705) of England; Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) of Germany; Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) of Italy; Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) of the Austrian Empire; Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) of the Roman Empire; and Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) of Switzerland.
On the biology list, Albrecht von Haller has a score of 37, the same as Adolf Butenandt and slightly more than Matthias Jakob Schleiden. Many other figures have a good medium-level ranking, among them Oswald Avery, William Bateson, Martinus Beijerinck, Edouard van Beneden, Charles Bonnet, Giovanni Borelli, Theodor Boveri, Robert Brown, William Buckland, Comte de Buffon, Ferdinand Cohn, Carl Correns, Max Delbrück, René Descartes, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Empedocles, Erasistratus of Ceos, Girolamo Fabrizio, Walther Flemming, Karl von Frisch, Leonhart Fuchs, Francis Galton, Luigi Galvani, Konrad Gessner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hans Christian Gram, Nehemiah Grew, Hermann von Helmholtz, Herophilus of Alexandria, Frederick Hopkins, Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Henry Huxley, Félix d’Herelle, Jan Ingenhousz, Dimitri Ivanovsky, Wilhelm Johannsen, David Keilin, Edward Calvin Kendall, Hans Adolf Krebs, Rudolf Albert von Kölliker, Leonardo da Vinci, Phoebus Levene, Fritz Lipmann, Konrad Lorenz, Jacques Monod, Hermann Joseph Muller, Severo Ochoa, Richard Owen, William Prout, Julius von Sachs, Charles Scott Sherrington, Hans Spemann, Wendell Stanley, Ernest Starling, Niels Stensen (Steno), Alfred Sturtevant, Theophrastus, Arne Tiselius, Abraham Trembley, Erich von Tschermak, Mikhail Tsvet, Frederick Twort, Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz, Alfred Russel Wallace, Otto Warburg, August Weismann and Caspar Friedrich Wolff.
The biology index includes a mixture of botany, zoology, evolution, genetics and physiology. A number of these categories overlap with medicine to such an extent that the two can be hard to separate. Pasteur was a microbiologist, yet he is listed under medicine because of his seminal role in establishing the germ theory of disease. On the other hand, several prominent individuals in the biology section worked so extensively with the properties and circulation of human blood that they might just as well have been listed under medicine. These include Realdo Colombo, Michael Servetus, William Harvey, Johannes Purkinje and finally Karl Landsteiner, whose fine work on blood groups was of tremendous importance for surgery.
The same principle applies to those studying physiology, anatomy, the nervous system and the human brain, for instance neurologists like the Nobel laureates Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, although Thomas Willis, the English doctor who founded modern neurology in the 1660s, is listed in medicine. The French nineteenth century physiologist Claude Bernard, one of the founders of experimental medicine, is listed in both medicine and biology.
One could debate whether Lamarck is ranked too high or Mendel too low, but they both belong on the list. Lamarck’s theory of evolution was wrong, but he contributed to interest in the concept and founded invertebrate zoology. Georges Cuvier founded comparative anatomy and paleontology as disciplines. Morgan is the only person born in the USA to make it to the top five in any science category, thanks to his fine work on chromosomes and heredity.
The Italian physiologists Marcello Malpighi and Lazzaro Spallanzani, the Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam, the German physiologist Theodor Schwann and the German embryologists Karl Ernst von Baer and Ernst Haeckel all used microscopes for some of their biological investigations between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a tool which opened up vast new research possibilities. Why isn’t the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ranked, although in the 1670s and 80s he was the first person in the world to see bacteria?
One could claim that the biochemists Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane haven’t been properly credited for their “primordial soup” hypothesis regarding the origins of life in Earth, experimentally tested by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago in 1952. Obviously, nobody knows how life first came into being on our planet or elsewhere, and the answers will differ greatly depending upon the religious views of those you ask. Nonetheless, regardless of whether or not you agree with their hypothesis, Oparin’s and Haldane’s ideas substantially influenced this field of research and should be mentioned.
Human Accomplishment: Art, Music and Literature
The 2003 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by the American political scientist Charles Murray has achieved a well-deserved status as a modern classic. Murray attempted to quantify the accomplishments of individuals worldwide in the arts and sciences. He did this by comparing important reference works made by leading scholars in their respective fields regarding various different forms of achievement, ranked individuals according to the amount of space they were given in the books he employed as source material, and only included persons in his lists over “significant figures” who were mentioned in at least half of these qualifying sources. “Setting the cutoff at 50 percent includes almost everyone who is famous and large numbers of the obscure.”
Imhotep, Immanuel Kant, and J.S. Bach
In addition to this, Charles Murray also attempted to analyze some of the variables involved in rates of human accomplishment, such as religion, political systems, urbanization and wars. The author found that nearly all important scientific and technological advances in the modern world until the mid-twentieth century were made by Europeans or their descendants overseas.
What had mankind accomplished by about 800 BC? Quite a lot: They had animal husbandry, a variety of grain and fruit crops, irrigation, several writing systems including the first alphabets, written laws, stone buildings and walled cities, mirrors, bow drills, swords, leather, glass, bronze, iron, silver, gold, mining, papyrus, board games, furniture, musical instruments, sailing boats, bridges, basic surgery, herbal pharmaceuticals, calendars and some knowledge of the solar and lunar cycles, simple geometry and algebra, wine and beer, red and blue dyes, cosmetics, jewelry, sculpture, painting, mosaics and fine architecture plus epics and poetry.
So why not start the book earlier? Primarily because the archaeological and historical records become increasingly uncertain the further back we move in time. Moreover, although these were accomplishments in their own right, essentially nothing of the art, music, medicine or mathematics from this archaic age is now a part of our everyday world. Murray’s work ranks named inventors, not inventions. These criteria do, sadly, leave out important advances such as the creation of the first undisputed writing system by the Sumerians, but it also excludes contributions made by European peoples in prehistoric times, from Paleolithic cave paintings to Stonehenge. This may be unfortunate, but it is not the result of any “Eurocentric” bias.
Early history is shrouded in myth, but a few individuals stand out. The Egyptian polymath Imhotep in the 27th century BC designed the Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser at Saqqara, which at over 60 meters tall marked one of the world’s first truly large-scale uses of stone as a building material. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt states that “His historicity has been confirmed by the discovery of the base of a statue of Djoser that also bears Imhotep’s name.”
William Osler, a prominent Canadian professor of medicine, considered Imhotep to be “the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity.” Osler revolutionized the medical curriculum in North America at the turn of the twentieth century and introduced the German postgraduate training system. His very popular medical textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine went through many editions during the 1900s.
In addition to the scientific disciplines, Human Accomplishment includes rankings in Western music and Western art, Indian literature, Japanese literature, Chinese literature, Chinese painting and Japanese art, as well as listings for Indian, Chinese and Western philosophy, respectively, but no ranking for Islamic philosophy. A separate philosophy inventory was not prepared for Korea or Japan because so much of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese philosophy derives from Chinese sources, or from India in the case of Buddhism.
While Oriental philosophy is in content very different from its European counterpart, the Chinese did historically generate an extensive and well-developed philosophical tradition. By contrast, much of the philosophical writings in the Islamic world were simply commentaries on ancient Greek works, and even that was frequently considered suspect. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “Islamic philosophy” in the narrow sense of the word because most Muslim scholars concentrated on interpreting the Koran and religious texts. Western scholars read the Bible, yes, but they did many things besides that and created a vast literature of political and economic philosophy that was and is virtually non-existent in the Islamic world.
The seeds of some ideologies that are still with us today can be traced back to the mid-first millennium BC, with the Axial Age in philosophy and the rise of the great Iron Age empires in Eurasia: the Persian one followed by Alexander’s and Rome’s, plus comparable entities in India and China. These huge empires established Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity.
In Chinese philosophy, Confucius (551-479 BC) ranks far ahead of anybody else as the single most influential thinker in East Asian history. The only other person close to his level is Laozi (“Old Master”), the shadowy figure who may have been a rough contemporary of Confucius and is traditionally viewed as the first thinker in the philosophy known as Daoism or Taoism. The rationalist Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose synthesis reinvigorated Confucianism, is number three, followed by Mencius (ca. 371-289 BC), the most important ancient Confucian thinker after Confucius; Zhuangzi (ca. 369-286 BC), an interpreter of Daoism who exerted a great influence on the development of Chinese Buddhism and landscape painting; Xunzi (ca. 300-230 BC), who systematized Confucian thought; and the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529). Only in eighth place do we finally encounter an original thinker not associated primarily with either Confucianism or Daoism: Mozi (ca. 470-391 BC), who founded the interesting movement known as Mohism.
While others mattered, such as Buddhism or Legalism, the militaristic-totalitarian ideology that allowed the ruthless First Emperor — Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC) — to unify China, no single school of thought has had a greater impact on Chinese civilization than Confucianism.
Among the most prominent personalities in the history of Western philosophy, Aristotle (384-322 BC) ranks ahead of his teacher Plato (ca. 428-348 BC), followed by the highly influential German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), especially remembered for his Critique of Pure Reason; then René Descartes (1596-1650) of France, one of the leading lights of rational thought during the Scientific Revolution; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the most notable of the post-Kantian German idealists who later influenced Karl Marx; the Italian Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-1274) with his Summa Theologica; the English thinker and medical researcher John Locke (1632-1704), especially famous for his social contract and “blank slate” theories and for works such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government; and the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist David Hume (1711-1776).
After Hume comes Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430), the most important Christian writer of Late Antiquity; the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), one of the most radical thinkers of early modern Europe; the polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716); the freethinker Socrates (ca. 469-399 BC) from ancient Athens; the prominent German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860); the Anglo-Irish bishop and naturalist George Berkeley (1685-1753), best known for his empiricist philosophy; Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) of Germany (Prussia), who challenged traditional Christian “slave morality” and promoted such ideas as the “death of God,” the Übermensch and the will to power; the English author Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who in the 1651 book Leviathan effectively founded modern political theory with the social contract concept and his “war of all against all”; the logician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) of Britain; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Swiss-born political theorist whose writings inspired the leaders of the French Revolution; Plotinus (ca. AD 205-270), the founder of Neoplatonism; and finally Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).
Good medium-level names are Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Francis Bacon, Democritus, John Dewey, Epicurus of Samos, Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus of Ephesus, William James, Søren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Parmenides of Elea, Pythagoras of Samos, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Schelling, Ludwig Wittgenstein and William of Ockham.
Other figures include Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus, Anselm of Canterbury, Jeremy Bentham, Henri Bergson, Boethius, Bonaventure, Giordano Bruno, Rudolf Carnap, Chrysippus of Soli, John Duns Scotus, Empedocles, Johannes Scotus Erigena, Johann Gottfried Herder, Edmund Husserl, Leucippus of Miletus, Nicolas Malebranche, Montesquieu, Thomas More, Nicholas of Cusa, Blaise Pascal, Philo Judaeus, Charles Sanders Peirce, Proclus, Protagoras, Thomas Reid, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Herbert Spencer, Voltaire, Alfred N. Whitehead, Christian Wolff, Zeno of Citium and Zeno of Elea.
Parts of the source material treated political thinkers as secondary figures. This affected negatively on the rankings of important personalities such as Cicero and Machiavelli. The most striking omissions from Western philosophy are Jesus of Nazareth — Jesus Christ to believers — and Saint Paul, who shaped the young religion that was to become Christianity more than any other person apart from Jesus himself. They are not listed as they were purely religious figures. I understand this point, but it does look somewhat artificial since many explicitly Christian thinkers made the list, from Origen via Aquinas to Martin Luther and John Calvin. Mr. Luther showed little interest in philosophy not directly related to religious issues.
Murray defines “philosophy” as something intermediate between theology and science, “seeking truths about great metaphysical and ethical questions as does religion, but, like science, appealing to the mind instead of faith.” The Buddha did not invoke a divine being as part of his teachings. He qualifies as a philosopher. The teachings of Jesus and Muhammad seem qualitatively different in this regard, containing philosophical elements but ones that are subordinate to a religious message. They are therefore not part of the inventory of philosophy.
The author included people who were described in the sources as philosophers or theologians, be that Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish or Muslim ones. Excluded from the lists are persons whose writings primarily involved economics, sociology, psychology or political science (as opposed to political philosophy). Political figures are considered only to the extent that they also had an impact on political philosophy. Among the Founding Fathers of the USA, applying these criteria would include Thomas Jefferson but not George Washington.
Absent are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and for that matter Adam Smith. Smith was a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and in 1776 published his Wealth of Nations, widely considered the first modern work of economics, where he introduced the idea that trade is not always a zero-sum game but can be a win-win situation, plus the metaphor of the Invisible Hand. Marx is presumably excluded because he, too, doesn’t fall under the label philosophy, which is fair enough, but again it looks a bit strange to name later thinkers in the Marxist tradition like Sartre, who was an apologist for brutally repressive Communist regimes such as Stalin’s Soviet Union, but not Karl Marx himself. If we instead make a list of “people who influenced Western thought,” which is not at all the same as “Western philosophy,” then Marx surely has to receive a prominent place, regardless of whether you like his ideas or not.
Who does Charles Murray personally consider to be the most accomplished individual who ever lived? “Aristotle. He more or less invented logic, which was of pivotal importance in human history (and no other civilization ever came up with it independently). He wrote the essay on ethics (‘Nicomachean Ethics’) that to my mind contains the bedrock truths about the nature of living a satisfying human life. He made huge contributions to aesthetics, political theory, methods of classification and scientific observation. Who else even comes close?”
In Indian philosophy, Adi Sankara or Shankara in the eighth century AD added system to the haphazard insights of the ancient Upanishads. He became the leading exponent of the Advaita Vedanta School, whose thoughts still form the mainstream of Hinduism. Number two, far behind him in influence, is Nagarjuna, who flourished around AD 200 and founded the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him “the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself and one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. His philosophy of the ‘middle way’ (madhyamaka) based around the central notion of ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) influenced the Indian philosophical debate for a thousand years after his death; with the spread of Buddhism to Tibet, China, Japan and other Asian countries the writings of Nagarjuna became an indispensable point of reference for their own philosophical inquiries.”
Number three is the eleventh-century Brahman philosopher and Hindu theologian Ramanuja. Only in fourth place do we find Siddhartha Gautama or Gautama Buddha, who was either a rough contemporary of Socrates in the fifth century BC or a younger contemporary of Confucius. He was the founder of a major religion or philosophy whose total influence throughout Asia exceeded that of Hinduism (and for that matter Confucianism), but his ideas were secondary within India itself. Nevertheless, it does look somewhat artificial to place a later Buddhist philosopher such as Nagarjuna above the founder of Buddhism in importance.
A few steps behind we find Madhva (ca. 1199-1278), the exponent of Dvaita, the Dualistic school of Hindu philosophy, in fifth place. After him comes the shadowy figure of Patanjali, who may have lived in the second century BC although this is not certain. Sometimes dubbed the “father of yoga,” Patanjali is alleged to have at least codified, and partly developed, some of the ideas behind the meditative practices of yoga (Sanskrit: “union”) in the Yoga-sutras:
“The men at the top — Confucius, Sankara, and Aristotle — are where they are because each, in some important sense, defined what it meant to be Chinese, Indian, or Western. Confucian ethics, aesthetics, and principles of statecraft became China’s de facto state religion in -3C and remained so for another two thousand years. As the man who shaped the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, Sankara has pervasively shaped Indian thought down to the present day. In the West, there is more ambiguity. Plato preceded Aristotle, Aristotelian thought owes extensively to Plato, and it was, after all, Plato rather than Aristotle of whom Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy is his footnote. And yet in the end Aristotle had had the more profound effect on Western culture. Some of Plato’s final conclusions, especially regarding the role of the state, are totalitarian. In contrast, Aristotle’s understandings of virtue, the nature of a civilized polity, happiness, and human nature have not only survived but have become so integral a part of Western culture that to be a European or American and hold mainstream values on these issues is to be an Aristotelian.”
Only painting had a consistent tradition of named artists in China, which means that valuable contributions there in sculpture and ceramics are not included. For the same reason, the only inventory for music is the Western one, not because good music hasn’t been made in other cultures but because only the European one had a tradition of named individual composers.
In Chinese painting, the scholar and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) is tied for first place with the artist and poet Gu Kaizhi (ca. AD 344-406). They are followed by Wu Daozi (ca. AD 700-760); Dong Qichang (1555-1636); the influential landscape painter Ma Yuan (ca. 1160-1225); Huang Gongwang (ca. 1269-1354); Guo Xi (ca. 1020-1090) who completed the famous Early Spring hanging scroll painting in 1072; the landscape painter Xia Gui (1195-1224); the painter, poet and calligrapher Mi Fu (1051-1107); the artist Ni Zan (1301-1374); and the accomplished poet, musician, painter and statesman Wang Wei (ca. AD 701-761).
In twelfth place we even find an emperor, Huizong of Song (1082-1135), who was a skilled painter and calligrapher. He cultivated the arts almost to a fault and arguably neglected China’s military defenses. Mary and Robert Heiss explain in The Story of Tea: “Known for his aesthetic tastes, he ushered in the creation of luxurious porcelains characterized by refined elegance, underglaze decorations, subtle etched designs, and sensuous glazes. Song porcelains were mostly monochromatic and the most popular type — Qingbai porcelain — had a bluish-white glaze. These cups not only increased tea-drinking pleasure, but they also encouraged awareness and admiration of the tea liquor itself. It was during this point in the development of tea culture that teawares began to be viewed as objects of desire and value and not just as functional tools.” Teahouses became important places to socialize and play board games.
The invention of porcelain was aided by the natural presence of two key materials, kaolin (soft white clay) and petuntse, near each other in China. Tea came into widespread use as a social drink during the Tang Dynasty; Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea around the year 770. Camellia sinensis occurs naturally in Burma and in the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of southwestern China. Tea was a medicinal herb in ancient times but became a daily drink between the fourth and ninth centuries AD. Its use spread to Korea and Japan via Buddhist monks. The elaborate Japanese tea ceremony was codified by Sen Rikyu in the late 1500s.
Europeans who came to China in the early modern period quickly developed a taste for the beverage, so much so that they spread its use to regions far beyond where it had previously been enjoyed, thus globalizing a Chinese invention and in return introducing American specialties such as tomatoes, sweet potatoes, maize and tobacco to Asia. The Dutch East India Company brought tea to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the Dutch later grew tea in their colonies in Indonesia. The British promoted it in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the nineteenth century, when the Scottish merchant Thomas Lipton created his famous tea brand. By the mid-1700s, tea had become popular in Russia, too. Russians became the first nation to invent a separate machine to brew it, a metal (traditionally brass) urn known as the samovar.
In Japanese art, the maximum score of 100 is achieved by Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506), a Zen Buddhist monk inspired by Chinese landscape paintings and a master of the style of monochrome ink painting, although he did use color skillfully later in his career. He was followed in the early 1600s by Tawaraya Sotatsu, the founder of the Rimpa school of painting.
Number three Ogata Korin (1658-1716) was another great master of the Rimpa school, famous for screen paintings, lacquerwork and textile designs. His brother Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) is often considered Japan’s greatest potter. In fourth place we find the painter Kano Eitoku (1543-1590), who came from a gifted artistic family. After him come Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), founder of the Hasegawa school of painting; and the celebrated painter, potter, lacquerer and calligrapher Honami Koetsu (1558-1637), born in the imperial city of Kyoto into a family of sword polishers. In seventh place is the printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) from Edo (Tokyo). He is among the Japanese artists who are best-known to a Western audience with his woodblock prints Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the sacred mountain of Japan, among them the beautiful color print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
In Chinese literature, the leading figure is without question Du Fu (AD 712-770), who spent years travelling in China. “Du Fu is barely known in the West. He is not only ranked first here but, according to those who are in a position to evaluate such things, was one of the greatest poets ever, anywhere. The problem for Western readers is that the aesthetic nuances and layers of meaning in great Chinese poetry cannot be retained in even the best translations.”
After him comes his contemporary poet Li Bai (AD 701-762), followed by Bai Juyi (AD 772-846) and the Song era poet and statesman Su Dongpo (1037-1101), a fine representative of the Imperial examination system at its best. Number five is Han Yu (AD 768-824); six the scholar and poet Qu Yuan (ca. 339-278 BC) from the Warring States Period of pre-Imperial China, whose death is commemorated during the Dragon Boat Festival. In seventh place we find the first prose writer: the Han Dynasty eunuch Sima Qian (ca. 145-87 BC), whose The Records of the Grand Historian was to shape Chinese historiography for centuries to come.
By universal acclaim, the greatest poet in Indian literature was the Classical Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa. He probably lived in the Gupta period, perhaps in the fifth century AD, and he may have been a Brahman (priest). Among the works ascribed to him, many of which are informed by Hindu mythology, is the drama Abhijnanasakuntala (“The Recognition of Sakuntala”), which was admired by Goethe when it was translated into European languages in the late 1700s, and the lyric Meghaduta (“Cloud Messenger”). Next to him we find Vyasa and Valmiki, the alleged authors of the great Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, respectively, yet their historicity is at least as debatable as that of Homer in archaic Greece.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali poet, novelist, short-story writer and playwright, was in 1913 the first non-European individual to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but traditional Indian literature before the British colonial period exposed India to Western influences was overwhelmingly dominated by just these three above-mentioned major figures.
The Japanese literature inventory is characterized by a large number of writers who all receive substantial attention rather than by a few dominant ones, as was the case with India. The ranking is topped by Basho (1644-1694), “by consensus Japan’s greatest poet and the master of haiku; Chikamatsu (1653-1725), by consensus Japan’s greatest dramatist, writing mostly for the bunraku (puppet theatre); Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978-1014), author of The Tale of Genji, by consensus Japan’s greatest work of literature (and the highest ranking woman in any of the inventories); and Saikaku (1642-1693), writer of brilliant erotic tales and famous for his speed-writing of haikai, humorous linked-verse poems that were the source of haiku.”
Number five is Mori Ogai (1862-1922), a modern novelist from an old samurai family who had studied medicine in Germany. Ki no Tsurayuki (died ca. AD 945), a man of letters from the Heian period, took part in the compilation of the first Imperial poetry anthology in Japan.
Murray prepared a separate inventory for “Arabic literature” which also includes several individuals who wrote in Persian, for instance the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), and non-Muslims who partly wrote in Arabic, such as the Lebanese-born Christian poet Khalil Gibran (1883-1931). Al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-Mutanabbi (AD 915-965), born in what is today Iraq and widely hailed as the greatest poet in the Arabic language, easily ranks ahead of Abu Nuwas (ca. AD 750-814). In addition to Arabic, Abu Nuwas knew Persian from his mother and was admired by Persian poets such as Omar Khayyam and Hafez for his style and for writing about wine, sex and subjects that were frowned upon by orthodox Muslims.
The blind Arab poet al-Ma’arri (973-1057) in third place led a more secluded life, although he, too, was a freethinker who questioned many central Islamic dogmas. Number four is Imru’ al-Qays, who may have lived around AD 500 and was the most famous Arabian poet of pre-Islamic times, above all remembered for his Mu’allaqat collection. Number five is Abu Tammam (ca. AD 800-845), born in Syria to Christian parents. Barely making it to the top twenty is the Moroccan Berber explorer Ibn Battuta (1304-1369). His Rihlah (“Journey”) describes Ibn Battuta’s travels in Islamic-ruled lands from West Africa to Southeast Asia.
As the case of Imru’ al-Qays demonstrates, Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula themselves admit that poetry has pre-Islamic roots in their culture. Arabic has been praised as a language well-suited for poetry, but the predominance of poetry is also because “Islamic literature operated under two theological constraints. Drama was considered to be a representational art and forbidden. Realistic fiction was considered to be a form of lying, and also forbidden.”
There never was anything resembling “theater” in the pre-modern Islamic world. Neither is this region known for its artistic traditions. Yes, fine Persian rugs can constitute works of art, but such handicraft traditions often have deeper historical roots that predate the Islamic conquests. As for calligraphy, Muslims could make some fine works in this category, but we should remember that East Asians such as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and the Vietnamese often excelled in this art form while simultaneously creating extremely refined works of painting and sculpture as well as exquisite poetry. On the whole, Islam served to severely restrict most possible forms of artistic expression. It would be accurate to state that Islam inhibited artistic creativity more than any other major religious tradition in the world.
Those who have been fortunate enough to visit the Vatican and see the great Church of Saint Peter’s in Rome cannot fail to be awed by the beautiful paintings and sculptures it contains. The Roman Catholic Church has received a lot of criticism over the years and has sometimes deserved this, but then it should also be credited for its positive contributions. It is unthinkable in Islam that religious leaders in the centers of Mecca and Medina would hire artists like Michelangelo or Raphael to decorate mosques with paintings and sculptures, as many Catholic popes did. Muslim militants no doubt want the Sistine Chapel to suffer the same fate as countless un-Islamic works of art such as the destroyed Buddha status of Central Asia. If the ongoing Islamization of Europe continues, a day may come when they have their way.
Likewise, music wasn’t normally used for religious services; there is no Islamic equivalent of Johann Sebastian Bach, who filled Lutheran churches in Germany with magnificent compositions designed to uplift the Christian faithful, and gave God credit for his works. They include The Art of Fugue and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, still one of the most played works in the organ repertoire, The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Brandenburg Concertos.
In Western music, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) stands at the top next to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), with both men receiving the maximum score of 100. After them we find the German composer, organist, harpsichordist and violinist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and the German composer, conductor and theater director Richard Wagner (1813-1883), with the prolific Austrian Classical composer Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in fifth place.
Following Haydn there are quite a few personalities with a decent score in the 40s, 30s or high 20s: the German-born English Baroque composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1759); the Russian-born composer, pianist and conductor Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971); the prominent French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918); the Hungarian piano virtuoso, composer and musical teacher Franz Liszt (1811-1886); the prolific Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828); the German Romantic composer and music critic Robert Schumann (1810-1856); the French Romantic composer, critic and conductor Hector Berlioz (1803-1869); the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951); the German Romantic composer and pianist Johannes Brahms (1833-1897); the Polish-born composer, piano virtuoso and music teacher Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849); the Italian late Renaissance composer and opera pioneer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643); the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901); the German Jewish composer, pianist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847); the German composer and opera director Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826); and finally the German opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787).
From Salzburg, Austria, Mozart was a child prodigy, famously prolific and still getting better when he died at the age of thirty-five. He wrote over 600 works during his lifetime, which include Eine kleine Nachtmusik, symphonies 40 and 41 (“Jupiter”), his 20th through 24th piano concerti and popular operas such as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro. The last year of his life was highly productive. He then created some of his greatest works, among them the opera Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”), the Clarinet Concerto K. 622 and finally his magnificent Requiem, left unfinished at the composer’s death in Vienna in December 1791.
Born in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven was a talented pianist who moved to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn and may also have met Mozart. He was in some ways an extension of this Viennese Classical world but he also introduced ideas that would define the ensuing Romantic era. He is especially remembered for his nine symphonies; the Third (“Eroica”), from 1803 marked a new period in his life, but the Fifth and Ninth symphonies are his most famous ones today. Beethoven is renowned for piano works, too, including sonatas such as Pathétique. His Moonlight Sonata from 1801 is surely one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever created, in any nation or age. His body of work is not at large as Mozart’s, but “There is still no department of music that does not owe him its very soul,” in the words of historian Paul Lang.
Perhaps finding Wagner in fourth place, significantly ahead of Haydn, will surprise some readers. After all, Haydn was an older friend and contemporary of Mozart, a teacher of Beethoven and the “father of the modern symphony.” Yet Wagner’s influence on the future course of music and art was far greater, regardless of what one might think of him as a person.
Other major names in the European tradition of what is now often called “classical” music are Jean-Baptiste Lully, Gustav Mahler, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Ravel, Gioachino Rossini, Richard Strauss, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Paul Hindemith, Josquin des Prez, Henry Purcell, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, Dimitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alessandro Scarlatti, Anton Webern, Camille Saint-Saëns, Béla Bartók, César Franck, Antonio Vivaldi, Anton Bruckner, Heinrich Schütz, Giacomo Meyerbeer, François Couperin, Orlando Lassus, Olivier Messiaen, Guillaume Dufay, Antonin Dvorak, Arcangelo Corelli, Edvard Grieg, Bedrich Smetana, Jean Sibelius, Georg Telemann, Charles Gounod, Gabriel Fauré, Darius Milhaud, Alban Berg, William Byrd, Giovanni Gabrieli, Domenico Scarlatti, Giovanni Pergolesi, Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Cherubini, Hugo Wolf, Georges Bizet and Adriaan Willaert.
Some additional musical figures: Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Christian Bach, Vincenzo Bellini, Franz Berwald, Alexander Borodin, Dietrich Buxtehude, Ferruccio Busoni, Antonio de Cabezón, Francesco Cavalli, Frederick Delius, Gaetano Donizetti, John Dunstable, Edward Elgar, George Enescu, Manuel de Falla, Mikhail Glinka, Johann Adolph Hasse, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Vincent d’Indy, Heinrich Isaac, Charles Ives, Leoš Janácek, Zoltán Kodály, Francesco Landini, Léonin (Leoninus), Martin Luther, Jules Massenet, Thomas Morley, Leopold Mozart, Carl Nielsen, Jakob Obrecht, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacques Offenbach, Carl Orff, Pérotin (Perotinus), Francis Poulenc, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Max Reger, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexander Scriabin, Johann Stamitz, Johann Strauss Jr., Karol Szymanowski, Thomas Tallis, Edgard Varèse, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Tomás de Victoria and Kurt Weill.
In the twentieth century we encounter a number of entirely new musical disciplines such as jazz or blues, many of them with strong North American influences. These are not generally listed in Human Accomplishment. Louis Armstrong, Édith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich are nowhere to be found although Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington are listed, which appears a bit arbitrary. Rock and roll music had a breakthrough in the USA in the 1950s with such performers as the African American guitarist and songwriter Chuck Berry, but since Murray’s work does not include anybody from after 1950 there is no Elvis Presley or The Beatles here, nor for that matter any Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd or Bruce Springsteen.
In the index for Western music we find an impressive number of composers, but not many individuals who developed musical instruments, for example Bartolomeo Cristofori who created the first recognizable pianos in northern Italy around the year 1700; the woodwind instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner who invented the clarinet at about the same time; the German flute maker Theobald Boehm who improved the key mechanism and fingering system on many flutes in the mid-1800s; or Adolphe Sax who created the saxophone in 1841.
In the twentieth century, electricity was increasingly used not just for recording and reproducing music but soon also for making it, either with newly invented musical instruments or with electric versions of older ones, for instance the guitar. Laurens Hammond in the USA invented an electric organ in 1934. He is absent. Brilliant makers of fine musical instruments like Antonio Stradivari, Nicolò Amati and Andrea Guarneri are excluded as well.
Dancing was not included by Murray, which left out personalities such as the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. He founded the Ballets Russes (“The Russian Ballets”) in Paris in 1909 and in Western exile “revitalized ballet by integrating the ideals of other art forms — music, painting, and drama — with those of the dance.” Dance was prominent in pagan rituals and largely ignored in medieval Christian Europe, but secular dance as an art form resurfaced in the Western world during the Italian Renaissance period. In the late 1600s at the court of Louis XIV, the French dancer Pierre Beauchamp, an associate of composer the Jean-Baptiste Lully, substantially influenced the development of ballet. His name is not mentioned, either.
Next to literature and music, the Russian contributions to European high culture have been particularly strong in ballet. As Norman Davies states: “From Italy, the baletto was exported in the time of Catherine de’ Medici to the French court, where, under Louis XIV, it became a major art form. Lully’s Triomphe l’Amour (1681) fixed the long-lasting genre of opera ballet. The modern theory and practice of ballet were largely developed in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, especially by the royal ballet master Jean Georges Noverre (1727-1810)… Russia first imported French and Italian ballet under Peter the Great, but in the nineteenth century moved rapidly from imitation to creative excellence. Tchaikovsky’s music for Swan Lake (1876), Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892) laid the foundations for Russia’s supremacy. In the last years of peace, the Ballets Russes launched by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) enjoyed a series of unsurpassed triumphs. The choreography of Fokine, the dancing of Nizinski and Karsavina, and, above all, the scores of Stravinsky, brought ballet to its zenith with The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). After the Revolutions of 1917, the Ballets Russes stayed abroad, whilst the Soviet Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets combined stunning technical mastery with rigid artistic conservatism.”
Notice that Communists didn’t totally ban ballet. Islamic sharia does. This demonstrates how Islam can be more totalitarian than even the most repressive elements of Western thought.
In Western literature, the top twenty are: the English writer William Shakespeare (1564-1616); the German poet, playwright and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832); the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321); the ancient Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, better known as Virgil or Vergil (70-19 BC); Homer from ancient Greece, who may have lived around 700 BC; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) from Geneva, an influential philosopher, author and composer; the French Enlightenment writer and philosopher François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), better known as Voltaire; the French comedy playwright and actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), or Molière; the English Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788-1824); the Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); the Russian novelist and short-story writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881); the Italian (Tuscan) scholar, poet and Renaissance humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), or Petrarch; the French Romantic poet and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802-1885); the German dramatist, poet and literary theorist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805); the Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375); the ancient Roman lyric poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC), or Horace; the leading tragic dramatist Euripides (ca. 484-406 BC) from ancient Athens; the French dramatist Jean Racine (1639-1699); the Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet Walter Scott (1771-1832); and finally the socially radical Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906).
In this context we leave out the still-ongoing scholarly debate as to whether or not Homer was an historical person and whether he composed both epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey alone. Shakespeare was a fine poet in addition to being perhaps the greatest playwright the world has ever seen. His plays Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream are all so famous, and justly so, that they require no further comment. Neither do Goethe’s Faust or Dante’s Divine Comedy, acknowledged masterpieces of world literature.
Dostoyevsky left us with such works as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Gambler; Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Molière, Petrarch, Hugo, Schiller and Euripides should not be too controversial to most lovers of literature, either, but a few of the other names mentioned here might be so. Murray predicts such a reaction:
“What is Rousseau doing in sixth place? Voltaire in seventh? Byron in ninth? Scott in nineteenth? In the cases of Rousseau and Voltaire, the ratings partly reflect their combined fiction and nonfiction. But even when I recomputed indexes based exclusively on fictional work, they ranked high, because of the difference between histories of literature and of the other arts. Historians of music and the visual arts discuss composers and artists almost exclusively in terms of their place in their artistic worlds. Histories of literature spend more space on the influence of authors, including authors of fiction, on social and political movements — the Enlightenment in the case of Rousseau and Voltaire, the Romantic movement in the case of Byron and Scott. This tendency contaminates the Western literature index as a representation of purely literary excellence, but it appropriately reflects the way in which Western literature has been intertwined with politics and society.”
Among the great many excellent names in this category — by far the largest in the book in terms of the number of individuals listed there — some other Western literary figures include Aeschylus, Aesop, H.C. Andersen, Ludovico Ariosto, Aristophanes, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Bertolt Brecht, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Luís de Camões, Miguel de Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Anton Chekhov, Cicero, Samuel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Pierre Corneille, Daniel Defoe, Demosthenes, Charles Dickens, Denis Diderot, John Donne, John Dryden, Alexandre Dumas, T. S. Eliot, Erasmus of Rotterdam, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Federico Lorca, André Gide, Nikolai Gogol, Luis de Góngora, Maxim Gorky, the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Hardy, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Herodotus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ludvig Holberg, Friedrich Hölderlin, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Julius Caesar, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich G. Klopstock, Jean de La Fontaine, Selma Lagerlöf, Gotthold Lessing, Lope de Vega, Niccolò Machiavelli, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, Adam Mickiewicz, John Milton, Michel de Montaigne, Montesquieu, Novalis, Ovid, Boris Pasternak, Luigi Pirandello, Plautus, Plutarch, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, François Rabelais, Samuel Richardson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean Arthur Rimbaud, Pierre de Ronsard, Sappho of Lesbos, Seneca, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Shelley, Sophocles, Edmund Spenser, Stendhal, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Tacitus, Torquato Tasso, Alfred Tennyson, Terence, William Thackeray, Thucydides, Ivan Turgenev, Mark Twain, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats and Émile Zola.
Since everybody who reads has his or her favorite authors, it should be possible to find names that were left out of this index. Personally, I noticed that there is no Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee here to track alleged signs of Western decline. I also cannot see José Ortega y Gasset from Madrid, Spain mentioned in Western philosophy or literature. He deserves at least a brief mention for his The Revolt of the Masses (“La rebelión de las masas”) from 1929.
Jules Verne, the prolific French author who laid much of the foundation of modern science fiction in the late 1800s with A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, is not listed under Western literature. The English sci-fi author H. G. Wells is, though. I find this strange. Verne was a widely read writer who fired the imagination of countless people, a few of whom were later to become serious scientists. Arthur C. Clarke, an English science fiction author, proposed a global satellite communication system already in 1945, years before the Space Age had begun.
Another literary genre not widely represented is fantasy, with elaborate stories set in imaginary worlds. George MacDonald’s allegorical fairy tales from the late 1800s inspired such twentieth century authors as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Of course, popularity at the moment is not necessarily synonymous with enduring literary qualities. Yet Tolkien in particular was also a serious philologist. The Lord of the Rings, one of best-selling novels of all time and made into a film trilogy by New Zealand director Peter Jackson (2001-2003), was published in 1954-1955, but Tolkien’s first book came out in 1937. He might have been mentioned, compared to some rather obscure names found elsewhere in the literature index.
There is a big debate regarding what constitutes the “first novel.” Murray claims that nothing quite like it existed in Asia until the late 1800s when it was adopted from the West. China and Japan (but not India) had produced works that portrayed common people and gave detailed descriptions of social life. The Plum in the Golden Vase, which was printed in the early 1600s, was complex, but it still contained elements of the supernatural and the plots were more episodic than in the Western form of the novel. Murray considers this to be true even of Cao Xueqin’s celebrated Dream of the Red Chamber from the mid-1700s. This work criticized the inhumanity Chinese feudal society. It portrayed many complex characters and also gave rich and detailed descriptions of their daily lives in the vernacular. The conversations were written in the Beijing Mandarin dialect, which has become the basis of modern spoken Chinese.
The Tale of Genji, attributed to the noblewoman Lady Murasaki (ca. 1010) is by some seen as the first novel, but Murray believes that this term should indicate something more than a long fictional prose narrative. Japanese literature could achieve great beauty, rivaling anything in the European tradition, but the energy was usually mainly directed toward poetry and drama:
“Perhaps the best evidence that the Western novel never really had a counterpart in China, Japan, and India before their contact with the West comes from the commentary of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian intellectuals after contact with the West. In each case, it was recognized that the Western novel was something unlike anything in their own tradition. The emergence of the novel is important for many reasons, but the most salient is the way in which the novel added a new dimension not just for creating beauty, but for seeking out truths. Writers since Homer had been trying to get at the truth of the human condition in it psychological dimensions, and the greatest writers succeeded spectacularly well even in ancient times. But there was hardly anything at all in the fictional literatures of the world about humans as social creatures. The novel made that inquiry possible, and in so doing made literature a partner with the social and behavioral sciences in understanding how humans and human societies work.”
Some of the great writers of European as well as world literature in the 1800s include Charles Dickens, one of the most popular English novelists of the Victorian era, the US-born British author Henry James and Leo Tolstoy of Russia. From the 1900s there are literally too many novelists to count, for instance Ernest Hemingway from the USA whose characteristic style is seen in The Old Man and the Sea. The term “novel” is used about many texts that differ from each other quite substantially apart from the fact that they are extended works of fiction written in prose. M. H. Abrams elaborates in A Glossary of Literary Terms, Sixth Edition:
“As an extended narrative, the novel is distinguished from the short story and from the work of middle length called the novelette; its magnitude permits a greater variety of characters, greater complication of plot (or plots), ampler development of milieu, and more sustained exploration of character than do the shorter, more concentrated modes. As a narrative written in prose, the novel is distinguished from the long narratives in verse of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton which, beginning with the eighteenth century, the novel has increasingly supplanted. Within these limits the novel includes such diverse works as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove; Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Franz Kafka’s The Trial; Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor. The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which is derived from the medieval term, the romance. The English name for the form, on the other hand, is derived from the Italian novella (literally, ‘a little new thing’), which was a short tale in prose.”
Long narrative romances in prose were written by Greek writers as early as the second and third centuries AD. Typically, they dealt with separated lovers who are reunited at the end of the story. Another influential predecessor of the modern novel was the picaresque narrative, which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain. Many observers consider Don Quixote from 1605 by the great Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes to be the first European novel, but Charles Murray finds it to be a “transitional work.” He believes that the novel had not reached its modern form until Samuel Richardson’s Pamela from 1740 or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones from 1749, which led to many similar works in Europe in the 1800s. M. H. Abrams again:
“Cervantes’ great quasi-picaresque narrative Don Quixote (1605) was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel; in it, an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance in the everyday world is used to explore the general relations of illusion and reality in human life. After these precedents and many others — including the seventeenth-century character (a brief sketch of a typical personality or way of life) and French courtly romances such as Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) — what is recognizably the novel as we now think of it appeared in England in the early eighteenth century. In 1719 Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and in 1722 Moll Flanders.…Robinson Crusoe is given an enforced unity of action by its focus on the problem of surviving on an uninhabited island, while both stories present so convincing a central character, set in so solid and detailedly realized a world, that Defoe is often credited with writing the first ‘novel of incident.’ The credit for having written the first English ‘novel of character,’ or ‘psychological novel,’ is almost unanimously given to Samuel Richardson for his Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740).”
Western art has the second-most extensive index. The highest-ranking person here by far is Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) of Tuscany in northwestern Italy, with no close competitor. After him we find Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) of Spain; Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), or Raphael, of Italy; Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519); Tiziano Vecellio (ca. 1490-1576), or Titian, of Italy; Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) of Germany; Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) of the Netherlands; Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267-1337) of Italy; Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) of Italy; Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) of France; the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640); Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) of Italy; Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) of Spain; Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (ca. 1386-1466), or Donatello, of Florence, Italy; the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (ca. 1395-1441); Francisco Goya (1746-1828) of Spain; Claude Monet (1840-1926) of France; Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Cassai (1401-1428), better known as Masaccio, of Italy; Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) of the Netherlands; and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) of France.
Michelangelo was a painter, architect and poet, but first and foremost a brilliant sculptor who created timeless statues such as his Pietà and David while still in his twenties. Yet the Biblical motifs he painted at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512, including the Creation of Adam, are among the most impressive works created by any single human being in the entire world history of art. He did this feat almost completely by himself, rarely able to get far enough away from the ceiling to see what he was doing. His confidence grew as he proceeded, and the later scenes evince greater complexity than the early ones. His massive work at the Sistine Chapel contributed to the great fame he enjoyed in his lifetime.
Art historian Ernst Gombrich is normally a man of measured words, but as he says, it is hard for any ordinary mortal to imagine how it could be possible for one human being to achieve what Michelangelo did in four years of lonely work on scaffolding. The mere physical exertion of painting this huge fresco is fantastic enough, “But the physical performance of one man covering this vast space is as nothing compared to the intellectual and artistic achievement. The wealth of ever-new inventions, the unfailing mastery of execution in every detail, and, above all, the grandeur of the visions which Michelangelo revealed to those who came after him, have given mankind a quite new idea of the power of genius.”
Other Western artists of great talent include Giovanni Bellini, Hieronymus Bosch, Sandro Botticelli, Georges Braque, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Annibale Carracci, John Constable, Correggio, Gustave Courbet, Jacques-Louis David, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Anthony van Dyck, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Doménikos Theotokópoulos (El Greco), Matthias Grünewald, Frans Hals, William Hogarth, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean Ingres, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Édouard Manet, Andrea Mantegna, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch, Piero della Francesca, Nicolas Poussin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Joshua Reynolds, Auguste Rodin, Georges Seurat, Tintoretto, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Johannes Vermeer, Jean-Antoine Watteau and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Some further names: Robert Adam, Albrecht Altdorfer, Fra Angelico, William Blake, Umberto Boccioni, François Boucher, Constantin Brancusi, Il Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Cimabue, Claude Lorrain, John Singleton Copley, Camille Corot, Lucas Cranach, Salvador Dalí, Honoré Daumier, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Max Ernst, Hubert van Eyck, Jean Fouquet, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Caspar Friedrich, Henry Fuseli, Thomas Gainsborough, Gentile da Fabriano, Théodore Géricault, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Giorgio da Castelfranco, Giovanni da Bologna, Hugo van der Goes, Francesco Guardi, Jean Houdon, Ernst L. Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Georges de La Tour, Charles Le Brun, Fernand Léger, the Limburg Brothers, Fra Filippo Lippi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Pietro Lorenzetti, René Magritte, Kazimir Malevich, Franz Marc, Hans Memling, Jean-François Millet, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore, William Morris, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Emil Nolde, Michael Pacher, Parmigianino, Perugino, Andrea Pisano, Giovanni Pisano, Nicola Pisano, Camille Pissarro, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo della Quercia, Guido Reni, José de Ribera, Tilman Riemenschneider, Luca della Robbia, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rosso Fiorentino, Mark Rothko, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, Jacob van Ruisdael, Martin Schongauer, Simone Martini, Claus Sluter, Jan Steen, Vladimir Tatlin, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Vasari, Paolo Veronese, Andrea del Verrocchio, Rogier van der Weyden and Francisco de Zurbarán.
It is perfectly possible to take issue with some of the details of these rankings. Personally, I like Picasso, but I’m not at all convinced that he should be listed before giants such as Dürer, Rembrandt, Giotto, Velázquez, Donatello, Caravaggio, Rubens and Jan van Eyck, not to mention Raphael, Leonardo and Titian. Charles Murray nevertheless explains his statistical methods in great — almost too great — detail and states categorically that the rankings in his book do not reflect his personal tastes, only what the scholarly source material tells him.
Yet his methodology could confuse historical influence with aesthetic achievement in the arts. The Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg experimented with atonality — music without tonality — in the early 1900s. This was ideologically influential, yes, but the music resulting from this was and remains controversial and is far from enjoyed by everybody. At the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of artists put themselves and their personal whims on the loftiest of pedestals. Schoenberg, “who announced the death of tonality and then did all he could to make his prediction come true,” also wrote that “…those who compose because they want to please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists.”
Author Charles Murray himself comments that “Contempt for the audience could not be plainer, nor the godlike role in which Schoenberg placed the artist.” In the early twentieth century, “The idea of the artist as a Bohemian outsider came out of this revolution, as did the contempt that artists would develop for the public, an obsession with self-expression and iconoclasm, and the rejection of classical standards of beauty as an objective of art.”
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. He receives an index score of 24 of 100 in Human Accomplishment. By comparison, this is exactly the same as such brilliant painters as Giovanni Bellini, Pieter Bruegel the Elder or Piero della Francesca, and higher than John Constable, Correggio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, El Greco, Matthias Grünewald, Jean Ingres, Tintoretto, J. M. W. Turner and Jan Vermeer.
Mr. Duchamp in 1917 took an already existing object — a standard white porcelain urinal laid flat on its back — and put on display in New York City in the USA. In 2004, hundreds of art experts named his Fountain the most influential modern art work, with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) second and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962) third.
An article in British newspaper The Independent stated in 2008, largely approvingly, that “While almost every artist since the beginning of time has adapted, refined and developed art as it was handed down to him, it is not given to very many artists, without resource to the changing means of technology, to invent an entirely new art. In fact, it might be that, in the long centuries since the invention of easel painting, only Duchamp has carried out the sort of revolution represented by that urinal. Such is the importance of Fountain that, in December 2004, it was voted the most influential work of modern art by 500 art-world professionals. In contemplation, that seems something of an understatement: with this single ‘readymade’ work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and severed forever the traditional link between the artist’s labour and the merit of the work. It couldn’t have happened anywhere but America.”
According to “experts,” the most important work of Western art in the sixteenth century was Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The most important work of art in the twentieth century was a urinal. Many comments about the state of Western civilization can be made from this insight.
Murray focused primarily on the visual arts, excluding jewelry and decoration (in other words, no Peter Carl Fabergé, René Lalique or Georg Jensen). Architects are largely ignored in favor of painters and sculptors. These definitions unfortunately leave out many fine names entirely, for instance some of those associated with Art Nouveau at the turn of the twentieth century, among them Alphonse Mucha, Victor Horta, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Émile Gallé, Louis Comfort Tiffany and above all Antoni Gaudí, but Gustav Klimt is mentioned.
Prominent and important architects from Filippo Brunelleschi, Donato Bramante, Andrea Palladio and Francesco Borromini via Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera to Jules Hardouin Mansart, Jacob van Campen, Christopher Wren, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, Johann Balthasar Neumann, Charles Barry, Thomas Telford, Joseph Paxton and Robert Maillart are all missing from the lists, as are William Le Baron Jenney, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright from North America, Alvar Aalto from Finland, Walter Gropius from Germany and finally the controversial, but influential Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier.
The magnificent octagonal dome of the Florence Cathedral was designed by the architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi. Before this, only two large domes had been used before in Europe — the Pantheon from ancient Rome and the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was the first such octagonal (eight-sided) dome ever to be built without a wooden supporting frame; the Pantheon had been constructed with the aid of support structures. A key to the success was his innovative use of large and capable lifting machinery.
The isorhythmic motet Nuper Rosarum Flores (“The Rose Blossoms”) made by the Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay was performed during the consecration service in 1436. Just as Gothic architecture was brought to Italy from France during this period, so, too musical genres were imported from the north. The Cathedral’s 44 windows depict Catholic saints and scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary. The list of artists includes the greatest Florentines of the time such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, famous for his beautiful pair of gilded bronze doors, dubbed Gates of Paradise, at the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral.
Brunelleschi was first and foremost a brilliant and extremely influential architect, but he is also generally credited as the inventor of the principles of linear perspective, the way to mathematically describe how objects diminish with distance to create a “mirror image” of the real world. This development was of such tremendous importance for the subsequent evolution of European art that Brunelleschi’s name should in my personal view have been included in the list even if we totally ignore his substantial architectural contributions. Once again, Charles Murray reminds us that whatever flaws he might have, he is not “Eurocentric.”
The increase in European artistic accomplishment after 1420, especially in painting, is notable. Two major changes occurred at this time. Brunelleschi had unveiled his mastery of linear perspective about a decade before the trendline shifts upward. Masaccio’s Trinity at the church of Santa Maria Novella was painted in the mid-1420s, and Alberti published Della Pittura in 1436. “The less obvious event was the invention that suddenly expanded the effects a painter could achieve: the use of oil in paints, developed by Jan van Eyck in the 1420s.”
The Flemish painter Jan van Eyck is strongly associated with the development of oil painting, yet he did not invent the medium. The Islamic Taliban regime destroyed two ancient Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan in 2001. Recent discoveries indicate that Buddhists made oil paintings in this region already in the seventh century AD. Nevertheless, the perfection of oil by van Eyck and others allowed depth and richness of color, and Dutch and Flemish painters in the fifteenth century were the first to make oil the preferred medium.
Apollodorus, an Athenian painter working in the decades after 500 BC, is thought to have been the first to gradate light and color and shade his paintings to give figures the appearance of reality. Zeuxis carried this trend to an unprecedented level. According to legend, his contemporary Parrhasius staged an artistic contest. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting. When it was discovered that the curtain itself was his painting, Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat.
The next development leading to artistic realism took place in Europe two thousand years later. Still life painting of objects from everyday life such as flowers, fruits and all types of food and drink flourished in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century alongside rising standards of living. Many oil paintings from this era of impressive realism that almost make you hungry just by looking at them can be admired today at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
As was the case with ancient Greece in Europe and elsewhere in Eurasia, a peak in Chinese philosophy came during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, from the eighth to the third centuries BC. The most important people in Asia were Gautama Buddha in India around 500 BC plus Confucius and Laozi in China at about the same time. The philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism were then consolidated by later exegetes, prominent among them Mencius and Zhuangzi in the 300s BC. A smaller secondary cluster in China occurred in the late Song Dynasty, especiall
When Treason Becomes The Norm: Why The Proposition Nation, Not Islam, Is Our Primary Enemy
This text was inspired by the essay “Why Is This Not Treason?” by the brave English activist and patriot Paul Weston and is partly based on comments I left at the blog Jew Among You.
In 2009 it was revealed that the ruling Labour Party had purposefully flooded Britain with several million immigrants, without consulting its citizens, in order to socially engineer a “truly Multicultural” country. The huge increases in migrants over the previous decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt to radically change the country and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair. He said mass immigration was the result of a deliberate plan, but ministers were reluctant to discuss this for fear that it would alienate the party’s “core working class vote.”
Immigrants in Birmingham
Lord Glasman — a personal friend of the Labour Party leader — in 2011 stated that “Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration… and there’s been a massive rupture of trust.” He admitted that the Labour Party had sometimes been actively hostile to the white natives. In particular, they tended to view white working-class voters as “an obstacle to progress.”
To my knowledge, these shocking revelations of a Western government virtually launching a full-front attack to crush its own people have so far not caused a single word of protest from political leaders or mass media in any other Western country, although these acts could be construed as a policy of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing targeting the white majority population. In my country’s mass media, these public admissions from Neather were hardly mentioned at all, although journalists never miss an opportunity to warn against the dangerous tide of “white racism and xenophobia” that is supposedly sweeping the Western world today.
I have since come to suspect that the reason for this shameful silence is that the authorities in all Western countries without exception themselves follow similar, deliberate policies of dispossessing Europeans and therefore see nothing wrong in what the British government did.
Also in Britain, immigrant gangs, especially Muslims, of sexual predators have exploited and abused hundreds of girls as young as 12 — usually white — who are plied with drink and drugs and then raped, abused and degraded. If the girls refused their advances they were threatened with hammers or thrown out of cars. Many such attacks were filmed by the men as “trophies.”
In November 2010, a teenage girl from Birmingham, England, was arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English language version of the Koran. In Britain, if Muslims or other immigrant groups rape white girls, the police are often reluctant to do anything about it because they don’t want to be perceived as “racists,” but if native girls, who are being actively displaced and driven out of their homeland by the authorities, do anything that might upset the feelings of Muslim immigrants they get arrested immediately.
CIP logo
In June 2007, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with Chancellor (and PM-in-waiting) Gordon Brown and Conservative Party leader (also future PM) David Cameron, met Muslim leaders at a conference organized by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme. Blair opened by defending Islam as a religion of “moderation and modernity,” announced a government fund to aid teaching of Islam and to train imams and designated Islamic studies as “strategically important” to the British national interest. Timothy Winter, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, said that “The question facing British society, and society as a whole, is not how we encourage minorities to engage with western countries, but how those countries define themselves as a collage of different religious cultures.”
In other words: Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and other Western countries with white majorities are no longer nations with a distinct heritage, only random spaces on the map just waiting to be filled with a “collage of different cultures.”
Critical Whiteness StudiesI could add here that North American authorities and mass media are little better than Western European ones, and sometimes worse. The USA was the first Western country, in 1965, to open its borders to mass immigration from the entire world as a matter of ideological principle. US authorities have been promoting similar policies elsewhere in the West ever since. The concepts of “white privilege” and “Whiteness Studies” were also developed in and spread from the USA. In conflicts between native Europeans and non-native colonizers, US authorities have repeatedly shown that they will go against the interests of native Europeans.
The more I look into the matter, the more I have to wonder whether the USA today has become the Anti-White Empire. If we make a list of groups or institutions that are promoting the dispossession and destruction of Europeans it would look something like this, starting from the top down:
1. The Unites States Government.
2. The European Union.
Medieval law and European civilization
As I have noted before, Toby E. Huff in 2010 published his book Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective, which inspired this essay. He was also the author of the modern classic The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West.
Although some scholars prefer to trace Europe’s defining moment back to the ancient Greeks of the Axial Age in 800-300 BC, Huff believes that a transformative event took place in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, with an extraordinary medieval fusion between Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian theology. Other major civilizations such as China, India and the Islamic world lagged behind with respect to scientific innovation or the creation of representative political institutions like parliaments.
The theory of corporate existence, as understood by Roman civil law and refashioned by the medieval Canonists, granted legal autonomy to entities such as cities and towns, universities, charitable organizations and merchant guilds as well as professional groups represented by surgeons and physicians. All of these entities were enabled to create their own rules and regulations and, in the case of cities, establish their own courts of law. Nothing like this kind of autonomy existed in Islamic law, Chinese law or Hindu law of an earlier age.
Huff argues that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a social revolution that laid the institutional foundations upon which modern science was later constructed. At the heart of this development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation, a collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular “whole body” and granted legitimate legal autonomy.
It also distinguished between the property, goods and assets of the corporation and those of individual members. A debt owed by the corporation was not owed by its members individually, and the allegiance of individual members was said to be to the corporation, not to other members of it personally. These ideas served to create a foundation for a public versus a private sphere of action – a clear distinction still lacking in many countries today. One could also argue that it is increasingly under threat within the Western world itself:
In short, the theory of corporate existence that was worked out uniquely by twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western legalists (but neglected by the Byzantines) created a whole new bundle of rights. These included the right to own property, to have representation in court, to sue and be sued, to make contracts, and to be consulted when one’s interests were affected by actions taken by others, especially kings and princes, following the Roman legal maxim, ‘What touches all should be considered and approved by all.’
Of course, it was a slow process putting all these new ideas into action, but the door had been opened, a new legal framework had been gestated. In the centuries to come, those ideas were to be transported across Europe and around the world. But notice that this whole constellation of ideas and institutions can be called civilizational complexes – that is, segments of cultural life – and they give a civilization a distinctive identity when they are shared by multiple societies or peoples encompassed by that civilization. Most if not all of these components of the European civilizational domain were disseminated over vast expanses of time and space without the force of empire.
They were to a large extent spread voluntarily as scholars, in the universities and elsewhere, discussed fundamental issues related to law, governance, philosophy and medical education.
Of course, medieval Christian Europe did have well-known religious controversies against heretics like the Cathars, some of which were indeed met by the use of violence. It is also true that the conversion of so-called pagans to Christianity in parts of northern Europe did include certain acts of force. Yet despite its many flaws, Europe still had a greater emphasis on peaceful, intellectual and rational persuasion than virtually any other civilization of that time.
The Birth of Capitalism
The Ottomans used a centralized power structure to extract a large proportion of the resources of the empire to use for military aggression, but they were successfully rebuffed by European states. The problem with an overly centralized power structure with high tax rates is that over time it will lead to economic and technological stagnation. Successful innovation requires some degree of decentralization, which could be found in regions of Western Europe with many free cities, from northern Italy via the Netherlands and Flanders in the Low Countries to England and northern Germany. This is where we encounter the development of capitalism.
The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, edited by J.G. Manning and Ian Morris, is a collaborative effort of various scholars on the economies of Egypt, the Near East and Greco-Roman Antiquity. The ancient world was not “capitalist” in our sense of the word. Slavery lessened incentives to develop labor-saving technology. People lacked a tradition of carrying on a sustained effort to produce a technological solution to a felt need (they had no “research-and-development” labs) and often suffered from a certain prejudice against work of the hands.
In the Greco-Roman world, wealth should preferably come from the land. Commerce was considered barely socially acceptable whereas industry was widely looked down upon. Sustained growth per capita requires sustained technological improvement. Roman economic growth was very slow because technological progress was slow – not necessarily nonexistent, but slow. There are few indications of what we might call a capitalist concept of making calculated investments in better technology in order to improve future productivity.
Western wealth began to grow with urban growth and commerce in the twelfth century and accelerated during the Renaissance into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the development of a relatively autonomous class of professional merchants. Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), an Austrian and later British economist and philosopher, identified a new individualism provided by Christianity and the philosophy of Classical Antiquity which was developed during the Renaissance. He explains this in his classic The Road to Serfdom:
“From the commercial cities of Northern Italy the new view of life spread with commerce to the west and north, through France and the south-west of Germany to the Low Countries and the British Isles, taking firm root wherever there was no despotic political power to stifle it….During the whole of this modern period of European history the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his ordinary activities….Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining of individual energies was the marvellous growth of science which followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and beyond….Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use of new knowledge, only since everything could be tried – if somebody could be found to back it at his own risk – and, it should be added, as often as not from outside the authorities officially entrusted with the cultivation of learning, has science made the great strides which in the last hundred and fifty years have changed the face of the world.”
Modern economic growth has roots back to the medieval period. Initially, “the West’s achievement of autonomy stemmed from a relaxation, or a weakening, of political and religious controls, giving other departments of social life the opportunity to experiment with change. Growth is, of course, a form of change, and growth is impossible when change is not permitted. Any successful change requires a large measure of freedom to experiment. A grant of that kind of freedom costs a society’s rulers their feeling of control, as if they were conceding to others the power to determine the society’s future. The great majority of societies, past and present, have not allowed it. Nor have they escaped from poverty.”
Europe exhibited an intellectual curiosity that cannot be reduced simply to a matter of economic interests. China was the world’s largest economy for many centuries but never produced anything resembling the Scientific Revolution. That does not mean that there is never any connection at all between wealth and accomplishment. The Medici banking family in Florence for generations sponsored great achievements, from artists such as Donatello to Galileo. Founded as a pawnshop in 1472, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena from the beautiful city of Siena in Tuscany, northern Italy, is today considered the world’s oldest surviving bank.
The German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) in his influential study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism identified capitalism with the Protestant branch of Christianity. I do think it is accurate to say that Protestant nations proved especially dynamic in adopting science and capitalism; Protestantism encouraged ordinary people to read the Bible in the vernacular, which spurred the growth of literacy. Still, there is no doubt that the foundations of capitalism were created in Catholic Europe, in the medieval city-states of northern Italy.
Avner Greif in The Ancient Economy agrees with the view that economic growth has roots in the Middle Ages and reflects an economic, social, legal and political process through which Western European nations created the first modern economies. Waterwheels were not used as extensively by the Romans as they were in medieval Europe, but the waterwheel did represent a major conceptual breakthrough as “the first machine to capture nonanimated energy for on-land productive use.” In addition to this, the Romans left Europeans with a unifying learned language across political borders, Latin, and above all with the legacy of Roman law:
“Finally, the Roman heritage in the West includes the Roman legal tradition. Many economists would agree that in order to bring about and support modern economic growth it is necessary to have a particular legal tradition – a legal tradition in which rules can be changed to fit the evolving needs of the economy and that ensures that individuals have property rights and freedom. Such a tradition exists in the Western world, and it is a legacy of the Roman period. It was then that the European legal tradition was formulated, and despite various challenges, it has survived the test of time. One can only wonder if modern economic growth could have occurred in Europe if it had possessed one of the alternative legal traditions that emerged elsewhere, such as the divine law that dominates the Muslim world.”
Greif, who is an economics professor at Stanford University in the USA, elaborates his views in Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade. The scientific societies of the seventeenth century had a practical emphasis on experimental science rather than Aristotelian philosophy, but they built upon the foundation of the network of European universities. In the eyes of Avner Greif, the organization of society in the West was centered on intentionally created institutions and self-governed, non-kin-based organizations such as guilds and universities, not tribes or clans as in the Middle East:
“Since then, this particular societal organization – centered on self-governed, non-kin-based organizations and individualism – has been behind the behavior and outcomes that led to European-specific economic and political developments. This societal organization is the common denominator behind such seemingly distinct historical phenomena as the late medieval economic expansion, the rise of European science and technology (Mokyr 2002), and the creation of the modern European state, the ultimate manifestation of a self-governed, non-kin-based corporation composed of individuals rather than larger social units (Greif 2004b). If institutions are central to economic, social, and political outcomes, and institutional development is a historical process, the roots of the eventual success of the West may very well lie in its past political and economic institutions.”
While he generally praises European individualism, he also speculates whether excessive individualism has contributed to the cultural decline of the West in more recent generations.
There was a decline in medieval self-ruled political entities during the Age of Absolutism, but Greif wonders whether this should be considered an exception in the long run of European history for the past millennium. Medieval innovations are manifested in current practices such as trading in shares, limited liability, auditing, apprenticeships and double-entry bookkeeping.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey in The Cambridge Illustrated History of China details how the “appearance of commercial cities did not play the same political or intellectual role in China as it did in Europe slightly later. Chinese cities did not become places identified with personal freedom.” Hence, “both cities and rural areas were under the political control of representatives of the central government.” Moreover, “It is the universal king who embodies political order and possesses the power to transform the society below him for good or ill. Law, by contrast, was not granted comparable power by any Chinese thinker. Whether from a Confucian, a Legalist, or even a Daoist perspective, law was viewed as an expedient, not as something noble or inviolable, or something that exists above and beyond the ruler.”
In line with Confucian principles, punishments were graded according to the social relationships between the parties. Contributing to the death of a parent was a capital offence even if it was accidental, whereas beating a son to death was a relatively minor crime if he had done something to warrant punishment, such as curse the parent. The law code was interpreted and applied by regular civil servants from the local level up. China’s legal system had no independent judiciary, nor lawyers for the defense or any presumption of innocence.
Chinese officials were Confucians concerned with the rule of virtue, not the rule of law. Confucius had not reasoned from systematic principles, still less from any ideas about the rights of individuals. Confucian ethic stressed hierarchy and outward obedience. Challenging authority figures was seen as an unforgivable sign of disrespect. Offences against the authorities and the social order attracted special severity. Author Harry G. Gelber elaborates:f
“In China, justice rested not on codes of law but on social norms and universal principles of Confucian morality. These would be applied by a court to any particular case in a process which also invariably leaned towards state interests. The imperial code was strongly weighted towards social order, and law was – and in modern China largely remains – a tool of administration, without reference to any ‘higher’ notion of natural law or even any system akin either to Roman or to Anglo-Saxon common law. That naturally created much uncertainty not just for the accused, but for the judge himself. There was no commercial law in a modern Western sense, although written contracts, and even some oral agreements, could be enforced by magistrates….Nor…was there any sense of firms as legal individuals. There was no Chinese equivalent to Western notions of sanctity of a written and signed contract….Moreover, given China’s system of collective responsibility, someone who might be personally innocent could be executed simply as the representative of a group, or a scapegoat. Family solidarity being such a powerful element of Chinese society, guilt by association was often assumed and punishment of relatives was a regular practice.”
The respected scholar Joseph Schacht states in his major work An Introduction to Islamic Law that “The concept of corporation does not exist in Islamic law.” Moreover, “There is also no freedom of association.” This serious legal defect had major implications for Islamic civilization, not least in the sphere of economic development, as Timor Kuran has made clear.
As ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan puts it in her fine book A God Who Hates, the raids Muhammad and his companions carried out, which amounted to at least twenty-seven if you believe Islamic sources, occupy a major part of his biography. They were intended to acquire booty and to humiliate and inflict harm upon rival tribes in order to deprive them of their ability to resist. A philosophy of raiding “has rooted itself firmly in the Muslim mind. Bedouins feared raiding on the one hand, and relied on it as a means of livelihood on the other. Then Islam came along and canonized it. Muslims in the twenty-first century still fear they may be raided by others and live every second of their lives preparing to raid someone else. The philosophy of raiding rules their lives, the way they behave, their relationships, and their decisions.”
A Brief History of Pasta
In recent weeks I’ve been on two major travels, one to Beijing, China, and another to northern Italy. I couldn’t really afford to go, but then I got some money from the CIA and the Mossad for my Islamophobic essays. I also remembered that I had not cashed in on my annual white privilege bonus for a few years. Once I had done that, I could go for a holiday, anyway.
I will describe my impressions from these travels in later essays, but will start with reflecting on the history of pasta. I talked to one Italian man who believed that pasta was invented by the Arabs, whereas another frequent claim is that it was invented by the Chinese. I am personally skeptical of both these claims. To quote food historian Linda Civitello in Cuisine and Culture:
“For hundreds of years, it was accepted ‘fact’ that Marco Polo discovered noodles in China and brought them back to Europe. Now, in his masterwork, A Mediterranean Feast, food historian Clifford Wright states flatly that there is no truth to the story of Polo and pasta. Wright unravels the tangled strands of the origin of pasta and takes it down to its basic ingredient: hard semolina or durum (Latin for ‘hard’) wheat. This makes pasta different from bread, which is made from soft wheat. The Chinese did not have durum wheat. Wright places the origins of ‘true macaroni’ – pasta made from durum wheat and dried, which gives it a long shelf life – ‘at the juncture of medieval Sicilian, Italian and Arab cultures.’”
Marco Polo (1254-1324) was the son of a merchant from Venice in northern Italy who had good contacts in the East. The book Il Milione (“The Million”), describing his alleged travels in Asia in the late thirteenth century, became hugely popular in the Renaissance period and inspired other European travelers in their search for Asia, among them Christopher Columbus. Polo supposedly spent years in Mongol-ruled China but never mentions tea, nor the Great Wall or the practice of foot binding, which crippled millions of Chinese women well into the twentieth century. It is quite possible that he was a well-traveled man for his time, but scholars are still arguing about whether he really did all of the things he claimed to have done.
Noodles or noodle-like foods made of wheat, buckwheat, rice or soya have been enjoyed in China, Korea and Japan for a very long time and we have no indications that pasta existed in the Roman Empire, but these foods do not taste alike and are made from different materials and methods. Besides, pasta is a lot more than spaghetti, and many varieties do not resemble noodles even superficially. There is no strong historical or logical reason to assume that the inventions of East Asian noodles and Italian pasta were directly connected. Pasta from durum wheat was an innovation of the European Middle Ages. Middle Easterners before and after the rise of Islam used durum wheat, but Muslims apparently never invented pasta-like foods.
Historian Toussaint-Samat, too, questions the myth that it was imported to Italy with Polo. Anything resembling modern pasta cannot be traced with certainty much further back than to southern Italy in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries AD. If you believe A History of Food, “the first production of pasta on any kind of industrial scale was indeed in Naples in the early fifteenth century. However, this pasta did not keep well, and it was not until 1800 that the process which would make it really asciutta (dry) was discovered. It involved natural drying alternately in hot and cold temperatures. Perfect conditions were found at Torre Annunziata, some kilometres south of Naples itself, where the climate changes four times a day, to a regular pattern. The macaroni of Torre Annunziata is the ne plus ultra of Italian pasta.”
The great merit of pasta, and one of the secrets behind its tremendous international success in recent years, is that it is very easy to make and also takes up little storage space, but swells when cooked. Cooking it is simple, too, since it only requires a large pot filled with water.
Another food myth is that Marco Polo introduced ice cream to Italy and Europe from China. Frozen desserts made from fruits or berries combined with ice and snow brought down from nearby mountaintops were served in several ancient civilizations, including ancient Rome. Whether this constituted ice cream as we think of it is debatable, however. A more recognizable version appeared in Renaissance banquets, with modern European ice cream dating back to the 1500s and 1600s. And yes, Italians did play a major role in this story.
I am personally a fan of Chinese cuisine, as are millions of other non-Chinese around the world judged by the popularity of Chinese restaurants, but I have to say that their dinners and warm dishes are a lot better than their sweets and desserts. I brought back some alleged Chinese sweets and candies to Europe and literally couldn’t give them away for free to my youngest relatives. It is the first time I have experienced children saying no to candy. There is nothing made in China, at least not today, that can be remotely confused with Italian gelato.
Gelato is Italy’s unique version of ice cream, but with significantly less butterfat and higher sugar content than regular ice cream. It is less solidly frozen, melts in the mouth faster, has a richer, creamier taste and is denser because not as much air is whipped into the mixture. It is extremely delicious, and to Western tastes easily beats anything similar produced in China.
On the Background for Easter Eggs
Christmas is a festival celebrating the birth of Jesus, but many of our current practices, such as giving Christmas presents, are of a relatively recent date. Although a specifically Christian celebration, like many other European ideas it has been adopted in other parts of the world as a kind of secular holiday, somewhat to the dismay of devout Christians. Even non-Christian countries like Japan have adopted certain of its traditions, for instance Santa Claus, gift-giving, decorations and Christmas trees. The same is true of China, Thailand and other places where Christians are a minority. It also contains traces of pre-Christian practices in Europe.
Christmas tree, 18th century Germany
Pagan Scandinavians in late December, around the time of the winter solstice, celebrated a festival called Yule. Present-day Scandinavians still call the Christmas season jul. The Christmas tree, an evergreen tree decorated with lights (originally candles) and ornaments, may also partly have older, pre-Christian roots. While its history is not entirely clear, the custom may possibly be traced back to the Baltic region, one of the last areas in Europe to be Christianized, to late medieval Estonia and Latvia and then to northern Germany from the sixteenth century on. The first use of candles on such trees is recorded in the early 1600s. The custom of creating Christmas trees remained confined to the upper Rhineland for generations, before it spread beyond the Protestant regions of Germany to the rest of Europe and the world.
In the Celtic religion, trees were seen as sacred objects, and the oak tree enjoyed a particular prominence. The name “druid,” referring to members of the learned class of priests among the Celts, originally meant “oak-knower.” The oak was the sacred tree of Zeus in ancient Greece. It was also often associated with the world tree in Slavic mythology while Yggdrasil, the huge world tree supporting the universe in Norse mythology, is usually identified as an ash tree. In the Völuspá, Ask was the first human man and Embla the first human woman, created by the gods from tree trunks. The meaning of Embla is uncertain, but Ask clearly means “ash tree.”
Professor Mary W. Helms reflects on the cultural significance of certain materials. The seagoing Dover Bronze Age Boat from England in the sixteenth century BC, for instance, was primarily constructed from oak and yew. Obviously, there are practical issues to consider such as the material properties of durability, elastic strength and resistance to rot (oak wood has great strength), but it is worth recalling that both the oak and the yew were widely recognized as cosmologically special species of trees, even sacred trees, in ancient European lore.
Taxus baccata (the common yew)The common yew — Taxus baccata — grows across much of the European continent. Ironically, it was simultaneously related to death (its leaves and seeds are toxic to humans and to livestock, though not to game) and to immortality since it is a very long-lived evergreen. Incredibly, the Llangernyw Yew, which grows in a churchyard in Llangernyw village in northern Wales, is thought to be more than four thousand years old, making it one of the world’s oldest living organisms. As for the oak, in the modern world it is often associated with the construction of fine furniture or the production of alcoholic beverages, for instance oak barrels for maturing wine, whiskey or cognac. In Celtic and Germanic cultures, that mighty tree was recognized as a cosmic axis mundi linking people with the sky and the gods:
Such an august association was probably very ancient. For example, Bronze Age northern Europe often utilised the oak as a coffin. Harding comments on the symbolic significance of such an interment, relating the oak tree-trunk coffin to house construction (also predominantly of oak in temperate Europe) and noting the relationship between houses and tombs both in Neolithic and Bronze Age contexts. He mentions, too, the ancient and long-lasting association of yews with graveyards (and churchyards) and the general connection of trees like ash, oak, and yew with longevity or eternal life; burial within a tree carrying the obvious connotation of a return to the source of life.
Pashka iconLike Christmas, Easter consists of a mix of Christian and older, pagan symbols such as spring fertility rites. Many European languages use variations over the name of the Jewish festival Passover, called Pesach in Hebrew. In Italian, it’s Pasqua; in French, Pâques; in Spanish, Pascua; in Scandinavian languages Påsk or Påske; in Dutch, Pasen; and in Russian, Paskha, borrowed from the Greek via Old Church Slavonic. However, in German it’s called Ostern. The English Easter probably stems from Eostre, a Germanic goddess of spring and fertility.
Easter is the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He was crucified in Jerusalem on Good Friday and was, according to believers, resurrected from the dead on the third day, having died for the sins and salvation of all mankind. This belief constitutes the very essence of the Christian religion. The date for Easter was settled during the First Council of Nicaea, presided over in person by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 325. It also adopted the Nicene Creed, which is accepted as authoritative by all major branches of Christianity and affirms the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity of God the creator as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Easter is a moveable feast taking place after the Full Moon following the spring equinox, or at some point between March 22 and April 25 in the Gregorian calendar. Eastern Christianity of the Orthodox Churches continues to base its calculations on the older Julian calendar, which means that the dates of their Christian holidays currently differ from the Western ones.
In the Western Church, Easter was preceded by Lent, a forty-day period of fasting (excluding Sundays). In early Christian thought, gluttony (overeating) had been defined as one of the Seven Deadly Sins along with wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust and envy. This was an era of scarcity. Lent is a partial fast where you abstain from certain types of food such as cheese, meat and eggs. This is very different from the fasting done by Muslims during Ramadan, who abstain completely from food and drink during the day for an entire month, including water in very hot countries, and then eat lots of cakes and watch TV during the night. Some types of fasting can have beneficial health effects, but this latter variety is not healthy for the body.
The island of LofotenThe Roman Catholic Church imposed fasting during Lent. There were certain “lean days” when it was forbidden to eat “fat” food. Meat-eating was forbidden on almost 180 days — nearly half the year — but fish came to be regarded as suitable food for fast days. This meant that trade in fish could be quite profitable. Lofoten, the scenic Norwegian island group just north of the Arctic Circle, enjoys a climate that is technically classified as “temperate” due to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream that heat northwestern Europe. Since the Viking Age, if not before, stockfish — cod hung on wooden racks to be air-dried by the Sun and the salt breeze from the sea — has been made here. It has a long storage life. By medieval times it was exported via the port city of Bergen and the trading network of the Hanseatic League to Continental Western Europe. Salted cod (bacalao) is still popular in Portugal, Spain and Italy.
Crucifixion by Theophanes of CreteLent ends with the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, when Christ is said to have given the ceremony of communion to his followers, the Twelve Disciples: “Take of this bread and eat of it, for it is my body. Take of this wine and drink of it, for it is my blood.” One of them, Judas Iscariot, betrayed Jesus and sold him out to Roman authorities for thirty pieces of silver:
The next day, Good Friday, is the deepest day of mourning in the Christian religion because it is the day Christ was crucified (on a cross made of olive wood), died, and was buried. On Easter Sunday, Christians believe that Christ rose again and ascended into heaven. Eggs were forbidden during Lent, but were used heavily in ritual foods when fast was broken on Easter Sunday. They were in special egg breads like Ukrainian paska or Russian saffron-scented kulich. Sometimes the bread is decorated with dyed hard-boiled eggs or shaped into a cross. For Easter dinner, traditional foods depend on geography. In the Mediterranean, it is lamb; in Northern Europe, ham; in England, beef. The custom of giving painted eggs for Easter dates to the later Middle Ages. Baskets to hold the eggs represent birds’ nest. The Easter Bunny with his basket of painted eggs came to America with German immigrants in the nineteenth century.
Family of Easter bunniesThe Easter lamb here refers to Jesus himself, as Christ was seen as “the Lamb of God.” To Christians they constitute a symbol of the Resurrection, but eggs are a self-evident symbol of creation and rebirth. The use of painted and decorated Easter eggs was first recorded in the Late Middle Ages.
The only possible ancient parallel is found among the Jews, the soup with hardboiled eggs of Passover, served after the Seder ceremony. There are no references earlier than the fifteenth century which mention the distribution of eggs at Easter, but from the sixteenth century on there are plenty. A tradition that eggs are brought by a hare or bunny is found in German lands, but it goes no farther back than the seventeenth century. It was the subject of a medical dissertation at Heidelberg in 1682, where it was announced as a novelty:
In some parts of Germany, instead of a hare, a bird or a fox brings eggs, or eggs may fall from the sky, together with church bells returning from a trip to Rome to be blessed. This started as a popular rather than a genuine folk custom of the South of France in the mid-nineteenth century, and was encouraged if not actually suggested by the clergy in an effort to make Easter celebrations more religious. Confectioners have spread the idea to all other countries, eggs and bells being an excellent way to market chocolate. Decorated eggs are not by any means all meant to be kept; most are eaten. However, in Romania and the Ukraine the shells are saved to be thrown in the river (an ancient gesture with various different kinds of significance). The shells go down into the other world to tell the dead to be of good cheer: Christ is risen, and all at home are rejoicing.
Book Review: “The Human Web”
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History from 2003 is an attempt by Robert McNeill and William H. McNeill, a father-and-son team of historians, to outline the major trends of human societies from Paleolithic times until the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The authors state that the Scientific Revolution was to have great consequences for all of mankind. Its emphasis on observation, experiment and unfettered reason – potentially subversive ideas that were often resisted by the political and religious establishment – has continued to flourish until the present day. While they agree that the creation of a network of universities was a uniquely European achievement, they also claim that “Ibn al-Shatir (died 1375) and others had challenged Ptolemy in much the same ways that Copernicus did later.”
This is not quite true. Yes, Ibn al-Shatir, working in Damascus, Syria and possibly the most gifted member of the Maragha school of astronomy, challenged certain aspects of Ptolemy’s models, especially his complex system of epicycles on top of circular orbits to account for apparent variations in the speed and direction of the motion of the planets. It has been speculated whether his ideas may indirectly have influenced Copernicus as a student in Italy.
Be that as it may, while a handful of the most talented astronomers in the Islamic-ruled world might question some of the technical details of Ptolemy’s models, none of them ever seriously questioned the notion that the Earth is the center of the universe. This was far more than a minor mathematical detail; it related to man’s place in the cosmos in very fundamental ways.
The Mongols under the leadership of Hulegu Khan (ca. 1217-1265), a grandson of the powerful Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan (ca. 1162-1227), sacked Baghdad in 1258 and ended the Abbasid Caliphate. Hulegu believed that many of his military successes were due to the advice of astronomers who were also astrologers (astrology was very important in Mongol culture) and was persuaded to found the Maragha observatory in present-day Iran by the Persian mathematician Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274). His brother Kublai Khan (1215-1294) constructed an astronomical observatory in Yuan Dynasty (Mongol-ruled) China.
Some have claimed that scientific advances in the Islamic world were halted by the Mongol conquests. This is historically inaccurate. The conquests affected Syria, Egypt, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula rather little, yet these regions didn’t make any more progress than did the Islamic East. Besides, science had already stagnated in many fields prior to this. In astronomy, achievements peaked after the conquests, and partly with Mongol encouragement.
Astronomy in the Islamic world remained fundamentally Ptolemaic and Earth-centered. The Maragha observatory from 1259 was destroyed already in the early 1300s. The fact that it “not only stopped functioning within fifty years but soon thereafter was completely obliterated suggests that there were very strong antipathies against it and its activities” because of their alleged association with astrology, which was considered a challenge to the omnipotence of Allah. Ultimately, the observatory as a scientific institution failed to take root in the Islamic world due to religious resistance. In the Ottoman Empire, the observatory in Constantinople/Istanbul created by Taqi al-Din (1526-1585) “was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti.”
Among major regions or civilizations, the two with the most similar medieval starting points were the Middle East and Europe. Superior Greek geometry was virtually unknown in East and Southeast Asia. This constituted a major disadvantage for Chinese, Japanese and Korean scholars in optics and astronomy. The only regions where clear glass was extensively made were the Middle East and Europe. Clear glass was used by Europeans to manufacture eyeglasses for the correction of eyesight and later for the creation of microscopes and telescopes, facilitating the growth of modern medicine and astronomy. The Maya in Mesoamerica did not know how to make glass and could consequently not have made glass lenses for telescopes. Muslims could have done so, but they didn’t. Likewise, medieval Europeans invented mechanical clocks while Muslims did not, despite a similar starting point.
A few Middle Eastern scholars were decent observers, as exemplified by the star catalogue of Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) in Central Asia or the lunar observations of Ibn Yunus (950-1009) in Egypt, but they never made any conceptual breakthrough comparable to that of Copernicus when he put the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of our Solar System. Combined with the pre-telescopic work of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Ptolemaic astronomy was outdated in Europe even before Galileo had introduced telescopic astronomy by 1610. Muslims resisted Copernican heliocentrism, in some cases into the twentieth century. One of those who rejected it was the Islamic activist and alleged reformist Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani (ca. 1838-1897).
Just to keep things in perspective, we need to remember that the observations made by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) in Denmark probably surpassed anything ever achieved before anywhere in the world previously, and were just about as accurate as was humanly possible to do before the telescope. “Much of his early work is reliable to three or four minutes of arc, and his later accuracy is often better than a minute of arc for star positions, and hardly much less for those of the planets. This was better, by a factor of five or even ten, than the level of accuracy of the best Eastern astronomers, even than that of Ulugh Beg’s observatory in Samarqand.”
The McNeills suggest that a “confluence of circumstances” explains why the Scientific Revolution took place in Europe, not elsewhere. For instance, greater political fragmentation made it more difficult to censor ideas there than in China. This may be true, yet the Middle East, India, Africa and Southeast Asia could be sometimes be fragmented, too, and nothing similar happened there. Fragmentation can at most provide only a partial explanation for this.
Their conclusion when it comes to science is that “Europeans alone developed a culture of scientific inquiry that after 1500 provided immense practical knowledge. Navigation and astronomy came first. Physics and ballistics – useful in artillery – followed, as, more slowly, did systematic sciences of medicine, botany, and chemistry, among others. Slowly, these sciences yielded practical advantages in military affairs, agriculture, mining, metallurgy, and elsewhere. These, particularly the military sciences of fortification, artillery ballistics, and mathematically precise organization of men and supplies, made even small European states increasingly formidable from the late sixteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, science in Europe (and the United States) systematically informed technology, generating a self-sustaining process of technological change to which no end is in sight.”
Just out of curiosity, I searched for the word “jihad” in the index of The Human Web and found a single reference to it. Arab Muslims had laid siege to Constantinople in AD 674-678 but failed to take the city. They tried again in 717-718, but once more the Byzantines, assisted by Bulgars, managed to repel them. On both occasions they were crucially aided by so-called Greek fire, a mysterious, but highly effective flammable substance possibly similar to modern napalm that was successfully employed to set ablaze the attacking Muslim fleet. They lost several important provinces, but had managed to salvage Constantinople for the time being.
If you believe Robert and William H. McNeill, after this event in the year 718, “Subsequent fluctuations of the military-political balance between Christendom and Islam, though substantial, never shook each side’s commitment to their respective versions of the one True Faith. Consequently, Crusade and jihad – raid and counter-raid – came to prevail in Christian-Muslim borderlands, even though trade and intellectual contacts were never broken off.”
Describing the Crusades, which were of limited duration in time and space, with the peculiar Islamic institution of Jihad, which is valid for all times and all places, is grossly misleading.
The authors also describe the emancipation of slaves, and of the serfs of the Russian Empire:
“As in Arabia, slavery on a small scale survived its legal abolition in colonial Africa. After independence, Mauritania banned slavery again in 1980, and it has yet to disappear entirely, especially in the country of Sudan. Even if never totally extirpated, the abolition of slavery and serfdom represents a great liberation for humankind. Between 1790 and 1936, an arrangement that for millennia had seemed normal, moral, indeed natural and necessary to most societies, came to seem immoral, uneconomic, and/or politically imprudent. What the harnessing of fossil fuels achieved in the sphere of work itself – a historic liberation from muscular toil – abolition achieved in the social sphere. They were connected events and roughly simultaneous. The use of inanimate energy gradually made labor less scarce, and forced labor less appealing. It made communication of antislavery ideas easier. It made the imposition of European antislavery morality upon Asia and Africa easier.”
They left out the fact that the stiff resistance to abolishing slavery in Islamic and Islamized African countries was due to the fact that slavery is permitted according to sharia law and remains so to this day. Only relentless Western pressure has kept it down until now, and if that external pressure should disappear, open Muslim slavery could resurface once more.
In the index of the book, scientific names listed include Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Gregor Mendel and Ernest Rutherford, which is fine, but among those who are omitted can be mentioned Maxwell, Lavoisier, Pasteur and Huygens. Al-Khwarizmi is there, but not Gauss, Leibniz, Fermat, Euler or Pascal. Remarkably, Newton’s name is left out entirely. For that matter, the Indo-European expansion is virtually ignored.
All things considered, The Human Web contains some interesting chapters. It is a fairly decent work on global history given that it tries to cover all of human existence in just over three hundred pages, but frankly, including non-European figures of relatively minor importance such as Ibn al-Shatir while completely ignoring Isaac Newton seriously strains credibility.
White Privilege: A Colloquy
The following excerpts are from an email exchange among Takuan Seiyo, Fjordman, and myself. Takuan started the conversation with an extensive list of left-wing groups that stage and support “White Privilege” seminars and similar PC MC scams.
The ensuing discussion between Fjordman and Takuan is worth reproducing, so, with their permission, here’s what they said:
Fjordman: Where is this “white privilege,” anyway? Whites today are not allowed to have a single country, or even a single city, suburb or school, all to themselves. It’s literally considered “racism”, and thus a crime for people of European origins merely to congregate and be themselves.
Anything we have just for us should be broken down through the active intervention of the authorities. There are now more nationalities in the city of Oslo alone than there are member states of the United Nations, despite the fact that Norway has no colonial history and gained its modern independence as late as the twentieth century.
Not only is the country being colonized, it’s a “hyper-colony” for all nations and “people of color” on the surface of the Earth, and the natives are expected to fund this and celebrate their own state-sponsored dispossession. How “privileged” does that make them, really?
The ruling ideology of the USA today is Dark Skin Privilege. That’s why they currently have a President whose primarily qualification is his dark skin color.
Takuan: That’s not so much our current privilege they are talking about. They want us to pay for our past privilege. After all it’s a privilege to have invented science and all modern social institutions, and to have an IQ 1-2 sigmas higher on average.
It’s a privilege that we had flintlock muskets, and they had only wooden clubs and bows and arrows.
It’s an unearned privilege (that’s an official term) — particularly for the Anglos, Nordics, Germans and Slavs — to inherit genes that make you tall, white-skinned and blond (the “coloreds” are of course far more hung up on skin color than we are).
A “Hispanic” once told me in an angry tone than not only we have stolen a part of Mexico, but we have stolen the part with better roads and highways.
Of course it’s all preposterous madness. Not the angry coloreds’ — they are not mad but acting rationally to further their interests. The madness is on the part of whites who support this. Where is the revolt?
Fjordman: We should also mention that on the 22nd of March 2011, individuals representing more than one hundred different nationalities gathered in front of the Royal Palace in Oslo, accompanied by Crown Prince Haakon Magnus, to celebrate the diversity of the kingdom.
People from 215 different nations have become “Norwegians” in a few decades. “Norway needed this,” said Fery Nourkami, the non-native who came up with the idea for the gathering.
Takuan: As an immigrant addressing this to a not-so, I’d like you to express what “white privilege” meant to the ancestors of those whites who had American ancestors pre-1850s. What it took to build the colony in Virginia, or to settle the Midwest and then the West. What incredible hardships and fortitude, and what perils.
Up to the 1960s, the typical immigrant was conscious of those and grateful that he could build a life based on a foundation laid by the blood, sweat and tears of previous generations of others’ ancestors. No more; since the 1960s they are coming for the government-provided honeypot.
The Chinese and the Irrational
James Evans in The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy has written an extremely thorough account of astronomy during historical times in the Middle East and Europe, up to and including Kepler just prior to the telescope. In his view, “The remarkable accuracy of the Babylonian observers is a silly fiction that one still frequently encounters in popular writing about early astronomy.” The important thing is that there was a tradition of making observations, recording them carefully and a social mechanism for preserving the records.
The gods were believed to speak through objects and events in the natural world, including animal entrails, dreams and celestial phenomena. Omens were important for every level of Mesopotamian society, yet astronomical observations did not become the major focus of divination until after 1500 BC. Mesopotamian bureaucrats and astronomers/astrologers gradually amassed detailed information about the movement of the planets after 800 BC.
By the fifth century BC, Babylonian celestial divination had expanded to embrace horoscopic astrology, which used planetary positions at the moment of the date of birth to predict individual fortunes. As explained by science historian James Evans, “While horoscopic astrology was certainly of Babylonian origin (as, indeed, the Greek and Roman writers always claimed), it was elaborated into a complex system by the Greeks. Thus, the familiar and fantastically complicated system of horoscopic astrology with dozens of conflicting rules does not descend from remote antiquity. Rather it is a product of Hellenistic and Roman times.”
An Egyptian astronomical interest can be detected in the alignment of their temples and pyramids, but rarely on the level of sophistication seen in Mesopotamia. The ceilings of royal tombs from the Middle Kingdom on, for instance in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, contain drawings that could be described as simple celestial maps, yet with the partial exception of their solar calendar it does not seem to have occurred to them to seek for any deeper explanation of what they observed. The Egyptians “seem to have produced no systematic records of planetary movements, eclipses, or other phenomena of a plainly irregular sort.”
To the ancient Greeks, the planets were “wandering stars.” Our word planet comes from a Greek verb meaning to wander. The modern names for the five naked-eye planets are the names of Roman divinities which were more or less equivalent to a number of Greek gods. Most people today probably know this. What many of them don’t know is that some of the Greek names themselves may have been derived from Babylonian divinities in Mesopotamia.
Mars was often associated with war because of its reddish color, which can be spotted through naked-eye observations; the ancient Egyptians called it the Red One. However, there are other parallels that are unlikely to be accidental. In ancient Mesopotamia, Ishtar was the Babylonian and Assyrian counterpart of Inanna, the moody Sumerian goddess of love and fertility, identified with the planet Venus. To the Romans, Venus was the goddess of love and fertility, their equivalent of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who was also a symbol of love and fertility.
In the eyes of Walter Burkert, a few similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homeric poetry can no longer be ignored. He is nevertheless careful to point out that natural and political philosophy in the true sense was a Greek invention as much as was deductive proof in mathematics. As Ibn Warraq puts it, “what emerges is something entirely distinctive: what we call Greek civilization. The very strength of this civilization lay in its ability to learn from and improve upon the ideas, art, and literature of the Near East, Persia, India, and Egypt.”
The website of the American Institute of Physics states that despite their observations, the explanations that the Babylonian, Mayan and early Chinese sky-watchers devised for planetary movements “were no more than colorful myths. Scientific cosmology – the search for a picture of the universe that would make sense with no mention of divine beings – began with the Greeks. They sought to look beyond the patterns of numbers to something fundamental…. Aristotle taught that rotating spheres carried the Moon, Sun, planets, and stars around a stationary Earth. The Earth was unique because of its central position and its material composition. All generation and corruption occurred in the ‘sublunar’ region, below the Moon and above the Earth. This region was composed of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Beyond the Moon was the unchanging and perfect celestial region. It was composed of a mysterious fifth element. Greek philosophers estimated the distance to the Moon, and even tried to calculate the size of the entire universe. They believed it was finite.”
The goals and methods of Babylonian astronomy were very different from those of the Greeks. In particular, the Babylonians seem to have had little interest in the actual motions of the celestial bodies as long as they could predict eclipses. Later Greek astronomers were well aware of these fundamental differences in the approach. “For example, Theon of Smyrna says that the Babylonian astronomers, using arithmetical methods, succeeded in confirming the observed facts and in predicting future phenomena, but that, nevertheless, their methods were imperfect, for they were not based on a sufficient understanding of nature, and one must also examine these matters physically.” They did not base their astronomy on an elaborate philosophy of nature. There was no Babylonian, Egyptian or Indian equivalent of Aristotle.
The Maya in Mesoamerica devoted much attention to divination and amassed detailed studies of the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets over long periods of time. The Inca elites in pre-Columbian South America, too, elaborated special forms of divination. The Chinese had their own ideas about the stars and divination from an early date, but may have absorbed additional ideas from Babylonian astrology by way of India during the Han Dynasty.
The Chinese lunisolar calendar with its twelve Zodiac signs (the rat, ox, tiger etc.) is used for marking holidays such as the Chinese New Year. The first known divinations there are found on inscribed oracle bones and turtle shells in the city of Anyang in northeastern China from 1200 BC or slightly before and “concern military expeditions, the construction of towns, illnesses, journeys, births – of significance to the King or (what comes to the same) the state.”
The cosmological outlook of the Chinese organically linked the Earth, and above all the royal family, to the Heavens and the spirit world. The misbehavior of officials, it was thought, and especially of the Emperor himself, might result in famines, earthquakes, droughts or other natural disasters because they had displeased the spirit world. Similarly, anomalies in the heavens were taken as portents of the future and might predict future events that should be known only to the Emperor. For this reason, there was a powerful inclination in Imperial China to keep sky watching confined to the official bureaucracy under a veil of secrecy.
Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd, a prominent historian from the University of Cambridge, England, explores the origins of systematic inquiry in Greece, China and Mesopotamia with his book The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China:
“Both Chinese and Greeks shared the notion that the world as a whole – ‘heaven and earth’ in Chinese terms, the cosmos in Greek ones – is orderly, but the forms their notions of orderliness took differ, providing interesting insights also into their divergent notions of intelligibility. In China, the regular relations between heaven and earth are, in a sense, the responsibility of the Emperor who acts as a mediator between them. On him depend not just the welfare of ‘all under heaven’, but also the orderly relations between heaven and earth themselves. They are a matter of due processes of change: yet these could be disrupted. When irregularities occurred, that could be taken as a warning, a sign of danger or even that the Emperor’s mandate was coming to an end – though the non-occurrence of an eclipse could be taken as a sign of his virtue. Order in the heavens, in that sense, could not be taken for granted. In Greece, by contrast, cosmic regularities are unchanging.”
G.E.R Lloyd goes on to show that the most important aspects of the institutional framework in China were the existence of considerable numbers of official posts, the sense that it was the ruler or his ministers that were the prime audience and the acceptance of the authority of the canons. “In Greece, with far fewer established positions available, far more depended on the skill that individuals showed in the cut and thrust of open debate – whether within a school or group, or between them, or just among individuals. It was success in argument with rivals that secured a reputation, essential not least if you were to make a living as a teacher. In these respects, the tradition of debate itself stands out as the key institution (of a different kind from those of bureaux or courts) in the situation within which most Greek intellectuals operated.”
As the esteemed author Charles Murray asks, was axiomatic logic inevitable? That is far from certain. “It is easy to assume that someone like Aristotle was not so much brilliant as fortunate in being born when he was. A number of basic truths were going to be figured out early in mankind’s intellectual history, and Aristotle gave voice to some of them first. If he hadn’t, someone else soon would have. But is that really true? Take as an example the discovery of formal logic in which Aristotle played such a crucial role. Nobody had discovered logic (that we know of) in the civilizations of the preceding five millennia. Thinkers in the non-Western world had another two millennia after Aristotle to discover formal logic independently, but they didn’t. Were we in the West ‘bound’ to discover logic because of some underlying aspect of Western culture? Maybe, but what we know for certain is that the invention of logic occurred in only one time and one place, that it was done by a handful of individuals, and that it changed the history of the world. Saying that a few ancient Greeks merely got there first isn’t adequate acknowledgement of their leap of imagination and intellect.”
A small band of Greek thinkers, starting with Thales from about 600 BC, embarked on a serious, critical inquiry into the nature of the world around them. The Milesian philosophers disagreed and used logic and reason to criticize the ideas of others. They did not immediately leave all traces of supernatural intervention behind; a perspective of repeated divine intervention could be traced in some of the writings of Herodotus in the fifth century BC.
Anaximander judged eclipses to be the result of blockage of the apertures in rings of celestial fire. According to the philosopher Heraclitus, the heavenly bodies are bowls filled with fire, and an eclipse occurs when the open side of a bowl turns away from us. David C. Lindberg elaborates in his accessible book The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450:
“These theories of Anaximander and Heraclitus do not seem particularly sophisticated (fifty years after Heraclitus the philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras understood that eclipses were simply a case of cosmic shadows), but what is of critical importance is that they exclude the gods. The explanations are entirely naturalistic; eclipses do not reflect personal whim or the arbitrary fancies of the gods, but simply the nature of fiery rings or of celestial bowls and their fiery contents. The world of the philosophers, in short, was an orderly, predictable world in which things behave according to their natures. The Greek term used to denote this ordered world was kosmos, from which we draw our word ‘cosmology.’ The capricious world of divine intervention was being pushed aside, making room for order and regularity; chaos was yielding to kosmos. A clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging; and there was wide agreement that causes (if they are to be dealt with philosophically) must be sought only in the natures of things. The philosophers who introduced these new ways of thinking were called by Aristotle physikoi or physiologoi, from their concern with physis or nature.”
The Classical scholar Eric Robertson Dodds in 1951 published The Greeks and the Irrational as a critique of the commonly held view that ancient Greek culture represented the triumph of “rationalism.” He demonstrated with examples how perceived spiritual influences or the notion of divine inspiration was common in Greece up to the time of Plato. While maybe true, this should not cause us to forget some of the unique contributions that the Greeks did make.
As we have seen, philosophers in Greece knew that moonlight is reflected sunlight. Plutarch even suggested that people live on the Moon.Around 300 BC, the geographer Pytheas of Massilia described the ocean tides and suggested a relationship to the Moon. Poseidonius(ca. 135-50 BC), a Greek Stoic philosopher and teacher of the Roman statesman Cicero, also correlated variations in the tides with phases of the Moon, and in the second century BC the Chinese had recognized a connection between tides and the lunar cycle. While correct, these insights did not progress further since nobody could explain why there was such a correlation.
Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation enabled the first explanation. Most of the Earth’s tides are caused by the Moon, with the Sun contributing a smaller part and other planets like Jupiter have a negligible effect. When the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned, the Sun’s and Moon’s gravity in combination create what we call spring tides, the highest high tides. This occurs at every new and full Moon. Neap tides are weak tides which occur during quarter Moons.
When the Moon passes through the shadow cast by the Earth we see a lunar eclipse. A solar eclipse occurs for a few minutes in the lunar shadow whenever the two celestial bodies line up vis-à-vis the Earth and the Moon is totally or partially obscuring the Earth’s view of the Sun. By pure chance, the Sun is 400 times larger than our Moon, but also 400 times farther from us, making the two bodies appear the same size relative to us. A similar coincidence does not happen anywhere else in our Solar System. Hundreds of millions of years from now, when the Moon has slowly moved further away from us, all solar eclipses on our planet will be partial.
Lunar eclipses can only occur at Full Moon when the Moon is directly opposite the Earth in relation to the Sun. The Chinese word for eclipseis chih, which means “to eat.” In ancient China, people beat drums and banged on pots to scare off the “heavenly dog” believed to be devouring the Sun. The bloody cast of the Moon in some eclipses only added to the fear of what was going on among many ancient peoples, quite possibly also in prehistoric Europe.
Even into the nineteenth century AD, the Chinese navy fired cannons to scare off the dragon or beast they imagined was eating the Moon. Christopher Columbus and his crew, stranded in Jamaica in 1503 on his fourth voyage, were wearing out their welcome with the natives who were feeding them. Columbus knew a lunar eclipse was coming and “predicted” the Moon’s disappearance. The natives begged him to bring it back which, of course, he did, in due time.
Unlike Mesoamericans, Andean peoples had not worked out the cycles of Earth, Sun and Moon that would allow them to predict eclipses, so these were frightening events. In South America, “when a solar eclipse occurred, the Incas would consult their diviners, who usually determined that a great prince was about to die and the Sun had thus gone into mourning. He continued that the Inca reaction was to sacrifice boys, girls, and livestock; the priestesses dedicated to the Sun went into mourning themselves, fasted, and made frequent sacrifices. Lunar eclipses were thought to occur because a puma or a snake was eating the moon. The corrective was to frighten the beast away by shouting, blowing trumpets, beating drums, hurling spears and other weapons toward the heavens, and whipping dogs until they howled.”
Toby E. Huff shows in The Rise of Early Modern Science that a very different metaphysical outlook prevailed in Chinese civilization compared to the worldview we find in Europe:
“In place of the Western atomism governed by laws of nature, or the Islamic occasionalism governed by God’s will, we find an organic world of primary forces (yang and yin) and the five phases (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth) constantly shifting in recurrent cycles. Within this cosmos there is no prime mover, no high God, no lawgiver. Of course, it is assumed that there is a pattern to existence and that there is a unique way (tao) for all things. But the explanation of the patterns of existence is not to be sought in a set of laws or mechanical processes, but in the structure of the organic unity of the whole. Moreover, Chinese cosmological thought came to stress the harmonious unity of natural and human patterns. That is, the patterns of the natural world were studied in order to find correlative correspondences between the patterns of heaven and those of human society below.”
The web of government and spiritual forces was so intimate that the traffic between the earthly and the spiritual worlds was constantly trod by officials speaking as gods and spirits speaking as officials. “In such a manner, the divine sanctioning of the authority of the emperor had its counterparts on the local level, and these served to reinforce the autocratic structure of government and local administration.” The prevailing Confucian ethic stressed the need to maintain outward obedience and respect for all authorities. To Chinese eyes, such public displays as challenging the word of authority figures constitute unforgivable signs of disrespect and dissension and the ultimate betrayal of filial piety. “In short, the Confucian stress on obedience stifled the development of all forms of contentiousness in public forums.”
He stresses that although medieval Europeans could debate the hierarchy of angles, the marriage between Greek philosophy and Biblical doctrines created a basis for viewing the world as orderly. The almighty God could make miracles if He wanted to, but such miracles were held to be rare events and the exceptions that proved the rule. This is in sharp contrast to the whimsical nature of Allah as portrayed in Islam, whose actions can never be predicted.
Huff in his writings emphasizes “the European medieval belief that man is a rational creature, one possessed of reason and conscience, and by virtue of these capacities is capable of understanding and deciphering the secrets of nature, with or without the aid of Scripture. Similarly, the medieval Europeans frequently deployed the metaphors of the ‘world machine’ (machina mundi) and the ‘Book of Nature,’ two devices giving pattern and intelligibility to the study of nature. Both ideas were integral to the teachings of the medievals (as in the writings of Grosseteste and Sacrobosco), and this shows again how deeply the metaphysical and religious roots of scientific culture are imbedded in the history of the West.”
By the seventeenth century, the European astronomical presence in China was significant. Western scholars had proved themselves superior to local astronomers when it came to making calendars and accurate predictions of eclipses. European Jesuit scholars used their undeniable edge in scientific and astronomical matters as a way of gaining entrance to the higher levels of Chinese society with the goal of promoting Christianity there, but the need for predicting lucky and unlucky days together with astrological divination for the Emperor and his court created tensions as to how far devout Christians could accommodate very different Asian beliefs, including what they viewed as superstition. Chinese divinatory emphasis on finding properly chosen sites and times of burial was powerful, and “the siting and burial of royal ancestors was a momentous event with serious consequences for all those involved.”
Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666) was a Jesuit missionary from Cologne, Germany, who worked in China. During the final years of the Ming and the early years of the Qing Dynasty he gained the official title of mandarin and was heavily involved in reforming the Chinese calendar. This prominent position, however, might involve significant dangers in China. He was charged with being responsible, as head of the Bureau of Astronomy, for selecting an inauspicious date for the burial of a young prince who died prematurely. The fiercely anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian (1597-1669) led the assault on Schall and the Jesuits. Huff tells the tale again, this time in his book Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution:
“Schall, the newly arrived Ferdinand Verbiest, and other Jesuits were rounded up, bound with ‘nine long and thick chains of iron, all with iron locks; three around the neck, three on the arms, and three on the feet,’ and carted off to jail. In the meantime, Yang Guangxian submitted still another memorial claiming that Schall, through his choice of an inauspicious date, was responsible not only for the premature death of the prince but also his mother and the emperor himself, who died of smallpox in 1661. Schall was partially paralyzed by a stroke precipitated by these events and had to rely on the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest for his defense. An investigation was undertaken and, on April 24, 1665, Schall and all the others were judged guilty: Schall was to be executed by dismemberment. Others involved were to be exiled after receiving forty blows with the bamboo. The next day, however, an earthquake rocked Beijing, leading all concerned to believe that perhaps an injustice had been done. The Princess Dowager intervened, absolving the Jesuits. The Jesuits, except for Schall, were released.”
Schall was placed under temporary house arrest and two non-Christian officials were pardoned, while several Chinese Christian converts, including Schall’s assistant Li Zubai, were beheaded for treason. Schall died the following year. The charges on which they were sentenced were those of sedition, although the judge admitted that he found it hard to determine which astronomical system was correct. Ironically, a few years later a test showed that Yang Guangxian as head of the Bureau of Astronomy could not produce a valid calendar in competition with Verbiest and the Europeans. He ended up being threatened with death himself for this failure and was eventually exiled to his home province, where he died.
A number of comments can be made about this episode. First of all is the fact that scholars often led a more dangerous and scientifically restricted life in China or in many other complex societies than they did in Europe, contrary to popular myth. Focusing only on the case of Galileo and ignoring this gives us a false picture of reality. First and foremost, however, it demonstrates that the leap to a (predominantly) non-magical worldview that had been achieved by certain Greek thinkers in Antiquity was far from self-evident. The Chinese, one of the most populous and prosperous nations in the world, as well as one of the cleverest according to themselves, still hadn’t made the same leap more than two thousand years later.
Some will probably claim that Europeans were just lucky and that other cultures were close to making a similar breakthrough. This view is highly questionable. The truth is that the most sophisticated Asian societies, or for that matter the complex urban cultures of Mesoamerica or the Andes region, were nowhere near making a similar breakthrough 500 years ago. Pre-colonial Australia and sub-Saharan Africa don’t even rank on the same scale in this regard.
The Chinese are practical people, which I for the most part mean as a compliment, and indeed often quite intelligent. One of the aspects of their culture that I find hard to relate to is their preoccupation with such things as “lucky and unlucky numbers.” Yes, you can encounter such notions in the West, too, but they are far more prominent in Oriental cultures. Many Chinese also seem to believe that luck is a character trait and that bad luck only happens to bad people.
From everything I have read, I have seen nothing to convince me that any other culture on Earth was moving in the same directions as Europeans did with the Scientific Revolution. Let us ask a provocative question: Would we have space travel today if we removed Europeans from the world? The answer is almost certainly no. China, the largest and richest country in Asia, was literally a couple of thousand years behind in certain crucial fields of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics and physics. Electricity was essentially unknown outside of Europe, as was calculus, the concept of gravity, modern material science and liquid hydrogen rocket fuel. My bet is that we would not have space travel, astrophysics or planetary science for a great many centuries to come without Europeans, as nobody else was independently close to making many of the crucial scientific and technological breakthroughs needed to achieve this.
Critics will no doubt point out that the ancient Greeks, despite their reputation for being rationalist and “non-magical,” could leave substantial room for superstition. This was true sometimes, just as it is true that a belief in occultism and horoscopes coexisted with the birth of modern science in Europe and is alive and well in parts of the Western world to this day.
Kepler was one of the greatest mathematical astronomers who ever lived, but there was also a mystical side to his cosmological ideas. As imperial mathematician in the 1600s he had to give astrological advice to the Holy Roman Emperor as a part of his duties, even though he himself was rather skeptical of horoscopes. Newton spent nearly as much time on alchemy or looking for hidden codes in the Bible as he did on mathematics. In the late 1800s the English chemist William Crookes, known for the Crookes tube, was a gifted scientist in addition to being passionately interested in spiritualism, including the possibility of talking to the dead. Science and non-science can and do coexist, occasionally even within the same individual.
And yet, there is something special about the European legacy of critical reason and the belief that reason, logic and public debate can be used to advance truth and insight into the natural world and the human world alike. After you subtract astrology and the notion that individual destinies are determined by spirits and stars, a belief that has been and partly still is very common around the world, a core of rationalism will emerge as one of the critical legacies of the ancient Greeks, running as a golden thread from them to modern Europe. It is easy to underestimate the importance of this, just as it is easy to take for granted many of the other unique advances made by Europeans, but we need to remember that there was never anything self-evident or inevitable about them. In the end, a (largely) rational understanding of the natural world was achieved in one civilization and in one civilization only: the European one.
The Curious Civilization
The eminent scholar Toby E. Huff in late 2010 published his book Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective, which inspired this essay. He was also the author of the modern classic The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West.
When the pro-Chinese English scholar Joseph Needham investigated the history of science among the Chinese he was eventually forced to conclude that “one can hardly speak of a developed science of physics” in China prior to modern contact with Europeans. It lacked the systematic thinkers that one encounters in the history of mechanics in medieval Europe, where there was an established tradition of arguing with Aristotle’s conceptions of motion. These include names such as Philoponus, Buridan, Bradwardine and Oresme, who all contributed to developments that culminated in Galileo’s work. In China there was no Galileo, nor Kepler’s laws of celestial motion which formed the basis for Newton’s great synthesis.
The Dunhuang Chinese Sky: A Comprehensive Study of the Oldest Known Star AtlasThe cosmological outlook of the Chinese organically linked the Earth, and above all the royal family, to the Heavens and the spirit world. The misbehavior of officials, it was thought, and especially of the Emperor himself, might result in famines, earthquakes, droughts or other natural disasters because they had displeased the spirit world. Similarly, anomalies in the heavens were taken as portents of the future and might predict future events that should be known only to the Emperor. For this reason, there was a powerful inclination in Imperial China to keep sky watching confined to the official bureaucracy under a veil of secrecy.
Chinese astronomical theory was never very sophisticated compared to that of the ancient Greeks, not to mention that which developed in modern Europe after the Scientific Revolution, but on a strictly practical level they had a rich tradition of celestial observation that was directly related to calendar making. As Huff asks, why didn’t the arrival of the telescope with Jesuit astronomers have the same fructifying effect on scientific inquiry there as it did in Europe?
Jesuit astronomersThe number of stars accurately catalogued by European astronomers more than tripled through the use of the telescope during the seventeenth century. Yet despite the fact that Western European eyeglasses by the sixteenth century had been exported in significant quantities to the Middle East and as far east as China, Asians did not conduct experiments with such glass lenses leading to their own construction of telescopes. What is even stranger is that after Asian nations had been introduced to the European telescope in the 1600s they were surprisingly slow in using it to gain new astronomical insights. Huff’s provocative suggestion is that they suffered from what he terms a curiosity deficit vis-à-vis Europeans.
The Middle East had a very ancient tradition of making glass for decorative purposes. The region had also produced theoretical studies of optical phenomena inspired by ancient Greek works that were superior to those of East, Southeast or South Asia. Yet after Muslims were confronted with European glass lenses they made almost no creative contributions of their own. Apart from some limited interest in using telescopes for military purposes or for spying on the infidels, there was little response to this new European device in Islamic-ruled lands:
In short, telescopes had been widely disseminated across the Ottoman Middle East, among the Safavids, and in the Mughal Empire within a decade or two after their invention in Europe in 1608-09 and the appearance of Galileo’s revolutionary revelations in The Starry Messenger of 1610. Yet, the telescope’s arrival in Muslim lands — in Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere — hardly created a stir. No new observatories were built, no improved telescopes were manufactured, and no cosmological debates about what the telescope revealed in the heavens have been reported.” The shift to a Copernican and Newtonian worldview was greatly delayed in the Middle East, as well as in India and China. “In that regard, the curiosity deficit seen in China also prevailed in the Muslim world.
Muslims, however, were much more aggressively hostile to Western ideas than were the Chinese. European Jesuit scholars like Matteo Ricci were allowed to practice their religion in China and even to convert some of the locals to Christianity. They would have been killed for doing the same in the Islamic world since this constitutes a capital offense under Islamic law.
Huff believes that an infectious ethos of scientific curiosity that existed across Europe was unmatched elsewhere in the early modern world. At the end of the day, there was no Thai Leeuwenhoek, no Korean Galileo, no Chinese Newton, no Indian Leibniz and no Turkish Tycho Brahe.
Toby E. Huff comments on the fact that several leading writers in recent years have claimed the parity or superiority of China to Europe economically prior to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but they have often more or less ignored the Scientific Revolution and the enormous technological and economic impact it had. This would include Kenneth Pomeranz in The Great Divergence, or books with such titles as The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.
There was a different public sphere of information sharing and debate in parts of Europe. In the seventeenth century, pamphlets evolved into newspapers, with the London Gazette appearing in 1666. Nothing like this took place outside of Western Europe at this point.
The Dutch RepublicResearchers Sascha O. Becker, Erik Hornung and Ludger Woessmann have reinterpreted Max Weber’s thesis and found that Protestant economies “prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity.” They also found that Protestantism’s strong effect on literacy rates was “large enough to account for practically the entire Protestant lead in economic outcomes.” Protestant countries had near universal literacy in 1900, but no Catholic country had reached full literacy, with many falling far short.
Estimates of book production in Asia reveal exceedingly low levels of production. It was close to zero in the cases of India or present-day Indonesia because printing did not become widespread in much of South and Southeast Asia until the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even regarding East Asia, where block printing had been invented a thousand years earlier, numbers provided by Sinologists indicate that total book production in Europe in the early modern era was vastly greater than in China. Moreover, those Asian books that were produced had little to do with scientific advances, mechanics, electrical studies or air pumps.
Britain, and Europe more broadly, had a major intellectual, institutional and human capital advantage that fed directly into the early Industrial Revolution, human capital here used to measure the knowledge, skills, health and experience of a society’s inhabitants. Seen in this light, “it is apparent that Western Europe was on an entirely different developmental plane than the non-West. This was probably true since the time of the Greeks.” Nevertheless, the Dutch economist Jan Luiten van Zanden has showed that this has roots in medieval times, with the establishment of corporations, parliaments, universities and professional associations. Western human capital formation from the fifteenth century onward was thus far ahead of the rest of the world, but Japan’s high literacy rate was the closest equivalent outside of Europe:
According to van Zanden, that lead was probably 300 to 400 years ahead of rivals such as Japan and China. Non-Europeans were triply disadvantaged: first, whereas literacy rates rose rapidly in Europe from the sixteenth century onward (perhaps even as early as the fifteenth century), levels of literacy in non-Western countries were extremely low and remained so to the end of the twentieth century; second, there was no scientific revolution outside the West; and third, the legal and intellectual foundations for stable economic development as well as democracy and constitutional government were absent. Nothing parallel to the legally circumscribed public sphere of newspapers and public dissent appeared outside Europe before the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Even then, those publications were distant approximations of the European press. All these results run counter to those who argue that there was no cultural or institutional difference between Western Europe and China, Mughal India, or the Ottoman Empire in this period. Finally, we cannot overlook among all these assets the unique broad-based scientific curiosity that propelled modern science throughout the seventeenth century.
As the leading historian J.M.Roberts put it: “The massive indifference of some civilisations and their lack of curiosity about other worlds is a vast subject. Why, until very recently, did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or western European texts into Arabic? Why, when the English poet Dryden could confidently write a play focused on the succession in Delhi after the death of the Mogul emperor Aurungzebe, is it a safe guess that no Indian writer ever thought of a play about the equally dramatic politics of the English seventeenth-century court? It is clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and adventurousness must lie deeper than economics, important though they may have been. It was not just greed which made Europeans feel they could go out and take the world. The love of gain is confined to no particular people or culture. It was shared in the fifteenth century by many an Arab, Gujarati or Chinese merchant. Some Europeans wanted more. They wanted to explore.”
The Lens SalesmanIf one looks up the meaning of the term “curious” as it is used in modern English, it carries the primary meaning of being marked by desire to investigate and learn to know how the world works. However, the word can carry the connotation of being novel, singular and unusual in the slightly negative sense of being odd or strange. Finally, being curious can carry the decidedly negative meaning of being meddlesome or prying, of taking an undue interest in other people’s affairs and thrusting oneself into their affairs unasked and unwelcomed.
I would venture to say that all of these different designations can accurately describe some defining characteristics of Western civilization: First and foremost we have an unusually powerful positive interest in knowing how the world and the universe looks like and works. We have made unusual advancements, but sometimes also strange and unusual mistakes. Finally, I have to admit that we can occasionally display a tendency to be meddlesome and unduly interefere into other people’s affairs. In short, the West is the curious civilization.
Is There A Genetic Basis For Northern European Drunkenness?
Alcoholic drinks made from wild fruits and berries or from honey (mead) may theoretically have existed prior to the Neolithic, but they became much more important with the rise of agriculture. Fermented beverages have many bad side effects, yet essentially all agricultural peoples regularly consumed some form of alcoholic brew. The consumption of beverages which contained modest amounts of alcohol could be beneficial to your health in ancient times as they might provide some level of protection against waterborne pathogens. For this reason, alleles that reduced the risk of alcoholism prevailed among agricultural populations. By contrast, peoples that did not have early food production, such as Eskimos, Aboriginal Australians or the Native Americans of North America, are more vulnerable to this problem.
Modern Europeans have easy access to chlorinated tap water, which may not always taste great but which they can usually drink without fear of getting sick. In the past, access to clean water was far from certain. Today, some of the common antiseptics are alcohols, used to disinfect the skin or surgical instruments. Alcohols for medical purposes have a much higher concentration of ethanol, typically 60-90%, than regular beer or wine, but even small amounts of ethanol has some effect. Because of its alcoholic content, wine was an excellent vehicle for dispensing various medical agents, too. Patrick E. McGovern writes in his book Ancient Wine:
“It was the most common ingredient in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Syrian medicines, which was readily administered by drinking or external application. Most important, people who drank alcoholic beverages, as opposed to straight water, in antiquity were more likely to live longer and reproduce more. As Paul advised Timothy (I:5.23): ‘No longer drink only water, but take a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.’ Ancient armies were ‘inoculated’ against disease by mixing wine with the uncertain water supplies that they came upon in their journeys. In addition to the alcohol, the polyphenolic aromatic compounds in wine have antiseptic properties.”
There were warnings against drunkenness in Antiquity, but “the Greeks drank their wine mixed with water, which, depending on the ratio of water to wine, must have reduced the alcohol content. It is estimated that the wine they drank ranged from about three to seven percent alcohol, the range of strength of modern beers. Wine was part of the diet of all Greeks. It may have even been healthier than drinking from the cities’ water supplies.” Italians, from the Etruscan to the Romans, were also wine lovers throughout historical times.
Early medieval Europe was a turbulent and therefore militarized place. Kings and aristocrats dressed like late Roman generals, not like the older toga-clad senatorial tradition. Traditional Roman values such as knowing Virgil and secular classics by heart, or being able to write poetry and complex prose, became less important in favor of swordsmanship and the Bible. A stress on aristocratic meat-eating among the Franks and other Germanic groups seems to be a genuine innovation of this time period. This had not been the most prominent feature of Roman cuisine, where status was conveyed by the complexity and the cost of the ingredients.
A particularly important innovation was the public assembly, a formal meeting of many of the free adult male members of a certain ethnic and political community to deliberate and decide on matters of war and, increasingly, to make law and judge disputes. The Romans had plenty of large-scale public ceremonials themselves, but in post-Roman Europe assemblies had a wider significance in that they represented the principle that the king had a direct relationship with all free Franks, Lombards or Burgundians, who in turn were expected to have military obligations. They had roots at least as much in the practices of some of the northern peoples as among the ancient Greeks or Romans, and had parallels with the Anglo-Saxon witena gemot (“meeting of wise men”) in England, the Scandinavian thing or the Irish óenach.
A hallmark of a good king was generosity and above all doing justice, fairness of judgment and accessibility to plaintiffs. Kings put their palaces beside woodland regions that were easy to reach for hunting. Frankish and Lombard kings began to see some of these regions as “forests,” royal reserves in which only they could hunt. Aristocrats did not do this yet, although they would do so later in the Middle Ages, but they were enthusiastic about hunting.
According to historian Chris Wickham, “Aristocratic clothing, marked by a large amount of gold and jewellery worn on the person and (for men) a prominent belt, similarly bejewelled, descended from the military costume of the Roman period, and so did the symbolism of the belt itself, which generally represented military or political office (though by now the belt was bigger and flashier than under Rome). Eligius of Noyon, when a secular official for Dagobert I in the 630s, was already saintly enough to give his ornamenta to the poor; Dagobert gave him another belt, however; he could not avoid wearing that. Royal and aristocratic courts also had a different etiquette from those of the Roman world. The otium of the Roman civilian aristocracy, literary house-parties in well-upholstered rural villas, and the decorum of at least some imperial dinner parties, was replaced by what sometimes seems a jollier culture. This was focused on eating large quantities of meat and getting drunk on wine, mead or beer, together with one’s entourage, usually in a large, long hall. In Italy, drunkenness was possibly less acceptable, but north of the Alps it appears in every society.”
It is striking to notice that drunkenness was more widespread and socially accepted in many northern European societies than it was in some of the Mediterranean ones already during the Early Middle Ages, if not before. The same basic pattern remains in place nearly fifteen hundred years later: Drunkenness is currently more widespread, or certainly more socially acceptable, among the British, the Irish, the Scandinavians and the Russians in far northern Europe than it is among the Spanish, the Italians and the Greeks in far southern Europe.
Obviously, there may be cultural reasons for this pattern, too, but then culture itself quite frequently has a major genetic component. Could this be true here as well? We know that Italians are less lactose tolerant than Scandinavians. Is it possible that some of the populations in the south and especially southeast, who have had agriculture and wine drinking significantly longer than the populations in the far northern fringes of the Continent, have therefore developed stronger protection against alcoholism? Vice versa, is there a genetic basis for northern European drunkenness? Maybe the British and the Finns are semi-Eskimos?
Metal and Early European Warfare
Surprisingly early copper tools such as axes from around 5500 BC have been found at Plocnik, near Prokuplje south of Belgrade in Serbia. Archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic comments that “These people were not wild,” pointing to fine statuettes recovered from the site. “They had finely combed hair and adorned themselves with necklaces.”
Before 5000 BC the inhabitants of the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills farmed, built sizable towns and mastered large-scale copper smelting. At its peak by 4500 BC, says Professor David W. Anthony, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world.” Admiring their colorful ceramics, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology noted that during this early period “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.” The Spondylus shell from the Aegean was a special item of trade.
Long-distance trade of certain materials existed in prehistoric times. Amber (fossilized tree resin) has been used for jewelry for many thousands of years and was exported from the shores of the Baltic Sea to other European regions quite far back into the Stone Age. During the Copper Age and Bronze Age in Europe and Near East, metals initially served prestige and decorative purposes, but gradually became employed for practical tools and weapons as well.
Bronze is an alloy of copper, usually in combination with tin. It had been made before 3000 BC but didn’t become widespread until somewhat later. The period prior to this is sometimes called the Copper Age or Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone) Age, referring to the limited initial use of pure copper along with stone tools. Bronze is harder than copper and easier to cast. Its eventual replacement by iron for tools or weapons before and primarily after 1000 BC happened mainly because iron is much more abundant in the Earth’s crust than copper and tin.
The Early Iron Age resulted temporarily in less international trade, precisely because iron was more common than tin. Tin mining in Erzgebirge between Saxony in present-day Germany and Bohemia in the Czech Republic existed by 2500 BC and was soon practiced in Brittany, France, the Iberian Peninsula and above all in Devon and Cornwall in southwestern England. Cornwall in particular was a key exporter of tin to Europe and the Mediterranean world throughout Roman Antiquity and the Middle Ages all the way up to modern times. It is conceivable that some peoples in the eastern Mediterranean also got tin from non-European sources such as Afghanistan; we know that the Egyptians and others traded with this distant region in order to gain access to the beautiful semiprecious blue stone known as lapis lazuli.
Early metallurgy spread from the Near East as well as southeastern Europe, where a limited use of copper was soon supplemented by more sophisticated bronze, occasionally gold and finally silver, but these innovations were initially more symbolic than practical; rare metal objects were prized as status symbols in this era. Materials such as obsidian (natural volcanic glass) and flint blades were still utilized during the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age. With very few exceptions, swords do not appear in the archaeological record until after 2000-1500 BC. Only during the Late Bronze Age do we see a much more widespread use of bronze, and eventually iron, for practical agricultural tools as well as for different types of metal weapons. This change was caused by a greater mastery of fire (pyrotechnology) and the controlled use of high temperatures, which was also utilized in Europe to create glass beads.
Scholar Anthony Harding writes about Europe, ca. 1300-600 BC. Gold was worked in some quantity in areas like Scandinavia and Ireland. A few other metals such as lead were also used, although sparingly at this point, plus some silver for drinking vessels and decoration. The exploitation of major copper ores – Alpine, Carpathian, Balkan and Irish – continued.
In the case of gold, Irish and Carpathian sources continued to supply the increasingly skilled European smiths and their customers with surprisingly large quantities of the precious metal. Especially in Ireland, Scandinavia and northern Germany, quite a few high-quality gold objects (mainly ornaments) from this period have been recovered. From the mid-second millennium BC, multi-piece molds began to be used in addition to an increasing reliance on the lost-wax method. Examples of the latter would be the finely made figurines of Sweden and Sardinia; of the former, the horns of Ireland and the lurer of Denmark, fine bronze trumpets probably used in ritual performances of music. Although the inhabitants of far northern Europe learned the skills of metal-working comparatively late they quickly mastered them, as demonstrated in the technical mastery of the Trundholm Sun chariot (ca. 1400 BC).
There was a veritable explosion, quantitatively and qualitatively, in metallurgical skills in the second millennium. The most important processes at first involved copper and tin, alloyed to make bronze. Iron ores were apparently not exploited much before 2000 BC, and large-scale use expanded rapidly after 1000 BC. “By the middle of the second millennium BC, a new metal had been discovered – iron – that needed no alloying and was locally available in many parts of Europe. Iron seems to have been produced unintentionally at first, during the smelting of some sorts of copper ore that had a naturally high iron content. Production of iron, in both the northern Carpathians (the Tatra mountains of Slovakia) and the Caucasus mountains of Georgia, seems to have begun around 1700 BC,” towards the end of a period of tremendous innovation in metallurgy observable across northern Eurasia all the way to China. The Shang Dynasty produced many fine bronze pots and drinking vessels in addition to jade ornaments.
Low-lying regions, where iron occurs in carbonate ores in association with clays, or moorland regions with “bog iron,” now became much more important than before. Early iron metallurgy probably used the methods of bronzeworking. By 600 BC, “iron was the standard material for tools and weapons, though the highest quality art products were still made in bronze.” It seems more than a coincidence that the period from 600-200 BC also witnessed the birth of the first truly vast empires in human history, from Persia and Rome to India and China.
Late Bronze Age Europe was apparently a turbulent place where weaponry evolved fast. “The sword, for instance, which had been developed in the east Alpine area in the Middle Bronze Age, assumed a variety of forms whose rather rapid pace of change probably reflects the need constantly to update equipment if military success is to be maintained. It was at once a functional implement (as shown by the degree of wear and resharpening on some pieces) and an object important for display purposes.” Moreover, “Armour (shield, helmet, cuirass, greaves) played an increasing role in the mechanisms of Bronze Age warfare, but archaeologically it is those pieces that were made in metal that survive, and these were not the ones that were functionally most effective. It has been shown experimentally, for instance, that shields of sheet bronze can be cut by a slashing blow from a sword, whereas those of leather or wood are much tougher. Added to the difficulty of moving freely in sheet-metal armour, it is much more likely that leather was the normal material and that these metal pieces were for display – either in warlike ceremonies, or intended to strike fear into the hearts of opponents at the mere sight, much as happened with Homer’s heroes in the Iliad.”
Alexander the Great and his soldiers may have protected themselves with linothorax, which was something like an ancient equivalent of Kevlar armor. Gregory Aldrete, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the USA, states that “this linen armor thrived as a form of body protection for nearly 1,000 years.” Modern reconstructions have resulted in several complete sets made from flax plants that were grown, processed, spun and woven by hand, using a glue made from the skins of rabbits and another from flax seeds. Tests included shooting the resulting patches with arrows and hitting them with swords. The material performed surprisingly well. It is only known through some descriptions in ancient literary sources and visual images in vase paintings and sculptures. The main visual evidence for Alexander wearing linothorax is the famous Alexander Mosaic found in Pompeii, Italy.
The use of armor in early historical times was relatively minor, focused on a helmet and leg plates plus a large shield, for example the hoplites of ancient Greece. The use of plate armor is mainly associated with the Middle Ages, and the weight always had to be balanced against mobility and flexibility. In late medieval and sixteenth century Europe, that is, the age of low velocity firearms, some metal armors were sufficiently strong to stop bullets. Following the Industrial Revolution, armored motorized vehicles and tanks were eventually developed, too.
Chivalry as a concept is closely associated with the knighthood and heavy cavalry of the European Middle Ages. It is derived through the French cheval from the Latin caballus, “horse.” The world “cavalry” comes via Italian from the Latin caballarius, “horseman.” Four peculiarities distinguished the late medieval professional warrior: his weapons, his horse, his attendants and his flag. Banners were attached to the lance. Aristocratic knights were expected to uphold virtues such as honor, courage, gallantry toward women and chivalrous conduct.
According to author Robert Friedel, the horse was put to even greater use than before during the Middle Ages. New forms of plow lent themselves to effective use of horses, which increasingly supplemented oxen for this purpose, as did the horse cart and the wagon for transport. In warfare, heavily armored mounted knights became the symbols of the medieval warrior of the feudal era. Different breeds were employed as pack horses or for long journeys:
“For battle use, however, the desired horse was the destrier, typically ridden by only the wealthiest knights and nobles. The properly trained destrier could move steadily from a walk to a canter to a full-fledged but controlled gallop while carrying a fully armored warrior. Their expense made them precious indeed, even at the height of chivalry. Chivalry itself, as a code of conduct and values, represented the ascendancy of the horse and its improvement to a central place in the European scheme of things.”
The use of iron continued to increase in medieval times. In Europe, it was applied to horseshoes, nails, spikes, sickles, in mills or as fittings for carts and harnesses. While there was a range of weaponry that was important to the medieval warrior, for instance longbows, crossbows, lances and pikes, the sword above all became a symbol of power. In the course of the Middle Ages the dependence of the warrior on iron increased, as the styles of battle and the growing resources available to support warfare led to an increase in the size of armor:
“Whereas the early medieval soldier was largely protected by thick pieces of leather and a shield made mostly of leather and wood, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the mounted warrior was encased in an almost impenetrable shell of iron armor, and when it could be afforded, the iron protection was extended to the horse as well. A complete suit of armor in the late Middle Ages might consist of as much as a hundred pounds of iron plate, and plate was supplemented by chain mail, drawing even further on the skills of the smith/armorer. The fully armored knight and horse was a formidable but ponderous weapon, representing the heaviest and most expensive mobile implement of land warfare until the introduction of the tank in the early twentieth century. The medieval military uses of iron, which extended well beyond the arms and armor of the knight to include arrow and spear points, spurs and stirrups, and key parts of crossbows and siege machinery, made particular demands on the most precious forms of the metal, especially hardened steel.”
War and Human Accomplishment
Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment from 2003 has already achieved a well-deserved status as a modern classic. In this work, Murray not only ranks individual achievements and contributions in the arts and sciences; he also attempts to analyze some of the variables involved in rates of accomplishment, such as religion, political system and wars.
There is no doubt that the chaos, death and disruption caused by major wars can potentially limit human accomplishment. Among the most extreme cases in point would be the two great wars in Europe from 1914 to 1945, which caused an orgy of bloodletting and ideological radicalization and disrupted the very fabric of European civilization. Yet this does not imply that wars always have to have a similarly negative impact.
The conflicts between Catholics and Protestants during of the Thirty Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which established the modern, sovereign European state. This fighting caused great devastation within the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in the mini-states of what we now call Germany. Yet from the late 1600s on, Johann Sebastian Bach spent his life in Germany between Weimar and Leipzig, and the eighteenth century in German-speaking Central Europe eventually turned out to be one of the most impressive periods in the history of music.
The first Persian invasion of mainland Greece ended with Athenian victory in a battle fought on the Marathon plain of northeastern Attica in 490 BC. According to legend, a soldier ran from the battlefield to Athens to announce the victory, a distance of roughly 42 kilometers. This consequently became the length of the long-distance footrace we now call marathon.
The Greco-Persian Wars continued with the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of Xerxes and his vast armies to invade Greece. They were slowed down with the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC and repulsed by the outnumbered forces of the Greek city-states against Persian galleys at the Battle of Salamis that same year. Socrates was born just a few years later. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) ended with defeat for Athens against Sparta and its allies.
Yet despite all of this, plus a plague after 430 BC that killed the statesman Pericles, Athens during this century and a half witnessed a great cultural flowering, the Athenian Golden Age. It included the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the sculptors Praxiteles and Phidias, the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius and above all the philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The city attracted talents from other parts of the Greek-speaking world, for instance the astronomer Eudoxus.
Renaissance Italy wasn’t too peaceful, either. Florence was in a chronic state of civil strife or threat of invasion during its greatest years. As Murray notes, the Dutch Golden Age gathered strength in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War and ended in 1648 with a treaty with Spain:
“Only four years later, the first of three Anglo-Dutch wars broke out, ending in 1654 the with Netherlands’ defeat. Rembrandt was 48 that year, Vermeer 22, Huygens 25. A decade later came the second Anglo-Dutch war, bloody but effectively a draw. Five years after that the French invade and the Dutch were forced to breach the dikes to save Amsterdam from conquest. The third Anglo-Dutch war broke out the same year, ending in 1674. The Dutch golden age was not a peaceful one. Of the most famous golden ages, only France’s La Belle Époque, dated in various ways between 1870 to 1914, was a time of peace.
Even in this case, France was on a downhill slide politically. Just as Athens’ most intense period of great work began after defeat, Paris’s Belle Époque began in the aftermath of France’s humiliating capitulation in the Franco-Prussian war, and it continued during a period when France’s international standing eroded. To say that (with the French exception) golden ages were punctuated by war doesn’t tell us much because every European age from 1400-1950, golden or not, was punctuated by war.”
He analyses different political systems such as absolute monarchy, parliamentary monarchy (for instance England after the Glorious Revolution in 1688), republics, liberal democracies and modern totalitarian states. What we can see clearly is that totalitarian states and very brutal absolute monarchies – that is, despotic states – greatly inhibit human accomplishment, with the partial exception of the military realm.
Examples of the former would be the Soviet Union, of the latter the Ottoman Empire. It was hard for the Christian subjects of the Ottomans to achieve great things when their children were taken away from them and taught to hate their own kind. They constantly lived in fear of a sword raised above their heads and enjoyed very weak property rights. This latter problem applied in Tsarist Russia as well.
The differences between less repressive monarchies and liberal democracies are not quite as pronounced, though, if we look at what the author calls freedom of action – the de facto freedom of maneuver an individual has at a given time, regardless of ruling system. This can be the result of custom, a tolerant ruler or the fact that you can move to a different location and political atmosphere.
This might have been possible in Europe for top scholars or artists. Many great cultural achievements have been made within aristocratic environments, and the potential for censorship of certain ideas unfortunately exists in liberal democracies, too.
Do Western Authorities Care More About Hamsters Than About Europeans?
In January 2011, the EU Observer stated that France stands to lose a case at the European Court of Justice over its neglect of the Great Hamster of Alsace, a species facing extinction. Sweden was about to be taken to court by the European Commission for allowing wolf hunting. Paris stands to be slapped with a multi-million euro fine for not protecting hamsters.
Notice how the EU worries more about hamsters than about the native peoples of an entire continent, the cradle of the most creative and innovative civilization in the history of mankind. We are worth less than dust. I cannot recall having seen a single report from the European Union, or for that matter the US Government, about the wave of racist violence against whites in major cities caused by the mass immigration of alien peoples that is actively promoted by Western authorities. Yet we now have one about hamsters. Does this mean that Western authorities care more about hamsters than about Europeans? It probably does, yes.
If the EU cared half as much about preserving the Swedes, Italians, Danes, Dutch, English, Germans, French or Poles as they do about animals then we might be getting somewhere.
The total human population on this planet when the last Ice Age ended may have been in the range of four to six million people, less than that of a single city the size of London, Paris or Moscow today. Another way of putting this is that for every living person on Earth ca. 9000 BC there are now at least one thousand, perhaps as many as two thousand, in the early twenty-first century. This should provide us with some perspective on just how much our numbers have increased in the course of the past ten thousand years. Two great revolutions caused this.
With the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture began more or less independently in a handful of different regions and spread very slowly from there for thousands of years. Understanding that the seeds of food plants could be collected and deliberately grown was a major turning point in history, but it was time-consuming. Even though the first farmers may, ironically, have enjoyed less leisure time and more health problems than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, their numbers and the complexities of their societies increased so much that they drove the latter into extinction. Settled communities eating agricultural products have by now enjoyed a global triumph, although a few isolated communities of hunter-gatherers exist here and there. The biggest and fastest upheaval was the Industrial Revolution, though.
Unlike the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution began in just a single location – Western Europe – and spread from there throughout the globe in a few generations, not thousands of years. Whereas the pace of change was barely noticeable for a person in 6000 BC, a man born in 1799 who lived a very long life would have witnessed a world utterly transformed. When he was a boy, the fastest way to transport information or people was still generally on horseback or by sailing ships, as it had been for thousands of years. Long-distance travel was rare and unusual. By the time he died, railway lines crisscrossed the continents, steamships carried bulky goods, cars with internal combustion engines rolled in the streets, the first airplanes had flown and radio waves had been transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean, following the already existing transatlantic telegraph cables. Add another century or so and billions of people annually travel by airplanes to distant places in a few hours, with space tourism in its infancy. Vast amounts of information are transmitted daily at the speed of light. This represents the greatest communications revolution in history, all achieved within the space of a couple of human lifetimes.
There really was no such thing as “world history” before the European global expansion over the past few centuries. For better or worse, European peoples have created an integrated and truly global technological civilization for the first time, and developed an international culture of organized science where none had existed before. That’s an extraordinary achievement.
One would think that their share of world population would increase after such an enormous success. For a while, it did. From the Scientific Revolution and roughly until the First World War – or the Great European Fractricide as it should properly be called – it grew, and then it plummeted during the twentieth century. By 2011, the European share of the global population is lower than it has ever been in recorded history, even if you count their descendants overseas, far lower than it was before Europeans created this globalization, and the rate keeps falling fast. The percentage of Europeans worldwide is now approaching that of whites in South Africa. This happened partly because their own numbers stagnated – all European nations apart from Muslim Albanians currently have below replacement-level birth rates, some of them far below – but mainly because populations exploded in other parts of the world. Apparently, Europeans created a world which they ultimately did not benefit from.
A person born in 1970 in Sweden, a country which has no colonial history outside of Europe, would have started school in a nation that was still nearly 100% ethnically homogeneous. If current trends continue, he will be a minority in his native land as an old man. Not only does he have to endure this or be socially vilified and maybe fired from his job or worse, he has to fund his own colonization and publicly celebrate it as a great and positive development. There has been no full-scale armed invasion here, nor has any deadly plague devastated the native population, unless, that is, you count Multiculturalism as a plague, and perhaps you should.
White Westerners have given other peoples, including actively hostile tribes, the tools needed to multiply beyond their native capacity, the transportation needed to travel to our countries, the human rights legislation needed to settle here and the welfare states needed to exploit us.
My personal opinion is that this situation is so unnatural that it cannot go on for much longer, nor will it. For one thing, the Western world simply no longer possesses the physical capacity to fund all of this madness even if it wanted to. I strongly suspect that the current Western-created international political order will soon implode and may take many of the networks it created down with it. Most likely, the global population will be nowhere near the 10-12 billion people many demographers now predict by the year 2100. The simple fact is that the planet cannot support such numbers. Much of Africa can barely feed itself today and will collapse without continued external aid. Human numbers have become artificially inflated because of the technological civilization created by Europeans and could plummet within the coming one hundred years due to wars, epidemics, natural disasters and ecological collapse.
Personally, I can live with China being the world’s largest economy. I cannot and will not accept, however, not having a single major Western city where my daughter can go without being verbally, physically and perhaps sexually harassed because of the color of her skin, eyes and hair. We simply have no other choice than to establish, or re-establish, countries that are exclusively or overwhelmingly for people of European origins. It’s the single greatest challenge we will face over the coming one hundred years. We will do that or we will perish.
How Did Europeans Develop Such a Variety of Hair and Eye Colors?
A number of remarkably well-preserved mummies from the second millennium BC have been recovered in the dry Tarim Basin of Central Asia, dominated by the Taklamakan Desert and located in what is today far western China. Several of the corpses have European features and blond or reddish-brown/copper-colored hair. The oldest ones such
as the Loulan Beauty date back to the early second millennium. From around 1800 BC, the earliest mummies in the Tarim Basin were exclusively Caucausoid, or Europoid, says Professor Victor Mair of Pennsylvania University. The textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber reckons that their cloth can be traced back to the Black Sea region of Eastern Europe. DNA samples have confirmed the northwest Eurasian origins of several of the ancient mummies found in this area.
Indra, the Vedic god of thunder, is described in the ‘Rigveda’ as having blond orred/copper-colored hair and beard, similar to his Slavic and Germanic Indo-European counterparts such as Thor. These hair colors are specifically European genetic traits that are rare elsewhere. Not totally unheard of, but rare. Indra was a preeminent drinker of ‘soma’, just like Thor was a great drinker of alcoholic beverages. Indra plays a part in the Jain and Buddhist mythology of India, but in Brahamanic times he was supplanted by Vishnu and Shiva as the most important gods.
People with red hair are sometimes referred to as redheads or gingers. This distinct phenotype exists primarily in Europe north of the Alps, starting from the Ukraine and Russia in the northeast, but red hair occurs most frequently (2-6% of the population) in Britain, Ireland and northwestern Europe and can occasionally be encountered elsewhere. Only 1-2% of the human population today has red hair, making it the rarest naturally occurring hair color. This rate keeps falling as the northern European percentage of the worlds population keeps falling.
Geneticists havent determined when red hair first came into being, but current estimates indicate that this event could have taken place already in the Paleolithic era. Carles Lalueza-Fox, a professor of genetics at the University of Barcelona, in 2007 claimed that his team had found a genetic variant among Neanderthals which is not present in humans today, but which causes an effect similar to that seen in modern redheads. Red hair among anatomically modern humans is associated with pale skin. It is an adaptation to the environment in northern climates with weak sunlight, especially in the winter. It appears as if the Neanderthals had lighter skin than the first African settlers in Europe, although the advances in paleogenetics are now so rapid that everything I say here could be proved or disproved in a few years.
In ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion‘: ”How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending estimate that by the end of the last Ice Age there may have been 6 million hunter-gatherers world wide. The subsequent advent of agriculture vastly increased the amount of food available, as humans didn’t merely have to rely on what was readily available in nature but could grow their own food. This allowed those who practiced it to greatly expand their numbers, but the nutritional quality may well have been poor at first.
Consequently, the health of each individual was not necessarily better in the Neolithic period than it had been in the Paleolithic era. The bodies of those who practiced agriculture had to adapt to a new diet consisting of foods that had either not been eaten before or had previously been of secondary importance. The more permanent settlements associated with agriculture gave rise to new infectious diseases, as a critical mass of humans lived in close contact with each other and with domesticated animals. There is every reason to suspect that the earliest farmers suffered from a number of health problems related to a low-protein, vitamin-short, high-carbohydrate diet, and some genetic changes may have helped to compensate for this:
For example, we see changes in genes affecting transport of vitamins into cells. Similarly, vitamin D shortages in the new diet may have driven the evolution of light skin in Europe and northern Asia. Vitamin D is produced by ultraviolet radiation from the sun acting on our skin an odd, plantlike way of going about things. Less is therefore produced in areas far from the equator, where UV flux is low. Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. In fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture. Vitamin D was not abundant in the new cereal-based diet, and´any resulting shortages would have been serious, since they could lead to bone malformations (rickets), decreased resistance to infectious diseases, and even cancer. This may be why natural selection favored mutations causing light skin, which allowed for adequate vitamin D synthesis in regions with little ultraviolet radiation.
During the past 10,000 years, the human skeleton has become more lightly built. Archaic features such as brow ridges have virtually disappeared in most populations (except Australian aborigines), even though a few Europeans still had them during the Bronze Age. Surprisingly, skull volume has apparently also decreased in most populations, which might correspond to a slightly smaller human brain today than in the Mesolithic. Some of these changes are apparent within the past one thousand years, judging from medieval skeletons.
*As Cochran and Harpending point out*, the genetic changes underlying light skin in Europe and East Asia are not identical, although both of these groups faced similar evolutionary pressures. In most parts of the world, even in temperate regions, everyone has dark eyes and dark hair. To us these facts suggest that there was something fundamentally different in the selective forces affecting skin color in Europe and East Asia. If those forces were different, at least one of them was probably selecting for something other than vitamin D.
We dont have access to all the genetic data just yet, but blond hair appears to be caused by a younger mutation than red hair. Most likely, when the Lascaux cave paintings were created by the end of the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 15,000 BC) not a single human being in the world had either blond hair or blue eyes. It is interesting to speculate why some Europeans developed blue eyes whereas people in northeast Asia, who experienced comparable evolutionary pressures for light skin (and quite probably high IQ as well), didn’t evolve the same wide range of eye colors as Europeans did, from brown to blue, green, gray or hazel eyes.
Blue eyes are common in many European populations but are nearly nonexistent in the rest of the world. They can occasionally be found in nearby areas such as northern Syria, among the Berbers of northwestern Africa or in regions which have been exposed to European genetic influences in the past, for example Afghanistan or parts of Central Asia since the Indo-European expansion, Alexander the Great and his men or certain traders and adventurers.
According to authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending*, blue eyes are caused by a change in a DNA sequence that is embedded in HERC2, the gene next to OCA2. That allele accounts for 75 percent of the variation in eye color in Europe. Its the third longest haplotype in Europeans and therefore cant be very old: Analysis of the unshuffled region associated with OCA2 suggests that it originated about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Blue eyes are most common in northern Europe, centered around the Baltic. The simplest assumption is that the allele originated in the center of the region, where its frequency is very high today, so our best guess is that it first occurred in a Lithuanian village about 6,000 years ago.
Originally, we all had brown eyes , says Professor Hans Eiberg from the Universityof Copenhagen. Moreover, all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. If this event happened between 6000-4000 BC then it may have been related to the introduction of agriculture to northern Europe. The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and literally turned off the ability to produce brown eyes. OCA2 is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to hair, eyes and skin. The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action. If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without melanin at all, that is, albino.
We dont know why red and blond hair came into being, but if the mutation for blue eyes happened in northern Europe after the introduction of agriculture then it may have been at least partly linked to diet. For example, northern Europeans utilized milk and dairy products much more than East Asians did, but this is speculation for the time being. Most likely, the evolution of the range of skin- and hair colors we see in modern Europeans happened in stages after the first influx of dark-skinned peoples from Africa. Merely by living in a cool northern climate you will evolve lighter skin over time, but perhaps there was a secondary effect after the introduction of agriculture, since the new diet included less vitamin D.
As anyone can wear contact lens to change their eye color, blue eyes are are rare among North America regions.
Blue eyes have become increasingly rare among North American children due to non European immigration and intermarriage with other ethnic groups. In 1900, 80 percent of people married within their ethnic group, and blue eyes a genetically recessive trait were passed down among people of northern European ancestry. About half of Americans born in 1899 had blue eyes compared to merely one 1 of every 6 today, and the rate keeps falling fast.
We keep hearing a lot of people praising diversity in Western mass media these days, but Europeans have a higher natural diversity of hair- and eye colors than the inhabitants of all other continents combined. This great diversity of phenotypes is directly threatened by non-European mass immigration, which once again reminds us that diversity in the Multicultural vocabulary is merely a code word for getting rid of everything thats unique to Europeans.
Mead, Butter, and the Indo-Europeans
I was inspired to write this after reading some news stories about mead. This got me thinking about the Indo-Europeans, one of my favorite subjects, much more fun than Mohammedans.
MeadMead, which is by many Europeans today perceived as an archaic drink of Viking sagas and medieval verse, is making a minor comeback in several Western countries, thanks in part to the enthusiasm of the home-brewing community. The number of meaderies in the United States has tripled in the decade since the year 2000, although admittedly from a very low level. To modern consumers who are more accustomed to beer and wine, mead made from honey, water and yeast often comes off as rather sweet, almost like liquid marzipan. But grapes can be sweet, too, and mead can have a dry taste, depending upon how it is made.
As one writer points out, the drink has an advantage over beer in certain respects: “ Mead possesses what winemakers call terroir, the French term for how something — wine, cheese, honey — conjures up the landscape around it. That’s because an artisanal mead is still, at least in part, an agricultural product. With its floral and herbal aromas, a good mead vividly communicates a sense of place — think a field of orange blossoms or rosemary bushes — in a way that’s impossible for beer.” Yet it suffers from a problem: Honey has little natural acidity. Unlike the best beer and wine pairings, mead doesn’t always combine well with food.
Mead: VikingThe bottom line is that mead is unlikely to ever again become the most important alcoholic beverage, as it was in many European nations for a very long time. It will most likely remain a drink for those with special interest and tastes, but as such, it is not unimportant. The original speakers of Proto-Indo-European consumed alcoholic drinks, at least mead and beer.
Authors J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World analyze the PIE language based on comparative linguistic research. Over the past couple of centuries, ever since European linguists became aware of the existence of the Indo-European family in the late 1700s by noticing far greater similarities in the structure and vocabulary of many languages than could have been produced merely by chance, Western scholars have tried to reconstruct the suggested vocabulary and grammar of the extinct mother language of this group based on comparisons between its younger daughter languages. The fact that they have been able to do this with any degree of certainty at all is a remarkable scholarly achievement, given that this original language has been dead for many thousands of years and not a single document written in it has been preserved.
Wheeled chariotWe can roughly date the time when PIE was spoken by comparing the vocabulary of this language with the physical archaeological record. For obvious reasons we cannot say with absolute certainty that all of the suggested word reconstructions are correct since no written text containing Proto-Indo-European exists, and most likely never did exist, but those who spoke PIE must have been familiar with wheeled vehicles since later, attested Indo-European tongues contain similar words for this and have not borrowed this vocabulary from each other.
We cannot reconstruct a very elaborate wardrobe for the Proto-Indo-European speakers, but they probably had some form of blanket wrap which, as we know, can vary greatly in shape and size from a kilt to a cloak or a shroud. We also have an early regional word for “shoe,” most likely some type of leather shoe; the Tyrolean natural mummy “Ötzi the Iceman” from around 3300 BC wore leather soles and fur uppers. Neolithic shoes were also made of bast.
Skin garments have been employed for tens of thousands of years and remain in use to this day. The spread of flax, and to a lesser extent hemp, was a product of the Neolithic Era. From roughly 7000-3500 BC, the recovery of textiles from European archaeological sites is almost exclusively of linen or some other plant material. The words for a white linen garment in several Indo-European languages, for instance the well-known ancient Roman tunica, appear to be borrowed from Near Eastern Semitic tongues, for instance the Akkadian term kitinnu.
There is a belief among some archaeologists that the Indo-European language family originated among the food producers of the Near East and “was swept quickly forwards in the fifth millennium as the language of the colonizing farmers.” This hypothesis is not convincing if one takes the linguistic evidence into account, which rather points to the fourth millennium.
Varna goldSome of the terms for containers may suggest vessels made of wood or skin, but their terms for the manipulation of clay and extensive evidence for domestic cereals clearly indicate that the speakers of PIE possessed a ceramic inventory. The early Indo-European languages shared what an archaeologist might term a late Neolithic vocabulary. There is a range of domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goat, pig, dog) and cereals (grain, barley) and the tools and techniques to process them (plough, harrow, sow, thresh, chaff, grind) and store the result (pot). The vocabulary associated with metallurgy is very restricted and includes copper, gold and silver, but not iron. Copper was utilized in the Balkans well before 5000 BC. Gold does not appear anywhere until the fifth millennium; the Varna cemetery near the Black Sea in Bulgaria from ca. 4200 BC contains many gold objects. Silver doesn’t appear anywhere before 4000 BC, after which we can find it in parts of Eastern Europe; it appears somewhat later in the Aegean.
The earliest evidence for the plough anywhere is about the sixth millennium BC in the Near East, with solid evidence for ploughing in Europe not much before 4000 BC; cultivation during the earliest Neolithic was associated with digging sticks. As we shall see, the speakers of PIE were familiar with honey and probably collected it from honeybees, yet there was an absence of honeybees east of the Urals. Their language exhibits strong links with speakers of Proto-Uralic and weaker links with speakers of languages from the Caucasus. In combination, this evidence points to an area west of the Urals, between the Urals and the Caucasus, in the steppes of the Ukraine and western Russia, or what is now called the Pontic-Caspian region.
The reconstructed vocabulary when compared with the archaeological record strongly suggests that Proto-Indo-European was spoken well after 4000 BC and had not begun to seriously expand and break apart into various Indo-European branches until after 3500 BC, when we have the oldest secure evidence of the existence of wheeled vehicles. Woven woolen textiles are made from long wool fibers of a type that did not grow on wild sheep. Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred just for that trait. Wool appears largely to be a development of the fourth millennium BC. We have unambiguous evidence for a PIE word for “wool.” This constitutes yet another piece of evidence that PIE was spoken after 4000 BC.
All things considered, the first phase of the Indo-European expansion was probably not associated with the slower diffusion of agriculture but with the faster spread of wheeled vehicles after 3500 BC. Whether such vehicles directly triggered the initial IE expansion is not known, but it seems plausible that they aided this by improving mobility, thereby making previously useless steppe grasslands available and converting them into useful animal protein.
The Horse, the Wheel, and LanguageIn his detailed work The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Professor David W. Anthony reminds us that it would be difficult to exaggerate the immediate importance of the first wheeled transport:
“Before wheeled vehicles were invented, really heavy things could be moved efficiently only on water, using barges or rafts, or by organizing a large hauling group on land. Some of the heavier items that prehistoric, temperate European farmers had to haul across land all the time included harvested grain crops, hay crops, manure for fertilizer, firewood, building lumber, clay for pottery making, hides and leather, and people. In northern and western Europe, some Neolithic communities celebrated their hauling capacities by moving gigantic stones to make megalithic community tombs and stone henges; other communities hauled earth, making massive earthworks. These constructions demonstrated in a visible, permanent way the solidity and strength of the communities that made them, which depended in many ways on human hauling capacities. The importance and significance of the village community as a group transport device changed profoundly with the introduction of wagons, which passed on the burden of hauling to animals and machines, where it has remained ever since. Although the earliest wagons were slow and clumsy, and probably required teams of specially trained oxen, they permitted single families to carry manure out to the fields and to bring firewood, supplies, crops, and people back home.”
The clearest proof of its impact was the speed with which wagon technology spread, so rapidly that we cannot say exactly where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented. The technology spread rapidly over much of Europe and the Near East before and after 3000 BC.
Where Proto-Indo-European was first spoken has been debated for more than two centuries, sometimes in a politicized manner. Although the question has not been fully settled, I agree with David W. Anthony when he says that “I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia. The case for a steppe homeland is stronger today than in the past partly because of dramatic new archaeological discoveries in the steppes.”
Many specialists have simply assumed that the earliest wagons were produced in Mesopotamia because ancient Europeans were perceived as being too “backward” to do this, but a possible prototype did exist in Europe in the form of Mesolithic and Neolithic bent-wood sleds, doweled together with fine mortise-and-tenon joints. Right up to the twentieth century AD, it made sense to park your carriage in the barn for the winter and resort to sleds (or skis), which are often more effective than wheels in snow since they don’t get easily stuck.
It is possible that skis were independently developed in several locations, but some of the first evidence we have of them comes from rock drawings in Scandinavia that are nearly 5,000 years old. The Sami peoples living in northern parts of the Nordic countries have long been known for their skiing skills. The Norwegian skier Sondre Nordheim (1825-1897) has been credited, justly or not, with a number of major innovations in this discipline and after 1860 used bindings of willow, cane and birch root around the heel from each side of the toe strap to fasten the boot to the ski. He won a ski jumping competition at Telemark, Norway in 1866.
Chariot muralIt was in the fourth millennium BC that wheeled transport first appeared in world history, across a vast region from present-day Denmark, Germany and Bronocice in Poland via the Black Sea to Mesopotamia, beginning around 3500 BC. As Philip L. Kohl says in The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia, “It is shortly after the introduction of wheeled transport that evidence for its massive utilization on the western Eurasian steppes is documented in the excavation of scores of kurgans containing wheeled carts with tripartite wooden wheels. These were not the chariots of a military aristocracy but the heavy, ponderous carts and wagons of cowboys who were developing a form of mobile Bronze Age pastoral economy that fundamentally differed from the classic Eurasian nomadism that is later attested historically and ethnographically.”
This innovation spread rapidly, which makes it harder to establish its origins, yet the earliest secure evidence of wheeled vehicles we currently possess comes from the eastern half of north-central Europe. The people who spoke Proto-Indo-European had their own terminology for axles, shafts and yokes: the PIE word for “wheel” relates to words for “to turn, spin.” By contrast, the corresponding terms in Sumerian appear to be loanwords from Indo-European.
In later Indo-European languages, basic terms in a number of categories are recognizably similar. For example, the word for the number “three” is treis in Greek, tres in Latin, drei in German, tri in Russian and Bengali and tre in Scandinavian as well as in Tocharian A from Central Asia. Words for new innovations that did not exist before (i.e., computer, motorcycle) are easily borrowed from other languages, whereas those related to more fundamental objects and relationships (i.e., mother, father, foot, air, Sun, Moon) are often much more stable.
It is not uncommon in the modern world to borrow words for borrowed technology, which is why many non-Western languages use terms similar to “telephone” today. The same principle presumably applied in ancient times. This does not by itself prove that the speakers of PIE themselves invented the wheel, although that it possible. They could theoretically have borrowed it from their neighbors but made more efficient use of it. It does, however, provide another indication that wheeled vehicles perhaps weren’t invented by the Sumerians. Wheeled transport may appear “inevitable” to us now, but let us recall that Mesoamericans and other settled American cultures still didn’t have this invention nearly five thousand years later.
It is true that Sumerian-dominated Mesopotamia after 4000 BC was an extremely dynamic region. The emergence of urban civilization there was a milestone in human history that affected a huge hinterland, from India and Egypt to the Caucasus and probably eastern parts of Europe as well. Philip L. Kohl suggests that Mesopotamia experienced a “fiber revolution” during the fourth millennium BC when it shifted from cultivating flax to herding wool-bearing sheep to produce textiles. Like many useful innovations, this one spread quickly.
Perhaps there was an exchange of innovations via the Black Sea region in the fourth millennium BC where Mesopotamians imported wheeled vehicles from the north while Europeans, including the speakers of PIE, imported wool-bearing sheep from the south. This model makes some sense in light of the archaeological and linguistic evidence we have today.
If wheeled vehicles were indeed invented by prehistoric Europeans, which is not a certainty but a real possibility, this would constitute one of the first instances when a revolutionary innovation of global importance spread from Europe. It was not to be the last. Bicycles, automobiles and other means of transport were created in modern Europe. If the first carts, too, were created on this continent in the fourth millennium BC then this would imply that almost all prototypes of the basic forms of wheeled vehicles during the past six thousand years were invented by Europeans. The only possible exception is the wheelbarrow, which may have been developed by the Chinese, yet the history of even this device is not beyond dispute; some historians claim that the wheelbarrow was independently invented in Europe.
The PIEs were familiar with horses, but whether or not these had been domesticated is a hotly debated topic in Indo-European studies. Did this event take place before or after 4000 BC? We don’t know for sure where the horse was first domesticated, but a common guess would be in far northeastern Europe, somewhere in the steppe and forest-steppe stretching from the Dnieper east to the Urals and beyond, in what is now western Russia or possibly Central Asia.
Wild horses were hunted for their meat in Paleolithic Europe. Anthony suggests that they were first domesticated by people who initially viewed them as food, a source of winter meat, since “they could feed themselves through the steppe winter, when cattle and sheep needed to be supplied with water and fodder. After people were familiar with horses as domesticated animals, perhaps after a relatively docile male bloodline was established, someone found a particularly submissive horse and rode on it, perhaps as a joke. But riding soon found its first serious use in the management of herds of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses.”
Royal Standard, UrThe images on the Royal Standard of Ur shows that the Sumerians in Mesopotamia were familiar with wheeled vehicles before 2500 BC, but still in the form of slow-moving carts pulled by oxen or tamed asses. This was contemporary with the Old Kingdom period when the Egyptians built their largest and most famous pyramids, yet we have no indications that they used wheels at this time. They did know wheels in the New Kingdom (1570-1070 BC), however; horse-drawn chariots were displayed in the tomb of Tutankhamun in the 1300s BC. The Battle of Kadesh (ca. 1270 BC) between the forces of the influential Pharaoh Ramesses II and the Indo-European-speaking Hittites is often cited as the largest chariot battle ever fought.
The earliest attested wheels were solid disk wheels. The invention of the spoke made wheels lighter and transportation swifter, with spoked wheels and chariots appearing around 2200-2000 BC. As we have seen, it is likely that people in the western Eurasian steppes were the first to tame the horse. The horse-drawn chariot was introduced before 2000 BC in the steppes of northeastern Europe, which aided a new phase of the Indo-European expansion. The “mother language” — Proto-Indo-European — was most likely dead as a spoken language by about 2500 BC, but the IE expansion continued thereafter through its daughter languages.
Judged by the available evidence it is a plausible working hypothesis that after 2000 BC, aided by the new horse-drawn spoke-wheeled chariot, speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian moved from somewhere around the Ukraine or western Russia into Iran, Afghanistan, northern India and Central Asia, eventually giving birth to the languages we know as Vedic Sanskrit and Old Persian. A few of them may have been preserved as the Tarim mummies in western China.
A suggested PIE word with good attestation is “honey,” which was something like *mélit. It is found in many regions of Indo-European speech, for instance as Latin mel. It has one Indo-Iranian cognate in the form of melition, a drink of the Scythians. The fermented alcoholic drink made from honey, mead, is PIE *médhu and is found in Greek méthu, wine; Latvian medus, honey, wine; Old Church Slavonic medu, honey, wine; Sanskrit madhu, honey, wine; and in Central Asia with Tocharian B as mit, honey, and mot, “alcoholic drink.” Honey in modern Portuguese and Catalan is mel; in Spanish and French miel; in Italian miele and in Romanian miere. The same word in the Slavic languages Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Russian and Ukrainian is med and in Polish miód, whereas “mead” in Scandinavian is mjød; in Icelandic mjöður; in Welsh medd; in Dutch mede; and in German Met. These similarities are not accidental. They date back in a straight line to Proto-Indo-European nearly six thousand years ago, making mead as a word and concept one of the oldest recognizable elements of European culture in active use today. In fact, mead as a drink may well predate agriculture itself in Europe.
The Chinese and Uralic words for “honey” as well as a few other terms appear to be loanwords from Indo-European. Consequently, honey is méz in modern Hungarian. Interestingly, mead is called sima in Finnish. Soma was an intoxicating drink possibly related to mead that was in ritual use among Indo-Iranians in the eastern regions of Indo-European speech. It is mentioned in the Rigveda and in the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism.
Loulan BeautyA number of remarkably well-preserved mummies from the second millennium BC have been recovered in the dry Tarim Basin of Central Asia, dominated by the Taklamakan Desert and located in what is today far western China. Several of the corpses have European features and blond or reddish-brown/copper-colored hair. The oldest ones such as the Loulan Beauty date back to the early second millennium. “From around 1800 BC, the earliest mummies in the Tarim Basin were exclusively Caucausoid, or Europoid,” says Professor Victor Mair of Pennsylvania University. The textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber reckons that their cloth can be traced back to the Black Sea region of Eastern Europe. DNA samples have confirmed the northwest Eurasian origins of several of the ancient mummies found in this area.
Indra, the Vedic god of thunder, is described in the Rigveda as having blond or red/copper-colored hair and beard, very similar to his Slavic and Germanic counterparts such as Thor in Europe. These hair colors are specifically European genetic traits that are rare elsewhere. Not totally unheard of, but rare. Indra was a preeminent drinker of soma, just like Thor was a great drinker of alcoholic beverages. Indra plays a part in the Jain and Buddhist mythology of India, but in Brahamanic times he was supplanted by Vishnu and Shiva as the most important gods.
The Indus Valley Civilization in northwestern India had cities and a writing system before 2000 BC. The people of the Rigveda had no words related to writing and did not live in cities, but their enemies lived in walled strongholds. We cannot say based on the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European lexicon alone with certainty where PIE was initially spoken, but the flora and fauna mentioned there does indicate a cool northern climate, not warmer India.
There is no secure PIE word for brick. “Bricks were made of sun-dried (and later fired) mud/clay and are the diagnostic building technique of the Neolithic (and later periods) in Anatolia, South-West Asia, and central Asia with some evidence from Neolithic Greece, but beyond Macedonia they are essentially unknown during the Neolithic. In short, the evidence for architectural terms in Proto-Indo-European is most consistent with an architectural tradition somewhere in temperate Eurasia where houses were exclusively built of timber.”
In the ancient world, intoxication was not always seen as reprehensible; it could sometimes be inspiring and creating a bond between man and the gods. The Greek term for ritual intoxication was enthousiasmos, divine possession or “having the god within,” from en, “in, within,” and theos, “god,” from which we derive the word “theology.” Over time, enthusiasm simply gained the meaning of “strong liking for something,” religious or not. To the Norse, the “mead of poetry” was an intoxicating beverage that made anyone who drank it a poet.
Both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are consistent in their condemnation of drunkenness, but Jews and Christians can use modest amounts of wine in their religious ceremonies, in sharp contrast to the practices of Muslims. The medieval Church saw wine as a gift from God and advocated its moderate use while rejecting abuse of it as a sin. The religious use of wine among Christians was anticipated in the cult of Dionysus, son of Zeus and the ancient Greek god of wine, theater and agriculture, known as Bacchus to the Romans.
DionysusDionysus, the beloved god of wine, is mentioned already in the Greek Linear B tablets from ca. 1500-1300 BC, but he then appears to be a god of intoxication rather than wine. The evidence is sparse, but it is conceivable that he was originally a mead god before becoming associated with wine. The ancient Greeks did not believe that they had always drunk wine. Max Nelson explains in The Barbarian’s Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe:
“The Greek philosopher Porphyry from the third century AD claimed, on the authority of ‘Orpheus’ (a mythic poet), that Zeus intoxicated Cronus with honey (that is, mead) since there was no wine at the time. The second century AD author Plutarch claimed that Jews used mead for their libations before wine was discovered. One ancient source even humorously stated that mead, then used by Illyrians, was once made among Greeks but that the recipe had been lost. Though we can certainly discount this explanation of why mead was no longer drunk by Greeks, these authorities may in fact be right that mead was known to Greeks before wine. The most telling clue is the fact that the Greek word for ‘intoxicant’ is methu, which likely meant mead…Though already in Homer methu is equated with oinos (presumably wine), there are texts in which the two seem to be opposed, thus perhaps showing that the former retained at least occasionally its original meaning of mead.”
Mead was enjoyed in the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Central Europe and in Wales more than in England. It continued to be a popular drink in northern regions for millennia, but consumption diminished as beer drinking spread. In Russia, it was widely drunk long after its decline in popularity in the West. It is still possible to buy bottles of freshly made mead from commercial producers, but it would be fair to say that the drink has by now become a marginal product compared to the great importance it once enjoyed.
People in India have been crystallizing cane sugar for more than 2,000 years. Tropical cane sugar was known in Europe by late medieval times, at least since the Crusades. It was soon grown in Sicily and Madeira. From the fifteenth century on it was used alongside honey in court kitchens and rich households to make sweets for dessert. With the beginning of the colonial period in Western Europe, sugar cultivation was spread to the New World, starting with the Portuguese and the Spanish and continuing with the Dutch, the British and the French. As prices declined, sugar became increasingly common and was used for jams and candy as well as added to the new tropical drinks, cacao, tea and coffee. The availability of imported sugar gradually reduced the traditional importance of honey as a natural sweetener, although several European countries continue to be major producers of honey to this day.
The use of sugar grew in Western Europe during the eighteenth century, primarily because of cultivation by African slaves in the Caribbean, but it wasn’t yet a regular part of the diet of ordinary people, with Britain as a partial exception. In 1747, during the early stages of the European chemical revolution, the German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709-1782) discovered that the sugar in a sugar beet is identical to that in sugarcane. In 1802 the first beet-sugar refinery began operations, after which it provided “a cheap new source of calories as well as a vast extension to the range of tastes available to the general public.”
Andrew Sherratt in The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe writes about the transformation of early agrarian Europe during the later Neolithic, Copper Age and Early Bronze Age, around 4500-2500 BC, when a belt of megalithic monuments stretched along the Atlantic coastlands of far western Europe, the Iberian Peninsula and western Mediterranean islands. There is a marked and rapid shift in the archaeological record starting just before 3000 BC and continuing until after 2000 BC, especially in northern regions of Central and Eastern Europe, with what archaeologists call the Pit Grave and Corded Ware cultures.
The so-called Bell-Beaker culture, named after their distinctive pottery drinking vessels, soon included the far western fringes of Europe in this continent-wide configuration. Many scholars suspect this was associated with the start of the first Indo-European expansion. The Corded Ware culture burials were usually single graves in pits. The Neolithic had been a period of communal enterprises and ritual centers. Compared to this, the emphasis that the Bell-Beaker and Corded Ware cultures placed on the individual constituted a radical change.
In a tomb from ca. 3000 BC at Plachidol in northern Bulgaria, the remains have been found of a vehicle with four solid wooden wheels. It is an outlier of the main distribution of such burials on the steppes north of the Black Sea, where they gave name to the Pit Grave culture. A new drinking culture and drinking vessels were imported to Eastern Europe at this time.
From 3500-2500 BC, European pottery shows diversity of types, especially in the decorated vessels used for ceremony and display. They record a growing tension between conflicting models of appropriate behavior, particularly the socially expressive consumption of food and drink. In northeastern Europe we can detect very rapid changes after 3000 BC with the spread of a new material culture where emphasis shifted from fixed ceremonial centers to mobility and portable wealth. The symbol of this change was the type of pottery known as Corded Ware, with comparable drinking vessels and stone battle-axes found in male graves in a belt stretching from Switzerland via Denmark and Poland to present-day Moscow in Russia:
“Graves containing these items now lay in the centre of a circular mound. This set of personal equipment and individual burial rite integrated elements both of southern and eastern origin. The emphasis on drinking had reached southern Europe from Anatolia, and now, in rustic northern mugs, dimly echoed the sophistication of the silver wine cups in use in the Aegean. These were no empty containers, and to fill them with the appropriate stimulant required a concentration of scarce resources. The corded decoration may hint that its contents contained more than the weak alcohol obtainable from forest honey and wild fruits, for if cannabis was smoked on the steppes it could have been infused by neighbouring drinking cultures.”
The new material culture was slowest in penetrating into Britain and the far western fringes of the Continent where megalithic, ritual-centered societies lasted longest. The relatively sudden appearance of Bell-Beakers on the western edge of Europe indicates the intrusion of a whole range of novel elements which had accumulated in central and northern Europe and which were adopted together in what appears to have been radical upheaval. Andrew Sherratt again:
“The disruptive character of this process is epitomized in two of these features (both of which were to have an equally dramatic impact some 4000 years later on the New World): alcohol and horses. That beakers were used for something like mead, flavoured with herbs such as meadowsweet or wild fruits, has been demonstrated from pollen grains found in the bottom of such drinking-cups. As with Corded Ware beakers, these vessels suggest individual hospitality rather than the great communal ceremonies at central gathering places which had hitherto dominated the ritual life of western Europe: the dry detail of pottery typology understates the social reality of a clash of cultural values. So, too, with the first appearance of horses in areas such as Spain or the British Isles: the animals were few in number, but their impact must have been a powerful one. Along with these, somewhat later, came metallurgical skills and woollen textiles, which by absorbing dyes could present a more colourful appearance than garments of skin or linen.”
Whether the Indo-European expansion literally introduced alcoholic beverages to these regions is debatable. Agriculture was well-established in much of northern Europe by 3000 BC. Beers made from grains had probably already been brewed there prior to this, and it is possible that fermented beverages had been made from honey or wild berries earlier. But the IE expansion may well have spread a new cultural emphasis on drinking rituals in Europe.
Ancient Europeans most likely made more extensive use of color in their clothing and art than they have normally been given credit for, but this hasn’t always survived in the archaeological record. Traditionally, Antiquity was by later generations taken to mean white marble statues, but the ancient Greeks thought of their gods in color and often portrayed them that way, too.
LaocoönWhite marble became the norm in European Renaissance art after Classical antiquities were rediscovered. The sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents (discovered in 1506 in Rome) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, Renaissance artists in the sixteenth century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their marble statues in its natural color. By the nineteenth century, though, scattered traces of their original, multicolored surfaces accumulated. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann and others armed with modern technology and ultraviolet light have tried to reconstruct the original, bright colors of old temples and statues.
The PIE lexicon emphasizes a diet that included meat, broth, salt, dairy products and the consumption of alcoholic beverages: beer, mead and perhaps wine. Sheep and goats can be milked, but the great abundance of terms for milk products such as cheese or butter in early Indo-European history suggests the more intensive exploitation of cattle for milk. There are several PIE words related to milk. One of them was something like *glakt, which is attested in Hittite as galaktar (“milky fluid” or “soothing substance”), in Latin as lac, milk, and finally in the Greek term gala. Yes, this is the same word we encounter in the modern term “galaxy.”
The name “Milky Way” for our own galaxy dates back to Antiquity. The infant Heracles, the mightiest of the Greek heroes (known as Hercules to the Romans), son of Zeus and a mortal woman, was placed at the bosom of the goddess Hera while she was asleep so that he would drink her divine milk and become immortal. Hera woke up and removed him from her breast, in the process spilling some of her milk across the sky. The term “galaxy” — a large system of stars, dust and gas held together by gravity — is consequently derived from the root “milky.”
Slavic, Greek and Indo-Iranian share a word for “curdled milk.” In the Slavic languages we have for instance Russian torog, “curds, soft cheese.” In Greek this is reflected in turos, cheese, and bouturos, literally “cow-cheese,” that is, butter. This term for “cow’s cheese” was borrowed into the Latin butyrum — buturum and then into modern English as butter.
The ancient Greeks and Romans did not use butter much in their cooking. Pliny the Elder was familiar with the substance, but mentioned it as a delicate food of the northern barbarians. It was almost unknown in Italy when the Renaissance period began, since it would spoil much more rapidly in the warm Mediterranean climate than in the cooler northern regions. Butter is produced by churning the cream from cows’ milk, although it is possible that it was first made accidentally from sheep or goat’s milk somewhere in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.
Scandinavian (Norse) Vikings dominated much of northern Europe from the late eighth century on, trading as well as plundering. At home they were free farmers. The Viking Age ended in the eleventh century AD when they faced stronger states abroad and Christianization at home, at which point Scandinavia became integrated into the literate Christian civilization of Europe. From Sweden they went down the rivers of Eastern Europe to Kiev and the Black Sea and founded what would later become the Russian state. Norwegians went to Scotland, Ireland and the North Atlantic. Dublin was the richest of the Norse colonies in Ireland.
Viking map
The Viking impact was strong in the British Isles, destructive but also transformative. From Denmark they raided and settled in Normandy and Brittany. The northeastern parts of England where the Vikings settled became known as the Danelaw because Danish laws and customs, not English, prevailed there. Some scholars argue that certain legal institutions such as the ancestor of the modern grand jury may have originated in the Danelaw. Danegeld was an English tax levied in a largely unsuccessful attempt to buy off the invaders. Charles “the Simple” III in the year 911 signed a treaty with the Viking leader Rollo for what would become Normandy along the English Channel coast of northern France. Their descendants of mixed Norse and French origins, the Normans, would successfully conquer England in 1066.
The driving force behind the Viking expansion is not known, but their ships were perhaps the fastest craft in the world of their time. Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea was originally one of the most remote regions of Europe. Rock carvings from around 1500 BC demonstrate that boat-building with oared vessels was known here by that time and most likely long before that, but the first depictions of sailing vessels, a principle that was well-established in the ancient Mediterranean world, come from the southern Swedish island of Gotland around AD 600. Soon after this, the Scandinavians developed remarkably fast and mobile sailed-and-rowed longships that could also be used on rivers. Author Else Roesdahl states categorically that “Without sails, the Vikings’ far-flung exploits would have been impossible.”
Oseberg ShipDendrochronology (tree-ring dating) shows that the well-preserved Oseberg ship was buried in AD 834. The Gokstad ship was found beneath a burial mound at a farm in Vestfold. It is 24 meters long, 5 meters wide and very seaworthy. Both ships can be seen in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. Tønsberg in Vestfold was probably founded in the 800s AD and is one of the oldest still-existing towns in Scandinavia. The only known pre-modern oceanic exploration in the world that can match the Viking expansion is the Polynesian expansion of peoples speaking Austronesian languages across the islands of the vast Pacific Ocean.
The French food historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat notes that “The influence of the example set by the Vikings and Normans when butter consumption began is obvious; in those parts of Western Europe which they later colonized, there is no mention of butter among the dues in kind collected by the officers of the Merovingian, Carolingian and even the first Capetian kings of France until the conquerors had really settled in. Not until the fourteenth century did the Church have anything to say about butter in its directives for fasting. Meanwhile the eating of butter spread from Normandy and the Loire valley to the Netherlands and Switzerland, where people also began to make it. In the twelfth century no one was sure whether, unlike lard, it could be considered suitable for fast days, a suggestion made by an abbot of Saint-Denis. As Jean-Louis Flandrin points out, butter consumption is a natural development in regions suitable for cattle-breeding. In such places, popular taste and the local economy had gone right over to butter as a cooking fat within 400 years.”
The Scandinavians and later the Bretons, Flemish and Icelanders became famous for their butter exports. The Catholic Church, “well knowing on which side its own bread was buttered, made money by selling dispensations to eat butter” on fast days. Coincidentally, those countries which use butter for cooking are nearly identical with those which broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Obviously, many of the northern European regions which became Protestant also have a very long history of dairy farming.
Athena was the daughter of Zeus. She competed with her uncle, the sea god Poseidon, brother of Zeus and Hades, for the affection of the Athenians. Poseidon provided them with a horse, handsome and strong. According to an alternative version he struck the Acropolis with his trident and created a saltwater spring. Athena provided them with an olive tree. The Greeks preferred her gift and named the city of Athens after her. On the Acropolis hill above it, the Parthenon marble temple contained a huge statue of her, Athena Parthenos, made of gold and ivory. It was designed by the great Athenian sculptor Phidias (ca. 490-430 BC). He also created the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
The olive tree was a symbol of wisdom and peace and has been grown throughout the Mediterranean region for thousands of years. The nude male athletes who won the original Olympic Games were crowned with olive leaves. Its fruits are the source of olive oil, now used primarily for cooking but for much more than that in Antiquity, including as a medicine.
Those European populations which have settled in the Americas, Australia and Africa in recent centuries have preferred to eat the fats of the customary diets of their countries of origins. The popularity of oil and butter roughly coincides with the official spoken language. People in English-speaking countries tend to eat much less oil compared to those in Spanish-speaking countries, for example. French-speaking areas, like France itself, are half-and-half.
In the famous fairy tale about the young girl and the big bad wolf, Little Red Riding-Hood carried to her grandmother a small pot of butter. Butter occupied a prominent place in many ancient religious ceremonies. People in northern India of Vedic times invoked butter as a primordial deity; among the early Indo-Europeans it is mentioned many times in the Rigveda:
“Indeed, butter thrown on a fire will make it crackle as it nourishes and regenerates the flames. It is regenerating life itself. The offering of butter is a form of prayer, a source of sacred energy such as might create a universe. The butter made from the milk of Indian sacred cows was intended for religious ceremonies; it was a purified, clarified, liquid butter.” Indians still use the clarified butter called ghi or ghee for cooking. Butter with its sunny, golden color was often associated with fire in folk memory. “Whether in the rites described in the Vedas, or in magical Celtic practices, butter features as a substitute for those natural golden treasures, honey and virgin wax, which themselves have sometimes been called the butter of the bees.”
Cheesemaking is a very ancient activity in societies that extensively utilize animal milk. Milk spoils quickly, and cheese is the most effective means of preserving milk nutrients over a period of time. Cheese does not by itself occur naturally; it has to be created. There is perhaps no other foodstuff — not even bread — that lends itself to such a great range of tastes and forms even within the same basic technical framework of curdled and cured milk. This local variety is the product of a range of possible treatments as well as different kinds of milk, combined with many different bacteria, enzymes and molds that enter into the cheese and give it much of its distinctive flavor. The variety of cheese was traditionally, and to a degree not maintained in any other product (with the possible exception of wine), identified with place.
Fungi constitute a kingdom of organisms that include microorganisms such as yeasts and molds as well as the larger mushrooms. They can be found virtually everywhere in large numbers. Mushrooms are the umbrella-shaped fruiting bodies of certain fungi. Many are poisonous to us and a few have hallucinogenic properties. Among popular edible mushrooms we find Cantharellus cibarius, the golden chanterelle, and Agaricus bisporus — commonly known as Champignon mushroom. Truffles are subterranean fungi prized as a great delicacy in France, Italy, Spain and Greece for centuries. The study of fungi is called mycology.
Penicillium roquefortiAuthor Toussaint-Samat reminds us that molds are fungi, too. Most of them are not good to eat, “but blue cheeses like Roquefort and Gorgonzola owe their delicious blue veining to a microscopic species of mould called Penicillium roqueforti. The velvety white rind of Camembert and similar cheeses is produced by Penicillium camemberti. Antibiotics were isolated from certain strains of Penicillium. Beer and wine yeasts are also fungi, the moulds of barley and of grape must respectively. Without these fungi, invisible to the naked eye, bread would not rise and champagne would not sparkle. Yeasts are a true food in their contribution to our intake of protein, vitamins and enzymes; we could not do without them.”
The dairy was almost the exclusive province of women until the modern era, from the proverbial “milkmaid” to the mistress of the household. Farm women were the marketers of butter and cheese, sometimes taking their products to nearby village and town markets:
“Dairy work was hard work, typically starting with the first milking at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and going well into the evening. Cheese was particularly demanding, since timing was crucial — the first batch of cheese was typically started some hours after milking, after the milk had cooled, but before there was any danger of spoilage. It was customary for the women of the household to do all the work themselves: heating the milk in vats, preparing and adding rennet (typically made from calves’ stomachs) to curdle the milk and set it, cutting up the curds and stirring at length, straining, salting, molding, pressing, turning, and so forth. All of this was guided by knowledge passed on from mother to daughter, from mistress to maid. There were numerous techniques for managing the rate of curdling, controlling the amount of liquid or whey in the new cheese, and manipulating the flavors of the result. This was women’s knowledge, and its female nature was unchallenged until the eighteenth century.”
Just as had been the case with beer previously, when cheese eventually became a product made on a larger and more industrial scale, it passed from the household — traditionally the domain of women — into the wider society and thereby became more of a male preserve.
The French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès (1817-1880) in 1869 came up with a butter substitute made from beef fat and milk which he called “margarine.” In the early 1870s, Antonius Johannes Jurgens (1805-1880) and Simon van den Bergh (1819-1907) created the world’s first margarine factory in Brabant in the southern Netherlands. Their company later became a part of the Anglo-Dutch multinational corporation Unilever, which owns brands related to foods, beverages, soaps and many other products for household consumption.
The breakthrough for mass consumption of this new product came in the early twentieth century following the discovery of a process for hardening oil, which made it possible to use oily plants such as copra, sesame and palm nuts, and also groundnuts and soya beans. The popularity of this “artificial butter” admittedly owed more to its cheap price than to its taste. Margarine thus reflects both the promise and the pitfalls of industrialized food production.
Medieval Myths
I should thank the pro-Israeli, Islam-critical blog Document for bringing this to my attention. The two Norwegian essays cited here were written by Ole Jørgen Benedictow, a professor emeritus at the University of Oslo specializing in the history of the Middle Ages. The translations were made by me, and the shorter excerpts should capture the spirit of the texts.
Benedictow, as an expert in the field, has tried to influence the public debate on issues related to Islam vs. Europe in the Middle Ages, but has repeatedly experienced being rebuffed in favor of young Marxists with little knowledge of the period. He is annoyed by the fact that people who know very little about this era and its complexities have easy access to the mass media and can spread falsehoods virtually unchallenged. “Revolutionary Socialists” — that is, Communists — have no problem promoting their propaganda in major newspapers despite representing a totalitarian ideology that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people — 100 million if you believe The Black Book of Communism — during the twentieth century alone.
For some reason, allegedly “anti-imperialist” Marxists in the Western world just love brutal, aggressive and oppressive imperialism — as long as it comes in an Islamic shape. There is no hint of an understanding of why the Spanish and Portuguese fought so many centuries for their liberation, nor of the plight of the Balkan Christians or those who suffered under Muslim rule elsewhere in the world, for example following the extremely bloody Islamic conquest of India. Islamic advances must be celebrated; the West demonized and ridiculed. European medieval peoples are invariable portrayed as barbarians with no culture of their own.
Yet the Middle Ages represented a creative growth period where we find the seeds of a new civilization — the European one — which replaced that of Greco-Roman Antiquity but also carried with it a number of Classical elements, albeit often in a somewhat altered form.
The French professor of medieval history Sylvain Gouguenheim has published a book titled Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les Racines Grecques de l’Europe (Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek Roots of Europe), triggered by a recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks should give a positive rendering of Islam’s part in the European heritage. Europe, he says, “became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them.” He attacks the thesis advanced by historians such as Edward Said of an enlightened, refined and spiritual Islam against a brutal and ethnocentric West. Apart from a tiny handful of freethinkers, the scholars of the Islamic Middle East retained from the ancient Greeks only what they considered to be compatible with the Koran.
The Western Church and its monks contributed to the preservation of many Classical texts. In addition to this, professional scribes could sometimes be found outside of the monasteries, catering to kings and nobles. A hallmark of the Western peoples was respect, even admiration, for different cultures and a willingness to seek out creative impulses from other civilizations. Muslims have historically exhibited little creativity in important forms of artistic expression such as painting or sculpture. In Benedictow’s view, “no cultural sphere with more than a billion people contributes so little to the development of science or the arts in our time.”
The Ottomans used a centralized power structure to extract a large proportion of the resources of the empire to use for military aggression, but they were successfully rebuffed by European states. The problem with an overly centralized power structure with high tax rates is that over time it will lead to economic and technological stagnation. Successful innovation requires some degree of decentralization, which could be found in regions of Western Europe with many free cities, from northern Italy via the Netherlands and Flanders in the Low Countries to England and northern Germany. This is where we encounter the development of capitalism.
Respected scholar Joseph Schacht states in An Introduction to Islamic Law that “The concept of corporation does not exist in Islamic law.” In addition to this, “There is also no freedom of association.” This legal defect had serious implications for Islamic societies, not least in the sphere of economic development, as Timor Kuran has made clear. The economic growth and social developments of modern Europe partly had medieval roots, as Avner Greif and others have shown. By contrast, Islamic culture was based on a very different mental outlook.
As the ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan says in her excellent book A God Who Hates, the raids Muhammad and his companions carried out, which amounted to at least twenty-seven if you believe Islamic sources, occupy a major part of his biography. They were intended to acquire booty and to inflict harm upon rival tribes in order to deprive them of their ability to resist Islam. A philosophy of raiding “has rooted itself firmly in the Muslim mind. Bedouins feared raiding on the one hand, and relied on it as a means of livelihood on the other. Then Islam came along and canonized it. Muslims in the twenty-first century still fear they may be raided by others and live every second of their lives preparing to raid someone else. The philosophy of raiding rules their lives, the way they behave, their relationships, and their decisions.”
According to Benedictow, “Like other great conquering peoples, from Romans to Mongols, the Arab-Muslim conquerors took over landed property and political control and established a tax regime that benefitted the small, but superior warrior elite. For many centuries this was the essence of the Arab-Muslim presence, the imperialist exploitation model. But since Muslims didn’t pay taxes there was also no great urge to do Muslim missionary activity. This is among Western, pro-Islamic left-wing political ideologues, social anthropologists and historians of religion characterized as tolerance. As long as this remained the case, however, the culture of Antiquity could continue to exist, now as a strong undercurrent that allowed for continued work on the Classical texts, translations and commentaries included. The ability of Classical civilization to nourish human ingenuity lived on. Many of those who contributed were Christians and Jews or converts to Islam; rather few were Arabs. As the Muslim religious oppression increased and permeated society and intolerance grew, these Classical civilizational elements withered away. What is actually the case is that the Arab-Muslim conquest of Eastern Roman lands led to the destruction of the civilization of Classical Antiquity. Claiming that the Arab-Muslim conquest saved it is backwards to say the least.”
|
i don't know
|
'Anima sana in corpore sano' (Latin for 'a healthy mind in a healthy body') is significant in which 1949-founded Japanese corporation's branding?
|
ASICS - SNEAKERS - WOMEN'S SHOES - SPRING SUMMER 2017 - LUISAVIAROMA
NOW AVAILABLE
Asics began as a small athletic footwear company in Kobe, Japan in 1949. Founded by Mr. Kihachiro Onitsuka, the company was given the name Asics in 1977 based on the famous Latin phrase “ Anima Sana in Corpore Sana”, meaning “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body”. Staying true to this philosophy every innovation, concept and idea is intended to create the best product. Asics was founded on the belief that the best way to create a healthy and happy lifestyle is to promote total health and fitness.
See also:
|
ASICS
|
To which major biblical event did the 'burning bush' direct Moses? The Sermon on the Mount; The Ten Commandments; Jesus' birth; or Noah's Ark?
|
Book Funds Luxembourg 2013 - Updated Edition by 360Crossmedia 360Crossmedia - issuu
Luxembourg 2013 5th edition
Hickory Editions
Decisionmakers LuxembourG I The NeTherLANdS I beLGIum I SwITzerLANd I mALTA I CypruS I uSA I ChINA (hoNG KoNG & ShANGhAI) I bVI I CurAçAo I ArubA I New zeALANd
Investment Funds Luxembourg 2013
SGG, a leadinG corporate and fund adminiStration ServiceS provider › independent and fully regulated › 500 professionals worldwide › 110 years’ experience delivering reliable accounting, reporting, tax and legal secretarial support to the private equity and real estate industries for their investment vehicles and related management structures.
SGG S.A.
412F, route d’Esch L-2086 Luxembourg Tel. : +352 46 61 11 1 l Fax : +352 47 11 01 [email protected]
2_MyOfficialStory
www.groupsgg.com
MyOfficialStory_3
ISBN 978-99959-745-0-3 Copyright © MyOfficialStory All rights reserved Coordination: Alexandre Coppa – Jules Kums Distribution: 360Crossmedia Design: Franck Widling
24 28 32 36 40 44 48 53 58 62 66 70
Analysis
Companies
Published by Hickory Editions Luxembourg
Decision makers Pierre-Antoine Boulat The king of re-use Freddy Brausch Open-minded Stéphane Brunet A tireless traveller Jean-philippe Cerutti Interview with Jean-Philippe Cerutti, a Partner at MEBS Pierre Cimino Professionalism in High Spirits Luc Courtois Beyond excellence Nick Curwen Balancing fund services with the call of the mountains Sébastien Danloy Full circle Steve David Meeting that shaped a career Simone Delcourt A self-made woman Josee Lynda Denis Never stop exploring Michael Ferguson The expert Rafik Fischer The diplomat
Decision makers
11 13 15 16 17
Introduction by Serge Krancenblum Introduction by Frédéric Perard Note from the editor Luxembourg at glance 4 people you should know…
Key Players
162 166 170 174 178
Key Players
78
Marc Saluzzi Multiple avenues of growth Carlo Schlesser Straight Forward Alex Schmitt The communicator Philippe Seyll Perfect balance Antonio Thomas Driven by dynamism Dominique Valschaerts Seeking challenge Paolo Vinciarelli Straight to the point Martin Vogel A fast thinker Denise Voss Well-rounded More decision makers …
183 188 191 194 196 198
Companies
74
200
Companies Adepa 202 Small packages – big things Atlantic Fund Services 204 Driving service quality through technological excellence
MyOfficialStory_7
Analysis
Elie Flatter An unquenchable thirst for discovery Jean-Paul Gennari The sweeper Joëlle Hauser A passion to create Vincent Heymans Cooking up a treat Kabanga Michel Kayembe Pragmatism and optimism Daniela Klasén-Martin A Self-Made Businesswoman Bob Kneip An entrepreneurial art Serge Krancenblum The Brainstormer Claude Kremer Marathon man Jean-Noël Lequeue A taste for change Roman Lewszyk A life built on teamwork Edith Magyarics The interpreter Sabine Moldenhauer Building networks Frédéric Perard Epicurean Brenda Petsche The straight Shooter Francois Pfister An uncommon sense... of self and success Kim-Andrée Potvin The risk-taker Olivier Renault Development and transformation
ceos’ favourite addresses
254 256 258 260 262 264
Companies
Analysis AIFMD Key issues for Non-EU managers Centuria Capital Luxembourg Family Office: East to West Ernst & Young UCITS V, without much debate Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (CSSF) Interview with Simone Delcourt Regulation and Microfinance Opportunity or Burden? OTC Derivatives central clearing UCITS’ next challenge ahead More analysis
Key Players
SGG 240 A question of trust Sqope 242 Legal and financial information Standard Chartered 244 Catering to ever-changing needs SS&C GlobeOp 256 Putting technology to the service of alternative fund managers UBS Luxembourg 248 UBS Luxembourg and the “one-stop shop” approach Victor Buck Services 250 The future rests on three pillars More companies… 253
267 268 Analysis
Baker & McKenzie 206 A Global Law Firm on the Rise BNP Paribas Securities Services 208 The closer, the better CIP Group 210 25 Years of Successful Print, IT & Mailing Solutions Clifford Chance 212 Committed to legal excellence across the world Confluence 214 Taking the Risk Out of Fund Administration Crédit Suisse Luxembourg 216 The challenge of excellence Ernst & Young Luxembourg 218 Ahead in asset management Fuchs et Associés 220 Under the sign of the fox Ikano 222 A profitable niche ME Business Solutions 224 Expertise and Commitment Morningstar 226 To be continued! Northern Trust 228 Getting ready for the new challenges Novacap Asset Management 230 Opening doors to Latin American investors Parva Consulting 232 A niche consultancy helps drive Luxembourg’s fund services growth RBC Investor Services 234 A premier provider of investor services Riva Financial Systems 236 New Needs, Fresh Thinking Robert Walters 238 Staying ahead of the pack
8_MyOfficialStory
Serge Krancenblum SGG Corporate and Fund Administration Services CEO www.sergekrancenblum.com
10_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_11
Decision makers Key Players Companies
SGG, CORPORATE AND FUND ADMINISTRATION SERVICES is proud to sponsor the 5th Decision Makers Investment Fund Luxembourg Book. SGG decided to support this edition to confirm its long standing commitment to promote Luxembourg’s funds industry. SGG is a leading player in alternative asset fund administration. As a regulated player, we serve fund clients stemming from Europe, America and Asia for their central administration, middle office and directorship needs. We offer them a fully integrated support by also servicing their SPVs and management incentive vehicles. We assist our institutional clients with the personalized approach which traces back to our roots. Having supported families for decades, we have the client attitude to service them in an integrated fashion. To further improve our offer to PE and RE players, we just opened a New York office. Our industry will face more challenges, the latest being the AIFM directive. SGG is equipped to face them. SGG wishes our fellow colleagues to face such challenges with growing success for the good of us all. We hope the present book will help clients and professionals to better apprehend the Luxembourg Fund Industry.
Analysis
Introduction by Serge Krancenblum
Their commitment and continuous adaptation has taken most of these individuals on an amazing personal and professional journey. The values advocated by BNP Paribas Securities Services – excellence, customer focus, team spirit and continuous innovation – combined with the expertise of our multicultural teams, are particularly valuable assets in the current climate. Our motto, “The closer, the better”, is reflected by our presence in more than 32 countries where we offer our clients unique and innovative solutions, from the classic to the sophisticated.
Decision makers Analysis
On the basis of its originality and ability to strengthen links between all industry actors, we immediately saw the benefits of the MyOfficialStory project. The advantages of this system – secure data and access for all users to a tool allowing them to control and promote their image in the circles of their choice – represent true value added in “a changing world”.
Key Players
Over the last twenty years, the Investment Funds Industry has experienced remarkable growth in Luxembourg. Behind these breathtaking figures are men and women: entrepreneurs, investors, bankers, lawyers, experts from all fields, each who has added his or her stone to the structure.
Companies
MyOfficialStory_13
Frédéric Perard BNP Paribas Securities Services Regional Manager Luxembourg and Offshore Centers www.myofficialstory.com/fredericperard
MyOfficialStory has been designed in response to the specific needs of individuals operating in this industry. This innovative tool enables you to promote your brand in all media, with the reassurance of knowing that your message will be faithfully reproduced. Our network of professional writers, photographers, translators and designers will assist you at every stage of your communication. Opening an account on www.myofficialstory.com allows you to create high quality content in a click, store it in complete security and then disseminate it in the press, internet, magazines and books like this one. Feel free to contact me for more details. Welcome!
Decision makers
Our company is privileged to mix with decision makers from the Investment Funds Industry since 2000 at gatherings such as ALFI, ICBI and IIR.
Key Players
We are glad that this original concept has become a tradition in the Luxembourg financial market. Enjoy.
Note from the editor Control your message!
Companies
The list of personalities who have agreed to appear seems to confirm our initial impression. The commitment and transparency of these men and women, operating in the business of trust, shows us a vision that goes beyond the professional sphere. It demonstrates the open-mindedness and quality of exchanges to be found within the Grand Duchy.
Analysis
Jérôme Bloch Chief Executive Officer 360Crossmedia [email protected] www.jeromebloch.com
14_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_15
Population: 502 100 (1/1/2010) Luxembourgers: 285 700 Foreigners: 216 400 Minimum Wage: 1 724€ (7/2010) Inflation: 2.6% (10/2010) (Source: Statec-BCL)
TOP 5 Largest employers Arcelor Mittal (Industry) Cactus (Department Store) Dexia Bil (Finance) P&T (Telecom) CFL (Rail Transport)
6170 3900 3830 3560 3490
(Source: Statec 1/1/2010)
TOP 5 Banks per country of origin Germany 44 Belgium/Luxembourg 15 France 13 Switzerland 11 Italy 10
Decision makers
4 people you should know… Grand-Duc Henri www.myofficialstory.com/grandduchenri www.monarchie.lu
Key Players
Luc Frieden Minister of Finance www.myofficialstory.com/lucfrieden www.gouvernement.lu www.myofficialstory.com/lucfrieden
(Source: CSSF 30/11/2010)
Ernst Wilhelm Contzen President of the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association (ABBL) www.myofficialstory.com/ernstwilhelmcontzen www.abbl.lu
Companies
Others Investment Funds 3889 UCITS 2484 SIFs 1161 Foreign UCIs 244 Net Assets under Management 2083.7€ Billion (Source: CSSF 31/10/2010)
Camille Thommes Director general Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry (ALFI) www.myofficialstory.com/camillethommes www.alfi.lu Also check Marc Saluzzi in this book, President of ALFI.
Analysis
Miscellaneous Area: 2,586 km2 Official languages: Luxemburgish, French, German Motto: “we want to remain what we are” Politics: constitutional monarchy Head of State: S.A.R. Le Grand-Duc Henri Internet: .lu Phone: +352
16_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_17
Decision makers Key Players ENGINE CAPACITY: 3799 CC - MAX POWER: 530 HP @ 6500 RPM - MAX TORQUE: 710 NM @ 2250 RPM (IN OVERBOOST, OTHERWISE 650 NM @ 2000 RPM) - MAX SPEED: 307 KM/H - 0-100 KM/H: 4.7 SECS - FUEL CONSUMPTION (COMBINED): 11.8 L/100KM (23.9 MPG) - FUEL CONSUMPTION (URBAN): 17.4 L/100KM (16.2 MPG) - FUEL CONSUMPTION (EXTRA URBAN): 8.5 L/100KM (33.2 MPG) - CO2 EMISSIONS: 274 G/KM
18_MyOfficialStory
ROUTE DE LONGWY 8B, L-8080 BERTRANGE Phone: 00352 45 00 47 38 - 00352 45 00 47 21 www.intini.lu
Companies Analysis
We hope the following chapters will meet the goal we set ourselves: to present to you a series of good, well-told stories.
MyOfficialStory_19
CEO of UBS Fund Services (Luxembourg) SA and Head of UBS in Luxembourg Asset Servicing Delivery, Pierre-Antoine Boulat came to the Grand Duchy in September 2011. Now his main objective is to continue building on a quality and controlled central administrator production environment, iwthin the integrated bank offering, moving it decisively towards a service organisation for distinctive and sophisticated clients. Lateral thinking French-born Pierre-Antoine Boulat has had a long and diverse career in sell – and buy – side capital markets, working for banks (CCF in Paris), brokers (Salomon Brothers in Paris and London), institutional asset managers (JP Morgan in London and New York, Citigroup in Stamford , Connecticut and UBS in Chicago) and even a software house (TradingScreen). Boulat studied Business Law and Political Sciences in Paris – and would likely be teaching law in an alternate career –, yet has mostly held risk/project/program management, internal consulting and business management functions.
Best Practice In terms of rapid success, Boulat is of the opinion that he has integrated easily into the varying environments of US and European based business models. As well as being a dynamic leader in a frequently uncertain market, Boulat co-authored the first French legal tome on the subject of fund swaps back in 1991. Recognising that he is not “paid to wait” Boulat rolls his sleeves up and gets things done. It may be that his love for long-distance running feeds into his work objective, or perhaps it is the other way around. A father of three sons and one daughter, and thus well versed in life’s challenges and rewards, Boulat is primed for streamlining and expanding the platform and operating model, with competitiveness, cost efficiency and client satisfaction in mind.
Decision makers
run and improve processes as well as ensuring clients’ total satisfaction with the UBS full experience. Boulat concedes that he has sometimes felt Luxembourg a location at times wary of change. His challenge has been in gaining and maintaining external trust so as to facilitate new ways of working that can be more readily and easily embraced. It is a slow yet steady process, and Boulat is confident that it can be done.
Key Players
Facts&Figures
Pierre-Antoine Boulat
A passionate professional, enthusiastic sportsman and occasional jazz musician, Freddy Brausch demonstrates an unflagging interest in diversity. The human adventure While he is aware of having been in the right place at the right time, Freddy Brausch had the insight to seize this unique opportunity to establish himself as a major actor in the development of the Luxembourg financial market and investment fund sector. Looking back on this collective and industrial adventure, he recalls many meetings that have enabled him to blossom, from a professional, cultural and personal point of view. The majority of his clients are American or Japanese, German, British, Scandinavian and, nowadays, also Chinese. They come to Freddy Brausch from multiple horizons, which is what he values most.
Enrichment He was one of those children who would attempt to carry a wheelbarrow rather than to push it forward using the wheel, to the consternation of his parents. Unjustified fears in view of his sporting achievements at school and crowning as French basketball champion with the University of Aix-Marseille. He admires Miles Davis for his musical genius, Charlie Parker for his saxophone technique, as well as Simone Weil for her tenacity and determination and Robert Badinter for his ethics and perseverance. Add to this a passion for the Marx brothers and you get a good picture of the multi-cultural Freddy Brausch. He also admits that without the support of his strong mother and equally caring wife, Chantal, he would probably not have gone all that way. In the long term, Freddy can see himself at sea, looking back on an eventful career.
Decision makers Analysis
Two mergers and more In 1980, a meeting with his first mentor, Jean-Pierre De Bandt, proved decisive. Freddy joined him in Brussels with then De Bandt, van Hecke, Lagae & Van Bael. In 1985, he returned to Luxembourg to join Loesch & Wolter where, in Jean-Claude Wolter, he met a second mentor and, in Jacques Loesch, a man of rare finesse and great wisdom. At the time, Freddy was actively involved in the merger which resulted in the creation of De Bandt, van Hecke, Lagae & Loesch in 1999, followed by the merger in 2002 that gave rise to Linklaters Loesch
(now Linklaters LLP). In both cases, Freddy is proud of having managed to keep the same teams in place after the mergers. Together with his partners he allowed the younger generation to access a truly international and global dimension. Since merging, other changes took place and the succession of several generations of lawyers in the firm has been managed. Freddy is equally proud to have been able to manage those changes and successions without undue human and reputational damage.
Key Players
Facts&Figures
Freddy Brausch
The head of BNP Paribas Investment Partners in Luxembourg since 2007, Stéphane Brunet has spent almost his entire career with this French bank. A career that has taken him all over the world. A well orchestrated merger 2010 saw the disappearance of the name Fortis Investments from the European asset management scene further to the bank’s merger with BNP Paribas Investment Partners. In Luxembourg, one of the bank’s key markets, one man played a prominent role in the process: Stéphane Brunet, a forty-eight year old French national and the head of BNP Paribas IP since 2007. True to his business philosophy of respecting and listening to others, he managed the merger with pragmatism, adaptability and determination. A very Luxembourg-style approach!
A long journey In 1994, BNP offered Stéphane Brunet a position as a country risk economist for Asia. This new role took him on frequent visits to Hong Kong, where he witnessed the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, and to Korea, where he helped to restructure banking debt. In 1999, Stéphane Brunet joined BNP’s general inspectorate, a vantage point from where he observed the merger with Paribas. Then in 2002, the year his son was born, he joined BNP Paribas IP as audit manager. This new job marked the start of a new life that would take him, five years later, to Luxembourg. However, this is by no means the end of the journey for this great admirer of Martin Luther King. By his own admission, other challenges await him elsewhere.
Analysis
Starting point It is hardly surprising that Stéphane Brunet feels so comfortable in the Grand Duchy, his home for the last four years. The Luxembourg model of dialogue and consensus is close to his own personal business philosophy, which has evolved over the course of a very international career with BNP Paribas. A former student, of both economics and epistemology, at the Sorbonne in Paris, his university days gave him a love of learning and understanding. After graduating, he travelled to Central Africa on an eighteen-month voluntary placement with the Agence Française de Developpement (French development
Decision makers
agency) as funding manager for the informal sector (similar to today’s micro-credit area). This experience heralded the start of a professional life devoted to the banking sector.
Key Players
Stéphane Brunet
MyOfficialStory_31
Can you provide a brief outline of your career to date? After having completed my studies – Engineer and MBA – I began my career at Société Générale, working in the Equity & Derivatives department in Paris. I was then recruited by Crédit Suisse First Boston in London to help setting up a hedge fund. After this, I moved to Geneva, where I was an independent manager for RBC and Lloyds. Finally in 2008, I was approachedby a major family from the Middle East who invited me to be the CIO of their family office in Geneva. This experience allowed me to see the other side of the picture. My professional path enabled me to build up an eclectic skillset in finance. Over the course of my career, interest rates have fallen to zero, turning asset management into risk management and asset allocation into risk allocation. For an UHNWI, in previous years, main concerns were focused on lack of performance. Today, the issue is to avoid having a government taking ownership of some of their assets, as we saw in Cyprus.
Why did you decide to move to Luxembourg? In the first place, within Europe, Luxembourg is a prime location for Family Offices. Dubai? Monaco? London? Switzerland? Luxembourg is regarded as a small and pragmatic country that demonstrated a great ability to adapt to a changing regulatory environment. The political drive to turn the country into a financial “Silicon Valley” is tangible for our clients and for wealth managers. Our clients nowrequire transparent and regulated vehicles. The second factor in my decision was MEBS itself. The company has a strong entrepreneurial culture where ethics play a major role in its operations. I joined this organisation to liaise with Families and advise them on their wealth.
Decision makers
economies. Everyone has realised that ‘finance for finance’ does not benefit anyone.
Companies
Interview with Jean-Philippe Cerutti, a Partner at MEBS
Key Players
Jean-Philippe Cerutti
Analysis
What is your analysis of international finance and the future challenges today? The main challenge is to deal with “the new normal”, i.e. a world with zero interest rates, anaemic growth and very high levels of debt. We need to rethink finance to address the key aim of creating value. We have a unique opportunity to establish a world of finance that serves investors, families and
32_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_33
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 24th september 1965 Place of birth: Saint Maur Nationality: French Children: 2 Languages: French, English, Italian, Portuguese Hobbies: Car racing (Track and Ice), Skiing, Windsurfing
My favourite
Companies
Cities: Venice (It), London, Paris, Kharnak (Thèbes) Places: Leman lake, Alps, Le Morne (Mauritius), Le Louvre Restaurants: Jamin (Robuchon), Alain Chapel, Domaine de Chateauvieux, Le Rectiligne (Divonne), L’ami Louis Book: The Book of the Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi) Music: U2, Noir Desir, classical (Lakmé, Chopin, Mozart) Artist: Monet, Van Gogh
Position Partner, Mebs
Others CIO Family Office, Hedge Fund manager
34_MyOfficialStory
Jean-Philippe Cerutti
MyOfficialStory_35
After almost 20 years with the Caceis Group, Pierre Cimino is still driven by a thirst for learning, pursuing his own very individual approach based on a combination of curiosity and perseverance. Anima Sana in Corpore Sano Pierre Cimino combined learning with sports, a daily mixture of basketball, Latin and mathematics. After leaving school, he enrolled on a sales engineering course at the I.C.H.E.C in Brussels. A work placement at the end of his studies introduced him to the international fashion industry, with trips to Saudi Arabia, New York and Norway. His first employer, Solvay, sent him to Thailand to set up a cost accounting system for a hydrogen peroxide plant. A lesson in developing a reliable system from a paper-based process.
Leonardo da Vinci Pierre Cimino’s favourite cities are San Francisco, Paris and Florence, where he enjoys soaking up the atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance. He finds Leonardo da Vinci a fascinating historical character. As well his engineering talents, he admires da Vinci’s all-round genius in designing both machines and paintings. He enjoys renovating houses from top to bottom and satisfies his curiosity by travelling whenever he can, or by losing himself in a book or cartoons such as Thorgall. He is not afraid of failure and views these experiences as an opportunity to learn and develop a deeper understanding of human nature.
Decision makers
him of his military service and long marches carrying a 30 kg backpack. He loves the feeling of finally clinching a deal after months of negotiations.
Companies
Pierre Cimino
Analysis
A varied path with Caceis Playground encounters at the school where his mother was a teacher taught Mr Cimino a valuable lesson: unity is strength! Persevering and optimistic by nature, he joined Caceis in 1992, starting out in the trading room. A rather unusual career path led him to the position of head of Human Resources in 1996, then Back Office Manager before finally becoming Managing Director of Fastnet Luxembourg. A role he has held since 2010 alongside the same post at Caceis Bank Luxembourg. At each step in this journey, he has pushed beyond his own limits and drawn on the strength of the team. An approach that reminds
36_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_37
Decision makers
Birthday: 12th July 1965 Place of birth: Ixelles Nationality: Belgian Children: 3 Languages: French, English, Dutch, Italian
Cities: Restaurants: Books: Music: Artist:
Key Players
My favourite Paris, Florence, San Francisco La garoupe à Antibes, La Mirabelle, Chiggeri, Kong (Paris), La Cantine du Faubourg (Paris) Les piliers de la terre (Ken Follett), Biographie de Napoléon (Max Gallo) Ave Maria (Gounod) De Vinci, Michel-Ange
Position Companies
CEO of Caceis Bank Luxembourg & Fastnet Luxembourg
Others Member of the Caceis Group Executive Committee
Analysis
Facts&Figures
Pierre Cimino
A partner and head of the investment fund department at Bonn Steichen & Partners is equally at home in the boardroom and the vineyard. Straddling town and country Luc Courtois easily moves from the earthy world of his rural roots to the thrilling world of high finance and investing. This native of the Belgian countryside is simultaneously a cosmopolitan, equally at ease in boardrooms of the largest global financial institutions and in vineyards searching for the best grapes. By experience and education he is comfortable in the worlds of both the concrete and the abstract. That is what makes Luc Courtois successful, a partner and Head of the Fund Department at Luxembourg’s Bonn Steichen & Partners. At university Luc spent as much time developing businesses as studying attending courses. That did not keep him from earning degrees in both law and international affairs and, most important, graduation with the golden “1%” that garnered him a scholarship at the Georgetown University Law Center. With his LLM in hand Luc Courtois returned to Luxembourg and investing.
Living life with gusto Luc Courtois understands how fleeting life is. Thus he lives every day to the fullest measure. Every moment with family and friends, every moment with clients, is too valuable to squander. He is a passionate traveler, seeking out the wildest countrysides as often as the best vineyards. Winemaking still beckons him but dedication to his clients and his work hold him fast to the world of investment. This openminded and cosmopolitan man cannot be pigeonholed. His tastes are eclectic and multicultural, a trait that allows him to fit comfortably wherever he is, with whomever he encounters and enthusiastically prepared to meet the challenges of the future.
Decision makers
Notwithstanding his many accomplishments, his greatest achievements are his family and friends, and the deep confidence of his clients. His dedication to his clients, their needs, their business, is the basis of his success. He places himself in his clients’ shoes, a rare talent. This allows him to produce tailor-made results for them. His legal background serves him well, as do his fertile imagination and his creative instincts: he applies and interprets the law in ways that allow him, and his clients, to find innovative and creative solutions to problems that for others would be intractable.
Key Players
Luc Courtois
Analysis
Loyal and available Luc Courtois is more than the sum of his impressive resume: what makes Luc Courtois more than just excellent in his life and his work is his dedication to his family, his friends, and his clients. Family, friends, and clients are his foundations.
40_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_41
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 21st August 1970 Birth place: Bastogne, Belgium Nationality: Belgian Children: 2 Languages: French, English, Italian under construction Hobbies: Outdoors activities, oenology, traveling, diving
My favourite Cities: Siena, Bruges Places: Wild lands Book: Historical Restaurants: Anne-Sophie PIC, La Truffe Noire and Taj Mahal Music: Eclectic Artist: Der MĂśnch am Meer by Casper David Friedrich
Companies
Position Partner, Bonn Steichen & Partners
Other Positions Lecturer at the Institut de Formation Bancaire Luxembourg Sitting on various board of directors of investment funds and management companies
42_MyOfficialStory
Luc Courtois
MyOfficialStory_43
Luxembourg-born Briton Nick Curwen studied astrophysics at university and has made his career in investment fund administration, but the real passion of his life is mountains and snowboarding. A Luxembourg upbringing As a Briton, Nick Curwen knows the grand duchy better than most – having been born here in 1976 and educated at the European School. His fluency in German, French and Luxembourgish serve him well in his new role as head of SS&C GlobeOp’s new fund administration office in Luxembourg. But there’s a lot more to Curwen than back-office fund services. He studied astrophysics at Birmingham University in England, but acknowledges he split his time there between academic work and helping to run the ski and snowboard club, and later took a career break to devote himself to winter sports. Not for nothing does he list Chamonix as one of his favourite places. Curwen began his career with Cedel (now the Luxembourg arm of Clearstream), and later worked for various fund administrators in the grand duchy. A turning point of his professional life came in 2005 when he moved to London to joined his then employer’s largest client, a European credit manager, eventually becoming head of client services.
Expecting the unexpected Curwen also has a long-standing appreciation of engineering, art and elegant design, “like a Le Corbusier chaise longue”. He cites Jean-Claude Biver among the people he most admires, for his “passion for watch-making, a true commitment to his brand, and a personal touch that few executives offer”. His immediate goal is to establish SS&C GlobeOp as a recognised alternative fund service provider in the grand duchy, and make it a top-tier player within five years. But having spent much of the past five years helping fund firms disentangle themselves from the effects of the global financial crisis, his philosophy is to “expect the unexpected”.
Decision makers
took on responsibility for the Dublin office. He saw the Irish business through a period of significant change and growth from less than $1bn in assets under administration to more than $10bn. Last year Curwen was handed the task of launching the office in Luxembourg, to which he retuned in September. SS&C GlobeOp formally opened for business in the grand duchy last month. Throughout his professional rise Curwen has continued to answer the call of the mountains; he spends over 30 days snowboarding a year and also enjoys rock climbing and bouldering. “My favourite activity is being dropped on top of a mountain with my snowboard,” he says.
Key Players
Balancing fund services with the call of the mountains
Companies
Facts&Figures
Nick Curwen
Twenty years after he came to the Grand Duchy, Sébastien Danloy’s career has taken a new turn at the top of the RBC tower. From Luxembourg… Sébastien Danloy may have graduated practically on his doorstep from Solvay Business School in Brussels, but he chose to hang his qualifications in Luxembourg’s capital, where his first post was with the European Court of Auditors. The job didn’t meet his expectations, and he didn’t stay there for long. “I left for the banking environment of State Street Bank,” Sébastien explains. “First in operations, then on the commercial side.” This time the sphere was a better match for his aspirations. An accomplished tennis player, he enjoys challenges, accuracy and healthy competition. He also likes moving forward. Equally comfortable on hard courts as in the muffled corridors.
Honesty and transparency Loyal in friendship (35 years on, he is still friends with the first person he sat next to in school), Sébastien also sticks to his principles. Being honest and transparent in his business dealings, staying in touch and seeking consensus wherever possible may require more effort, but it enables him to remain true to himself at all times. These personal and professional qualities will probably take Sébastien off to new horizons, but not for the time being. Luxembourg is a country he loves and which has much to offer, and it’s where he feels at home.
Decision makers
old blast furnaces, Sébastien is mindful of the immense challenges facing him. RBC Luxembourg is one of the pillars of the group. This is a match equal to his ambitions and talent, which he has every intention of winning in three straight sets.
Companies
Sébastien Danloy
Analysis
… to Luxembourg Together with his two children and his wife, who he fell in love with one morning on the bus, he left Luxembourg after working in the world of finance for almost ten years. The opportunities open to Sébastien enabled him to continue his career first in Ireland, then in the United Kingdom, before a longer spell in La Défense, the business district of Paris, where the family grew up. RBC then offered him the post of managing director for Luxembourg and CEO of RBC Investor Services Bank S.A., so he headed for Esch-sur-Alzette to take up his new post. From his office on the 17th floor of the RBC tower, next to the
48_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_49
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 25th May 1970 Place of birth: Namur Nationality: Belgian Children: 3 Languages: French, English, Dutch Hobbies: Tennis
My favourite Cities: Book: Music: Artists:
Paris, Londres, Dubaï Victor Hugo Dire Straits Monet, Turner
Position Head of Investor Services, Europe & Offshore Managing director Luxembourg
50_MyOfficialStory
g n i t o m o Pr mbourg Luxe
MyOfficialStory_53
Fateful encounter It was during a FundForum conference in Monaco in 2001 that Steve David had an encounter that would shape his subsequent professional life: with Toby Glaysher (today Head of Global Fund Services for EMEA) and Steve Potter of Northern Trust (today President of Northern Trust Global Investments). David was so impressed that he said to himself that one day he would like to work for Northern Trust – and it wasn’t long before, in late 2003, Northern Trust decided to open an office in Luxembourg. Following a two-hour interview with Ian Baillie, who was setting up the operations, he became Northern Trust’s second hire in the Grand Duchy, as Head of Risk and Control as well as Conducting Officer in the group’s Luxembourg Management Company. Now Country Head for Northern Trust in Luxembourg, David says he can see himself still working for the group a decade for now.
Social dimension He stepped up to become Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Northern Trust Luxembourg Management Company S.A. in 2009, then Country Head in May 2012, leading the continued expansion of the group’s specialist fund servicing and custody operations. David is a self-confessed perfectionist (and impatient with it), traits well suited to the demands of the financial services industry, yet in another life he might made a career in the social field. He says: “The people I respect are those who work with people – social workers, nurses, doctors and teachers – because people are at the heart of everything.”
Decision makers
important influence on his career, John Parkhouse, and gained experience of the fund industry. After a couple of years with Chase Manhattan Bank Luxembourg, first in the Quality Control team and then in the Fund Compliance and Fiduciary area, he joined IKANO Advisory Management as Fund Compliance Officer. “It was important for my career because I was responsible for creating a function from scratch,” David says now, “helping me build a strong knowledge of the fund compliance world.”
Key Players
Steve David’s professional development has been shaped by a handful of people, who influenced him at key stages of a career that has taken him from an audit trainee at Price Waterhouse to Country Head for Northern Trust in Luxembourg.
Companies
Steve David
Analysis
Learning experience Born in Bettembourg, he studied economics and finance at the Institut Catholique des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Brussels, and in 1994 became an audit trainee at Price Waterhouse in Luxembourg. There David worked with another
54_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_55
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 11th May 1971 Place of birth: Luxembourg Nationality: Luxembourgish Languages: Luxembourgish, German, French, English, glimpse of Spanish Hobbies: Sports, Art
My favourite Cities: Luxembourg, Paris, Tokyo (though I have never been there) Restaurants: Kamakura, Bru, Mesa Verde (for my girlfriend) Places: rue de Montorgueil (for the movement and diversity), “Vieille-Ville” of Luxembourg Books: Tintin Music: Jazz-House, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen Artwork: Helmut Newton, Araki, Giraud, Joerg Doering
Companies
Position Country Head – Northern Trust Luxembourg
Other Managing Director – Northern Trust Luxembourg Management Company S.A., various directorships
56_MyOfficialStory
Steve David
MyOfficialStory_57
Director of the Luxembourg Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) for the last eight years, Simone Delcourt owes her exemplary success to unfailing commitment and hard work. The trigger “You aren’t mature enough to sit the high school entrance examination.” Looking back, these words spoken by her primary school teacher marked a decisive turning point in Simone Delcourt’s career, years before she started working life. Brought up in a rather typical way for a young girl of her time, her route appeared to be mapped out in advance – studying to the strict minimum, working for a few years before getting married and then looking after the household. Conscientious and determined, Simone Delcourt paid no heed. Her teacher’s words persuaded her to devote herself to her studies in order to choose her own career path. Thanks to her unfailing commitment and hard work, in 1975 she obtained her secondary school leaving certificate, followed by a bachelor’s degree in Economic Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles five years later.
Nothing to change Simone Delcourt is quite rightly proud of her exemplary career path and is pleased at having been able to play an influential role in the development of the Investment Funds industry in Luxembourg. While never becoming complacent, just like the people she admires, such as Gandhi or Mother Teresa, who devote all their time and energy to helping others. “If I could go back, I don’t think I’d change much…”
Decision makers
Luxembourg financial market, then called the Commissariat au Contrôle des Banques. After working as an auditor for ten years in the “bank monitoring” department, she took on various management roles in different departments within the Commission, before being appointed Director of the CSSF in early 2005. “My guiding principle is the conviction that with patience, perseverance and energy, there is a very strong chance that you will achieve your objectives”, she states.
Companies
Facts&Figures
Simone Delcourt
Having travelled the world, Josee Lynda Denis is based in Luxembourg, where she heads Standard Chartered Bank Luxembourg and continues to passionately promote the country as a leading fund domicile and fund services centre of excellence. Growing up a tomboy Growing up in her native Canada, Ms Denis was a true tomboy. Despite attending an all girls boarding school, scrapes and bruises were the norm. Some of her fondest childhood memories include being a guide in Nature Parks of Quebec, taking groups of children to explore the wilderness on canoe, learning about nature and how to live with its elements. This affection for wildlife is still there today, along with a passion for travelling, other cultures and good food from all over the world. She always knew that she would move on to live in many different countries in her life.
Reaching new heights Settling in Luxembourg and building a career did not stop Ms Denis exploring. In recent years, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895 meters) – her first high altitude mountain trek. Despite a busy schedule and wide-ranging interests, Ms Denis mainly values spending quality time with family and friends. She also champions causes that improve the lives of women, children and endangered animals.
Decision makers
bank’s motto, “Here for good”, has also become her own. Though a lesson for life came much earlier, from her grandfather, when she was just 14 years old and working in the family business. To be a good leader, he told her, you have to have an equal part of three key traits: a cool head, a warm heart, working hands.
Companies
Josee Lynda Denis
Analysis
Committed to Luxembourg Her desire to explore was such that Ms Denis decided to take a break from her MBA studies with a two-year sabbatical to travel in Europe and research for her thesis. What was meant to be a stint in Luxembourg, turned into a long-term commitment to the local financial industry! In more than 24 years, she has built an international career in both banking and investment funds. Her biggest achievement, however, is setting up a branch of a leading, global, Asian bank in Luxembourg. The
62_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_63
Decision makers
Birthday: 5th December 1961 Place of birth: Montreal, Quebec Nationality: Canadian Languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian
Cities: Restaurants: Music:
Montreal, Luxembourg, Paris, London, Hong Kong La Queue de Cheval (Montreal), Aqua (Hong Kong), La Mirabelle (Luxembourg), Toit pour Toi (Schouweiler) Jazz, R&B, Soul, Robert Charlebois (always brings me back to my roots)
Art:
Pop art, Andy Warhol, Cesar Manrique, Jorg Doehring
Key Players
Position Companies
CEO Luxembourg - Head of Depositary Bank Standard Chartered Bank Luxembourg Branch
Other Founder and Chairman of the Association of Luxembourg Fund IndustryALFI) TA & and Distribution Forum since 1999 Member of the Luxembourg Female Board Pool
Analysis
Facts&Figures
Josee Lynda Denis
A native of Ireland, Luxembourg has been Michael’s adopted homeland for over twenty years, where he enjoys a successful career as Head of the Asset Management Practice at Ernst & Young. A family story Born close to the border with Northern Ireland, Michael’s initial choices focused on finance, despite a strong interest in science. After studying accountancy – like two of his brothers – he spent five years in Dublin where he qualified as a chartered accountant and auditor before the desire to travel lured him away from Erin’s green shores. His career took a new direction upon his arrival in Luxembourg in 1989. Initially relocating under a two-year contract, he had no idea that he’d still be here twenty years plus.
Author and speaker Regarded as one of leading asset management specialists within his group and in Luxembourg, Michael now occupies various responsible roles in Ernst & Young’s internal committees and in expert associations such as the AIMA (Alternative Investment Management Association) and ALFI (Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry). Author of various specialist works “Investment Funds in Luxembourg – A Technical Guide” and “Hedge Funds in Luxembourg – A Technical Guide”, he regularly receives invitations to speak at investment fund conferences all over the world. A perfect example of how to combine business with pleasure - the opportunity to satisfy his desire for travel and discovery through his work.
Analysis
A taste for travel An admirer of his fellow countryman Michael O’Leary, the man who revolutionized the air travel business model with Ryanair, the world’s first low-cost airline, Michael undertook a series of missions abroad, including in the United Kingdom and the United States. All of these experiences established him as a prominent figure in the Investment Fund World. In 1994, Michael joined Ernst & Young Luxembourg, was appointed partner and later became responsible for their Asset Management Practice. Subsequently be was appointed Head of Ernst and Young’s EMEIA regulated funds practice. His expertise covers both
Decision makers
traditional and alternative investment fund products as well as asset managers. Pragmatic by nature, but by no means lacking principles in his work, Michael emphasizes that fairness, honesty and transparency are essential qualities in business.
Key Players
Michael Ferguson
MyOfficialStory_69
His education had prepared him for a career in foreign affairs or public service. However, in the end it was in the private sector that he applied his deeply held principles. The art of consensus Rafik Fischer is a firm believer in management by example as opposed to pressure, and by encouragement rather than conflict. His relationships with his clients and staff are based on respect. He has spent the majority of his career at KBL European Private Bankers, which he joined in 1989. Currently Head of the “Global Investor Services” business line, his role models include his father and Winston Churchill. The first was a generous and humble company manager. While the second was an expert in the art of using his persistence and perseverance to exert a remarkable power of persuasion.
Balance and first name terms Rafik Fischer has managed to balance his responsibilities at KBL European Private Bankers, includind his chair of the board of EFA (European Fund Administration) as well as at ABBL, CSSF, ALFI, Luxexpo and other consultancies, with time at home with his blended family and five children. He admits that it has taken time to achieve this balance. His professional life has brought many unforgettable moments, in particular some very important negotiations in New York, however his best memories are more subtle. He still remembers exactly how he felt when certain distinguished individuals such as Me André Elvinger and Jean-Nicolas Schaus asked him to call them by their first names. A young executive at the time, he regards this honour as one of the greatest recognitions.
Decision makers
to a powerful association: a metamorphosis of which he is proud.
Companies
Rafik Fischer
Analysis
President of ALFI Rafik Fischer was president of ALFI from 1998 to 2001: the association’s golden years. During this period, the number of funds increased from 4,300 to 7,000, with deposits tripling to reach the 1,000 billion euro mark. Under Rafik Fischer’s presidency, the association’s permanent staff increased from 1 to 8, with the articles of association reviewed to support this dazzling development, boosted by a favourable economic and political climate. By his own admission and with his customary humour, Rafik Fischer says that ALFI entered the new millennium by transforming itself from a friendly “dining club”
70_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_71
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 27th April 1960 Place of birth: Luxembourg Nationality: Luxembourger Children: 2 (5) Languages: French, English, German, Luxembourgish, Spanish Hobbies: Reading, trips, scuba diving, skiing, family
My favourite Paris, Boston, Luxembourg Maison Arendt (Luxembourg), Marius (Copacabana) A house in the south of France, Ulusaba reserve (South Africa), Rocky Mountains The Art of War (Sun Tzu), The Pillars of Earth (Ken Follet) From Opera to Jazz or Heavy metal Antoine-Louis Barye, Hans Erni
Companies
Cities: Restaurants: Places: Books: Music: Artists:
Position Head of Global Investor Services KBL European Private Bankers
Others • Director and Former chairman of ALFI • Diretor of KREDIETRUST • Chairman of the board of directors of EFA
Analysis
Facts&Figures
Rafik Fischer
At the age of just 38, Elie Flatter is in charge, at the Banque Centrale de Luxembourg, of the prudential supervision of the liquidity of market operators. A successful career which he happily combines with an endless quest for discovery. Increasing complexity Elie Flatter’s story starts in 1974, in a small village in the Vosges region of France where he spent his childhood. His education began in the local school, which had just one class. As the result of family moves, he subsequently enrolled in schools in Epinal and then Nancy. With each move his horizons expanded, as he discovered new and more complex worlds, each increasing his curiosity and developing his ability to adapt. This hard-working and brilliant scholar followed an unusual path: although specialising in sciences at high school, Elie’s true passion was for Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Over time, a great thirst for knowledge of all kinds shaped the young man’s character, helping him to feel quickly at ease in any situation. After passing his baccalaureat examination, he decided to study economic sciences at Nancy University.
Specialisation On his return to the working world, Elie Flatter joined Ernst & Young Luxembourg where he spent four years in business advisory, specialising, among other areas, in Islamic finance and making many visits to the Middle East. His thirst for discovery took on a new dimension in September 2009, when he joined the Banque Centrale du Luxembourg, taking responsibilities in the prudential supervision of the liquidity of market operators. Alongside this mission, Elie was mandated to represent the BCL in working groups of Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) on management of the liquidity of Islamic financial institutions.
Decision makers
fund management. He then built on these solid foundations, moving on to a new challenge at Crédit Agricole Indosuez Luxembourg, where he gained skills in team and project management. Wishing to develop his skills and widen his horizons, Elie decided to take a career break to return to the academic world. He signed up for an MBA course organised jointly by Warwick Business School, ESSEC and the University of Mannheim. His stay in the United Kingdom also brought him into contact with a new culture, since this was where he met his wife, a Chinese national.
Key Players
An unquenchable thirst for discovery
Companies
Elie Flatter
Analysis
Internationalisation At the end of his studies, Elie Flatter began working life with the Banque Populaire du Luxembourg. Over the next four years, he gained experience in the trading room, learning about trading techniques, arbitrage, setting up structured products and
74_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_75
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 7th December 1974 Place of birth: Epinal Nationality: Luxembourgish, French Children: 2 Languages: French, German, English, Hebrew Hobbies: Theatre, badminton, hiking
My favourite Cities: Restaurant: Places: Music:
Luxembourg, Shanghai (People’s Republic of China), Muscat (Sultanate of Oman) Um Plateau (Luxembourg), Chalet Am Brill (Mondorf-les-Bains) Nature, forests Classical music
Position Companies
Liquidity Surveillance & Prudential Supervision, Central Bank of Luxembourg
Analysis
Facts&Figures
Elie Flatter
Jean-Paul Gennari, CEO of Crédit Suisse Fund Services, used to dream of being a professional footballer. His favourite position was sweeper: a defender. Rather like a CEO, wouldn’t you say? Football forever Playing in defence, the sweeper has an overview of the match. Incidentally, this strategic coordinating and passing position is a bit like the role of a company CEO. Jean-Paul Gennari draws on his skills acquired on the pitch, such as teamwork, and applies them to the world of business. A torn cruciate ligament at the age of nineteen forced him to kiss goodbye to his dreams of youth and drop football. However, the sport gave him his self-confidence. “My natural optimism means I believe that every cloud has a silver lining,” he smiles. The young man resumed his studies at the Luxembourg School of Business and Management and launched his career in the trading department of BGL in 1982.
Cycling into retirement Back at UBS in 2001, he originally had some responsibility for managing funds. He subsequently became CEO of UBS Funds Services. The sweeper in him was back! At the end of 2010, he was given the same position at Crédit Suisse Fund Services. Receptive and willing to listen, his door is always open. If he had to do it all again, this proud father of two grown-up children would spend less time at work and more time with his family. So what will he be doing in ten years’ time? When he retires, the fifty year old of today sees himself cycling around his beloved Lubéron, and no doubt kicking a ball about too, just for fun!
Analysis
Like on the pitch One year on, at UBS, Jean-Paul held a number of positions and saw his responsibilities grow. When UBS and SBS merged in 1998, he joined the newly created Central Bank of Luxembourg (BCL). “It was a rewarding experience,” he remembers. “We started from nothing and I had six months in which to put something in place.” His best quality is undoubtedly his flexibility. “You have to be able to adapt to the situation,
Decision makers
a bit like the sweeper has to do on the pitch.” Hired by the Luxembourg Monetary Institute to set up the Central Bank of Luxembourg’s future processes, he was involved in setting up the Central Bank of Luxembourg, and in the separation of the BCL and the CSSF (Financial Sector Supervisory Commission). He left the BCL one year later. At VP Banque, he was responsible for setting up the family office, a natural role for someone who has always managed his affairs paternally, the old-fashioned way.
Key Players
Jean-Paul Gennari
MyOfficialStory_81
The passionate drive to create and deliver the most adequate investment fund structures will allow Joëlle to further develop her vision to position Clifford Chance as the leading international investment fund practice in Luxembourg. Perspective Joëlle Hauser was born in the charming town of St. Vith, in the German speaking part of Belgium. After graduating magna cum laude from her Licence en Droit at Université Catholique de Louvain, Joëlle’s path led her to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. After starting her career with one of the major Luxembourg law firms, Joëlle moved on to experience the Luxembourg fund and custody/settlement industry first hand, working at UBS and Clearstream. Joëlle returned to legal practice by joining Clifford Chance in 2000 in the role of partner, with the ambition to build up the firm’s Luxembourg investment fund practice and to position it as the provider of choice for international, cross-border institutional fund promoters.
Personal life Careful towards a healthy work-life balance, Joëlle finds calm and serenity in spending her leisure time with her family. She is an enthusiastic runner and yoga adept and can enjoy a good book, preferably biographies and novels.
Decision makers
counseling a wide variety of local and international clients in the set-up and structuring of UCITS, hedge funds and private equity and real estate investment structures, helping her clients steer firmly through the ups and downs of an eventful decade. From there, under Joëlle’s leadership, the firm’s practice further developed along the path of diversification, extending its knowledge to the challenging realms of publicprivate partnerships and public policy funds for a multitude of public institutions and supranational bodies.Guided by a passion to deliver, Joëlle ensures that each client receives a high quality, tailor-made solution to even the most complex and multi-facetted issues.
Key Players
Joëlle Hauser
Analysis
Performance and Teamwork From the start, Joëlle’s relationship with Clifford Chance has been one of successful symbiosis between her energetic and demanding nature and the firm’s culture of “Local Excellence, Global Standards”. Joëlle greatly enjoys fostering a multinational team within an extensive global network.Drawing on her industry experience, she developed a successful practice
82_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_83
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 14th June 1967 Place of birth: Saint Vith (Belgium) Nationality: Belgian Children: 1 Languages: German, French, English, Luxembourgish Hobbies: Yoga, reading, jogging
My favourite Cities: Venise, Paris Restaurant: The Thaïland (Luxembourg) Places: Red Sea – Sharm-el-Sheikh Books: Biographies Music: My husband’s compositions
Position Companies
Partner – Head of the Investment Funds Department, Clifford Chance Luxembourg
84_MyOfficialStory
Joëlle Hauser
MyOfficialStory_85
In his view, the long-term approach is the best, whether at work or at home. Vincent Heymans is equally at ease demonstrating his theories in the office as to the kitchen. Starting up After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economic sciences, Vincent Heymans agreed to join a friend in a leasing and insurance brokerage start-up. This initial experience created the foundations on which Vincent went on to build his career. From sales, to computerisation and accounting, he turned his hand to everything, developing skills that proved essential in his future career. Two years later, the economic situation at the time lead the two entrepreneurs to change path. Deciding to take up a more conventional role, Vincent joined Cedel. Starting out in Operations, he progressed through the ranks over the next three years, before finally joining KPMG Advisory to focus on what he likes doing best: project management. He has now been advising fund trustees and sponsors in a whole range of fields for fourteen years.
Jump in! When he was a child, Vincent learned to swim by jumping into the water without his armbands. He had simply forgotten to put them on. Perhaps it was then, at this early age, that he formed the conviction that the best way to learn is by doing. A firm believer in deep thinking, in particular when it comes to human behaviour, Vincent Heymans has “jumped in” on more than one occasion, in pursuit of an overview and general understanding of the funds industry. In future years, he will of course continue to dispense advice and build relationships, but his retirement dream is to run a guesthouse – an opportunity to meet people from all walks of life and give free rein to his culinary passion.
Decision makers
to avoid compromise and concentrate on what matters most to him. He divides his time between work, family, friends and his passion for cooking.
Companies
Vincent Heymans
Analysis
Jacques Brel As a schoolboy, the young Vincent displayed an insatiable curiosity and was an avid reader, while suffering from extremes of boredom during school lessons. A characteristic he shares with Jacques Brel, the personality he most admires. In addition to his outstanding lyrics, it is Brel’s insight into others that has always impressed the businessman. Like Brel, he seeks
86_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_87
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 18th July 1966 Place of birth: Uccle Nationality: Belgian Children: 3 Languages: French, English Hobby: Cooking, golf
My favourite Cities: Restaurants: Places: Book: Music: Artist:
Perugia, Barcelona A trattoria in Italy Tuscany, Provence Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt) Pink Floyd Jacques Brel
Position Companies
Partner, Head of Financial Services, Head of Marketing, KPMG Luxembourg
88_MyOfficialStory
Vincent Heymans
MyOfficialStory_89
From Lubumbashi to Luxembourg, Kabanga Michel Kayembe, a partner with Kurt Salmon, talks about the people and events that have shaped his career. A career There aren’t many finance executives out there who dream of being a waffle seller! This man is clearly an idealist. He would like to see more philanthropists out there, along the lines of Bill Gates. He is a big admirer of the founder of the Microsoft empire, who has decided to put his fortune to good use by helping the underprivileged. “Being someone is knowing how to be at the service of others”, he adds. Born in Lubumbashi forty years ago, Michel arrived in Belgium at the age of eleven to go to school and graduated in economics from the FUCaM in Mons before completing a Master’s in finance at the University of Liege. In 1996 he started his career as a consultant before leaving four years later to join Atraxis, a subsidiary of Sabena. Following its financial difficulties, this adventure came to an abrupt end.
A business vision In 2001, Arthur Andersen asked him to join the Business Risk Consulting Advisory in Luxembourg. Two years later, the company merged with Ernst & Young and Michel joined an asset management company as an internal auditor. “I considered the experience as a stepping stone towards the world of portfolio management, private banking and, above all, fund administration”, he remembers. In 2004 he came back to consulting with a stint at DCE Consultants. But when the former partners of Deloitte Consulting France came up with the idea of creating Ineum Consulting Luxembourg, he didn’t think twice. “Won over by the business vision, I agreed to follow Eric Crabié into the venture.” In January 2011, after 5 years of activity in the Grand Duchy, Ineum Consulting merged with Kurt Salmon Associates to give birth to Kurt Salmon, a new player on the consultancy market. “In the course of my career, I’ve had to contend with two bankruptcies and one merger. But I keep a positive outlook. The worst is behind me!” smiles this eternal optimist. Pragmatic and discreet by nature, he does not thirst after popularity or hunger for the glamour of a big name, as he firmly believes that “it simply sidetracks you”.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/kabangamichelkayembe
Analysis
A chance encounter When on holiday in the Congo at the age of seventeen, he had a chance encounter with the woman who was later to become his wife. They lost sight of each other for a few years before coming across each other again on a station platform in Brussels. They have been inseparable since. Devoted to his four children and an adventurous entrepreneur, Michel is quick
to emphasise the two sides of his profile, which he compares to the fictional character Batman. But while he may look up to the hero, he has never actually considered the possibility of actually becoming a caped crusader in real life!
Key Players
Facts&Figures
Kabanga Michel Kayembe
An unconventional career path criss-crossing the European continent, and picking up numerous languages along the way, Daniela Klasén-Martin brings her wealth of life and business experience to any challenge making her one of the most dynamic businesswomen in Luxembourg today. Hard-Work, Determination & Perseverance Daniela Klasén -Martin has never chosen the easy way. After finishing high school in Italy, Daniela moved to Sweden to pursue her academic career and explore her family roots. Having never had formal Swedish lessons, Daniela convinced the university to let her sit the Swedish language exams after only a couple of months of intensive studies. Not only did she pass, she graduated with the one of the highest marks of her year. After earning a Masters in Business Administration & International Economics from Linköping University and ESC Nantes Business School, Daniela started her career as a management accountant at Fiat Auto Sverige in Stockholm in 1992. Meeting her future husband shortly after, they moved to France in March 1993, where she was hired as a Business Manager at Fiat Auto France.
Determined, Focused and Ready for a Challenge “I am constantly on the lookout for new challenges, new learning opportunities, innovative projects and new industries to explore. No matter the sector, success correlates with hardwork, commitment, quality services and clear strategic management vision, said Daniela. I am not waiting for things to happen. Whether in business or in your private life, it is up to yourself to achieve your goals and objectives.”
Decision makers
Management Luxembourg as a management accountant in 1997. After setting up the firm’s finance department and being promoted to the company’s Head of Finance, Daniela moved to the Director’s office in July 2006, where she was first CEO, then General Manager of MDO after the firm merged with Mercuria in 2008. Since September 2010, she is MD at DCG SA (DCG), a corporate services and management company services firm based in Luxembourg. With close to 20 years of international experience across different sectors, a broad knowledge of the fund industry and the Luxembourgian business environment in particular as well as an unparalleled ability to instil her visions and passion onto her work environment, Daniela is determined to make DCG one of the leading players in the industry.
Key Players
Daniela Klasén-Martin
Analysis
A Career Steeped in the Finance, Investment & Professional Services Industry Constantly looking for new professional challenges and different work environments, Daniela joined Schroders Investment
94_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_95
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 13th June 1967 Place of birth: Bari (Italy) Nationality: Italian and Swedish Children: 2 Languages: Italian, Swedish, English, French Hobbies: spending time with my daughters and my husband, Aïkido, jogging, reading
My favourite
Companies
Cities: Stockholm, Paris Places: Lakes in Sweden, the sea of Salento in Italy Books: Thrillers (Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson), historical novels (Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Mika Waltari), Comic Books (I collect them). Restaurants: I prefer my husband’s “cuisine” Music: Eclectic: rock, funk, electro funk, trip hop, electro jazz, jazz, pop, classic Artist: Dalí
Position Managing Director, DCG SA (DCG)
96_MyOfficialStory
Daniela Klasén-Martin
MyOfficialStory_97
Wherever he goes, Bob Kneip influences his environment. Just like his favourite artists, he leaves his mark. Early works The employees of a company where Bob spent a summer placement still remember him. The “pink shirt day” he introduced demonstrated the positive impact of this type of initiative. The entrepreneur started his career in Belgium, in Sodexho’s “Chèque-Repas” division. Recognising the potential of the luncheon voucher concept, he completed a postgraduate course in Management and set up Chèque-Repas Luxembourg S.A, which he managed from 1987 to 1990. He then developed this business in Germany and Austria, gained experience as a Managing Director with a major distribution company, before entering the communications’ world with IP Group. Drawing on the best aspects of his experience to date, he developed an ambitious business model combining finance, communication and industrialisation of distribution. His employer was hesitant, so he set out on his own.
Passion for Pop Art “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art”. Bob appears to follow Andy Warhol’s philosophy to the letter, with works of art to be found in every corner of his offices. His passion for pop art can be traced back to the age of 12, when he used his pocket money to purchase his first print. By no means does he regard himself as a collector. He acquires works for pleasure rather than as investments. He enjoys the effect his paintings create on visitors and staff. His employees are involved in his “Private Art Kirchberg” initiative – an opportunity for the public to view his collection. Futuristic or critical, but always fun, these paintings present a fairly accurate image of a creative and professional businessman, whose passion for art is surpassed only by his passion for life.
Decision makers
father Victor and his established network of friends. Renamed “KNEIP”, his company went on to expand through the investment of 3i Growth Capital, who provided support in making 3 acquisitions in 2009, and culminating in a repurchase of all shares in 2010. Today Bob continues to lead his company into the future as sole proprietor.
Key Players
Bob Kneip
Analysis
The Masterpiece Kneip Communication S.A started trading in 1993. Building on various development phases and innovations, the company carved out a place for itself in the distribution of financial information. Its services supply thousands of destinations: newspapers, websites and other regulators. To address this challenge, Bob calls upon all available expertise, including his
98_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_99
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 23rd April 1962 Place of birth: Boulogne Billancourt (France) Nationality: Luxembourger Children: 3 Languages: Luxembourgish, English, French, German Hobbies: Golf, skiing, running
My favourite Cities: Restaurant: Place: Books: Music: Artist:
Paris, New York Brasserie Mansfeld Museum of Modern Art (New York) Cartoons by Van Hamme Simple Minds, U2 Andy Warhol
Position Companies
CEO of KNEIP
Others • Founding member of IMS Luxembourg • Member of markcom Luxembourg • Board member of “Pour un sourire d’enfant” and “Foundatioun Kriibskrank Kanner”
100_MyOfficialStory
Bob Kneip
MyOfficialStory_101
Far from being two tone and limited to just black and white, Serge Krancenblum sees the world in infinite shades of grey, because everything in the world is complex, exciting and constantly on the move, and everything, absolutely everything, is in an unstable equilibrium. Fear does not avoid danger Daring to move forward without fear of falling and without fear of making mistakes is what sums up Serge Krancenblum. This native of Metz doesn’t see standing still as a viable solution. Being active and proactive is the only possible thing to do. After studying in France and in the United States, specialising in finance, Serge headed for Luxembourg, where he embarked on a long and glittering career. Clear-thinking, which is his main quality and his main fault, he is well aware that he owes his success to the Grand Duchy. Of course, he would have had a dazzling career anywhere else, but it has taken on another dimension here. Aware of this fact, Serge demonstrates his gratitude by attempting to be its most persuasive ambassador.
Marx Just because he is a knowledgeable financier doesn’t mean that Serge Krancenblum doesn’t quote Marx. Groucho that is, not Karl. For although he loves his work, he also likes having a life outside of the office. Quoting the eldest of the comic quartet, he says “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” For although he willingly accepts his professional obligations, he prefers not to mix business with pleasure and sets aside time and energy for his passions and his family. In fact, every facet of a person has equal importance and helps to maintain equilibrium. An equilibrium, that is, which makes it possible to keep moving. An unstable equilibrium.
Decision makers
making it particularly difficult to put them together. So many parameters to take into account with infinite variables might be torture for some people, but it’s something of a passion for Serge. Just like martial arts, which require constant self-control, discipline and humility to recognise that what you thought was an end is, in fact, just one step on a longer journey.
Key Players
Serge Krancenblum
Analysis
Grey is beautiful While some people may have a black and white view of things and of the world, Serge Krancenblum knows that things are not that simple. The complexity at every level of our planet makes things more attractive and more stimulating. Geopolitics is a puzzle where the pieces are constantly changing shape,
102_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_103
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 8th October 1961 Place of birth: Metz Nationality: French Children: 2 Languages: French, English Hobbies: Geopolitics, Martial arts
My favourite Cities: Restaurants:
Paris, New York Favaro, Um Plateau, Boos Café
Position CEO, SGG S.A.
Others Companies
• President of the Luxembourg Association for Family Offices “LAFO” • Director of the Luxembourg Private Equity Association “LPEA” • Director of selected investment funds and listed and private companies
104_MyOfficialStory
www.360crossmedia.com
MyOfficialStory_107
Strong support For a businessman constantly on the move, a stable environment is the key to his performance. Claude Kremer has impeccable foundations. A member of the Luxembourg Bar since 1982, he is a founding partner of the Arendt & Medernach practice, established in 1988. A straight career path, and a strong family unit to maintain his sense of balance. His wife is his most loyal supporter and his three children make his life complete. Between work and personal life, most of his friendships can be traced back to his years in the scout movement. A school of life that taught him all about teamwork, resourcefulness and the great outdoors.
looking back, he is constantly scanning the road ahead in search of new opportunities. Arrival Far from being satisfied by the personal achievements he has notched up over the years, Claude Kremer constantly questions himself to avoid falling prey to complacency, motivating his teams and devoting all his energy to delivering the right messages to the right people. One day, when this frenzied working life is behind him, he can see himself opening an art store. A way of maintaining the discussions and culture that have always been an important part of his life. Perhaps also a way of putting off the moment when the finishing line comes into view - because for this man of action the journey is far more important than the destination.
Analysis
Companies
Endurance To an observer, his life appears fast-paced and frenetic. Alongside his legal practice, he teaches at the university centre, has written a book on investment funds, is a member of numerous organisations and sits on countless committees. Last but not least, he was Chairman of ALFI from 2007 to 2011 and has been elected President of the European Fund and Management Association (EFAMA) in June 2011, roles that require unfailing commitment on an international level. It is therefore rather surprising to hear him describe his professional life as “a long quiet river�. His experience running marathons has no doubt helped him to pace his efforts and handle his countless responsibilities with apparent ease. Never
Decision makers
Claude Kremer moves from challenge to challenge with the speed of a sprinter. A pace he’s maintained for more than twenty years now
Key Players
Facts&Figures
Claude Kremer
After thirty years of faithful service to the Dexia group, Jean-Noël Lequeue has set up his own internal audit and compliance company. At an age when many people’s thoughts are turning to retirement, now in his sixties, this dashing individual is still seeking new horizons. A new challenge What makes a man who has reached the pinnacle of professional success with an international group decide to start all over again and launch his own small business? Why not finish your senior management career with a world leader in the banking industry? “A taste for change”, is Jean-Noël Lequeue’s answer. In 2007, this 63-year old Belgian set up ICE, his own internal audit and compliance company, after thirty years working his way up the management ranks at Dexia. Viewing retirement as “a not particularly attractive prospect”, the process of setting up and developing his company has brought Jean-Noël Lequeue his greatest professional satisfaction: “I found starting again on my own an exciting challenge after having enjoyed the comfort of the infrastructure of an international group.” Passionate about his business, at the start of 2009, this resident of the Grand Duchy since 1993 was appointed Chairman of the ALCO (Luxembourg Association of Compliance Officers).
Family time Today, Jean-Noël Lequeue’s “hands-on” involvement in his new business has brought him new motivation. By no means ready to stop, he is still learning, discovering and pursuing his professional aims in complete independence. The father of two children, and with several grandchildren, he now also plans to spend more time with his family.
Decision makers
brilliant studies, Jean-Noël Lequeue started his career in the then emerging field of IT. A path that was to lead him to the world of banking, first to Banque de Bruxelles, where he was responsible for IT projects, then in 1977 to Crédit Communal de Belgique, one of the two banks that founded Dexia in 1996. In the course of three decades with the bank, Jean-Noël Lequeue has worked in many areas, from IT to the Chief Compliance Officer role created for him, not forgetting research, purchasing, marketing, general inspection and the management committee. Three decades motivating teams to build for the future, while constantly adapting to the requirements of the present.
Key Players
Jean-Noël Lequeue
MyOfficialStory_115
Roman Lewszyk, CEO of Atlantic Fund Services Europe, learned the true importance of teamwork studying orchestral conducting at university. It’s been a lesson that served him well during a career in financial services in the US and Europe. Perfect pitch Studying music at university, Roman Lewszyk discovered the power of teamwork during a course on conducting: “You have to bring in the violinists, obtain the right beat from the percussionist and get perfect pitch from the trumpeters to achieve a unified, harmonious and lasting sound experience.” Years later, while working with KPMG to build trading systems in Washington, he was struck by the similarity between the techniques required to conduct an orchestra and to lead a business project. “It’s all about a harmonious yet driven approach to teamwork,” Lewszyk says. Today those skills are serving Atlantic Fund Services Europe, an independent fund services provider with 190 staff and offices in Warsaw (Lewszyk was born a few hundred kilometres to the southwest, in Zabrze, in 1958) and Luxembourg.
Reducing carbon footprints But when Forum’s founder John Keffer took the business independent again in 2007 under the Atlantic banner, Lewszyk initiated with John the same process in Europe and was keen to take up the challenge. “It has been a great and invigorating experience,” he says. Part of the appeal is the company’s role in training young people and instilling values such as integrity, conscientiousness and diligence, which he says is crucial at a time when many traditional institutions are failing the younger generations. Tellingly, when asked where he expects to be in 10 years’ time, Lewszyk says: “Passing the baton to an inspired leader.”
Decision makers
country as an adviser to the chairman of Poland’s Securities & Exchange Commission – “a rare opportunity,” he says. In the late 1990s Lewszyk engaged in the fund services sector as CEO of Investment Fund Services, a joint venture between Maine-based Forum Financial Group and Warsaw’s Bank Handlowy, which grew from start-up to capture 80% of the Polish market. When Forum was acquired by Citigroup, he took on a succession of roles, including heading its transfer agency business in Europe and Asia and overseeing the global implementation of a new TA platform.
Key Players
A life built on teamwork
Companies
Roman Lewszyk
Analysis
Rare opportunity Lewszyk emigrated to the US at the age of 21 (he has both Polish and US nationalities). He spent the 1980s studying in San Francisco and working in the new hi-tech hotbed of Silicon Valley before returning to Europe in the 1990s. There he helped to build capital markets institutions in his native
116_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_117
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 5th August 1958 Place of birth: Zabrze, Poland Nationality: Polish, American Children: 2 Languages: English, Polish, Russian, Latin, Greek Hobbies: Sports (hiking, rowing), reading
My favourite Cities: Places: Restaurant: Places: Book: Music: Artist:
San Francisco, Cracow Costa Blanca (Spain), Napa Valley (California) Greens (San Francisco) Grand Canyon, Little Switzerland The Seven Pillars of Wisdom Mozart, Chopin, Musorgsky Tintoretto, Kandinsky
Position Companies
CEO of Atlantic Fund Services Europe
118_MyOfficialStory
Roman Lewszyk
MyOfficialStory_119
A comment made by a German teacher could have crushed her dreams. Instead, it had the opposite effect! For more than 20 years, Edith has continued to push her own limits. English-German Born in Charleroi in May 1968, Edith knew from as young as 8 years old that she would be an interpreter. She wasn’t afraid to make mistakes and focused on the most important thing, namely being understood by the person in front of her. She spoke Hungarian from an early age and eagerly devoured books throughout her time at school. As planned, she began studying English-German translation, then moved on to studying marketing and international commerce at the EPHEC (Practical School of Business), despite the pessimistic predictions of one teacher. Her studies taught her to be open-minded and enabled her to touch on a lot of subjects. This was also where she met her husband.
Two new challenges “I rely on my gut feeling”. Following her instincts, Edith agreed to join ING in 2010 for an ambitious project. She wasn’t leaving her colleagues nor the company; she was taking on a new challenge. In May 2012, she joined Victor Buck Services for the same reason. “Nicolas and Renaud hired me after a 10 year probation period,” she jokes, referring to the fact that the trio have worked together a lot over the past decade. This has enabled them to learn the things they have in common, i.e. good listening skills, the desire to keep moving and tremendous drive. To be continued.
Analysis
Twenty years At the end of November 1991, Edith went for her first interview with “The Bank of New York”. When she left 9 years later, her manager showed her the notes from that interview: “she has spirit but is not career-oriented”. Her son was born in 1992. She moved to Luxembourg with her husband andchild in August 2000 to join Fleming Asset Management. A life crisis in February 2001 allowed her to find out who her real
Decision makers
friends were and lose herself in her work. She became “Head of Client Services” in 2001, moving on to the post of “Head of Transfer Agency” 3 years later, before becoming “Head of Vendor Management for Continental Europe” in 2006. When she left JP Morgan Asset Management Europe, her business card read “Head of Product Delivery and Fund Vendor Management”.
Key Players
Edith Magyarics
MyOfficialStory_123
She was born in the northern part of Germany, in a well-known City named CELLE, near to Hannover, the bassinet of the best spoken standard German. Her father’s job made them move to Hamburg and settling down in the Southern part of Germany, where she grew up. Sabine had to learn in early stages, to build new friendships and to try to keep them. Moving She kept on moving and travelled a lot to get to know new people and cultures. She applied for becoming a Stewardess with Lufthansa to combine her interest of being in touch with people and the possibility of travelling. She failed, because she prepared herself for the interview with reading the balance sheet and learning by heart the different types of airplanes with all technical details. Out of this she took the opportunity to get involved in the banking business.
Slogan “Every manager and boss is only as good as her/his team” motivates her every day, also after having spent about 24 years in the financial business. Through her career she was promoted to various positions and encouraged to step further, that is what she gives back to her team: trust, support, honesty and sustainability. The most worth-full praise she achieved from one of her biggest clients was, that she was told, that the person, CFO, wants to learn from her saying NO, but as charming, friendly and well argued as she does.
Analysis
Banking In all her professional stations she had a responsibility for big teams and big client relationships, and she had the chance to build new business areas in a, for the fund business in Germany, unknown area – Outsourcing of Fund Administration Services. Additionally she supported her husband in building his business and supported him with building networks.
Decision makers
Most of her contacts got very personal and she is focused on bringing different people with different ideas together to gain new ideas and a common understanding. Since she joined HSBC in November 2011 and moved to Luxembourg in March 2012, those strengthens are challenged every day.
Key Players
Facts&Figures
Sabine Moldenhauer
Today a fund administration specialist, Frédéric Perard’s original ambition was to manage luxury hotels. Evidence of this early passion is apparent in the form of a creative approach and an appreciation for the finer things in life. Striking out alone, age 17 Frédéric Perard first discovered basketball when he was eight years old. The sport had a deep influence on him. His business decisions are still influenced by the same factors, a fun element, team spirit and an ongoing quest for technical and tactical excellence. Frédéric could have carried on playing, but in the end the lure of the gastronomic world prevailed. Thus, after an uneventful childhood and adolescence in the bracing climate of the North Sea coast, the young man left home in 1980, at the age of 17, to pursue a burning ambition: to one day manage a major international hotel in a prestigious location. However, Frédéric quickly realised that this industry held few prospects for him. He then changed path, entering the world of finance and economics with a bachelor’s degree in commercial and financial sciences from the ICHEC in Brussels.
Hunting, travel and oenology Frédéric Perard’s move to Luxembourg in 2004 has brought two major benefits: on the one hand, he finds a peaceful family haven in the city on his return from the many business trips required for his role. On the other hand, he can indulge his passions for oenology and hunting, enjoying the conviviality and fresh air aspect of these pursuits. In the medium term, Frédéric may explore new horizons far from Europe – maybe even in Asia – however, his most cherished dream is to buy a vineyard where he can make his own wine and go hunting with his dog.
Decision makers
dissertation on “measuring the performance of Monory-CEA unit trusts”. His working life therefore began in fund administration, an area in which he has chosen to remain. Until 1995 and the sale of the business to Paribas and the Bank of New York, JP Morgan Securities experienced exponential growth, giving Frédéric Perard ample opportunity to express his talents. In 1999, he joined Paribas. Thanks to his team spirit, responsiveness and innovative flair, he naturally found himself in a key role in the two major acquisitions made by BNP Paribas - Paribas in 1999 then BGL Fortis in 2009.
Key Players
Frédéric Perard
Analysis
Promoting fund administration In 1986, on leaving university, Frédéric Perard only needed to reply to a single job offer. He was immediately hired by JP Morgan in Paris, who had been impressed by his
128_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_129
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 12th July 1963 Place of birth: Malo-les-Bains Nationality: French Children: 1 Languages: French, English, Spanish, German Hobbies: Oenology, golf, hunting, basket ball
My favourite Cities: Restaurant: Places: Book: Music: Artist:
New York, San Francisco, Rome Gagnaire (Paris) Rajastan, Saint Eustache Germinal (Emile Zola) Norah Jones, Amadeus Mozart Leonard de Vinci
Position Companies
Regional Manager, Luxembourg and Offshore Centres
Others Member of the Executive Committee of BNP Paribas Securities Services
130_MyOfficialStory
Frédéric Perard
MyOfficialStory_131
Brenda Petsche shares her time between HSBC and her family, that she often meets around hockey rinks. Chateauguay Born in a little town – Chateauguay – located in the suburbs of Montreal, Brenda Petsche had a pretty fun childhood. She was often raising money for various causes and her father recalls “If she couldn’t do a math problem, I would tell her it is money and she would find the answer”. She grew up in Quebec, until it was decided that it would become a Frenchspeaking province: the family moved to Toronto in 1979. Integration there was very difficult as Brenda was already driven and ambitious. She thought she would be a fashion buyer, then decided “not really” and ended up in mutual funds! She started in a small third party provider, and gradually worked her way up.
“Get on and do it” When she moved to Guernsey in 2000, she had the intention to slow down. But after 2 months, she was bored and accepted a job at Bank of Bermuda, as Manager of the Fund Accounting department. She had her two sons whilst in the job, and four years later, HSBC bought Bank of Bermuda. She was promoted to various positions before becoming MD of the Guernsey office and moved to Luxembourg in 2009, as Head of Client Delivery. A year later, she was appointed managing director of HSBC Securities Services. When asked about her management style, she smiles: “People ask too much for permission to do things. They expect their boss to say “Get it done” but that would imply an order. I prefer “Get on and do it””. She believes in exemplarity: she will work as long as it takes to get things done. And a very challenging client blown away by the work of her team is what she likes best.
Analysis
Entrepreneur She quit her job and established her own company providing accounting and services to small companies. She learnt a life lesson: she thought it would be easier to be her own boss, but all her clients became her bosses! Nevertheless, she enjoyed becoming part of their lives and the friendships that she earned. She learnt to sell herself, draw parallels and experience a wide range of life experiences. Consulting appealed to the fact that a big company would value what she had to share and achieve greater heights. But the attraction of
Decision makers
banking was strong: she consulted for a bank in Toronto for three and a half years before finally joining it full-time.
Key Players
MyOfficialStory_133
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 10th February 1965 Place of Birth: Montreal Nationality: Canadian Children: 2 boys (Xavier, Gabriel) Languages: English, French Hobbies: hockey mom, (not a sport a lifestyle), reading books
My favourite Venice, Toronto, (Fiji would like to go) hockey rink Towards a Society of Frugal Abundance by Serge Latouche, Child psychology books (what makes my boys tick) Brasserie Mansfield, Chi Chi`s Pop – PINK, Phil Collins David Begbie, Edouard Matinet
Companies
Cities: Place: Books: Restaurants: Music: Artist:
Position Head of Client Delivery HSBC Securities Services (Luxembourg) S.A.
Others Director on the boards
134_MyOfficialStory
Brenda Petsche
MyOfficialStory_135
What makes us who we are? What is the impact of witnessing, as a young man, the murder of a relative in Africa? At the age of twelve, discovering our first “haute cuisine” meal (no ketchup allowed!)? As a teenager exploring America while already a resolute European? As a kid playing sports with friends, yet solidly equipped with a deep understanding of playing by adult rules? It’s not just common sense As François Pfister opens up about his past, one unmistakably understands the importance of sense. Sense of taste, discovery, friendship, fairness… and excellence. Very early on, François Pfister was able to shape his life with the unparalleled intuition that comes from listening to oneself while opening up to others. Maintaining a keen sense of equilibrium, allowing discovery to meld with steadfastness. Blending the joy of family with the passion of work. Mixing the excitement of entrepreneurship with the demanding constraints of law. Achieving a balancing act of youthful wonder and stalwart leadership that has brought success and satisfaction to him and his family and to clients and colleagues the world over.
Most important date in my life: tomorrow His latest “endless possibility”? For Ogier Luxembourg’s recently appointed managing director, life is an eye-opening work-in-progress – a past full of achievement and a future open to adventure, discovery and giving back. Don’t be fooled: with his incredible gift of keen senses, he gathers, remembers and recalls. But the purpose of his gathering is clear and vital: taking the best of what he has seen, heard, tasted and smelled and making them an integral part of the future: never-ending discoveries of wine and food, a new challenge on the guitar, taking family relationships to a new, decidedly more mature level and, guiding Ogier to a unique level of excellence.
Decision makers
and career can only be characterized as diverse. This diversity has made him one of the most respected legal minds in Luxembourg, but there is a deep, unwavering constant that guides every endeavor, mission and relationship: trust. For François Pfister, “the essence is trust”. Once established, the possibilities are endless.
Key Players
An uncommon sense … of self and success
Companies
Francois Pfister
Analysis
Senses built for trust While keen senses have contributed to the making of the man, trust has become his watchword. François Pfister’s education
136_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_137
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 25th october 1961 Place of Birth: Brussels Nationality: Luxembourger Children: 2 (twins boy and girl - 17years old) Languages: French, English, German, Luxembourgish (basic) Hobbies: Wines, cooking, music
My favourite NYC, Hong Kong, Paris, Venice my sea front terrasse in the south of France, on a wood junk in the Halong Bay, the Burgundy vineyards in a sunny autumn Le Petit Prince by St-Exupéry La Haine de la Musique by Pascal Quignard Michel Bras in Laguiole, Les Flocons de Sel in Megève, some of my friends’ homes Jazz, Blues and Rock: Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimmy Hendrix, John MacLaughlin, Stanley Clarke Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, african tribal sculptors, Picasso
Companies
Cities: Place: Books: Restaurants: Music: Artist:
Position Managing Partner Ogier Luxembourg
138_MyOfficialStory
Francois Pfister
MyOfficialStory_139
A native of Canada, Kim-Andrée has spent the last ten years building up her experience in Europe. She now holds the role of Deputy Managing Director of BNP Paribas Securities Services Luxembourg. Energetic and spontaneous by nature, her love of travel and exploring distant lands has taken her on a varied career path. Change of continents Even as a young child, Kim-Andrée used to say to her parents: “I’m going to live abroad”. After obtaining her MBA, she decided to move to Europe and initially opted for France. She believed that if she stayed in her native Canada the focus of her career would inevitably be mainly the United States. Starting from scratch, she arrived in Paris and joined Accenture’s Process Reengineering division. She then moved to BNP Paribas Insurance and was involved in auditing its subsidiaries on all continents. After this, she progressed through a variety of roles – from General Inspection at BNP Paribas, to heading the Benelux internal audit department where she set up a multidisciplinary Hub and finally BNP Paribas Securities Services Luxembourg. At each stage, she pursued her driving passion: creating!
Wild encounters A great lover of nature and wide open spaces, Kim’s trips with her husband are decided according to which wild animals they would like to observe in their natural environment. So far, they have been to see tigers in India, jaguars in Brazil and leopards in South Africa. Her ideal book would be about travel and landscapes. Her idea of heaven on earth is the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania. All her travels, whether in Australia, South Korea or Namibia, have the same effect on her: they make her question things and send her home with new ideas to constantly move forward.
Decision makers
it brings us. She likes to quote Abraham Lincoln “It’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years”. True to this philosophy, she puts all her energy into everything she does, as demonstrated by her sports achievements – she has taken part in horse-riding and figure skating at a competitive level. As a true Canadian, she started skating at 5 years old and progressed as a competitor and coach. She is enthusiastic, practical and enjoys working in varied teams that strive to innovate and exceed their objectives.
Key Players
Kim-Andrée Potvin
Analysis
Appetite for life From a very early age, Kim realised that life is short and that the biggest risk was missing out on the many opportunities
140_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_141
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 5th June 1975 Place of birth: Montreal Nationality: Canadian and French Languages: English, French Hobbies: Observation of nature and wild animals, figure skating
My favourite Cities: Capetown, Rio, Sidney, Vancouver, Rome Restaurants: Bouquet Garni, Home Places: African Savanna, the forests of Quebec during Indian Summer, Ngorongoro Crater (Tanzania) Books: Bradt travel guides, animal or landscape photography Music: Franck Sinatra, Michael Bublé ,Tony Bennett
Position Companies
Deputy Managing Director, Head of Asset Fund Services Business Line
142_MyOfficialStory
Kim-Andrée Potvin
MyOfficialStory_143
Olivier Renault had an idyllic country upbringing. After studying science at university, his professional choices have brought him a great deal of variety and a great many challenges, two big motivators for this energetic SGSS Luxembourg Country Manager. A thirst for discovery His innate curiosity has steered his professional career. Oliver started off as a consultant in banking strategy before going on to become management control director with a large services company. He joined Société Générale in 1999 in corporate functions before discovering the field of Asset Servicing in Paris, then in Milan. In Italy, he served as Deputy CEO of SGSS in Milan for 4 years, where one of his tasks was to integrate this subsidiary into the Société Générale group. He is now revelling in his role in Luxembourg, an international financial centre, where the cut and thrust of business life is balanced by its bucolic setting.
Energy and pragmatism Indeed, he thrives on modelling, identifying opportunities and setting up strategies. His enthusiasm and energy make him extremely results-focused. In the course of his career, he has been required to carry out an in-depth transformation of the departments that he has headed. He is well aware that the paths can be difficult, but the taste for success makes the arduous journey worthwhile. Now based in Luxembourg, he works with the teams to supply a quality service to the Société Générale customers. Several major projects have already been successfully completed over the last eighteen months, but for this strong-willed character, many more development opportunities lie ahead.
Decision makers
industrial model in Italy. Defining quantified objectives and achieving these objectives by transforming organisations are just some of the things that make Olivier Renault tick.
Companies
Olivier Renault
Analysis
The Cartesian logic with the human touch The current Country Manager of Société Générale Securities Services loves to make figures talk, as is only natural given his training as an economic statistician. But while figures make it possible to take reasoned decisions, he believes that the human factor remains the driving force behind any transformation. His finest moment? Having succeeded in making the Italian and French teams work together to transform SGSS’
144_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_145
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 18th December 1963 Place of Birth: Eaubonne Nationality: French Children: 3 Languages: French, English, Italian Hobbies: roller, cycling, travelling
My favourite Cities: Restaurants: Places: Book: Music: Art work:
Nice, London, Milan, Paris Japanese, French and Italian cuisine the Mosel, Promenade des anglais, Lac d’Orta L’étranger (Camus) classical music, Jazz, electro, arabian L’ours blanc de François pompon (Musée d’Orsay)
Position Companies
Deputy CEO & Country Manager de SGSS
146_MyOfficialStory
F UN, FA S T, F R E E
148_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_149 VIDEO
Professional growth In one way or another, Marc Saluzzi has always worked for PwC. He began his career with Coopers & Lybrand in 1986, at the time the European Parliament was voting on the UCITS Directive. From the very start of his life as an auditor, he specialised in collective management, consolidating his experience with a 24-month stint in the Boston office. Appointed partner in 1996, he was involved in the merger with Price Waterhouse two years later, one of his best business memories to date. In 2000, he took over the Investment Management business at PwC Luxembourg. This role would serve as a springboard to the European role in 2003, followed by head of Investment Management and Real Estate for the entire PwC network in 2006. This sector represents 12% of the international company’s revenue. In addition to his responsibilities within the network, Marc is involved in the CSSF’s OPC Committee. He is also a member of the board of ALFI.
Other growth In the late1980s, Marc remembers asking Marie-Jeanne Chèvremont-Lorenzini the maximum number of people she thought their company could employ. She said around one hundred. Less than 20 years later, more than 1900 people work at PwC Luxembourg. He would have liked to have been a police inspector at the French police HQ – 36 Quai des Orfèvres – and he admires Steve Jobs, the Apple boss, for his ability to reinvent the future of his industry through technological innovations. In the long term, his dream is to buy some vines and develop a vintage that is just like him: strong and generous.
Decision makers
his spine. Narrowly avoiding immobilisation, this experience gave him an appreciation for sustained effort and the value of a hard-won result.
Companies
When he left his home in Lorraine to study in Paris, he never dreamt he would one day make his career in his native region. Fate worked out well.
Key Players
Marc Saluzzi
Analysis
Personal growth Who knows where men develop the features that make up their character? In Marc’s case, they can perhaps be traced back to a period during his teenage years. At the age of 14, he grew a total of 17 centimetres in 12 months. To avoid wearing a spinal support, he had to work on his dorsal muscles every day for six months in order to straighten
150_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_151
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 16th May 1963 Place of birth: Briey (France) Nationality: French Children: 2 Languages: French, English Hobbies: family, cycling
My favourite City: Rome Restaurant: Oustau de Baumanière Place: Provence, Alpilles Book: Regain (Jean Giono) Music: Jazz Artist: Cézanne (Montagne Sainte Victoire paintings)
Position Companies
Leading partner - Investment Management & Real Estate practice for the whole PricewaterhouseCoopers network
Others • Member of the OPC committee (CSSF) • President of ALFI
Analysis
Facts&Figures
Marc Saluzzi
What a mistake to think you are in front of a soon to retire, 60 year old native Luxembourger with a rich career behind him, when you meet Carlo Schlesser. On the contrary: despite his calm and poised manners, Carlo Schlesser still has the energy of a resourceful, youthful and multi-facetted entrepreneur. An action man The list of functions Carlo Schlesser has held and still holds is, to say the least, a head spinning list: Chairman of the Luxembourg International Management Services Association, elected Member of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, Member of the Accounting Standards Committee, Director of the Federation of the Professionals of the Financial Sector (PROFIL), Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sources Rosport S.A., Deputy Chairman of the Board of M Immobilier, Member of the Board of Securitas… Who would have bet on it in the 70’ies when Carlo started his career: hard times if any! The current President of the Board of Directors of SGG could easily boast about his past achievements were he not that focused on his future goals.
“I am interested in facts not fiction” Pragmatic: You could hardly find a single word that better defines him. Carlo Schlesser is more fund of real life than cerebral constructions. “I am interested in facts not fiction” he explains. “I prefer experiencing things myself, hands on”. “There is no single person I would say I admire. I however met lots of people I would define both valuable and respectable.” Not far from the normal age for retirement, this tennis and sports car enthusiast shyly admits that his major achievement in life is his marriage. And that the major success of his first 60 years is his two children…
Decision makers
degree at HEC Haute Ecole de Commerce, the prestigious Swiss business School. Carlo muscled his academic background heading to Brussels where he graduated from the Ecole Supérieure en Sciences Fiscales (Brussels Post Graduate Tax Institute) in 1976. He then headed to New York where he obtained his Certificate in International Banking. Such international curriculum opened him up the doors of Kredietbank Luxembourg: the first step in a long, rich and fulfilling career.
Key Players
Carlo Schlesser
MyOfficialStory_157
Partner of Bonn & Schmitt, Alex Schmitt’s career as a lawyer, spanning almost thirty years, has been exemplary in more than one sense. An American experience Born in 1953, Alex Schmitt grew up in a little village in the south of Luxembourg dominated by the steel industry, a time from which he has “marvellous memories”. Boarding school and high school in Echternach, then law at Liege and Brussels, he followed a classic path before joining a Brussels law practice in 1979. It was there that he met Jean-Pierre De Bandt, founder of the practice and his first boss: “his exceptional human and professional qualities made a deep impression on me”, recalls Alex Schmitt. However, two years later, he decided to set off for the United States, to combine a course of study – a masters in Law at Harvard – with working life as a lawyer in a New York practice. In addition to experiencing a new culture, his two-year stay in America helped him to gain the discipline and excellence he needed to join, on his return to Luxembourg in 1982, the practice that now bears his name.
An art fan Despite a busy career and the many responsibilities he holds alongside his work, he still has time for art, one of his passions, as demonstrated by the many contemporary works that adorn the walls of the Bonn & Schmitt Avocats practice. Hardly surprising for someone who freely admits that if he had not been a lawyer, he would have liked to have been an advertising designer.
Decision makers
Libre de Bruxelles, a member of several expert committees with the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg, and sits on the boards of around half a dozen financial establishments in the Grand Duchy.
Companies
Alex Schmitt
Analysis
Discipline and excellence Alex Schmitt currently combines several activities. A lawyer specialising in banking, finance, corporate and investment, he provides the benefit of his expertise to clients all over the world, thanks to his skills in English, French, German and Italian. However, Alex Schmitt is also a lecturer at the Université
158_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_159
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 24th March 1953 Place of birth: Luxembourg Nationality: Luxembourger Children: 2 Languages: French, English, German, Italian Hobbies: History, art, outdoor activities
My favourite Cities: Paris, Milan, New York, Buenos Aires Restaurant: Mosconi Place: Oesling (Luxembourg) Book: Le grand Condé (Bernard Pujo) Music: Mozart, Haendel Artist: Lucian Freud
Position Companies
Associé, Etude BONN & SCHMITT, Luxembourg
Others • Maître de conference (Université libre de Bruxelles) • Member of Cour Permanente d’Arbitrage, La Haye • Member of OPC Committee (CSSF)
160_MyOfficialStory
Alex Schmitt
MyOfficialStory_161
From Brussels to London, via Hong Kong and Luxembourg, Philippe Seyll has achieved a perfect balance from his considerable experience. Science and finance As a young engineer, Philippe Seyll felt drawn to the world of finance. After studying for masters degrees in telecommunication and management, he joined Swift in 1989. The company’s multicultural environment proved a superb school of professional life. In 1994, he was appointed head of marketing of Banque Indosuez Luxembourg, before setting off for London three years later to join the Bank of New York. Returning to Luxembourg, in 2005 he became Head of Clearstream Investment Funds Services (IFS) and joined the executive board of Clearstream Banking. His achievements include the successful launch of the Central Facility for Funds (CFF).
History and modernism Philippe Seyll cites Thomas More among his role models. This great Renaissance figure contributed towards the renewal of humanism, of which he was the most distinguished British representative. His book “Utopia” advocates tolerance and discipline to promote freedom. Whenever he is in France, Philippe Seyll likes to visit the Jacquemart André museum in Paris. This mansion was once the home of a couple of art collectors. Edouard André, a banker, was a member of one of the wealthiest families of the Second Empire. His wife, Nelly Jacquemart, was a young artist who had been commissioned to paint his portrait. Together they travelled around the world amassing a magnificent collection, mainly centred on the Italian Renaissance. A firm follower of modernism, Philippe is still influenced by this period in which money served to promote culture.
Analysis
Discipline and good humour Philippe has always managed to strike a balance between his home life and professional life. He is proud of having never sacrificed one for the other. Despite long working hours, he always manages to find time for his wife and their two children. Raised in the Luxembourg Province of Belgium, Philippe likes to walk in the Ardennes forest, but also seeks out the rich variety of cultural activities in the cities in which he has worked. To develop his perseverance, at the age of 29 he ran (and completed!) the New York Marathon. In his eyes, what matters
Decision makers
most is achieving a balance between hard work and good humour. The two are not necessarily exclusive.
Key Players
Philippe Seyll
MyOfficialStory_165
Under the wings As the Managing Director of RBS (Luxembourg) S.A. and, since November 2012, the Executive Chairman of the newly born RBS Fund Services structure, this practical and solutions driven Londoner sees Luxembourg as a perfect platform from which to oversee the continued and rapid growth of RBS’ Independent Management Company business, now joined and reinforced by the wider offer that its Trustee and Depositary Services sister provides.Two figures helped steer Antonio Thomas toward the successful path he is now on: Audley Twiston Davies and the late Fred Packard. Offering Thomas a role at their Latin American Securities Asset Management start-up business, the duoprovided an opportunity in a sector still emerging as an asset class and helped to shape the ‘partnership’ approach he is known for today. The eight years spent working with these two members of the UK fund management industry is a timehe still looks back on with great fondness. The company was absorbed into the larger asset management house of F&C Group. Thomas settled into the Product Management function for F&C and worked closely with the executive management to help restructure various product ranges around the world.
166_MyOfficialStory
Decision makers Never take anything on face value There’s an unwritten rule when building your impressions of what it takes to become an MD and now a Chairman i.e. ‘you need to be ruthless’, Thomas spins this notion on its head. The two key dates in his life? The day he met his future wife and the birth of his son. A lover of international travel, Thomas spent some time based in Ireland’s capital as he gained further insight into the Fund Industry, with the stay also kick starting a new found appreciation for Irish Whiskey. Having had considerable experience in working with investment funds for over two decades in a variety of roles and jurisdictions, he was able to draw on a diverse network of contacts and experiences to help restructure and grow RBS’ independent Management Company business, established in 2004, in Luxembourg. Make it happen, nothing is impossible Thomas views the finance industry as one that is constantly changing and with that change comes new challenges and opportunities, something that this passionate and dynamic leader thrives upon. When he first set out on his career path, 23 years ago, dipping his toe into the investment funds space, the industry was a very different animal – no mobile phones, no 24/7 internet and the world was a smaller place. He reflects on the early days of UCITS compared to therequirements of UCITS IV and more recent laws and regulations, and regards the ability to react quickly to an ever changing regulatory and transparent business environment as important factors in securing success. A possible chink in the armour? By his own admission he feels he can be too driven, but his drive has certainly helped to deliver results.
MyOfficialStory_167
Key Players
Ernest Hemingway may not be the first name that you would expect to be referenced as a key influence on the career of someone involved in the finance industry, but then Antonio Thomas isn’t your ordinary Management Company Executive.
Companies
Antonio Thomas
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 6th July 1971 Birth place: London Nationality: British Children: 1 Languages: Fluent English and Spanish, Hobbies: History, Walking, Swimming, Wine
My favourite Florence, Italy. Valencia, Spain, London (West End) Street Cafes, Valencia Port, London Embankment in the rain Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon, The Sun also Rises, For whom the bell tools Savoy Grill – London, Le Sud – Luxembourg Debussy – Clair de Lune, Maestro Rodrigo – Concierto de Aranjuez, Miles Davis – Poetics of Sound Sorolla, Picasso, Miro
Companies
Cities: Places: Books: Restaurants: Music: Artist:
Position Chairman at RBS Fund Services
Others Representative of RBSL as an associate member of EFAMA Regular speaker at Industry conferences and seminars
168_MyOfficialStory
Antonio Thomas
MyOfficialStory_169
From the Brussels Stock Exchange to the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, Dominique Valschaerts is carving out his own path. From the Brussels Stock Exchange… Dominique Valschaerts started working life in 1987 at the Brussels Stock Exchange, as a legal advisor. At the time, the Stock Exchange was still operating according to the principles of the historic model, in contrast to the London Stock Exchange and its “Big Bang”. A meeting with Baron Jean Peterbroeck turned out to be a pivotal point in his career. This individual was a dynamic manager, who was not afraid of betting on youth. In 1991, at his initiative, Dominique Valschaerts became managing director of the Brussels Stock Exchange. Over the next few years, he supported the company’s modernisation, in terms of IT as well as with regard to regulatory and commercial aspects.
Eclectic tastes An avid reader and music lover, Dominique Valschaerts loves architecture and enjoys visiting or simply contemplating contemporary works. In his younger days, he loved getting out in the mountains and admired the achievements of Reinhold Messner, the first mountaineer to reach the summit of Everest without any oxygen equipment. Dominique Valschaerts is hardworking and a loyal friend. He is a firm believer in family values and speaks proudly of his four children, their characters, differences and harmony.
Decision makers
years. Dominique Valschaerts is working to establish the company’s reputation while expanding its range of products.
Companies
Dominique Valschaerts
Analysis
… to the Luxembourg Stock Exchange In 2000, Dominique Valschaerts moved to Luxembourg to take up new challenges, at the request of Michel Maquil, President and CEO of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange Management Committee. In addition to his responsibilities as a member of the Executive Committee, he took over the reins of the Stock Exchange’s subsidiary, CCLux, now Finesti, which specialises in collecting, processing and disseminating data relating to investment funds. A service provider to the fund industry, Finesti has grown constantly and steadily over the last fifteen
170_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_171
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 4th July 1960 Place of birth: Charleroi Nationality: Belgian Children: 4 Languages: French, English, Dutch, a bit of German and Luxembourgish Hobbies: Eclectic, mountaineering
My favourite Cities: New York, Paris, the old city of Luxembourg, San Francisco Restaurant: Ma Langue sourit (Moutfort) Music: Eclectic, Jazz, Rock, Opera Artist: Magritte
Position Companies
Others Member of Executive Committee of Luxembourg Stock Exchange
172_MyOfficialStory
Dominique Valschaerts
MyOfficialStory_173
Born in Esch sur Alzette to Italian parents, Paolo Vinciarelli has been responsible for the Fund Management business at the Banque et Caisse d’Épargne de l’État (BCEE) since November 2006. A career After primary and secondary school in Luxembourg, Paolo Vinciarelli continued his studies in Nancy, obtaining a degree in economic sciences with the specialisation “Money and Finance”. He then went on to study for a Masters of Science at the Luxembourg School of Finance. He began his career with Dexia, in financial strategy, before joining the BCEE in 1998. Initially Portfolio Manager, he was Deputy Manager of Risk Management from 2004 to 2006 before going on to take responsibility for the Investment Fund department.
Family spirit An active football player until the age of 33, Paolo Vinciarelli now follows his two sons from the terraces. He is proud at having been able to combine a career and family life. During his holidays, travelling helps him to relax, in particular skiing, a hobby he practices several times a year. The rest of the time, he follows the financial news and unwinds by reading detective novels. His best business memory is the flotation of Foyer S.A. Finance is his world. He cannot imagine working anywhere else, even if his role evolves in future to cover other, wider aspects of this industry.
Analysis
Team spirit At the start of his career, Paolo Vinciarelli’s work was strictly supervised and he began to feel as if he lacked scope to act on his own initiative. The system did not allow him to express his creativity. However, he had to revise his view after he was promoted. As a manager, he had to learn to set limits and he realised the importance of supervising his team. He has tried to follow the example set by some of the excellent managers he has met along the way. He has been particularly impressed by certain individuals in high positions who have managed to stay down to earth and modest. Like them, he tries to be
Decision makers
close to others, to be understanding and to avoid taking himself too seriously. To motivate and enhance his colleagues, he uses a management style he describes as “participative”, based on “open mindedness” and a “positive approach”. The challenge involves ensuring compliance to rules and achieving performance, while still allowing individual personalities to shine through.
Key Players
Paolo Vinciarelli
MyOfficialStory_177
In 2009, after spending 16 years of his career in Switzerland, Martin Vogel became Shareholder and CEO of MDO Services. A very good reason for a move to Luxembourg. Swiss precision Born in Switzerland to a family of engineers, Martin Vogel graduated as a lawyer. He worked for BP, Swiss Reinsurance and several law firms before joining the Zurich office of Julius Baer in 1996. He stayed there for 12 years, working his way up to Managing Director, pursuing a strong focus on asset management, product management and global custody. Enjoying the kind of freedom that his position allowed, he decided to move into the entrepreneurial side of business. In 2009, Martin invested in MDO Services, becoming CEO of the new company resulting from the merger of “The Directors’ Office” and Mercuria Services.
Work-life balance His colleagues know just how quickly their CEO can think and act. “Don’t think too much: leap into new adventures,” he says with a smile. He enjoys skiing and golf, but family life is his top priority. “At the end of the day, nobody says “thank you” for business”. His 2 children give him the energy he needs on a daily basis. He remembers Peter Spaelti, the former CEO of Winterthur, as a man who managed to combine excellence in business with a successful family life. A track record he hopes to replicate.
Decision makers
position as a leading fund service provider in Luxembourg, the Swiss businessman once flew to Florida to terminate an agreement with a supplier. “I am not the kind of businessman who attends meetings when things are going well and sends emails when times are tough. In addition, you never know what the future will hold.”
Companies
Martin Vogel
Analysis
Loyalty first At Martin’s wedding, his father gave his new daughter-in-law some advice: “Don’t always listen to Martin if he gives too many orders”. A natural leader, he learned a lot during his national service in the Swiss Army: “It’s a complex process organising and managing a group of people who are forced to do something. I find it much easier in business, where employees are motivated”. Loyalty and respect still feature high on his list of core values. Now enjoying the challenge of further establishing MDO’s
178_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_179
Decision makers
Birthday: 29th September 1963 Nationality: Swiss Children: 2 Languages: English, German native, Italian (a bit of French) Hobbies: Sports, politics
Cities: Places: Books: Restaurants: Music: Artists:
Key Players
My favourite Zurich, Roma Mountains, Sea The name of Rose (Eco), Old books of Michener Brasserie Mansfeld, Monte Carlo: Mas de Provencale, Zurich: Seerose Vivaldi, Hit parade 1-10 Cezanne, Caravaggio
Position Companies
Shareholder, Board member and CEO of MDO services
180_MyOfficialStory
Well-rounded creat ing s o l uti ons
Companies
c rossing b orde rs
Decision makers
Denise Voss
We adapt to fit your requirements, not make you change to fit ours. Independent Fund Administration Services Frankfurt [email protected] Tel +49 (0)69 5830 35700
Geneva Hong Kong [email protected] [email protected] Tel +41 (0)22 319 18 90 Tel +(852) 28 27 61 88
Jersey [email protected] Tel +(44) 01534 504 700
Luxembourg [email protected] Tel +(352) 26 68 41 24
Malta [email protected] Tel +(356) 21 31 42 59
Vistra Fund Services S.a r.l is regulated by Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier. Vistra Fund Services Limited is regulated by the Jersey Financial Services Commission.
182_MyOfficialStory
For further information please contact
www.vistrafundservices.com
MyOfficialStory_183
The right partners Denise Voss began her career at Coopers & Lybrand in Boston in 1985. At that time, Robert de Normandie also worked at the firm and when she mentioned she was interested in working abroad for a few years, he indicated that the Luxembourg office was looking for someone… She found herself the only American in the office of Coopers & Lybrand in Luxembourg in 1990, at a time when a number of US promoters were thinking about setting up investment funds in the Grand Duchy. In a case of being in the right place at the right time, she was very pleased to be involved from the outset with a number of high profile projects, under the leadership of Marie-Jeanne Chèvremont – who has been a mentor for Denise from the start – and Didier Mouget. She joined Franklin Templeton Investments in 1995 as CFO, and became a general manager in 2000. Since January 2006, she has been Conducting Officer of Franklin Templeton Investment Funds, along with another talented individual: Bill Lockwood.
One step back Denise was very influenced in growing up as one of 2 children of a single mother, who set an example in rising from working as a sales clerk to being the owner of an advertising agency. Another big influence was her step-father: a charismatic person and “bon vivant” who introduced her to literature, music, art and other cultural pursuits. These two characteristics are fundamental to Denise’s personality: perseverance and enthusiasm for life!
Decision makers
a young age through university, she studied, performed and taught dance throughout that time. She was able to combine that love for dance with her university studies, in graduating with diplomas in psychology and in dance therapy, before obtaining a Masters in Accountancy. Today, her interests continue to be varied and include the history of the English language, rugby, which she watches with her husband, who is French, and books by her preferred chefs. She is also a “swimming mom”, cheering on her daughter at swimming competitions.
Key Players
She could have been a psychologist or a professional dancer, but finally it is finance that allows her to satisfy her taste for what she calls being a “well-rounded person”.
Companies
Denise Voss
Analysis
The right steps All of the positions that she has held have permitted her to meet people from all walks of life and to be in close contact with a number of companies working in a wide range of fields. This desire to be well-rounded is very important to Denise, in both her professional and private life. A dance enthusiast from
184_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_185
Decision makers Key Players
Birthday: 28th October 1958 Place of birth: Los Angeles Nationality: American Children: 1 Languages: English, French Hobbies: Family, house, reading
My favourite Luxembourg, London, Paris, Boston, Florence, Venice (in California and Florida) Mosconi, Toit pour toi Vista Palace Hotel (Roquebrune Cap Martin), The Venice Beach House (California), Ruisodo (New Mexico) Anything by Jane Austen, M.F.K.Fischer Handel, George Gershwin, Al Jarreau, Bob Marley, Maxime Le Forestier Turner, Hogarth, Gainsborough
Companies
Cities: Restaurants: Places: Books: Music: Artists:
Position Conducting Officer / Dirigeant of Franklin Templeton Investment Funds
Others • Director and Vice-Chairman, International Affairs (ALFI) • Member, Institut Luxembourgeois des Administrateurs • Certified Public Accountant, Massachusetts, USA
Analysis
190_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_191
Studies Like many inhabitants of Luxembourg, Gilles Dusemon had an opportunity to study and work abroad at a very young age. After obtaining a diploma in economic law and business law in Nice in 1996, four yeas later he completed a Masters in Law at the University of New York. Gilles Dusemon speaks English, French, Italian and German both at home and at work.
career when he joined Arendt & Merdernach as cohead of private equity. Here and there His disciplined approach – as well as his passion for architecture and design, no doubt – has resulted in him managing the swings in the market. From his extensive travels, he still remembers a dinner in Beijing in the presence of Grand Duke Henri and President Ju Hintao. Apart from these occasional assignments abroad, Gilles Dusemon is now strongly attached to his Luxembourg roots, and plans to continue to develop his practice in the Grand Duchy in years to come.
Decision makers
A child of Luxembourg’s coal mining region, Gilles Dusemon has spent a great deal of his life abroad. However, his return to his homeland in 2001 has given new impetus to his career while allowing him to rediscover his roots.
Key Players
Analysis
Companies
Independent Admitted to the Luxembourg bar in 1997, he initially specialised in tax law and company law. In 2000, in the middle of a two-year stay in the United States, where he was combining studying with a position as a legal expert with the global law firm Allen & Overy, he declined an offer from the Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry, but nevertheless decided to return to Luxembourg to pursue his career. Two years later, he accepted a role with ALFI, while at the same time joining forces with Jean-Pierre Winandy at the Loyens Winandy practice (which became Loyens & Loeff in 2008). Seeking to “redress the balance between work and private life”, a year later he decided to focus on his work as a lawyer. He resigned from his post at ALFI, although he has since taken up a role as an external expert. 2010 marked another milestone in his
192_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_193
Jill Griffin, Managing Director at Northern Trust Luxembourg, is passionate about people. A source of endless fascination, inspiration, counsel and joy. Jill has forged her career on her ability to listen to them – and understand their value. Striving for balance Three priorities guide Jill’s life: her family, her client relationships and her service as a charity worker. Balancing them is not always easy, but it is essential. She has maintained the balance living in cities around the world, from Frankfurt to London to Tokyo. She has maintained the balance in various professional positions. And she is continuing to balance her priorities in Luxembourg, which feels like a second home. London-born Jill first came to work in Luxembourg in 1990 and returned in 2001.
Decision makers Values … and Valuing Jill has three values that are core to how she lives her life: service, expertise and integrity. She regards excellent listening skills as essential for building effective client relationships.”Listen to your clients. They will tell you everything you need to know about how you are doing, where you need to improve and what your future strategy should be.” These values are also reflected in what she sees as her main quality: valuing people, both in her personal life and her professional life. The perfect balancing act. www.myofficialstory.com/jillgriffin
Companies
Jill Griffin
Analysis
Learning and living Through her professional life and her charity work (Jill is cofounder and president of the NGO Stop Aids Now – Access and is currently working on a new project to help women return to the workplace) Jill benefits from ample opportunities to listen to, learn from and help others. But she also takes time for herself, with favorite restaurants (curry on Friday night!) and love of music. She loves to visit Switzerland’s Crans-Montana with friends and family.
194_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_195
Thierry Grosjean glides through life with the ease of the outstanding skier that he is. Forging ahead, being inventive with a certain measure of risk and knowing how to learn from his mistakes, that is the philosophy of the managing director of Centuria Capital Luxembourg. The perfect match Thierry Grosjean was born in Metz. At the age of four, he discovered rock music when he went along to a concert with his uncle. He is a still a fan to this day. His demanding standards made him opt for the legal profession rather than a career in music, which naturally prompted him to study law at the university of his home town. When he graduated in 2000, he started his professional career as customer account manager and jurist in a Luxembourgbased trust. Eight years later, he became managing director of Centuria Capital Luxembourg in charge of domiciliation, the legal and litigation department, human resources and the Compliance function. “I like finding pragmatic solutions adapted to the needs of an increasingly demanding and sophisticated clientele”, points out this admirer of the Rolling Stones. One of his favourite hobbies is listening to music or, even better, experiencing first-hand the intensity of a group playing live on stage.
A future paved with possibilities This thirty-something specialises in Islamic finance applied to the field of domiciliation. “We have developed and acquired recognised experience in the structuring of Islamic finance. The huge diversity of the investment vehicles available in Luxembourg allows us to find the best adapted solutions for these products.” Travel is Thierry Grosjean’s way of taking time out to recharge his batteries! He either heads back to New York, his favourite city, or heads off to a new, unknown destination. One experience that will stay with him forever was his dive among white sharks in Gansbaai, in South Africa. Where does he see himself in ten years’ time? He would like to be one of the major market players in the field of Islamic finance. Somehow, you just know that he’ll make it. www.myofficialstory.com/thierrygrosjean
Decision makers
important to him when carrying out his current responsibilities. The great captains of industry gave him a taste for management and the drive to succeed in business. The “PSF” label is a gauge of quality and seriousness according to him. It is important for the clients, the players and/or the intermediaries of the financial sector to have a reassuring quality standard.”
Key Players
Thierry Grosjean
Analysis
Precision and rigour As a boy, he dreamt of becoming a pilot. Precision and rigour, two of the qualities that are essential for any pilot, are equally
196_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_197
A varied international background has been the key influence on Rana Hein Hartmann, as over the past five years she and her business partner have built up a specialised recruitment business spanning several continents and time zones. Multiculturalism personified Rana was born in Kuwait to a Lebanese-Palestinian mother and German-Russian father (she holds British and Lebanese nationality). Her favourite cities are Rome, San Francisco and London, although she likes to relax around the northern Italian lakes. She studied French and Arabic. Her heroes include Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi. Rana Hein-Hartmann knows all about a life shaped by a broad mix of cultural influences. It’s hard to imagine a better background for her role as director for Europe at Funds Partnership, a recruitment boutique specialising in the investment industry. As well as Luxembourg, Funds Partnership has offices in London, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and Paris. It is an impressive growth story for a company that was established only 5 years ago, with the simple aim of becoming the most specialised recruiter for Asset Management globally.
Complementary skills Having studied in the northern English city of Leeds, with spells in Lyon – which no doubt boosted her acknowledged interest in cooking – and Cairo, Rana moved to the “great mixing pot” of London, where she met her business partner Ayyaz Ahmad in 2004. As an admirer of the books of Malcolm Gladwell, she might call their decision to set up Funds Partnership a tipping point in her professional life. It has combined Ayyaz’s ability to launch new offices with Rana’s complementary skills in building long-term strategy and managing risk. Rana sees their current team around the world as future Directors as the firm carves out a position as a global specialist in recruitment across every sector of the Asset Management industry. That might give more time for her favourite occupation: yoga on the beach. www.myofficialstory.com/ranaheinhartmann
Decision makers
sit in on interviews. Her philosophy is that there should be a ‘click’ in hiring, like there should be in all personal relationships. Ultimately Rana enjoys meeting people and helping the right people move upwards in their careers, developing profound relationships that sometimes last many years.
Key Players
The United Nations of investment
Companies
Rana Hein-Hartmann
Analysis
Focusing on character Living in several countries in her childhood taught her to quickly understand others, and gave her the character judgment skills that her clients rely on her for today, often requesting that she
198_MyOfficialStory
200_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_201
Whether it’s Christmas gifts, company committees or the food on our plate, in nearly all situations we have all learned that smaller is – in most cases anyway! – better. That’s never been truer than in the provision of tailor-made investment-fund services. Here in Luxembourg, there is no better example than ADEPA, one of the most exciting, boutique firms in the Grand-Duchy. Consolidating for Success in Luxembourg ADEPA was created in 1980 in Spain, and over 30 years has gained unparalleled expertise in the business. 2006 was a landmark year, with the opening of an office in Luxembourg. In 2010, ADEPA took a big step further by moving the headquarters of the company to the Duchy in response to the remarkable expansion of its fund administration and management company business. In the six years since its establishment in Luxembourg, the company has become a recognized actor by the industry decision makers. But even more importantly, it has taken its place as a worthy competitor with a portfolio of solutions – and an expert team – that is matching the quality and responsiveness of the biggest and most well-known firms.
The Personal Touch With its size and agility, clients can count on personal service and attention that are rarely found with larger firms. They benefit from close relationships with the experts of the company, but also from its internationalization, as ADEPA brand turns into a true global financial services provider. And while ADEPA is living rapid development and growth, its clients will always be able to trust in it as a partner with an exceptionally personal touch, shaped by integrity and unmatched customer care. www.myofficialstory.com/adepaluxembourg
Decision makers
now recreated itself into a truly global company in a place where future success is all but guaranteed: ADEPA is certain that Luxembourg offers the right business community and potential for achieving its ambitions. Its multidisciplinary team is eager to serve and focused on developing a new approach to providing fund services. ADEPA is a unique combination of tradition, entrepreneurialism and youth: a true boutique firm in a world of giants.
Key Players
Adepa
Analysis
Starting from Scratch to Develop Solutions Globally In an uncertain world, moving to Luxembourg allowed the company to renew itself. While it has not lost the valuable experience gained since its creation over 30 years ago, it has
202_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_203
Atlantic Fund Services, a long-standing provider that has been through a cycle of being part of a global organisation before recovering its independence, is bringing its focus on personnel expertise and technological excellence to the Luxembourg market. Three decades of experience Atlantic Fund Services traces its history back to 1986 and the founding of Forum Financial Group in Portland, Maine, by John Keffer, today Atlantic’s chairman. Forum rapidly became the largest privately-owned US fund services provider, adding a Bermuda operation and in 1995 a European joint venture in Warsaw headed by Roman Lewszyk. When Forum was acquired by Citigroup in 2003, its team took on leading roles, Keffer as chairman of Citi’s global fund service operations and Lewszyk heading transfer agency. Six years later, the company regained its independence under its historic leadership and the Atlantic name, with many of its original staff. Now it is growing fast in both Europe and the US, servicing more than 300 funds from leading asset managers with assets exceeding $20bn and some two million accounts. And Atlantic is back in Luxembourg with technologyled solutions designed for the world’s second largest fund market.
Making technology count Atlantic embraces technology as part of continuing efforts to develop innovative solutions for the fund industry – seen in its nomination for prestigious industry awards, advanced TA platform, and robust AML and distribution capabilities. The company’s IT development has yielded cost-effective solutions such as GTAS, its hi-tech TA platform, and internetbased applications to support asset managers, distribution and investors on a global basis – available to managers of all sizes at an affordable cost. Just as important is the continuing education and development of Atlantic’s staff to enable them to adapt IT systems to the ever-changing needs of clients – and give technology a human face. www.atlanticfundservices.com
Decision makers
technologically sophisticated service, delivered by experienced professionals with a commitment to the client’s success. The company has always focused on building a team with expertise handling diverse and complex investment, as well as a focus on consistent delivery of high-quality service the essential core of a first-rate service provider.
Key Players
Driving service quality through technological excellence
Roman Lewszyk www.myofficialstory.com/romanlewszyk
Atlantic Fund Services
Analysis
Client focus Its business approach is based on insight into client requirements built up over many years: problem-free, efficient and
204_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_205
Counting well–known personalities such as Christine Lagarde among its former partners, Baker McKenzie is the world’s bestknown law firm. Following outstanding growth since opening two years ago, Baker McKenzie’s Luxembourg office relocated and expanded to a new building in October 2012. Luxembourg, a Key Jurisdiction in a Powerful Global Firm With its second anniversary just passed, legal and tax specialists Baker McKenzie Luxembourg can look back at a robust two years that exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts. The law firm that began in 1949 after a chance taxi meeting in Chicago, Illinois between Russell Baker and John McKenzie, is today one of the most influential law firms worldwide. The largest by revenues since 2011, Baker McKenzie employs over 4,000 expert lawyers and tax advisers, working in 72 offices across five continents.
Luxembourg and Baker McKenzie, a Win Win Situation Demonstrating more economic resilience than many European jurisdictions, Luxembourg remains an attractive target for multinational corporations in sectors including IT and Internet, asset management, private banking and other financial sectors. Working closely with governmental bodies, and local and international clients to attract new businesses to the Grand-Duchy, Baker McKenzie is at the forefront of creating new business opportunities in the country. “Baker McKenzie Luxembourg is dedicated to helping the Luxembourgian economy grow and prosper. Whether through our many offices around the world or by organising conferences and personal meetings, we raise the Luxembourgian flag high, providing new business opportunities for local firms and businessmen,” André Pesch explains.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/bakerandmckenzie
Analysis
Baker McKenzie Luxembourg, an Extraordinary Journey Under the leadership of Jean-Francois Findling, founder of the Luxembourg office, and André Pesch, Principal Tax Specialist, Baker McKenzie’s operations in Luxembourg and the greater region have been taken to new horizons. With a team of 45 expert lawyers and tax advisers, specialising in Funds
and Cross-Border Tax Structuring, Corporate and M&A, Banking, Private Equity, Financing & Structured Finance, the Luxembourg office is a key jurisdiction in the firm’s extensive and growing global presence. To further provide multidisciplinary solutions to clients, the Luxembourg office recently added IP/IT, Insurance and Employment practices. “Our rule is to commit and to deliver. Baker & McKenzie has a long-standing reputation for commitment, innovative solutions and premium results. Hard work, entrepreneurial spirit and outstanding local expertise combined with unmatched global reach have led Baker McKenzie Luxembourg to become one of the main regional players in just two years,” André Pesch says.
Key Players
A Global Law Firm on the Rise
André Pesch www.myofficialstory.com/andrepesch
206_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_207
BNP Paribas Securities Services Luxembourg brings to its clients both local and international expertise across a range of banking and associated services. Their clients benefit from the know-how and strength of the one of the largest financial institutions in the Grand Duchy. Origins The origins of the BNP Paribas Group date back to 1872, with the establishment of “Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas”. In 2000 this heritage continued to emerge with the keystone merger of Paribas and BNP. BNP Paribas Securities Services was established in 2001 and its Luxembourg subsidiary opened soon after in 2002. As a result of acquisitions by the BNP Paribas Group (including Cogent in 2003, and Fortis Banque/BGL in 2009), BNP Paribas Securities Services has grown to an organisation that now covers more than 100 markets with a local presence in 32 countries and serves a wide variety of international institutional clients.
Aims In July 2011, as a result of its new legal status, BNP Paribas Securities Services was given the same credit rating as its parent company, BNP Paribas. The three biggest rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Fitch and Moody’s – emphasised the strength of its commercial position and very low risk profile. Constantly in pursuit of excellence, the aim of BNP Paribas Securities Services is to continuously support its clients in order for them achieve their objectives while offering a secure and long-term business partner. The recent development of the Luxembourg subsidiary has helped to create new opportunities for the Grand Duchy, in particular with the creation of the European Hub for fund execution activities and the establishment of a “Fund Administration” training centre. In January 2011, BNP Paribas Securities Services Luxembourg also received the “Best Fund Administrator in Luxembourg” award from FundDomiciles.com.
Decision makers
mix while covering diverse demands and various business sectors: banking, brokerage, and fund management. On 30 June 2011, BNP Paribas Securities Services acquired the legal status of société en commandite par actions (SCA – partnership limited by shares). The BNP Paribas Group is the only “general partner” and therefore provides a direct and unlimited guarantee to its clients.
www.myofficialstory.com/bp2s www.securities.bnpparibas.com
Analysis
Organisation Securities Services’ activities cover the entire investment cycle and is arranged into four business lines: Banking Services, Treasury and Liquidity Management, Issuer Services and Fund Services. Its organisation is structured by business and regions, allowing BNP Paribas Securities Services to provide a localised service depending on a clients location and business
Frédéric Perard www.myofficialstory.com/fredericperard
208_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_209
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, CIP Group can look back at a wealth of experience and expertise in providing a wide range of premium data services and print solutions to the financial sector and wider industry. Quality, Flexibility and Consistency Founded in 1986, the company rebranded into CIP Group after the merger of Comptoir International du Papier and Lettershop Luxembourg in 2008. Accredited as a Professional of the Financial Sector (PFS) in the Client Communication industry by the Luxembourgian State (2003), CIP Group is one of Luxembourg`s leading outsourcing companies with clients ranging from the fund management, insurance and banking sector to telecommunications, education and the public sector. With over 50 highly experienced specialist staff, CIP Group creates and distributes a wide range of tailor-made, solutionorientated services. From prospectuses to annual reports, and AGM mailings, it is the CIP team creative and approachable consultants that provides a boutique, unique local service with a global impact.
An Active Corporate Citizen More than only a financial outsourcing company, the CIP Group and its staff are committed to applying the same solution-focused approach and high standards of quality and efficiency to environmental and global poverty issues. Approaching its corporate social responsibility the same way it endeavours its work with clients, CIP Group has a track-record of successfully implementing charity programmes including Spillstad Hesper 2012, LittlePlus and Happy Chandara, a school project in Cambodia.
Decision makers
innovation are the key driving forces in today’s ever-changing environment. As the official printer of the European Union Daily Official Journal, issued in 20 European languages, CIP Group provides premium, tailor-made process solutions and technologies that facilitate its clients’ requirements and needs, no matter how complex or time constrained their projects might be. “Our clients’ success was and will be always our first and utmost commitment. With consistent investments in the most cutting-edge IT solutions for print, mailing and supplies, we make sure to place ourselves and our clients at the forefront of innovation, providing them with the quality, consistency and the reliability they require”, said Patrick Jost, Managing Director CIT Group.
Key Players
25 Years of Successful Print, IT & Mailing Solutions
Patrick Jost www.myofficialstory.com/patrickjost
www.myofficialstory.com/cipgroup www.cip.lu
Analysis
Your Success is Our Commitment To survive and indeed thrive in the 21st century printing solutions business, CIP Group understands that quality and
210_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_211
International law firm Clifford Chance combines the highest global standards with local expertise. Origins Leading lawyers from different backgrounds and nationalities come together as one firm, offering unrivalled depth of legal resources across the key markets of the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The firm focuses on the core areas of commercial activity: capital markets; corporate and M&A; finance and banking; real estate; tax, pensions and employment, funds & investment management and litigation and dispute resolution. Through a strong understanding of clients’ cultures and objectives, Clifford Chance draws on the full breadth of its legal skills to provide results-driven, commercial advice.
Working with communities all over the world, we are committed to contributing positively to society, improving access to justice, being environmentally conscious and acting with corporate social responsibility. Clifford Chance has more leading global practices than any other firm (Chambers Global 2010) and further recognition includes: Most Innovative Law Firm: Financial Services (FT Innovative Lawyers Report 2010). www.myofficialstory.com/cliffordchance www.cliffordchance.com
Analysis
Philosophy We have never been afraid of being the first to respond to new developments in the legal market; to anticipate the cross-border nature of business today; to take ideas that worked in one part of the world and to apply them, with thought and flexibility in another. Our working environment – the people who work here, the work that we do, the facilities we enjoy and the way we behave – reflects these international aspirations and makes the most of our multicultural strengths. As well as recruiting the best people, we insist on the professional development of
Decision makers
all our employees. Our lawyers work continuously to develop both legal and personal skills through the training programmes offered by the ‘in-house’ law education system. In addition our community affairs programme covers pro bono legal work, community education, charity initiatives, and support for the arts. Our aim is to use our expertise and resources to help to change people’s lives for the better.
Key Players
Committed to legal excellence across the world
Joëlle Hauser www.myofficialstory.com/joellehauser
212_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_213
As a global partner in investment data management automation, Confluence and its Unity® and Unity NXT™ platform solutions is relied on by more than 40 percent of the leading asset managers and administration firms worldwide. Committed to European Asset Managers Since 2006, Confluence International has been an established and trusted technology partner for the European fund administration and asset management community, operating from offices in Luxembourg and London. Designed for the global fund industry, the company`s technology platforms take the risk out of fund administration. These solutions solve some of the toughest data consolidation and automation challenges faced by European asset managers and their global service providers – from fund expense processing to reporting under multiple statutory standards and delivering regulatory reports for multiple domiciles across the globe.
Taking the Risk Out of Fund Administration Confluence delivers innovative solutions to take the risk out of fund administration. From the Confluence traditional install, hosted and outsourced Unity® platform solutions to our enterprise-grade SaaS enabled Unity NXT Expense Processing solution, Confluence automates critical fund administration and reporting processes – such as regulatory reporting, financial statement preparation and the expense processing for the funds. As a result, Confluence empowers asset managers and global service providers to scale with agility and control. Offices Confluence has offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, London and Luxembourg.
Decision makers
solutions support a wide array of collective fund investment types – including European domiciled UCITS, alternative investments, traditional U.S. based ’40 ACT mutual funds, and contemporary fund structures such as ETFs.
Key Players
Taking the Risk Out of Fund Administration
Companies
Confluence
Analysis
Roots in Financial Services Technology For more than 20 years, Confluence has been recognised as an innovative technology leader which is solely committed to meeting the data management and automation needs of the asset management industry. The company`s vision is to empower asset managers to instantaneously transform data into knowledge and deliver it to the world. Confluence
214_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_215
Luxembourg has the technical infrastructure and people to back up its position as European leader in the field of funds, provided it avoids a few pitfalls. Flashback The fantastic development of investment funds in Luxembourg started 25 years ago, when the UCITS legislation was put in place. Growth was steady up until the turn of the millennium, but the implementation of UCITS III in 2003 sparked a massive boom. ALFI supported this movement with roadshows worldwide, enabling Luxembourg to be No. 2 in the world behind the United States today. The industry suffered in 2008-2009, but has now returned to its pre-crisis levels as a result of conquering markets such as Asia and subsequently Latin America, which were won over in turn by the reliability of Luxembourg funds.
Three measures needed Jean-Paul Gennari thinks that the emphasis needs to be on harmonising fund distribution regulations throughout Europe, because a lot of progress still needs to be made in this field. As far as investors are concerned, he believes that the ‘KIID’ needs to be improved now because it relies on past figures, which provide no guarantee at all when it comes to assessing a future risk. He sums up his position by saying “the lessons of the sub-prime loans and government bonds need to be learned”. When it comes to skills, he believes that the country is lacking a natural pool of talents. As far as this native of Esch is concerned, locating the university campus in Belval is a bad idea. He believes that a campus capable of enticing the world’s best students should be located close to the city to allow for an attractive student life. There is a great deal of competition in this field, but he remains optimistic. His experience at the Central Bank proved to him that when we want to do something, we can. Particularly when we don’t have a choice.
Decision makers
these conditions, he sees the regulatory changes, no matter how deep they may be, as an opportunity to consolidate Luxembourg’s global credibility and stay one step ahead of competing financial centres.
www.myofficialstory.com/creditsuisse
Analysis
Challenges In 2006, Jean-Paul Gennari carried out a due diligence assignment in a Brazilian company. Arriving with pre-conceived ideas, he was astounded by the company’s level of automation, which was far more advanced than in Luxembourg. Likewise, the Central Bank’s controls proved to be extremely professional. He discovered that most professionals had studied at top universities in the USA, which explained their depth of know-how. This experience taught him that Luxembourg was running the risk of underestimating the competition. Given
Jean-Paul Gennari www.myofficialstory.com/jeanpaulgennari
216_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_217
At a time of continuous change in the asset management industry, Ernst & Young prides itself most on supporting its clients navigate their strategic opportunities and challenges. This means focusing first on the big picture: current and emerging trends, industry issues and regulation. In the global context of global asset management industry, clients‘ overriding expectation of the firm is seamless, consistent, high-quality service.
Always thinking ahead… Ernst & Young is not only renowned for thinking ahead, but also for its deep technical expertise. A good example is the distinctive “Thought Leadership” publications such as: • The Luxembourg Financial Connection which provides the industry with bi-annual insights and updates on regulatory, leading practice and market developments. • The thought provoking series of publications on the UCITS and Alternative Investment Fund Managers (AIFM) Directives dealing with the business, operational and regulatory opportunities and challenges of these Directives. Ernst & Young also publishes THE reference publication to setting up and running investment funds in Luxembourg: “Investment Funds in Luxembourg − A Technical Guide”.
Decision makers
Inspiring in both the traditional and alternative investment fund space In Luxembourg, we provide services to the entire value chain of the investment fund industry. Ernst & Young’s AIF Club was created two years ago to support clients with the on-going transformation of the alternative investment fund industry. The AIF Club does this by providing insight into developments in the alternative sectors, education and trainings for the industry practitioners and a platform for alternative industry practitioners to meet, exchange views and network.
www.myofficialstory.com/ernstandyoung
Analysis
Visionary leaders The asset management practice is led by Michael Ferguson, one of the investment fund industry’s leading figures in Luxembourg, and a specialist in traditional and hedge funds. Michael is a member of the Ernst and Young’s Global Asset Management Advisory Board, and plays key roles within industry associations including the Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry (ALFI) and the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA). Michael is a recognized as an author and speaker at investment fund conferences all over the world. In the alternatives space, Michael’s focus on hedge funds is complemented by industry leading figures including Alain Kinsch in Private Equity and Michael Hornsby in Real Estate.
Michael Ferguson www.myofficialstory.com/michaelferguson
218_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_219
The company Fuchs & Associés Finance S.A. (FAF), specialised in asset management and Family Office, stands out from the crowd, not only due to its unique history but also due to the electrifying pace of its development. Off to a good start In 2000, Jean Fuchs managed to transform the Chinese Year of the Dragon into the Year of the Fox, and in Luxembourg of all places. Serving at the time as the president of the asset manager association, J. Fuchs outlined to the Director General of the CSSF (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier/Financial Sector Supervisory Commission) his vision of the improvements to be implemented to secure the future of the profession. The Director’s answer was short and to the point: “Well, do it then!” There was no turning back and the company was set up. FAF saw the light of day on the 25th of May 2000. Which brings us to another anecdote: the company was validated by the Finance Minister on the 21 of June and the CSSF revealed to J. Fuchs that every company that had been incorporated on that date had gone on to great things. The logo is also highly symbolic: not only does Fuchs translate into English as fox, but this animal also has a very positive aura in Germanic and Luxembourg imagery. The beast was unleashed!
One season at a time Today, FAF has 100 employees world-wide, including 70 in Luxembourg. Its tenth anniversary was duly celebrated while looking forward to the future with confidence. “The enthusiasm and dynamism of the FAF stakeholders are its driving force and that stands up to the passing of time”. Even if the “fox” approaches one season at a time, he knows that the FAF model will continue to prove its worth, as it is built on the human factor, an essential and lasting element at the heart of the profession. He also knows that the trend is favourable to the profession and the Luxembourg market for private banks. Another good sign! www.myofficialstory.com/fuchsetassocies
Decision makers
and the importance granted to the human factor. With its unique approach, FAF sets great store by the notions of freedom, honesty and justice. And rather than spend the winter of the crisis hidden away in its lair, the “fox” reinforced his clan and his hunting ground: FAF recruited, sending out clear signals to the market, and inaugurated new offices in Brussels and Geneva in 2008.
Key Players
Under the sign of the fox
Jean Fuchs www.myofficialstory.com/jeanfuchs
Fuchs & Associés
Analysis
Instinctive Built on the values of morality and independence, the company is witnessing spiralling growth, buoyed by its entrepreneurial spirit
220_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_221
Founded in 1988, as an independent group of companies, owned by the Kamprad family, Ikano was originally a part of the home furnishing company IKEA. Leaving the past behind Today the Ikano Group owns and develops competitive and profitable niche companies in the areas of finance, real estate, asset management, insurance and retail. Employing over 2,500 people, Ikano’s strength lies in working together with clients in order to create long-term solutions based on a rigid set of ideals that bring added value to customers, partners and further the development of the company on a global scale. Recognising opportunities and demands that others do not see, Ikano strives to also constantly improve solutions, making them easier to understand and easier to use.
The Ikano Way To inspire people toward building profitable companies that dare to be different and are fun to work for, Ikano believe strongly in social responsibility and, in giving support to selected social initiatives both locally and globally, are determined to offer help where they feel it can make a difference. This means striking the right balance between their affiliated bodies (partners/clients/staff) concerning risks, work and profits, and ensuring that they remain available, reliable, effectively delivering what is promised and doing so on time. It also means being transparent and clear in gaining momentum with which to structure the foundations for the future.
Decision makers
sense and simplicity, working together and daring to be different. These values support their promise; “on fair terms.”
www.myofficialstory.com/ikano
Ikano
Analysis
In it for the long haul Operating throughout Europe and Asia, The Ikano Group turns over business volumes in excess of 4.2 billion euro and constantly reviews the methods in which they reach out to partners, customers and employees. Seeking long-lasting relationships, Ikano are forging ahead in becoming a revolutionary market leader. Addressing business on fair terms is essential for building strong relationships, creating value and for sustained development – the quality and reputation of a company is determined by the promise made and the promise kept. Three basic values guide all Ikano businesses: common
222_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_223
ME Business Solutions provides independent directors and risk or conformity managers for the financial sector. Complementary roles Eric Chinchon and Michael Lange have worked together for a long time, succeeding each other as directors of Mercuria Services and Mercuria Management Company, before the two organisations merged to become MDO Services. Young, enthusiastic, visionary and fully complementary, Eric’s background in the audit sector, and Michael’s in banking and asset management led them to join forces in the risk management and governance sector. They founded ME Business Solutions in 2008, having recognised the undoubted future of governance in the asset management and investment fund sectors, a future guaranteed by both the regulatory changes and the expectations of investors, especially institutional investors.
Looking to the future ME Business Solutions is constantly evolving. Jean-Philippe Cerutti and Pierre Bruyant have recently joined as associates. The first founded “Proprietary Trading” at Société Générale and Credit Suisse, before spending five years as Chief Investment Officer in a significant yet discreet Family Office. The second has worked as Risk Management Director at Duet Asset Management and Caxton Associates in London. ME Business Solutions is strongly innovative, practising what it preaches, which is why the company has an independent Management Committee. The Committee gives impartial advice on the strategy followed by the associates, a guarantee of serenity and wisdom. www.myofficialstory.com/mebs
Analysis
Market Expertise Over the years, the founders’ initials have come to represent “Market Expertise” and also “Maximum Efficiency”. Their expertise is represented by the 14 associates and employees who have joined the initial team over the last five years. The company brings together the best experts in financial and administrative management of regulated structures, risk or conformity management, and supervision of sales and marketing activities. Their success is tangible: in profit from the first year, a turnover that has multiplied ten times in four years, a
Decision makers
hundred or so assignments for around seventy developers all over the world, twelve successful recruitments and nearly as many independent affiliates, all evidence of the technical and operational effectiveness of ME Business Solutions.
Key Players
224_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_225
Morningstar arrived in Luxembourg straight from Chicago in 2010, with the clear aim of shedding light on the financial investment landscape. Genesis The early 1980s brought spectacular growth to the investment fund sector. However, it was difficult for private investors to obtain detailed information about the performance of funds. Few had the tools needed to monitor, analyse and take decisions about investing in these funds, which had, after all, been created for them. To bring this information within the reach of as many people as possible, in 1984 Joe Mansueto launched Morningstar in Chicago. In response to the need for information and decision-making support, the company’s founder began to publish a quarterly collection of data on 400 investment funds at a very accessible price: the Mutual Fund Sourcebook. The first success…
Solutions Morningstar provides its private and professional clients with tools and services. Its teams of experts carry out research on products, concentrating on funds and ETFs on the one hand, and shares on the other. The resulting reports and a qualitative and quantitative rating are then distributed via the company’s client network. The company also has an intranet and websites: morningstar.be, .fr or direct round off a tailored offering that also includes consulting. Morningstar Rating and Style Box are appreciated for their conciseness, combining performance and the concept of risk. An investor in search of integrated solutions will also find what he or she needs to create a portfolio. The company has also published a whole range of documents relating to the UCITS IV Directive, still pursuing the same aim of serving the customer. Born under a lucky star? www.morningstar.com www.myofficialstory.com/morningstar
Decision makers Analysis
A constellation Morningstar now has 6.5 million private customers, 260,000 financial advisors and 3,300 institutional customers all over the world. Present on five continents, the company was listed on the stock exchange in 2005 and is still 70% owned by its founder. Employing 3,000 staff, in 2010 the company established a presence in Luxembourg, where it now has seven employees. Its objective is to become “the reference” for investors and authorities, it wants to be the leader and secure its
position in financial legal documentation. Thanks to its long experience in creating financial documents and its approach – investors come first – Morningstar has earned a solid reputation for independence and objectivity.
Key Players
226_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_227
Fund service firms need to combine the attributes of specialist boutiques and global providers, say Jill Griffin, managing director of the Luxembourg branch of Northern Trust Global Services Ltd, and Steve David, country head of Northern Trust Luxembourg. How would you assess the current state of the fund industry? Steve David: Luxembourg is still the second largest fund market in the world, and the leading one in Europe, with a market share of 30 per cent. Its assets have grown 14 per cent over the past 12 months, a spectacular increase. But although Luxembourg remains strong, there are challenges ahead for which we have to be ready. Jill Griffin: One factor is that there is a lot of new regulation. Our clients expect us to be a partner, delivering highly personalised service, at a time when barriers to entry into the industry are getting higher. You need to deliver the best of both worlds: sophisticated solutions combined with a boutique-style approach, underpinned by a very strong infrastructure of IT, product and executive engagement.
Is Northern Trust well placed to respond to these developments? JG: Keep in mind that Northern Trust, which was founded in Chicago in 1889, now has more than $5 trillion in assets under custody, over 14,000 employees and offices in 17 locations worldwide, so for us rising barriers to entry are a non-issue. SD: When we established the Luxembourg office in 2004, we were pioneers in true third-party management company provision. This was a response to client demand, and our growth here over the past nine years has been purely organic. The boutique service approach is in our DNA in the Grand Duchy. We look at the future with confidence, and we are open to thoughtful acquisitions to continue our growth.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/northerntrust www.northerntrust.com
Analysis
What risks and opportunities do you see ahead? SD: Operational costs will increase – what the industry is figuring out right now is by how much, and who is going to pay for it. How will service providers help their clients to mitigate operational risks? Right now, it is a waiting game.
At Northern Trust we are updating procedures both in-house and with providers such as custodians and prime brokers in the light of AIFMD and the future UCITS V requirements. It is the right time to invest in infrastructure and people, which for us is simply a matter of enhancing our existing way of doing business. This involves recruiting, delegating and running deep due diligence. As a depositary, we have a long history of monitoring our network. JG: Those providers that are most agile in interpreting the true sense of the new regulations while maintaining a service culture and high-touch client relationships will find themselves with more opportunities than risks. This is an industry issue, and the whole industry is coming together to respond, but at the company level, the challenge lies in implementing changes seamlessly.
Key Players
Getting ready for the new challenges
Steve David www.myofficialstory.com/stevedavid
228_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_229
Demand is booming in Latin America’s investment industry, not only among institutions looking to invest internationally but increasingly local fund firms looking for a platform from which to target a global market. Novacap offers a solution in the region’s preferred jurisdiction, Luxembourg. A paragon of stability Originally launched in 2007, Novacap Asset Management now focuses on offering a solution to a key priority for asset managers in Latin America: expanding their potential market beyond their domestic one to the other latin american markets, Europe and other parts of the world Luxembourg has long been viewed as the primary international gateway for the Latin American investment industry, thanks to its long experience as a fund domicile and servicing centre as well as its political, economic and financial stability, reflected in its AAA international rating. Funds established in the Grand Duchy have long been favoured by institutions in Chile and other Latin American nations seeking a broader choice of international asset managers. Now Novacap is providing management company and related services for Chilean and other managers targeting the European market.
Letting managers focus on their core skills Today Novacap offers managers a range of services from the creation of white-label funds to advice on the establishment of Luxembourg structures and independent administration, tailored to each manager’s particular requirements.Together with specialised functions such as risk management, compliance and the supervision of outsourcing arrangements, Novacap’s services enable investment managers to focus on their key area of added value, their core portfolio management skills.With the first Chilean-managed funds in the process of being launched in Luxembourg, Novacap’s strategy of opening the Grand Duchy’s fund expertise to managers worldwide is already proving its worth.
Decision makers
www.novacap-am.com www.myofficialstory.com/novacap
Analysis
Entering new markets worldwide In 2011 Novacap established a partnership with Novadvice, a provider of financial services to institutional investors in Chile
and Uruguay headed by Marc Michiels, a Belgian resident of Santiago. In October it secured its first client win in the region with a leading Chilean bank. Since then the benefit of an on-the-ground presence has brought Novacap a wider range of contacts throughout the region and established relationships not only in Chile and Uruguay but in Brazil, Panama, Guatemala and the Bahamas. Now the company is building on its success in Latin America to develop further markets around the world. Following a market development trip to Russia in spring 2012, the company is also examining requirements of managers in Singapore as well as other parts of Europe.
Key Players
Opening doors to Latin American investors
ement
230_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_231
In Europe’s leading jurisdiction for fund domiciliation and servicing, niche asset management and banking specialist Parva Consulting is helping industry players manage change in areas such as regulation and tax and take advantage of opportunities for expansion. A global hub Over the past quarter-century Luxembourg has become Europe’s pre-eminent jurisdiction for the domiciliation and servicing of retail investment funds and led the development of the EU single market in financial services. Already a leading centre for the international lending, private banking and wealth management, the grand duchy has become the world’s most important hub for cross-border retail funds, and is now building its expertise in servicing alternative investment structures.
A track record of success Over the past years Parva has burnished its credentials with a number of demanding projects that have added to the team’s knowledge and capability. One involved the post-merger integration of two management groups with €180bn in combined assets into a single organisation, creating in the process one of Europe’s leading asset managers. Other flagship projects have included managing a major tax reform for a securities services provider, implementing performance measurement and efficiency improvements at a newly-acquired subsidiary, and reorganising an asset manager’s local businesses into a single European hub. Many of these projects have in common the need to manage differences in culture as well as in business organisation and structure – an area where Parva’s capabilities perfectly match Luxembourg’s pan-European business vocation.
Decision makers
www.parvaconsulting.com
Analysis
Hands-on experience Against this backdrop, Parva Consulting has carved out a niche in providing asset management industry players with hands-on assistance in managing the challenges of a changing regulatory and tax environment and positioning clients to take advantages of growth opportunities across the single European market and beyond. Founded in early 2005 and with offices in Milan and Luxembourg, Parva’s small and
focused team serves the asset management and securities services sectors with particular expertise in operations, product development, project and change management, including post-merger integration. The firm prides itself on the direct industry experience that its team members apply to clients’ requirements – a vital attribute as the fund services sector positions itself to meet new investor needs and expanding market possibilities.
Key Players
A niche consultancy helps drive Luxembourg’s fund services growth
Alessandro Viviani www.myofficialstory.com/alessandroviviani
232_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_233
RBC Investor Services is a premier provider of investor services to asset managers, financial institutions and other institutional investors worldwide. Their unique approach to domestic and crossborder solutions, combined with awardwinning client service and the expertise of 5,500 professionals in 15 markets, helps their clients achieve their ambitions.
A leading actor in Luxembourg’s financial market RBC Investor Services in Luxembourg provides an extensive range of products and services from global custody, to fund administration and shareholder services. With over 1,500 employees based in Luxembourg, RBC Investor Services is the country’s fourth largest employer for the financial services sector (source ABBL). Client surveys and industry ranking for their different core activities - fund administration, custodian bank and transfer agent - have positioned the bank as a major leader in the Luxembourg financial market, the second most important world financial centre for investment funds. www.myofficialstory.com/rbcinvestorservices
Decision makers Analysis
Top 10 global ranking RBC Investor Services ranks among the world’s top 10 global custodians with USD 2.7 trillion (CAD 2.8 trillion) in client assets under administration and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada, one of the largest and most financially sound banks in the world. Their complete range of investor services is supported by a worldwide network of offices in 15 countries on four continents, award-winning European transfer agency capabilities, fund administration services in 13 global markets and strong credit ratings: A2 (Moody’s), AA- (S&P). RBC Investor Services has more than 100 years of experience in institutional financial services and provides products and technology that meet clients’ evolving needs, supported by top ratings for client service in industry client satisfaction surveys.
Comprehensive and innovative services RBC Investor Services’ innovative solutions include global custody, fund and pension administration, shareholder services, distribution support, securities lending and borrowing, reconciliation services, compliance monitoring and reporting, investment analytics, and treasury services.
Key Players
A premier provider of investor services
Sébastien Danloy www.myofficialstory.com/sebastiendanloy
234_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_235
A systematic approach… Riva Financial Systems Limited (Riva) was incorporated in October 2002 by a group of industry professionals with extensive operations and technology experiences at some of the largest asset managers and fund administrators in Europe. A thorough understanding of the asset management industry and the particular needs of its participants, along with a special technical expertise, brought recognition that legacy systems and their reliance on decades-old software and hardware were inadequate to deal with increasingly volatile, complex and global markets. Fresh, imaginative approaches were needed if companies were to thrive. Their vision called upon the creation of a flexible, cost-effective, totally integrated global transfer agency system solution; the flagship product that emerged from this blueprint was Riva Transfer Agent (‘Riva TA’). … and a comprehensive solution Suitable for both transfer agent and fund administrator, Riva TA is a highly functional dealing and registration software solution capable of supporting the entire investor record-keeping process across multiple administration centres, investment products and currencies, all on a single platform. Importantly, Riva TA comprises a range of features designed to make transfer
236_MyOfficialStory
Looking to the future Riva’s ascendancy was publicly acknowledged in September 2007 when Franklin Templeton Investments, one of the world’s largest asset managers and global distributors of funds acquired a majority stake in the company. Riva’s status as a key market player was confirmed in January 2013 following the announcement that the Riva TA solution had been successfully deployed across the entire international transfer agency operations at Franklin Templeton Investments marking the culmination of a project that Mr Ghassan Hakim, CEO of Riva Financial Systems, described as being “unprecedented in terms of scale and complexity”. Whilst the company and its customers benefit from Franklin Templeton’s global expertise, investment and knowledge with respect to the Riva TA development roadmap and other Riva products, Riva remains a commercial software house and continues to flourish. To learn more about Riva TA’s potential within your organisation, please visit our website www.rivafs.com or alternatively please call us on +44 (1624) 850 140 or email [email protected] www.rivafs.com www.myofficialstory.com/rivafs
Decision makers Key Players
Riva Financial Systems is a software company which has developed a global transfer agency system capable of supporting multiple countries and investment products on a single platform.
agency operations more efficient, flexible and responsive. As a new global solution to the market, the system is designed with the latest technology in mind; it offers among other features, a web enabled front-end for ease of servicing, integrated cash management and general ledger advanced functionality, integrated imaging and workflow functionality, enhanced foreign exchange processing and interface capabilities with an open database architecture.
Companies
Riva Financial Systems
MyOfficialStory_237
Founded in 1985, Robert Walters has become one of the world’s leading specialist in Professional Recruitment consultancies. With 47 offices spanning in 23 countries, the award-winning group that opened its first office in Luxembourg in 2001 is still continuing to expand today. New media approach Beginning as a subsidiary of the Brussels office and operating in the finance and accounting, the company has expanded to all other areas of financial services as well as other industrial sectors. Enjoying a strong reputation as an industry specialist, Robert Walters is one of the largest recruitment and selection advertisers in Europe and, as such, holds significant relationships with advertising partners in multiple media. The strong combination of brand reputation and exposure ensures that the client’s message reach the best target audience with effective results. Robert Walters’ employees are considered experts in all their fields, a reputation that enables them to pick the perfect candidate for the vacancy.
A focus on the future, now Highlighting a new trend in candidate sourcing, Robert Walters is expanding its current expert model to provide a client’s company with a broader reach into new business. A further development in the recruitment process consist of bringing candidates directly from abroad, which, for Robert Walters, constitutes a significant trend for the future. In anticipation of the expected increase in personnel hiring throughout specific business areas, e.g. structured finance, holding companies and family offices, Robert Walters will be opening new branches in Asia and Americas in the coming years. “When we look at the track record of the past 25 years, we are confident that our future is very bright” – says Robert Van den Oord, Country Manager for Luxembourg. With expertise in the fields of finance and broad knowledge of financial services, Robert Walters will always find the perfect candidate in the least amount of time.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/robertwalters
Analysis
The Luxembourg method With an office based in Luxembourg, Robert Walters provides specialist services in international relocation – assisting candidates through the entire process of moving from their home country to the new location. Compared to other recruitment companies, this offer is quite unique.
Drawing on their multinational background, Robert Walters can drill down swiftly to the bedrock of the client’s needs. The eight different channels of candidate sourcing include database and direct search (social media), networking with business schools alumni, advertisements (direct and industry specific), international networks, events in the target country, print media and internet advertising.
Key Players
Staying ahead of the pack
Companies
238_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_239
SGG is a leading independent, regulated financial services provider occupying more than 500 professionals. Since 1953, SGG delivers reliable accounting, reporting, tax compliance, legal administration/secretarial support to the investment fund industry, international groups and wealthy families. Growth since 1953 SGG’s roots date back to 1953 when a Luxembourg bank creates a corporate services division. In 1998, SGG becomes a subsidiary of one of the world’s top 5 audit companies. A 12 year period of buoyant growth follows: it culminates in a management buy-out in April 2010. CoBePa, the BeNeLux based investment company enters SGG’s capital alongside the historical partners. With the support of its new shareholder, SGG pursues its growth. In 2011, it purchases IMFC, Netherlands 8th player and FAcTS, a Luxembourg provider mostly supporting institutional clients. SGG has today two principal operational bases – Luxembourg and the Netherlands – and subsidiaries in Belgium, Switzerland, Malta, Cyprus and the US. In January 2012, SGG opened a New York office to better serve its US clients, among which leading players of the real estate and private equity industries.
Trust at all levels SGG services institutional clients – mostly for their fund administration and associated SPVs needs – large companies and wealthy families. SGG supports its clients in a comprehensive fashion and services more and more alternative asset investment fund managers through its integrated Sifs and Sicars administration offer. With its Plug and Play turnkey offer, SGG also helps multinational companies and institutional clients establish themselves in Luxembourg and discover the country’s best kept secret: trust at all levels. www.myofficialstory.com/sgg www.sgg.lu
Decision makers
personnel, a consequence of a dynamic local acquisition campaign (Mercuria Services and Fiduciaire François Winandy). The cylindrical and “iconic” building inspired the company’s motto: “New Heights in Trust”. “Trust” has a financial connotation in SGG’s industry: it is meant in the literal sense here, as all of SGG’s activities are based on one essential factor, its clients’ trust. The tower also became the media of its last Riders on the Storm lighthouse campaign
Key Players
SGG
Analysis
The SGG Tower The tower, a feature of Luxembourg’s city landscape symbolizes the company’s independence. The 2008 move to the tower, marks a company’s milestone after the doubling of its
240_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_241
Sqope’s motto is “the most accurate information possible”. The legal and financial information it offers provides an essential service to grow your business in accordance with the laws and regulations in place. Did you say “financial intelligence”? Financial intelligence enables you to grow your activities in a secure framework, thanks to in-depth knowledge about your various customers and prospective customers. Sqope helps you to get to know them better and study their strengths. Founded in 2009, this company grew out of the need to respond to the growing demands of laws and regulations in various countries around the world. Sqope stood out from the outset, with the launch of a benchmark information report: the Personal Intelligence Report and the Corporate Intelligence Report. In 2011, the company went international and Thomas Ormond took over as chairman and director. New products are on offer in 2012. Scope View is a monthly or quarterly update. Sqope currently has a 3 person team in Luxembourg and 15 employees worldwide through one subsidiary.
Unique Sqope caters in particular for private banks, life assurance companies, independent asset managers, legal firms, accounting firms, etc. Currently, despite a competitive environment, the company does not have any direct competitors. Its trump cards include the accuracy and quality of the information collected, unsurpassed IT processes and unrivalled timing. Everything it does is fully transparent. Within the next five or ten years, Sqope will be essential and worldwide in equal measure. www.myofficialstory.com/sqope www.sqope.lu
Decision makers
with a person, company or even a country, you need to decide to do it in full knowledge of the facts. Knowing your customers and prospective customers guarantees a good commercial relationship in the long term. It is an essential condition for accelerating the expansion of your business in a secure way.
Companies
Sqope
Analysis
Ever more necessary KYC (Know Your Customer) is a legal requirement all companies need to comply with. This customer knowledge is now essential today. The stringency of the regulations differs depending on the business sector. This stringency means the need to find out, as well as analyse, legal and financial information. Before starting out
242_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_243
A leading international banking group, Standard Chartered provides a unique and comprehensive package of Depositary banking alongside dedicated Fund Services suite to cater to the ever-changing needs of Luxembourg domiciled funds. Commitment to relationship-building Ageographic focus on the world’s most dynamic markets – Asia, Africa and the Middle East – and a commitment to relationshipbuilding have allowed Standard Chartered to prosper even during the financial crisis. With 1,700 offices in 68 countries and territories, Standard Chartered is building a sustainable business over for long term. This promise is reflected in its brand philosophy, “Here to stay”.
Decision makers
Placing clients first With a state-of-the-art infrastructure, Standard Chartered places clients first, providing them with an innovative platform to access local investment markets and enabling efficient communication, data delivery and reporting. Asset safekeeping and supervision for Luxembourg funds is provided by its depositary bank and related fund services. These services are aligned with operations and relationship management while risk is controlled through executive oversight across an unrivalled and growing direct network of 39 securities markets. In addition, the offering comprises market-leading client reporting services and best-in-class partnerships.
Key Players
Standard Chartered
Analysis
Seamless integration At Standard Chartered, Luxembourg funds benefit from best-inclass regional custody, fund administration and transfer agency services across Asia, Africa and the Middle East to/from its Luxembourg Branch. The bank can facilitate direct access to custody and clearing services across a comprehensive range of domestic securities markets through a single communications and service interface. Its securities services platform is integrated seamlessly with foreign exchange dealing and cash management capabilities. Portfolio returns are maximized through performance analytics, liquidity and cash management services as well as a full range of financial markets solutions.
244_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_245
Faced with the new legislation, the major groups have had to develop their range of services. Interview with Christophe Cornet, Executive Director in charge of Management Company Services for third party clients. How has UBS adapted to the changes in the Funds sector? UBS has had its own Management Company for third party clients for a long time, but some clients based in different jurisdictions have now expressed new needs. UBS has therefore developed its range, based on the existing model for UBS funds in terms of procedures, controls and organisation. We have reinforced our existing team with additional experts, to cope with the latest changes in legislation: UCITS IV, the new SIF law, and the AIFM Directive. This includes monitoring delegated functions, managing risk and supporting governance. In practice, we offer the Management Company, but its services can also be accessed on a flexible basis. We draw on the group’s strengths: its platform, R&D expertise, etc. For example, the risk manager in the Management Company works very closely with his risk colleagues at UBS Global Asset Management.
How do you see your sector developing in the next few years? I see two main trends. The first is the disappearance of small, self-managed structures, which will be forced by the new legislation to make use of companies like UBS to meet the requirements of the authorities in the countries where they distribute their products. Faced with this standardisation of the market, critical mass and branding will take on increasing importance, which leads to the second trend: Asset Managers looking for leverage effects by relying on large companies which have experts, technical expertise and the necessary financial backing. An Asset Manager who manages tens of billions does not have the power of a group that manages several hundred billion. We are now working on setting up a “Super Management Company”, capable of taking charge of UCITS and non-UCITS funds, in the context of the AIFM Directive.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/ubs
Analysis
What do your institutional clients expect? Our clients want us to react rapidly and flexibly, meeting all the regulatory requirements. Our company has the best experts and the best technology, two essentials for keeping up to speed
with current developments. UBS procedures in fact sometimes follow standards that are higher than those required by the law. That said, we make a distinction between traditional clients who want a “one-stop shop”, capable of managing all their needs, and clients who want to remain focused on their core business – portfolio management or Fund distribution – by relying on a partner capable of taking charge of their secondary activities. Some services are essential – central administration and safeguarding assets – but UBS Management Company Services also offers a flexible approach to selecting the portfolio manager or Fund distributor.
Key Players
UBS Luxembourg and the “onestop shop” approach
Companies
246_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_247
The grand duchy’s ambition to extend the scope of its fund industry following implementation of the AIFMD has been boosted by the arrival of technology-led alternative fund administrator SS&C GlobeOp. New vista for alternative funds Although Luxembourg has long been home to hedge funds and funds of funds, private equity and property funds, in the past alternative investments have been overshadowed by the UCITS fund business that has made the grand duchy the world’s second largest fund domicile. But the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, which imposes greater regulation on managers targeting European investors, increases the attractiveness of EU fund domiciles – like Luxembourg, which adopted the directive just in time for its entry into force on July 22. Last month the country’s credibility as a service centre for alternative funds was boosted by the establishment of a Luxembourg office by SS&C GlobeOp, a specialist administrator of hedge funds and other types of investment structure.
Technology at the service of investment GlobeOp was established in 2000, at the start of the boom that turned hedge funds from a cottage industry to a global business managing well over $2trn in assets. It was acquired by Windsor, Connecticut-based financial software specialist SS&C last year. Drawing on the expertise of its parent, SS&C GlobeOp exploits technology to give it, and its clients, a competitive edge, including cloud-based computing and mobile services – it has just launched voice recognition capabilities allowing clients to obtain information or carry out functions on the move. As such, the company straddles two of Luxembourg’s key economic priorities, consolidating its role as a fund services centre, and attracting the IT-led business of tomorrow.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/globeop
Analysis
Meeting client and regulatory demand SS&C Technologies chairman and CEO Bill Stone sees Luxembourg as a key market for existing and future clients that manage hedge funds, funds of hedge funds and private equity structures, and that are increasingly looking for local
service in fund domiciles. The Luxembourg office, headed by Nick Curwen, offers fund administration and middle- and back-office services including fund accounting and reporting, share registry and transfer agency, and investor communications. It offers independent portfolio and OTC derivative valuations, risk analytics and aggregated web-based reporting. The broad scope of these services matters because of the AIFMD’s reporting obligations to both investors and regulators. Increasingly alternative fund managers are looking to administrators and other service providers to help them meet the new requirements.
Key Players
Putting technology to the service of alternative fund managers
Nick Curwen www.myofficialstory.com/nickcurwen
248_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_249
With one foot in Luxembourg, the other in Asia, and La Poste as one of its shareholders, Victor Buck Services is pursuing its development strategy. Pillar 1: Mass transactions Since it was founded, Victor Buck Services’ main activity has been serving the “Transfer Agent” business line in the realm of investment funds, as well as major groups unrelated to the financial world. This activity is closely linked to the constant need to protect customers’ sensitive data, and to enrich it to provide distributors and end users with the necessary reports. The firm has therefore developed great flexibility while bearing in mind the requirement to comply with stringent regulatory obligations. During discussions with its partners, Victor Buck Services brings to the table a broad knowledge of the obligations and prerequisites that ensure that their data is protected and valid and that reports are distributed on time, worldwide.
Decision makers
Pillar 3: The KIID FundD, created internally at Victor Buck Services, is a web content management solution for the mutual fund industry. It is currently based on two separate but related information flows: the production and distribution of the Key Investor Information Document (KIID). The creation, retention and modification of these documents is closely linked to the product development process within a management company and the registration of Funds in various European and Asian countries. Our platform covers both the declaration requirements at a European level and the subtle differences imposed by national regulators in Europe and Asia.
Key Players
The future rests on three pillars
Edyth Magyarics www.myofficialstory.com/edithmagyarics
A unique directory, to control your message in all media
MyOfficialStory_253
The Grand Duchy, from the source
Companies
Alter domus www.myofficialstory.com/alterdomus ALFI www.myofficialstory.com/alfi Allianz www.myofficialstory.com/allianz Bonn & Schmitt www.myofficialstory.com/bonnandschmitt Bonn Steichen & Partner www.myofficialstory.com/bonnsteichen Caceis www.myofficialstory.com/caceis Citibank www.myofficialstory.com/citi Clearstream www.myofficialstory.com/clearstream Crédit Suisse www.myofficialstory.com/creditsuisse Custom house www.myofficialstory.com/customhousegroup Deloitte www.myofficialstory.com/deloitte Arendt & medernach www.myofficialstory.com/arendt Finesti www.myofficialstory.com/finesti Fondation de Luxembourg www.myofficialstory.com/fondationdeluxembourg FundsEurope www.myofficialstory.com/fundseurope HSBC www.myofficialstory.com/hsbc IFBL www.myofficialstory.com/ifbl Ikano www.myofficialstory.com/ikano ING www.myofficialstory.com/ing KPMG www.myofficialstory.com/kpmg Linklaters www.myofficialstory.com/linklaters Loyens & Loeff www.myoafficialstory.com/loyensloeff Luxembourg School of Finance www.myofficialstory.com/luxembourgschooloffinance Multifonds www.myofficialstory.com/multifonds PwC www.myofficialstory.com/pwc RBC Dexia www.myofficialstory.com/rbcdexia SGSS www.myofficialstory.com/sgss UBS www.myofficialstory.com/ubs VP Bank www.myofficialstory.com/vpbank Etc… www.luxembourgofficial.com
Analysis
More companies
22 July 2013 marked the “go-live” date of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. Here we consider the key issues for non-EU managers. How will I market to EU investors after July 2013? The AIFMD introduces an EU-wide passport for marketing to professional investors. However, this will only be available before 22 July 2015 to fully on-shored structures. Most nonEU fund managers will therefore continue marketing in the EU under the national private placement regimes until 2015 or even 2018.
www.myofficialstory.com/cliffordchance
Decision makers Analysis
What must I consider when privately placing? In order to market to EU investors using national private placement regimes, co-operation arrangements must be in place with the authorities of the Member States where the AIFs are marketed and the “third country” in which the AIFM/AIF is established must not be listed as non-co-operative by the FATF. It also triggers certain transparency requirements: publication of annual reports; pre-investment disclosure of information to investors; reporting to regulators. Consequently, non-EU managers should, before marketing, check the exact requirements in the Member States in which their investors are located as Member States may have “gold-plated” the AIFMD Regulations. Also, Member States can impose stricter requirements and some may interpret Article 42 as being optional, imposing their own marketing restrictions.
How do I plan ahead? Going forward, non-EU managers need to start thinking about full compliance and identify their gateways to the EU. Full AIFMD compliance triggers a number of further requirements: identification of a Member State of reference; appointment of a legal representative; existence of an OECD model tax agreement between the authorities of the Member State of reference and any Member State in which the AIF is marketed. It will also raise other significant considerations, including on remuneration, depositaries and risk management. Although it is undoubtedly so that the AIFMD imposes more regulation on the alternative fund sector than has so far been the case, stricter regulation does not always have to be an obstacle to boosting investor appetite. Tighter rules may indeed attract investors that had previously been precluded from investing in alternative investment funds by increasing protection.
Key Players
Key issues for Non-EU managers
by Paul Van den Abeele, Counsel, Clifford Chance
Companies
254_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_255
Changes in the requirements of international wealthy families are bringing about a profound transformation in the Family Office the world over, and in Luxembourg in particular. We analyse the situation. The view from the East In the Middle East, the Family Office is a common entity, in countries where relationships based on trust are seen as far more important than considerations of product or price. Forging business relations with a new partner can take years, and once mutual trust is in place, the emphasis is on the long term, quality of service and above all, interpersonal relationships. That said, the regulatory authorities in these countries take their role very seriously and local players naturally gravitate towards service providers who are regulated, like they are.
www.myofficialstory.com/centuria
Analysis
New developments in the West The crisis of confidence that has been shaking the Western markets since 2009 has triggered an unprecedented wave of regulation. An exacerbating factor lies in the reluctance of investors outside Europe to invest in countries with unstable economies. Luxembourg has grasped the situation fully, being the first to transpose the regulations and taking steps to create a Family Office PFS status. Although the process adds slightly to the regulatory load, it means that Luxembourg can capitalise on a label of trust that should bring new customers to the Grand Duchy.
Decision makers
Future trends Two major trends are emerging in this area. The first will see the Family Office gradually encompass all areas relating to customers’ requirements - funds, Islamic finance, private equity - to such an extent that the very notion of the Family Office could partialy replace the private banking notion. For Luxembourg, the challenge is to make the entire country a hub, a portal capable of receiving a very specific clientèle of wealthy families, wherever they are in the world. The second is a consequence of this shift: the field of players will change. Mergers will help to reduce the impact of the cost of the new regulations, while the smallest players will become ultra-specialised, calling on a host of other specialists to meet their customers’ evolving requirements. The point of contact will be in Luxembourg, but the solutions will be implemented at the relevant centres of excellence.
Key Players
Family Office: East to West
bourg
256_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_257
The European Commission’s “investor protection” agenda keeps rolling forward. There is a certain sense of urgency with UCITS V as when the Alternative Investment Fund Managers (AIFM) Directive goes live in 2013, the retail investor will, in relation to the depositary and remuneration provisions, benefit from less regulatory protection than the institutional investor. UCITS V is the solution to resolve these anomalies. Depositary The key UCITS V provisions on the depositary cover: • Duties: the depositary’s cash flow monitoring duties are enhanced, and its safekeeping duties clarified. The depositary’s oversight duties are also harmonized. A key challenge will be interpreting the new detailed rules and putting them into practice • Delegation: the depositary can only delegate safekeeping, under strict conditions • Liability: the depositary is liable for loss of any financial instrument held in custody, independently of whether it has delegated safekeeping tasks, except in case of certain unforeseeable external events. It is also liable for negligence or failure to perform its tasks
The implications In practice, when implementing the AIFM Directive, many depositaries will have already reviewed their service offering, upgraded their organizational models, established their own network of trusted sub-custodians and counterparties, enhanced systems and acquired much of the required know-how to deal with UCITS V. For managers, UCITS V will trigger consolidation in the UCITS depositary space, result in higher depositary fees with related product consolidation and may restrict certain of the more exotic investment strategies. The remuneration provisions will result in the obvious additional compliance costs and a greater level of transparency. The real unknown here is whether these provisions will truly result in the development of a product range with a more stable long-term outcome for investors. There is also the debate to be had on the scope of application of certain measures, whether a management company is “significant”, requiring a remuneration committee of non-executives, and the implementation of disclosure requirements.
Decision makers
Remuneration Management companies are required to establish and apply remuneration policies and practices that do not encourage risktaking which is inconsistent with the risk profiles of the UCITS it manages. Management companies that are “significant” will have to establish a specific remuneration committee composed of non-executives. The annual report of the UCITS must include information on the total amount of remuneration paid over the financial year, and various breakdown analyses.
Key Players
UCITS V, without much debate
by Kerry Nichol, Partner, Asset Management, Ernst & Young, Luxembourg
Companies
258_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_259
Simone Delcourt, Director of the CSSF since 2005, answers our questions about the recent regulatory changes.
What are the main challenges ahead? Luxembourg must acquire the means to deal not just with European competition but with global competition. The financial centre has good advantages. For example, it enjoys an undisputed international reputation for trustworthiness and has a respected supervisory authority. It must continue along these lines, at the same time as investing in product and service innovation and in training the various stakeholders with the emphasis on financial consumer protection, so as to restore customer confidence.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/simonedelcourt
Analysis
What is the CSSF’s view about the regulatory changes Luxembourg has seen over the past few years? There have been massive changes in the regulations governing the financial sector in recent years in response to the global economic crisis and the crisis in customer confidence in financial players and products. The crisis brought to light the fact that international integration of financial institutions was closer than international cooperation between supervisory authorities. Precisely in order to overcome these variations, a new European financial supervision system was set up in January 2011, comprising a European Banking Authority (EBA), a European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and a European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA). Their aim is to restore confidence, help develop a single set of rules, resolve the problems linked to cross-border companies and avoid a build-up of risks liable to threaten the stability of the global financial system. It is clear that the establishment of this system means that Member States’ room for manoeuvre is destined to disappear in favour of greater harmonisation, both in terms of the transposition of the regulations and in terms of applying and overseeing them.
What is the outlook like for the country? Luxembourg will increasingly find itself on an equal footing with the other Member States when it comes to the application of the regulations in the financial sector. The financial centre should take advantage of the opportunity to take a long, hard look at itself and engage in more innovation and internationalisation. In recent decades, Luxembourg has acquired undisputed expertise in the field of finance, and this process must continue in order to improve the products and services offered further still. Certain projects underway, such as the transposition of the AIFM Directive, are liable to offer new prospects for the country, and several offshore funds have already indicated an interest in moving their registered offices to Luxembourg.
Key Players
260_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_261
Microfinance institutions (MFIs) provide micro-loans to the entrepreneurial poor but also take deposits, fulfilling the role of banks in areas where traditional commercial banks are either non-existent or not accessible to the poorest individuals.
EuSEF Regulation – an alternative? It is likely that MIVs, if they comply with the requirements, will be encompassed under the EuSEF Regulation. EuSEF thus provides a welcome alternative to the AIFMD, especially for small MIV managers for which full AIFMD compliance would be difficult to achieve and would need to opt out of the AIFMD regime and its benefits. EuSEF also provides for an EU-wide passporting regime for compliant social fund managers, thus making marketing possible throughout the EU. These new frameworks undoubtedly represent an opportunity for MIVs and the MFIs they support, as well as a way for Europe to become the domicile of choice for responsible investing.
Decision makers
AIFMD Due to the form chosen by most MIVs, such vehicles will qualify as alternative investment funds (AIFs) within the meaning of Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. This reform, albeit imposing stricter regulation on AIFs, represents a great opportunity for entities managing MIVs that chose or will choose Luxembourg as domicile. Not only can they benefit from Luxembourg’s experience in setting up and marketing funds, but also from the memorandums of understanding (MoU) that Luxembourg has already signed with multiple jurisdictions outside the EU.
www.myofficialstory.com/cliffordchance
Analysis
MIVs – the fuel for MFIs MFIs are currently operating in the form of NGOs, credit unions and other financial cooperatives, and state-owned development and postal savings banks. An increasing number of MFIs are organized as for-profit entities, often because it is a pre-requisite to obtaining a license from banking authorities to offer financial services. However, for-profit MFIs may also be organized as nonbank financial institutions, commercial banks that specialize in microfinance, or microfinance departments of full-service banks. Whereas a significant part of MFI get funding from governments and not-for-profit organizations, profit seeking investors, both individual and institutional, have recognized the value of investing in microfinance. Therefore microfinance has moved away from purely public funding and given birth to a significant number of private-public, as well as purely private undertakings known as microfinance investment vehicles (MIVs). Luxembourg offers a wide variety of structures for microfinance funds, the majority of them being structured as securitization vehicles, specialized investment funds, investment companies in risk capital or non-UCITS investment funds.
by Joëlle Hauser, Partner, Clifford Chance
Key Players
262_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_263
The financial crisis that hit the world in 2008 has resulted in a strong statement published on 25 September 2009 by the G20 leaders calling for additional safety and transparency around OTC derivatives and especially credit default swaps. From that point in time, the American and European regulatory bodies have started to draft what will be the new framework for the execution, clearing and reporting of OTC derivatives transactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Clearing and reporting obligations In Europe, the EMIR (European Market Infrastructure Regulation) will introduce mandatory clearing and reporting of transactions as well as additional collateral requirements for OTC derivative transactions that will remain bilateral. EMIR also encompasses supervisory and governance principles for both the CCPs and the trade repositories. All financial counterparties will be asked to clear standardized products on central counter party (CCP) and UCITS have clearly been identified in scope of the market reform.
Understanding collateral costs Collateral requirements for mutual funds will be a paramount importance and a crucial element to consider not only when choosing a clearing broker. The new regulation will significantly increase the need for collateral. Each CCP call initial margin to clearing members based on its own risk methodology and additional margin – excess margin –, could be requested by the clearer depending on the mutual fund’s risk profile. CCPs and clearers will also define the type of collateral they accept and they will be selective. Custodians are ideally placed to support mutual funds to address this new challenge. Because they hold the fund’s assets, they should propose efficient solutions to facilitate the operational processes through back office outsourcing solution and to optimize collateral. Both services leading to costs reduction.
Decision makers
www.myofficialstory.com/bp2s
Analysis
UCITS key considerations The obligation to clear standardized OTC derivatives by end 2012 will generate a significant amount of work for investment funds to adapt to these new rules as well as additional costs especially on the collateral requirements side of things.
Mutual funds will have to select one or multiple clearers to support the clearing of their contracts. All major investment banks have adapted their organisation to cope with this new piece of business and most of them propose a combined execution and clearing service across various asset classes. Mutual funds have to perform exhaustive reviews of the service offers and associated costs. Managing those new processes and relationship will create additional complexity for the fund manager and back office outsourcing may become an attractive alternative.
Key Players
Derivatives central clearing UCITS’ next challenge ahead
by Florence Fontan, BNP Paribas Securities Services
Companies
264_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_265
More analysis Alco www.myofficialstory.com/alco Arendt &Medernach www.myofficialstory.com/arendt BCEE www.myofficialstory.com/bcee Centre Tudor www.myofficialstory.com/tudor Chambre de Commerce www.myofficialstory.com/chambredecommerce Clearstream www.myofficialstory.com/clearstream CSSF www.myofficialstory.com/cssf Custom House Group www.myofficialstory.com/customhousegroup Ernt &Young www.myofficialstory.com/ernstandyoung Fuchs et Associés www.myofficialstory.com/fuchsetassocies HSBC www.myofficialstory.com/hsbc Kurt Salmon www.myofficialstory.com/kurtsalmon Mangrove www.myofficialstory.com/mangrove MDO www.myofficialstory.com/mdo MPLAW www.myofficialstory.com/mplaw NautaDutilh www.myofficialstory.com/nautadutilh RBS www.myofficialstory.com/rbs SGG www.myofficialstory.com/sgg
www.andyaluxembourg.com
A one of a kind magazine designed to reach decision makers in Luxembourg
266_MyOfficialStory
MyOfficialStory_267
UPSCALE Clairefontaine 9 Place de Clairefontaine Luxembourg www.myofficialstory.com/ clairefontaine
Mosconi 13 r. Münster Luxembourg Ma langue sourit 1 Rue de Remich, Oetrange Bouquet garni 32 Rue de l’Eau 1449, Luxembourg Léa Linster 17 Route de Luxembourg, Luxembourg Favaro 19 Rue des Remparts, Esch-Sur-Alzette La Rameaudière www. larameaudiere.lu Le Windsor www.windsor.lu CASUAL Um Plateau 6, plateau Altmünster, Luxembourg www.myofficialstory.com/umplateau
268_MyOfficialStory
SPECIALITIES Asian Opium Burger Le Booster’s Italian Voglia Matta Indian Maharaja 8, rue Louvigny Sushi Yamayu Santatsu 26, rue Notre-Dame CIGAR La tabatière www.la-tabatiere.lu
leasure
CULTURE Mudam 3 Park Drai Eechelen 1499, Luxembourg
www.myofficialstory.com/rivesdeclausen
www.myofficialstory.com/mudam
Philharmonie Place de l’Europe 1499, Luxembourg Casemates 30, place Guillaume II, Luxembourg Palais Grand Ducal 17, rue du marché-aux-Herbes, Luxembourg SPORTS Golf de Luxembourg www.myofficialstory.com/ golfdeluxembourg
Golf Club Grand Ducal Route de Trèves, 1 2633 Senningerberg Kikuoka Country Club Scheierhaff L-5412, Canach Tennis/Squash Kockelscheuer: 42, route de Bettembourg, Luxembourg
Decision makers Key Players
Brasserie Mansfeld 3 rue de la Tour Jacob, Luxembourg Ikki 2 Rives de Clausen, Luxembourg Brasserie Schuman 1, Rond Point Schuman, Luxembourg Boos K Fé 31, Biergerkraitz L-8120, Bridel
Bypass 19, rue des Bains, Luxembourg White House 21 rue des Bains, Luxembourg
Hôtels Sofitel Grand Ducal 40 Boulevard d’Avranches, Luxembourg
Companies
www.luxembourgofficial.com
www.myofficialstory.com/ sofitelgrandducal
Hotel Le Royal 12 boulevard Royal, Luxembourg Le Place d’Armes 18 Place d’Armes, Luxembourg j Melia 1 Park Dräi Eechelen Albert 1er 2 rue Albert 1er
MyOfficialStory_269
MyOfficialStory_271
Notes
funds europe funds europe is a central information resource for cross-border professionals in the global investment fund business, tracking and interpreting developments in the asset management industry.
With research and analysis from top financial journalists and exclusive commentary from industry leaders, funds europe provides a roadmap to success in today's complex marketplace. Request a sample copy today! funds europe, 288 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4QP 272_MyOfficialStory
T: +44 (0)20 3178 5872 W: www.funds-europe.com E: [email protected]
MyOfficialStory_273
EU Savings Tax
Short Selling
Make the connection Regulations are interconnected. KPMG’s global practitioners, based in 156 countries across our global network, help business leaders address the business implications of evolving regulation. Our teams keep pace with fastdeveloping regulations on every continent and help companies stay competitive.
Solvency II
|
i don't know
|
In many Asian/Eastern beliefs 'Naraka' is what?
|
What Is Naraka? | Metaphysics Knowledge
By on February 2, 2013
Naraka Punishments
Naraka is the Hindi name for hell. Hell as we all know is the place where souls go after death. It is said that when one does a lot of sins in this life then they are sent to hell. In the hell the souls are punished and tortured for the sins that they have done during their life time. We will now discuss what is naraka? In more detail so that you get a better idea as to what our scriptures have to say about it.
What Does Naraka Mean?
This is primarily a Sanskrit word. It means the underworld. The concept is present in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
The concept has basically come from the Vedas. The Vedas clearly mention that the naraka is the place where the souls are sent to get rid of the sins that they have done during their life time. When you read the vedas and the Upanishads you will find the mention of naraka many a times. It is described as a place that is dark. It is very close to the core of the earth as a result it is very hot.
The lord of death Yama decides what would be the appropriate punishment for the souls. There are many punishments that are designed like putting the soul in burning water or oil. Once after these tortures the souls are made free of all the sins. These souls are set free and they can get Moksha.
Moksha means salvation. Other souls once they are purified of the sins are born again and they live another life on earth. The reincarnation also depends on the deeds. A person who did good deeds will get a better life and vice versa.
The duration of the punishment and the tortures are decided by the lord of death Yama. When the sins are more the duration of the torture is longer and vice versa. Yama has an assistant named Chitragupta. He keeps a track of all the sins and the good deeds that one commits during life time.
When a dead person goes to Chitragupat he decides if the person should be sent to haven (swarg) or hell (naraka). He also decides what should be the duration of the punishment or torture. There are many characters from the epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana who have spent some time in hell. This was just to ensure that they are purified of the sins that they have committed.
The same concept of naraka is found in Buddhism and Jainism. Interesting perhaps this was one of the ways that the saints in the olden days thought would ensure that people don’t get into wrong deeds. The fear of naraka would also ensure that no one does or commits any sins. This would help people live a better and pure life.
This would make people more religious. I hope we have been able to explain what Naraka is. This is basically an idea about the naraka as it is explained in the scriptures. However, with time people really don’t fear about going to naraka. That is exactly why there are so many sins that are happening around. Some people also say that heaven and hell are on earth itself.
Test Yourself
|
Hell
|
"The obsequious ""ever so 'umble"" money-lender in Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield, is?"
|
Answering Buddhism
Jesus and Buddha
As Buddhism comes into contact with Christianity, a comparison is often made between Jesus and Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama). In fact, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism [7] , the Dalai Lama was recently interviewed by James A. Beverly [8] for Christianity Today, who asked how Jesus could be �Enlightened� and teach falsehood according to Buddhist teaching.
I reminded him of his belief that Jesus is "a fully enlightened being" and
asked, "If Jesus is fully enlightened, wouldn't he be teaching the truth about himself? Therefore, if he is teaching the truth, then he is the Son of God, and there is a God, and Jesus is the Savior. If he is fully enlightened, he should teach the truth. If he is not teaching the truth, he is not that enlightened."��..As the Dalai Lama felt the momentum of the question, he laughed more than at any other time in the interview. He obviously understood the argument, borrowed from C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity���."This is a very good question," he said. "This is very, very important, very important." Even in Buddha's case, he said, a distinction must always be made between teachings that "always remain valid" and others that "we have the liberty to reject."��.He argued that the Buddha knew people were not always ready for the higher truth because it "wouldn't suit, wouldn't help." Therefore, lesser truths are sometimes taught because of the person's ignorance or condition. This is known in Buddhist dharma as the doctrine of uppayah, or skillful means. The Dalai Lama then applied this to the question about Jesus��."Jesus Christ also lived previous lives," he said. "So, you see, he reached a high state, either as a Bodhisattva, or an enlightened person, through Buddhist practice or something like that. Then, at a certain period, certain era, he appeared as a new master, and then because of circumstances, he taught certain views different from Buddhism, but he also taught the same religious values as I mentioned earlier: Be patient, tolerant, compassionate. This is, you see, the real message in order to become a better human being." He said that there was absolutely no lying involved since Jesus' motivation was to help people. [9]
In this interview, the Dalai Lama was forced to either say Jesus was a liar, lord or lunatic. While saying there was ��Absolutely no lying�, the Dalai Lama called Jesus a liar, who taught false hood, according to Buddhism. According to the Dalai Lama, Jesus was enlightened but knowing told lies, Himself being the Son of God and God being personal, both which contradict Buddhist teaching. So either Jesus lied, or was a lunatic. In the last line of the quote, the Dalai Lama basically says the lying was justified because the �motivation was to help people�. Trying to fit Jesus into Buddhist doctrines does not work, because Buddhism and Christianity are not compatible.
Today, many are trying to compare Buddha and Jesus as two similar spiritual beings with two similar messages. As we shall see, this is false. Jesus and Buddha have very little in common. Jesus in commenting on the teaching of Buddha and others who claimed the �Keys to salvation� apart from God�s revelation in scripture said,
7 Then Jesus said to them again, "Most assuredly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.
8 "All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them.
9 "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.
10 "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. John 10:7-10
Jesus preached exclusive truth; there is only one way for salvation, through Christ alone, He called others who came before him thieves and robbers. Buddha, taught the way of escape (Salvation) was by following his teachings as revealed in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold path. With Good works, resulting in good Karma, one might escape into Nirvana.
Jesus and Buddha an evaluation
When we compare Jesus and Buddha, what we are really asking is, who is the messenger of truth? Though both taught people how to live moral lives, both Jesus and Buddha claimed to know the answers to the questions most important to those alive on earth.
� Who am I?
� What happens after we die?
� Is there a heaven or hell?
� Is there something I can do, while I am alive, to determine my destiny?
The teachings of Buddha and Jesus both address these questions for humanity, but can they both cannot be right. The answers given by Jesus and Buddha both have contradictory claims so they both cannot teachers of ultimate truth. For example, Jesus taught He alone was the way to Heaven, and there is only one life. Buddha taught, salvation is attained through self-effort, after living many lives, you attain nirvana. Both Jesus and Buddha cannot be right. They may both be wrong, but they cannot both be right, because their claims contradict each other.
So how can we know if Buddha or Jesus was right? Is there a way to evaluate, whether Jesus or Buddha has the truth, or do we just have to wait until we die to find out?
One place to start is to examine and compare the teaching of Buddhism and Christianity. This ultimately leads us to the history behind each person. What is the basis on their teachings? Did they just appear and say accept me, I have the truth? Is there a basis to their claims?
The basis of Jesus Christ
The basis of Buddha
The Old Testament: Jesus Christ claimed to be the Messiah (Christ), the redeemer of humanity promised at the fall of man. From four hundred to over a thousand-year, before Jesus, God spoke through prophets, who foretold the events surrounding the coming of Messiah [10] . For example, in Micah 5:3, were told he would be born in Bethlehem. 2 Samuel 7:12 tells us he would be a descendent of King David. Daniel 9:24-27, tells us the exact time when Messiah will be killed and what happens after his death. Isaiah 53, talks about his rejection by his people the Jews, and how his death would pay for the sins of the world.
All this and more was revealed in the scriptures before Jesus came, to prove the identity of the Messiah and his work on the cross. The Old Testament identified the Messiah as God himself who would dwell in flesh. (Isaiah 9:6-7)
Hinduism: Buddha�s basis is Hinduism. Most of the doctrines and teachings of Buddha are steeped in Hinduism. The concepts of Karma, Reincarnation, Samsara and Illusion comes from the Vedic (Wisdom) teachings of the Aryan tribes which migrated into India. Buddha, himself claims to be one in a succession of Buddha�s. According to Buddhism, another Buddha is coming, Maitreya. The concept of incarnations of into the realm of the living is also a Hindu concept. In Hinduism, Vishnu would incarnate himself as an avatar, Buddha is believed to be the 9th incarnation of Vishnu after Ram and Krishna.
So in essence, Buddhism is a sect of Hinduism, without the Caste System [11] and some other aspects. So the question needs to be asked, Is Hinduism inspired? Are the Aryan Vedas inspired? Is there any evidence?
Evidence: The evidence for the Jesus and the Bible is substantial. Archeological and Historical Evidence demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible from a historical perspective. Super-natural evidence demonstrates the Bible as having a supernatural source (The God of the Bible).
The Bible reveals the person of Jesus Christ before he came. Giving us details which could only be fulfilled by the Jesus of Nazareth. The seventy weeks of Daniel gives the exact month, day and year Jesus would be cut off, 539 years before his birth.
The Bible also reveals events in the future, events happening today regarding Israel, Jerusalem and the Jewish people as evidence the God of the Bible is only God, there is no other.
Evidence: The evidence of Buddha being a historical figure is not denied by anyone, nor is the fact that he started Buddhism. The question is was his revelation super-natural. Again, we have to understand, Buddha preached a reformed Hinduism. What he taught was not unlike the teachers of Jainism or Hinduism. His teaching modified some of Hindu doctrines, but in essence Buddhism is Hinduism, without the caste system, and without a focus on Brahman [12]
Texts: The text of the Bible both Old and New Testaments are preserved through manuscripts. The oldest existing Hebrew Manuscripts (The Dead Sea Scrolls) prove the integrity of manuscript transmission. The Greek translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint) also affirm the transmission of the Old Testament.
The New Testament manuscripts we have are dated as early as 50 years (John Rylands) to150 years from its authorship.
Texts: Pali Canon Tripiṭaka (Three Baskets): The Pali Canon is one the earliest existing scripture collections of the Buddhist tradition. These scriptures were recited orally from the time of the Buddha and were put into writing in Sri Lanka around 30 BC. So for 500 years, after Buddha, what he said was not even written down.
The other texts of Mahayana and Vajrayana branches of Buddhism are even less reliable then the Pali Canon and number in the thousands.
Comparing Jesus and Buddha
Buddha/Buddhism
Salvation
Jesus died for our sins, being crucified on the Cross. By our faith in Christ we are given the gift of grace by God. (John 3:16-18, Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 3:23-26)
Salvation is available to all who accept Jesus (Biblical Jesus) and call on his name for salvation.
Buddha according to Buddhist teaching attained Nirvana, exiting into annihilation. The salvation for the Buddhist is to escape into annihilation and end the cycle of reincarnations and suffering. (Samsara). According to orthodox Buddhism, to attain Nirvana you must be a male Buddhist monk.
Truth
Jesus claims to be �Truth�. The only way of salvation. Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. John 14:6
Buddha taught there is no reality in this physical world, all is an illusion. The way out of this illusion is to follow the Buddha�s 4 Noble Truths and the 8 fold path. This will then take the karmic elements toward the point of annihilation.
Person
Every person is a unique individual soul, who will live for eternity, with memory of their life on earth. Each person lives one life, after our life on earth is judgment. (Hebrews 9:27, Luke 16:20-31,) The Lord God created the soul of the person at conception. (Zechariah 12:1)
Each person now living has lived past lives; In Buddhism there is no soul, only Karmic elements that are preserved from reincarnation to reincarnation.
Death
After death, the soul of the individual goes to Heaven or Hell. There is only one life for each person. In this life we need to make our decision where we will spend eternity. According to the Bible there are no second chances after death.
According to Buddhism if a human does not obtain nirvana or enlightenment, as it is known, the person cannot escape the cycle of death and rebirth and are inevitably be reborn into the 6 possible states beyond this our present life, these being in order from the highest to lowest; 1. Heaven 2. Human life, 3. Asura 4. Hungry Ghost 5. Animals 6. Hell (See attached Table)
God
There is one God who created the heavens and the earth, who has revealed Himself in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God, who came to die for our sins on the cross.
Though most Western Buddhist deny the existence of God in Buddhism, this is not so clear cut. As Buddha himself in most ways held Hindu beliefs. According to the Pali Canon, Brahma the creator-god of Hinduism appeared to Buddha after his enlightenment. In some parts of the world Buddha or his disciples are worshipped as gods. Pure Land Buddhism is example where Buddha is worshipped as god and savior. In Buddhism�there are many gods�because Buddhism for the most part is polytheistic Hinduism without and emphasis on Brahman.
Heaven
Heaven as understood by most is the presence of God. When the saved Christian dies, he enters Heaven to be with Christ. (John 14:1-6, Phil. 1:23)
After death, there are according to some Buddhist traditions up to 37 levels of heaven. And you rest there until your karma runs out.
Hell
According to Jesus, Hell is a real place where un-saved souls go after death. (Luke 16:20-31).
Naraka or Neraka, in Buddhism and Hinduism, is the underworld and Hell. In Hinduism, there are many hells, and Yama, Lord of Justice, sends human beings after death for appropriate punishment. Such punishment can be in boiling oil, etc. However, Naraka in Hinduism is not equivalent to Hell in Christian ideology. Naraka is only a purgatory where the soul gets purified of sin by sufferings.
Morality
God is objective truth, God established what is right and wrong. When we violate God�s will this is known as sin. In Christianity there is an objective right and wrong. (Exodus 20:1-17)
Buddhism has no objective right or wrong according to Buddhist. They have right or wrong thinking and actions, which lead to good or bad karma.
Buddhism and Its relationship to Hinduism and Jainism
Same
Yogi: from the Sanskrit root yuj ("to yoke") meaning to yoke with the divine.
Buddha, became a Yogi, after he left the palace and according to Jainism was under the influence of Jain Yogis. Demonstrating Buddhism is a Hindu sect.
Hinduism see Buddha as a Hindu Yogi.
Jainism founder was a Hindu Yogi, showing Jainism like Buddhism is actually Hinduism. Buddhist scriptures record philosophical dialogues between the wandering seeker Buddha and Udaka Ramaputta, who appears to have been a Jain teacher (having taught a doctrine of eight types of karma).
Samsara: , "to flow together," to go or pass through states, to wander
This term is used in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism to describe the cycle of birth and rebirth, prior to Nirvana.
Hinduism is the basis of this term. Both Buddhism and Jainism demonstrate their total dependence on Hindu teachings.
Jainism also has this doctrine.
Karma: Sanskrit: कर्म from the root kri, "to do", meaning deed)
This a purely Hindu doctrine which Buddha based his understanding of attaining the right amount of �Good� Karma. In Buddhism, only intentional actions are karmic "acts of will". The 'Law of Karma' refers to "cause and effect",
Palī kamma in Indian philosophy, the influence of an individual's past actions on his future lives, or reincarnations. The doctrine of karma reflects the Hindu conviction that this life is but one in a chain of lives (saṃsāra)
This is also a foundational doctrine of Jainism.
Reincarnation:
Buddhism there is no reincarnation of the soul, just the Karmic elements. Tibetan Buddhists do believe that a new-born child may be the reincarnation of someone departed, like the Dalai Lama.
The idea that the soul reincarnates is intricately linked to karma, whose first explication was also seen in the Hindu books of the Upanishads. The idea is that individual souls, jiva-atmas pass from one plane of existence and carry with them samskaras (impressions) from former states of being.
In Jainism, gods reincarnate after they die. A Jainist, who accumulates enough good karma, may become a god; but, this is generally seen as undesirable since gods eventually die and one might then come back as a lesser being.
Maya: Sanskrit: ma: not, ya: this, translated illusion. The view world we live in is an illusion.
Buddha, borrowed this concept from Hinduism, and Jainism.
is the illusion of a limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled, a veiling of the true, unitary Self, also known as Brahman.
Same
Relationship between avidya, or ignorance, of one's true self, karma and reincarnation. And the state of illusion, Maya.
The Same as Hinduism, except reincarnation involves only the Karmic elements and only transfers to humans and not animals.
In Hinduism, it is avidya, or ignorance, of one's true self, that leads to ego-consciousness of the body and the phenomenal world. This grounds one in desire and the perpetual chain of karma and reincarnation. The state of illusion is known as Maya.
Same
The Creator God
Though Buddhist claim Buddhism is an atheistic religion that does not have a creator-god, their scripture contradicts this claim. In fact after his enlightenment, two Hindu gods appeared to Buddha. One of these gods was Brahma Sahampati, who is the creator-god, according to the Pali Canon. Samyutta Nikaya VI.1
The Hindus have a pantheon of gods and goddess. The main god is Brahman, the supreme god. The senior god of the hindu trinity Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma was the creator god who appeared to Buddha, according to Buddhist scripture.
The founder of Jainism renounced Brahman. But later his disciples worshipped him as god.
6 Realms of Buddhist Rebirth
In the Buddhist viewpoint, there are 6 different realms we can be reborn into. And beings in each of these states has different degrees of happiness and suffering. These realms are namely:
The Upper Realms
Hell Beings
These Realms represents 6 different states of existence. Though some cannot be readily seen, they can be experienced. These 6 realms also represent 6 different states of mind a person might continually go through.
Gods
It is important to note that in Buddhism, gods are not beings that control or intervene in our daily lives. Rather, they are beings who experience a great deal of happiness as life goes on smoothly for a long time with absence of general suffering. However, this state is only temporal. We all, at one time or other, have had such an experience. When "everything" goes our way, as we wish, we are experiencing a state very similar to the gods.
Demi-Gods (Asuras)
These are beings who are constantly in an aggressive or competitive state of mind. They have great wealth, yet they are always reaching out, striving for more. In our modern world many of us are not unlike them. We live a generally high standard of life. Yet, we are constantly seeking and reaching out for more endlessly.
Human Beings
In this state we experience a mix of happiness and suffering. It is also in this state that we are able to attain Buddhahood. Thus a Buddhist would strive not to be born as a god but as a human, as it is as a human that we are most able to best practice the Dharma.
Animals
The most powerful force acting on animals is ignorance. They are guided mainly by instincts where the preoccupying thoughts are food, sex and material comfort. Many of us have had experiences when craving for food or sex is so strong that we do things that we might regret later. A person who is too preoccupied by these thoughts is thus somewhat bestial or animal in nature.
Hungry Ghosts
In the ghost realm, beings are in a state of neurotic desire, and not having them fulfilled. They are always filled with great hunger or thirst. We have often seen people in less fortunate nations in great hunger due to drought or war. Their living is not unlike beings in the ghost realm. Closer to home, many people experience neurotic craving for relationships and cause great pain to both parties.
Hell Beings
These beings, of all the realms, are the ones suffering from the most pain. These beings suffer from constant acute physical and mental pain. These descriptions fit the details of the ways in which many prisoners-of-war have been tortured.
[1] Nirvana mean �Blown Out� where the flame is blown out and the person exits.
[2] This is the literal teaching of Buddha and Buddhism, the more liberal schools have changed this.
[3] Samsara is the cycle of birth in rebirth in reincarnation of karmic elements of the person.
[4] Tissa Weerasingha, �Karma and Christ: Opening Our Eyes to the Buddhist World,� International Journal of Frontier Missions 10:3 (July 1993):103
|
i don't know
|
In 2014, Illinois University research found higher casualty rates from female-named (what?) due to victims' complacency, compared to having higher perceived fear of male names?
|
The Golden Sparrow on Saturday 12/07/2014 by Golden Sparrow Publishing - issuu
issuu
PAGES: 16+16 (TGS LIFE) | PRICE: `5
PUNE, JULY 12, 2014 | www.goldensparrow.com
SPOTLIGHT
Now, the city bats for football P 13
Experts demystify budget 2014 P4&5
Dabholkar murder: Crime & punishment P 12
University of Pune’s vice chancellor Wasudeo Gade’s goal is to secure a place among top 200 universities of the world See full report on p7
MISSION
Indian Navy LCA to begin test flights soon LCA has already done more than 25 test flights NEW DELHI: The naval variant of India’s indegenous light combat aircraft (LCA) is due to begin ramp trials soon. Avinash Chander, scientific adviser to the defence minister and director general Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), told India Strategic magazine (www.indi-
craft carriers are also located. The station has a 14-degree ramp along with necessary testing sensors and paraphernalia to monitor the fl ights and was specifically built as part of the indigenous LCA-Navy development programme. But as it is a national naval asset, it is shared by the
astrategic.in) that the LCA-Navy had already done more than 25 test fl ights from a runway. As these were successful and met the designated parameters, the aircraft will now be deployed at a naval base in Goa to commence ramp fl ights, probably after the monsoon. Goa, on the Arabian seafront, has a major naval air station, INS Hansa, where the MiG-29Ks for Indian air-
MiG-29Ks for training pilots and fl ight tests. Both the aircraft need the same degree in the ramp, matching the one on INS Vikramaditya, acquired from Russia, and INS Vikrant, now being built at the Kochi shipyard. Chander said that the fl ight tests are being conducted with LCA MarkI to prove certain technologies and to Contd on p 10
PARAKRAM
Common man satisfied with budget 2014
Signpost Infosys net profit up in first quarter
NEW DELHI: Income tax exemptions and the focus on women’s safety and senior citizens has put a smile on the common man’s face. The maiden budget of finance minister Arun Jaitley saw the IT exemption limit for those below 60 raised from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh and from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 3 lakh for senior citizens. It also proposed to use the huge amount of money lying “unclaimed” in saving schemes for the welfare of senior citizens. “For a change the government has given us importance. I welcome the announcements and hope that the government will take proper care of us,” said Kailash Nihalani, a 72-year-old retired teacher living in west Delhi. However, some complained that Jaitley failed to give them any relief from the inconvenience they face at government hospitals and dispensaries. “At times, it’s difficult for the elderly to get proper access to medicines or treatment at the government-run hospitals and dispensaries. There is
Indian IT bellwether Infosys posted a net profit of Rs 2,866 crore for the first quarter (April-June) of this fiscal (2014-15), registering 21.6 percent yearon-year (YoY) and 3.5 per cent sequential growth. In a regulatory filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Friday, the global software major said its consolidated income for the quarter under review (Q1) increased 13.3 per cent YoY and 0.8 per cent sequentially to Rs 12,770 crore. Under the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS), net income rose 15.3 per cent YoY and one percent sequentially to $482 million and gross revenue 7.1 per cent YoY and two percent sequentially to $2.13 billion. The company’s huge cash reserves, however, declined to Rs 29,748 crore sequentially from Rs 30,251 crore. Though the company and its subsidiaries added 11,506 people during the quarter under review.
no provision for getting proper access to medical facilities for us,” rued Dev Singh Bajaj, a 65-year-old writer based in Mumbai. The allocation of Rs 150 crore to improve safety for women in larger cities was applauded by all especially the women in the wake of the horrific December 16, 2012 gang rape in the national capital. Jaitley announced Rs 50 crore for the surface transport ministry to make road transport safer for women in addition to setting up of a crisis management centre for women in Delhi, the money for which will be provided from the Nirbhaya fund. “I hope this money is spent properly on protecting our mothers, daughters and sisters and making our cities safer for them,” said Rajan Singh, a 32-yearold businessman from Chandigarh. While the allocation of Rs 1,000 crore for implementing one rank, one pension scheme was welcomed by those in the armed forces. Contd on p 10
Indian mathematician wins Polya Prize for solving knotty riddle Nikhil Srivastava of Microsoft Research India and his two colleagues have cracked the puzzle that was perplexing mathematicians for more than half a century WASHINGTON: A young Indian mathematician, Nikhil Srivastava, has been named a joint winner of the prestigious George Polya Prize for finding proof of a riddle that had eluded mathematicians for more than half a century. Srivastava of Microsoft Research India and Adam W Marcus and Daniel A Spielman from Yale University will be presented the 2014 George Pólya Prize at the July 7-11 annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in Chicago. The trio had announced the proof of what is known as the Kadison-Singer conjecture, first proposed by Richard Kadison and Isadore Singer in 1959,
HTTP://BLOGS.TECHNET.COM/
BY ARUN KUMAR
Nikhil Srivastava (left) with his colleagues Adam W Marcus and Daniel A Spielman
pertaining to the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics about a year ago. The Pólya Prize named after a Hungarian mathematician credited with fundamental advances in combinatorics, numerical analysis, number
theory, and probability theory, is presented by SIAM every two years. Citing an email received by Srivastava, Inside Microsoft Research blog said the selection committee wanted to recognize him and his colleagues “for the solution to the Kadison-Singer problem.” “Not only have Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava proved an important conjecture, which has consequences in various areas of mathematics, but their elegant methods promise to be applicable to a broad range of other problems, as well,” the citation continued. He wrote a post on the Windows on Theory blog shortly after the conjecture was proved. Contd on p 10
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
Amidst nature lies his passion P6
Infidelity is a double-edged sword P8
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, honourable, compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Touching lives of needy, the Baba Amte way Following in the footsteps of the great social activist, the young and old of Anandvan Mitra Mandal are giving stationery, grain, money and other essentials to NGOs after collecting it from city donors for the past two years
Anandvan Mitra Mandal has been able to send about 250 trucks filled with goods to over 60 NGOs across the state, from Gadchiroli to Mumbai, in the past two years; (left, bottom) Baba Amte
collecting books, stationery, grain, money and other essentials. They give these items to NGOs across Maharashtra, and it reaches the needy of society. “People tend to waste so many things. We believe that instead of throwing things
For Donors
away, give it to us so that we can give it to those who need it badly,” said Bagal, a BA political science student from Fergusson College. Within two years, the response from donors has increased manifold. “We have received an overwhelming response from people so far and have been able to
Contributors can contact 09767588687 or send email to [email protected]
Motivational Devotion Jayanth Kulkarni came to know that he was suffering from cancer after he returned from the camp held at Anandwan and Somnath. The ailment has not deterred him from spending three-four hours at the office daily. “Working in this organisation is therapeutic and helps me forget that I am suffering from a serious disease,” Kulkarni said.
send about 250 trucks filled with such goods to over 60 NGOs across the state, right from Gadchiroli to Mumbai, in the past two years,” he said. Senior citizens like Jayant Kulkarni, Suresh Paranjape and Satish Soman are also lending a helping hand by managing the mandal’s office and accounts. Students handle the collection, bifurcation, packaging and loading of products. Celebrating the birth centenary of Baba, the organisation has set a goal of collecting 100 bags of grain by December this year. They have already crossed the halfway mark for collecting funds. [email protected] and [email protected]
A guiding light for visually impaired
Vikram Dubal has made life easier for the visually impaired, with his 100-year Braille Calendar BY MANASI SARAF JOSHI @GargiManasi When 25-year-old visually impaired Swapnil Padyal was filling the admission form for his music class he found it difficult to tell the day he was born. A 100-year Braille calendar designed and developed by a Bal Kalyan Sanstha teacher has solved his problem. Vikram Dubal, who teaches physics and mathematics, said, “The calendar helps the visually impaired to know the date and day covering 100 years. In fact, they can also plan their future with the help of this calendar.” “A one-year calendar was only available to the visually impaired. They can now plan their holidays or vacations with ease with my calendar. The technique is very simple. With a little training, they will learn that the 1st, 8th, 15th and 29th of any month fall on the same day,” he said.
Dubal, who has been creating applications for the visually challenged for over a decade now, said, “While working with them, I came to know that they face new challenges and difficulties every day. And I always try to create something innovative for them.” Dubal has made Braille visiting cards, roller dice, a goggle that beeps when faced with any obstruction and a white cane that warns against any electrical signal. “Bal Kalyan Sanstha manager Minetta Patil has always supported me in my mission,” he said, adding that corporates and NGOs should also do their bit. The calendar is just two plastic sheets with 40 pockets on one side and a reference page carrying the year and its reference on the other. The calendar also helps students about the leap year, days in a month — 30/31 days. [email protected]
ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
The life of late social worker Dr Baba Amte has inspired the youth from various parts of the country to gather at Somnath in Chandrapur district and take part in the ‘Shramsanskar Chavni Shibira’ (annual youth camp) started by the famous activist. They set aside the period between May 15 and May 22 every year to learn to lead a life dedicated to social work before returning to their respective places to do their bit for the society. In 2012, college students Sandeep Barve, Avdhoot Bagal, Ghansham Yenage, Neha Gadgil, Anuradha Bhuskute, Parshant Borude and Sagar Dumal returned to Pune from the camp to start the Anandvan Mitra Mandal, an organisation committed to social work. These students approached corporator, Mukta Tilak, who helped them by allotting two rooms in Tilak Wada, Narayan Peth, to set up their office. The organisation has been undertaking social initiatives like ‘Snehabhet Prakalp programme’ and
SWAPNIL SONAWANE
ASHOK BHATT AND ISHANI BOSE @ashok_bhatt | @ishani_bose
PUNE
The calendar made by Vikram Dubal (centre) is just two plastic sheets with 40 pockets on one side and a reference page carrying the year and its reference on the other
A friend for life Swapnil, who wants to make a career in music, lost his eyesight due to measles when he was just a year old. But his dedication and determination helped him get a visharad in tabla. “The calendar will help me reserve dates for my music performance so that it does not clash with exam dates,” said Swapni, who is pursuing a degree in Arts. For Varsha Gayakar, who was born blind, the calendar will help her plan holidays with her family in Shahapur in Thane district. “I am a second year BA student at Mhalsakant College and also learning vocals at Pimpale Gurav. It will now be easier to plan vacations with my family,” she said.
Pimpri Chinchwad Citizen Forum
Taking small steps towards a big leap to better living Youths of Pimpri Chinchwad have united to serve society and help the administration improve life in the city by holding meetings and making their presence felt on the online social media BY ARCHANA DAHIWAL @ArchanaDahiwal The huge voter turnout at the recent Lok Sabha polls in Pimpri Chinchwad could partly be attributed to the mass public awareness campaigns carried out by the Pimpri Chinchwad Citizen Forum (PCCF). Riding on the success of social body Nigdi Pradhikaran Citizen Forum (NPCF) set up to improve the way of life in neighbourhood, around 18 such citizen groups have formed the PCCF. These citizens, mostly youngsters working in the IT, media, engineering, government sectors and Right to Information Act (RTI) activists, during their spare time, take part in activities to bring about positive changes in society and city development in the twin town. As in Pune, citizen activism is catching up in the rapidly growing Pimpri Chinchwad, with a population touching 20 lakh as per the municipal corporation figures. NPCF was formed in 2013 with the aim of improving the political and social structure of society. Th is group is now merged with PCCF under the new name of ‘Nigdi Pradhikaran Chapter’. NPCF staffers are working as core team members of PCMC SARATHI (System of Assisting Residents and Tourists Th rough Helpline Information) project. These youths have contributed to the launch of PCMC’s Facebook page, probably the
Body of work
1
NPCF group organised RTI Katta, to spread awareness about the Act, at Nigdi recently
fi rst municipal corporation in the state to have a social media presence. PCCF’s core values are nonpolitical, non-biased, zero tolerance to corruption, accountability, discipline, courage to raise voice and empower citizens. Its main objectives are to form an unbiased platform for citizens to highlight their issues/concerns. The members come from different walks of life who want to work for society in cooperation with the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) and other government agencies. PCCF member Bilwa Deo said, “Th rough PCCF we wish to support good governance in PCMC and other government offices. We will involve all who want to do their bit for community welfare.” PCMC commissioner Rajeev
Objectives • • • • • •
Objecting and opposing improper policies with well-reasoned arguments. Making the government bodies answerable and liable for their actions. Making the dormant citizens aware of the political scenario. To form a pressure group for prevailing good things around us Using social media to spread awareness and share thoughts Link between citizens, politicians and bureaucrats
Focus Areas 1. City Structure 4. Heritage
2. Environment 3. Right to Good Governance 5. Traffic and Transportation 6. Citizens Awareness
Jadhav inaugurated the PCCF on Gudi Padwa (March 31) at the Auto Cluster Auditorium in Chinchwad. Social activists Vishwambhar Chaudhari, Vivek Velankar, Vijay Kumbhar and Vinita Deshmukh were present.
Amol Deshpande of PCCF said, “Our 10-point manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls includes better traffic and transportation, industry specific requirements and basic infrastructure for the middle-class and restoration of
Multi-modal transport at Nigdi: The NPCF has suggested that a multi-modal transport hub should be developed at Bhakti Shakti Chowk in Nigdi as it will benefit road users, including passengers arriving or leaving for Mumbai. The proposed structure, the forum suggested, could cater to transport modes like Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd (PMPML), Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation buses, autorickshaws and provide parking space for private tourist bus operators. The basic facilities such as waiting rooms, refreshments could be provided at the hub. Although Nigdi is an important junction point, there are no facilities at present for either city bus commuters or passengers who wish to travel by state transport buses leaving for Mumbai.
2
Green Pradhikaran concept introduced: NPCF identified Sector 24 to 28 as pilot area and prepared a blue print of Green Pradhikaran. The area is based on
tourist destinations in Maval.” They have praised the citizenfriendly initiatives carried out by former municipal commissioner Shrikar Pardeshi and give him credit for the social body’s formation. PCCF
density control rule. There is a lot of scope to develop a green city. The group suggested that mini biogas plant at various gardens and open spaces will help to dump wet garbage and output of biogas like created slurries will help to maintain gardens and gas for lit garden lights in the evening time.
3
Working core team of PCMC SARATHI project.
4
PCMC approved the group suggestion to create separate official ID for every corporator so that the citizens can raise their concern, suggestion easily and effectively.
5
Its youth team contributed to the launch of the PCMC facebook page, probably the first municipal corporation in state having its official FB page.
6
Organised seminars on Participatory Budget for citizens
is also seeking guidance from Punebased activists. Sajag Nagrik Manch, Jugal Rathi, PMP Pravasi Manch have extended their assistance. [email protected]
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
Dastur Meher Road, named after a distinguished Parsi member of the Poona Cantonment Board, offers a glimpse into old Pune. - Samita Gupta’s Glimpses of Pune’s Heritage - A Mosaic
BY GITESH SHELKE @gitesh_shelke The crude bomb which went off in front of the crowded parking lot of the Faraskhana police station, adjacent to the famous Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganapati temple, has striking similarities with the five bombs planted on Jungli Maharaj Road (JM Road) on August 1, 2012. The make of the bombs, planted on JM Road, is similar to the Faraskhana police station’s bomb. They too had failed to cause serious damage. The bombs used on JM Road had circuits and ammonium nitrate. The same circuit has been found in the recent bomb too. It reveals that the bombs used on JM Road and Faraskhana were made locally. The deployment of the bombs was also similar. The bombs were planted in the baskets of a bicycle at JM Road, while Faraskhana parking bomb was planted in a motorcycle compartment. Police sources said that Yasin Bhatkal, who was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in August last year, had maintained that he was assisted by one ‘Ibrahim’ of Pune. Based on the description provided by the Yasin, the staff of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) prepared a description report of Ibrahim in this February. The description matched a youth based at Ghorpade Peth but whose identity (name) was different. The youth had fled the city before the police could interrogate him. He has not even contacted his wife. [email protected]
Vehicle-lifters turn chain-snatchers Snatching chains has become extremely lucrative and this crime rose by nearly 100 per cent during 2011-13 BY GITESH SHELKE @gitesh_shelke The rising number of chain-snatching incidents and falling figures of vehicles reported stolen have left the police wondering whether thieves are getting smart and taking the easy way to make quick money. The crime department statistics point to an increase in chain-snatching incidents in the city and Pimpri–Chinchwad areas, and a surprising dip in number of vehicle thefts in these localities. Let us crunch the numbers. In 2011, 2,522 two-wheelers, 81 three-wheelers, 212 four-wheelers (cars/jeeps/SUVs) and 58 heavy vehicles were stolen. The number reduced to 2,184 two-wheelers, 70 three-wheelers, 294 four-wheelers (cars/jeeps/SUVs) and 52 heavy vehicles in the subsequent year and further dipped to 2,068 two-wheelers, 69 threewheelers, 213 four-wheelers (cars/jeeps/
SUVs) and 67 heavy vehicles in 2013. And the cases of chain-snatching have risen from 301 in 2011 to 479 in 2012, and 566 in 2013. Assistant commissioner of police
They are now targeting men... The city police have registered about 20 such cases in the past six months. Before committing the crime, the bikeborne culprits create a scene as if it is a road rage. The police have managed to crack 80 of the 160 cases of chain theft lodged at police stations across the city in one year. These cases of robbery have been registered under the different sections of Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860. Probe by the investigating agency has revealed that, in many cases, the victims fi le ‘false’ complaints of gold chain robbery against others to settle personal scores. Assistant commissioner of police
Eminent docu film-maker Prem Vaidya no more Eminent documentary fi lm-maker Prem Vaidya (87) died on the morning of July 10 at his residence in Pune due to cardiac arrest. An accomplished figure in the field of short fi lms, he was the recipient of a number of national and international awards for fi lms such as Man in Search of Man on the Andaman & Nicobar aborigines, a biographical documenPrem Vaidya tary on Swatantrayeer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, an Indo-New Zealand production on the Ganga, Against the Current and fi lms on Baba Amte and Vinoba. The documentary fi lm on Savarkar was released in 1983, the birth centenary year of Swatantryaveer Savarkar. Vaidya joined the Government of India’s Films Division as assistant cinematographer in 1954 and rose to the position of newsreel cameraman, director and producer by the dint of sheer merit. Among his memorable assignments was fi lming the 1965 war with Pakistan in the Western Sector and the 1971 Indo-Pak war in the Eastern Sector which led to the birth of Bangladesh. Vaidya wrote articles in popular newspapers and magazines in English, Hindi and Marathi. His memoir was published by the National Film Archive of India. He also had another book to his credit, Memorable Documentary on Revolutionary Freedom Fighter - Veer Savarkar.
(crime) Prasad Hasabnis said, “The modus operandi is more or less similar to what the suspects use to snatch chains of women victims.” The spots that have mostly seen the 20 incidents of gold chain robbery are Pimpri–Chinchwad, Chatuhshrungi, Sangvi and adjoining areas. The police have verified the suspects but deny the involvement of a specific gang. According to the police, the motorcycle-borne suspects target youths, labourers and other pedestrians at night on deserted roads and isolated spots. Cases of suspects using four wheelers have also been reported. [email protected]
TGS Quiz Contest
dumpers and trucks sold in Vidarbha and Marathwada regions. The heavy vehicles were lifted from different construction sites in Yerawada and Vimannagar areas,” Hasabnis said. Inspector Sunil Pawar of the crime branch had busted a gang of fourwheeler thieves hailing from Uttar Pradesh two years ago. The police officer said that chain-snatchers are regularly targeting victims in Kothrud, Swargate, Market Yard, Sahakarnagar, Yerawada, Vishrantwadi and Peth areas. As the crime is easier compared to vehicle theft, the robbers are even targeting men. “The modus operandi of vehicle theft includes keeping an eye on the vehicle, making a duplicate key or breaking open the door locks, driving the vehicle on roads monitored by the police, preparing fake number plates and changing the chassis numbers before looking out for a buyer,” Hasabnis said, adding that chainsnatching involves no such high risk. Senior crime branch officials state that the cost of a second-hand twowheeler is equal to one or two tolas of gold, thus it is equal in terms of money. There are also cases of youths stealing two-wheelers for joy rides and abandoning the vehicle later. [email protected]
PICTURE FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY
Faraskhana bomb plot similar to JM Road blasts
Graduate of the year P 11
Is Modi courting a dream or nightmare? P 10
(crime) Prasad Hasabnis said, “We suspect that the culprits involved in vehicle thefts have taken to chainsnatching as the crime is less risky and gives easy money.” According to the police, the target areas for two-wheelers are Deccan, Kothrud, Chatuhshrungi, Bund Garden, Cantonment, Wanowrie and Yerawada; and Bund Garden, Chatuhshrungi, Kothrud, Wanowrie and Hadapsar for cars, jeeps and SUVs. The crimes take place during the nights and unattended vehicles on roads and in front of theatres are also lifted. Hasabnis said that the lifters change the number plates and chassis numbers before selling the stolen vehicles in rural areas and other states. Heavy vehicles are sold in Marathwada, Vidarbha and Madhya Pradesh, while two-wheelers find buyers in Satara, Solapur and Latur. Cases of SUVs being sold in Nepal, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have also been reported. “A few years ago, the Yerawada police station had recovered nine stolen
BY BARNALEE HANDIQUE @barnalee Senior scientist and researcher Dr Vinaya Ghate has been conferred with the Dr Janaki Ammal International Award by the International society of Ethno-Botany. A pioneer in ethno-botanical studies in Maharashtra and the former head of Botany Department of Agharkar Research Dr Vinaya Ghate Institute (ARI), Dr Ghate has been associated with this field for 35 years. She has specialised in taxonomy, ethno-botany and bio-diversity conservation and has also worked in distribution, diversity and germ plasm studies in endemic and medicinal plants. A recipient of the Dr Ekbote Prize and Dr VD Vartak Vanamitra award among others, Dr. Ghate has many firsts to her
credit and her research work has been lauded nationally and internationally. She has written over 70 research papers and authored a number of books in Marathi regarding popularisation of science. Among the research conducted by Ghate, the classification of flora into its genetic and chemical compositions, found in rural Maharashtra has been recognised. “My botany teachers in high school and college always encouraged and inspired me to take up this particular subject seriously. That’s how my interest for Botany developed. After completing my graduation from SP College, I got an opportunity to assist Dr. VD Vartak in various projects at the Agharkar Research Institute as a lab assistant in 1975,” she said. It was under Dr Vartak that Dr. Ghate began to explore the subject and began visiting places. Later, in 1980, the EthnoBotany Society of India was founded, that carried out dedicated studies in understanding the relation between tribals and the surrounding flora in rural areas.
nswers to the following 10 A questions are embedded in the stories featured in this edition. Send us the correct answers at [email protected] and be one of the three lucky winners to receive gift coupons. 1. What is the name of the
blog that photographer and trekking enthusiast Pankaj Zarekar writes?
2. What is the name of the group that collects stationery, grain, money and other essentials from donors in the city to
provide them to NGOs across the country?
3. Name the enterprising trio who started the online reservation portal, Hungrytable.in
4. Where did Akash Shetty
pursue his acting course ?
5. Who has designed and
developed the 100-year Braille calender, which has made
Keeping it secure • Park vehicle at a secure place, preferably under electronic surveillance (CCTVs) • Prepare additional locks (petrol lock or wheel lock), ignition lock, accelerator or clutch lock • Install an anti-theft alarm
life easier for the visually impaired?
6. Who recently joined the
Rockefeller Foundation’s Board of Trustees?
7. What will you find in Alia
Bhatt’s dabba during a fi lm
City scientist wins prestigious award Dr Vinaya Ghate has been conferred with the Dr Janaki Ammal International Award by the International society of Ethno-Botany
No. 4
8. Which flavours in beer did
Independence Brewing Co. experiment with?
While she was working there, she completed her MSC in Botany from Pune University. Over the years, she became totally immersed in her projects and Dr Ghate decided to pursue her post-doctoral degree in floristic. Her doctoral thesis was based on, ‘The flora of north-western ghats in relation to social forestry’. After retiring from Agharkar Research Institute in 2011, Dr Ghate joined Nisargsevak, an NGO that works for the conservation of nature. She and her team have been trying to protect the sacred groves in the state from destruction. “Our efforts at Nisargasevak are to create awareness among general public regarding the conservation of forests. We are also focusing on the Western Ghats and hold open workshops for students, teachers of Botany and others,” she said. [email protected]
9. Who are Amir Khan’s favourite authors?
10. Which was the fi rst Marathi fi lm produced by Riteish Deshmukh?
Contest # 3 winners 1. Rakesh Kumar Jain 2. Shrikant Paranjape
With this issue
The winners of the super mom competition organised by Swamini at Tilak Smarak Mandir on July 9
D
S PAGE EW I V
In the issue ON TH EI N
They were trained by Sandhya Dance Studio for the ramp walk and groomed by Asha Rath. The judges included Vaishali Billimoria, Charu Mathur, Bhavisha Bhutty and Sapana Fatak. The super mom winner in Group A was Purvi Shah, Priti Mehta (1st runner-up) and Sonali Agarwal (2nd runner-up); Group B were Dipti Garg, Namita Agarwal (1st runner-up), and Rekha Shah (2nd runner-up). There were various dance performances in the form of Remix Kawali, Bollywood Punjabi tadka, comedy concept and Gujarati folk Ramleela. The programme was sponsored by Kritikas Sarees, Indian Aroma and Maharashtra Electronics. Over 950 women attended the event. [email protected]
ON TH ER E
TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSWeky Women’s organisation Swamini celebrated its seventh anniversary by holding a super mom competition followed by a dance performances at Tilak Smarak Mandir on July 9. Neeta Mehta Saraswati Mehta and Kalpana Maroti conceptualised the super mom contest. The 60 participants of the show were aged between 30 and 55 years. Mayor Chanchala Kodre, corporator Usha Jagtap, Latikaji Sankla, Harsha Khivsara and Seema Jain were present. The mayor praised the group for celebrating motherhood. The participants went through various selection processes to reach the Top 10, before they performed on stage and answered questions asked by the panel.
ON TH ET O
Celebrating super mom with a message
Reliving DDLJ
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
Total expenditure in 2014-15 estimated at Rs 17,97,892 crore; plan expenditure estimated at Rs12,19,892 crore
Excise duty on footwear halved
Quote Unquote The budget has definitely provided a direction for the economic growth for the next 5 years. The emphasis on certain urban infrastructure development projects such as smart cities, metros, housing for the weaker section is definitely a welcome move. —SK Jain, president, MCCIA The budget has covered several policy directions. The government has recognised the need for development and infrastructure, industry, urban and rural development. Facing a fund crunch, the government has thought of creating funds like infrastructure, real estate, investment. — Anant Sardeshmukh, director general, MCCIA Budgetary allocation towards education, in both direct and indirect ways, is quite encouraging. Introducing new medical colleges, including four new AIIMS, seems like a step. Setting aside Rs 500 crore individually for broadband and power supply and lower excise duty on computers will uplift education sector indirectly. Our disappointment is the government’s insistence on adhering to populist ideas of ushering new IITs and IIMs. — Maneesh Upadhyaya, business head, Shiksha.com The announcement of the launch of Kisan TV in the Union Budget is a welcome step that will help farmers adopt new technology and get information on real time basis. Allocation of Rs 8 lakh crore for agriculture credit and strengthening of the supply chain would help reduce the farmers’ stress. The industry requests the minister to reduce excise duty on plant protection agrochemicals. — MK Dhanuka, managing director Dhanuka Agritech Limited
T
he first budget of the Modi government is strong on intent to control inflation, fiscal deficit and bring about long-term stable economic growth. The government expects the economy to grow at 5.4 per cent to 5.9 per cent in this fiscal and at levels of 7 per cent to 8 per cent in the coming years. Inflation target of 8 per cent and 6 per cent for CPI (Consumer Price Index) as adopted by the RBI will be maintained while fiscal deficit is expected to come down from 4.1 per cent of GDP for this fiscal year to 3.6 per cent and 3 per cent of GDP over the next two fiscal years. The budget for fiscal 2014-15 did not deviate from the interim budget presented by the then FM, P Chidambaram in February 2014. F i s c a l deficit is maintained at 4.1 per cent of GDP. The fiscal deficit of Rs 5,31,100 crore is funded by market borrowings of Rs 4,61,000 crore or 86.7 per cent of fiscal deficit. Gross borrowings, including buyback of Rs 50,000 crore is projected at Rs 6,00,000 crore. Gross and net borrowings are higher by just around 0.5 per cent from interim budget levels. There were expectations that the subsidy bill would be brought down, as there was a strong note on wasteful expenditure in the economic survey for 2013-14 that was released on July 9. However, the subsidy bill was actually higher by Rs 5,000 crore from
Allocation of Rs 2.037 crore for creating integrated Ganga conservation mission
Hastkala Academy to be set up with allocation of Rs 30 crore
Thirteen more airports to get 24x7 customs facilities
Jaitley gets Modi govt ready for long innings
Budget 2014 is a lot about the big picture and consolidation, laying down a broad policy indicator, even as it is conscious about the enormity of the task at hand BY SOURAV MAJUMDAR
broadly maintain status quo on tax rates while giving some relief to the ordinary taxpayer and encouraging savings.
L
ike a batsman settling down for a long innings, finance minister Arun Jaitley, who presented the maiden budget of the Narendra Modi government on 10 July, chose to first get used to the playing conditions before coming up with the scoring shots. So it was a context-setting introduction to the Budget, and a few statements of intent here and there, before Jaitley really got down to demonstrating what he had in the bag. Clearly, Modi’s Budget 2014 is a lot about the big picture and consolidation, even as it is conscious about the enormity of the task at hand. Consider Jaitley’s clear statement to that effect: “In the first Budget of this NDA government that I am presenting before the august House, my aim is to lay down a broad policy indicator of the direction in which we wish to take this country. The steps that I will announce in this Budget are only the beginning of a journey towards a sustained growth of 7-8 per cent or above within the next 3-4 years along with macro-economic stabilisation that includes lower levels of inflation, lesser fiscal deficit and a manageable current account deficit. Therefore, it would not be wise to expect everything that can be done or must be done to be in the first Budget presented within forty five days of the formation of this Government.” An impatient market, straining at the bit for some big bang announcements from the finance minister, initially showed extreme disappointment and fell a steep 300 plus points at one stage. But by the time the minister was done with his speech which lasted well over two hours (with a five-minute break in between), the 30-share S&P BSE Sensex was up 450 points: A rebound of 750 points. The Sensex finally closed just 72 points - or 0.3 per cent - lower indicating that the markets did not have any big problems about what they heard from the new FM. The broad themes, if you will, of Jaitley’s Budget were inclusive growth, facilitating investment and entrepreneurship and sending a signal to the global investing community that India will work towards a stable policy environment. Whether one looks at
Do not expect quick returns from market BY ARJUN PARTHASARTHY
FDI in defence sector raised to 49 per cent from 26 per cent
PUNE
Rs 2,55,500 crore budgeted in the interim budget to Rs 2,60,500 crore. The bond market has reacted positively to the FM’s commitment to keep borrowings in check and ten year bond yield is down 5bps from pre budget levels of 8.73 per cent. Outlook for bonds is positive over the longer term given the FM’s commitment to keep down deficit and inflation. However in the short term, bond yields will react to levels of liquidity in the system and movements in global commodity prices. RBI will maintain policy rates at 8 per cent for this year unless there is a sharp fall in CPI inflation, which is around 8.3 per cent levels as of May 2014. The rupee will benefit from an improved BOP (Balance of Payment) position with CAD (Current Account Deficit) down from $88.7 billion to $32.4 billion in fiscal 2013-14. The budget 2014 addresses the need for FII and FDI flows and has calmed FIIs on tax issues and has increased FDI in defence and insurance sectors from 26 per cent to 49 per cent. Higher portfolio flows is positive for the Rupee. The FM had just over a month to prepare the budget and given the time constraints, there has not been any major announcements except for intent on a strong macro economic framework. The markets will have to be patient for the economy to stabilise and grow and not expect quick returns. (By special arrangement with Firstpost.com)
AGENDA FOR INVESTMENT AND REFORM Jaitley’s Budget keeps infrastructure creation as a central pillar, even as it seeks to reach out to rural India and aim for inclusive growth. The creation of roads, waterways, new airports get enough prominence in the Budget speech and is expected to act as a multiplier, benefiting cement, steel, engineering and construction sectors, Dash adds.
Representatives of industry at the budget special meet organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in the city on Thursday
the several proposals on education, healthcare, rural India, the farm sector or the underprivileged, or the broad tax proposals or those related to infrastructure creation and the capital market, it is these three broad themes which dominate Budget 2014. MARKET FRIENDLY What has gone down well with the corporate sector (which was unabashedly rooting for a Narendra Modi government in the run-up to the elections) and the markets is that Jaitley decided to take on the challenge of restricting the fiscal deficit to 4.1 per cent of GDP for FY15, which he admitted was a tough task set out by his predecessor Palaniappan Chidambaram. For FY16 and FY17 the fiscal deficit target has been set at 3.6 per cent and 3 per cent respectively. Additionally, the disinvestment target has been hiked to Rs 58,425 crore. The FM has clearly decided to focus on fiscal consolidation despite keeping the growth and structural objectives in mind. This has pleased Corporate India. Godrej Group chairman Adi Godrej, who has been vocal about the need for more reform and making doing business easier in India, told the media after the budget that Jaitley had addressed some of the key concerns around growth and
investment. Ashish Chauhan, MD & CEO of BSE, says: “In view of the difficult background, the efforts he has made in a short six weeks or less is commendable.” However, industrialist Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico, isn’t too impressed. He says: “I had very high expectations of some path-breaking reform measures. What has come has disappointed me. It seems more like a continuation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) budgets, not the kind I expected.” There’s some good news for the capital markets, though. Chauhan feels his proposal of selling bank shares to retail investors will go a long way in improving market infrastructure and sentiment. He has also given a big boost to entrepreneurial activity by seeking to ease funding for startups. “BSE had requested for an SME fund of Rs 6,000 crore ($1 billion). The FM has not only accepted our request but enhanced it to Rs 10,000 crore,” Chauhan points out. The proposals for deepening of the currency derivatives and corporate bond market, extending the 5 per cent withholding tax to all corporate bonds, the revamping of Indian Depository Receipts into more exhaustive Bharat Depository Receipts are other proposals which the capital market has welcomed.
The move towards a uniform Know Your Customer (KYC) set-up across the financial sector and a single demat account for holding all asset classes are being seen as investor friendly measures which would simplify the process of investing. “Directionally this is a good budget, where the FM has tried to address a whole range of issues that impact our everyday life as well as the ones that could make long term impact and create sustainable economic as well as spiritual growth,” says Sudhir Dash, managing director of Investec Capital Services India. STABILITY OF POLICIES While the Budget does not do away with the retrospective tax provision altogether, the FM’s intent was clear: The government would not “ordinarily” bring about any change retrospectively which brings about a fresh liability. Besides, all fresh cases arising out of the 2012 retrospective amendments would be scrutinised by a high level committee of the CBDT before any action is initiated. This move should go a long way in assuaging fears of foreign investors that India’s policy regime would not see sudden jolts in the future. Towards that end, the Budget also chose to
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SKILLING With job creation as a prime challenge before the new government, one proposal which has gone down well is that of creating the Rs 10,000 crore fund which would provide equity, soft loans or other funding options for start-ups. Another vexed issue, the lower capital ceiling for the definition of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) will also be sought to be raised, according to the Budget. Viewed together, these two steps should be cause for enough cheer for entrepreneurs and small businesses which are starved of organised funding and often see great ideas fall by the wayside. The Budget also proposes to launch Skill India, to skill the youth and focus on employability and entrepreneurship. Analysts, however, have also begun examining the Budget figures carefully with some wondering whether the revenue projections were realistic. The biggest relief for the corporate sector and the markets is that Jaitley has kept fiscal consolidation as a key pillar of this Budget and promised that his proposals would be met without compromising fiscal discipline. How the FM manages to do that will hold the key. The market, which has lauded Modi’s maiden Budget, is fickle and can change its mind pretty quickly. How Arun Jaitley executes his Budget over the next several months will be closely watched by domestic and foreign investors alike. (By special arrangement with Firstpost.com)
How Jaitley beat Pranab, Chiddu with sheer word power BY R JAGANNATHAN
T
he unique feature of Arun Jaitley’s maiden NDA budget was not its content, but its sheer length. It beat by a mile any budget speech by P Chidambararm or Pranab Mukherjee under UPA-2, and left the even longer speeches of two of his NDA predecessors in North Block – Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh, finance ministers in the Vajpayee government of 1998 - 2004 - as also-rans. Jaitley’s speech went on and on, punctuated with one just break of five minutes prompted by the minister’s own exhaustion. His speech was 16,536 words long – beating Yashwant Sinha’s best effort, the 200203 budget with 15,882 words, and Jaswant Singh’s 15,081 hollow. The best effort by the UPA came in 2012-13 – Pranab Mukherjee’s swansong budget - where he struggled to cross 14,000 words (he managed 14,157). Sixteen thousand plus will surely rank among India’s longest budget speeches. People heard Jaitley out patiently for the simple reason that this was his fi rst budget, and everyone wanted to hear it till the end in the hope that something big will emerge. It didn’t. But nothing bad emerged either. The question is: why did Jaitley need to make such a long speech? One clue could be his boss: this budget had to reflect Narendra Modi’s pet themes. There were so many of them that there was no way to avoid a boring speech alleviated only by a
health break. Jaitley delivered the rest of his speech sitting down. Consider the sheer number of things that had to be put in on behalf of his boss, his themes, and elements of the Gujarat model. For example, the term neo middle class. It was dished out in the BJP Gujarat manifesto issued before the 2012 assembly polls. Neo made its
appearance in the very fi rst para of Jaitley’s speech. Then, the BJP campaign theme, Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, surfaced in para five. Granted, budget speeches have to reflect the political priorities of the party in power, especially if the party has just come to power and wants to let the world know it has arrived. Add a superboss with his own ideas and Jaitley had no option but to soldier on with the yak-yak. Next on the list of major themes was the idea of smart cities (which received Rs 7,000-and-odd crore in its very fi rst airing) and urban investments and industrial corridors. Then we had the secular and
cultural messaging – the Ganga cleanup, inter-linking of rivers, religious tourism circuits, et al. All came with their inevitable acronyms. Thus there was Hriday - the National Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana - with Rs 200 crore to spend on “conserving and preserving the heritage characters” of five religious places - Mathura,
Amritsar, Gaya, Kanchipuram, Vellankani and Ajmer. The choice is secular - two Hindu places, one Sikh, one Christian and one Muslim. The Buddhist circuit around Gaya got its own scheme. Apart from the Ganga, Jaitley had more clean-up acts to announce: the Swatch Bharat Abhiyan – a plan to “cover every household with total sanitation by the year 2019, the 150th year of the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi…”. Another Modi slogan that got more than a look-in from Jaitley was the welfare of the girl child. Modi’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana got Rs 100 crore. Not enough to bachao or padhao all betis of India, but no harm in making a start.
And who could forget Modi’s gigantic plan for a statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat – set to be the world’s tallest. During the campaign, Modi had called for the collection of waste iron pieces from all over the country, to be melted and used to build this Statue of Unity. But a little cash from the central budget can obviously help build unity. Jaitley slipped in Rs 200 crore for the Iron Man of India’s steel frame. A national war memorial and a national police memorial got Rs 100 crore and Rs 50 crore. The BJP always has a special relationship with men in arms, and Modi made it a point to allocate money for memorials for the valorous dead. But it was not Modi alone who had to be pleased. The BJPSangh Parivar icons who needed to be extolled and placed on the same pedestal as the NehruGandhi ones could not be left out. Thus we had the Syama Prasad Mookerji Rurban Mission. The folks at North Block apparently had not heard much about this BJP icon, for they managed to misspell his name in the budget papers as Shyama Prasad Mukherji. Mixing the Sangh icon and Gujarat model together, Jaitley also announced the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana to offer 24x7 power to rural areas by bifurcating the subsidised feeder lines from commercial lines. The Sangh, obsessed about the conversion of tribals by missionaries, got a tithe from Jaitley with Rs 100 crore being earmarked for the Van Bandhu Kalyan Yojana. Jaitley clearly had a lot to put into his speech. But if brevity is the soul of wit, verbosity is the bane of budget documents. He should try a shorter speech on 28 February 2015. (By special arrangement with Firstpost.com)
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
Excise duty on cigarettes raised from 11 per cent to 72 per cent
Allocation of Rs 150 crore to improve safety of women in larger cities
Allocation of Rs 100 crore for “Beti bachao, beti padhao” (Protect the girl child, educate the girl child) programme
Allocation of Rs 500 to support Kashmiri Immigrants for rebuilding their lives
Total sanitation in every household by 2019
Free baggage allowance raised from Rs 35,000 to Rs 45,000
CRACKING THE FINANCIAL NUMBERS Well-known financial experts from the city analyse the Narendra Modi Government’s first-ever national budget
Industrialists and experts at the live telecast of the Union Budget 2014-2015 organised by the Mahratta Chamber Of Commerce Industries & Agriculture in the city on Thursday
A step towards fulfilling common man’s expectations BY PRAMOD SHINGTE & MILIND GRAMOPADDHYE Since the next budget is going to presented within a year, in just seven months, this budget is a step towards promises made by the NDA government. Here are some key points:
MAJOR CHANGES FOR INDIVIDUAL TAXPAYERS The income chargeable minimum slab is increased from `2 lakhs to `2.50 lakh For senior citizen the slab has been raised from `2.50 lakhs to `3.00 Lakhs, however there is no change for Super senior citizen tax bracket. The deduction available under section 80C in respect of investment in Life Insurance Premium, PPF etc. is raised from `1.00 lakh to `1.50 lakhs. Consequential amendment is also made in maximum amount of contribution in PPF amount from `1.00 lakh to `1.50 lakhs.
Missing the woods and the trees No major cuts in personal and corporate tax, no reduction in prices of consumer and industrial goods – and yet the business leaders bankers and investors community are calling it a step in the right direction! Somethings don’t look right or do they? The fact that income levels of the people as well as the prices of the commodities mostly stay where they are has prompted some to label this as a status-quo-ist budget; but then one needs to only look at the title of this piece to get a sense of what would happen if we just skim through this budget instead of soaking into it. To begin with, this budget has virtually no surprises. If there’s thing that financial markets hate, it is the feeling of something dark lurking in the corner. Over the last few years, India’s financial credibility was under a dark cloud due to one economic misstep after the other: taxing multinationals retrospectively, changing taxation treatment of Special Economic Zones midway after Developers had invested thousands of crore in the land acquisition, not accounting for full extent of subsidies and presenting doubtful unachievable budget targets etc had resulted in we being labeled as a
country practicing “tax terrorism”. The biggest achievement of this budget is that it’s taken the fi rst baby steps in the direction of restoring the confidence of the business and investor community across the world. Considering the fact that the previous finance minister had left a legacy of a huge fiscal deficit due to populist programmes, loan waivers and subsidies, the present FM had very little leg room to cut the tax rates as the fi rst priority was to achieve the budgeted level of tax revenues and spend on social programmes judiciously so as to maintain the level of fiscal deficit target set by the previous government. At the same time he had to find the money to restart the investment cycle to pull the Indian economy out of its slumber of 5 per cent growth and make it run its full potential of a 9-10 per cent. Foreign investors and rating agencies were - and still are – keeping a close watch whether this finance minister and India manage this tightrope walk without a stumble. So the million dollar question: What is that this budget truly holds that has made the world react with enthusiasm; albeit a cautious one. I
believe that the tone of the budget has made the world come to the quick conclusion that this is a government that holds promise rather than promises. Instead of being a ‘caretaker’ by announcing grandiose populist welfare schemes which fail to reach the targeted populace, this government has chosen to play the role of a ‘catalyst’ by promoting infrastructure projects. This infrastructure theme is predominant in the budget that it spans the length and breadth of the country, encompassing everything from International Convention Centre in Goa to Sports University in North East; from special funds for Kashmir to focus on development of Telangana. It also runs across industries from the core ones like infrastructure and realty for whom access to funding has been made convenient, and simpler tax, labour and industrial laws for manufacturing companies on one hand to steps to boost services and tourism on the other. So this is a budget in which one will need to watch out carefully for both the woods and the trees to be able to really enjoy the shade and fruits which will come from them. (The author is CMD, Posiview Consulting Partners)
The interest paid on housing loan on self occupied property is deductible up to Rs. 1.50 lakhs is now raised to Rs. 2.00 lakhs. To illustrate the savings in total tax due to above changes is shown below.
VINIT VYANKATESH DEO
“The biggest achievement of this budget is that it’s taken the first baby steps in the direction of restoring the confidence of the business and investor community across the world.”
Jaitley sporting enough to think of Indian sport BY VETURI SRIVATSA Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is, perhaps, the first finance minister who paused during his “Super” budget speech to talk of the needs of Indian sport and also doled out fat sums to the youth affairs and sports ministry in his budget allocation. For the 2014-15 fiscal, Jaitley has proposed Rs 1,769 crore for Youth Affairs & Sports as against the previous year’s alocation of Rs 1,207.76 crore. The allocation works out to an increase of 46 per cent and it should be wholeheartedly welcomed by sportspersons in the country, even if it is a small beginning keeping in mind the overall context of Indian sport. Ironically, Jaitley is associated with a sport which is seen as elitist by sportspersons of other disciplines only because of the status the cricketers enjoy and the money they command for their performance. Till recently, he was the vice-president of the Indian Cricket Board and president of the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA). One of Jaitley’s predecessors and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) colleague Yashwant Sinha was also closely connected with sport, as president of the All India Tennis Association (AITA), but not even he thought of Indian sport as much as he has done. Another finance minister, C. Subramaniam was also a president of the AITA when it had Lawn included
in it (AILTA) facilities for and was a training of keen sports accomplished follower but athletes and during his for nurturing time the best talent g ov e r n me nt in shooting, could not archery, boxing, YOUTH AFFAIRS think of sport wrestling, & SPORTS in a big way. w e i g ht l i f t i n g BUDGET 2014 Most finance and various track ministers had and field events. a perfunctory interest Jaitley is right, and one in sports and at least one of them need not go into the reasons, that J&K Chaudhury Charan Singh tried his has a lot of sporting talent which is not best to cut down on the budgetary “finding expression due to inadequate allocation for the 1982 Asian Games, sports facilities”. Cricket all-rounder saying money need not be wasted Pervez Rasool forced his way into the raising flyovers all over Delhi for the India team by the sheer weight of his Games! performance and so has footballer Like in most decisions by this Mehrajuddin Wadoo. government, surely this spurt in the Modi’s stamp could also be seen budgetary allocation will also be in the allocation of Rs 100 crore for credited to Prime Minister Narendra setting up India’s first sports university Modi, more so the Rs 200 crore in Manipur. Like in the case of J&K, allocated for refurbishing the stadiums Modi promised to carry forward Atal in the Kashmir valley. Last week, Bihari Vajpayee’s vision for north-east. Modi was in the valley and talked of If India has to encourage winter every Indian’s desire to see that the sports in a big way, J&K has to be the state made progress and the youth got nodal state along with its neighbour employment. Himachal Pradesh, and if archers, Carrying forward Modi’s boxers, footballers and even hockey sentiments, Jaitley unveiled some sort players have to be promoted, northof a vision document of the government east is the place to concentrate on. for sport. Detailing, he said national He has gone a step further and level sports academies will be set up talked of unique sports traditions for major games in different parts of in the countries and states around the country with international level the Himalayan region by holding an
annual event inviting sportspersons from Nepal and Bhutan. Jaitley has also not forgotten to help the sportspersons preparing for the Commonwealth Games in a fortnight in Glasgow, Scotland, and the Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea, in September-October. The national sports federations will be a relieved lot as the sports ministry expressed its inability to fund the trip to the two major sporting events and asked the federations to pay for their passage. Now the Rs.100 crore will come in handy to bale them out. On paper, most of the decisions announced by the finance minister sound appealing, but it has to be seen when it comes to the implementation and the time-frame to complete the projects. Jaitley deserves to be complimented for sparing so much time in his budgetary speech for sports and the good money he has allotted. A good beginning by the government and at least one veteran sports administrator, also from Jaitley’s party, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, would be happy. He is one sports administrator who has over the years held forth soon after the budget presentation to slam the government for not spending enough on sports. (Veturi Srivatsa is the sports editor of IANS and the views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])
Particulars
1,70,000 35,000
Total Savings in Tax
OTHER MAJOR CHANGES In order to ensure that tax is levied Under the sale of property deal if any 1distributable 8 on proper base the amount of advance is received and such agreement income and the dividends is cancelled and amount is forfeited in that which are actually received by the unit holder of mutual fund or shareholder of the domestic company will be grossed up of the computation of additional tax. In effect, all the companies and mutual funds will have to bear additional burden of tax. For investors receiving dividends there will not be any impact.
2
For unlisted securities and debt based funds of mutual funds for calculation of long term capital gain the period of holding has been increased from 12 months to 36 months. However this provision will not apply to listed securities.
Concept of Real Estate Investment 3 Trust [REIT] and Infrastructure Investment Trust [INVIT] is further
supported by making amendment in taxation laws and if units of such trust are traded at recognised stock exchange then the tax benefit in respect of taxability of capital gain is extended to these units i.e. Long Term Capital Gain will be completely exempt and Short Term Capital Gain will be charged at 15 per cent.
case as per new provision u/s 56 entire such advance will be treated as income from other sources. And in that case provisions of section 51 will not be applicable.
Those amounts which are received 9 back from life insurance for which exemption u/s 10(10D) is not available; the provision has been made for deduction of TDS @2 per cent.
As per the current provision of 10 section 40a(ia), if TDS is not deducted or deducted but not paid then 100 per cent of expense is disallowed. Relief has been extended in the proposed amendment and henceforth only 30 per cent of such expenses will be disallowed.
As per the old provision of 11 presumptive taxes u/s 44AE applicable to transport operator
presumptive tax was required to be paid by assuming the income of Rs 5,000 per month per vehicle for heavy goods vehicle and Rs 4,500/- for others. However, as per the new proposal, it will be Rs 7,500 per month per vehicle.
In case of External Commercial As per the provision of section 4 borrowings by the said [REIT] or, 12 54EC Rs 50 lakh was allowed to [INVIT] the rate of withholding tax is be invested for claiming exemption from reduced from 10 per cent to 5 per cent. Similarly, the dividend received by the trust will be exempt in the hands of said trust.
Benefit of investment allowance 5 u/s 32AC has been extended to small and medium industries whose
investment in machinery is more than Rs 25 crore, they will be allowed to claim investment allowance of 15 per cent of total investment.
Foreign Institutional Investors (FII) 6 having given relief by amending section 2(14) of the Act, whereby a Foreign Portfolio Investor (FPI) makes the investments within the norms fixed by SEBI then such investment will be treated as capital asset.
In an attempt to widening of the tax 7 base and anti-tax avoidance measures amendment is provided in section 115JC
i.e. Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) and accordingly in adjusted total income the investment linked deduction claimed u/s 35AD will be added back. Similarly the benefit of taking tax credit paid under 115JC is allowed.
long-term capital gain and as per the decision of certain courts if such capital gain is accrued in second half of financial year then this investment can be made up to Rs 1 crore. Henceforth it is proposed that no such benefits can be taken by the assessee and deduction will be available only up to Rs 50 lakh.
By selling one house or any other 13 property assessee can invest in another house u/s 54/54F and claim
exemption from long term capital gain. Certain courts have taken view that such benefit can also be extended for house purchased outside India but as per the new amendment it is proposed that such new house has to be necessarily purchased in India. The finance minister has promised that henceforth no retrospective amendments will be made in the Income Tax Act, and also made a statement that past retrospective amendments will be scrutinised by high level committee, this will boost the confidence of foreign investors. (The writers are well-known chartered accountants from the city)
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
Amit Shah appointed BJP chief: Is Modi sidestepping RSS? P 12
Why this needless controversy over Sai Baba? P 14
PUNE
In 1972, the Electronic mail was introduced by Ray Tomlinson, a US computer programmer.
City Blogger of the Week
Amidst nature lies his passion
Top 5
Edu Websites Pagalguy.com has been providing necessary resources for MBA applicants since 2002, in order to make their efforts and hard work fruit-
Bhatkanti Unlimited is a very popular blog born out of photographer and trekking enthusiast Pankaj Zarekar’s love for nature
If you are a regular trekker and are also interested in photography, you must have heard about Bhatkanti Unlimited. This blog is very popular with trekking communities for the stunning photographs and travelogues. The blog has so far received more than 1,50,000 hits and a couple of awards too. However, Pankaj Zarekar, the man behind the blog, feels that it has much more to offer than just photographs. “I know the photographs play a major role in popularising the blog, but it’s not just about photography or trekking. I have taken the liberty to express my thoughts on current affairs and on some historical events too,” says Zarekar. A resident of Kharadi, Zarekar was introduced to the Sahyadri mountains by his father when he was barely nine. It was much later that he became passionate about this mountain range. “During my college days, I couldn’t afford any long treks and my expeditions were limited to the nearby forts like Lohagad or Visapur. The serious trekking, photography and blogging started simultaneously around 2006, and now it has become a habit for me. I have completed more than 60 treks and bike journeys covering almost 1,00,000 km on the untrodden paths in the Sahyadri and the Konkan region,” he says. ABOUT THE BLOG Zarekar’s initial blog posts were just informative, he says, which he would upload typically with a few photographs. “I just had a point-and-shoot camera that time, so the photo quality was not satisfactory. However, gradually, I started getting inquires about different places, on ways to get there, what to see, food arrangements to be made etc. With time, I realised that posting raw information is a very common phenomenon and so
ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
BY ASHISH PHADNIS @phadnis_ashish
ful. It consists of MBA forums that so far have over 3.5 million discussion posts on MBA preparation and admissions. Making right education related decisions is not always easy. A wrong decision can ruin one’s entire future. However owing to the absence of a standard forum such important education related and career-driven information cannot reach out to the masses. Shiksha.com acts as the perfect platform to get these queries replied. Educationobserver.com is one of the pioneering Indian portals on education serving students all over India with timely educational news from various universities and colleges, scholarship news, discussions on various subjects and more.
Prakash Zarekar, an avid photographer and trekker, narrates his trekking experiences through his blog posts. Apart from travelogues, his blog also guides new trekkers.
gradually started posting my first-hand experiences and thoughts about the nature on the blog,” he says, adding that this change received a huge response and since then he has been trying to give a human angle to his posts. Simultaneously, he also invested a large sum of money in a professional camera kit. “The readers welcomed the improved version of my blog and kept motivating me to update it further,” says Zarekar. His work was acknowledged in 2012, when the blog received the first prize in the trekking blogs’ competition, conducted by Girimitra, a Mumbai-based trekking
e-ticketing to revamp railways reservation Railways will improve reservation capabilities Railway Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda Tuesday said the current railway reservation system will be revamped through the use of next generation e-ticketing system. The minister, presenting his maiden budget in the Lok Sabha, said instruments like ticket booking through mobile phones and post offices will be promoted. The minister said the railways will improve the reservation capabilities through e-ticketing to support 7,200 ticket bookings per minute from 2,000 tickets per minute and allow 120,000 simultaneous users to use the system at
any point. The minister said the facility of coin-operated automatic ticket vending machines will be introduced on an experimental basis and efforts will be made to provide the facility of buying platform tickets and unreserved tickets over the internet. Combo-t ick ing like parking-cumplatform tickets will be launched to facilitate the passengers. He added that online booking facility of railway retiring room will be extended to all the stations during the course of the year. IANS
“Comboticking will be launched to facilitate passengers.”
Five dangerous apps teenagers should avoid using TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSweekly Parents are always vary about their children’s online activities. Quick heal lists five dangerous applications to parents from which your teenagers should stay Sanjay Katkar away. Kiki Messenger, Voxer, Yik Yak Snapchat, Poke Tumblr and Whisper. Sanjay Katkar, chief technology
officer, Quick Heal Technologies, said, “Kids want an environment that is not monitored and unregulated. While there is nothing wrong with that, and both sides are justified in their actions, we have identified certain apps that take things a little too far, in our opinion. These dangerous apps for teens are not risky by nature, but it is important to monitor your child’s activities on them as the potential for danger over these apps is higher than others”. [email protected]
organisation. The blog won a prize last year too. Zarekar’s imaginary piece on how Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj would have celebrated Diwali received an overwhelming response with more than 13,000 hits in a single day.
SOCIAL ASPECT Zarekar’s passion for travelling is not just limited to adventure. For the last couple of years, he and his group of friends have been distributing books, stationery, clothes and Diwali sweets in the villages situated at the base of various forts. “When we visit forts in remote areas, we experience warm and unconditional hospitality from these villagers. So as a part of our gratitude towards them, we started distributing things in the villages,” he said.
FUTURE PLANS Apart from the Sahyadris, Zarekar loves the snowy mountains of the Himalayas. His Leh-Ladakh trip last year was memorable and he now plans to trek in that region. “I have Chadar and Zanskar valley treks on my list. Hopefully I will complete at least one before next season. I am also working on a documentation project of medieval temples in Maharashtra along with my friend Dhruv Mule,” he says, stating that a photo exhibition and documentation of forts are among his big plans ahead. [email protected]
Indiastudychannel.com offers reliable and all-inclusive information
about schools, colleges, institutes and universities all across India.It also gives students a chance to earn proceeds for providing content. Indiabix.com provides an opportunity to learn and practice aptitude questions, (data interpretation, arithmetic and verbal ability questions) prepare for interviews, competitive examination and entrance tests.
‘Your body language shapes who you are’ Our body language affects not just how others perceive us but also how we perceive ourselves, said social psychologist, researcher and Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy at a Ted Global Conference. Ishani Bose presents a synopsis @ishani_bose
“We are really fascinated with body language. And we are particularly interested in other people’s body language. We are interested in an awkward interaction, or a smile or a contemptuous glance or even at an awkward wink or a handshake. When we think of non-verbal communication, we think of language. When we think of language, we think of communication. When we think of communication, we think of interaction. And it is not just others who are judging us or are influenced by our non verbal communication, but it is we who are deeply influenced by it---our thoughts, our feelings and our physiology.” With that information, social psychologist, researcher and professor at Harvard Business School, Amy Cuddy, began her talk at the TED Global Conference in 2012--- ‘Your body language shapes who you are’, which is perhaps one of the most viewed TedTalks till date. (http:// www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_ body_language_shapes_who_you_ are#t-825960) At the conference, Cuddy threw some light on how our body language not only affects how others perceive us but also how we perceive ourselves. Non-verbal expressions of power and dominance in her MBA classrooms at Harvard is what got her interested in the subject and further led her to study the impact of power poses in how people are perceived. A power pose, Cuddy says, is when an individual makes his/her posture expansive and stretches out his/her arms. One of the examples that she uses is that of the “Wonder
woman” pose with one’s hands on ones hips and the other of the victory position. On researching it further, Cuddy learnt that power posing can increase one’s testosterone (the dominance hormone) and decrease the cortisol level (the stress hormone) in the brain, and impact one’s chance to succeed. The opposite happens when one is in a low power or a weak position. “The idea is that our bodies change our minds and even tiny tweaks in our posture can lead to big changes,” Cuddy says. So what happens when one takes a role change--- a tiny manipulation in the way one behaves? Cuddy asks a very pertinent question to the
audience: “Can you fake it till you make it? Can you fake it just for or a little while so that you can experience an outcome which is more powerful? Can power posing just for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways?” Th is point she elucidates with her own life’s experience. Cuddy who had met with an accident at an early age,
suffered a head injury because of which her IQ had dropped by almost two standard deviations. “ It was a very traumatic experience. I had always been smart and was always referred to as a gifted child but the accident changed everything forever. When your identity has been taken away from you, you know it’s a struggle of a different kind. After the accident, I was left feeling more powerless than ever. I had to work really hard to get this far,” she says. All through the way, from college to Princeton to Northwestern to Harvard, Cuddy said, she had to fake it and try to be someone she wasn’t. “I wanted to quit but my angel adviser, Susan Fiske, kept me going. Every time I felt like giving up she would say, ‘You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you’re staying. You are going to do what it takes to be here, until you have this moment where you say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this’.” she says. She ends the conference with a statement, that truly gets one thinking. “Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalise it.” [email protected]
WHAT ARE TED TALKS? TED is a global platform where people from different fields come together and speak for 18 minutes or less about their respective disciplines. It was started in 1984 by a non-profit organisation called Sapling Foundation, under the slogan — Ideas worth sharing. Initially it organised conferences where matters related to technology, design and entertainment merged, but today it includes varied topics such as business, photography, art, science and the like.
ED UCATION
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
CARE ER
“Education for him means that process by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, and intellect is sharpened, as a result of which one can stand on one’s own feet.” - Swami Vivekananda
“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.” - John F Kennedy
University of Pune: Mission Parakram
VC Wasudeo Gade’s goal is to secure a place among top 200 universities of the world The University of Pune has embarked on an aggressive push to raise standards by entering into strategic tie-ups with leading universities in the USA and Canada. At the same time, improving campus placements and generating employment are top priorities, says vice-chancellor Professor Wasudeo Gade in this exclusive interview with Manasi Saraf Joshi TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSWeekly
MoUs with American universities
In a major effort to enhance standards at the University of Pune (UoP) internationally, vice-chancellor Professor Wasudeo Gade has chalked out a multi-pronged strategy that focuses on curriculum upgradation at the international level, tie-ups with leading western universities, tieups with industry for training and research, employment generation and improvement in the quality of teaching at the UoP. All these steps are being taken to find a place for the UoP within the top 200 universities of the world. “Designing online courses and tieups with foreign universities are the need of the hour, if we want to achieve the set target of finding place in the top
University of Massachusetts: Social sciences, teachers training University of California: Science and Research University of Illinois: Science and Research Cartel University, Canada: Modeling and Stimulation
New identity for UoP Professor Gade expressed satisfaction over the widespread support to the renaming of the UoP as Savitribai Phule Pune University in honour of the great reformer. The senate members in October 2013 had passed the resolution which was pending for a decade now. Later, it was also passed by the Management Council.
UoP Vice Chancellor Professor Wasudeo Gade
Biology of CSIR in Delhi between 1983 and 2003. Prof. WN Gade took over as ViceChancellor on May 2012. “After taking charge, I was the fi rst VC to increase the number of tie-ups with foreign universities. I am now taking this to the next level and have signed various MoUs with universities
in USA and Canada,” he said. Having recently returned from a foreign tour, Gade said MoUs have been signed between UoP and the top universities in California and Illinois for research in science and a few courses. An MoU has been signed with the University of Massachusetts for collaboration in Social Sciences,
with the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) for Science and Management faculty enhancement. “In the Science stream, we have focused on Physics, Chemistry, Computer Stimulation, Lab Sciences
3,000 appear for Japanese proficiency test Job opportunities on the rise in MNC sector, interpretation & translation services BY PRACHI BARI @prachibari More than 3,000 students from the city took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) at the Sinhagad College of Engineering recently. Conducted by the Japan Foundation, the three-hour test on vocabulary, grammar and listening was organised by the Japanese Language Teachers Association of Pune (JALTAP). This examination has five levels with the fourth level being the lowest and the first level being the most difficult. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has been offered by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services (formerly Association of International Education, Japan) since 1984 as a reliable means of evaluating and certifying the
Japanese proficiency of non-native speakers. “As JLPT is a Proficiency Test for Japanese Language, it acts as a certificate for the applicants undertaking the test, confirming their excellence in this foreign language. This further acts as a strong base for the job prospects for these applicants,” explains Shailey Goyal, assistant programme officer, The Japan Foundation. In view of the rising numbers of students from Mumbai and Pune, the foundation decided to look at Pune as a centre. The Sinhagad Institute is among those institutes taking in a higher number of examinees for the JLPT since 2002. Students come from Nagpur, Satara, Mumbai, Nashik, Kolhapur and Aurangabad for the test centre in Pune,” said Vinay Sathe, Japanese language teacher and Head of Department, (Japanese) Tilak
[email protected]
Considering the increasing demand for the Japanese language in MNCs, more than 3000 students took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) at the Sinhagad College of Engineering, recently
Life’s Lesson
Kaizen
A career in the entertainment industry calls for hard work
After my Class XII exams, my parents enrolled me in a dance camp. At first I was furious as I wanted to play basketball and not dance. But after completing the camp, I realised that dancing was something I was good at. My instructor Terence Joseph also encouraged me to take it up professionally and like they say the rest is history. I have been dancing for over a decade now and can’t think of a better career option to be in. I went on to complete an acting course from Institute of Creative
Excellence (ICE), an acting institute run by Balaji Telefi lms which helped me bag a character role in ‘Aasman Se Aage’, a daily soap on Life OK! My first project as a choreographer was as an assistant on the sets of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ from the Emraan Hashmi starrer ‘Shanghai’. From there to now I have definitely come a long way in terms of projects but I still have a lot to learn. This industry teaches you to be humble and patient. If you are creative and are ready to work hard, only then can you survive here. For the past one and a half years, I have been assisting Ranju Verghese, Bollywood choreographer, who earlier
“This field has changed my perception about life and how to deal with situations.”
[email protected]
Maharashtra Vidyapeeth. After gaining proficiency in the language, job opportunities can be tapped in areas such as translation and interpretation. Also, a vast amount of literature is being translated into Indian languages on popular demand. “The applicants are increasingly looking for a career in MNCs in India and even in Japan, especially in the fields of automobiles, mechanical, IT etc,” said Goyal. Demand in the R&D sector in Japan has also risen tremendously in the last few years. Tejashree Kirpekar, who is pursuing her second year Bachelors in Japanese, felt that Japan is opening up many avenues for language lovers. “One could look at a lucrative career as a teacher and even the idea of visiting Japan and working as a translator is a great opportunity.”
Pursuing My Career
BY AKASH SHETTY
the main building will be completed,” he said about this work which has been much-criticised as it has been pending for nearly five years now. A completely modernised canteen, a world class international hostel for research scholars, a fully equipped hostel with modern amenities for PhD students, a good auditorium, a social science complex and Science Park are on the cards. “There is a long way to go and the need of the hour is to improve the academic credibility of the varsity,” he stressed. “A number of steps have already been taken towards this end, which has led to the significant rise of ‘H’ index (the index which shows the graph of academic excellence of the varsity), rise in the number of academic grants from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and similar grants for colleges and departments,” he said. Decisive steps have also been taken to deal with the scams in the exam department. “Automation in the examination department has been successful and has helped remove the tainted image of the varsity,” he said. “As a part of recent initiatives, question papers are being sent online to colleges and from the coming semester computerised answer-sheets checking will be introduced for the Pharmacy faculty, he said. Under this, the answer-sheets would be scanned and sent to the teachers for checking online”, he added.
SWAPNIL SONAWANE
200 universities in the world,” Professor Gade said in an exclusive interview to this newspaper on Wednesday. Gade did his graduation from Nagpur University and post graduation and doctorate from Jahawarlal Nehru University, New Delhi in Life Sciences. He was a post-doctoral fellow in France and Sweden between 1988 and 1990. He is a recipient of Lupin Endowment Award instituted by UICT, and served as scientist in the Institute of Genomics and Integrative
Penn State University: Online curriculum, joint research projects
and Bio Active Molecules”, he said. These tie-ups will include online courses ranging in duration from six months to two years. We are planning to start this by January 2015,” he added. “These MoUs will cover faculty and students exchange, joint research projects and faculty enhancement,” Professor Gade said. Besides, students who opt for the Aviation course which was started in the last academic year will have the option to do it either from Germany or USA at Dean International Miami,” he said. The vice chancellor, who is passionate about his mission, said in many university departments, a strong tie-up with the industry has been introduced for training and research. “I want to step this up and bring in many more industries to the campus,” he said. Keeping pace with new trends in education is an important focus area for the UoP. One important focus area is enhancing the quality of teaching. “When we talk about taking the varsity to new heights we also need to make our teachers equipped with the latest knowledge and training,” he said. Gade said that he has discussed with foreign varsities various opportunities for students and faculty members to raise their capabilities for the global competition. He said that the UoP is not focusing on academic growth alone but also better infrastructure at the campus. “I am confident that within the next seven to eight months, the restoration work of
worked with Bosco-Ceaser. With him my choreography projects were Shilpa Shetty’s ‘Dishkayoon’ and ‘Karle Pyaar Karle’ by Suneel Darshan. As an actor I featured in Airtel regional and Idea advertisements. The most memorable moment of my journey till now has been with Bollywood actor Sridevi. She showed me that no matter what you achieve one should never forget where they started from and who they learnt from. This field has changed my perception about life and how to deal with situations too. I am too young to give advice but if you want to make a career in the entertainment field then you have to move base to Mumbai. Because that is where everything from shootings to auditions take place. Also, hard work is a must and you must not expect an overnight miracle. Unlike the way it is portrayed, this is a career where you get to learn a lot and have scope to achieve your dreams as well.
Implement and practise Kaizen in your life to experience positive change Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of ‘continuous improvement’ and was fi rst applied in the process of manufacturing, engineering and business management. It can however be applied to any area of our personal and professional life and can bring about dramatic results while helping us realise our goals and become efficient. Kaizen was first implemented in Japanese firms after the crushing defeat in the second World War. It was influenced partly by the lessons drawn from American business management scholars and professionals. Kaizen has many followers in Pune. The Leading Edge Group lists the top 10 principles of Kaizen as follows: Th row out all your old fi xed ideas on how to do things No blame - treat others as you
want to be treated Th ink positive – don’t say can’t Do not wait for perfection, 50 per cent improvement now is fine Correct mistakes as soon as they are found Don’t substitute money for thinking, Creativity before Capital Keep asking “why” until you get to the root cause Better the wisdom of five people than the expertise of one Base decisions on data not opinions Improvement is not made from a conference room!
RE LATIONSHIPS “Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
“Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.” —Amelia E Barr
Infidelity is a double-edged sword Many individuals who cheat on their spouses or loved ones also feel severe self-reproach and guilt
A one-night stand, a fling, or even a long-standing affair becomes a bitter pill to swallow, especially if they never ‘intended’ to hurt their spouse
BY RITU GOYAL HARISH @ritugh Sometimes love is all it takes for two individuals to bond. Sometimes it only takes love to drive them apart. When a man or woman cheats on their loved one, by being physically intimate with someone else or by being involved in an emotional entanglement, they irrevocably harm a relationship that had been precious to them when they started on the journey of life together. To the partner who was cheated on, the discovery of a love affair and their partner’s indiscretion is earthshattering. From losing sleep to losing faith, it’s a journey that takes them spiralling down an abyss of complicated emotions. Heartache and heartbreak become more than just two words. A cheated spouse questions every thing; the very foundation of their relationship, what went wrong and why, blaming the other ‘woman’ or ‘man’, looking for the reasons that led their partner to look beyond the confines of their wedlock. Was it complacency? Was I too trusting? Am I a bad partner, a bad spouse, a bad parent? There is an immense sense of loss. The fear of financial crisis, the shock, the hurt, the anger and the obsession “Is he/she with her/him right now?” can be all-consuming. Values are questioned and allegiances tested. Families are compelled to take sides and when children are involved, there is a huge price to pay. On the other hand, many individuals who cheat on their spouses or loved
When someone cheats on his or her loved one, they irrevocably harm a relationship that had been precious to them
ones, also feel severe self-reproach and guilt. A one-night stand, a fling, or even a long-standing affair becomes a bitter pill to swallow, especially if they never ‘intended’ to hurt their spouse or partner by their actions.
Marriage counsellors and psychologists say that humans react in a textbook style to the shock of being cheated on. First there is anger, then there are emotional outbursts, followed by grief and sadness, and lastly, there
is the inherent need to take action – either the partner chooses to reconcile or seek separation/divorce. After the confrontation, the cheating partner may be forced to take a stand – to choose, to act upon their
choice and to let go. But many can’t let go of their life ‘as they know it’ - their children, their home, the comfort of their surroundings and even the spouse they cheated on. Whether they cheat out of
disinterest in their marriage, or merely for fun (they wanted romance and excitement), the deep repercussions of seemingly innocuous liaisons disrupts their lives completely. They live in their own private hell suffering the pain of knowing that they have betrayed their partners, broken the hearts and dreams of their loved ones and perhaps even lost their own souls along the way. Infidelity is a double-edged sword and neither person can survive it unscathed. Overcoming infidelity is not impossible but it is a slow and intense process that requires both partners to show commitment to their relationship. [email protected]
When saying ‘no’ It’s better to make a commitment empowered women and do it than saying “I’ll try” The Way Forward with compassion and hope
BY SHILPA RAINA
Are you unable to solve a problem that is bothering you? Write in to us at [email protected] BY C. RAVINDRANATH Last week, we dealt with “What can I do?” This week, let’s take up another common expression all of us use frequently: “I’ll try.” The best examples can probably be found in the dusty corridors and dingy offices of government establishments where people don’t do their jobs – they do favours for people. “I’ll try” is often an indication that the job will not be done. It could also be a hint for other considerations. Forget the government clerks. What do we mean when we say, “I’ll try my best?” We only promise efforts – not results. We open up an escape route. It becomes easy for us to say later, “What did I say? I said I’d try my best. I tried. If it didn’t happen, what can I do?” This is justification. This is excuse. The fact is, we neither made a commitment nor did we stick to a promise. We indicated either lack of confidence or willingness. We said we would try. We perhaps did. Trying is not doing, for as long as we try, the task is not over. The process is incomplete as long as the effort goes on. My friend has been ‘trying’ to quit smoking for the past two decades. He is still ‘trying’. Can we therefore go beyond just trying? On a training programme, one of the participants said he would try to do something. The trainer threw his pen down
joined hands with an NGO to prevent prostitution grow in their area. “When you As a child-bride, activist Sampat Pal’s sell a girl, you sell her dream. I might not mother-in-law sternly instructed her to have have faced any discrimination, but these dinner only after everyone in the family had girls were too scared to have said ‘no’. They eaten. She agreed, but a part of her rebelled needed a voice, and I became their voice,” against this gender discrimination. And a Fatima told IANS. day came when she could take it no more These three women activists were in the and ate before everyone else did. That very capital recently for a gender conference where moment forever changed the course of her they all stressed on the fact that a moment life. comes in everyone’s life when they decide to “My mother-in-law was furious. She take reins of life in their own hands and say scolded me, but I asked her to give me one ‘no’ to the discriminators and abusers. good reason why I should eat in the end? “It is that very moment when the mind Where is the rule written?” becomes free of any fear Pal told IANS. or outcome, and a person This one step led to the transforms,” said Tripathi, making of 200,000 grassrootswho has participated in the women activists “Gulabi TV reality show ‘Bigg Boss 5’. Gang” that fights against These women have become oppression. It is originally icons in their respective from the Bundelkhand region social-gender based work. of Uttar Pradesh, and is active The 55-year-old Pal who since 2010. comes from a small village in Things were slightly Uttar Pradesh, first was in the different for 35-year-old news when a documentary transgender Lakshmi fi lm-maker Nishtha Jain - Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi Narayan Tripathi, who was made a fi lm ‘Gulabi Gang’ sexually abused by a close (2012) on the ‘pink-sari gang’ family member, and was being - as Pal chose this colour to mocked for her feminine features. But the make the gang identifiable and leave its own unconditional support of her family had kept mark. her going all through, till she had the guts to But, the gang made more news and a few say ‘no’ to her abuser. controversies with Madhuri Dixit and Juhi “I was sexually abused by somebody who Chawla starrer ‘Gulaab Gang’ (2014) which was a part of our family. It was difficult for was based on the workings of the gang. me to even go to school and college. People “To protect ourselves, women have to stay used to call me ‘chhakka’, ‘gur’ and what together in a group and stand up for their not,” recollected Tripathi who champions rights. If she is empowered, only then she rights for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual can make a difference in her life,” Pal said. and transgender) community. Tripathi, however, strongly feels a woman “Whichever man came to my life, abused has to first love herself before she thinks of me. At that time, I was a very different others. “In life, what we require the most is person from what I am today. I could hardly love, unconditional love. But the problem is, speak then. I was not confident. One fine as women, we don’t love ourselves enough. day, I got the guts to say ‘no’. After that no, Women love their children, their husbands, my whole life changed,” Tripathi told IANS. their homes, their money, their makeup, but The story of Fatima Khatoon is also how much do they love themselves?” she somewhat the same. She was married to a asked. “Women need to love themselves in trafficker and her house was a brothel. Rising order to feel loved,” she concluded. in protest, she helped a few girls to flee and IANS
“Women need to love themselves in order to feel loved.”
Trying is not doing, for as long as we try, the task is not over
“When we can do something, why don’t we say “I will?”
and asked the participant if he would follow his instructions. On receiving an affirmative nod, he asked him, “Please try to pick up the pen.” When the young man picked up the pen easily, the trainer asked others what he had asked him to do. “Try to pick up the
pen,” they chorused. “What did he do?” “He picked up the pen.” “What did I ask him to do?” “To try to pick up the pen, not pick it up.” Getting the point, the lad bent down, put his hand on the pen but did not pick it up. After the laughter had subsided, the trainer explained, “He now followed my instructions. He ‘tried’ to pick up the pen. The pen will be picked up only when he goes beyond just trying and actually does the task. Can we therefore stop saying ‘I’ll try to do it’ and start saying ‘I will do it?’ Can we make a commitment – give
our word?” This is not to say we can promise anything. However, when we say “I’ll try,” when we know we can do it or have a fair chance of doing it, then can it be just a ploy to avoid doing it and creating an ‘honourable’ escape route? When we can do something, why don’t we say “I will?” How long are we going to keep trying? (The writer is a multi-faceted personality who believes in responding with compassion and hope to the difficult situations in life.)
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
“If you want to get somewhere, you have to know where you want to go and how to get there. Then never, never, never give up.”
— Norman Vincent Peale, author
Conference on building famous brands A workshop on building successful brands that assume high value and significance in any business has been organised by the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce of India (FICCI) from 10 am to 6pm, on July 18.The conference will be held at Hotel Hyatt Regency and for the first time in Pune, some eminent brand experts and industry leaders will address the audience. The conference will delve into brand strategies, the challenges, case studies and the role of advertising and media in building successful brands. The event will also deliberate on the growing importance of the digital medium and the innovations happening in this area to augment reach and consumerism. The event will be useful for CMDs, CEOs and CMOs, professionals in the field of marketing and branding, advertising, media, public relations, digital and direct marketing agencies, media houses and market research organisations, brand and marketing consultants, SMEs and startups and budding entrepreneurs. For details contact Varsha Mahajan (MCCIA) on 020 - 25709223 / 25709000 or email [email protected].
Free event to popularise govt’s scheme MCCIA’s SME committee will be holding a free workshop between 3 pm and 5 pm on July 16, to generate awareness about the state’s Package Scheme of Incentives (PSI). Participants may attend the event at Pune or at Bhosari after confirming participation by email with Sandhya Acharya at [email protected]. The Maharashtra government is providing incentives to the industry through PSI introduced in April 2013 but the response is pretty low. The benefits available for applicable MSMEs are in the form of electricity duty exemption, power subsidies and industrial promotion subsidies, VAT subsidies and are in the range of 30 per cent to almost 80 per cent of the capital invested depending on the zone of investment. The discussion will be led by Bhavesh Thakkar, partner in MZSK & Associates and chartered accountants. The firm is a part of BDO International Network, which is the fifth largest accounting network in the world.
Workshop on share market tomorrow Pune Nagar Wachan Mandir will be holding a workshop on ‘Share Market’ at 10 am on Sunday. Chandrashekhar Thakur, an economist and professor of investors’ education at the Central Depository Services (India) Ltd (CDSL), will be the key speaker. With over 46 years of experience in Bombay Stock Exchange, Thakur will elaborate on the style of functioning of market, selection of broker, D Mat, IPO, Pay In – Pay out, T + 2, online trading, protection to investors of share market and Rajiv Gandhi Equity saving scheme in a common man’s language. The workshop will be held at Pune Nagar Wachan Mandir, 181 Budhawarpeth, near Citypost.
Share Market
– Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder
It’s sweet success for this enterprising trio Rishab Oswal, Aditya Ghanekar and Akshay Kothawale’s one-yearold online restaurant reservation portal Hungrytable.in is serving profits now
ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
Signposts
“If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.”
BY ISHANI BOSE @ishani_bose They are young, talented and filled with zest for doing something new. Perhaps, it is their enthusiasm that led media management post graduate Rishab Oswal (23); MBA graduate Aditya Ghanekar (25) and computer engineer Akshay Kothawale (25) to start Hungrytable.in, an online restaurant reservation portal, on July 1, 2013. The portal has already tied up with 100 restaurants and processed over 3,000 reservations in one year. Rishab and Aditya handle the operations and Akshay provides technical assistance. “Aditya and I are friends since college and are alumni of the University of Sterling, Scotland. I met Akshay through Aditya, and we decided to to start this online venture,” said Rishab. It was in November 2012 that Rishab approached Aditya with a business idea. “Initially, we had thought of coming up with loyalty cards for restaurants, wherein every time one visits a restaurant and uses the card, he or she would get discounts and rewarded points,” said Rishab, adding that the restaurants did not show much interest. “We were disappointed but their disinterest pushed us to do something completely different. We wanted to stick to the food and beverage industry but were undecided about the venture,” said Rishab. After visiting a few more restaurants, the trio realised that these eating places lacked a proper and efficient reservation system. “Most of them are done over
The trio (from left) Akshay Kothawale, Aditya Ghanekar and Rishab Oswal have already tied up with 100 restaurants and processed over 3,000 reservations in one year
the phone by taking down numbers from Just Dial. The restaurant owners admitted that they needed someone to give them more reservations and maintain a database. And Hungrytable. in was born,” he said.
Developed on the model of bookmyshow.com, the online portal offers discount every time someone reserves a table. “We thought of integrating the loyalty card facility, something that we had earlier set out to
do. In fact, today, we maintain discount as the main criterion along with reservation in our portal,” said Rishab. The trio started making money in March. “We went without salary for eight months but now earn just about
enough to meet our operational costs,” said Rishab. The team plans to cover Bangalore and Hyderabad by 2014-end and are looking out for investment. [email protected]
Start-up Mentor Decode the art of import substitution Entrepreneurs need to choose MCCIA to hold meet for engineering, technical institutes on July 16 BY TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSWeekly The Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) has organised a workshop for engineering and technical institutes to evolve a high quality import substitution syllabus as a part of the curriculum for import substitution engineering. The workshop has been organised on July 16 from 2 pm to 6 pm and participation in this workshop is through registration on the MCCIA website. According to the MCCIA, technical institutions can play a vital role in enabling and empowering young engineers to exploit the opportunity of import substitution. India has imported various goods worth more than Rs 14.4 trillion in the last five years in the engineering industry from mechanical, electrical and instrumentation field. These are mostly outside patent purview. These can be effectively manufactured and sold to the Indian markets as import substitutes. These high quality import substitute products can be sold at competitive price and lucrative profit. They can build “Import Substitution Product Bank” of various imported products, defective or otherwise. This will inspire students about concentrating their efforts in this direction. The bank may have imported samples which are of no commercial
value but have great educational value. The idea is borrowed from medical education with attached hospital where students learn from bodies first and then work on live human beings! Engineering professors can use the information received at the workshop to help students identify import substitute products through the Internet and product bank. The detailed information about the import substitute products with the product codes, measurements and price can be downloaded from the Internet by students. One must use one’s contacts to locate a sample for manufacture and sale. Initially one can work on repairing the existing imported product and gain knowledge and confidence. The workshop will also discuss issues relating to the manufacture and sale of such products. The event will be conducted by Shekhar Kulkarni, an IIT alumnus of 1976 batch, who has been practicing the concept of Superior Import Substitution for 30 years. He manufactures over 100 import substitute products himself and has developed a scientific method for imparting this knowledge to entrepreneurs. He has given many presentations through Sakal and other platforms for guiding students and entrepreneurs. [email protected]
Professors can use the information received at the workshop to help students identify import substitute
appropriate legal structure
This feature is a collaboration between The Golden Sparrow on Saturday and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), the world’s largest non-profit network of entrepreneurs. For additional questions about your entrepreneurial challenges, write to [email protected]
I have decided to start my venture and would like to incorporate a company. What is the most appropriate legal structure for my company? —Ashish Kothari First of all, congratulations on your decision to start your company. Most people approach a practicing CA or CS to help in corporate. However, it is important to understand this a bit. In India, you can start your business by choosing any of the available legal structure in the form of Sole Proprietorship, Partnership Firm, Limited Liability Partnership or a Company (Private Limited or Public Limited). Let’s understand better:SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP This is the easiest form of business entity to establish in India because there is no requirement of its registration and the business is in the name of the individual who is called sole proprietor. The business and the ownership is not separate from each other and the owner commands the complete control over all the aspects of the business. Registrations with various government departments are required only on a need basis; for example service tax, VAT or excise. Proprietors have unlimited business liability and their personal assets can be attached to meet their business liability. PARTNERSHIP FIRM When two or more people come
together to share the profits and losses of a business without any formal entity, they are said to be running a general partnership firm, it can have a maximum of 20 partners. A partnership firm may or may not be registered but unless it is registered, it cannot command a legal status. However, it does not prevent its partners from suing each other in a court of law. A partnership deed contains clauses like capital contribution, profit and loss, sharing ratio or salary to partners. LIMITED LIABILITY PARTNERSHIP LLP It is a new form of business entity recognised by an Act of the Parliament and is similar to partnership with a difference of protection of limited liability of its partners. The liability of each partner is limited to the extent of their investment in the firm andit commands alegal status. PRIVATE LIMITED COMPANY It is a form of company registered under the Companies Act with limited members between 2 and 200 and starts with a minimum capital of Rs 1,00,000. It is also a separate legal entity and liability of the shareholders is limited to their share capital or agreed amount. For carrying out the business, directors are appointed by the shareholders and legal compliances in case of a private limited company are much more as compared to a partnership firm or an LLP.
PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY It is similar to a private limited company with a benefit of having an unlimited number of shareholders with a minimum of seven members to start with. Establishing a public limited company is advised only after achieving a scale in a business as it has a lot more compliance to be fulfi lled than the other entities. A public limited company can also sell its shares to public and be listed on a stock exchange. CONCLUSION If you are a budding entrepreneur, you should choose the appropriate legal structure so as to know what you are getting into. Choosing the type of entity can have far more implications when scaling up, seeking investors or funding, exit option, introduction of new co-founders or your personal liability. This choice also depends on various other factors like taxation, owner’s personal liability, legal compliances, funding and exit strategy. If you are alone and in the very initial stage of your business, start with a sole proprietorship to keep your time and monetary cost at a very low level. As you progress gradually, then think of getting more people in the form of partners/founders or investors and form a partnership or a private limited company suiting to your long term goals with respect to your company, select wisely. (with inputs from Rishabh Parakh of Moneyplant Consulting )
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
Doing biz in India will equip you to succeed anywhere P 14
PUNE
“This kind of political witch-hunt (National Herald newspaper case) will only help us come back faster.” - Congress president Sonia Gandhi
Bullet Trains
Is Modi courting a dream or nightmare?
A Rs 60,000 crore project to connect just two cities — which are anyway just a hour’s flying time away — may make no sense economically, and the plan should not become another Concorde BY R JAGANNATHAN
The one thing that gave me considerable cause for pause in Sadananda Gowda’s Railway Budget was his proposal for a bullet train between Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Gowda said: “It is the wish and dream of every Indian that India runs a bullet train as early as possible.... Indian Railways is on its way to fulfi l that long cherished dream. We propose bullet trains by starting off with an already identified Mumbai-Ahmedabad sector, where a number of studies have been done.” Quite apart from the fact that Gowda is stretching the truth in claiming that “it is the wish and dream of every Indian” to ride a bullet train, I am not sure India needs bullet trains. Fast trains, yes, high-speed rail corridors, sure. But bullet trains between two cities at Rs 60,000 crore a pop? Hmmm. There’s a saying, be careful what you wish for, for you may get it. A bullet train may be something to impress the natives with and take “phoren” visitors on a show tour, but I doubt the idea has sound economics on its side. Consider the cons. First, a Rs 60,000-crore project to connect just two cities — which are anyway just a hour’s flying time away — may make no sense economically. The
project will have to earn a minimum surplus of Rs 5,000-6,000 crore annually to service debts and capital. Gowda said the railways carried 23 million passengers daily on 12,617 trains. This works out to an average of less than one million passengers per train annually. Will the bullet train have enough traffic to justify the costs? To generate a profit of Rs 6,000 crore annually, and assuming the bullet train traffic is a high one million passengers a year, the annual servicing cost of the investment would have to be Rs 60,000 per journey. Of course, there can be other streams of revenue, but just look at the impossibility of the basic math. And why build a project by creating commercial space or food courts to make it somewhat viable? Second, a bullet train — largely meant for people who value time over money, which means the rich and better off only — should always pay for itself. It cannot be just a super-subsidised showpiece. When the railways are moving away from reducing passenger subsidies even to the poor, it would be criminal to set up a bullet train where fares have to be subsidised. Third, since a
bullet train needs all-new infrastructure, it means a huge amount of land acquisition. After the UPA-legislated Land Acquisition Act, the money and effort involved in acquiring land for the Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train would not only be mind-boggling but mind-numbing. It could take all of five years. By which time, the cost of the project would have escalated. Remember, the route connects some of the most populated cities along the way and land won’t be cheap. Fourth, the distance between the two cities is around 550 km. A high-speed train
that, for full weaponised operations aboard carriers, will come the LCA Mark-II powered by GE 414 engines, according to India Strategic. The naval variant, being tested from
the HAL airport in Bangalore, has a bigger undercarriage that Hindustan Aeronautics has built to facilitate deck landings. The development programme is coordinated by a one-star naval pilot.
‘Obama wants stronger economic ties’
Common man satisfied with the budget 2014
US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, who called on prime minister Narendra Modi Friday, conveyed to him US President Barack Obama’s desire to strengthen economic relations with India, and handed him Obama’s letter inviting him to visit Washington in September. The Prime Minister’s Office said Obama reiterated his invitation to Modi to visit Washington in September and to work closely to make India-US relations a defining partnership for the 21st century. Burns conveyed Obama’s desire to boost economic ties with India, with a focus on next-generation technologies and manufacturing sector. Burns said US sought India’s cooperation in enhancing energy security; deepening security cooperation, including in maritime security, counterterrorism and intelligence exchange. Modi thanked Obama for the invitation and looked forward to a ‘result-oriented’ visit with concrete outcomes that impart new momentum and energy to India-US strategic partnership, the PMO said. “Modi was of the view that reenergising the partnership between India and the United States would send an important message to the region and beyond. Articulating his vision for India-US relations, Modi stated that the relationship between the world’s oldest and largest democracies should not only be for the benefit of the two countries, but should emerge as a powerful force of good for peace, stability and prosperity in the world,” PMO added. IANS
Contd from p 1 The raising of the FDI cap in the defence sector from 26 percent to 49 percent evoked mixed reactions. “I am not sure if increasing FDI is such a good step. I think we should promote our indigenous private and public defence industries. The focus should not be on importing equipment and weapons but exporting them,” said V. Kurien, a retired Navy officer from Kerala. Meanwhile, the decision to increase excise duty on cigarettes and tobacco products as well as aerated drinks is a step in the right direction, felt many. “Who needs these colas and cigarettes? They are poison for our health. I know it’s tough to ban them but the next best thing to do is to make them
expensive,” said Vivek Sethi, a 30-yearold dietician based in south Delhi. The news obviously upset smokers, many of whom said that they had no option but to curtail the number of sticks they smoke or kick the butt altogether. “I guess I will have to cut down on the number of cigarettes I smoke daily as there are other important expenses in life,” said Zahid Jibran, a 40-year-old ad fi lm maker from Mumbai who smokes around a dozen cigarettes a day. Other announcements like allocation of Rs.500 crore for the rehabilitation of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, total sanitation in every household by 2019, e-visas at nine airports, cheaper cars and televisions too were appreciated.
Indian mathematician wins Polya Prize for solving knotty riddle Contd from p 1 He emphasised the discrepancy-theoretic nature of the new result and explained its application for partitioning graphs into expanders. “It is definitely inspiring and motivating to be put on a list with so many great mathematicians,” Srivastava was quoted as saying. Winning awards is rewarding, but for Srivastava, the true reward for his research is in extending its relevance, “My focus is mainly to better understand the techniques that went into
The Anglo-French Concorde supersonic aircraft project was one of the biggest white elephants created by politicians keen on trophy projects. Driven by hubris rather than economics, it was perpetually lossmaking. It was finally put out of misery when British Airways and Air France both decided that they had bled enough and allowed common sense to overide vanity. The Concorde service, which brought down the New York-London fly time from eight hours to around three-and-a-half hours, ended in 2003. India’s bullet
train should not become another Concorde. This is not to say its viability should not be checked by experts, but commercial profitability should be the only guiding principle before a final gono-go decision is taken. As things stand, my own suspicion is that it won’t withstand the profitability test. A potential tiger economy does not need white elephants to feed endlessly. Some dreams are best left as dreams. Trying to realise them can turn into a nightmare. (By special arrangement with Firstpost.com)
The plan will have to earn a minimum surplus of Rs 5,000-6,000 cr annually to service debts and capital
Indian Navy LCA to soon begin test flights Contd from p 1 familiarise the naval pilots with them. One aircraft is operational, another is on the anvil and a third will son be available to complete the trials. After
— which travels at 160-200 kmph (which is the proposed speed indicated for high-speed rail corridors) — would take all of three-and-a-half hours. This is not exactly a waste of time even for the truly busy. And with all the jingbang of wi-fi and other services, anyone who travels on a high-speed train will not waste even this three-and-a-half hours in travel. Why would anybody use a bullet train at a much higher cost just to save an hour or two?
this proof,” he said. “I suspect it is an instance of much more general phenomena, rather than a one-off.” The Kadison-Singer problem asks, at its core, if unique information can be extrapolated from a scenario in which not all features can be observed or measured, according to Yale News. The idea is particularly relevant to abstract fields, including quantum physics, operator theory, complex analysis, graph theory, signal processing, and finite-dimensional geometry, it said.
Bank to women recruits: When was your last period? BY FP STAFF “When was the date of your last period?” It’s a question usually reserved for the privacy of a doctor’s office, but Canara Bank is apparently no less interested in intimate workings of a woman’s body. Its women applicants were asked to give an account of their menstrual history, date of their last period and whether they were suffering from any breasts - or uterus - related ailments. According to a TOI report, candidates were also asked if they were pregnant, as pregnancy would be grounds for immediate disqualification. The bank applications were used as a recruitment drive to hire over 1,000 clerical employees across the country, including 300 for Kerala, according to Canara Bank Staff Union Central Committee member and BEFI state secretary SS Anil Kumar. The 150 new clerical staff who joined duty on July 7 were asked to produce their medical reports. The questions about menstruation and pregnancy were part of a longer questionnaire that asked if the new recruits suffered from a variety of ailments including hypertension, diabetes, TB, cancer, HIV positive, hepatitis or any other chronic or contagious diseases. Instructions had been given stating that if the candidates were found to be suffering from any of the chronic ailments, they would not be recruited, Kumar said. “The candidates were being recruited for clerical work in the bank and not for the Army,” Kumar said, adding “that stipulations were against constitutional provisions on right to live and right to work.” He said this was the first time a public sector bank had bought in such terms and conditions while recruiting
employees. The bank has withdrawn their “new form” after protests by its employees in various parts of Kerala, including Kozhikode and Kochi. “Yes such information was sought. Many other banks follow this process and ask for such information; however, we withdrew it around last week as soon as we received some objection stating why such personal information needs to be shared,” Canara Bank general manager (HR) Shyamalendu Saha in Bangalore told
The bank form is just another reminder of the personal humiliation that women are made to face because of biology PTI. He added that the next batch of recruits have been asked not to fill the objectionable form. Thank god for that. But it is clear from his response that the bank is still unable to see what it did wrong. The bank official claims that “no new recruits protested against the format”, which is hardly surprising. In a country where even a clerical job that doesn’t pay much has thousands of applicants, no one is likely to object. Putting the bank’s interest in
gathering medical history, since when do periods or pregnancy qualify as an ‘ailment’ — questions that were reserved only for women candidates, and display a complete disregard for gender equity. As K Chandru, former judge of the Madras high court told TOI, these questions would amount to violations of Articles 14 to 16 of the Constitution. He added that, “The Supreme Court had shot down such insensitive practices in a case related to the Life Insurance Corporation of India recruitment.” Given that Canara Bank is a public sector bank, denying women candidates jobs simply on the basis of their gender (aka the fact that they are pregnant) is clearly a violation of the constitution’s above mentioned articles. It also points to the way a woman’s natural body functions are used as the basis for gender discrimination. And this phobia against periods isn’t just a new problem. In a place like the Army or Air Force, women candidates continue to face discrimination. For instance the IAF boss in March this year justified why women can’t fly fighter jets in our country. Never mind that women are already flying fighter jets in America, Russia, and even Pakistan. The Canara Bank form is just another reminder of the personal humiliation that women are made to feel simply because of biology. It is the modern version of age-old taboos that kept women segregated and isolated in their own home during “that time” of the month because they were seen as unclean. Many of those old norms are dying out at least in the cities, but as Canara Bank reveals, they may have just been reincarnated in new forms. With inputs from PTI © Firstpost.com
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
Meeting the victims and their relatives, Pope Francis said, “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness.”
The game for women needs a boost P 13
Graduate of the year
She gets no respect Sexism persists, even among the enlightened
Despite facing hardships with no parental support, Tay Thi Nguyen has achieved her goal of becoming an English teacher QUINN RYAN MATTINGLY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Tay Thi Nguyen is about to become an English teacher, and the best-paid member of her extended family in a Vietnam farming village.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF LONG AN, Vietnam: Tay Thi Nguyen is one of the mightiest people I’ve met, at 43 kilograms. She has a towering presence, at a bit more than 5 feet tall. She is so strong that she probably could bench press 11 kilograms. Three times Tay Thi has fainted while here at college, training to become an English teacher, because she starved herself to afford tuition. But she had the strength to persist and soon will become the first person in her village to graduate from college, and she embodies such grit and selflessness that, to me, she’s the world’s college graduate of the year. Tay Thi, 20, also underscores the principle - especially important in the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls - that the best leverage we have to achieve social change is to educate girls. The eighth of nine children to an impoverished farming family in the Mekong Delta, Tay Thi shone in school, but her mother demanded - unsuccessfully - that she drop out after primary school and earn money as a live-in housemaid in
distant Ho Chi Minh City. sobbing. Still, she aced the exam. “She got very angry with me,” With no parental subsidy, college seemed Tay Thi recalled. In eighth grade, her unaffordable, but Tay Thi saved every mom burned her schoolbooks to try penny she could. She had long worked to force her to drop out, but Tay Thi every vacation - sometimes in a factory borrowed books and continued to excel. job by day and in a duck soup restaurant Staying in school was possible because by night until 2 am. At college, Tay Thi of the help she received from Room confined herself to a food budget of to Read, an aid group that sponsored $3.50 - per week. Malnourished, she Tay Thi and covered her school fees, sometimes toppled over in the middle of uniform, books, bicycle class in a dead faint. to get to school and other Professors and expenses. students discovered that Tay Thi persevered, she was starved and even when her parents basically penniless again burned her books leaving Tay Thi feeling in 12th grade, and, as humiliated. “I was so she graduated from high upset about that,” she school, she prepared said, but, in retrospect, secretly for the college it was a turning point entrance examination. because her teachers and - Tay Thi Her mother found out classmates responded about this when Tay Thi with kindness, sympathy left to take the exam and and help. lashed out, saying “I hope you fail the Room to Read arranged a corporate exams.” scholarship. Tay Thi shares a small Other students arrived at the room with two other young women, exam location escorted by cheering, all sleeping on the floor next to each doting parents; Tay Thi arrived alone, other. She set up a small reading light
“I would like to change people’s thinking.”
that won’t keep the others awake. She studies until midnight, and then sets her alarm for 4 am to resume studying. She is just as passionate about education for others. First, she encouraged her older brother to return to school, after years of working as a labourer, so he could become a mechanic. Then she coaxed her younger brother to follow her to college, where he is now a freshman. Even her parents have come around, partly because they see that Tay Thi will soon be an English teacher - and the best paid member of the extended family. Tay Thi is trying to arrange to teach in her own remote village school, where she wants to advocate for education. “It’s a way of helping children in my community,” she said. So let’s celebrate the mightiest college graduate of this commencement season, a young woman of incomparable strength who now is thrilled at the prospect of returning to an impoverished farming village to teach children and change the world. © 2014 New York Times News Service
NICHOLAS KRISTOF Here’s a riddle: Why would a Hurricane Alexandra be deadlier than an identical Hurricane Alexander? Because females don’t get respect. Not even 161-kilometre-per-hour typhoons, if they’re dubbed with female names. Researchers find that femalenamed hurricanes kill about twice as many people as similar male-named hurricanes because some people underestimate them. Americans expect male hurricanes to be violent and deadly, but they mistake female hurricanes as dainty and don’t take adequate precautions. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscored how unconscious biases shape our behaviour - even when we’re unaware of them. Researchers examined the most damaging hurricanes between 1950 and 2012, excluding a couple of outliers like Katrina in 2005. They found that female-named storms killed an average of 45 people, while similar hurricanes with male names killed about half as many. The authors of the study, Kiju Jung and others at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and Arizona State University, also conducted experiments asking people to predict the intensity and riskiness of a hurricane. When asked about a male hurricane, like Alexander, people predicted a more violent storm than when asked about a female hurricane, like Alexandra. Likewise, research subjects were more willing to evacuate to avoid Hurricane Victor than when it was Hurricane Victoria. The more masculine the name, the more respect the hurricane drew. The researchers estimated that changing the name of a hurricane from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple the death toll. Women were as likely as men to disrespect female hurricanes. We often assume that racism or sexism is primarily about in-your-face bigots or misogynists, but research in the last couple of decades - capped by this hurricane study - shows that the larger problem is unconscious bias even among well-meaning, enlightened people who embrace principles of equality. This affects the candidates we
vote for, the employees we hire, the people we do business with. I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Barack Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president again. “It’s a mistake to assume that gender bias is only or mainly about misogynists,” said Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton University and the editor of the hurricane study. Yale researchers contacted science professors at major research universities and asked them to evaluate an application from a (mythical) recent graduate for a laboratory position. The professors received a one-page summary of the candidate, who in some versions was John and in others Jennifer. On a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 the highest, the professors rated John an average of 4, and Jennifer a 3.3. On average, the professors suggested a salary for Jennifer of $26,508, and $30,328 for John. Professors were more willing to mentor John than Jennifer. The professors’ assessments were unrelated to their own age or gender. Other studies have reached similar conclusions, often by sending out identical résumés for job applicants - some with a female name and some with a male name. The male versions do better. For example, evaluators assess the CV of “Brian Miller” as stronger than that of an identical “Karen Miller.” While virtually all voters say today that they would vote for a qualified woman for president (only 30 per cent said so in 1930), experiments by Cecilia Hyunjong Mo of Vanderbilt University suggest that in practice people favor male candidates because they associate men with leadership. I suspect that unconscious biases shape everything from salary discrimination to the lackadaisical way many universities handle rape cases. They also help explain why only 4.8 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 18.5 per cent of members of Congress are women. This deep bias is as elusive as it is pernicious, but a start is to confront and discuss it. Perhaps hurricanes, by catching us out, can help us face our own chauvinism.
This deep bias is as elusive as it is pernicious, but a start is to discuss it
© 2014 New York Times News Service
Study of LIFE: Take a daily walk to age gracefully without injuries A large study shows the benefits of walking for older people and how it reduces the chance of becoming physically disabled GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Regular exercise, including walking, significantly reduces the chance that a frail older person will become physically disabled, according to one of the largest and longest-running studies of its kind. The results, published recently in the journal JAMA, reinforce the necessity of frequent physical activity at whatever age. While everyone knows that exercise is a good idea, the hard, scientific evidence about its benefits in the old and infirm has been surprisingly limited. “For the first time, we have directly shown that exercise can effectively lessen or prevent the development of physical disability in a population of extremely vulnerable elderly people,” said Dr Marco Pahor, the director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Florida in Gainesville and the lead author of the study. Countless epidemiological studies have found a strong correlation between physical activity in advanced age and a longer, healthier life. But such studies cannot prove that exercise improves older people’s health, only that healthy older people exercise. Other small-scale, randomised experiments have persuasively established a causal link between exercise and healthy aging. But the scope of these experiments has generally been narrow, showing, for instance, that older people can improve their muscle strength with weight training or their endurance capacity with walking.
So, for this latest study, the Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders, or LIFE, trial, scientists at eight universities and research centers began recruiting volunteers in 2010, using an unusual set of selection criteria. Unlike many exercise studies, which tend to be filled with people in relatively robust health who can easily exercise, this trial used volunteers who were sedentary and infirm, and on the cusp of frailty. Ultimately, they recruited 1,635 sedentary men and women ages 70 to 89 who scored lower than a nine on a 12-point scale of physical functioning often used to assess older people. Almost half scored an eight or lower, but all were able to walk on their own for 400 meters, the researchers’ cutoff point for being physically disabled. Then the men and women were randomly assigned to either an exercise or an education group. Those in the education group were asked to visit the research center once a month or so to learn about nutrition, health care and other topics related to aging. The exercise group received information about aging but also started a programme of walking and light, lower-body weight training with ankle weights, going to the research centre twice a week for supervised group walks on a track, with the walks growing progressively longer. They were also asked to complete three or four more exercise sessions at home, aiming for a total of 150 minutes of walking and about three 10-minute sessions of
weight-training exercises each week. participants in the education group Every six months, researchers began to exercise, study data shows, checked the physical functioning of although they were not asked to do so. all of the volunteers, with particular “It wouldn’t have been ethical” to keep attention to whether they could still them from exercise, Lipsitz continued. walk 400 metres by themselves. But if the scientists in the LIFE study The experiment followed people “had been able to use a control group for an average of 2.6 years, which is far of completely sedentary older people longer than most exercise studies. with poor eating habits, the differences By the end of that time, the between the groups would be much more exercising volunteers were about 18 per pronounced,” he said. Overall, Lipsitz cent less likely to have experienced any said, “It’s an important study because it episode of physical disability during focuses on an important outcome, which the experiment. They were also about is the prevention of physical disability.” 28 per cent less likely to In the coming have become persistently, months, Pahor and his possibly permanently colleagues plan to mine disabled, defined as being their database of results unable to walk those 400 for additional follow-up, metres by themselves. including a cost-benefit A subtler concern analysis. Pahor cautioned involves the surprisingly that the LIFE study was small difference, in not meant to prompt absolute terms, in the older adults to begin solo, number of people who unsupervised exercise. became disabled in the “Medical supervision two groups. About 35 is important,” he said. per cent of those in the Mildred Johnston, 82, education group had a retired office worker - Dr Lewis Lipsitz a period of physical in Gainesville who disability during the volunteered for the LIFE study. But so did 30 per cent of those in trial, has kept up weekly walks with two the exercise group. of the other volunteers she met during “At first glance, those results are the study. “Exercising has changed my underwhelming,” said Dr Lewis Lipsitz, whole aspect on what aging means,” a professor of medicine at Harvard she said. “It’s not about how much help Medical School and director of the you need from other people now. It’s Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew more about what I can do for myself.” SeniorLife in Boston, who was not Besides, she said, gossiping during involved with the study. “But then you her group walks “really keeps you have to look at the control group, which engaged with life.” wasn’t really a control group at all.” That is because in many cases the © 2014 New York Times News Service
“Study focuses on an important outcome — prevention of physical disability.”
The study found that about 18 per cent exercising volunteers were less likely to have experienced any episode of physical disability during the experiment
TH E EDIT PAGE
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
Editor’s picks
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
PUNE
COURTESY: SANGREA
Dabholkar murder: Crime & punishment The rationalist Narendra Dabholkar and his work relating to the antisuperstition movement never received as much local and national attention as it has done since his murder August 20, 2013. Dabholkar crusaded against a large number of religious rituals, superstitious beliefs and practices that are inhuman, exploitative, anti-women and anti-children. For more than a decade, during every assembly session, he crusaded for the introduction of an antisuperstition bill on the floor of the house. All political parties of the day routinely ignored him and it had become an SOP (standard operating practice) for Dabholkar to convene a press conference in Mumbai or Pune to highlight his disappointment with politicians. His ardent desire to see an anti-superstition legislation became a reality within weeks of his death. Cornered by the public furore over his murder, the state government hastily enacted the ‘Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2013’. In the immediate years preceding his death, Dabholkar’s movement had waned somewhat and he worked somewhat silently compared to the attention-grabbing, fire-breathing demonstrations that he organised in previous years. In the latter years of his life, his work was concentrated in rural Maharashtra and the mainstream, urban media took little notice of it. Many people heard of Dabholkar only after his death rather than when he was alive and the small flame of inspiration that he ignited became a torch much brighter than before. Police investigations into his murder are as yet clueless as to who killed him and why. Some Hindu organisations attacked him fiercely because they wrongly perceived his work as an “attack” on their religion and pointing out to the NRI donations that his organisation received, they accused him of playing into the hands of anti-Hindu forces. There is a strong suspicion that his murder was the work of professional killers but the police have no evidence as yet as to who killed him and why. Looking at the enormous attention that Dabholkar and his life received,
sadly after his death, the forces that conspired and got him shot to death on August 20 must be truly mourning their hate-inspired crime. It is by their very own hands that they have contributed significantly to Dabholkar’s work and his greatness. Ten months after his death, the Dabholkar murder investigations have made no headway and the investigations have been handed over to the CBI. The latest flashpoint in the Dabholkar saga is the revelation by a news magazine that none other than the Pune Police resorted to some mumbojumbo to “invoke his spirit” and solve the murder. According to the report, former Pune Police Commissioner Gulabrao Pol, retired ACP Ranjit Abhyankar and ex-constable Manish Thakur authorised or participated in this exercise. Laughable as this is, it is also indicative of the enormous pressure on the Maharashtra Police to solve the crime one way or the other. Our police officers are like the average mass of people: they are neither rationalists by faith nor crusaders of the antisuperstition movement. Further, since they are the custodians of the law, they tend to disregard law and rationality when it suits them best. When people face desperate situations, they act in a desperate manner and hold on to any straw of hope. Therefore, you have the soothsayers, black magicians, clairvoyants and astrologers who try to solve your problems and give hope for a better future. The Pune Police officers who resorted to such desperate measures have brought disrepute to themselves and to the organisation they work for. They will certainly learn. So will the people who think that by murdering a Gandhi or a Dabholkar you can put an end to their philosophy or their life’s mission. When a person genuinely works for the welfare of others, his work cannot be stopped just by putting an end to his life violently. As we have seen in the case of many martyrs, their work will only grow. This is a fitting punishment for Narendra Dabholkar’s murderers, irrespective of whether or not the Maharashtra Police or the CBI succeeds in bringing them to justice. They laws of the Universe have their own ways of delivering justice.
“When a person genuinely works for the welfare of others, his work cannot be stopped just by putting an end to his life violently.”
Vol-1* lssue No.: 4 Printed and Published by: Shrikant Honnavarkar on behalf of Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Printed at Diligent Media Corporation Ltd, Plot No. EL-201, TTC Industrial Area, MIDC, Mahape, Navi Mumbai. Published at Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt. Ltd. 1641, Madhav Heritage, Tilak Road, Pune-411 030, Tel: 020-2432 4332/33. Editor: Abhay Vaidya (Responsible for the selection of news under the PRB Act, 1867)
Amit Shah appointed BJP chief: Is Modi side-stepping RSS? BY AMULYA GANGULI
When LK Advani was dragged kicking and screaming from the post of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president in 2005 under the orders from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Delhi to Washington stated that the event “demonstrated the power of the RSS ... and will likely increase the party’s (the BJP’s) political decline”. According to Wikileaks, the cable also noted that Advani was “shocked” by the failure of the “second tier” of the BJP leadership comprising, among others Murli Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj, to come to his aid. While leaving the president’s post, Advani called for changing the “impression that has gained ground that no political or organisational decision can be taken (by the BJP) without the consent of the RSS functionaries”. Nearly a decade later, Narendra Modi can be said to have changed the impression by making the party choose its own man, Amit Shah, for the president’s post without the concurrence of the RSS. The latest turn of events, which appears to have ended the “continued dominance” of the RSS over the BJP (to quote Wikileaks again), cannot but cause a flutter among the Nagpur patriarchs who had become used to selecting the BJP president in recent years. After choosing Rajnath Singh to replace Advani, they asked Nitin Gadkari to take Rajnath Singh’s place
in 2009. But four years later, the RSS had to appoint Rajnath Singh again as president in view of the allegations of sleaze against Gadkari. Now, it is clear that the RSS had little or no say in Shah’s appointment. To stretch a point, it can also be said that neither did the BJP, notwithstanding the party’s formal association with the selection, since it has been clear ever since Shah was credited with the party’s excellent showing in Uttar Pradesh in the parliamentary elections that he would be anointed for the post with Modi’s blessings. As Shah is known to be the prime minister’s Man Friday because of the long association between the two through the thick and thin of Gujarat’s turbulent politics, the belief had gained ground that Modi would trust no one but him in the key position of party chief. It isn’t only the political and organisational closeness of the two which is behind Shah’s elevation. It is also undeniable that Modi’s insular nature makes him work in close concert with only a few of his hand-picked men. At a time when a generational shift is taking place in the BJP, and Modi has emerged on top despite the reservations of several senior party members, it is obvious that Modi will be wary of having someone with whom he is not totally familiar to hold a key organisational position. While this much is in line with Modi’s penchant for running a oneman show, whether in Gujarat earlier and now at the national level, what is of interest is how the RSS will react to its
marginalisation by a former ‘pracharak’ (preacher), who has now risen beyond all expectations not only to be the lord and master of the BJP, but is probably on his way to be the predominant figure in the Sangh Parivar, as the Hindu nationalists groups are known, as well. Since such a possibility entails the relegation of the RSS to a secondary position, it will obviously have to take a fresh look at the changing equations. But it has to tread carefully in view of Modi’s wide acceptability not only in the party and the saffron brotherhood, but also among the general public, which sees in him a new hope after the dismal years of the Congress’ dysfunctional governance. This across-the-board popularity is Modi’s great asset unlike Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani, who also chafed at the control exercised by the RSS; but since they did not enjoy Modi’s general popularity, they had to abide by its dictates most of the time. The result was that the RSS openly called for their removal as in 2005 when the then RSS chief, KS Sudarshan, said that both Vajpayee and Advani should make way for “new leaders”. The RSS’s grouse against them was mainly about their moderate outlook, especially Vajpayee’s, which had become evident during the BJP’s stint in power at the Centre between 1998 and 2004.
The nature of desire BY ANIL K RAJVANSHI Human desire manifests itself in different forms, including lust, aim, ambition, control and goal. However, the driving force is the same – power, fame and money and I think it ultimately boils down to control and hence power. Some also call it an ego trip. Desire is fuelled by experience. A living being wants to experience the world. This is an inherent trait of all life forms. We are wired for experience. Urge for maximisation of experience fuels the desire. Whether the desire is for sex, money or fame, it is driven by the same need to have experience. As our brains develop (right from our birth) the neurons need to form the memory pathways. This process is accomplished by sensory perception where the inputs from the senses form the memory. Thus memory formation forces experience gathering. Thus we are hardwired to increase our experience and memories. This is the basis of desire. Thus desire and brain are interlinked. As long as brain exists there will always be desire. One of the outcomes of desire is possession. This possession provides an anchor for the experience and helps in maximisation it. As we absorb this “experience” through our senses, our brain processes this information. It is during this process that we “decide” whether our desires are fulfilled or not. Fulfilment of desires therefore helps us in releasing the “possessions” and is the genesis of detachment or contentment as preached in most of the religions of the world. Thus a powerful processor or mind which can coolly and calmly evaluate
all the possibilities can sometimes get excesses. Unresolved desires produce its desires fulfilled without physically memory knots or stresses which have possessing the objects of desire. This the mechanism of always directing process gives us a tremendous sense of the brain to them and creating anger, peace, tranquility and perspective in our frustrations and hence depression. lives and it is called wisdom. Thus to live This happens because the thought a sustainable life it is necessary to have a production is chanelled or influenced powerful brain processor. by the existing memories. If the brain Desire is a useful and necessary has more memory knots of unfulfilled emotion. It allows us to be active and desires then its working memory gets helps in achieving something. Without reduced and the new thoughts get desire, we will be lifeless, dead or like centered and focused around these knots stones. However what we need leading to anger, frustration. to do is to channel our desires A stressed mind, therefore ,gets so that they get fulfilled without angry very fast. Anger is an too much taxing of resources, emotion that occurs when things materials and energy. For don’t happen the way we want. example, a desire to invent a new Thus a powerful processor or process, to create a new thought mind may have better conflict and or discovery does not require anger resolution capabilities than a much energy or resources, say as THINK shallow thinking mind. Insecurity that required for possessing too and anger may be related. many cars or luxury items like a 100The power of brain processor is foot yacht or a private jet liner! The increased by availability of its working desire for material goods which supply memory. This can happen with our needs and not our greed could be cultivation of deep thought so that good for humanity at large and will lead the dissolution of other memories and to sustainability. psychological knots takes place. As One of the possible ways to satiate the this memory increases, the absorption desire for possession of material goods is and digestion of inputs also get sublimating it via virtual reality (VR) enhanced since the mind becomes tools. These high-tech tools, basically hungry for more experiences and 3D video games, like aircraft simulation this increases our desires. This “mind systems allow the mind to have an opening” or God experience allows the enhanced experience without physically interaction of mind with external and possessing the objects of desire. higher dimensional knowledge space Satiation of most desires requires and allows us to access the existing energy and material resources and information from it - the basis of most excessive desire leads to greed and discoveries, inventions. hence to unsustainability. The wisdom The writer is Director, Nimbkar of “I” or ego can keep a check on the Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), desires. If not, the mind goes into an Phaltan, Maharashtra. He may be reached ever-expanding spiral of greed and at [email protected]
In calling for their replacement, the RSS evidently wanted that the “new leaders” would adopt its own hawkish postures. But this isn’t what has happened where Modi is concerned. The RSS, therefore, will be doubly worried. Not only has Modi curtailed its influence over the BJP as Shah’s selection shows, he is also not the hardliner which the RSS thought he would be at the time of the Gujarat riots. It is this belief which makes Ashok Singhal of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) say that only Modi can stop the “total Islamisation” of the country. Views of this nature are also expressed by the Hindutva netizens. But Modi is seemingly following his own line, which is guided by his economic vision, which promises improved conditions for all Indians, Hindus and Muslims alike. The RSS cannot be too pleased. (Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail. com)
Limericks of the week BY C RAVINDRANATH
Rain Tunes All of us, from noon to noon Now sing the same tune With anxious eyes We watch the skies And hope the rains start soon
Laws & Flaws Seems there are some serious flaws In our basic system of laws Some insist Others resist How do we get out of their claws?
Sports After reading the reports Do we need the courts Butting and biting Kicking and fighting Can this be called sports?
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
Now, the city bats for
FOOTBALL
The large number of football clubs that have sprouted in the city in the past few years kicks home the fact that the sport is catching up among Punekars BY ASHISH PHADNIS @phadnis_ashish
PUNE: The city is following the national trend of tilting their love more towards football than cricket. The clubs and grounds that have come up in the city over the past 7-8 years heads home this reality. Over 150 city clubs dribble for the top spot during the district leagues and Pune FC and DSK Shivajians have gained a firm footing in the national contests. After holding international friendlies and organising the Indian team’s training camps, Pune is looking forward to be chosen as one of the venues for the Under-17 Football World Cup that will be held in 2017. “The birth of Pune FC in 2007 kick-started the love for football in the city as it was the first team to be a part of I-league. Their matches at Shiv Chhatrapati sports complex helped the authorities maintain the football ground. Soon under-23 India camps,
Olympics qualifiers and even Asian Football Club (AFC) matches were organised at this stadium and we also hosted the Federation Cup tournament. Holding these contests is a dream for many cities,” said Pune District Football Association (PDFA) treasurer Mandar Tamhane. The football body official said that many local clubs have tied up with international clubs and corporate groups are investing in the game, thereby benefitting the players. Amanora is the sponsor of DSK Shivajians and the Vincent’s Old Boys Association (VOBA) team is supported by Venky’s. Pune’s Prakash
“Local clubs have tied up with foreign clubs and corporate groups are investing in the game, thereby benefitting the players.” PDFA official
Thorat (Pune FC) and Jeevan Nalge (Salgaoncar FC) are playing in the elite league and several others are on contract with clubs. “This is a good sign for the development of the game,” he said. PDFA vice president Pyarelal Choudhary said, “The sport has also reached the backyards of suburbs from the popular spots of Khadki and Ghorpadi. Even malls and academies have come up with compact sporting arenas and have started conducting five-a-side tournaments. These welcome changes have played a major role in popularising the game.” The city has also
Ground reality ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
PUNE: Lack of quality football grounds is a common failing in India. Pundits lament the national side’s dismissal performance at the international level but the most important aspect of providing a better platform to children who are keen to play this sport has been ignored over the years. In the recent years, however, Pune has turned over a new leaf in the promotion of football. The Shiv Chhatrapati sports complex in Balewadi has seen many international and national-level contests and ground like St Vincent’s High School and Jeejeebhoy Ground of The Bishop’s School are the favourite venues for inter-school football tourneys. From Bharati Vidyapeeth’s floodlit grass ground to the compact arenas of HotFut Academy in Mundhwa, Pune has better options than any other city in Maharashtra. The football infrastructure development and taking the sport to the grassroots level has enabled the city to provide a valid alternative to popular football hubs like Goa and West Bengal. “The credit for well-maintained grounds and success at inter-school football level goes to schools like St Vincent’s, Bishop’s, Loyola and Kataria. The clay grounds of New English School (Tilak Road) and Ramanbaug have been producing good players like Paresh Shivalkar, Rohan Phasage and Pratik Pardeshi for the past 33 years,” said New English School coach Jayant Deshpande. “Though some prefer grass grounds to clay, the former is difficult
Top football grounds in city
to maintain and every school can’t afford it. Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce (BMCC), Kataria and New English School have clay grounds and they are operational throughout the year, even during the monsoons,” he said. Senior coach Milind Kshirsagar, who has been coaching at Loyola School for over 23 years, has a different take on the growth of this sport in the city. “Grounds in the city are vanishing and the number of tourneys is dwindling. Some 20-25 years ago, the grounds of COEP, Agriculture College, BJ Medical, Modern and Wadia College were in a good condition and I remember the tournaments held on these grounds would attract over 1,500 spectators. Now, only a few come to watch the matches that are held either at Khadki or Ghorpadi,” he said. Corporates extending help to local clubs has popularised the sport in the city. The city still needs an international quality turf ground. PDFA treasurer Mandar Tamhane said, “We missed a golden opportunity to have such a ground when FIFA, the apex body of football, had offered to install an astro-turf ground as part of development project. They had put a condition that the ground should be owned by a district association or at least have the ground on lease for more than 20 years. We failed to the approval from Pune Municipal Corporation and the administration was reluctant to give the Dobberwadi ground for more than five years. Later, I came to know that FIFA has installed the turf in Kerala.”
Shiv Chhatrapati sports complex, Balewadi
Jeejeebhoy Ground (The Bishop’s School)
St. Vincent’s School, Camp
[email protected]
Kataria High School, Mukundnagar
Bharati Vidyapeeth, Katraj
GROOMING NEW TALENT City teams are performing well in under-13, under-15 and under-17 categories at the state level tournaments,
but experts feel that budding players need more attention. “Young players get adequate exposure to quality infrastructure in foreign countries but our schools cannot afford to manage a team, and provide them kit and other facilities. Top city clubs should come forward and support talented players,” said Jayant Deshpande of Friends XI Club. FUTURE PLANS Tamhane said, “Our priority is to get the U-17 World Cup match
st
international training centre
Abhijit Kadam Football Development Centre, India’s first international training centre for the game, was launched by deemed university Bharati Vidyapeeth in association with the famous English club Liverpool.
5
[email protected]
The city has hosted few international football friendly matches at Shiv Chhatrapati sports complex in Balewadi, including India vs Vietnam, India (under-23) vs Burma Myanmar & Qatar.
Pune-based Venky’s Group owns Blackburn Rovers, a renowned club in English Premier League
Deccan XI Football Club The club became the first team in the city to receive corporate sponsorship. The club has signed a one-year contract with citybased project Amanora Park Town. DSK Shivajians The club is winner of the Abhijit Football club Kadam Memorial Football It is an Indian I-League 2nd diviShield in 2011 sion club founded in 1987. The club played their first ever national season last year. They have tied up with Liverpool for a full-time coaching academy, Pune Football Club named LFC International Football Parshuramians is one of the (PFC) Academy at DSK Supinfocom oldest football clubs of Pune. It Nicknamed Red Lizards and International, situated in Loni was established in 1984. The club owned by Ashok Piramal Group, trains at SP College ground and has PFC was founded in 2007. The club played many district, state and national-level participates in India’s I-league. The tournaments. Parshuramians have won club has its own training ground Rupmay Chatterji Trophy, Sudhir Joshi in Mamurdi on the outskirts Trophy, Guru Teg Bahadur Trophy, Chetak Football Club of Pune Vishwakarma Trophy and Dara The super division football Irani club was established in 1988. Chetak FC is training at the Fergusson College ground. The club is considered to be an academy of young soccer talent and has won many district and state level tourneys
Top
in Pune. A major infrastructural change will take place in the city to hold the event and we can upgrade the venue with the help of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) development programme.” The sports official also pointed to the need to improve the quality of coaching and referring. “More professionalism is also needed in PDFA administration. We are doing a good job, but we can’t just sit and enjoy,” he said.
DSK Shivajians FC has tied up with Liverpool for a full-time coaching academy, named LFC International Football Academy at DSK Supinfocom International, situated in Loni.
FOREIGN CONNECTION
Even as the city has more than 50 good grounds, experts feel success in terms of quality is still a long shot
BY ASHISH PHADNIS @phadnis_ashish
progressed in coaching with over 150 coaches getting the All India Football Federation (AIFF) certification. “AIFF’s licence coaching programme received a huge response in the city and now we have A, B, C and D licence coaches. But we need qualified referees and more training programmes for them,” Choudhary said.
Clubs in city
ANNUAL TOURNAMENTS Abhijeet Kadam Memorial national tournament Ashok Vanjari Memorial Invitational Guru Teg Bahadur invitational Symbiosis International Students tournament KP Jadhav Memorial tournament Subroto Mukherjee inter-school The Bishop’s invitational inter-school
The game for women needs a boost
City-based football club officials and women footballers believe that the sport has been neglected in Pune and suggest ways to attain the goal BY ISHANI BOSE @ishani_bose PUNE: In a world where women football ranking is higher than that of men, it comes as a rude shock to know that Pune has not had the comparative head start for the former compared to the latter. Many attribute this to the lack of interest shown towards training girls in the sport, right from school. In Pune, there are a handful of clubs that have a separate women’s team, such as Pune Football Club (PFC), Deccan Rovers Football Club, Sangam Football Club, Go Sports, United Poona Sports Academy (UPSA) and Vidya Bhavan. However, the problem that still persists is the low participation of women in the sport. “The involvement of women is low because of poor awareness at the grassroots level. Football for girls is not well promoted in schools and colleges. Due to low participation, there can’t be that many tournaments, and hence no future,” said Deccan Rovers Football Club coach Anil Deshpande, adding that those who pursue the sport in the city do so only as a hobby and not as a career. The PFC team has about 8-10 players after it started a soccer school for girls in March 2014. The club’s senior executive (legal and marketing) Vikas Atri said, “A lot needs to be done
to popularise the sport for women in this city. We went big with our publicity initiatives on social media and personally called interested candidates encouraging them to take up the sport. We are focusing on increasing the level of participation, as it’s a domino effect. With an increase in women participation, there will be more teams and more tournaments.” And it was through these initiatives that 22-year-old fi lm-maker Hrutika Patole and 19-year-old law student Bhavya Pande (both avid football players) got to know about the football classes. Both were introduced to the sport in school, but couldn’t pursue it due to the absence of training clubs in the city. “Some schools just teach basic football. More clubs should take the initiative to start a women’s team,” said Hrutika. “Another aspect affecting the sport is the lack of interest at the football federation and state association levels,” said Vinay Murgod, head coach, founder and director at the United Poona Sports Academy (UPSA) futsal and football school. “We do not have a conscientious mind working towards a common goal of developing a ladder, structure, and a proper programme that can facilitate the development of women’s
“Lack of interest shown at football federation and state association levels is affecting the growth of women football” Vinay Murgod football. The right kind of people must be appointed at the right place. People who have technical knowledge, who understand the game and its issues related to women must be elected,” said Murgod. ishani.bose@ goldensparrow.com
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
clash of titans
A welcome breakthrough for Arya P 16
Signposts
NEW DELHI: Muslims fast in this holy month of Ramzan — from pre-dawn hours to dusk. Health experts have a word of caution for those who may be diabetic. “Prolonged fasting results in metabolic changes which necessitate adjustment in diabetes management plan, in terms of dietary intake and medication schedule. During Ramzan, most people take two large meals with a gap of 12 to 15 hours,” said Atul Luthra, senior consultant physician, Fortis C-Doc. He said carbohydrate and fat intake should be kept under control to prevent blood sugar from rising rapidly during the day, or between “sehari”, the early morning meal prior to the beginning of the fast, and the “iftaar”, the ritual breaking of the fast in the evening hours. “Diabetics should not indulge in high-calorie, high-refined food. Rather, they should take food with high fibre content,” he added. The problems diabetics face while fasting can either cause hypoglycemia (sudden fall in blood sugar levels), which can cause seizures and unconsciousness, or hyperglycemia (increase in blood sugar). IANS
Community policing: spl cadre in Punjab
TGS is interactive Our newspaper is interactive and you are welcome to write in to our various segments: • Letters to the Editor, email: editor_tgs@ goldensparrow.com; [email protected] by post: The Editor, The Golden Sparrow on Saturday, 16411 Madhav Heritage, Tilak Road, Pune-411030, (Best letter gets a weekly prize) • Articles for the Relationships page relationships@ goldensparrow.com, relationships.tgs@ gmail.com • The Way Forward with compassion & hope wayforward@ goldensparrow.com, wayforward@ gmail.com • Want to become an entrepreneur? For mentoring advice, write to our associates: [email protected] • Get weekly events listed: [email protected]
Why this needless controversy over Sai Baba?
The Sai Baba controversy is a perfect example of how a needless controversy has been generated out of a non-issue. Let’s recognise that TV channels are harping on this controversy - no matter if it whips passions and spreads intolerance- to increase their viewership and TRPs by Hinduism as “avatars”- incarnations of god. Th is is how Hinduism respects the founders of other religions and life in this great country has been a harmony of faiths, punctuated by violent flashes of intolerance and hate. Nevertheless, the intrinsic culture of inclusivity and tolerance of this land has been accepted universally and therefore India is famed as the birthplace of many world religions. Therefore, why this needless controversy- especially on Hindi TV channels- over the faith that so many millions have in the Sai Baba of Shirdi? These debates, with the participation of many religious heads don’t enlighten viewers on an issue that needs serious debate and discussion. Instead, they are an instructive spectacle on how to be impolite and constantly interrupt other speakers by wanting to dominate the discussion; on how to be intolerant and hold narrow positions. They remind you of the “nation wants to know...” journalist who revels
BY ABHAY VAIDYA @vaidya_abhay Hinduism is among those great religions in the world which is extraordinarily inclusive and tolerant. There are a number of gods and deities in this ancient religion which is as vast as the ocean itself. Incredulously, some religious leaders try to convince their followers that this number is no less than 330 crore, making one wonder how they arrived at this figure. Hinduism begins with the premise that there are various paths to selfrealisation. There is the path of devotion and knowledge and there is the path of work too. “Karma yoga”- devotion to god through work- is an established doctrine and the adage “Work is worship” probably owes its genesis to this religion. “To each his own” is the path of this ancient land which has survived over the centuries. Many enlightened souls, some of who went on to establish world religions, have been promptly accepted
Sai Baba of Shirdi is loved and worshipped by millions. Even rationalists would have no serious complaint with his beatific smile on the marble statute at Shirdi
in being provocative to the extent that his show is more often than not a slanging match between agitated speakers rather than an informed debate; turning the entire exercise into hot air and a waste of time. Sai Baba of Shirdi is loved and worshipped by millions. Even rationalists would have no serious complaint with his beatific smile on the marble statute at Shirdi. He is among the many great icons of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood- the two dominant communities of India which have suffered so much of pain and anguish in communal violence over the years. The Sai Baba controversy is a perfect example of how a needless controversy has been generated out of a non-issue. Let’s recognise that TV channels are harping on this controversyno matter if it whips passions and spreads intolerance- to increase their viewership and TRPs (television rating points) which bring them revenue in the form of commercials. [email protected]
Doing biz in India will equip you to succeed anywhere Former Microsoft-India and Cummins-India chairman Ravi Venkatesan’s book ‘Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere’ provides an insider’s view to winning in emerging markets and why India cannot be ignored by the world BY ISHANI BOSE @ishani_bose Ravi Venkatesan, former chairman of Microsoft-India and Cummins-India, social entrepreneur, mentor and orator is also the author of ‘Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere’. He talked about his book that gives an insider’s view to winning in emerging markets at the BDB Book Club in the city recently. GENESIS OF THE BOOK Venkatesan’s book is based on his personal experiences. After a long stint in America, he returned to India in 1996 when the country was opening to business opportunities. “My family thought that I was giving up an extraordinary opportunity in the US to earn peanuts in India. Tim Solso, the then CEO of Cummins instructed me to end a joint venture with Tata Motors called Tata Cummins in India. I resolved the issue and turned things around. The firm has now opened new businesses and is worth a billion dollars,” he said. Bill Gates appointed him Microsoft India chairman in 2004. Heading companies like Cummins India and Microsoft India equipped him to deal
ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
CHANDIGARH: The Punjab government has decided on a separate cadre of officers for the community policing and investigation wings of Punjab Police. Deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal has directed the home department’s principal secretary to create separate cadres of dedicated police officials with a long-term perspective for community policing and investigation wings, a spokesman said. These officials will supervise ‘Sanjh Kendras’ (government service centres) and redressal of complaints on the 181 police helpline. Badal said the specially created investigation wing would be separate from the police and it would undergo extensive training so that complaints are solved within a stipulated timeframe. IANS
“The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.” - Mark Twain
IANS
Diabetics must be cautious during Ramzan
P 15
PUNE
“What companies need to do is just show up whenever opportunities come their way in the country.”
with technical roadblocks and other business handicaps in running a business in India and telling the foreign heads of the organisations about our country’s working style. “After handling these issues I felt the need to write about what it takes to succeed in a country like India,” he said. DOES INDIA REALLY MATTER? Venkatesan strongly believes India to be a litmus test for a company to grow in the emerging markets. “Companies should learn to live in chaos and not
complain. India is a lab and if one can succeed here then one can succeed anywhere in the world. India is a 2 trillion dollar economy so even if it grows just 6 per cent it is substantial. Since 1950 we have seen weak leadership with pretty bad ideas on how to run the economy. Yet India has managed to come this far. That means it seems unlikely that a bad government can slow down the country’s growth,” he said. WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR MNCS TO SURVIVE IN INDIA? His opinion is that growth and
Ravi joins Rockefeller board NEW YORK: Ravi Venkatesan, founder and chairman of Social Venture Partners India, a network of philanthropists addressing social problems, has joined The Rockefeller Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The appointment was announced by The Rockefeller Foundation, a New York-based philanthropic organisation with a mission of “advancing the well-being of humanity”. “With our commitment to catalyse new ideas and innovations at The Rockefeller Foundation, I am delighted to welcome Ravi Venkatesan, a proven leader with strong business and technology backgrounds,” said Board Chair David Rockefeller, Jr. “I am thrilled and honoured to be joining The Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees,” Venkatesan said. - IANS
development never take place in a steady environment and urges companies to never give up, no matter how difficult it gets. “What Indian companies need to do is just show up, whenever opportunities come their way. When bad times come, do nothing but survive. Do that for 1020 years and you’ll be at the head of the pack. The retail sector went through a very bad patch because of policy issues. Walmart went back but German company Metro AG has steadily progressed and opened many stores in India,” he said.
Letters to the Editor
FIRMS NEED TO DEVELOP INDIACENTRIC MODEL Highlighting the need for MNCs to come up with business models that are India specific, he said, “McDonald’s, known for beef burgers, had a tough time when they came to India. Things only started going well when they included Aloo Tikki, Mac Veggie and other food items at a nominal price in their menu. The ability to adapt and change their model is the key to survival. It is also necessary for MNCs to employ an Indian to head their branch in our country.” [email protected]
[email protected]
Technology should help increase employment, not otherwise The ‘Golden Sparrow’ is a welcome addition to the newspapers being published from Pune. It is different from others in that it is published only once a week. It can therefore, devote itself to various issues, global, national and local, in a more detailed and comprehensive manner. I wish to comment on Spotlight in the inaugural issue of June 21, Agenda Points for Modi Sarkar and Policy Recommendations- Road Map 2014-19. Under the topic ‘Towards new agriculture’, it has been stated that India is number 1 in the production of certain food grains, jute, milk, etc. It has been suggested that the new agriculture policy ‘must provide greater employment opportunities and more balanced regional development’. The need to increase per acre productivity of farm products, which has vital importance, has been lost sight of. The policy should also aim at providing fuller employment to existing farmers/ farm labourers as major portion of agriculture is dependent on the monsoon. Interlinking of rivers to solve the problem of availability of water assumes more
importance in this context. There is no limit to the ingenuity of the human brain. New and more productive machines and methods of production are bound to be developed. Unfortunately, advances in technology lead to saving in labour and leads to unemployment. Given the rate at which new techniques and improved machines and equipment are being developed, there is always the danger of these getting obsolete in a much shorter time than before. The concept of ‘appropriate technology’ therefore requires to be studied in depth for ensuring employment to a greater number of people and therefore, assumes more importance. - NH Umarji (Umarji gets the prize for best letter of the week)
of the concerned individual. Sincerely, this article is an eye opener for many such vendors like ‘Pappu’ who use coal as the fuel rather than exorbitant fuels. Once other vendors start doing the same they not only can improve their product quality but save on costs too. Word of mouth spreads better as is shown from various customers of Pappu who not only taste Pappu’s tea regularly but also make it a point to introduce their clients/friends as Pappu’s customers. I can conclude by exclaiming “Pappu Distinction Mein Pass Hogaya”! I sincerely thank you, Anjali and the entire editorial team for bringing out this article . Will definitely go to Rasta Peth to taste Pappu’s tea as and when I can. - CV Narayanan
Pappu passes with distinction!
“Deccan Queen is nation’s best shortdistance train” by Prachi Bari (July 5) is apt and true to its potential specially when it comes to the brand called “Deccan Queen”(Dakkan Ki Rani). The fact that this train has been on the track for the past 84 years speaks volumes. I for one used to constantly
I read the article Pappu’s five rupee fi x on “bhatti chai” by Anjali Shetty in TGS Life with interest specially because tea is my favourite. Any item made by using coal as fuel shows on the health
Reviving old memories
watch this train from 1962 when I was at Matunga, Mumbai. The article in your newspaper took me down memory lane of my stay in Matunga close to the workshop from where the coach bodies were made. My childhood friends and I used to land up at the foot over-bridge in Matunga by 5.10 pm to watch its speedy arrival from platform 3. Such was the respect for this train that the passengers in all CR stations keep at least 5-6 feet away when the train arrives. I thank Prachi Bari and the entire editorial team for printing such memorable article. - CV Narayanan
Consumer awareness
The article ‘Citizens wake up to your consumer rights’ on June 28, is very appropriate to sensitise people on their consumer rights. I have tried to search
for the proper place for people to fi le their consumer complaints online. It is difficult as so many pages crop up in the search but one does not get the correct information. If the web addresses of the local consumer courts are given publicity, then many people could fi le their complaints in the appropriate forum online. - RK Jain, vice chairman (retired), Settlement Commission
Write to Us Letters to the Editor may be emailed to editor_tgs@goldensparrow. com or mailed to Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1641 Madhav Heritage, Tilak Road, Pune-411030. The Best Letter of the Week will receive a special gift from Venus Traders, Pune’s finest stationery departmental.
SPORTS
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JULY 12, 2014
PUNE
“Nobody should feel invincible. That is perfectly clear and both Argentina and Holland have played a great World Cup so far.” — Germany coach Joachim Loew
“Germany have always shown physical might, tactical, mental prowess, and have always had players with a certain South American touch.” — Argentina coach Alejandro Sabella
CLASH OF TITANS Well-rested Germany will have the advantage against the weary South Americans in World Cup final, while it will be a battle between individual glory against clinical team effort on Sunday RIO DE JANEIRO: It will be a battle between individual glory and the tight discipline of a team when Germany will take on Argentina in the World Cup final at Rio de Janeiro on Sunday. Germany with their massive 7-1 win over hosts Brazil and earlier a devastating 4-0 win over Portugal has shocked the world. Along with their ruthless and efficient performance, the Germans have found balance with smooth and simple passing. It will be a tough task for the South Americans, who so far have proved that they can play as tactically as the Germans. Considering the history between these two teams, the Germans can be said to be as favourites in this long awaited final. In the defence department, Manuel Neuer’s reputation as one of the best goalkeepers in the world has grown in Brazil. The Bayern Munich goalkeeper played the role of the sweeper by repeatedly rushing out to help the defense in the match against Algeria. He was also a key player against France by saving the certain equaliser from Karim Benzema. Though, coach Joachim Loew, has shifted Philip Lahm to midfield, he showed that he is the best man in his favourite position. Mats Hummels and Mertesacker have been doing a good job in neutralising the attacks. Midfield has always been Germany’s biggest strength. Bastian Schweinsteiger and Sami Khedira along with Toni Kroos
and Mesut Ozil directing most of the attacks. In addition, they have the highest-scoring player in World Cup history in Miroslav Klose and the possible contender of the golden boot in Thomas Muller (5 goals). Lukas Podolski’s chances in the final are very thin as the talented striker is not fully fit yet. On the other hand, Argentina keeper Sergio Romero has came through big in the penalty shootout against the Netherlands, with two saves. So far he has kept three straight clean sheets in the knockout rounds, but will face his greatest challenge yet against the clinical Germans. The Argentina’s defence have also delivered an impressive performance with defensive midfielder Javier Mascherano supporting Pablo Zabaleta and Martin Demichelis. In the midfield, Argentina will be hoping that Angel Di Maria could play the full 90 minutes. Though Messi hasn’t scored in the knockout games, he has proved his talent in the group stages. With Sergio Aguero and Gonzalo Higuain in the team, Messi has always been the key to Argentina’s success and expected to repeat his performance against Germany’s well-oiled machine. Bookies prefer Germany Germany are 11/8 to lift the trophey, according to most bookmakers, and Argentina are 5/2. Odds for a draw is 23/10, according to OddsChecker.
GERMANY
(Pre-Q/F) Bt Switzerland 1-0 (Q/F) Bt Belgium 1-0
Bt Algeria 2-1 (Q/F) Bt France 1-0
(S/F) Bt Netherlands 4-2
(S/F) Bt Brazil 7-1
(on penalties)
Germany score from a variety of sources and launch wave after wave of attacks with the trio of Thomas Muller, Miroslave Klose and Mesut Ozil (above)
Argentina will need not only every bit of Messi’s greatness, but also an extraordinary efforts from many others along with goalkeeper Sergio Romero (above)
LIVE ON SONY SIX: ON MONDAY, JULY 14 @ 12.30AM
Maradona’s hand of God
A
rgentina beat Germany 3-2 on June 29, 1986 in Estadio Azteca, Mexico Argentinean captain Diego Maradona was the star attraction of the tournament. He scored five goals and created another five in his team’s 14 goals en route to a final. His famous goal, termed as ‘Hand of God’, was scored against England in the quarterfinal and was followed by his magnificent dribble which left five England players, trailing in his wake before he found the net. Naturally, the striker was marked the entire game and central defender Jose Luis Brown opened the scoring for Argentina with a 23rd minute header and it stayed at 1–0 until half-time. After the break, Jorge Valdano doubled Argentina’s lead. Germans were relying on their key player Lothar Matthaus, but it was Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who pulled a goal back in the 74th minute.
Germay enacts revenge
B
eat Argentina 1-0 in final on July 8, 1990 in Rome, Italy Germany, making their fourth consecutive appearance in the final, were all set for the perfect revenge. The two sides met in an equally tight affair at the Stadio Olympico, Rome.
Rudi Voller equalised in the 80th minute. The contest looked to be going into extra time but Maradona broke free of the shackles placed on him and produced a superb pass to Jorge Burruchaga that allowed Argentina to regain the lead at 3–2. This was how it remained and Argentina were able to celebrate their second World Cup
Argentina reached the final after beating Italy via penalty shootout in the semifinals, while West Germany also progressed in a shootout against England. It was an ill-tempered and also the lowest-scoring final.
victory in three tournaments (after winning the 1978 World Cup). HEAD TO HEADS Argentina wins: Goals for: Germany wins: Goals for:
FIFA RANKING 9 28 6 28
Germany: Argentina:
2 5
TOP SCORERS Germany: Thomas Muller (5) Argentina: Lionel Messi (4)
Argentina’s Pedro Monzon was the first player to be sent off in the 657th minute. He was shown a straight red card for a hard leg tackle on Jurgen Klinsmann. FIFA had warned its officials to enforce the rules and Monzon had raised his foot during the tackle. Later on, Gustavo Dezotti, who had already, was booked with a yellow card, received the second when he brought down Jurgen Kohler in the 87th minute. Argentina coach Carlos Bilardo had no other option but to watch his team reduced to nine. Mexican referee Edgardo Codesal awarded a penalty to Germany, when Voller was brought down by Roberto Sensini in the 85th minute. Brehme converted the penalty with a low right footed shot to the goalkeeper’s right. This victory gave West Germany their third World Cup success
SPORTS “It’s just a myth that the BCCI and India are opposed to DRS. They want technology to be consistent. Let the third umpire do it - give him the technology that works.” — Former India cricketer Ravi Shastri
Signposts
Pranav to train in Japan
Arya in action during the district badminton championship at the PDMBA complex
Slideways look to retain top position
Pune-based rally team all set for the second round of IRC in Coimbatore from July 12 TGS NEWS SERVICE PUNE: Slideways Industries, Pune’s fi rst national rally team in the FMSCI Indian Rally Championship (IRC), is all set for the second round of the IRC to be held at Coimbatore on July 1213 . The ‘Cotton City’ will host the fi rst gravel rally of the year and with 36 confi rmed entrants across the various classes, competition is expected to be intense. The Rally of Coimbatore will feature Team Slideways Industries’ principal Rohan Pawar and Sirish Chandran competing in the 1600cc category in the Rally Polo, Byram Godrej in the 2000cc category and Aniruddha Rangnekar in the 1600 cup category. Pune’s fi rst female rally driver and Delhi-based Garima Avtaar, who along with an all-women crew put up
PUNE
A welcome breakthrough for Arya
PUNE: Deccan Gymkhana’s Amol Abdagiri defeated Satara’s Ganesh Jadhav to storm into the third round of the Kumar Khandelwal Memorial Open Snooker tournament at Deccan Gymkhana. Abdagiri lost the first frame 41-50 in a close battle before winning the second 52-10, but the Satara cueist again got ahead by taking the third. The Deccan Gymkhana cueist, however, got his act together and took the next two frames to win 41-50, 52-10, 16-44, 69-10, 54-11. In another match, Rohan Sakalkar of Deccan Gymkhana needed five frames to get better of Nitin Jinzur of Snook Club with a 51-15, 53-26, 8-49, 30-56, 61-40 verdict.
PUNE: Pune FC has decided to send upcoming city youngster Pranav Kale for a training programme to Japan. Eleven-year-old, Pranav, who represents Pune FC Under-12s, will be on a 13-day training programme at a top J-League Division 1 club. Pranav’s trip is being facilitated by Pune FC and the club’s long serving medio Arata Izumi. Impressed with the youngster’s footballing abilities, the Japanese-born India International arranged for a training stint after getting in touch with a few teams in Japan. Arata is also accompanying Pranav on this trip and the duo has already left for Japan.
JULY 12, 2014
“Japan has one of the finest youth development systems in the region helping them produce players who go on to make a mark in Asia and Europe.” - Pune FC player Arata Izumi
ANIRUDDHA RAJANDEKAR
Abdagiri moves ahead
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY
a strong display in the IRC debut at Nashik, will compete in the 1600cc category. “With phenomenal success in the opening round we are very confident as we now moved into the gravel rallies. Our Rally Polos keep getting faster and we sorted out the reliability last year itself so we expect to continue on our winning streak,” said Rohan Pawar. “It is also great to see so many Polos on the rally circuit and it is a
great vindication of the faith we put in the car when we debuted the untried and untested Polo last year. Nobody expected the car to do so well and now on the back of our successes in 2013 more than half the grid in Rally Coimbatore is made up of Rally Polos,” added Pawar. Stating that their technical team haven’t been sitting idle, Pawar said, “In Nashik the Slideways Polos were still the fastest cars on the grid – not just compared to the other Polos but even the Cedias and we will continue to set the rally circuit ablaze.” Coimbatore has a special significance for Slideways Industries as their fi rst Rally Polo was built and tested in this city last year, while the teams service partners Chettinad Sporting are also based out of the city which is one of the biggest motorsport hubs in the country. [email protected]
After an unsuccessful year, city-based shuttler finds form and pockets a state junior selection badminton tournament title in Karad this week BY ASHISH PHADNIS @phadnis_ashish PUNE: For Pune-based shuttler Arya Bhivpathaki, winning a state title is nothing new, but this year is special. His recent win in the under-17 category of the state badminton junior selections trials held at Karad, has come after a long wait. “It was in 2012, that I won the state title. 2013 I consider to be a dry run for me. Though, I reached the finals I couldn’t convert them into titles. But with this win I am confident about my form,” said Bhivpathaki on the sidelines of the ongoing district badminton tournament at the PDMBA Complex in Shivajinagar. “Temperament is crucial to the game,” states Bhivpathaki, analysing his own performance. “I wasn’t lacking in technicalities, but temperament. I lose my temper at crucial points hence was not able to give the final push. But yoga and meditation have helped me keep my cool,” he said. This 14-year-old has been winning the titles in different age groups since he was 10 and has recently graduated to the under-17 age group where he aims to achieve the success that he had in the under-15 segment. “I was India ranked 5th in the under-15 category, but now in under-17 age group, I have slipped to 16th rank. However ranking is not the priority. All I have to do is to concentrate on getting in to the quarters and semis in the national tourneys,” he said. Bhivpathaki, who trains with Hemant Hardikar at the PDMBA, was selected for the Tata Padukone Badminton Academy in 2012. Though, the academy’s branch in Pune was shut down due to some financial constraints, Bhivpathaki was allowed to train at their main
branch in Bangalore. “Presently, I am studying for my SSC exams and later I might shift to Bangalore for further training,” said Bhivpathaki, a student of the Hutchings School. [email protected]
Invitation Price
|
Tropical cyclone
|
Originating in Turkish cuisine terminology the 'shish' in a shish kebab refers to? Lamb; Skewer; Spice; or the 'Sizzle' sound?
|
Monitor on psychology september 2014 by Psychotopos - issuu
issuu
SEPTEMBER 2014 • VOL. 45 • NO. 8
A PUBLICATION OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION GST# R127612802
College students’ mounting stress CE: The dark side of professional ethics The psychologist behind the 9/11 Museum
For ADHD evaluations...
Who is going to give you the best information? All of the above.
DefiniPoint is the first and only complete online system that makes it easy and convenient to obtain needed ADHD behavioral information from multiple individuals. DefiniPoint enables you to efficiently distribute, collect, and score many of the well-accepted ADHD rating scales that you’re already familiar with.* In fact, Clinicians using DefiniPoint are experiencing an 85% return rate within four days.
Free unlimited use for 30 days at DefiniPoint.com More Data • Less Time • Less Hassle
* DefiniPoint offers psychometrically validated and well-accepted, standardized ADHD rating scales that use DSM-5 Criteria. Over the last five years, more than 200 clinical research studies have been published using these rating scales.
1939—Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale®
75 years and counting… 1974—The WISC®–R
2003—The WISC®–IV
Coming Fall 2014!
See how far we’ve come. 2014—The new WISC®–V on Q-interactive® No more manuals, record forms, or response booklets.
Q-interactive welcomes the new WISC®–V. Now you have a choice, digital or paper.
Discover Q-interactive at HelloQ.com/Home Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. Q-interactive, WISC, Always Learning, Pearson, design for Psi, and PsychCorp are trademarks, in the U.S. and/or other countries, of Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). 510E026 8810-E 09/14
President Nadine J. Kaslow, PhD
Consulting Editor Kim I. Mills
President-elect Barry Anton, PhD
Chief Executive Officer Norman B. Anderson, PhD
Director of Advertising Jodi Ashcraft
Monitor on Psychology staff Executive Editor Rhea K. Farberman
Assistant Director of Advertising Karen L. Eskew
Editor Sara Martin
Advertising Sales Manager James Boston
Senior Editors Jamie Chamberlin Lea Winerman
Recruitment Advertising Sales Manager Amelia Dodson
Associate Editor Anna Miller
Sr. Classified Advertising Production Coordinator Antoinette Amorin-Aryee
Intern Heather Mongilio Senior Art Director Malcolm McGaughy
Advertising Sales Associate Corey Bockhaus
Please recycle this magazine
© Robert Leighton/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank
The Monitor on Psychology (ISSN-1529-4978) is the magazine of the Americ an Psychological Association (APA) and is published 11 times per year—January, February, March, April, May, June, July/August combined, September, October, November, December. Publications office, headquarters and editorial offices are at 750 First St., N.E., Washington, DC 20002-4242. APA purchases only “first publication rights” for photos and illustrations. There fore, it cannot grant permission to reuse any illustrative material. APA holds the copyright for text material in Monitor on Psychology articles. Permission requests to reproduce text material should be addressed to APA, Permissions Office, at the APA address. Telephone numbers: Headquarters (202) 336-5500; TDD (202) 336-6123; Display advertising (202) 336-5714; Classified advertising (202) 336-5564; and Sub scriptions (202) 336-5600. The views expressed in the Monitor on Psychology are those of the authors and may not reflect the official policies or positions of the American Psychological Association or the Monitor on Psychology. No endorsement of those views should be inferred unless specifically identified as the official policy or position of the American Psychological Association. The publication of any advertisement by APA is an endorsement neither of the advertiser nor of the product. APA endorses equal employment opportunity practices, and we reserve the right to edit all copy and to refuse ads that are not in consonance with the principles of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Subscription to the Monitor on Psychology ($6) is included in the annual dues and fees for all APA members and student affiliates. Individual subscription rate is $50; individual surface rate is $103; and individual airmail rate is $131. Institutional subscription rate is $93; institutional surface rate is $195; and institutional airmail rate is $223. Single copies are $20 each. For $16 extra, the Monitor on Psychology will be mailed first-class to subscribers in the United States, Canada and Mexico. For $75 extra, airmail is available to foreign subscribers (other than Canada and Mexico). Periodical postage is paid at Washington, DC, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Monitor on Psychology Subscriptions Department, 750 First St., N.E., Washington, DC 20002–4242. CANADA SUBSCRIPTIONS: Canada Post Agreement Number 40036331. Send change of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Printed in the United States of America. ©2014 by APA. Address editorial inquiries to the Monitor on Psychology editor, and advertising and sub scription inquiries to Monitor on Psychology/advertising or Monitor on Psychology/subscriptions.
2
“Be afraid to try new things!”
Need to contact APA? Answers to many of your questions may be found on APA’s website: www.apa.org. For service over the phone, here are some frequently requested APA numbers: APA’s Service Center................................... (800) 374-2721 • Membership • Subscriptions • Orders American Psychological Foundation........ (202) 336-5843 Convention Services................................... (202) 336-6020 Division Services......................................... (202) 336-6013 Education Directorate................................. (202) 336-5959 Ethics Office.................................................. (202) 336-5930 Monitor on Psychology............................... (202) 336-5675 Practice Directorate.................................... (202) 336-5800 PsycINFO....................................................... (800) 374-2722 Public Interest Directorate......................... (202) 336-6056 Science Directorate.................................... (202) 336-6000
l
Got a story idea? We want to hear from you. Send your ideas to Monitor Editor Sara Martin at [email protected].
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Psychology is Your Business
Protecting You and Your Practice is Ours Trust Sponsored Professional Liability Insurance It’s there for you when you need it the most. Take The Trust’s Advocate 800 Risk Management Consultation Service: When you’re faced with a risk management issue… whether you have a question or you’re in the middle of a crisis, a confidential call to The Advocate can help you avoid potential problems before they begin. The Trust’s Advocates are licensed psychologists with extensive legal, ethical, and risk management experience. With more than 50,000 consultations under their belts, they are uniquely positioned to help you find the answers you need.
Learn more about The Trust’s Advocate Service, check rates, and apply for coverage at trustinsurance.com or call us at 1-877-637-9700.
trustinsurance.com
The Trust is the sole authorized and preferred provider of Insurance Products for APA members. * Insurance provided by ACE American Insurance Company, Philadelphia, PA and in some jurisdictions, other insurance companies within the ACE Group. The product information above is a summary only. The insurance policy actually issued contains the terms and conditions of the contract. All products may not be available in all states. Surplus lines insurance sold only through licensed surplus lines producers. Administered by Trust Risk Management Services, Inc. Policy issuance is subject to underwriting. ACE USA is the U.S.-based retail operating division of the ACE Group, a global leader in insurance and reinsurance, serving a diverse group of clients. Headed by ACE Limited (NYSE: ACE), a component of the S&P 500 stock index, the ACE Group conducts its business on a worldwide basis with operating subsidiaries in more than 50 countries. Additional information can be found at www.acegroup.com/us. Association membership is no longer required to apply for Trust Sponsored Professional Liability Insurance.
Letters More psychologists needed on integrated-care teams Thanks to Dr. Kettlewell for focusing on the positive impact of psychologists in primary care settings (July/August issue, “Integrated care at work.”) As part of the leadership team for a recent summit on care management, I was both surprised and disappointed to see few psychologists among our more than 100 participants. Although social workers and nurses predominate in the care management field, the Monitor’s article makes it clear that other practitioners also have work to do to improve medical outcomes and efficiencies. For example, we know that many individuals with primary medical diagnoses and/or chronic conditions may develop psychological symptoms as well. Elders, too, can be susceptible to depression and substance abuse. These co-occurring conditions might be identified, but are not necessarily treated in the course of a basic physical examination or functional assessment. In such cases, I am often asked to provide additional information and referrals through my consulting practice. I encourage APA to continue to highlight the value that psychologists can add to care management and medical treatment teams, and to support legislation and reimbursement structures that make psychological services an accessible and affordable part of integrated care. LAURA E. PASQUALE, PHD La Jolla, California
Protecting our planet Kudos for the June Monitor article “Climate change communication heats
up.” The article is useful in equipping more of us with conceptual and practical tools for helping to lighten the carbon footprint. Yet a subtle influence that may underlie selective resistance to addressing problem-solving approaches to climate change is religious ideology. For example, in the Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, a well-referenced article by Jost et al. (February, 2014, pp. 56–81), “Belief in a Just God (and a Just Society): A System Justification Perspective on Religious Ideology,” asserts that “religious ideology appears to serve the palliative function of making people happier or more satisfied with the way things are” (p. 56). Yet rather than ideological complacency, the existence of climate change at the environmental level challenges the notion of status quo. As Winerman cites in the Monitor article, “The pain of paying more for gas at the pump, turning down the thermostat, or deciding to forgo airplane trips is real and immediate. And yet those actions can feel minuscule compared with what needs to be done to limit global warming. Meanwhile, the most serious consequences of climate change seem remote — far away and far in the future.” Nevertheless, discussion with parents regarding the improved status of future life if climate change is brought under control seems a promising incentive. That is, appeals to healthier, safer lives for children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and beyond offer a transgenerational perspective for effective communication.
Misguided article on parental alienation The “Contested custody” article in the July/August Monitor presents an extremely biased view of the problem of parental alienation in disputed custody cases. The article quotes Joan Meier, an attorney, who dismisses parental alienation as “a small problem” and states that only a “tiny” percentage of children end up “seriously” alienated from one parent in divorce cases. The article also implies that the concept of parental alienation is a ploy used by abusive fathers’ attorneys to gain custody of their children. These positions do not represent the views of most forensic psychologists who perform custody evaluations, nor do they accurately reflect the findings of the many empirical studies of parental alienation. The other two “experts” who were cited in the article hold similarly extreme views about the utility of the concept of parental alienation. The views expressed by the three “experts” cited in the article do not reflect the views of most psychologists who perform custody evaluations. For example, a survey of 84 forensic psychologists who perform custody evaluations found that 58 percent of respondents rated the usefulness of the concept of parental alienation in the evaluation of allegations of sexual abuse in custody disputes as 4 or 5 on a scale from 1 (useless) to 5 (very useful). Only 11 percent rated it as useless (1). This study, by Bow, Quinnell, Zaroff, and Assemany (2002), was published in a peer-reviewed APA journal, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.
WILLIAM F. VITULLI, PHD Mobile, Alabama
STEVE HERMAN, PHD University of Hawaii at Hilo
continues on page 8 4
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
President’s COLUMN
Becoming a better supervisor BY NADINE J. KASLOW, PHD • APA PRESIDENT
C
lose your eyes and get an image of both your most and your least effective supervisor, whether in the context of service delivery or research. What comes to mind? While both types of experiences can be transformative, they are very different. My positive supervisory relationships were associated with an enhanced sense of well-being, greater confidence in my work and increased competence; better outcomes of the work being supervised and a greater depth of connection with my supervisor. These powerful supervisory relationships were characterized by care and compassion, gentleness and patience, an appreciation of my strengths and a willingness to challenge me. The problematic supervisory relationships I experienced often were hurtful to me. They made me feel insecure about myself and my work, made it more of a struggle to deliver quality services and scholarly products, and led me to experience the relationship as uncomfortable and not safe. Many of us learned to supervise by following the lead of our positive supervisory role models and avoiding the attitudes and behaviors we found unhelpful in other supervisors. While role modeling is valuable, it is an insufficient way to develop supervisory competence. That requires extensive reading of the pertinent literature, formal preparation that has both didactic and experiential components, and the opportunity to obtain ongoing feedback from others, including our supervisees. The time has come for psychologists to transform supervision from a practice driven by osmosis to a distinct professional competency. To respond to this need, a task force convened this year by APA’s Board of Educational Affairs crafted supervisory guidelines for one type of psychological practice: health-service psychology. The competency-based Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology, endorsed by the APA Council of Representatives in August, offer an invaluable resource regarding optimal performance. These developmentally informed, strength-based guidelines focus on three goals: ensuring that supervisees acquire the requisite competence and professional development, prioritizing the delivery of quality care to the client/patient and protecting the public. The guidelines are organized around seven domains: • Supervisor competence. Being competent in the practice
of supervision, the services that one’s supervisees are providing and the use of technology. • Diversity. This includes infusing diversity into all aspects of supervision and professional practice; attending to the diversity characteristics of both parties; pursuing ongoing training to enhance diversity competence; and addressing the effects of bias, prejudice and stereotyping. • Supervisory relationship. Forging respectful, collaborative relationships with supervisees; delineating roles, expectations and rights of both parties; and engaging in mutual review of the supervisee’s progress and the supervisory relationship. • Professionalism. Modeling professionalism; educating supervisees about knowledge, skills and attitudes associated with professionalism; and offering feedback about supervisees’ attainment of developmentally expected levels of professionalism. • Assessment/evaluation/feedback. Monitoring and providing input on supervisee performance; providing candid, timely feedback; being attuned to supervisees’ responses to input and its impact on the supervisory dyad; incorporating into the evaluation the supervisee’s self-assessment; and using input from supervisees to enhance one’s own competence. • Professional competence problems. Addressing problems of professional competence in one’s supervisees directly; attending to these problems in a timely fashion to offer time to effect change; developing and implementing plans to remediate problems; and serving as gatekeepers when necessary. • Ethics, legal and regulatory considerations. Modeling ethical practice and decision making; upholding one’s primary ethical and legal responsibility to protect public welfare; and documenting appropriately supervisee performance. Although these guidelines focus on health-service psychology, their tenets are informative for all endeavors that require supervision. For those of you being supervised, remember you have the responsibility to be a fully engaged participant in the supervisory process and the right to have effective supervisors who are dedicated to advancing your growth in a respectful and supportive way. We can all help ensure that the two-way street of competent supervision is associated with psychologists’ optimal growth and development. n For more on the guidelines, see the article on page 42. To read the guidelines, go to www.apa.org/ed/resources/index.aspx.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I T O R O N P S Y C H O L O G Y 5
Contents
Students under pressure College and university counseling centers are examining how best to serve the growing number of students seeking their services. 36
42 46 50 54 6
Fostering successful clinical supervision An APA task force has created guidelines that promise to make supervision a more evidencebased and codified part of training. On the reservation How prescribing psychologists are improving access to care at one Indian Health Service facility. Prosecuting child sexual abuse Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr. revamped the process for forensic interviews to make sure that abused children get the treatment they need. From serious mental illness to recovery An APA curriculum trains psychology students how to help people recover from schizophrenia, major depression and other serious mental health conditions.
68 72 86
Candidates express their views The five candidatesYOUTUBE for APA’s 2016 LOGO SPECS president answer two final questions.
PRINT
on light backgrounds APA honors psychology’s best During APA’s 2014 Annual Convention standard last month, APA and its divisions honored PMS 1815C PMS 1795C members who made far-reaching contributions. main red
gradient bottom
C0 M0 Y0 K0
C100 M100 Y100 K100
Meet APA’s 2014WHITE fellows BLACK One worked for a U.S. senator from Colorado, the other served a powerful Senate health committee.
no gradients
watermark
stacked logo (for sharing only)
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
28 QUESTIONNAIRE: Memorializing a tragedy Thanks to psychologist Billie Pivnick, the new 9/11 Museum in New York City was designed with visitors’ mental health in mind.
Departments 4 Letters 5 President’s Column 9 From the CEO 15 By the Numbers 18 Datapoint 20 In Brief 24 Judicial Notebook 26 Random Sample 52 Perspective on Practice 90 Division Spotlight 95 Personalities
extra digital content
Upfront 10 Psychologists featured at White House summit on concussions 11 Are marijuana legalization laws based on bad science? 12 Illinois law allows psychologists to prescribe 13 APA honors middle school for using psychological science to help students 14 Interventions show promise in helping treat and prevent domestic violence among military couples 15 National Science Board welcomes psychologist James S. Jackson 15 Spend a year working for the federal government 16 Workshop for high school psychology teachers celebrates 10 years 17 APA in the classroom bolsters student mental health
32 58 66 91 92 97
SCIENCE WATCH Reproducing results APA and other groups advocate for more data sharing and replication studies, although some psychologists say they aren’t necessary. CE CORNER The dark side of professional ethics Even the best psychologists can unwittingly fall into ethical problems. Recognize any of these behaviors in your own practice? ETHICALLY SPEAKING Keeping a clinical focus Legal and ethical issues may make psychologists feel anxious, yet often such questions call for a psychologist’s best clinical skills.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION Leading by example APA CEO Norman B. Anderson and his wife P. Elizabeth Anderson pledge $100,000 to APF’s Visionary Fund. Grants and opportunities
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES Jobs, conferences and more
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I T O R O N P S Y C H O L O G Y 7
Letters continued on page 4 The “Contested custody” article was a one-sided and questionably framed argument about child abuse and parental alienation, actually two distinct phenomena associated with high conflict divorce. As an evaluator with over 30 years experience, I have observed judges weigh evidence — including parent testimony — carefully in countless court appearances. In abuse cases, there are often data available to establish patterns of abuse: social services reports, observation of the parent-child relationships, child interviews and third-party corroboration. Alienated children don’t
display the ambivalence of abused children; they often express exaggerated and global accusations without supportive data and wholly reject the parent and their extended families. Protocols exist to aid evaluators in determining realistic estrangement vs. alienation: a far more likely scenario than alienation vs. abuse. In over 1,300 cases, I have never seen a judge remove a child from a caring mother and “have them handed over to abusive fathers.” Litigating parents are a separate population from divorcing parents. As such, there are a variety of significant issues that arise and rarely is it abuse
APA Handbooks in Psychology™ APA Handbook of Ethics in Psychology
Volume 1. Moral Foundations and Common Themes Volume 2. Practice, Teaching, and Research Editor-in-Chief Samuel J. Knapp 2012. 1,008 pages. 2-Volume Set. ISBN 978-1-4338-1000-8 • Item # 4311504 List: $395.00 • APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00
APA Educational Psychology Handbook
Volume 1. Theories, Constructs, and Critical Issues Volume 2. Individual Differences and Cultural and Contextual Factors Volume 3. Application to Learning and Teaching Editors-in-Chief Karen R. Harris, Steve Graham, and Tim Urdan 2012. 1,843 pages. 3-Volume Set. ISBN 978-1-4338-0996-5 • Item # 4311503 List: $595.00 • APA Member/Affiliate: $295.00
FAD0078
APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology
Volume 1. Foundations, Planning, Measures, and Psychometrics Volume 2. Research Designs: Quantitative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological Volume 3. Data Analysis and Research Publication Editor-in-Chief Harris Cooper
2012. 2,264 pages. 3-Volume Set. ISBN 978-1-4338-1003-9 • Item # 4311505 List: $695.00 • APA Member/Affiliate: $395.00
APA Addiction Syndrome Handbook
Volume 1. Foundations, Influences, and Expressions of Addiction Volume 2. Recovery, Prevention, and Other Issues Editor-in-Chief Howard J. Shaffer 2012. 984 pages. 2-Volume Set. ISBN 978-1-4338-1103-6 • Item # 4311507 List: $395.00 • APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00
www.apa.org/pubs/books • 800-374-2721
8
and/or alienation. And no one I know serves in dual roles. A professional is never likely to be a therapist and an evaluator. But an evaluator can, after litigation is over, serve as a parenting coordinator. I only do so if both parents make that request and with the caveat that I will not return to the evaluator role if their case is relitigated. BILL J. FYFE, EDD Denver
While the title is correct, the content of the Monitor’s “Contested custody” article cannot be further from what I, as an attorney, see in the courts. The article appears, at best, uninformed of reality of the subject matter. There is much research that supports the existence of alienating behavior when parents are divorcing. Although my vantage point is that of an attorney, I can assuredly state that alienation tactics are much more common than one would ever expect. Not surprisingly, the flipside — false allegations — are usually coupled in the same cases. The debates over research in this area have been highlighted in articles by Jennifer McIntosh, PhD, and Richard Warshak, PhD. Perhaps an article documenting actual research, as opposed to unsupported statements, would be appropriate in the near future. MICHAEL D. GERHARDT Chicago
Please send letters to [email protected] or Sara Martin, Monitor editor. Letters should be no more than 250 words and may be edited for space and clarity.
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
FROM THE
CEO
Violence and mental illness: What’s behind the story BY DR. NORMAN B. ANDERSON • APA CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Last year, when President Obama initiated a national effort to prevent gun violence, APA offered assistance with the goal of ensuring that psychological research contributes to the national response to prevent violence. In January 2013, I had the opportunity to participate in an invitational meeting on gun violence at the White House. At that meeting, APA, along with other mental health groups, asked the president to make it a national priority to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness and the perception that violence and mental illness are linked. APA also urged President Obama to ensure that every child and adult who needs mental health care receives it without barriers or limitations. Since early 2013, APA has been actively involved in many initiatives to prevent gun violence. In May, APA partnered with the American Bar Association to present a comprehensive conference that focused on family and community violence prevention. We convened a panel of experts on gun violence and released a report that identified the most promising approaches to reduce this problem. APA also appointed a task force to create a resolution on gun violence prevention. The APA Council of Representatives adopted the Resolution on Firearm Violence Research and Prevention in February, which now guides our efforts. APA’s Government Relations Offices (Education, Practice, Public Interest, and Science) have been working to educate and inform members of Congress and the administration on policies that reduce violence and strengthen our mental health system. Today, the national dialogue on mental illness and gun violence continues based on reports of mental health problems among some mass violence perpetrators. The shocking nature of mass shootings provokes intense media attention. Unfortunately, the conversation in the media has focused in large measure on keeping guns out of the hands of what some have called the “dangerous mentally ill.” Some policymakers have promoted mental health system reform as a panacea for violence. Yet the vast majority of violent acts are not committed by people who are diagnosed with, or in treatment for, mental illness. The attention to mass shootings perpetuates the stigma attached to mental illness and may create a disincentive to seeking treatment. The focus on mass shootings contrasts with much less extensive coverage of other types of more prevalent community violence. Moreover, the focus on mental
illness ignores the fact that most gun violence is committed by people in crisis, who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or in the context of domestic violence or other illegal activities. Given that most people with mental illness do not harm or threaten others, continuing to frame the conversation about gun violence solely in the context of mental illness does a disservice both to the victims of violence and those who suffer from mental illness. More important, it does not direct us to appropriate solutions. Our response to violence must be based on evidence. APA and other associations are working to reframe the conversation about mental illness to recognize that most people with a mental disorder are not violent, but that our mental health system does need immediate reform to be more accessible and effective. One way APA is trying to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness is via our contribution to Microsoft’s Skype in the Classroom project, which is designed to bring quality mental health information directly to elementary and secondary school students (see article on page 17). APA also co-sponsored the Speak Up for Kids campaign, an annual, national initiative focused on reducing stigma and increasing access to services for children. APA continues to urge Congress and the Obama administration to advance mental health system reform and enact violence prevention policies. At the same time, we must embrace opportunities for research and promising approaches to violence prevention, including suicide prevention, school-based mental health services, substance and alcohol abuse treatment, and trauma-informed care for victims of violence. Psychology comprises an essential component of the multidisciplinary approach needed to lead us to effective violence prevention strategies. n To read the APA Resolution on Firearm Violence Research and Prevention, go to www.apa.org/about/policy/firearms.aspx.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I T O R O N P S Y C H O L O G Y 9
Upfront Before Barack Obama was President Obama, he was a high school basketball player who dreamed of going pro. Now, with two athletic daughters and a wife who’s made “Let’s Move” her platform, sports remain central to Obama’s life, the president said at the Healthy Kids and Safe Sports Concussion Summit at the White House in May. “There’s a huge public health interest in making sure that people are participating in sports,” Obama said. “But sports is also just fundamental to who we are as Americans and our culture. We’re competitive. We’re driven. And sports teach us about teamwork and hard work and what it takes to succeed not just on the field but in life.” But for all their benefits, many sports also come with the risk of concussion. According to the latest U.S. President Barack Obama talks at the White House Healthy Kids and Safe Sports data from the CDC, young people Concussion Summit on May 29 with psychologist Dr. Gerard Gioia. make nearly 250,000 emergency room trips annually due to brain injuries from sports and recreation. And exactly how watching videos on the CDC website or by using tools such as they’re caused and the extent of the damage is still not well the “Concussion Recognition & Response” smartphone app, understood, Obama said. which he created with a colleague. That’s why, during the summit, he emphasized the Gioia also advised parents and coaches to err on the side of importance of concussion research and education to keep caution with young athletes who may have been jolted or hit by children as safe as possible while staying active. He also taking them out of the game and clearing them with an experiannounced new research initiatives to further explore the enced medical provider before returning them to play. “When in causes and consequences of concussions, including a $30 doubt, sit them out. If you suspect, you must protect,” he said. million research project funded by the NCAA and the U.S. In an interview after the summit, Gioia emphasized that Department of Defense and a $16 million partnership between psychologists have a major role to play in helping children the NFL and the National Institutes of Health to study the and adults with brain injuries — including veterans who have chronic effects of repetitive concussions. sustained a traumatic brain injury — since such injuries can The event featured psychologist Gerard Gioia, PhD, as cause mood changes, feelings of loss of identity and other a panelist, and was attended by several other psychologists, forms of psychological distress. “The good news is that people including APA CEO Norman B. Anderson, PhD. Gioia, chief get better from this injury, and we have an important skill set to of the division of pediatric neuropsychology at Children’s help them with their recovery,” he said. National Health System and director of the Safe Concussion — ANNA MILLER Outcome, Recovery and Education Program, outlined steps parents and coaches can take to prevent or minimize damage To watch a video of the president’s remarks from concussions. and the panelists’ discussion, go to http:// For example, he said, learn to recognize a concussion by wh.gov/lovs4 10
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Larry Downing / Reuters Pictures
Psychologists featured at White House summit on concussions
sarra22/Thinkstock
Are marijuana legalization laws based on bad science? Myths about marijuana abound. Among them are claims that it’s harmless, it’s not addictive and that legalizing it will solve the government’s budgetary problems, said U.S. Rep. John Fleming, MD, at a June 19 congressional briefing. “My concern today is, are we making bad laws to, in fact, respond to mythology?” The briefing was sponsored by APA and other members of The Friends of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a coalition that advocates for research funding for NIDA and educates policymakers about its findings. This event sought to dispel myths about marijuana and outline what is known about its use and its societal impact. For example, 9 percent of people who experiment with marijuana will become addicted, and regular marijuana use in adolescence is linked to impaired neural connectivity in adulthood, according to a June review article in the New England Journal of Medicine. “It’s the exposure of adolescent brains [to marijuana] that concerns all of us because of the unique and important nature of brain development during teen years,” said Wilson Compton, MD, the deputy director of NIDA and a co-author of the article. The briefing featured psychologist Robert Booth, PhD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who presented his preliminary findings on marijuana use and its consequences. So far, he’s found that since Colorado started implementing its medical marijuana laws fully in 2009,
the number of students expelled or suspended for drugs in Colorado schools each year has gone up from about 4,000 to more than 5,279 during the 2011–12 school year. “Colorado is at an all-time high in terms of [drugrelated] expulsions, and 98 percent of these expulsions are for marijuana,” Booth said. Similarly, the number of people arrested for driving under the influence of THC, the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, nearly tripled from 2009 to 2012, he said. Patrick Kennedy, a former U.S. congressman and chairman of the marijuana awareness organization Project SAM, spoke about the danger of commercializing marijuana products such as lollipops and sodas. “This is really an industry that makes its profits off of addiction,” he said. Kennedy and other speakers also stressed that widespread distribution of marijuana may counter efforts to improve the country’s mental health system by encouraging people to self-medicate with marijuana or to become addicted to it. All speakers agreed that more research is needed to understand the effects of marijuana and inform policy. “Policy is all about making decisions, and those decisions have to be made based on real information, solid information,” said Charles O’Keefe, co-chair of The Friends of NIDA and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “And solid information comes from good, solid research.” — ANNA MILLER
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 1 1
Upfront Illinois joins New Mexico and Louisiana as states that allow licensed clinical psychologists with advanced, specialized training to prescribe certain medications for the treatment of mental health disorders. “This is a landmark moment for mental health care,” says Norman B. Anderson, PhD, APA’s chief executive officer. “Allowing properly trained clinical psychologists to prescribe is a logical step in helping to improve access to quality mental health care for consumers, especially the underserved. And the collaborative approach between prescribing psychologists and physicians in Illinois should help to ensure coordinated patient care.” Illinois Senate Bill 2187 requires that licensed clinical psychologists in Illinois who want to prescribe successfully to complete advanced education and training in psychopharmacology as well as supervised clinical training in various settings, such as hospitals, outpatient clinics, community mental health clinics and correctional facilities. One notable provision of the new law paves the way for psychology graduate students to begin studying clinical psychopharmacology at the predoctoral level, setting the stage for them to apply for prescriptive authority in Illinois once they complete their doctoral training and licensure. The new law stipulates a collaborative practice agreement between prescribing psychologists and physicians. It does not permit psychologists to prescribe for children, adolescents or adults age 66 or older, or for patients who are pregnant or have serious medical conditions or developmental/intellectual disabilities. Psychology advocates are hopeful that prescribing psychologists in Illinois will eventually earn a broader scope of prescriptive authority. “Giving prescriptive authority to licensed clinical psychologists with advanced specialized training in clinical psychopharmacology will improve access to care and expand options for Illinois residents seeking treatment for mental health conditions,” says Beth N. Rom-Rymer, PhD, past president of the Illinois Psychological Association. “With state resources stretched to the limit, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are in short supply, and the demand for mental health services far exceeds the capabilities of the existing provider network. This law will help ease the enormous pressure on the state system.” More than 50 Illinois counties have no inpatient psychiatric services in their hospitals. Another 24 counties have no hospitals at all. Yet 614,000 Illinois residents currently need treatment for serious mental illness. The unmet need is greatest 12
Stacey Lynn Brown/Thinkstock
Illinois law allows psychologists to prescribe
among people who need help the most: low-income, rural and minority populations whose needs are often underserved. “Obtaining prescriptive authority for qualified, licensed psychologists will help fill the nationwide need for access to comprehensive, quality mental health care,” says APA Executive Director for Professional Practice Katherine C. Nordal, PhD. “We’re excited to see another state take this important step.” New Mexico was the first state to pass a prescribing law for psychologists in 2002. Louisiana followed in 2004. — APA PRACTICE DIRECTORATE STAFF
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Comstock Images/Thinkstock
APA honors middle school for using psychological science to help students Two years ago, Stanton Middle School in Wilmington, Delaware, was underperforming academically compared with state and national averages. Now, thanks to the school’s evidence-based efforts to boost students’ social and emotional growth so they can focus on learning, Stanton students are outperforming those averages in both reading and math. Stanton’s impressive progress has earned it APA’s 2014 Golden Psi Award, a $1,000 prize that recognizes schools that do an exceptional job of using psychological science to help students grow and learn. Among the many ways the school stands out is with mental health screening and its emphasis on improving students’ social competence and behavior. “The thing that they do very well, which is often missing from social-emotional support in schools, is they practice accepted behaviors,” such as impulse control and conflict management, says Tammy Hughes, PhD, chair of APA’s Golden Psi Committee. Stanton teachers, counselors and administrators work as hard on correcting students’ behavioral mistakes as they do on correcting math or spelling errors. A conflict between two students isn’t an automatic trip to the principal’s office, but rather an opportunity to teach problem solving, Hughes says.
“It’s not about just stopping the fight, but about saying … how do we come to a compromise, and let’s practice that,” she says. Stanton’s teachers meet regularly with the school’s student support team, which includes school psychologist Teri Lawler, to review students’ academic and behavioral progress and identify students who might need more mentoring, tutoring or counseling. Teachers are also regularly trained in classroom management as well as in the challenges students may face at home, such as the chronic stress that comes with poverty and a lack of resources, says Lawler. “Based on their experiences, many of our kids may be functioning years below their chronological ages, and so it’s important that there’s a level of understanding for the complexity of behavior and behavior change,” Lawler says. “We work to help teachers and staff understand that as much as we are teaching academics, we are also teaching behavior.” The Golden Psi Award, now in its second year, is presented to a school located in the same region as APA’s Annual Convention. For more information on the award, go to www. apa.org/about/awards/bea-golden-psi.aspx. Applications for the 2015 award are due Nov. 1. — JAMIE CHAMBERLIN
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 1 3
Upfront For soldiers returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reconnecting with partners can be just as difficult as finding employment, recovering from physical and psychological injuries, and redefining their roles in the community. Some research suggests that once they’re back in their communities, veterans perpetrate violence up to three times as often as civilians; they’re also more likely than civilians to cause significant injury. But a new cognitive-behavioral group intervention developed by the National Center for PTSD may help reduce those rates, according to multiple pilot studies. Strength at Home is a 12-session intervention program focusing on preventing domestic violence. Participants learn how to handle potential conflicts by better understanding their own reactions and learning to cool down rather than escalate negativity, as well as how to manage anger and stress by communicating in more constructive ways. “A lot of the veterans in our program are prone to misinterpreting their partners’ intentions or misinterpreting situations in overly hostile or overly negative ways, likely due to their experience of trauma and being in dangerous situations and not really knowing whom they can trust when they were deployed,” says Casey Taft, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, who helped develop the intervention. Results of a pilot study with six returning veterans at the Boston VA Medical Center showed a significant decrease in both physical and psychological intimate partner violence, based on veteran and partner reports before the intervention and six months after (Journal of Family Violence, April 2013). Similarly, a pilot study of the intervention, adapted as a 10week program for both returning male vets and their intimate female partners, found reduced levels of both types of violence among nine couples six months post-treatment (Partner Abuse: New Directions in Research, Intervention, and Policy, January). The study also suggested lower levels of PTSD among veterans following the intervention. Additional soon-to-be-published pilot studies of both the veteran and couples intervention in Honolulu and Fresno, California, have shown a significant 14
LucieHolloway/Thinkstock
Interventions show promise in helping treat and prevent domestic violence among military couples
reduction in abusive behavior, and two larger-scale randomized clinical trials will be completed by the end of the summer, with initial analyses showing positive results, Taft says. “There are so many human and societal costs associated with violence, particularly among military families, who make up a pretty substantial portion of our population,” Taft says. “This intervention is showing that if you really work to educate people about the roots of so many conflicts and demonstrate better ways to handle them, you really can see great gains and ultimately prevent violence.” — AMY NOVOTNEY
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
National Science Board welcomes psychologist James S. Jackson James S. Jackson, PhD, leads the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, but since August, he has an additional job as a new member and the only psychologist on the current National Science Board. The board oversees the National Science Foundation and advises the president and Congress on science policy. Members are appointed by the president. Although Jackson will be the only psychologist on the board, he is joined by other members of the social sciences. Jackson began his six-year term in August, joining 24 other members. His goal for his term is to make sure each area of science is treated equitably. “It’s a great opportunity, not only for me but also for behavioral and social sciences,” Jackson says. Specifically, he looks forward to bringing a psychological and social science perspective to the board’s deliberations. He also hopes his background in research on the influence of ethnicity on mental health will contribute to the discussions. And he looks forward to connecting with the other board members of different scientific backgrounds. “One never knows where the next important scientific breakthrough is going to come from and how that will be of assistance to the future of the country,” Jackson says. — HEATHER MONGILIO
Spend a year working for the federal government APA seeks applications for its Congressional Fellowship and Executive Branch Science Fellowship programs. These opportunities allow a select number of psychologists to spend a year in Washington, D.C., where they receive firsthand experience with federal policymaking and agency research and funding. Congressional Fellows work as special legislative aides in congressional member or committee offices and engage in a diverse range of policymaking activities on vital issues. APA offers specialized Congressional Fellowships for midcareer/senior professionals, experts in health and behavior issues, and developmental and clinical psychologists with experience working with children. Executive Branch Science Fellows gain crucial experience in science policy and research coordination and funding working in a federal science agency. Both programs offer a yearlong stipend and funds to support relocation, travel and the purchase of health insurance. For more information, visit www.apa.org/about/gr/fellows or call the Public Interest Government Relations Office at (202) 336-5935 or the Science Government Relations office at (202) 336-5932. Applications must be postmarked by Jan. 9.
By the numbers
10,000
How many suicides in North America and Europe were associated with the Great Recession, estimates a report in the June issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry. The study compared suicide rates before the recession in 2007 with those between 2008 and 2010.
3,300
Number of reported forcible sex crimes on college campuses in 2011 — a 52 percent increase from 2001, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Education in June. College crimes as a whole, however, decreased over the decade.
$2.4 million
How much it costs to support someone with an autism spectrum disorder over his or her life, mostly due to special education and lost productivity for parents, estimates a June study online in JAMA Pediatrics.
1in 8
How many American children are physically, sexually or emotionally abused or neglected by the time they reach age 18, according to a study in the June issue of JAMA Pediatrics. One in five black children and one in seven Native American children are maltreated.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 1 5
Upfront Workshop for high school psychology teachers celebrates 10 years After 14 years teaching AP psychology at a large high school in Gurnee, Illinois, Sean Mahoney needed new ideas to keep his courses fresh. So he applied to attend the APA/Clark University Workshop for High School Teachers, a three-day forum of presentations, networking and other professional development activities aiming to enhance the teaching of high school psychology. The workshop, hosted by APA’s Education Directorate and Teachers of Psychology This year, 24 teachers participated in the 10th annual APA/Clark University Workshop for High School Teachers, held each summer at Clark University. The workshop, sponsored by APF, APA and Clark with in Secondary Schools generous support from Dr. Lee Gurel, gives participants the opportunity to sharpen their teaching skills (TOPSS) in partnership and learn about cutting-edge research. (Dr. Gurel is in the first row, second from the right.) with Clark University and the American Psychological Foundation, is supported by a gift from Lee Other presentations featured Clark University professors Gurel, PhD, a psychologist and Clark University alumnus. who talked about their latest research on such topics as men’s “This was by far the most meaningful and lasting mental health and learning environments, while Ball State professional development opportunity I’ve been a part of,” says University professor Mary Kite, PhD, delivered the keynote Mahoney, who heard about the event through other teachers address on multicultural competence. who help score the AP Psychology Exam. He and 23 other “That’s one of the things that makes this a valuable high school teachers attended this year’s workshop — the 10th workshop — the mix of pedagogy and cutting-edge research,” annual — at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in says Emily Leary Chesnes, assistant director of precollege and June. “I came away with probably 10 different ways that this undergraduate education at APA. conference will really contribute to how I teach next year.” Participants also toured the archives and psychology For example, Randy Ernst, a social studies curriculum laboratories at Clark University, where APA was founded specialist in Lincoln, Nebraska, shared creative ways to teach in 1892, where adolescence and emerging adulthood were positive psychology, such as by having students talk themselves formally established as stages in human development, and out of negative thought patterns by writing to their brains as if where Francis Cecil Sumner, PhD, became the first African they are someone else. Nancy Fenton, a teacher in Lincolnshire, American to earn a doctoral degree in psychology in 1920. Illinois, demonstrated how to teach theories of motivation For Mahoney, who double majored in psychology and by describing them in the context of making a peanut butter history in college, the opportunity to learn about Clark’s and jelly sandwich — an activity developed by past TOPSS history in addition to hearing from experts in teaching and chair Steve Jones. One person might do it to satisfy her hunger, psychology was unexpected — and welcome. “It brings you meeting the drive theory of motivation, for instance, while a back,” he says. “It’s a chance to feel like a student again, to cafeteria worker does it to get paid, representing the incentive recharge your intellectual side.” theory. — ANNA MILLER 16
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
APA in the classroom bolsters student mental health When seventh-grade health teacher Ben Leven invited psychologist Mary Alvord, PhD, to talk to his Buffalo Grove, Illinois, middle school students about stress, Alvord didn’t have to leave her Rockville, Maryland, office. Alvord was broadcast into the classroom with the help of “Let’s Talk about Mental Health,” a joint project with Microsoft and Skype in the Classroom to bring psychology lessons into the classroom via Skype. More than 100 APA members have volunteered as presenters for the program, through which psychologists and teachers work together to plan 50-minute presentations about anger and depression, resilience or anxiety, says Rhea K. Farberman, APA’s executive director for Public and Member Communications. “The program will help destigmatize mental health and spread awareness,” says Farberman. “It is really a great opportunity.” For their class, Leven and Alvord agreed to teach the
students different ways to cope with the intense stress of school, such as visualization and muscle relaxation. By teaching younger children about techniques for coping with stress, Alvord says, psychologists and teachers can help prevent unhealthy coping behaviors later in the students’ lives. As part of the lesson, Alvord asked students to discuss stressors and categorize them as little, medium or large. She then had one student hold books that represented each stressor to demonstrate how stress builds. Next the students listed healthy methods to cope with stress, and after each one was named a book was removed from the pile. The kids responded well to the program and gave great feedback about Alvord, Leven says. As students walked out, they told him the lesson was “cool” and that they learned new ways of handling stress. “The kids loved it,” Leven says. — HEATHER MONGILIO
Put it to the test. With more than 230 published articles and ever-expanding use in private and group practices, the MMPI-2-RF ® sets a new standard in personality assessment. To see for yourself how the MMPI-2-RF could benefit your practice, we’re offering three free trials to help you discover the potential for: Increased Effectiveness. The Restructured Clinical (RC) Scales are at the core of the MMPI-2-RF which provides a thorough clinical assessment using up-to-date personality constructs and scales. Test results for comparison groups are available for forensic, mental health, criminal justice, and public safety settings. Increased Efficiency. The 338 items require only 35–50 minutes to complete, so you can quickly gather critical information. Computer-based score and interpretive reports provide scale scores, item-level information, and a rich, annotated interpretation of results to support and augment your clinical experience and judgment. Increased Confidence. Comprehensive, clinically informative, and linked to current models of psychopathology and personality, the MMPI-2-RF is a valid, reliable, and valuable personality assessment. Take advantage of our limited-time offer and put it to the test today. Call 800.627.7271 before October 31, 2014 and receive three free usages of the MMPI-2-RF. Request code A2G. Offer limited to first-time MMPI-2-RF customers and to Q Local™ or Q-global™ reports.
Test with confidence. 800.627.7271
|
PearsonClinical.com
Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. Q-global, Q Local, Always Learning, Pearson, design for Psi, and PsychCorp are trademarks, in the U.S. and/or other countries, of Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form and MMPI-2-RF are registered trademarks of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. 8731C 09/14 A2G
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 1 7
Datapoint News from APA’s Center for Workforce Studies
What proportion of the nation’s behavioral health providers are psychologists? As a way to create uniformity in reimbursement for health-care services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services groups different types of providers.1,2 Through its National Provider Identifier system, all health-care providers self-identify their professional field into one of various broad categories3, including behavioral and social science providers, which are the following: psychologist, psychiatrist4, counselor, social worker, marriage and family therapist, and other behavioral health related fields.1,2 As of May 2014, about 510,000 identified themselves as behavioral and social science providers. About 16 percent of them were psychologists.1,5,6
Behavioral Health and Other Related Providers, by Field6
Counselors 37%
Other Mental Health Related Professionals 2% Marriage and Family Therapists 7% Psychiatrists 9%
Social Workers 29%
Psychologists 16%
Source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Provider Identifier (NPI) Database (2014)
Approximately 78 percent of licensed psychologists are registered in the NPI database.1,6,7 Registration for an NPI is not a requirement to provide services. Providers who do not receive reimbursement from CMS or other forms of insurance do not need an NPI. — Auntré Hamp, MEd, MPH, Karen Stamm, PhD, Peggy Christidis, PhD, and Andrew Nigrinis, PhD For more information, contact APA’s Center for Workforce Studies at [email protected]. 1. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (2014) National Provider Index Database [Data file accessed on 6/10/2014]. Retrieved from http://nppes.viva-it.com/ NPI_Files.html 2. NPI’s are currently required by most health insurances plans to qualify for reimbursement. 3. CMS utilizes the taxonomy code set maintained by the American National Standards Institute. The Health Care Provider Taxonomy Code Set can be found at: www. wpcedi.com/reference/ 4. For the purpose of this analysis, psychiatrists are counted in the behavioral health category. 5. The totals reported here underestimate the total number of professionals who provide health-related services. Those who are registered in the NPI database are eligible for reimbursement; the data reported here do not reflect the number of hours or amounts billed. 6. Data for this analysis include only individual providers and not organizational entities. 7. American Psychological Association (2014). 2012 APA state licensing board list. [Unpublished special analysis]. Washington, D.C.
18
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Performance You Can See & Hear Exclusively from
NOW
AVAILABLE
Evaluate attention disorders and neurological functioning with the Conners Continuous Performance Tests, now with both visual and auditory attention assessments.
• A comprehensive evaluation with the introduction of an auditory attention test • Easy interpretation with new reports offering clear visuals & summaries • Trusted results with the most representative CPT normative samples collected • Diagnostic confidence with a refined measurement of attention & new scores Multi-Health Systems Inc. USA Tel: 1.800.456.3003 / CAN Tel: 1.800.268.6011
A S S E S S M E N T S
mhs.com • [email protected]
Fuse/Thinkstock
Snapshots of some of the latest peer-reviewed research within psychology and related fields.
significantly more time in areas where they could best hear the music. When the researchers played Japanese music — which has regular, strong beats that are also typical of Western music — the chimps were more likely to be found in spots where it was more difficult or impossible to hear the music (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, online June 23).
n Most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness, according to an international team of scholars who analyzed dozens of studies on gun violence and mental illness. The researchers found that while mass murderers with mental health problems receive a tremendous amount of media attention, they are not typical of those who commit violent crimes, and the vast majority of those with serious mental illness do not engage in violent acts. The team also suggests that gun violence can be reduced by instituting federal and state policies that prohibit firearms possession among individuals who display clear risk factors for violence (Annals of Epidemiology, online April 28).
n Delinquent youth — especially girls and Hispanics — are more likely to die violently as adults, according to
n We trust strangers out of a sense of obligation, according to a study of 645 undergraduates by Cornell University
Chimps spent more time in areas where they could hear African and Indian music, which is characterized by extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, a study found.
n Chimpanzees enjoy listening to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, according to a study that examined the behavior of 16 adult chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. Over 12 consecutive days for 40 minutes each morning, researchers played African, Indian or Japanese music near the chimps’ large outdoor enclosure. They found that when they played African and Indian music — characterized by extreme ratios of strong to weak beats — the chimps spent 20
research conducted by Northwestern University scientists. The study examined data from the Northwestern Juvenile Project, a longitudinal study of 1,829 youth who were in a juvenile detention center between 1995 and 1998. The researchers followed the youth for up to 16 years after and found that 111 of the original study participants had died. Among them, 68 percent were homicide victims. The study showed that delinquent females died violently at nearly five times the rate of those in the general population, while delinquent males died at three times the rate of the general population. Death rates in Hispanic males and females were five and nine times higher than rates in the general population, respectively (Pediatrics, July).
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Brief IN
researchers. In one experiment, participants could either keep $5, give $20 to a stranger who could either keep the entire amount or give half back to the participant, or give $20 to a stranger who flipped a coin to determine whether to return half. Although the coin flip would seem to offer the best odds of doubling your money, only 22 percent of participants chose that option. More than half decided to trust a stranger to share fairly, whereas 24 percent kept the $5 for themselves. Before each experiment, the participants completed a questionnaire about their tolerance for risk and expectations of their peers, which allowed the researchers to connect the participants’ behavior with feeling morally obligated to trust strangers (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, online May 12). n An intervention aimed at reducing behavior problems also boosts math and reading scores among low-income kindergarteners and first-graders, according to a study by New York University researchers. The scientists randomized 22 urban elementary schools serving low-income families to either a 10-week INSIGHTS Into Children’s Temperament intervention or a supplemental reading program. In the INSIGHTS intervention, teachers and parents received education on the best ways to appreciate and support differences in the personalities of children and learned child management strategies that match children’s temperaments. Children also had lessons on temperaments and on understanding and solving daily dilemmas. Findings showed that children enrolled in
INSIGHTS experienced greater growth in math and reading achievement and more sustained attention than children enrolled in the supplemental reading program. In addition, children participating in INSIGHTS had fewer behavior problems over time, while those enrolled in the supplemental reading program had more such problems (Journal of Educational Psychology, online April 21). n Doing something — possibly even self-harm — is better than doing nothing for most people, finds a study led by a University of Virginia psychologist. In a series of 11 studies, researchers found that participants from a range of ages generally did not enjoy spending even brief periods of time — between 6 and 15 minutes — alone in a room with nothing to do but think or daydream. Instead, they enjoyed more focused activities, such as listening to music or using a smartphone. Some even preferred to spend the time giving themselves mild electric shocks rather than to spend it thinking (Science, July 4). n Female managers in science and engineering firms were more likely than male managers to be influenced by a boss’s or colleague’s attitudes about whether to hire, promote and retain women in their companies, according to a survey of 233 middle managers. In the study, conducted at the California School of Professional Psychology, researchers found that concern about what another person might think was more likely to lead female managers to forgo women-friendly hiring practices. Many participants also believed that
women can be harder to manage, emotional, sensitive and distracted by family-related commitments, and that these characteristics may result in women being less committed to their work or to advancing their careers (Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, June). n Bigger cigarette warning labels could prompt more smokers to quit, according to research led at the Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. The study examined data from telephone surveys and follow-up calls conducted with more than 5,000 smokers in four countries from 2007 to 2009. The findings indicate that small, text-only warning labels, such as those on U.S. cigarette packs, prompt people to think about the health risks of smoking, and people who notice the warnings regularly are more likely to try to quit. However, larger, more graphic warning labels that showcase photos of mouth or throat cancer, used in Australia, among other countries, were better at getting people’s attention and motivating them to attempt quitting (Health Psychology, online June 30). n Heavily decorated classrooms may disrupt attention and learning in young children, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon psychologists. The researchers placed 24 kindergarten For direct links to these journal articles, click on the journal names.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 2 1
Brief
Fuse/Thinkstock
IN
Players who said their coaches ridiculed them were more willing to cheat than players who had more sympathetic coaches, a study found.
students in laboratory classrooms for six introductory science lessons on unfamiliar topics. The researchers taught three lessons in a heavily decorated classroom and delivered three others in a sparse classroom. They found that the children were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning gains in the highly decorated classrooms than when the decorations were removed (Psychological Science, July). n Twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation can lead to symptoms of schizophrenia in healthy people, according to a study by researchers 22
at the University of Bonn and King’s College London. Sleep lab scientists kept 24 healthy adults awake all night with movies, conversation, games and brief walks. The next morning, they asked participants about their thoughts and feelings and measured their prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response, a standard test to measure the filtering function of the brain. The study showed that participants’ pre-pulse inhibition was significantly reduced. Participants experienced pronounced attention deficits, indicated more sensitivity to light, color or brightness and reported altered senses of time and smell (Journal of Neuroscience, July 2).
n College athletes who have abusive coaches are more willing to cheat to win than players with more supportive coaches, according to research led by scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The study was based on surveys from nearly 20,000 student athletes at more than 600 colleges, representing 11 men’s and 13 women’s sports. Players who said they had coaches who ridiculed or put them down in front of others also were more likely to report that their coaches didn’t create inclusive team environments and that both their coaches and teammates were less respectful of people from other racial or ethnic groups. The players also reported that they were more willing to cheat to win a game than players with nonabusive coaches. The study also found that players with more ethical and supportive coaches were more likely to be happy about their college choice and to feel included on their teams (Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, online July 7). n The less older adults sleep, the faster their brains age, according to a study conducted at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore. Scientists examined data from 66 Chinese adults age 55 and older who underwent structural MRI brain scans measuring brain volume and neuropsychological assessments testing cognitive function every two years. They also completed a questionnaire recording their sleep duration. Participants who slept fewer hours showed evidence of a faster decline in cognitive performance as a result of more rapid brain ventricle enlargement (SLEEP, July).
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Brief IN
n Early elementary school start times may negatively affect students’ ability to learn — particularly among more affluent families, according to a study led by a University of Kentucky psychologist. Researchers examined standardized test scores of reading, math, science, social studies and writing skills of students from 718 public elementary schools in Kentucky. They found that early start times were associated with worse performance in schools in more affluent districts, where fewer kids got free or reducedcost lunches. Among schools with more disadvantaged students, start times did not seem to make a difference in performance — perhaps because these children already have so many other risk factors, the authors suggest (Journal of Educational Psychology, online June 16).
controlling themselves (Developmental Psychology, June).
n Children who have strong bonds with their parents make better friends and are more adaptable, suggests research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Researchers assessed how securely attached 114 33-month-old children were to their mothers, and asked parents to rate their children’s temperament, including anger proneness and social fearfulness. Six months later, children of the same gender were randomly paired and observed over three laboratory visits in a one-month period. Investigators found that securely attached kids were more responsive to a new peer partner and were more likely to use suggestions and requests rather than commands to get what they wanted. When paired with anger-prone peers, securely attached children also adapted their behavior over time to become more
n Babies from lower income families whose mothers work outside the home fare as well as or even better as kindergarteners than those with stayat-home moms, finds research out of Boston College. The study used data from a federal education longitudinal survey that followed 10,700 children born in the United States in 2001, collecting data when children were 9 months old, 2 years old and 4 years old, and when they entered kindergarten. Children’s cognitive skills were measured at the start of kindergarten, and teachers reported on their behavior in the classroom. The researchers found that children from low-income families had slightly higher cognitive skills if their mothers went back to work before they were 9 months old, and fewer conduct problems if their mothers went back to work when they
n Children in homes affected by violence, suicide or the incarceration of a family member have significantly shorter telomeres — a cellular marker of aging — than kids in stable households, finds research conducted at Tulane University. Researchers took genetic samples from 80 children ages 5 to 15 in New Orleans and interviewed their parents about their home environments and exposures to adverse life events. Even after controlling for the child’s age, parental age, household income, maternal education and other factors, the researchers found that the more traumatic events the children were exposed to, the shorter their telomeres (Pediatrics, online June 16).
were 9 months old to 24 months old. For children in high-income households, however, having a mom who went back to work quickly was linked with small detrimental effects on children’s cognitive skills and behavior (Developmental Psychology, online June 9). n Female-named hurricanes kill about twice as many people as male-named hurricanes, possibly because people underestimate the power of a “woman,” according to a study led by a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign scientist. Researchers examined the most damaging hurricanes in the United States between 1950 and 2012, excluding a couple of outliers, including Katrina in 2005. The researchers found that femalenamed storms killed an average of 45 people, while comparable hurricanes with male names killed about half as many, likely because female-named hurricanes lead to a lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness. When scientists asked about a malenamed hurricane, like Alexander, they found that people predicted a more violent storm than when asked about a female-named hurricane, like Alexandra. Study participants were also more willing to evacuate to avoid a hypothetical Hurricane Victor than a Hurricane Victoria (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online June 2). — AMY NOVOTNEY
For direct links to these journal articles, click on the journal names.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 2 3
Judicial
NOTEBOOK
Lies during jury selection: What are the costs? BY RYAN J. WINTER, PHD, MLS • FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, AND JON VALLANO, PHD • UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT GREENSBURG
O
n Aug. 4, 2006, under the stony gaze of the presidents on Mount Rushmore, Randy Shauers, a young man driving at high speed in a pickup truck, clipped a motorcycle driven by Gregory Warger, who suffered numerous injuries, including the amputation of the lower part of his left leg. Although Warger sued Shauers for negligence, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the defendant. After the trial, juror Stacey Titus approached Warger’s attorney, alleging that the jury forewoman, Regina Whipple, may have unduly biased the panel during deliberations. According to Titus, Whipple told other jurors that her daughter had been at fault in a similar collision that left a man dead, and that had her daughter been found negligent, it would have “ruined her life.” Titus claimed Whipple’s disclosure improperly influenced the rest of the jurors. Warger’s counsel filed an appeal with the district court of South Dakota, alleging that Whipple deliberately lied during jury selection (voir dire) about her ability to be impartial. The district court denied Warger’s petition, ruling that juror statements made during deliberations cannot be used as the basis for an appeal. Although Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) does prohibit appeals based on statements that jurors make during deliberations, there are three exceptions: when jurors make a mistake in filling out the verdict form, when extraneous prejudicial information is improperly brought to the jury’s attention (for example, through pretrial publicity or thirdparty contact, such as a judge or attorney communicating with jurors) or when an outside influence is improperly brought to bear on jurors. In Warger v. Shauers, the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear the case, will focus on this last exception. Lower courts disagree about whether juror testimony can be used to seek a new trial based on juror dishonesty during voir dire. Some courts (including the 8th and 10th Circuits and the district court that excluded Titus’s statement) disallow juror statements about other jurors, citing that such statements fall outside the purview of 606(b). However, other courts (including the 9th and D.C. Circuits) frequently consider juror reports regarding dishonesty, noting that if a juror’s personal experiences are related to the litigation in question,
24
such experiences may constitute “outside influence” if jurors lie about those biases during jury selection. The U.S. Supreme Court will try to resolve this inconsistency, but regardless of its decision, the mere possibility of juror bias should spur research into the weight that such bias (as well as juror dishonesty about it) may have on jury verdicts. Voir dire, after all, may be illequipped to fully identify instances of juror bias for several reasons. First, attorneys may fail to ask jurors questions that adequately uncover bias. Asking broad questions may gloss over specific juror biases. However, asking precise questions may highlight some instances of bias while sidestepping others. Second, research by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson suggests that people aren’t always aware of their biases. Third, even if jurors are aware of their biases, they may still reason that they can remain fair and impartial. Finally, jurors may feel uncomfortable discussing their inability to be fair or impartial in the presence of other prospective jurors. Even when jurors are aware of their biases, it may be difficult to detect their prejudices if they lie about them during voir dire. Psychologists have long been interested in detecting lies (William Moulton Marston introduced his first polygraph in 1915), yet research continues to show that trained professionals in law enforcement are rarely better than novices at detecting deception. Given trained detectives’ difficulties in deception detection, attorneys would be hard pressed to discover juror dishonesty during voir dire. Thus, statements that jurors make to their colleagues in the deliberation room may be the best tool to discern dishonesty, and allowing such statements under Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) may be the best way to address juror lies. While research suggests that biases can affect jurors’ legal decisions, of more concern is the impact that such biases may have on other jurors. While many studies suggest that jurors’ backgrounds may affect their own case perceptions and verdict decisions, discovering the extent to which a single juror’s bias may sway the rest of the panel should be a goal of psychological research. n “Judicial Notebook” is a project of APA Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Assessment to
Administer to a group or individually in 30 minutes via paper and pencil
Administer to a group or individually in 25 minutes via computer or paper and pencil
Administer individually in 20 minutes via paper and pencil
Excellent for: Low-functioning or low-skilled individuals
Excellent for: Special populations and those for whom English is a second language
Excellent for: Engaging reluctant examinees
Assess: Nonverbal intelectual abilities through five subtests including coding, picture completion, clerical checking, picture absurdities and matrix reasoning
Assess: Nonverbal intelectual abilities using four subtests presented through a series of colored matrices
Assess: Nonverbal intelligence through a matrices subtest as well as verbal intelligence through a verbal scale that includes receptive and expressive items that do not require reading or spelling
NOW AVAILABLE!
Q-Global ® Web-based administration, scoring and reporting
800.627.7271
|
PearsonClinical.com
Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. Beta, Gama, KBIT, Q-global, Always Learning, Pearson, design for Psi, and PsychCorp are trademarks, in the U.S. and/or other countries, of Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). 8921 09/14
Untitled-1 1
8/6/14 10:30 PM
Random SAMPLE
Seema Clifasefi, PhD Working with the community: Clifasefi’s research with the homeless takes her out into the community, where she hopes to lower the barrier between the clients and herself. “The interaction with these individuals is my favorite part of my work,” she says. Working with the community has shown her the frustrating side of psychology. Good science takes time, she says, but people can’t wait the 14 years it might take to develop a good intervention for a specific population. “Hopefully, cocreating the interventions with affected community members in the relevant communities is one answer to that frustration,” she says.
Harm-reduction researcher, community advocate and inspiring mom of two.
Member since: 2005 Her job: Clifasefi is an assistant professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at the University of Washington and the co-director of the Harm Reduction Research and Treatment Lab at the University of Washington– Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she works with chronically homeless people with alcohol dependence with the goal of creating harm-reduction interventions and programs. 26
From research to practice: Clifasefi earned her PhD in psychology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she studied how alcohol placebos affect eyewitness memory. In 2003, she came to the University of Washington for a postdoctoral fellowship and learned about harm reduction. The school’s pragmatic approach and compassionate philosophy won her over.
Balancing family and work: Although Clifasefi does not see her work as a job, she makes sure she takes time for herself and for her family. She goes offline one day a week to catch up on research or exercise — she recently discovered cycling. She also spends at least one weekend day with her two sons and husband. In addition, the family takes a vacation every winter to New Zealand, where her husband grew up. Her work has influenced her children, who want to be scientists and do something for the good of the community. “I don’t think my 5-yearold understands as much,” she says. “My 8-year-old is pretty in tune and is proud of what his mom does.” — HEATHER MONGILIO
Each month, “Random Sample” profiles an APA member. You may be next.
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
NEW RELEASES from the American Psychological Association A Practical Guide to PTSD Treatment
APA Handbook of Career Intervention
Edited by Nancy C. Bernardy and Matthew J. Friedman
Editors-in-Chief Paul J. Hartung, Mark L. Savickas, and W. Bruce Walsh
Pharmacological and Psychotherapeutic Approaches
2015. 192 pages. Paperback. List: $29.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $29.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1832-5 | Item # 4317356
Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy for Trauma Edited by Donald F. Walker, Christine A. Courtois, and Jamie D. Aten
2015. 312 pages. Hardcover. List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1816-5 | Item # 4317354 AN APA LIFETOOLS® BOOK
Write It Up
Practical Strategies for Writing and Publishing Journal Articles Paul Silvia
2015. 224 pages. Paperback. List: $19.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $19.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1814-1 | Item # 4441024
Interdisciplinary Frameworks for Schools
Best Professional Practices for Serving the Needs of All Students Virginia Wise Berninger
Volume 1: Foundations Volume 2: Applications
2015. 1,008 pages. Hardcover. • Series: APA Handbooks in Psychology® List: $395.00 | APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00 ISBN 978-1-4338-1753-3 | Item # 4311514
Psychological Practice With Women Guidelines, Diversity, Empowerment
Edited by Carolyn Zerbe Enns, Joy K. Rice, and Roberta L. Nutt
2015. 304 pages. Hardcover. • Series: Division 35: Psychology of Women List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1812-7 | Item # 4317353
Premature Termination in Psychotherapy
Strategies for Engaging Clients and Improving Outcomes Joshua K. Swift and Roger P. Greenberg
2015. 216 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1801-1 | Item # 4317349
2015. 432 pages. Hardcover. List: $79.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1808-0 | Item # 4317352
TO ORDER: 800-374-2721 • www.apa.org/pubs/books
AD2780
Questionnaire Memorializing a tragedy Thanks to psychologist Billie Pivnick, the new 9/11 Museum in New York City was designed with visitors’ mental health in mind. BY ANNA MILLER
O
n the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, psychologist Billie Pivnick, PhD, was preparing to see patients in her Greenwich Village office when a plane struck the first tower of the World Trade Center. Her first patient called to cancel, saying she was going to help. Her second patient came in, frantic because her partner, who worked in the World Trade Center, wasn’t answering her phone. Pivnick could relate: She couldn’t get in touch with her husband, a criminal defense attorney, who was in court either in a World Trade Center building or a few blocks away near Foley Square. “So while I’m listening to the patient, I’m also in my own panic,” Pivnick remembers. Meanwhile, her sons — ages 8 and 12 at the time — were watching the violent scene unfold from the 12th-story window of their school in Brooklyn. Fortunately, the family returned home safely. Her husband, who had been near Foley Square when the first plane hit, ended up among the masses running across the Brooklyn Bridge as the first tower fell. He picked up their boys at school and met Pivnick at home in Brooklyn hours later. “When I finally reached home and was in my husband’s arms, I could cry and mourn,” says Pivnick, who had walked home across the Manhattan Bridge. “Then I had to work on pulling my own children together because they had witnessed this thing.” 28
As a clinical psychologist specializing in loss and trauma, Pivnick knew how to do that. For one, the family helped to raise money for new firefighter equipment so they could “do something active … to try to reverse the helplessness,” she says. She and her sons also became regular visitors to a firehouse that had lost eight men in the attacks. Today, one of Pivnick’s sons is a first responder and the other is studying to become an emergency medical technician. “I do believe the experience imprinted them in a very fundamental way,” she says. In the years since the tragedy, Pivnick, who has worked on several museum exhibits, including at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Connecticut Science Center, has been using these same skills on a broader scale: To help design the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened in June near the site of the attacks. As the consulting psychologist to the design firm Thinc Design, Pivnick spent five years working with exhibition designers, curators and other museum professionals to help inform the museum’s visitor experience. The goal? “To make it alive enough to feel the emotions and the reality of what went on, but not so alive that it’s unbearable,” she says. Pivnick talked to the Monitor about the museum and her role in its design.
outer perimeter where you see all of the many photos of the people who perished lined up as far as the eye can see, as well as an inner sort of sanctum, which is dimly lit, where people may contemplate the lives of individuals we lost. In the outer area, there are touch screen tables where you can call up the name of someone you want to remember or learn more about. You are also given the option to project that person’s story on the wall of the inner room. We thought of it as “the zone of the many and the zone of the one”; the idea was to create an opportunity for some intersubjective witnessing so that while you’re feeling your own pain, you’re also aware that other people are suffering, too. The whole spirit of the museum is how to honor these multiple perspectives, multiple narratives and multiple points of view on the history behind it. The museum’s second exhibit is historical. It’s telling the story of the day. You walk through the day chronologically and you are able to make choices: You can stay on the perimeter with the facts or you can have a more intensely emotional experience by looking at personal artifacts found on the site. You can also choose to look at photos of people who jumped or hear voices of some of those terrible, awful wrenching phone calls, which are so much more distressing because they feel so present.
What does the museum look like? There are really two main exhibits. The first exhibit, the memorial exhibit, has an
How do you even begin a project like that? You begin with listening. That’s what
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Mel Evans
“The real goal is to make the experience bearable for people so that they can remember, which is the essence of mourning, and move on,” says Dr. Billie Pivnick, who lent her psychological expertise to the 9/11 Museum.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 2 9
Questionnaire we do as psychologists. We listen, we look, we assess and that’s where I started. The museum development staff hosted “conversational series” with various stakeholders, including those representing families of victims, first responders and the neighborhood to get their opinions on the design as it was being considered. I kept a notebook. I took notes at all the meetings. I also sat in on design team meetings so that we could develop a common language. Even before that, when Thinc Design founder Tom Hennes was in the final stages of competing for the museum design job, I spent a few days telling him about the visitor experience at other memorial museums, such as Yad Vashem in Israel. We talked about the importance of creating lots of exits so people don’t feel claustrophobic and decided to build in tissue boxes in key places in the museum so people could feel “safely held,” similar to the idea that psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott talks about in which there is a certain amount of containment within which people can re-experience very troubling emotions but still feel safe. In what other ways did psychology inform the museum’s design? One thing we were very concerned about was the effect of overstimulation on visitors who had already been traumatized or were depressed. Obviously, this will not be all of the visitors — many visitors will come from other parts of the world, people will come who were born after Sept. 11, 2001, because they want to understand the history or they want to touch history in some way. But for people who see the museum 30
as a memorial, we felt it was very important to help move them “from shock to think,” meaning that you have to make the absent more present in order to ultimately make it more absent. We wanted to create a narrative arc and obviously this wasn’t just going be words — it’s a very large space. We thought about it choreographically, too. So during the entry sequence, you come through this long corridor where you hear the voices of people talking about where they were on 9/11 and how they first heard about the attacks. You see them located on maps, identifying what parts of the world these voices are coming from. Then people go from there down a 70-foot ramp into the exhibits. When they come out at the end, there’s the opportunity for them to sign a piece of steel electronically, which creates a kind of mirror image to the entry narratives where the signatures are on a map projected on the wall. People can leave their mark on the site. They can turn passive into active, which is one way you help people cope with trauma — you help them find active mastery of an experience of powerlessness. We also provided booths for them to tell their stories in response to the museum’s exhibits, where they were on 9/11, or any other story they want to tell. At the end of it, by signing the piece of steel and kind of reorienting themselves, they’re able to say, “But I’m here now,” and it brings them back to the present in case the exhibits sort of collapsed time for them and they felt stuck in the past. From a psychological point of view, you’re talking about working with procedural memory, not just semantic memory. Memories start out as fragments — sound fragments, visual fragments, kinesthetic fragments —
and so we’re giving people a chance to experience these things individually before they have to make meaning out of it and create a larger representation that will now include what they learned from the museum experience, too. How did your clinical experience come into play during the design process? I made a lot of referrals [for design team members], that’s the first thing. I also discovered disjunctions between the story and the way we were representing the story, just as one might discover in a patient’s trauma narrative. In other words, when something didn’t make sense, we stopped and tried to understand what was missing. Just like in therapy, when an emotion is uncovered and experienced, you find words for it and you put it back into the narrative. The emotions should inform the exhibit itself, not just get enacted in the team meetings. For example, one day the design team was looking at some preliminary designs that were kind of flat and lifeless. The chief designer was very frustrated and he took a piece of wood and he walked briskly across the room and forced the wood through a piece of foam core and said, “This is what’s missing!” very vehemently. And of course it was the violence. We were working so hard to keep from retraumatizing people that we had left out some of the shock and surprise and violence. Once we were able to recognize that the emotion had been really drained out of the design, the team very quickly developed a new design vocabulary and the exhibits became more vertical and jutting, incorporating more of the discordant elements of the real experience. Whenever we hit one of those impasses, one of those gaps in the
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Mel Evans
The 9/11 Museum in New York City stands next to the 9/11 Memorial, two pools with 30-foot waterfalls set in the footprints of the original Twin Towers. Such structures are important, says psychologist Dr. Billie Pivnick, who helped design the museum, “so that we don’t repeat whatever mistakes were made in advance [of the tragedy] and we can derive meaning from it that can help make the world a better place.”
The nearly 3,000 names of the victims of the 2001 and 1993 World Trade Center attacks are inscribed around the two memorial pools. The names are positioned to reflect where the 2001 victims were on that day and their relationships to others who also died in the attacks.
narrative, we tried to understand what was in that space. What were we missing? What was the emotion? What was the part of the story that we weren’t telling? Inevitably, some new awareness would come and we’d be able to deepen the story or change the design in some way that was meaningful. How did you cope with the intensity of the work? I was in my own therapy, of course. One should not do a project like this without having a lot of emotional support. You can get too easily flooded and I felt it was important to separate out my own personal reactions from those in the team and those on the tapes we were listening to. That’s part of our work as clinicians: We learn to do those things so that we’re able to feel like our own instrument is accurately attuned. When you’re working with an individual, not every session every week
for four years has that level of intensity and drama. If anything, it’s like the difference between running a mile and running a marathon: You have to change the way you approach the project. What do you want visitors to take away from the museum? Tom and I thought about the museum as a way to help manage everything that collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. It was more than just the buildings — they were iconic symbols that collapsed. There was a collapse in a lot of our reasoned dialogue in this country, our ability to talk about things. [There was a] collapse
in time where people are still stuck in the past and haven’t been able to come back into the present if they were traumatized. And there was a collapse of intersubjective meaning — listening to other and different points of view, other people’s beliefs. The mourning in many ways has only been in fits and starts and hopefully that mourning conversation will start now with this museum. Of course, the real goal is to make the experience bearable for people so that they can remember, which is the essence of mourning, and move on. If we accomplish anything beyond that, then so much the better for society. n
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 3 1
SCIENCE WATCH
Reproducing results
APA and other groups advocate for more data sharing and replication studies, although some psychologists say they aren’t necessary. BY AMY NOVOTNEY
I
n a classic 1951 experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Schachter, PhD, study participants were placed in groups and asked to discuss what to do with a juvenile delinquent they had read about. Unknown to participants, the researcher planted a “deviate” in the groups who strongly opposed the opinions of other group members. After the discussions ended, participants rejected the deviate the most, considering him to be the least desirable of the members and relegating him to the least important tasks, including appointing him to the lowly “correspondence” committee, as opposed to the group’s “executive” committee (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology). Schachter’s findings on deviation rejection are often referred to by researchers studying group dynamics and normative social influence, but so far there have been only two direct replications of the study — one done by Schachter himself. Last year, psychologists at Illinois State University attempted to reproduce Schachter’s study using the original measures. They were able to replicate the original study’s results, albeit with a smaller effect size (Social Psychology, May). “One intriguing possibility is that our study found somewhat weaker reactions to deviates because society is 32
becoming more tolerant of individuals who hold deviant opinions, but only future research can answer this question,” the authors say in the article. “We hope that our replication study will inspire other researchers to revisit the deviation-rejection link.” These scientists are among a growing number of researchers who say replications add substantial value to science, says David Dunning, PhD, chair of APA’s Publications and Communications Board. Dunning notes that APA and several other national psychology organizations are working to make sure psychological science is based on meticulous, thorough research practices. “Replication is important not only for preventing misuse of data, but also for furthering science,” Dunning says. “Issues related to irreproducibility are not unique to psychological science, and with continued efforts to promote the value of replications, such as publishing them in online versions of APA journals, the necessary attitude shift will begin to take place.” Additional efforts include providing journal space specifically for reproducing classic research and promoting new statistical and open-data guidelines for article submission. But some psychologists are concerned that the recent
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Jeffrey Hamilton/Thinkstock
commotion around replications may do more harm than good. University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, PhD, for example, says he is that worried the movement has put too much emphasis on false positives. “When an effect fails to replicate, the spotlight of suspicion shines on the original study and the authors who conducted it,” Wilson says. “But why should we assume that a failure to replicate is ‘truer’ than the original study? Shouldn’t the spotlight shine as brightly on the replicators, with a close examination of their research practices, in case they have obtained a false negative?” Advancing replication While much of the work to promote the reproducibility of scientific studies has only just begun, the field’s enthusiasm — particularly among early career psychologists — is strong, says Brian Nosek, PhD, the University of Virginia social psychologist who directs the Center for Open Science, which aims to increase openness, integrity and reproducibility of scientific research. Last year, the center received $10 million in grant money from several private foundations, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the
John Templeton Foundation, to support its mission. “Many people in their early career seem willing to challenge the status quo and find a way to do this better,” says Nosek. Among APA’s replicability projects is one that invites researchers to submit replication studies for its Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. These journals encourage authors to submit proposals for replication plans before data collection begins and are interested in replication studies with an interdisciplinary appeal, says JEP: General editor Isabel Gauthier, PhD. Although replication articles will be published only online, the abstracts will go in the print journal. Other APA journals, including the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, have published special issues on replication. And APA’s Archives of Scientific Psychology — the association’s first open-access, open-methods, collaborativedata-sharing journal — published its first articles last summer. A top goal of Archives of Scientific Psychology is to increase the number of replication studies by making it easier for researchers to access one another’s full methods and data sets. APA divisions are also advancing data sharing and replication. In its January issue of Personality and Social
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 3 3
“Replication is important not only for preventing misuse of data, but also for furthering science. Issues related to irreproducibility are not unique to psychological science, and with continued efforts to promote the value of replications, such as publishing them in online versions of APA journals, the necessary attitude shift will begin to take place.” DAVID DUNNING, PHD Chair, APA Publications and Communications Board
Psychology Review, APA Div. 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) summarizes recommendations from its task force on publication and research practices. The task force recommends improving the dependability of research in psychology by using larger, more powerful sample sizes whenever possible, reporting effect sizes and 95 percent confidence intervals, making research materials available to enable others to attempt replications and encouraging the publication of high-quality replication studies. Other psychology organizations are also working to promote more careful science. In 2013, the Psychonomic Society’s Publications Committee and Ethics Committee and the editors of the society’s six journals developed new journal guidelines for statistical issues, focusing on the analysis and reporting of quantitative data. Many of the guidelines address vulnerabilities in null hypothesis significance testing, in which the central question is whether or not experimental results differ from what would be expected due to chance. The guidelines also touch on the importance of having a sufficiently large sample size, since studies with low statistical power produce inherently ambiguous results because they often fail to be replicated. To address this, the editors encourage researchers to attain adequate power and to explain how the number of study participants was determined. The guidelines warn against cherry-picking experiments, conditions, dependent variables and observations, and call for providing readers with the information they need to gain an accurate impression of the reliability and size of the effect in question. In another effort last year, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) launched its Registered Replication Reports initiative, an effort to replicate important psychological studies. The project brings together the original authors of an influential paper with a new cohort of scientists who will design a protocol to repeat the original study. Multiple laboratories then conduct new independent studies following the protocol, 34
and the results from all of these studies are published together as a single Registered Replication Report in Perspectives on Psychological Science. Other journals have also adopted this approach: In May, Social Psychology published an entire issue consisting exclusively of pre-registered replication studies. In addition, the APS journal Psychological Science has begun promoting open communication by naming authors who have made their data or research materials public or have preregistered their design and analysis plans with specific “badges,” which appear with the published articles. Dunning says psychology is in a trial-and-error stage as it works to develop the best ways to replicate important findings. Although it can be challenging since as yet there are no set rules or overarching guidelines, “I think at the end of the day everyone will be very accepting of where the field moves,” he says. But is it necessary? Not all psychologists agree about how best to extend and replicate each other’s work, or about how best to disseminate information about what they’ve found, says Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, PhD. In May, Gilbert spoke out in defense of Simone Schnall, PhD, a University of Cambridge researcher whose 2008 Psychological Science paper, indicating that cleanliness is tied to less severe moral judgments, was selected as one of Social Psychology’s pre-registered replication studies. Michigan State University researchers failed to reproduce Schnall’s findings, leading to several discussions in blog posts and on Twitter about “replication bullying” and how to improve the handling of replication attempts. From Gilbert’s perspective, replications should be treated as data points, not verdicts, and he notes that no matter how precisely another researcher attempts to execute a study, he or she will always do something slightly differently. “Why should your failure repudiate my success rather than
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
the other way around?” he says. “Since there are so many ways to screw up a recipe and so few ways to execute it properly, your failure is likely to be less informative than my success.” Wilson agrees, noting that several psychologists he’s spoken with on the topic of replication have expressed concern about “false negatives,” replications that purport to find no effect but which may have been done poorly, or, for any number of reasons, may not have uncovered the true effect. “The great concern among replicators is that there are too many false positives out there — studies that purport to show some effect that may be false,” Wilson says. “But there can be real dangers to false negatives as well, both to the reputations of the researchers, and to science in general.” Wilson also says he’s concerned that the increasing focus on replication may inhibit creativity, particularly among younger researchers. “Almost by definition, new findings and new discoveries will be less replicable because we don’t fully understand what’s producing the effects,” he says. In an effort to ensure the scientific quality of replication efforts, in May, Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman, PhD, proposed several “etiquette rules” for conducting replications. These include giving the original author a chance to comment on the replication methods and allowing reviewers to read the correspondence between the original team and the replicators. “The rules are designed to motivate both author and replicator to behave reasonably even when they are thoroughly irritated with each other,” Kahneman says in his commentary on the topic. Other replicablility projects Meanwhile, Nosek and other psychologists are working to promote replicability as a central tenet of psychology — and all other scientific disciplines. At the end of last year, Nosek co-led the “Many Labs” Replication Project, a 36-site, 12-country, 6,344-subject effort to try to replicate a variety of findings in psychology. The project tested a variety of effects from studies dating back as far as 1941 and reported successful replications of 10 out of 13 of them. These included classic results such as gain-versusloss framing (in which people are more prepared to take risks to avoid losses than to make gains) and anchoring, an effect in which the first piece of information a person receives can introduce bias into later decisions. The group is now in the midst of a “Many Labs 2” project to examine several additional effects in psychology. Nosek is also heading up the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, a large-scale, open collaboration involving more than 250 scientists from around the world. The investigation is dedicated to reproducing as many studies as possible that were published in the 2008 volumes of three prominent journals: the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science and the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition. The team now has nearly 50 replications completed and another 40 underway, with the goal of completing 100 replications by the year’s end. The goal is to evaluate just how challenging it is to reproduce psychological research. “Having an estimate of that would be very helpful in understanding more about the challenges in reproducibility, the causes for things not being reproducible and whether there’s a problem that needs intervention,” Nosek says. The project is backed by the Open Science Framework, a free, open-source Web application to help researchers organize, archive, document and share their research materials and data. The Open Science Framework was developed by Jeff Spies, PhD, who co-directs the Center for Open Science with Nosek. While the center was originally focused on psychology research, it has now moved on to cancer biology and is exploring collaborations in neurodegenerative diseases, drug addiction and economics. The National Institutes of Health is also working to address growing concerns from both scientists and lay people about reproducibility in science. The agency now requires its postdoctoral fellows to be trained in responsible research and plans to post information on its website to guide others in rigorous science practices. Several of the NIH’s institutes and centers are also testing the use of a common checklist to ensure a more systematic evaluation of grant applications. In this trial system, reviewers are reminded to check that appropriate experimental design features have been addressed, including plans for randomization and blinding. Agency leaders are also considering ways to address the academic incentive system, possibly by providing greater stability for investigators during certain career stages, and providing grants that allow for more flexibility and a longer period than the current average of approximately four years of support per project. And in a move to aid the campaign to make published scientific findings more reliable, in June, a group of about 40 leading medical-journal editors convened by the NIH — including the editors of Science and Nature — endorsed a set of draft guidelines and a general agreement intended to address this issue of reproducibility in their publications. While these issues are common across the sciences, Nosek notes, psychology is better positioned than most fields to address replication problems and is taking the lead in tackling them. “The problem of reproducibility is ultimately a psychological problem — it’s the incentives, the motivations, the rewards that scientists face, the decisions that they make and the process of how information gets communicated through the journal system,” he says. “Psychology has the tool sets to start to think about how to address the culture of science, the motivations that individual scientists face and the impact that that has on the quality of evidence that’s produced.” n Amy Novotney is a journalist in Chicago.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 3 5
James O’Brien © Corbis
36
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Students under pressure N
icole Stearman remembers the morning well. Around 10:30 a.m., just as her research methods class at Eastern Washington University was finishing up, she felt an abrupt sense of terror and shortness of breath. It was the start of a panic attack — not the first she’d experienced — and she knew she needed immediate help. Stearman headed straight to the university’s counseling and psychological services center. When she arrived, she learned there were no counselors available, so she left and found a corner of the building to ride out the rest of the attack. “I can’t really time my panic attacks to hit only on weekdays during the center’s 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. counselor walk-in hours,” says Stearman, who’d been diagnosed with depression and social phobia/social anxiety disorder in high school. “While the counseling center is a great resource, it could be a lot better.” Stearman is one of an increasing number of students who struggle with getting treatment for their mental health issues in college. About one-third of U.S. college students had difficulty functioning in the last 12 months due to depression, and almost half said they felt overwhelming anxiety in the last year, according to the 2013 National College Health Assessment, which examined data from 125,000 students from more than 150 colleges and universities. Other statistics are even more alarming: More than 30 percent of students who seek services for mental health issues report that they have seriously considered attempting suicide at some point in their lives, up from about 24 percent in 2010, says Pennsylvania State University psychologist Ben Locke, PhD, who directs the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH),
College and university counseling centers are examining how best to serve the growing number of students seeking their services. B Y AMY NOVOTNEY
an organization that gathers college mental health data from more than 263 college and university counseling or mental health centers. “Those who have worked in counseling centers for the last decade have been consistently ringing a bell saying something is wrong, things are getting worse with regard to college student mental health,” Locke says. “With this year’s report, we’re now able to say, ‘Yes, you’re right.’ These are really clear and concerning trends.” Psychologists are stepping in to help address these trends in several ways. Researchers are examining the effect of mental health on how prepared students are for learning and exploring innovative ways to expand services and work with faculty to embed mental wellness messages in the classroom, says Louise Douce, PhD, special assistant to the vice president of student life at Ohio State University. “For students to be able to learn at their peak capacity, they need to be physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually well,” says Douce. “Students who struggle are more likely to drop out of school, but by providing services for their anxiety, depression and relationship issues, we can help them manage these issues, focus on their academics and learn new ways to be in the world.”
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 3 7
Students under pressure College and university mental health trends by school year among students already receiving services at counseling centers Percentage of students Attended counseling for mental health concerns Taken a medication for mental health concerns Been hospitalized for mental health concerns Purposely injured yourself without suicidal intent (e.g., cutting, hitting, burning, hair pulling, etc.) Seriously considered attempting suicide Made a suicide attempt Considered seriously hurting another person Intentionally caused serious injury to another person
2010–11 2011–12 2012–13* 45.2% 47.6% 48.7% 31.0% 31.8% 32.9% 7.0% 7.8% 10.3% 21.8% 23.8% 7.9% 7.8% 2.4%
22.5% 25.5% 8.0% 7.9% 2.2%
23.2% 30.3% 8.8% 11.2% 3.3%
Source: Center for Collegiate Mental Health *In 2012–13 the answer format was changed for all items except prior counseling/medication. This change may have partially accounted for some of the increases, but because rates changed differentially, it’s clearly more than that. For a more detailed explanation of changes, see the Center for Collegiate Mental Health 2013 Annual Report.
“Those who have worked in counseling centers for the last decade have been consistently ringing a bell saying something is wrong, things are getting worse with regard to college student mental health. With this year’s report, we’re now able to say, ‘Yes, you’re right.’” BEN LOCKE, PHD Center for Collegiate Mental Health
38
More students, more need One of the biggest reasons why college and university counseling services are seeing an increase in the number of people requesting help and in the severity of their cases is simply that more people are now attending college. Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 11 percent from 1991 to 2001 and another 32 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. “One of the things that seems to be going on for colleges and universities is that as access to colleges and universities continues to grow, the population of colleges and universities is moving towards the general population, especially if you combine community colleges as part of that equation. So the level of need for access and the severity of concerns is growing — just like it has been in the general population,” Locke says. In addition, students who may not have attended college previously due to mental health issues, such as depression or schizophrenia, or behavioral or developmental concerns, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism, are now able to attend thanks to better treatment approaches and new medications. Access to wraparound services and individualized education plans in primary and secondary education have also helped more students graduate high school and qualify to attend college. But when these young people go to college, such specialized services and accommodations rarely exist. The result is more students seeking help at counseling centers. Over the last three school years, the CCMH reports a nearly 8 percent increase in the number of students seeking mental health services. And college counseling centers report that 32 percent of centers M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
College and university counseling center presenting concerns
48
Percentage of students who presented with depression, anxiety or a relationship problem as their main reason for seeking help at a counseling center.
44
42 40 38 36 34 32 30 2007
2008
2013
Source: Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors
report having a waiting list at some point during the school year, according to the 2013 Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) survey. Unfortunately, even as students want more services, many center budgets remain unchanged or have increased only slightly from years past, the same survey finds. AUCCCD survey data suggest that larger institutions have struggled to attain pre-2008 recession budget levels, reflected in fewer counseling clinicians proportionate to the student body, compared with smaller institutions. The result can be seen in lower utilization rates and large waiting lists. In fact, the AUCCCD survey finds that from 2010 to 2012, the average maximum number of students on a waiting list for institutions with more than 25,000 students nearly doubled, from 35 students to 62 students. Healthy minds and the bottom line One way that counseling centers are trying to get more support for mental health services is by focusing on a factor administrators understand: a return on investment. Research led by University of Michigan economist Daniel Eisenberg, PhD, for example, suggests that investing in mental health services for college students can help keep them from
dropping out (B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009). That’s good news for schools since they want to retain tuition revenue, but more important, it helps secure significantly higher lifetime earnings for the students, Eisenberg says. “Every college and university cares a lot about its retention rate,” he says. “It’s one of the primary indicators of operating a successful institution — that people want to stay and that people are succeeding there.” Eisenberg has replicated these findings with samples from other colleges and universities, and in 2013, posted a formula to help counseling centers develop their own return on investment spreadsheet to present to university administrators when advocating for additional funding. Users can plug in their school’s population size, departure/retention rate, and prevalence of depression to calculate the economic case for student mental health services. “This economic case doesn’t even count the most direct benefits of mental health services and programs — the boost in student well-being and the relief of suffering,” Eisenberg says. Students who participate in counseling report improvements in their satisfaction with their quality of life — often a better predictor of student retention than grade point average.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 3 9
Innovative treatment models The insufficient funding for college mental health services also means inadequate access to care and treatment. Colleges and universities are addressing this challenge by developing quick screening tools and brief consultations to rapidly determine the needs of each new student who visits the counseling center. The University of Texas at Austin’s Counseling and Mental Health Center, for example, created a Brief Assessment and Referral Team (BART), which replaces a lengthy initial consultation with a brief assessment with a trained counselor, who then refers the student to the appropriate level of care. “For some students, a single session with a mental health professional is all they need, perhaps to help them problem-solve a situation or talk about a personal concern,” says Chris Brownson, PhD, associate vice president for student affairs and director of UT-Austin’s Counseling Center. “Other students are in need of more intermediate or even extended care. This is a way of getting students in front of a counselor more quickly and then ultimately getting them connected to the type of treatment that they need in a much faster way.” In another effort to connect students with mental health services faster, the University of Florida’s Counseling and Wellness Center launched its Therapist Assisted Online (TAO) program to deliver therapy to students with anxiety disorders
— all over a computer or smartphone screen. The sevenweek program consists of several modules that teach students to observe their anxiety, live one day at a time and face fears. Students also have weekly 10- to 12-minute video conferences with counselors, as well as homework that they do via an app. They even get text message reminders to prompt them to complete their assignments, says Sherry Benton, PhD, the former director of the UF counseling center who led TAO’s development. The idea for TAO emerged after the center got funding to hire three more counselors, which Benton thought would help them eliminate their waiting list. Instead, it only bought them two weeks without a waiting list. “It just seemed like every time we got an increase in funding and got more staff, we just had more students who wanted services,” she recalls. The realization forced her to rethink how the center delivered care. TAO’s success has been beyond Benton’s expectations: When she compared the outcomes of the center’s traditional face-to-face services with TAO’s outcomes, the online clients’ improvement in well-being and anxiety symptoms was significantly better than those receiving face-to-face therapy. “It was phenomenal,” says Benton, whose study on the results was submitted for journal publication in June. She thinks the program’s success is due to how it’s integrated into each student’s life via smartphones — the technology allows students
APA partners to review college student mental health Colleges and university counseling centers could benefit from more surveys, presentations, selfassessments, activities and special events to identify students whose psychological well-being is interfering with their development, learning and achievement. That’s one of the messages conveyed in a briefing paper issued to college and university presidents by the American Council on Education (ACE) in September. The paper — “A Strategic Primer on College Student Mental Health” — is part of a yearlong partnership with ACE, APA and NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, in response to President Barack Obama’s call in June 2013 to launch a national conversation to increase understanding and awareness about mental health. The paper reviews trends in college student mental health and highlights promising practices that contribute to student well-being. In addition to academic administrators, the publication is also being widely disseminated to practitioners working to address campus mental health. Much of the briefing focuses on the need for
40
schools to ensure that students get the care and support they need to learn and succeed in college. “We know that for students to draw as much from their college experience as possible, they need to be engaged in the classroom and engaged with their communities and with peers,” says Brian Sponsler, EdD, vice president for research and policy for NASPA. “Our focus on student learning and development foresees positive mental health as a pillar of a student’s readiness to learn platform.” Making sure students are aware of and have access to the supports available to them is also critical, as is ensuring that no student feels alone, isolated or stigmatized, says Louise Douce, PhD, one of the briefing’s contributors and an advisor to the partnership project on behalf of APA. “Simply put, mental wellness is integral to learning,” Douce says. “The less time and energy a student has to put toward feeling safe and well, the more time and energy they have to put into the reason they’re there — to get an education.” — A. NOVOTNEY
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Some counseling centers are beefing up their efforts to help all students understand the importance of mental health. That’s essential, since 78 percent of students with mental health problems first receive counseling or support from friends, family or other nonprofessionals. to do their therapy homework easily, and their counselors can monitor what students do during the week. “Let’s face it, we would all floss our teeth more often if our dentist could check up on us every few days and see if we were flossing,” says Benton. She is now working with the school’s office of technology and licensing to develop TAO into a commercial product and is investigating a similar prototype to treat substance abuse and depression among college students. Education and awareness Counseling centers are also reaching out beyond the therapist’s walls in another way: working with faculty to include wellness awareness in their interactions with students. “Certainly the bread and butter of what counseling centers do is seeing and treating individuals, but there’s a significant amount of campus policy, faculty and staff training, consultation, outreach/prevention, and crisis work they provide as well,” Douce says. Data from the AUCCCD survey confirm that counseling centers are getting involved in more and more aspects of the university, says David Reetz, PhD, director of counseling services at Aurora University in the suburbs of Chicago, and one of the survey’s lead authors. The association’s data show that a typical counseling center staffer spends about 65 percent of his or her time in direct clinical service, and another 20 percent to 25 percent of time on outreach initiatives, such as training students, faculty and other staff in mental health issues, as well as offering suicide, sexual violence, and drug and alcohol prevention programs, Reetz says. At Aurora University, for example, in addition to delivering presentations to faculty on ways to detect early signs of student distress, strategies to intervene and techniques for referring them to the appropriate mental health services, Reetz instructs faculty on the best ways to increase student motivation, pulling in concepts from the psychological literature on resilience, growth mindsets and grit. “We’re taking psychological concepts
that we … have been using in one form or another in the clinical setting and helping faculty think about how they can … infuse these concepts into their curriculum or into creating their classroom climate,” Reetz says. Some counseling centers are beefing up their efforts to help all students understand the importance of mental health. That’s essential, since 78 percent of students with mental health problems first receive counseling or support from friends, family or other nonprofessionals, suggests a 2011 study led by Eisenberg (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease). One popular alliance among counseling centers and students is Active Minds. The organization’s more than 400 student-run chapters throughout the United States support efforts to remove the stigma around mental health issues. For example, the Active Minds’ “Send Silence Packing” is a traveling exhibition of 1,100 donated backpacks that represent the number of college students who die by suicide each year. “The backpacks are spread out in a high-traffic area on campus, like the quad, and it’s impossible to walk by without taking notice,” says Sara Abelson, senior director of programs at Active Minds. “It helps students recognize the need to pay attention, because we all have a role to play in preventing suicide.” Abelson says the organization is also dedicated to championing the idea that student mental health and wellbeing are central to the mission, purpose and outcomes of every school — and that they need to be a priority. “I think we’re beginning to see more and more universities recognizing that creating a healthy climate and an open dialogue about mental health needs to be a priority,” she says. “They’re also realizing that it can’t just be the responsibility of the counseling center, but that this is relevant across the university, and that everyone from the students to the administration needs to be playing a role.” n Amy Novotney is a journalist in Chicago.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 4 1
pablographix/Thinkstock
42
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
An APA task force has created guidelines that promise to make clinical supervision a more evidence-based and codified part of psychology training. BY TORI D e ANG ELI S
W
hen done well, clinical supervision is key to the thriving and future success of up-and-coming practitioners. Under the wings of a trusted, knowledgeable and competent supervisor, a novice therapist’s intellectual understanding transforms into reallife interventions that can profoundly affect others’ lives for the better. But the gold standard of supervision is too often unmet in psychology, in large part because supervisors tend to view the role as a given, supervision experts say. While there is a fairly strong knowledge base in the area, supervisors tend to think the skill is something learned through osmosis. “A pervasive attitude has been, ‘If you were supervised, you can supervise — what’s the problem?’” says Pepperdine University adjunct professor Carol Falender, PhD, who with Edward Shafranske, PhD, wrote the 2008 book “Casebook for Clinical Supervision: A CompetencyBased Approach.” She’s concerned this attitude has resulted in a devaluation of the need to ensure supervisor competence. A new set of guidelines aims to give psychology supervisors guidance grounded in research and experience. Earlier this year, an APA task force headed by Falender completed two years of work on a document that defines and fleshes out the parameters of good supervision, including a strong, trusting supervisory relationship and sound, modern assessment and feedback methods, among others. The guidelines were adopted as policy by APA’s Council of Representatives in August.
“Until now, there has been no national policy or guidance to help psychologists understand the best ways to implement high-quality supervision,” says APA Deputy Executive Director for Education Catherine Grus, PhD, who was the APA staff liaison to the guidelines task force. “That’s what this document does.” A unique set of skills Seeds for the guidelines were planted at a 2002 conference on competencies in professional psychology organized by the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers and co-sponsored by APA and other organizations. There, psychology educators mapped out eight core areas for students to grasp to become good practitioners. One of these was supervision, detailed in a 2004 article by Falender and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. It stated that professional development — including supervision — should be a lifelong, cumulative process that pays strong attention to diversity and takes into account legal and ethical issues, personal and professional factors, and selfand peer-assessment. The guidelines pick up on these points, organizing them in seven domains that task force members agree are necessary to becoming a good supervisor. They include competence in supervision itself, as well as in diversity issues, the supervisory relationship, professionalism, assessment, evaluation and feedback, and ethical, legal and regulatory considerations. Practitioners also should be knowledgeable of the literature on supervisory incompetence, which includes
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 4 3
inadequate supervision — not meeting your agreed-on schedules or other duties with supervisees, for example. Supervisory incompetence also includes harmful supervision, which may include sexual boundary violations or poor or otherwise erroneous feedback on performance, for example, the document states. A major point in the guidelines is that supervision should be viewed as a unique set of skills, independent of therapy skills or for that matter other seemingly related skills, such as consulting, teaching, therapy, management, administrative supervision and case management, says task force member Michael V. Ellis, PhD, who is division director of counseling psychology at the University at Albany in New York. “There has been very little recognition that supervision really is a discipline in and of itself that requires discrete skills, knowledge and attitudes,” says Ellis, who has studied supervision for some 30 years. “A lot of people who are practicing clinical supervisors are untrained or unknowledgeable, and that’s where a lot of harmful or inadequate supervision is coming from.” The guidelines also discuss research that provides clues about what constitutes good supervision and which areas need further study.
As with therapy, a main issue is the quality of the supervisory relationship. For Ellis, that includes more than an agreement on goals and tasks, or the emotional bond, which are commonly studied variables. It also incorporates safety and trust issues, for example. “If supervisees can’t come in and talk to us about the places they’re messing up, then how will they learn to be effective as opposed to doing something inept or harmful?” he says. To this end, good supervision also entails giving consistent, high-quality feedback, adds task force member and University of Redlands professor Rod Goodyear, PhD, who with Janine M. Bernard, PhD, wrote “Fundamentals of Clinical Supervision” (Merrill), now in its fifth edition. Good feedback is thorough, timely, honest and helpful, while poor feedback ranges from vague and unclear to blindsiding (for example, a student who thought she was doing well discovers that her supervisor thinks she has important deficits). Getting accurate feedback is intimately connected to the ethical issue of gatekeeping, or keeping poor students from continuing on if there’s concern they might harm clients. “Gatekeeping — rarely easy for supervisors anyway — is made all the more difficult when supervisors feel vulnerable to
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
AUGUST 6–9, 2015
123RD ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
CALL FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION (CE) WORKSHOP PROPOSALS The APA Continuing Education Committee is now accepting half- and full-day workshop proposals for the 2015 APA Convention that represent the lifelong learning needs of psychologists. Workshops are offered on a range of topics (ethics, assessment, geriatrics, psychopharmacology, and trauma, among many others). Submit a continuing education (CE) workshop proposal and share your expertise with colleagues at this event. As a presenter, you have the opportunity to: • Share your knowledge with fellow psychologists from around the world • Broaden your professional network • Attend one complimentary CE workshop • Receive an honorarium of $175 per instructional hour per workshop
Submit a proposal online at www.apa.org/ed/ce (All proposals must be submitted online; no exceptions)
ALL TOPICS WELCOME 44
Submission deadline: Monday, November 10, 2014
Questions? Contact Marcia E. Segura email: [email protected]
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
accusations that they have not been providing feedback, which might have enabled that supervisee to succeed,” Goodyear says. Likewise, good supervisors use assessment methods and strategies that allow them to give appropriate feedback — regular videotaping and discussion of sessions, for example. Third-year Pepperdine University graduate student Mark Miller says it took some time getting comfortable with watching his sessions on videotape, but now he wouldn’t choose a practice site that didn’t use this strategy. “For me, giving a supervisor access to my performance and choosing sites that have those resources and mechanisms in place is extremely important,” he says. “I’m not sure how deep or effective supervision can be without that.” Finally, good supervisors should be alert to cultural, gender, ethnic and other differences between themselves, their supervisees and their supervisees’ clients, Falender says. “Supervisors should be constantly thinking about their own world views, about others’ world views, about their own diversity status on multiple dimensions and how this intersects with the supervisee’s world view, and about how all of this relates to the client’s presenting problem,” she says. Cultural competence is one area where students may have something to teach their supervisors, rather than the other
Executive Function Scores You Can
Trust!
way around, Falender adds. To this end, the guidelines also emphasize the importance of supervisory relationships that are collaborative. “Students may have training that might be superior to or different from their supervisors,” she says. “By embedding the whole idea of collaboration into supervision, we hope supervisors will understand more fully that they can learn from their supervisees as well as imbue them with knowledge, skills and values.” The guidelines also emphasize that students should be trained to become supervisors while they’re still in graduate school, Falender adds. While APA’s current accreditation guidelines call for supervision training, the new guidelines will underscore the importance of that activity, she says. While other mental health professions and psychologists in some other countries have supervisory guidelines, they are something new for American psychology, Grus adds. “This is a resource that APA has not embarked on before,” she says. “It’s filling a void that’s been there for a long time.” n Access the guidelines at www.apa.org/ed/resources/index.aspx. Tori DeAngelis is a journalist in Syracuse, New York.
The Most Representative Nationally Normed Behavior Rating Scale of Executive Function.
Measure Executive Function
Strengths & Weaknesses to
TM
The CEFI™ a comprehensive evaluation of executive function strengths and weaknesses in youth aged 5 to 18 years.
Goldstein & Naglieri Exc nce I n A s seelslsem ents
• Accurate Results: Normative samples are within 1% of U.S. Census targets for an accurate representation of the U.S. population.
Provide a
Comprehensive Evaluation
• Easy to Understand Reports: Generate three types of dynamic reports including a Comparative Report by comparing results from multiple rater forms (Parent, Teacher, and Self). • Strategies for Intervention: Utilize the CEFI’s nine scales and full scale score to pinpoint targets for intervention. • Save Time: Assess, score, and report from anywhere with the safe and secure MHS Online Assessment Center.
to
Student Success Multi-Health Systems Inc.
Available
USA Tel: 1.800.456.3003 / CAN Tel: 1.800.268.6011
A S S E S S M E N T S
mhs.com • [email protected]
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 4 5
reservation
How prescribing psychologists are improving access to care at one Indian Health Service facility. BY REB ECCA A. CLAY
B
On the
46
efore prescribing psychology came to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations of Montana, it wasn’t always easy for the Native Americans who live there to get the psychotropics they needed. For one thing, “Montana winters make for difficult transportation,” says Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr., PhD, behavioral health director at the Crow/Northern Cheyenne Indian Health Service Hospital. Also, many residents are so poor they often had to choose between buying food or paying for gas to get to an appointment with a psychiatrist. The alternative was to see their primary-care providers, who didn’t necessarily have the time or expertise to prescribe psychotropic medication appropriately. The result? People living with bad side effects or going off their medications altogether. “It was very easy for patients to fall between the cracks,” says Sutherland. Things are different now. Since 2012, Sutherland has been able to prescribe medications himself. He has also recruited two other prescribing psychologists, making the Crow/Northern Cheyenne Hospital unusually well-equipped. In addition to providing psychotherapy and other traditional psychological services, these psychologists prescribe medications for depression, anxiety and serious mental illness. They also continuously reassess patients to make sure they’re not on medications they don’t need. And they work with primary-care providers at the hospital — which includes a primary-care clinic, emergency room and inpatient unit — to treat such physical concerns as diabetes, dementia and chronic pain. The care these psychologists provide has been life changing, says Sutherland. One patient with serious mental
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
© Marilyn Angel Wynn/Nativestock Pictures/Corbis
A sculpture in Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Montana, honors the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian warriors.
illness, for example, used to have a hard time getting his medications despite living just 100 feet or so from one of the hospital’s satellite health clinics. “When he gets his meds, he’s very stable, but he wasn’t able to consistently come in to see the psychiatrist,” says Sutherland. “Now, if he misses an appointment, I just walk over and knock on the door.” Prescribing and ‘unprescribing’ Prescribing psychology got its start at the hospital when the child psychiatrist who used to contract with the hospital quit. After six years of trying to find a replacement, Sutherland gave up. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just do it myself,’” says the child psychologist. He earned a master’s degree in clinical psychopharmacology from Alliant International University —– which included didactic training at Alliant sponsored by APA’s Div. 18 (Psychologists in Public Service) — and in 2012 received a New Mexico prescribing license, which can also be used in federal facilities. For Sutherland, part of the appeal of prescription privileges was the ability to “unprescribe.” “Working with hundreds of
kids over the years, I felt that many were overmedicated, and I wanted to be able to do something to change that,” he says. In many cases, for example, children were being medicated for attention-deficit disorder when their real problems might have been anxiety or learning disabilities. Trauma was also misdiagnosed, adds Sutherland. “Many of the symptoms that would be considered indicative of potentially psychotic processes are more likely due to trauma,” he says, noting the extremely high incidence of sexual violence and other trauma in Indian Country. “And there’s a very different treatment approach for trauma than medication for psychotic disorders.” Of course, there are patients with chronic and severe mental illness who need medication, too. And while the psychiatrists who used to come to the hospital twice a month were capable and caring, what they were able to offer just wasn’t enough, says Sutherland. “We’re now able to see people for more than 15 minutes at a time, as often as needed,” he says, adding that prescription management services are now available at the two satellite clinics as well as the hospital.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 4 7
John Warner
RxP in action at the Crow/Northern Cheyenne Indian Health Service Hospital: From left to right, Dr. Michael Tilus, Deborah Russell, Dr. Marie Greenspan and Dr. Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr.
Integrated care Sutherland and his team don’t just focus on psychological problems, however. “In our psychopharmacology training, they always talked about the bread-and-butter issues of anxiety and depression,” says Michael R. Tilus, PsyD, one of the other prescribing psychologists at the hospital. “But in Indian Country, everyone is complex.” In addition to standard psychological problems, he says, Native Americans may face historical trauma, fetal alcohol syndrome, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, child neglect and abuse, high rates of diabetes and other chronic conditions, even malnutrition. That complexity is why integrating with primary care is so important, says Tilus. If patients with diabetes aren’t taking their medication, for example, Tilus and his colleagues offer tips on exercise and diet and cognitive-behavioral therapy, as well as order blood work so that both the providers and patients can monitor the diabetes. 48
“In Indian Country, we’re not auxiliary. All of the medical psychologists have full medical privileges in the hospital and are full members of the medical team,” says Tilus. “In the more isolated parts of Indian Country where I’ve served, it’s such frontier medicine that the medical providers have tremendous support for us.” The prescribing psychologists also order EKGs, thyroid tests, metabolic panels and similar tests to check for underlying medical conditions before they prescribe psychotropic medication. For one thing, says Sutherland, they want to make sure the patient doesn’t have a previously undiagnosed condition. “We’ve identified a number of cardiac problems and patients who were undiagnosed diabetics,” he says, explaining that prescribing psychologists are trained to interpret lab studies. The prescribing psychologists also need to make sure the medication they prescribe won’t cause any medical problems. “A lot of the medications we prescribe can induce metabolic changes,” Tilus points out. For example, mood stabilizers and antipsychotics could raise patients’ lipid levels. In some cases,
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
says Tilus, medications could actually push someone from a prediabetic condition to full-fledged diabetes. Marie Ruth Greenspan, PhD, the third prescribing psychologist at the hospital, spends one day a week in the primary-care clinic, which is just steps away from the behavioral health department. A physician might call her in when a patient with high blood sugar isn’t taking his or her medication, for example. “I can help sort out the emotional or psychological aspects of the things standing between the patient and better health,” she says. For some patients with diabetes and other chronic diseases, the problem is depression. In such cases, Greenspan may consult with the physician about the patient’s medical co-morbidities and other factors before prescribing an antidepressant and referring the patient to psychotherapy. Greenspan spends another day each week at the area nursing home, whose residents include both older people and young people who have devastating brain and spinal cord injuries due to substance abuse-related car accidents. Greenspan offers psychotherapy and prescriptions for problems that include dementia and accompanying behavioral issues, anxiety and depression.
She is so integrated into patients’ medical care that she even chairs the hospital’s controlled substances committee. The committee reviews policies and procedures for prescribing opioids, anxiety medications, psychostimulants and all other controlled substances and ensures that agreements between patients and prescribers — designed to prevent addiction or diversion of medication — are completed. The committee also reviews individual cases. If a patient wants more pain pills, for example, the solution might be to work with the physician to consider more or different medication. But, says Greenspan, it’s more likely that the committee will recommend that the patient work with a psychologist to come up with a nonpharmacological way to manage his or her pain. “There’s no problem we try to handle simply with medication,” Greenspan says. If she prescribes sleep medication, for instance, she also gives the patient psychoeducation or psychotherapy to encourage a safe, long-term solution. “We maintain a policy of no pills without skills,” says Greenspan. “If we’re giving medication, people also need to come in and talk with us and learn nonpharmacological ways of managing their issues as well.” n Rebecca A. Clay is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
Tools to help you assess, intervene, and support. Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Second Edition (Vineland™-II) Vineland-II is highly respected for its ability to diagnose intellectual and developmental disabilities from birth to age 90. It is organized around three domains: Survey Interview, Parent/Caregiver Rating, Teacher Rating, and Expanded Interview to: • Address today’s special needs populations, such as individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, and ADHD • Determine qualification for special programs, progress reporting, program and treatment planning, and research
Resiliency Scales for Children & Adolescents™—A Profile of Personal Strenghts (RSCA) Build positive psychology into your assessment practice by measuring children’s personal attributes that are critical for resiliency. Use the RSCA separately, together, or in conjunction with other symptom-based measures to obtain a balanced view and plan targeted treatments. Included are 20-24 questions in each of three stand-alone global scales: • Sense of Mastery Scale: optimism, self-efficacy, adaptability • Sense of Relatedness Scale
800.627.7271 PearsonClinical.com
Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. Vineland, Resiliency Scales For Children & Adolescents, Always Learning, Pearson, design for Psi, and PsychCorp are trademarks, in the U.S. and/or other countries, of Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). 8923 07/14
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 4 9
John Warner
Prosecuting child sexual abuse Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr. revamped the process for forensic interviews to make sure that abused children get the treatment they need. B Y R E B E C C A A. C LAY
W
hen psychologist Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr., PhD, decided he didn’t like the way forensic interviews in child abuse cases on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations were being conducted, he didn’t complain. He took action. Forensic investigators would interview children as a way of gathering evidence for prosecuting perpetrators. But once they were finished, that was often that: The children wouldn’t necessarily get treatment, explains Sutherland, behavioral health director at the Crow/Northern Cheyenne Indian Health Service Hospital in Montana. “I felt we were opening children up through the forensic process — for a very good reason — but then we were walking away,” he says. 50
When Sutherland realized that he needed the same information to treat children as the forensic investigators needed to prosecute abusers, he came up with an alternative model. After getting an OK from the assistant U.S. attorney and FBI in the area, he sought training and certification in forensic interviewing. In 2007, he established the Child and Adolescent Referral and Evaluation Center at the hospital. When an abused child comes to the center, Sutherland interviews him or her in a way that satisfies the need to gather evidence and the need to diagnose the child and come up with an effective treatment plan. Law enforcement and child protective services representatives observe the interviews in real time through closed-circuit TV,
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
“We were opening children up through the forensic process — for a very good reason — but then we were walking away,” says Dr. Earl B.H. Sutherland Jr. His model helps ensure children get treatment.
and Sutherland also records the interview for the forensic team. The model does more than just ensure that children get the treatment they need, says Sutherland, adding that pediatrician Caitlin Hall, MD, performs a full medical evaluation at the same time. It also means children don’t have to tell traumatic stories more than once. “And,” says Sutherland, “if a child has an acute anxiety attack in the process of describing what happened, I can intervene directly.” It’s often not just the child who needs treatment, he adds. “We often find out that the mother or even the grandmother was herself a victim of sexual abuse and no one ever did anything about it,” he says. “We
can take the time to work with them and do crisis intervention at the same appointment with the child.” Sometimes entire families get involved, he says. Those on the forensic side are happy, too, says Sutherland. In fact, the Indian Country units of the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys Office have identified the model as a best practice. In 2010, the FBI’s Salt Lake City Field Office gave Sutherland a Director’s Community Leadership Award for what FBI Special Agent in Charge James S. McTighe called “his life-changing contributions to Native American children traumatized by sexual abuse and violence.” Rebecca A. Clay is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 5 1
Practice PERSPECTIVE ON
Overcoming the challenges of PQRS BY DR. KATHERINE C. NORDAL • EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Value trumps volume in the evolving health-care system. In an effort to improve the quality of patient care, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is strongly encouraging health-care providers to report quality measures on their patients. However, the complex reporting requirements of these programs can be daunting for psychologists. CMS introduced the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) in 2007 as an incentive- and penalty-based payment program in which eligible Medicare providers report data on quality measures for covered professional services provided to Medicare beneficiaries. The system includes measures aimed at promoting long-term health, such as preventive care and screening for clinical depression. Since 2007, the APA Practice Organization (APAPO) has been working to educate members about reporting program requirements. Psychologists who don’t participate in 2014 by reporting PQRS measures for more than 50 percent of their applicable Medicare patients may face a 2 percent Medicare payment penalty in 2016. To facilitate participation in PQRS, APAPO is exploring options to partner with a qualified registry for psychologists. A registry is an electronic system that allows eligible professionals to enter quality-measurement information for PQRS. The registry will collect clinical quality data, through a web-based program, spreadsheets and/or electronic health records. A registry would be responsible for calculating and submitting quality measures data to CMS in a specified format on behalf of the eligible professional or group practice for the respective program year. A list of registries qualified to submit PQRS data appears on the CMS website. Although not used as often as claims-based reporting by mental health professionals, registries are an important option for psychologists to explore following the decision by CMS to make some measures ineligible for claims-based reporting in 2014 and beyond. Two individual measures previously reported by psychologists through claims — No. 9 (Antidepressant Medication Management) and No. 173 (Unhealthy Alcohol Use Screening) — now must be reported through either a registry or electronic health records. In addition, all measures groups, including the dementia measures group, must now be reported 52
via a registry. Measure No. 325, Adult Major Depressive Disorder, Coordination of Care of Patients with Specific Comorbid Conditions, has always been limited to registry reporting. For 2014, registry and claims-based reporting have the same requirements: Providers must report nine measures across three domains for 50 percent of the eligible professional’s applicable Medicare cases. Providers who report fewer than nine measures will have their data reviewed under the Measure Validation Process (MAV) to determine if additional measures could have been reported. If the MAV review indicates that the requirement to report nine measures across three domains requirement could not have been met, then the provider will not incur the 2 percent penalty in 2016. Providers who use a registry can save time since they no longer need to manually add PQRS measures and codes to claims. In addition, they can submit the data as late as February of the following year. Registries automatically update the list of PQRS measures annually. Costs vary, but psychologists should expect to pay at least $250 annually to report through a registry. It is important to verify that a registry can support all of the measures on which a psychologist might report. Resources for practitioners starting out in PQRS appear on APAPO’s Practice Central website (www.apapracticecentral. org). They include: • Updates to Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System. • Quick Reference Guide for PQRS Measures, Procedure Codes and G-codes. • PQRS Measures for 2014. • PQRS: Questions and Answers for Psychologists. If you have questions about participating in PQRS, contact your local Medicare contractor or APAPO at (202) 336-5889 or [email protected]. APAPO will continue to monitor changing requirements and advise members of important information online and through our PracticeUpdate e-newsletter. n
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Get the
Monitor app!
A more interactive Monitor at your fingertips: • Use the Text button to tailor articles to the size of your screen. • Tap the Links button for a quick list of the links on each page. • Use the Save function to find content you want to read later. • Use the Share button to share stories via Facebook, Twitter and email. • Find all of our back issues via the Library button.
Look for it in the Apple, Google Play and Amazon app stores. iPad • iPhone • iPod touch • Amazon Kindle • Android smartphones
From serious mental illness to recovery An APA curriculum trains psychology students how to help people recover from schizophrenia, major depression and other serious mental health conditions. BY REB ECCA A. CLAY
54
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Toltek/Thinkstock
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y
55
M
ost psychology students are still trained in the medical model, say members of APA’s Recovery Advisory Committee. They learn to identify a patient’s pathology and treat that pathology. But psychology students should also learn how to help people recover the skills they need to function well in society once the acute problem is resolved, committee members say. “If I break my leg, I not only want it to heal but want to walk again and do all the activities I did before my leg was broken,” says committee member Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD, commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services. “It’s no different with mental illness. People want more than just to not have
Consulting Inc., in Vancouver. “Together, the modules form a solid foundation of the basic training psychologists need.” Known as Reframing Psychology for the Emerging Healthcare Environment: Recovery Curriculum for People with Serious Mental Illnesses and Behavioral Health Disorders, the curriculum is part of a broader effort called the Recovery to Practice initiative. Funded by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the initiative aims to promote recovery-oriented principles and practices among mental health professionals in all disciplines. The initiative has two goals: to create an online library of recovery resources and to support APA and four other mental health organizations in developing training materials.
“The idea that people actually do recover from serious mental illness is foreign to many psychologists. It really is a paradigm shift — one that psychologists must make in order to compete in an evolving health-care landscape that emphasizes primary care, interdisciplinary practice and accountability.” MARY A. JANSEN, PHD Bayview Behavioral Consulting Inc., Vancouver
symptoms; they want to regain their lives to whatever extent they can.” Now Evans, other Recovery Advisory Committee members and members of APA’s Committee on Assessment and Training in Recovery are helping to ensure that future psychologists learn how to help their patients recover from serious mental illness and regain their lives. The team has released a 15-module curriculum for doctoral, internship and postdoctoral psychology programs that teaches students how to provide recovery-oriented behavioral health care. “You need specialized training to work effectively with this population,” says Mary A. Jansen, PhD, a Recovery Advisory Committee member and director of Bayview Behavioral 56
Funded by a subcontract from SAMHSA, APA’s Recovery to Practice initiative is contributing materials to the Recovery Resources Library, available at www.samhsa.gov/ recoverytopractice/RTP-Recovery-Resources-Database.aspx. The new curriculum fulfills the second objective. The curriculum’s modules include one that introduces recovery-based psychological practice and another that offers a historical overview of the recovery movement and how healthcare reform emphasizes recovery. Another module outlines recovery’s empirical underpinnings. Research documenting that people can recover from serious mental illness began in the mid-1970s, the module points out. In the mid-1990s, psychologist Courtenay
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Harding, PhD, published a landmark compendium of studies from around the world, which showed similar rates of recovery in several countries. Harding identified studies showing that between 46 and 84 percent of people with schizophrenia had recovered or significantly improved, for example. Other modules teach practical skills, such as how to conduct a clinical assessment that focuses on strengths and a person’s functional capabilities and how to work with other professionals and patients to develop recovery-oriented treatment plans. Three modules focus on interventions. One lays out the guiding principles of recovery-oriented interventions. Another describes evidence-based practices, while a third describes promising or emerging practices and supportive services. Other modules cover the role of partnership and engagement in the recovery process, peer-delivered services, special issues and interventions in forensic settings, health disparities, systems transformation and inclusion of people with mental health disorders in the community. Each module consists of lecture notes, which include learning objectives, terminology and other items; PowerPoint slides; a suggested learning activity, such as role playing how to integrate a peer support worker into a practice or coming together in small groups to define recovery; a suggested assessment; and citations and resources, including links to videos of people in recovery describing their experiences. APA’s Recovery to Practice initiative designed the curriculum for flexibility so that training programs can integrate the approximately 1.5-hour-long modules into existing courses or use the introductory module along with specific groupings, such as the clinically oriented or systems-oriented modules, to create a special mini-course. However, the project team believes that training in all the modules is necessary for psychology students to fully understand the concepts and be ready to use them in practice, Jansen says. That’s one reason the Recovery to Practice team isn’t just posting the curriculum on its website for anyone to use, adds Andrew Austin-Dailey, who directs the Recovery to Practice initiative at APA. To get the free curriculum, training directors or others must request it from www.apa.org/pi/rtp or call APA. “We want to maintain quality control and make sure that people getting the modules understand what’s expected of them,” Austin-Dailey says. For example, the project team expects faculty to present the curriculum alongside someone who has recovered from a serious mental illness. (The team can help faculty find cofacilitators, if necessary.)
Recovery Advisory Committee member Peter Ashenden says that people in recovery offer a unique perspective on the curriculum’s content. “Unless you’ve been diagnosed with a particular illness, you don’t have as clear an understanding as those individuals who have gone through that experience,” says Ashenden, the former chief executive officer of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. Ashenden is also living proof of how important a recovery orientation is. “The system told me I wouldn’t be able to complete college or hold a full-time job, and I’ve done both,” says Ashenden, who is recovering from clinical depression. “Those are the kinds of limitations we tend to put on people and why it’s so important that we work with our emerging students so they stop doing that and instead build on people’s strengths and help them identify and achieve their goals.” This feature prompted the most enthusiasm in pilot testing of the curriculum by about 200 trainees in 14 doctoral, internship and postdoctoral programs, Austin-Dailey says. “Trainees were very positive about the fact that they could interact with people who have experienced serious mental illness as opposed to just hearing about recovery or maybe never hearing about it at all,” he says. “Very few people, for instance, understand that people with schizophrenia can and do recover.” The curriculum’s release is just the first step. APA’s two recovery committees are also reaching out to psychology training councils, peer support organizations, consumer organizations and other groups to get the word out about the curriculum and promote its use. The committees are also working to ensure that the upcoming revision of APA’s accreditation guidelines and principles reflect a recovery orientation. “The idea that people actually do recover from serious mental illness is foreign to many psychologists,” says Jansen. “It really is a paradigm shift — one that psychologists must make in order to compete in an evolving health-care landscape that emphasizes primary care, interdisciplinary practice and accountability.” n Rebecca A. Clay is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
For more information about the Recovery to Practice initiative and the new curriculum, visit www.apa.org/pi/rtp.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 5 7
CE CORNER
Welcome to ‘CE Corner’ “CE Corner” is a quarterly continuing education article offered by the APA Office of CE in Psychology. This feature will provide you with updates on critical developments in psychology, drawn from peer-reviewed literature and written by leading psychology experts. To earn CE credit, after you read this article, purchase the online exam at www.apa.org/education/ ce/1360372.aspx. Upon successful completion of the test — a score of 75 percent or higher — you can immediately print your CE certificate. The test fee is $25 for members and $35 for nonmembers. The APA Office of CE in Psychology retains responsibility for the program. For more information, call (800) 374-2721.
58
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
The dark side of
professional ethics Even the best psychologists can unwittingly fall into ethical problems. Recognize any of these behaviors in your own practice?
B Y S AMU E L K NAP P, PHD, MI TCHELL M. HANDELSMAN, PHD,
Anthony Hall/Thinkstock
M I C H AE L C . GOT T L IE B, PHD, AND LEON D. VANDECREEK, PHD
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I T O R O N P S Y C H O L O G Y 5 9
Overview: CE credits: 1 Exam items: 10 Learning objectives: After completing this course participants will be able to: • Discuss the limitations of assimilation strategies. • Discuss the limitations of separation strategies. • Identify ways to improve adherence to integrated strategies.
M
ost psychologists strive to act ethically, but all of us are vulnerable to lapses in which we perform in a less-than-optimal way, often without even being aware of it (Bazerman & Banaji, 2004, p. 111). Some psychologists, for example, may stumble because they don’t know the laws or standards governing their profession. Others may place self-interest above public welfare — such as taking on lucrative forensic work without the training to do so. Still others impulsively enter into clinically contraindicated multiple relationships with patients. We’ve all heard of colleagues who act in a questionable way but perceive themselves as behaving ethically and even consider their behaviors exemplary. We are not referring to obviously unethical behavior that is rationalized — such as one psychologist who billed Medicare for services he never delivered and claimed he did not attend to the details of billing because his time was consumed as a concerned healer. Instead, we are referring to situations in which psychologists believe they are acting ethically, even though a peer evaluation would suggest otherwise. We refer to these types of behaviors and attitudes as the dark side of professional ethics. The problem seems to occur because psychologists define professional ethics in different ways. For example, consider this vignette: A young trainee gave her home phone number to a patient who was in deep distress. The patient called one weekend and the trainee agreed to meet the patient at a restaurant. They talked for two hours and ordered beverages and light snacks. The trainee fully disclosed the events to her supervisor the next day. The instructor noticed wide discrepancies in how the trainee’s classmates responded to this event. Some students criticized the trainee for a boundary violation. Others praised the trainee’s dedication to her patient. Both groups justified their opinions on the basis of “ethics.” In this vignette, as in many other situations psychologists face, psychologists use the word “ethics” very differently. Some focus almost exclusively on laws, regulations and the enforceable standards of the APA Ethics Code. When asked, “What is the ethical thing to do?” they only want to know the laws or standards that govern the situation. Perhaps their fear of disciplinary action is so great, their training so inadequate or their character so rigid that they place excessive emphasis on the more rigid interpretation of risk management strategies, even if those strategies place unnecessary barriers between themselves 60
and their patients. And, if confronted with such behavior by a colleague, they may even view with scorn those who take a more balanced approach. Other psychologists define professional ethics by disproportionately emphasizing their own personal beliefs, virtues and value systems. When asked, “What is the ethical thing to do?” they refer to their personal sense of morality and make little reference to the laws, rules or APA Ethics Code. Perhaps their sensitivity to the concerns of their patients is so excessive, their training so inadequate, their confidence so inflated or their self-reflection so superficial that they minimize the importance of laws and standards; they may even disdain those who are more scrupulous about following professional laws and standards. We consider both of these views of professional ethics to be inadequate and believe that they can lead psychologists into less-than-optimal or even unethical behaviors. We argue that the dark side may manifest itself in two ways. First, it may lead practitioners to focus on rules so much that they risk harming their professional relationships. Second, it may appear in the guise of placing one’s personal beliefs above value-based professional standards such that they similarly risk delivering less than optimal services. The Ethics Acculturation Model According to the Ethics Acculturation Model, or EAM (Anderson & Handelsman, 2010; Handelsman et al., 2005), the task of becoming a psychologist involves understanding new professional values and integrating them with one’s existing moral values. This integration is similar to the way that Berry and Kim (1988) described immigrants’ acculturation. Some immigrants accept the new culture wholeheartedly, even minimizing or rejecting their culture of origin; this strategy is termed an assimilation strategy. Others retain as much of their culture of origin as possible, minimizing their involvement with the new culture and avoiding its new norms and standards; this is referred to as a separation strategy. Still other immigrants lose their culture of origin and fail to adopt the norms of their adopted country; this is a marginalization strategy. Finally, some adopt helpful elements of their new culture while retaining the functional and helpful elements of their old culture; this is an integration strategy. In a manner similar to immigrants, psychology students can adopt assimilation, separation, marginalization or integration strategies as they strive to incorporate both their personal and professional ethics. Berry and his colleagues (Berry, 2003; Berry & Sam, 1997) have found that integration is the most effective acculturation strategy; we contend that this is the case for ethics acculturation as well. When trainees use an assimilation strategy, they rely too little on their personal ethics and too much on the laws or standards that govern the profession of psychology. In the extreme, strict adherence to the rules is all that matters to them. Students
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
minimize the importance of overarching values — such as feelings of compassion or a sense of fairness — and follow the rules thoughtlessly. The extreme of an assimilation strategy might be summarized as “too much attention to professional rules without enough attention to personal virtue.” Assimilation strategies have appeal because reasonable psychologists have a legitimate desire to be “law-abiding” and they respect disciplinary bodies. However, well-meaning efforts to inculcate a respect for disciplinary authority and conscientiousness in following its rules may inadvertently reinforce assimilation strategies. For example, a trainee who is warned about minor boundary crossings may become overly concerned with trivial or even clinically indicated boundary crossings for fear of sliding down the slippery slope — by, for example, rudely ignoring a patient who says hello in a grocery store out of an excessive concern for avoiding a multiple relationship. Other trainees may adopt separation strategies, relying too little on the laws and APA’s Ethics Code and giving disproportionate emphasis to the sense of virtue that guides them in their personal lives. They may implement values in ways that would be appropriate in their personal lives but harmful in the professional context. Separation strategies have appeal because most professional psychologists enter the field to help others and may have had service, learning, volunteer or other helping experiences well before entering graduate training. However, “learning the skills to properly channel our desires to help others is not easy” (Tjeltveit & Gottlieb, 2010, p. 103). A student’s well-meaning efforts to promote caring may inadvertently reinforce separation strategies. For example, a trainee who learns the importance of feeling empathy with patients may not appreciate the additional need to maintain professional distance. Separation could mean ignoring an ethical standard or law and result in a disciplinary action against the psychologist. Still other students may use marginalization strategies and rely too little on either personal or professional ethics. They ignore professional standards and lack the moderating influence of personal ethics that could prevent them from harming or exploiting their patients. Ideally, students would use integration strategies in which they know and follow the laws, regulations and standards governing the practice of psychology. Although psychologists can experience serious disciplinary consequences for failing to follow the law to the extent possible, they also act upon these rules with attention to their values of origin. They understand that the role of psychologist requires them to express compassion, fairness or respectfulness in a way consistent with professional values (such as described in the General Principles of the APA Ethics Code) and not through
those behaviors characteristic of close relationships among friends and family. The benchmarks of integration strategies would be the extent to which the students adhere to the values of the profession, such as being respectful of patient autonomy, professionally striving to help patients, being transparent in their actions and so forth. We might summarize integration strategies as “sufficient attention given to both personal virtue and professional rules.” To an outsider, some obligations of professional psychologists can appear counterintuitive. A friendship includes mutual sharing of details of one’s personal life and the mutual
Following rules without considering any exceptions can create barriers between patients and psychologists and may cause psychologists to lose opportunities to improve their relationships with patients and facilitate positive outcomes. exchange of favors, such as lending money or offering a person a ride. Although the professional relationship has some elements of a friendship, including one person sharing details of his or her life with another, other elements of the friendship are not present and would be contraindicated. Many laypeople do not appear to appreciate this distinction. A person using a separation strategy would believe that the failure or refusal to lend money to a client would represent a failure to uphold moral obligations. However, in the context of the “ethical culture” of professional psychology, separation strategies such as lending money are often problematic. Compassion needs to be expressed in other ways. The ethical culture of psychology has developed standards because they promote patients’ well-being, respect for their autonomy, fair treatment and other overarching ethical goals. Of course, not every rule, regulation or standard in psychology practice perfectly fulfills an overarching ethical principle. For example, the privacy notices required by health professionals covered by HIPAA appear overly legalistic and probably do little to educate patients about their privacy
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 6 1
rights. Still, for the most part, the profession’s standards, including the APA Ethics Code, represent considered and deliberative approaches to help psychologists fulfill their obligations to patients, students, supervisees, research participants or others. In the ordinary course of professional practice, psychologists may slip from an integration strategy, even if only temporarily. Sometimes, especially when stressed, they may choose an assimilation strategy and focus excessively on rules and miss opportunities for empathy and compassion. Sometimes they will choose a separation strategy and fail to consider how their feelings of compassion and generosity need to be tempered by the context and boundaries of the professional relationship. Ideally, they can monitor and correct these tendencies. However, at their extremes, or if left unchecked, assimilation or separation strategies can harm patients or violate overarching ethical principles under the guise of “being ethical.”
All of us have blind spots …. As part of our lifelong education in ethics, we can strive for humility, use think-aloud processes and welcome feedback. The dark side of assimilation strategies Although psychologists who use assimilation strategies may believe they are acting in a highly ethical manner, they may not appreciate the impact their behaviors have on patients or others. Assimilation strategies can lead psychologists to interpret rules too rigidly or without compassion, set lower standards for professional behavior or create harm by giving disproportionate attention to certain rules. Below we provide examples of each of these problems. Interpreting rules too rigidly The APA Ethics Code standards were developed, among other reasons, to protect the welfare of patients, supervisees, employees, research participants, students and others. However, the complexity of professional practice requires discretion in interpreting and implementing many of these standards. Consequently, the code has a number of modifiers such as 62
“reasonable,” “appropriate,” “to the extent possible” and so forth in recognition of the need for professional judgment in unique circumstances. For example, Standard 3.05 (Multiple Relationships) states that “Multiple relationships that would not reasonably be expected to cause impairment or the risk of exploitation or harm are not unethical.” However, psychologists who use assimilation strategies sometimes act as if the modifiers did not exist; they may also act as if simply following the rules ensures the best ethical practice (Handelsman, Knapp, & Gottlieb, 2009). Consider the different ways that psychologists may respond to this potential multiple relationship: A psychologist was treating a medical student suffering from anxiety and loneliness. The student learned that a local church sponsored an organization for young singles that was open to people who were not church members. The psychologist discouraged the student from joining this group because the psychologist was a member of that church and there was a possibility that the patient could become more involved in the church and that their paths might cross. A prudent psychologist would weigh the extent and likelihood of harm that might occur from such an encounter against the extent and likelihood of benefit to the patient. For some patients, such as those with problems maintaining boundaries, it may be appropriate to discourage such involvement. But this patient had an adjustment disorder with no personality disorder features, was unlikely to be in therapy much longer and had a personality that could tolerate the possibility of future social contact with the psychologist. From the standpoint of an integration strategy for ethics, it appears that the psychologist missed an opportunity to express compassion within the context of a professional relationship. Acting from an assimilation strategy, other psychologists might interpret the rule against clinically contraindicated multiple relationships so strictly that they would condemn any action that might increase the possibility that the patient’s and psychologist’s paths could cross if the patient ever decided to become more active in the church. They might decide that any increased risk of a boundary crossing is too risky. Thus, psychologists using assimilation strategies may lose the opportunity to help patients when they fail to weigh thoroughly both risks and benefits in their decision making. Interpreting rules without attention to overarching values At times, psychologists apply rules that appear unnecessarily to distance themselves from their patients. For example, a psychologist concerned about boundaries refused to hug any patient under any circumstances. He even rebuffed hugs from little children out of a concern that it might be misconstrued. Another psychologist refused all gifts from patients, even a holiday card with a pleasant and benign holiday greeting. Another psychologist focused so much on getting the informed-
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
consent forms explained and signed that he failed to involve patients adequately in developing treatment goals, thus increasing the risk of treatment failure. Following rules without considering any exceptions can create barriers between patients and psychologists and may cause psychologists to lose opportunities to improve their relationships with patients and facilitate positive outcomes. Often psychologists can take the lead from their patients on whether to accept or offer hugs. Nonetheless, discretion needs to be used in these situations; at times it may be clinically indicated to refuse to hug certain patients or to refuse gifts beyond those of nominal value. For example, one female psychologist accepted hugs from most patients in recovery from alcoholism, knowing that hugging at the end of meetings is common within the AA culture. On the other hand, she refused to hug her teenage male patients because doing so might have sexual overtones for some of them. However, she would hug small children and, when dealing with a highly sexualized victim of childhood sexual abuse, she discussed hugging with the parents to make the understanding of appropriate (and inappropriate) hugging a part of her treatment. Helping students develop appropriate judgment is essential for psychology training programs. This judgment involves understanding how principles and rules apply in a variety of circumstances (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009, p. 40) and how to apply rules in context and in the furthering of worthy goals (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010). Psychologists can demonstrate such judgment by examining the unique demands of the situation, attending to nonrational factors that influence behavior (Rogerson, Gottlieb, Handelsman, Knapp, & Younggren, 2011) and modifying their behaviors to account for unique demands. We can imagine how oppressive an agency, institution or university training program might become if its members were “ethical” in the sense of adopting extreme assimilation strategies. The atmosphere could become characterized by the need to identify others’ shortcomings and vigilance to protect oneself from others’ accusations. The net effect could be that many supervisors, supervisees, faculty members and students would stop discussing their ethical issues publicly. Thus, chances for productive exploration of some of the most common and grayest of ethics issues would be lost (Gottlieb, Handelsman, & Knapp, 2008; Pope, Sonne, & Greene, 2006). Setting low standards for professional behavior Assimilation strategies run the risk of setting low standards for professional behavior. The notion “if it is legal, then it is ethical” applies here. Consider this case: A psychologist was treating a patient who made a serious threat to harm an identifiable third party. Knowing that this met the threshold for a duty to warn in his state, the psychologist quickly contacted the intended victim. Although the psychologist’s
actions met the letter of the law, the question arises whether the psychologist had other options to defuse the danger, such as seeking a voluntary hospitalization (if appropriate) or asking the patient for input on other ways to control the situation. Warning an intended victim is often clinically indicated and may be the most ethical and best clinical response to a situation. However, there is always a danger that a psychologist, in a period of stress, may pick the first “half-way reasonable” and legal solution that comes to mind to quickly reduce anxiety and cognitive load, and to avert loss. In doing so, the psychologist may not have considered less intrusive, equally legal and more clinically effective options. Ideally, the psychologist’s actions would have been informed most by the welfare of the third party and the patient, not only his or her own personal liability. He or she would have taken the time to do a detailed analysis of the context in which the violence might occur and sought to engage the patient in a plan to defuse the violence. Paradoxically, the failure to consider other clinical options might lead the patient to drop out of treatment, thereby increasing the risk that the feared violence might actually occur. Creating harm by giving disproportionate attention to certain rules Consider the psychologist who included the following statement in his informed consent form (this actually happened): I recognize that I am here to see Dr. X for professional purposes and that I have no sexual interest in him and will not attempt to involve him in a sexual relationship or even fantasize about him. It’s admirable that the psychologist wanted to avoid sexual relationships with patients, but his manner of addressing the issue appeared to place the responsibility for sexual misconduct on the patient and to raise it to a level of importance that most patients would never have considered. Such statements could also cause patients to wonder if this psychologist had issues with personal control over his own impulses. Another psychologist made a point of telling all her patients (male and female, young and old) at the start of therapy that sexual contact with psychotherapists is always unethical. This overemphasis on the rules embarrassed and confused many patients who did not know why this issue got so much attention. The dark side of separation strategies Psychologists who use separation strategies may perceive themselves as acting in a highly ethical manner but do not appreciate the cumulative wisdom expressed through professional standards. Examples of separation strategies include psychologists who attempt to solicit patients for social causes (intrusive advocacy), fail to maintain professional boundaries or allow personal values to trump professional ones. We consider some examples below.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 6 3
Advocating intrusively Intrusive advocacy occurs when psychologists place a social cause or their own personal values above their patients’ welfare (Pope & Brown, 1996) and fail to separate personal values from therapeutic ones (Tjeltveit & Gottlieb, 2010). Consider this example: A psychologist expressed anger at a patient who refused to file charges against an inpatient facility that had, probably inadvertently, violated her privacy rights by giving out information in a nonemergency situation without a proper release or court order. Other psychologists have tried too strenuously to convince patients to file complaints against previous therapists with whom they had a sexual relationship or to file criminal suits against a parent who had abused them as a child. One psychologist told a patient that the patient had a social obligation to other victims to publicly expose and humiliate the offender. Another psychologist believed so strongly in protecting children that she included campaign literature in her waiting room for a political candidate who was vocal on the need for increased funding for child welfare programs. Such well-meaning efforts fail to respect patients’ autonomy in choosing their own goals and values. The psychologists’ role is to establish conditions that allow patients to reach autonomous decisions; focusing on the psychologists’ goals instead is likely to lead to a poorer quality of service, including an increase in the number of patients who resist or drop out of treatment. In the extreme, such behavior could also cause harm. Failing to maintain professional boundaries Effective professional relationships focus on patient well-being. Consider this situation: At an initial evaluation, a patient reported that she was coming to therapy to deal with a recent sexual assault. The psychologist immediately shared her own assault history, as she had been instructed to do years earlier when she volunteered in a sexual assault facility. The general rule for psychologists is to self-disclose deliberately and selectively, based on a patient’s need (Sommers-Flanagan, 2012). The psychologist’s discussion of her own sexual assault, especially when she did not know the patient well, was ill-considered and potentially harmful. Although this sharing might have been appropriate in a friendship or paraprofessional relationship, excessive selfdisclosure early in the professional relationship risks derailing the focus of attention from the patient onto the psychologist (for further reading, see Gottlieb, Younggren, & Murch, 2009). Allowing personal values to trump professional values Although it is commendable to respond with concern and loyalty and to assist friends, in professional roles, psychologists should decline some requests for help. Consider these examples: 64
A psychologist was contacted by an attorney who told him about a man who was alienated from his daughter through no fault of his own, and the court had issued an order for reunification therapy. The psychologist agreed to conduct the therapy, even though he had no training or experience in this modality and was unprepared for the difficulty and the intensity of emotion generated by the case. Another psychologist was treating a patient with a long history of disruptive interpersonal relationships, including failed treatment relationships with previous therapists. To reassure her patient, who was going through deep depression, the psychologist told her, “I will always be here for you.” One year later, the psychologist terminated treatment with the patient who had continually missed appointments, made inappropriate nighttime calls, refused to comply with reasonable treatment plans and failed to pay her bills. The patient filed a licensing board complaint noting that the psychologist had lied about always being there for her. When a former patient was having trouble finding a place to live, a psychologist rented an apartment to her well below market rates. Two years later, the former patient was far behind in her rent and unemployed. When the psychologist attempted to collect the rent, the patient filed a licensing board complaint against the psychologist. It’s important for psychologists to set limits on their assistance and loyalty to patients, especially when such help exceeds the psychologist’s competence, misleads patients concerning psychologists’ roles or creates clinically contraindicated multiple relationships. How to protect yourself We view ethics acculturation as a developmental process that occurs throughout one’s career. In that spirit, we offer these suggestions for balancing your personal ethical systems with professional rules, standards, values and principles. 1. Reflect on your behaviors. By reflecting on your professional conduct, you can explicitly link your behavior to both the rules governing the profession (such as the APA Ethics Code, state and federal laws, etc.) and to personal overarching ethical theory, whether that theory be principlebased ethics, virtue ethics, deontological ethics, feminist ethics or a system based upon your religious traditions. You can evaluate behaviors based on both personal and professional standards of conduct and then deliberate in a more comprehensive way (Anderson & Handelsman, 2010). Explicit instruction using the EAM (such as through readings or continuing education) may be one way to better understand how to integrate personal and professional ethics (Gottlieb et al., 2008). 2. Exhibit good ethical behaviors. Graduate students in psychology observe how their professors and supervisors respond to ethical problems. Of course, this knowledge is not transmitted by osmosis (Handelsman, 1986); faculty and
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
supervisors can think aloud when they are confronted with situations that require ethical reasoning and demonstrate how they are linking their behaviors to the values of the profession. These kinds of demonstrations will help students develop judgment and the ability to apply overarching ethical principles of the profession appropriately, depending on contextual factors. 3. Be transparent. Strive for greater transparency with patients and colleagues in your ethical decision making and openly articulate your reasons for decisions. Transparency means more than just identifying the relevant rules, laws and standards — it also means discussions regarding how to implement these rules in ways that promote overarching ethical principles or virtues, such as the welfare of patients, respectfulness and justice. Openly speaking about your questions may reduce the tendency for ethical issues to be driven underground and may reduce the discrepancy between descriptive norms (how people actually behave) and injunctive norms (how people are expected to behave); it may also promote ethically excellent behavior (Handelsman et al., 2009). 4. Respond to feedback. All of us have blind spots (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011) that can lead us to act in a less-than-optimal manner for reasons outside of our conscious awareness. We can accept the fact that all of us will make mistakes, and when we do, we should acknowledge and try to correct them (Tavris & Aronson, 2007). As part of our lifelong education in ethics, we can strive for humility, use think-aloud processes and welcome feedback. n
This article is adapted from “The dark side of professional ethics,” which appeared in the December 2013 issue of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Vol. 44(6), 371-377. To read the original article, which includes all references, visit www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/ pro-a0035110.pdf. Authors Samuel Knapp, EdD, is director of professional affairs for the Pennsylvania Psychological Association. Mitchell M. Handelsman, PhD, is professor of psychology and a CU President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Denver. Michael C. Gottlieb, PhD, ABPP (Family) is in independent practice in Dallas. Leon D. VandeCreek, PhD, was formerly a professor at the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University.
Clinician’s Corner Workshops The Clinician’s Corner is a series of 3-hour workshops (1:00–4:00 p.m. E T) that feature leading practitioners and scholars working in key areas of professional practice. Participants can choose to attend via live webcast or in person at the APA building. All programs include three CE credits. September 26 Concussion on the Cutting Edge: Evidence-Based Comprehensive Approach From Assessment to Treatment Presenter: Anthony P. Kontos, PhD October 17
Introduction to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive-Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD Presenter: Louanne W. Davis, PsyD
November 7 Caregiver Family Therapy: An Integrative Intervention for Family Caregivers Presenter: Sara Honn Qualls, PhD
Fees
APA Members
Nonmembers
To Attend LI V E webcast: Visit http://apa.bizvision.com and select Clinician’s Corner Webcasts I N PER SON at the APA building (Washington, DC): Call 1-800-374-2721, ext. 5991, option 3 Visit www.apa.org/ed/ce for more CE opportunities. Continuing Education from your Association
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 6 5
Ethically SPEAKING
Keeping a clinical focus BY STEPHEN BEHNKE, JD, PHD, MDIV
Legal and ethical issues may make psychologists feel anxious, yet often such questions call for a psychologist’s best clinical skills.
I
n the past several columns, I have written about a four-bin analysis as a framework for offering consultations. The four-bin approach consists of differentiating legal, clinical, ethical and risk-management issues, and then integrating these four bins into a coherent response. The key to the differentiation process is recognizing that although closely related, the four bins represent different kinds of questions and so are distinct in nature. The key to the integration process is recognizing that like the four wheels on a car, moving forward depends on the four bins working in a synchronous fashion. Each of the two steps in the consultation process — differentiation and integration — brings unique challenges. Differentiating legal, clinical, ethical and risk management questions is not always straightforward, especially when working with clients who display significant Axis II symptomatology and with whom the clinical and ethical may seem inextricably intertwined. (See June “Ethically Speaking.”) Integrating the four bins can be complex and difficult, for example, when a psychologist’s best clinical judgment seems out of step with what the law requires and/ or what will minimize the psychologist’s exposure to liability. A fruitful exercise can be to explore why the process of differentiation or integration has become stuck at a particular moment and to consider whether some aspect of the situation has been overlooked. Mandatory reporting illustrates complexities in the integration process. The APA Ethics Office receives many calls from psychologists asking about a duty to report, very often about possible child abuse or neglect and sometimes about a duty to warn or protect an individual whom a client has threatened. A consultation for these calls begins with the legal bin to determine how the laws of the psychologist’s jurisdiction apply. Once it has been determined whether the law requires, permits or prohibits a disclosure of the information in question, the ethical bin becomes relevant. Ethical Standard 4.05, 66
Disclosures, identifies three conditions in which it is appropriate for a psychologist to disclose confidential information: “(a) Psychologists may disclose confidential information with the appropriate consent of the organizational client, the individual client/patient, or another legally authorized person on behalf of the client/ patient unless prohibited by law. (b) Psychologists disclose confidential information without the consent of the individual only as mandated by law, or where permitted by law for a valid purpose. ...” The three conditions when disclosure of confidential information is permitted under Standard 4.05 are client consent, when the law mandates disclosure and when the law permits the disclosure for an appropriate reason. A useful teaching approach can be to have students consider themselves to be in the “room of confidentiality.” Only the three doors of client consent, legal mandate and legal permission are available to leave the room, so a psychologist must identify which door(s) is/are open before allowing confidential information to leave the room. An unfortunate artifact of identifying a question as a “legal” or an “ethical” question is that this differentiation sometimes leads psychologists to stop thinking clinically. It is as if clinical thinking ceases to be relevant once an attorney or ethics officer becomes involved. To the contrary, it is often a challenging legal or ethical question that calls for a psychologist’s best clinical skills. This point bears emphasis. Although the law may mandate that a psychologist take a particular course of action, the law rarely precludes the psychologist from fulfilling a legal mandate in a clinically appropriate manner, and it is most often in the psychologist’s risk management interests to do so. As an example, that a psychologist must file a mandated report and how the psychologist does so are distinct in important ways. The former will get answered in the legal and ethical bins; the latter will be influenced by the law and the ethics code but will unfold largely in the clinical bin. Law and ethics provide the foundation and frame of a house, while the design and
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Although the law may mandate that a psychologist take a particular course of action, the law rarely precludes the psychologist from fulfilling a legal mandate in a clinically appropriate manner and it is most often in the psychologist’s risk management interests to do so. decorating are the psychologist’s clinical judgment. A clinical approach to fulfilling a psychologist’s legal and ethical responsibilities has not received sufficient attention in our literature or professional meetings. One reason for this professional oversight may be related to our discipline’s countertransference: Legal and ethical rules generate anxiety. Anxiety works against nuance and toward disjunctive thinking. Once a legal or ethical question is clarified by an attorney or ethics officer, a psychologist may view the matter as settled and act in the hope it will go away. A different approach is to view clarifying legal and ethical questions as the cue to begin considering the most clinically appropriate manner of proceeding. At this point in the process, a clinical consultation on how to move forward may be the most appropriate next step. An article or conference session titled “Best Clinical Approaches to Fulfilling Mandatory Duties to Report” would be a welcome contribution to this discussion. When a psychologist is mandated to disclose confidential information, how the disclosure takes place may have profound clinical implications. Using the “room of confidentiality” approach can be helpful clinically because it highlights that the three doors in standard 4.05 — client consent, legal mandate and legal permission — are not mutually exclusive. Although the law may mandate a psychologist to disclose information, the structure of standard 4.05 offers the consent door as well: For good clinical reasons, a psychologist with a legal mandate to disclose may seek to involve the client in the disclosure or at the very least inform the client that a disclosure must be made. Involving the client in the disclosure may be an excellent way to achieve multiple goals simultaneously: fulfill the legal mandate (the legal bin), show respect for the client (the ethical bin), maintain the professional relationship (the
clinical bin) and help protect the psychologist against a claim that the psychologist has breached confidentiality (the riskmanagement bin). This approach is integrative rather than disjunctive. Another example of integrating a clinical perspective comes from calls to the APA Ethics Office regarding meeting with a family after a client has died. Especially when the death may be a suicide, psychologists become focused — appropriately so — on risk-management considerations. A clinical approach is not in contrast to abiding by legal and ethical constraints regarding a psychologist’s continuing duty of confidentiality following a client’s death. Rather, a clinical approach asks how a psychologist can be helpful to grieving survivors in a manner that respects the legal and ethical bounds of the interactions. A shift from a reactive, defensive posture toward an approach that incorporates clinical sensitivity and insight into the experience of grief may be consistent with law and ethics and at the same time bring both relief to distressed individuals and considerable risk-management benefits for the psychologist. The four-bin approach consists of two steps: differentiation and integration. The integration step brings all four perspectives to bear on a psychologist’s thinking. The integration step also highlights where psychologists begin and end a consultation: With psychology. n Stephen Behnke, JD, PhD, MDiv, is the director of APA's Ethics Office.
Do you have an ethical question or vignette you would like this column to explore? If so, email [email protected].
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 6 7
The five candidates for APA’s 2016 president are answering two questions
Candidates
of concern to psychology in the June, July/August and September issues of the Monitor. This month’s questions are:
Q5 How would your presidency work to move APA toward realizing and sustaining APA Vision Statement 6: “A principal leader and global partner promoting psychological knowledge and methods to facilitate the resolution of personal, societal and global challenges in diverse, multicultural and international contexts”? Q6 In light of the impending changes in the governance structure of APA, how do you envision your role as president? Balloting begins Sept. 15, and the election closes Oct. 29. For biographical information on each candidate and the candidates’ election statements, see the May Monitor.
Kurt F. Geisinger, PhD
Q5
As APA’s president, I would seek to blanket the news media extensively with information about APA’s status as a global partner in addressing worldwide challenges. An important role of any association leader is to help members partner with those abroad to collaborate on research and practice initiatives, or just learn and share with each other. My work as an officer in two international psychology associations speaks to my commitment to APA’s international vision. My scholarship and applied work, which is largely driven by needs of underserved populations, especially ethnic-minority groups and those with disabilities, has focused on fairness and testing.
Q6
First, it is incumbent upon the president to support the changes implemented by APA’s governance. Second, as a member of the Good Governance Project, I know the data continues on page 70
68
Todd E. Finnerty, PsyD
Q5
No one can do it alone, and partnerships add value to our efforts. For example, we can grow our partnership with the World Health Organization by improving and adapting its ICD clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines for use in the United States. No diagnosis is perfect. However, strengthening our relationship with the WHO could offer psychology more influence on the way psychological difficulties are conceptualized in the future. Expanding our partnership by adapting and publishing an online, free, psychologically supported diagnostic system would benefit the public. It would also give the public a viable alternative to psychiatry’s DSM-5. Visit www.toddfinnerty.com.
Q6
We’ve grown distracted from the public’s interest in our psychological services by coveting prescription privileges. APA has grown continues on page 70
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
answer final questions
Antonio E. Puente, PhD
Q5
Psychology must lead by developing academic and health-care assessments, interventions and training opportunities relevant to all by investing from and for a perspective of diversity. Having been a visiting professor of psychology at the Universidad of Granada for 25 years, having collaborated internationally throughout my career and published in three languages, I am poised to take these efforts and institutionalize them. In my presidency, I will foster the development and maintain collaboration between international psychological societies and organizations of diversity to address global problems. The recent endorsements by the Spanish and Russian psychological societies are a testament toward this goal.
Q6
The role of the president is to: 1. Speak for the broad APA membership in the contexts continues on page 70
Susan H. McDaniel, PhD
Q5
Behavior is at the core of many world problems: health, sex trafficking, climate change, violence. My experience consulting on integrated care in 14 countries across Asia, the Americas and Europe taught me the value of coming together around a common mission. To be leaders, we must be partners first. As president, I will work to create and solidify international partnerships, as we have done with the World Health Organization, to help people “Think Psychology First.” Collaboration with other disciplines will help ensure psychology’s research, policy and clinical knowledge is brought to bear as we tackle these complex global challenges.
Q6
The next president will have the unprecedented privilege of leading APA as it transforms and streamlines its governance structure. It is essential that the president prioritize airing all views, continues on page 70
Jessica Henderson Daniel, PhD
Q5
My assertion that “Psychology Is Every Day in Almost Every Way” and encouraging psychologists to engage in “Leadership and Collaborations as Citizen Psychologists” are both consistent with the APA Vision Statement 6: “A principal leader and global partner promoting psychological knowledge and methods to facilitate the resolution of personal, societal and global challenges in diverse, multicultural and international contexts.” The discipline of psychology must have a presence in the room, at the table and often at the head of the table at the local, state, national and international levels. The development of leadership and negotiation skills will facilitate this participation.
Q6
Given the numerous impending changes in the governance structure of APA, it seems likely that the organization will be in transition for continues on page 70
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 6 9
Kurt F. Geisinger, PhD continues from page 68
Susan H. McDaniel, PhD continues from page 69
showing member dissatisfaction with current governance. As a recent Board of Directors member, I know that APA needs to make decisions thoughtfully and expeditiously. I strongly support the proposed functional changes that will reinvigorate council and re-orient the board. With substantial experience as a department chair, dean and university vice president, I am expert in organizational functioning and budgets and would work collaboratively and provide leadership initiating those changes approved by governance. n
managing tensions inherent in change, facilitating decisions and inspiring the organization to translate vision into reality. The president, serving on both the board and the council leadership team, will help shape their collaboration. Working with the board, she will help chart the financial course of the association, ensuring our budget reflects our values. My experiences in governance and career focus on systemic collaboration have prepared me well to meet these challenges. n
Todd E. Finnerty, PsyD continues from page 68
Jessica Henderson Daniel, PhD continues from page 69
distracted by issuing policies that don’t reflect good science. For example, APA’s council suggested an APA-accredited internship should be required for licensure. My role will be seeking additional changes with a more focused approach. For example, I’ll press APA to allow the APA Practice Organization to have a separate board that’s elected by APAPO members only. I’ll press APA to allow practitioners to join only APAPO without joining APA. This would allow each separate organization to focus on its separate mission. n
several years as decisions are implemented. APA governance involves APA members active in governance and the APA staff. As APA president, one role would involve facilitating smooth communication between these two groups as the timing and modes of change are negotiated. I would also encourage communicating with the general APA membership on a consistent basis. A transparent process will be important to maintain trust and good will at all levels and across the multiple constituencies. n
Antonio E. Puente, PhD continues from page 69 of the council and the board. 2. Implement presidential initiatives that reflect the concerns and goals of the general membership. 3. Serve as a face of American psychology to the broader world. Further, enactment of the Good Governance Project is critical. I have conducted several membership surveys asking APA members about practice, academic and other issues that affect their careers and pro-social contributions. As president, it will be my first priority to ensure that APA members’ voices are heard in APA governance. n
Candidates’ statements reflect their own views and do not represent the positions of APA or APAPO. 70
The candidates are also answering questions about the American Psychological Association Practice Organization. The answers to those questions are at www.apapracticecentral.org/ news/2014/presidential-candidates.aspx.
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY THIRD EDITION Charles J. Gelso, Elizabeth N. Williams, and Bruce R. Fretz AVAILABLE ON AMAZON KINDLE®
The first edition of this seminal book appeared more than twenty years ago and was acknowledged as the first comprehensive overview of counseling psychology. This long-anticipated new edition has been thoroughly updated to serve a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students—and all readers who want to know more about the field. It has been skillfully reorganized to clearly present the history of the field, its foundational principles and practices, its relationship to other psychological disciplines, and its four primary therapeutic approaches—psychoanalytic, cognitivebehavioral, humanistic, and feminist multicultural. 2014. 768 pages. Hardcover. List: $89.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $69.95 | ISBN 978-1-4338-1711-3 | Item # 4317337
TABLE OF CONTENTS I: The Scope and Goals of Counseling Psychology | 1. An Introduction to Counseling Psychology | 2. History of Counseling Psychology | 3. Ethical Values of Counseling Psychology | II: The Science of Counseling Psychology | 4. Research Strategies and Paradigms of Counseling | 5. Vocational Theory and Research: Milestones and New Frontiers | 6. Diversity and Social Justice | 7. Working with Strengths: Counseling Psychology’s Calling | 8. Analyzing the Techniques, Processes, and Outcomes of Counseling and Psychotherapy | III: The Practice of Counseling Psychology | 9. The Therapeutic Relationship | 10. Science and Practice of Assessment | 11. The Psychodynamic Approach | 12. The Cognitive-Behavioral Approach | 13. The Third Force: The Humanistic-Experiential Approach | 14. Feminist Multicultural Counseling Integration and Cultural Competence in a Changing World | 15. Career Psychology: Theories and Interventions | 16. Beyond the Individual: Group, Couple, and Family Therapy | IV: Careers in Counseling Psychology | 17. Training and Professional Issues in Counseling Psychology
ALSO OF INTEREST
Helping Skills Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action Fourth Edition Clara E. Hill
2014. 600 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1678-9 | Item # 4311021
APA Handbook of Counseling Psychology
Transformation in Psychotherapy
Volume 1: Theories, Research, and Methods Volume 2: Practice, Interventions, and Applications Editor-in-Chief Nadya A. Fouad
Corrective Experiences Across Cognitive Behavioral, Humanistic, and Psychodynamic Approaches Edited by Louis G. Castonguay and Clara E. Hill
2012. 1,132 pages. Hardcover.
• Series: APA Handbooks in Psychology®
List: $395.00 | APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00 ISBN 978-1-4338-1107-4 | Item # 4311508
List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1159-3 | Item # 4316142 Credit: 6.5
APA BOOKS ORDERING INFORMATION: 800-374-2721 • www.apa.org/pubs/books In Washington, DC, call: 202-336-5510 • TDD/TTY: 202-336-6123 • Fax: 202-336-5502 In Europe, Africa, or the Middle East, call: +44 (0) 1767 604972
AD2721
APA honors psychology’s best in D.C.
72
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
orhancam/Thinkstock
During APA’s 2014 Annual Convention last month, APA and its divisions honored members who made far-reaching contributions. APA Lifetime Achievement Award: Beverly Tatum, PhD APA Council of Representatives Raymond D. Fowler Award: Melba J.T. Vasquez, PhD APA Board of Educational Affairs Distinguished Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award: Barbara L. Bonner, PhD Distinguished Career Contributions to Education and Training in Psychology Award: Julio J. Ramirez, PhD Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award: Sümeyra Tosun, PhD APA Board of Scientific Affairs Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award: Richard N. Aslin, PhD, John A. Bargh, PhD, and Carol A. Barnes, PhD (shared) Distinguished Scientific Award for the Application of Psychology: G. Terence Wilson, PhD Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Animal Learning and Behavior, Comparative: Amanda Seed, PhD, and Katie E. Slocombe, PhD (shared) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology — Cognition/Human Learning: George A. Alvarez, PhD Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology — Developmental Psychology: Laura E. Schulz, PhD Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology — Health Psychology: J. David Creswell, PhD Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology — Psychopathology: Emily A. Holmes, PhD APA Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (Senior Career): Gary B. Melton, PhD Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy: Lonnie R. Snowden, PhD The Key Bridge connecting Georgetown to Arlington, Virginia. 73
APA Board of Professional Affairs Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research: Thomas Grisso, PhD Distinguished Professional Contributions to Independent Practice: Thomas Wolff, PhD Distinguished Professional Contributions to Institutional Practice: Kevin McGuinness, PhD APA/APAGS Award for Distinguished Graduate Student in Professional Psychology: Allie Abrahamson and Rebeccah Bernard
Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology) Wayne S. Weiten Award (two-year institutions): J. Kris Leppien-Christensen, PhD Jane S. Halonen Award (Early Career): Sadie Leder Elder, PhD Wilbert J. McKeachie Award (Graduate Students): Angela Legg Mary Margaret Moffett Award (High School Teachers): Amanda Vanderbur Adjunct Faculty Teaching Excellence Award: Thanos Patelis, PhD President’s Award for Career Contributions: Dana S. Dunn, PhD, and Maureen A. McCarthy, PhD
APA Committee on International Relations in Psychology Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology: Sathasivan (“Saths”) Cooper, PhD International Humanitarian Award: Malcolm MacLachlan, PhD
Div. 3 (Experimental) Lifetime Achievement Award: Keith Rayner, PhD New Investigator Award — Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes: Travis Todd, PhD New Investigator Award — Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied: Caitlan Rizzardo and Elizabeth McGregor New Investigator Award — Journal of Experimental Psychology: General: Tim Brady, PhD, and Talia Konkle, PhD New Investigator Award — Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance: Grayden Solman, PhD New Investigator Award — Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition: Daniel Peterson, PhD
American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Raymond D. Fowler Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Professional Development of Graduate Students: Winfred Arthur, PhD Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) William James Book Awards: Michael Lewis, PhD, for “The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life”; Sendhil Mullainathan, PhD, and Eldar Shafir, PhD, for “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”; Honorable Mention: Alexandra Horowitz, PhD, for “On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes” George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology: David H. Uttal, PhD, Nathaniel G. Meadow, PhD, Elizabeth Tipton, PhD, Linda L. Hand, PhD, Alison R. Alden, PhD, Christopher Warren, PhD, and Nora S. Newcombe, PhD, for “The Malleability of Spatial Skills: A Meta-Analysis of Training Studies” Ernest R. Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award: Scott Lilienfeld, PhD 2014 Arthur W. Staats Lecture Award for Unifying Psychology (from the American Psychological Foundation): Peter Salovey, PhD 2015 Arthur W. Staats Lecture Award for Unifying Psychology (from the American Psychological Foundation): Judith Torney-Purta, PhD Anne Anastasi General Psychology Graduate Student Research Awards, Under Two Years of Graduate Work: Andrew M. Kiselica; Honorable Mention: Eva Keatley Anne Anastasi General Psychology Graduate Student Research Awards, Two or More Years of Graduate Work: Jeffrey D. Shahidullah; Honorable Mentions: Reut Avinum, Amy J. Jeffers, Hannah C. Williamson, and Mary Louise Woody 74
Div. 5 (Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics) Anne Anastasi Early Career Award: Ken Kelley, PhD Distinguished Dissertation Award: Nathaniel E. Helwig, PhD Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring: Bruce Thompson, PhD Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award: Cecil Reynolds, PhD Div. 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology) D.O. Hebb Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award: Michael Domjan, PhD Brenda A. Milner Award: Dan Brooks, PhD Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Service to Div. 6 Award: Nicolle Matthews, PhD Clever Systems Early Career Investigator Award: Sarah Brosnan, PhD Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award: Camila Ferrara, PhD D.G. Marquis Behavioral Neuroscience Award: Cynthia Woo, PhD Div. 7 (Developmental) G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology: Michael Lamb, PhD
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society: Adele Diamond, PhD, and Ann Maston, PhD Mentor Award in Developmental Psychology: Susan Carey, PhD Boyd McCandless (Early Career) Award: Adriana Galvan, PhD Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology: Barbara Rogoff, PhD, and Paul Harris, PhD Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology: Hyowon Gweon, PhD Early Career Outstanding Paper Award: Kathryn Monahan, PhD Early Career Research Grants: Natalie Hiromi Brito, PhD, and Kathleen Carriveau, PhD
Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) Kurt Lewin Award: Susan Fiske, PhD Distinguished Service to SPSSI Award: Margaret Bull Kovera, PhD, Amy Marcus-Newhall, PhD, Maureen O’Connor, PhD, and Mark Snyder, PhD Innovative Teaching Award: Jamie Franco-Zamudio, PhD, Honorable Mentions: Dusty Johnstone, PhD, and Mary Kite, PhD Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award: Cynthia McPherson Frantz; Honorable Mention: Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, PhD SPSSI Speaker at the National Institute for Teaching of Psychology: Alicia Nordstrom, PhD
The Washington, D.C., metro. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 7 5
CelsoDiniz/Thinkstock
Div. 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) 2013 Jack Block Award: Robert McCrae, PhD 2013 Donald T. Campbell Award: Timothy Wilson 2013 Career Contribution Award: C. Daniel Batson, PhD, and James Sidanius, PhD 2013 Robert B. Cialdini Award: Judith Harackiewicz, PhD, Christopher Rozek, PhD, Chris Hulleman, PhD, and Janet Hyde, PhD 2013 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychology: Andrew Elliot, PhD 2013 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology: Nalini Ambady, PhD 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award: Carol Dweck, PhD 2013 Media Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science: Jonathan Haidt, PhD 2013 Methodological Innovation Award: Anthony Greenwald, PhD 2014 SAGE Young Scholar Awards: Paul Eastwick, PhD, Jochen Gebauer, PhD, Edward Lemay, PhD, Kristina Olson, PhD, and Tessa West, PhD 2013 SPSP Awards for Distinguished Service to the Society: Wendi Gardner, PhD, George (Al) Goethals, PhD 2013 SPSP Awards for Service on Behalf of Personality and Social Psychology: Kay Deaux, PhD, and Hazel Markus, PhD 2013 Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize: Kurt Gray, PhD, Liane Young, PhD, and Adam Waytz, PhD
Div. 10 (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts) Arnheim Award: Tom Ward, PhD Berlyne Award: Zorana Ivcevic, PhD, and Pablo Tinio, PhD Barron Award: Ben Wigert Div. 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology) Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology: Anke Ehlers, PhD Florence Halpern Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Clinical Psychology: Barry A. Hong, PhD Stanley Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology: Hector F. Myers, PhD Toy Caldwell-Colbert Award for Distinguished Educator in Clinical Psychology: Richard G. Heimberg, PhD David Shakow Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology: Randy P. Auerbach, PhD Theodore Blau Early Career Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Clinical Psychology: Bunmi O. Olatunji, PhD Samuel M. Turner Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology: Alinne Z. Barrera, PhD Distinguished Student Research in Clinical Psychology Award: Jonathan P. Stange Distinguished Student Practice in Clinical Psychology Award: Priscilla Lui
The Tidal Basin.
Distinguished Student Service in Clinical Psychology Award: Casey Calhoun Div. 13 (Society of Consulting Psychology) RHR International Award for Excellence in Consultation: David Peterson, PhD Society of Consulting Psychology Exemplary Impact Commendation: Rodney L. Lowman, PhD Society of Consulting Psychology Service Award: Amy Nieberding Owen, PhD Leadership Worth Following Award for Excellence in Developing Consulting Psychologists: John Patrick Fennig, PhD Div. 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award — Science: Brent Scott, PhD Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award — Practice: Tracy M. Kantrowitz, PhD Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award — Practice: Rich Cober, PhD Distinguished Teaching Contributions Award: Ann Marie Ryan, PhD Distinguished Service Contributions Award: Kurt Kraiger, PhD Distinguished Service Contributions Award: John C. Scott, PhD Distinguished Professional Contributions Award: Jack W. Wiley, PhD
Div. 15 (Educational) Paul R. Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award: Kate Niehaus, PhD Richard E. Snow Award for Early Contributions: Kou Murayama, PhD E.L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award: Sandra Graham, PhD Div. 16 (School) Outstanding Dissertation Award: Sarah A. Fefer, PhD Jack Bardon Distinguished Service Award: Karen Stoiber, PhD
Lightner Witmer Award: Amy M. Briesch, PhD, Honorable Mention: Matthew Reynolds, PhD Senior Scientist Award: Robert C. Pianta, PhD Div. 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) Leona Tyler Award: Robert Lent, PhD Fritz and Linn Kuder Early Career Scientist/Practitioner Award: Meghan Davidson, PhD Barbara A. Kirk Award: Brandon Velez Donald E. Super Fellowship: Jillian Wasson Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Achievement in Counseling Health Psychology: Donald Nicholas, PhD Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award in Counseling Health Psychology: Mary Heppner, PhD John D. Black Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Practice of Counseling Psychology: Amanda Baden, PhD John Holland Award for Outstanding Achievement in Career or Personality Research: Lisa Flores, PhD Div. 18 (Psychologists in Public Service) Outstanding Student Award: Samantha Sterling Yard Early Career Achievement Award: Erica L. Fitzgerald, PhD Michael S. Neale Award: Mary Jansen, PhD Distinguished Career Award: Mary Schohn, PhD Harold Hildreth Award: Joel A. Dvoskin, PhD Peter J.N. Linnerooth National Service Award: Tim Hoyt, PhD
OceanFishing/Thinkstock
Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award: Lawrence R. James, PhD S. Rains Wallace Dissertation Award: Allison S. Gabriel and Crystal I. C. Farh Raymond A. Katzell Award in I-O Psychology: Benjamin Dattner, PhD John C. Flanagan Award and Best International Paper Award: Jack W. Kostal and Brenton M. Wiernik Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance: Bart Wille, PhD, Filip De Fruyt, PhD, and Barbara De Clercq, PhD William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award: Michele J. Gelfand, PhD, Lisa M. Leslie, PhD, Kirsten Keller, PhD, and Carsten de Dreu, PhD Best Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) Research Award: Frank Golom
Div. 19 (Society for Military Psychology) Gersoni Award for Excellence in Psychology Research, Service, or Product Development by an Individual or Group: Armando Estrada, PhD Flanagan Award for Lifetime Achievement Over a Career in Military Psychology: Paul Bliese, PhD Yerkes Award for Outstanding Contributions to Military Psychology by a Non-Psychologist: Lt. Gen. Patricia D. Horoho, PhD Melton Early Achievement Award: Kathryn Lindsey, PhD Nichols Award for Excellence by a Uniformed Clinical Psychologist for Military Members and Their Families: Cpt. Scott Edwards, PhD Uhlaner Award for Outstanding Contributions in Research on Military Selection and Recruitment: Air Force Office of Special Investigations Behavioral Science Team — Linda Estes, PhD, Maj. Jeane Lambrecht, PhD, Lt. Col. Deborah Sirratt, PhD, Larry Lewis, PhD, Ashleigh Diserio, Ernesto Munoz, and David Ray, PhD
M. Powell Lawton Distinguished Contribution Award for Applied Gerontology: Robin Lea West, PhD Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award: Jutta Heckhausen, PhD
Div. 20 (Adult Development and Aging) Walter G. McMillen Memorial Award for Parkinson’s Disease Research: Andrea M. Weinstein Travel Award to Present Completed Research at APA Convention: Carla Strickland-Hughes Springer Publishing Early Career Achievement Award in Research on Adult Development and Aging: Walter R. Boot, PhD Mentorship Award in Adult Development and Aging: Lisa Hollis-Sawyer, PhD
Div. 22 (Rehabilitation) Lifetime Achievement: Mary Hibbard, PhD Roger G. Barker Distinguished Research Contribution Award: Charles Bombardier, PhD Rosenthal Early Career Research: Noelle Carlozzi, PhD Early Career Practice Award: Maggi Budd, PhD Mentoring Award: Stephen Wegener, PhD
amedved/Thinkstock
Div. 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology) Franklin V. Taylor Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Applied Experimental/Engineering Psychology: Patricia DeLucia, PhD Earl Alluisi Award for Early Career Achievement: Jeanine Stefanucci, PhD George E. Briggs Dissertation Award: Christian Janssen Raymond S. Nickerson Award for Best 2013 Paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied: Boris Maciejovsky, PhD, and David Budescu, PhD, for “Verbal and Numerical Consumer Recommendations: Switching Between Recommendation Formats Leads to Preference Inconsistencies.”
The Jefferson Memorial.
BEST SELLERS from the American Psychological Association
Assessing Bilingual Children in Context
APA Handbook of Multicultural Psychology
Medical Family Therapy and Integrated Care
An Integrated Approach Edited by Amanda B. Clinton 2014. 281 pages. Hardcover. Series: Division 16: School Psychology List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1565-2 | Item # 4317323
Volume 1: Theory and Research Volume 2: Applications and Training Editor-in-Chief Frederick T. L. Leong 2014. 1,314 pages. Hardcover. List: $395.00 | APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00 ISBN 978-1-4338-1255-2 | Item # 4311511
SECOND EDITION
Universal Screening in Educational Settings
APA Dictionary of Statistics and Research Methods
The Marriage Checkup Practitioner’s Guide
Evidence-Based Decision Making for Schools Edited by Ryan J. Kettler, Todd A. Glover, Craig A. Albers, Kelly A. Feeney-Kettler 2014. 328 pages. Hardcover. Series: Division 16: School Psychology List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1550-8 | Item # 4317318
Educational Evaluations of Children With Special Needs Clinical and Forensic Considerations David Breiger, Kristen Bishop, and G. Andrew H. Benjamin 2014. 152 pages. Hardcover. List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1575-1 | Item # 4317326
Autism Spectrum Disorder A Clinical Guide for General Practitioners V. Mark Durand 2014. 216 pages. Hardcover. List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1569-0 | Item # 4317325
The Stigma of Disease and Disability Understanding Causes and Overcoming Injustices Edited by Patrick W. Corrigan 2014. 312 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1583-6 | Item # 4318124
Attachment-Based Family Therapy for Depressed Adolescents
Guy S. Diamond, Gary M. Diamond, and Suzanne A. Levy 2014. 280 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1567-6 | Item # 4317324
Mechanisms of Social Connection From Brain to Group Edited by Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver 2014. 416 pages. Hardcover. List: $79.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1415-0 | Item # 4318118
Varieties of Anomalous Experience Examining the Scientific Evidence SECOND EDITION
Edited by Etzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley Krippner 2014. 464 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1529-4 | Item # 4316157
AD2338
Editor-in-Chief Sheldon Zedeck 2014. 452 pages. Hardcover. List: $39.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $29.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1533-1 | Item # 4311019
APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology Volume 1: Person-Based Approaches Volume 2: Contextual Approaches Editors-in-Chief Deborah L. Tolman and Lisa M. Diamond 2014. 1,400 pages. Hardcover. List: $395.00 | APA Member/Affiliate: $195.00 ISBN 978-1-4338-1369-6 | Item # 4311512
Psychotherapy Theories and Techniques
Susan H. McDaniel, William J. Doherty, and Jeri Hepworth 2014. 368 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1518-8 | Item # 4317314
Promoting Lifelong Relationship Health James V. Cordova 2014. 264 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1552-2 | Item # 4317319 Available on Amazon Kindle®
The Nature of Work Advances in Psychological Theory, Methods, and Practice Edited by J. Kevin Ford, John R. Hollenbeck, and Ann Marie Ryan 2014. 328 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1537-9 | Item # 4318119
Couple and Family Therapy
A Reader Edited by Gary R. VandenBos, Edward Meidenbauer, and Julia Frank-McNeil 2014. 368 pages. Paperback. List: $34.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $29.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1619-2 | Item # 4317329
An Integrative Map of the Territory Jay L. Lebow 2014. 312 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1362-7 | Item # 4317313
Exploring Three Approaches to Psychotherapy
A Foundation for Evidence-Based Practice in Applied Psychology Edited by Lisa M. Hagermoser Sanetti and Thomas R. Kratochwill 2014. 320 pages. Hardcover. Series: Division 16: School Psychology List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1581-2 | Item # 4317327
Leslie S. Greenberg, Nancy McWilliams, Amy Wenzel 2014. 280 pages. Hardcover. List: $39.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $34.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1521-8 | Item # 4317316 Paperback: List: $29.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $24.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1520-1 | Item # 4317315
Exploring Sport and Exercise Psychology THIRD EDITION
Edited by Judy L. Van Raalte and Britton W. Brewer 2014. 672 pages. Paperback. List: $49.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $39.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1357-3 | Item # 4317312
The Power of Metaphor Examining Its Influence on Social Life Edited by Mark J. Landau, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier 2014. 304 pages. Hardcover. List: $79.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1579-9 | Item # 4318123
Culture Reexamined Broadening Our Understanding of Social and Evolutionary Influences Edited by Adam B. Cohen 2014. 256 pages. Hardcover. List: $79.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1587-4 | Item # 4316159
Treatment Integrity
Pretend Play in Childhood Foundation of Adult Creativity Sandra W. Russ 2014. 240 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1561-4 | Item # 4318122
Trauma and Substance Abuse Causes, Consequences, and Treatment of Comorbid Disorders SECOND EDITION
Edited by Paige Ouimette and Jennifer P. Read 2014. 336 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1523-2 | Item # 4317317
Geographical Psychology Exploring the Interaction of Environment and Behavior Edited by Peter J. Rentfrow 2014. 336 pages. Hardcover. List: $69.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1539-3 | Item # 4316158
To Order: 800-374-2721 • www.apa.org/pubs/books
AD2014
Div. 23 (Society for Consumer Psychology) 2014 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution in Consumer Psychology: Jennifer L. Aaker, PhD 2013 C. W. Park Young Contributor to the Journal of Consumer Psychology Award: Jesse R. Catlin, PhD, and Yiton Wang, PhD, for “Recycling Gone Bad: When the Option to Recycle Increases Resource Consumption.” 2013 Dissertation Proposal Competition Winner: Stephanie M. Tully 2014 C. W. Park Outstanding Contribution to the Journal of Consumer Psychology Award: Maria Galli, PhD, and Gerald J. Gorn, PhD, for “Unconscious Transfer of Meaning to Brands.” Div. 24 (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) Award for Distinguished Theoretical and Philosophical Contribution to Psychology: Phillip Cushman, PhD Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology: Josh Clegg, PhD Distinguished Student Service Award: Elisabeth McClure Distinguished Service Award: Lisa Osbeck, PhD Theodore Sarbin Award: Rom Harre, BPhil, DLitt Div. 25 (Behavior Analysis) ABA International Don Hake Translational Research Award: Arthur W. Staats, PhD Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education Award: Marc N. Branch, PhD B.F. Skinner Foundation Young Researcher Awards: Brian D. Kangas, PhD (Basic Research Award), and Anthony DeFulio, PhD (Applied Research Award) Nathan H. Azrin Outstanding Applied Research Award: Jon S. Bailey, PhD Med Associates Basic Research Award: Thomas R. Zentall, PhD Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Dissertation Awards: Catarina Castro, PhD (Basic Dissertation Award), and Stephen F. Walker, PhD (Applied Dissertation Award) Div. 26 (Society for the History of Psychology) Early Career Awards: Alexandra Hui, PhD, and Laura Stark, PhD Lifetime Achievement Awards: Leila Zenderland, PhD, and Henry Minton, PhD Div. 27 (Society for Community Research and Action) Distinguished Contributions to Theory and Research in Community Psychology: Anne Brodsky, PhD Distinguished Contribution to Practice in Community Psychology: Sam Tsemburis, PhD Early Career Award: Manuel Reimer, PhD Ethnic Minority Mentorship Award: Bernadette Sánchez, PhD Best Dissertation on a Topic Relevant to Community Psychology: Susan Eckerle Curwood, PhD 80
Emory L. Cowen Dissertation Award for the Promotion of Wellness: Lindsay Satterwhite Mayberry, PhD Div. 28 (Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse) Med Associates Brady Schuster Award: Alice Young, PhD Young Psychopharmacologist Award: Cassandra Gipson, PhD Outstanding Dissertation Award: Rebecca Spirada Div. 29 (Psychotherapy) Distinguished Psychologist of the Year: Lorna Smith Benjamin, PhD Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring: Mark Hilsenroth, PhD APF/Div. 29 Early Career Award: Zac Imel, PhD Donald K. Freedheim Student Development Award: Jenny H. Lotterman for “Erotic Feelings Toward the Therapist: A Relational Perspective” Jeffrey E. Barnett Psychotherapy Research Paper Award: Harold Chui for “In the Mood? Therapist Affect and Psychotherapy Process” Mathilda B. Canter Education and Training Award: Ashlee J. Warnecke for “Intercorrelations Between Individual Personality Factors and Anxiety” Diversity Student Paper Award: Jackson J. Taylor for “From a Linear Match Equation to the Intersubjective Sphere: Negotiating Identities of the Sexual Kind” Div. 30 (Society of Psychological Hypnosis) Distinguished Contributions to Professional Hypnosis Award: Joseph P. Green, PhD Distinguished Contributions to Scientific Hypnosis Award: Amanda Barnier, PhD Early Career Award: Rochelle Cox, PhD Div. 31 (State, Provincial and Territorial Psychological Association Affairs) Karl F. Heiser APA Presidential Award for Advocacy: Trisha Stark, PhD Outstanding Psychologist Award: Beth Rom-Rymer, PhD Div. 32 (Society for Humanistic Psychology) Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Humanistic Psychology: E. Mark Stern, EdD Charlotte and Karl Bühler Award: Department of Psychology, University of Dallas and Scott D. Churchill, PhD Carl Rogers Award: David J. Cain, PhD Abraham Maslow Award: Louise (Kuen-wei Lu) Sundararajan, PhD, EdD Rollo May Award: Frederick J. Wertz, PhD Carmi Harari Mid-Career Award: Mick Cooper, DPhil Sidney M. Jourard Student Award Symposium: Monica Lawson, Patricia Perryman and Linda D. Theis, PhD
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
\
Your Job Search s Starts Here d n E • In-depth career services, professional development information, interview and job searching tips • Jobs at all levels: fellowships, internships, postdoctoral, early career and experienced • Revamped user interface for improved navigation and search—New • Responsive design for mobile devices—New
What kinds of things can I do using PsycCareers? • Apply for position openings • Submit your resume • Find the latest psychology career advice
How do I get started? Visit www.PsycCareers.com! You can browse open listings, upload your resume, and/or create a job agent. Questions? Contact: Amelia Dodson at 202-336-5564 or [email protected].
Mike Arons and E. Mark Stern Award for Outstanding Lifetime Service to the Society for Humanistic Psychology: Arthur W. Lyons, DA Div. 33 (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities) Edgar A. Doll Award: Wayne Silverman, PhD Sara S. Sparrow Early Career Research Award: James McPartland, PhD Student Research Awards: Karim Ibrahim and Meredith Robinson Div. 34 (Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology) Proshansky-Newman Award: Daniel Stokols, PhD Graduate Research Award: Sander Van Der Linden Div. 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) Carolyn Payton Early Career Award: Earlise Ward, PhD Student Scholar Hispanic Woman/Latina Award: Karina Cervantez Laura Brown Distinguished Contributions Award: Anne Peplau, PhD Pioneer Awards: Reiko Homma-True, PhD, and Christine J. Yeh, PhD Bonnie R. Strickland and Jessica Henderson Daniel Award for Distinguished Mentoring: Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, PhD Carolyn Wood Sherif Award: Laurie A. Rudman, PhD Geis Memorial Award for Dissertation Research: Tara Dennehy; Honorable Mention: Amy C. Moors Georgia Babladelis Psychology of Women Quarterly Best Paper Award: Caroline C. Fitz, PhD, and Alyssa N. Zucker, PhD Sue Rosenberg Zalk Award for Distinguished Service: Asuncion M. Austria, PhD Heritage Award: Fran Trotman, PhD SWP/AWP Annual Prize for Psychological Research on Women and Gender: Haley Miles-McLean; Honorable Mention: Margo A. Gregor Hyde Graduate Student Research Grant Award: Spring 2014, Stephanie M. Anderson; Honorable mentions: Kara Anne Rodenhizer-Stämpfli and Sara E. Burke; Fall 2013: Amy W.Y. Yeung and Harmony A. Reppond Psychotherapy With Women: Lauren Mizock, PhD, and Zlatka Russinova, PhD Div. 36 (Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality) William James Award: Crystal Park, PhD William C. Bier Award: Tanya Luhrman, PhD Margaret Gorman Early Career Award: Uffe Schjoedt, PhD Virginia Sexton Mentoring Award: Wade Rowatt, PhD Distinguished Service Award: Gina Brelsford, PhD 82
Div. 37 (Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice) Nicholas Hobbs Award: Michael C. Roberts, PhD Distinguished Contribution to Child Advocacy: Desmond Runyan, MD, DrPH Lifetime Advocacy Award: Representative George Miller Dianne J. Willis Early Career Award: Paula J. Fite, PhD Dissertation Award: Jonathan Martinez, PhD Section on Child Maltreatment Early Career Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research: Kristin Valentino, PhD Section on Child Maltreatment Dissertation Grant Award: Helen Masland Milojevich Div. 38 (Health) Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology by a Senior Professional: Perry N. Halkitis, PhD, and Dawn K. Wilson, PhD Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology by an Early Career Professional: Sarah D. Pressman, PhD Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Health Psychology: Barbara Cubic, PhD Nathan W. Perry Jr. Career Service to Health Psychology Award: Ronald H. Rozensky, PhD Graduate Student Research Awards: Kimberly S. Bowen, Jessica Chiang, Jennifer A. Pellowski, Jiabin Shen, and Michelle J. Zaso Div. 39 (Psychoanalysis) Scholarship and Research Award: William Gottdiener, PhD Diversity Award: Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, PhD Leadership Award: Richard Ruth, PhD Div. 40 (Society for Clinical Neuropsychology) Early Career Pilot Study Awards: April Thames, PhD, for “The Effects of Marijuana Use and HIV Status on Neurological Integrity and Cognitive Functioning” (Mentor: Susan Bookheimer, PhD), and Sarah Szymkowicz for “Age-Related Mechanisms of Emotion Anticipation and Perception” (Mentor: Vonetta Dotson, PhD) Dissertation Award: Kelsey Thomas for “Understanding Errors in Complex Everyday Cognitive Tasks in Older Adults” Thesis Award: Jessica Dougan for “Detecting Simulated Malingering on Baseline Testing Using the ImPACT, TOMM, and Emotional Stroop Paradigm” Div. 41 (American Psychology-Law Society) Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring in the Field of Psychology and Law: Bradley D. McAuliff, PhD Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law: Saul Kassin, PhD Saleem Shah Award for Early Career Excellence in Psychology and Law: Lindsay Malloy, PhD
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
American Academy of Forensic Psychology Distinguished Contributions to Forensic Psychology Award: Matt C. Zaitchik, PhD
Distinguished Early Career Scientific Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology: Pamela Rutledge, PhD Student Dissertation Award: Allison Otto, PsyD
Div. 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice) Distinguished Psychologist of the Year: Helen Coons, PhD Distinguished Public Service: Andrew Benjamin, PhD Mentoring Award: Armand Cerbone, PhD
Div. 47 (Exercise and Sport Psychology) Early Career Practitioner Award: Amanda Visek, PhD Distinguished Contribution to Exercise and Sport Psychology in the Public Interest: Mary Wilfert Steven R. Heyman Memorial Lecture: Emily Roper, PhD Dissertation Award: Kaitlynn Sedabres, PhD
Div. 43 (Society for Family Psychology) Family Psychologist of the Year: Steven R. H. Beach, PhD Distinguished Contribution to Family Psychology Award: John Caffaro, PhD Distinguished Service Contribution: Marianne Celano, PhD Carol Atteneave Award for Diversity: Melanie DomenechRodríguez, PhD Florence Kaslow Distinguished Contribution to International Family Psychology Award: George Hong, PhD Div. 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues) Bisexual Foundation Scholarship Award: James E. Arnett Malyon-Smith Scholarship Award: Stephanie Anderson Distinguished Book Award: Perry N. Halkitis, PhD, for “The AIDS Generation” Distinguished Contribution to Education and Training: Jillian C. Shipherd, PhD, and Michael R. Kauth, PhD Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Minority Issues: Laura M. Bogart, PhD Distinguished Scientific Contribution: Abbie E. Goldberg, PhD Distinguished Student Contribution: Julie M. Austen, PhD
Div. 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence) Ralph K. White Lifetime Achievement Award: Kathie Malley-Morrison, EdD Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award: Daniel Bar-Tal, PhD Outstanding Service Award: Susan Opotow, PhD Ignacio Martín-Baró Lifetime Peace Practitioner Award: Luisa Saffiotti, PhD
The U.S. Capitol.
Div. 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race) Toy Caldwell-Colbert Student Contributions to Service Award: Riana Anderson Asuncion Miteria Austria and John Robinson Distinguished Mentoring Award: Jessica Daniel, PhD Charles and Shirley Thomas Award: Nicole Coleman, PhD Distinguished Career Contribution to Research Award: Nolan Zane, PhD, and Laurence Armand French, PhD Emerging Professional — Contributions to Service Award: Yuying Tsong, PhD Emerging Professional — Contributions to Research Award: Germine Awad, PhD
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y
f11photo/Thinkstock
Div. 46 (Society for Media Psychology and Technology) Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology: Alan Entin, PhD, and Brad Bushman, PhD Distinguished Professional Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology: Pauline Wallin, PhD
83
Div. 49 (Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy) Arthur Teicher Group Psychologist of the Year: Les R. Greene, PhD President’s Award for Distinguished Service: Rebecca McNair-Semands, PhD Dissertation Award: Catherine Shea, PhD
Div. 53 (Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology) Distinguished Career Award: Annette M. La Greca, PhD
Div. 50 (Society of Addiction Psychology) Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions: Adam M. Leventhal, PhD Distinguished Scientific Contributions to the Application of Psychology: Mark B. Sobell, PhD Outstanding Contributions to Advancing the Understanding of Addictions: Anne M. Fletcher Presidential Citation for Distinguished Service to SoAP: Marsha E. Bates, PhD Div. 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity) Researchers of the Year: Joseph Vandello, PhD, and Jennifer Bosson, PhD Professional of the Year: Wizdom Powell, PhD Practitioner of the Year: John Robertson, PhD Loren Frankel Dissertation of the Year: Caitlin Moore Advocate for Boys Award: Hector Torres, PsyD, Ramel Smith, PhD, and William Seymour, PhD Student of the Year: David Scheinfeld Div. 52 (International) Outstanding International Psychologist Award (non-U.S. based): Abel-Sattar Ibrahim, PhD, (Cairo, Egypt) and Peter Smith, PhD, (Sussex, England) Outstanding International Psychologist Award (U.S. based): Shane Jimerson, PhD, and Walt Lonner, PhD Anastasi International Psychology Award: Elizabeth Dykhouse Early Career Outstanding Psychologist Award (U.S. based): Vaishali Raval, PhD Early Career Outstanding Psychologist Award (non-U.S. based): Dana Basnight-Brown, PhD (Nairobi, Kenya) Early Career Psychologist Travel Award: Boniface Harerimana (Rwanda, Africa) Florence L. Denmark and Mary E. Reuder Award for Outstanding International Contributions to the Psychology of Women and Gender: Briton Lykes, PhD Henry P. David International Mentor Awards: John Romano, PhD, and Diana Zelman, PhD International Student Research Awards: Spencer Evans, Maha Y. See, PsyD, Sheena Jeswani, and Laura Taylor, PhD Student Travel Grants: Maria Espinola and Lu Tian Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award: D.W. Schwalb, PhD, B.W. Schwalb, PhD, and M.E. Lamb, PhD, for “Fathers in Cultural Context.” 84
Div. 54 (Society of Pediatric Psychology) Wright Ross Salk Award for Distinguished Service: Sharon Berry, PhD Award for Outstanding Mentorship: Edward R. Christophersen, PhD Dennis Drotar Distinguished Research Award: Tonya M. Palermo, PhD Carolyn S. Schroeder Award for Outstanding Clinical Practice: Bryan D. Carter, PhD Donald K. Routh Early Career Award: Amy Lewandowski Holley, PhD Marion and Donald Routh Student Research Grant: Bridget Armstrong Student Research Award: Katelynn Boerner Lizette Peterson-Homer Injury Prevention Grant: Catherine Glenn, PhD Diversity Research Grant: Erin M. Rodriguez, PhD C. Eugene Walker Education Award: Meghan McGrady Mary Jo Kupst Trainee Grant for Research in Resilience: Laura Cousins Div. 55 (American Society for the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy) Distinguished Service at the State Level: Ray Folen, PhD Distinguished Service at the National Level: Beth Rom-Rymer, PhD Major Caraveo National Service Award: Johna Hartnell, PhD Patrick H. DeLeon Prize: Andrew Davis, PhD Div. 56 (Trauma) Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Trauma Psychology: Stevan Hobfoll, PhD Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Trauma Psychology: Fran H. Norris, PhD Outstanding Service to the Field of Trauma Psychology: Steven N. Gold, PhD Outstanding Early Career Achievement in Trauma Psychology: Erika Wolf, PhD Outstanding Early Career Award for Ethnic Minority Psychologists in Trauma Psychology: Betty Lai, PhD Outstanding Dissertation in the Field of Trauma Psychology: Darryl Etter, PhD Outstanding Media Contribution to the Field of Trauma Psychology: Julia Hoffman, PhD n
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
SPOTLIGHT
ON APA EARLY CAREER MEMBERS 3 Ways to Engage and Make a Difference in 2014
1
Make sure you renew your membership for uninterrupted benefits and services.
PLUG-IN AND 2 WEIGH-IN IN 2014
Take a minute to give your input on key membership issues by completing our 3-question Early Career Member Survey.
3 EACH-ONENOMINATE-ONE IN 2014
Help us reach our goal to gain 2,014 new early career members in 2014. For each person you nominate, both you and your nominee will be entered in a drawing to win a FREE* trip to the
2015 APA Annual Convention in Toronto, Canada. *Entries will be accepted from January 1, 2014, through December 31, 2014. For complete drawing rules, go to www.apa.org/membership/discounts.aspx.
Renew, Weigh-In and Nominate today!
To get started, go to www.EarlyCareerAPA.org, or simply scan the code. “The vast array of resources available to me as a member of the APA are invaluable to my effort to stay current with the best practices in applied psychology, cutting-edge research findings and information that helps me to thrive as an early career professional.”
Michael Sulkoushi, PhD Member Since 2006
Meet APA’s
2014 fellows One worked for a U.S. senator from Colorado, the other served a powerful Senate health committee. BY MIC AH HASKELL-HOEHL
A
PA’s 2014 congressional fellows have just finished their year: Irina Feygina, PhD, worked in the office of Sen. Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) and Joshua Wolff, PhD, served in the Majority Health Policy Office of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Before her APA fellowship, Feygina trained in social psychology at New York University and had just finished a postdoctoral research fellowship at Rutgers University’s Center for Green Building. On Capitol Hill, she worked on energy and environmental issues, including development and financing of clean energy and energy efficient technologies and programs, advanced biofuels, declining forest health and wildfires in the American West. Feygina enjoyed hearing the full spectrum of perspectives on the charged issue of energy. “It afforded me a view of how these many parts of the system interact, depend on each other, distribute power and contribute toward the challenges of maintaining a balanced and resilient system in both the short and long term,” she says. She says she was particularly struck by how often politics can stand in the way of good policy. Yet she also saw significant success, such as the creation of powerful conservation programs in the Farm Bill that will protect the Colorado River Basin and reduce wildfire risk in nearly 100 national parks. The skills she gained through her psychology training — such as active listening and the ability to embrace multiple 86
perspectives — were helpful while working in the legislative environment. “I have greatly enjoyed meeting with constituents and have repeatedly received appreciation for the depth and quality of our interactions,” she says. Now that her fellowship is complete, Feygina hopes to work in a government, nonprofit or industry position that will blend her research on behavior, critical thinking on social issues and focus on energy and the environment. “My training, in particular my focus on the interaction between institutions, groups and individuals, has served me well,” she says. Wolff was the Jacquelin Goldman congressional fellow, a position funded by the American Psychological Foundation through a bequest by Jacquelin Goldman, PhD, to support psychologists with expertise in child development. He earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from Biola University and completed two years of postdoctoral fellowship work at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His work there focused on families and children diagnosed with chronic and life-threatening medical conditions. His most recent research focuses on religiosity, health risk behaviors and sexual minority youth. On Capitol Hill, Wolff worked on a range of issues, including mental health parity, implementation of the Affordable Care Act and funding for more traumatic brain injury research. Day to day, this meant meeting with lobbyists and constituents, researching continues on page 88
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Dr. Irina Feygina and Dr. Joshua Wolff say the APA Congressional Fellowship opened their eyes to new career possibilities.
APA’s Congressional Fellowship celebrates 40 successful years Since the program’s founding in 1974, 119 psychologists have worked on both sides of the aisle, in both chambers of Congress and in 77 different Capitol Hill offices as APA congressional fellows. These psychologists have a dual role: They learn about policymaking and educate congressional staff and members about psychology’s contribution to policy. “The APA Congressional Fellowship is an important investment in psychology that ensures that psychologists understand government and policymaking,“ says program director and former fellow Judith Glassgold, PsyD. “Fellows gain critical knowledge about a fundamental force in psychology and society — government — and then use this knowledge to advance the field.” APA’s congressional fellows have contributed to several significant policy and legislative successes. They include: • Drafting major legislation to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act,
which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1997. The law provides core protections for young people in juvenile justice systems. • Overseeing the 1990 passage of the Patient Self-Determination Act, which required many health-care entities to provide adult patients with information on advance health-care directives. • Participating in passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. • Leading efforts to write the teacher training title of the successful 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which guides the federal role in postsecondary education. APA fellows have gone on to top positions at the Edward Zigler Center at Yale University, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the offices of Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.). — MICAH HASKELL-HOEHL
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 8 7
continued from page 86 the effects of policies, attending legislative negotiations, helping to organize congressional hearings, and many other activities. He also worked with the office on confirmation hearings for President Obama’s nominations for the U.S. surgeon general and the secretary of health and human services. His psychological training prepared him well for Capitol Hill. Wolff ’s research and statistics experience allowed him “to understand the strengths and weaknesses of studies in the stream of information from various groups and media.” His background also helped him advocate within his office for mental health issues within ongoing health-care conversations and in policy recommendations. Before his fellowship, Wolff viewed Congress as very partisan and he expected little interaction with staff from across the aisle. But he was surprised by the collegial relationships. “[I learned about] negotiation, appropriate compromise and improving communication with persons who may have differing opinions,” he says. After the fellowship, Wolff accepted a position as assistant professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology’s Chicago Campus, where he continues to pursue work that combines his clinical, research and public policy training. “I now realize how important it is for mental health professionals to make their voices heard in the political process,” Wolff says. n
Apply for an APA fellowship APA seeks applications for its Congressional Fellowship and Executive Branch Science Fellowship programs. Congressional fellows work as special legislative aides in congressional member or committee offices and engage in a range of policymaking activities on vital issues. Executive branch science fellows gain experience in science policy and research coordination and funding in a federal science agency. Both programs offer a yearlong stipend and funds to support relocation, travel and the purchase of health insurance. For more information, visit www.apa.org/ about/gr/fellows. Applications must be postmarked by Jan. 9.
Micah Haskell-Hoehl is a senior policy associate in APA’s Public Interest Government Relations Office and administrator of the Congressional Fellowship Program.
Revision arriving early 2015
Adaptive Behavior Assessment System™, Third Edition
20% OFF &
Only when you preorder direct from the publisher, WPS!
Use discount code MONITOR20 when ordering.
Key benefits Offers a complete picture of adaptive skill deficits across the life span (ages 0 to 89)
Integrates assessment, intervention planning, and progress monitoring
Assesses 11 essential skill areas within 3 major adaptive domains: Conceptual, Practical, and Social
Aligns with DSM-5, IDEA, and RTI criteria
800.648.8857 APA_Sept_Issue_Half_Page_Horiz_72214 V3.indd 1
Available in traditional print format and through the new WPS® Online Evaluation System www.wpspublish.com/ABAS3
Western Psychological Services 7/22/14 5:24 PM
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Renew your APA membership online in just 3 easy steps…
1 2 3
Go to http://my.apa.org Log in using your APA user ID and password Click on “Pay 2015 Dues” (Have your credit card or APA Bank of America card handy)
Stay Connected to Benefits and Services You Can Depend On The Monitor on Psychology (print and digital), and American Psychologist APA Access monthly electronic newsletter highlighting the latest psychology and APA news Reduced subscription rates (up to 60%) on your choice of nearly 80 journals (print and digital) Discounts on hundreds of discipline-specific books, professional videos, APA PsycNET® subscriptions and other electronic resources
Scan here to access My.APA.org with your mobile device
Division SPOTLIGHT
Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology) will host its 13th Annual Conference on Teaching on Oct. 10–11 in Atlanta. Targeted to psychology teachers at high schools, twoyear and four-year colleges and universities, the conference will feature tracks that address each of APA’s new learning goals for the undergraduate psychology major: • Knowledge base in psychology. • Scientific inquiry and critical thinking. • Ethical and social responsibility in today’s diverse world. • Communication. • Professional development. For more information, visit the conference website at: http://teachpsych.org/conferences/ bp/index.php
Monkey Business Images/Thinkstock
Examine APA’s undergrad learning goals in depth
Explore APA’s new learning goals for undergraduate psychology majors at Div. 2’s annual conference, Oct. 10–11 in Atlanta.
Register for Div. 14 conference Div. 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) is hosting its 10th annual Leading Edge Consortium “Succession Strategies: Building Your Leadership Bench” on Oct. 17– 18 in Chicago. Sessions will focus on effective succession management, including how to align succession management with an organization’s goals and develop strong and diverse leadership talent. Register at www.siop.org/lec. Blog for Div. 15 Div. 15 (Educational) invites all of its members to submit content for its blog. Up to two submissions per author are allowed each year. Posts should be 400 to 1,000 words in length and toned for a general readership. Send a sample post to Wade George at [email protected]. Learn about the latest Div. 27 projects Div. 27 (Society for Community Research and Action) and Portland State University are hosting the annual Northwest Ecological Community Psychology Conference on Oct. 17 in 90
Portland, Oregon. The conference theme is “Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Community Research and Action.” Presentations will focus on such topics as community action projects, cuttingedge social research, and diversity and social justice. Register by Sept. 26 for a discount. To register, go to bit.ly/NWECO. For questions and more information, email NWEConference@ gmail.com. Nominate for a Div. 52 book award Div. 52 (International) welcomes applications for the Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award, which honors a copyright 2014 nonfiction book that highlights psychology as a global discipline and profession. Submissions should include a two-page letter in English that describes the book’s contribution to global psychology and three copies of the book for reviewers. Div. 52 will announce the winner this spring. The winner receives a stipend toward attending APA’s Annual Convention in Toronto, Aug. 6–9, to present an invited address. Nominations are due Oct. 1. Send submissions to Renée Goodstein, PhD, at [email protected]. n
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Foundation AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Leading by example APA CEO Norman B. Anderson and his wife, P. Elizabeth Anderson, pledge $100,000 to APF’s Visionary Fund. BY JAMIE CHAMBERLIN Monitor staff
Public Health. P. Elizabeth Anderson is a health journalist and author s APA’s chief executive of the 2008 book “The officer, Norman B. Powerful Bond between Anderson, PhD, lives and People and Pets: Our breathes psychology more Boundless Connection to than most, operating 24/7 on Companion Animals.” his infectious enthusiasm for The Andersons plan how psychology is making to continue giving back the world a better place. to psychology however So when he and his wife they can. “For many wanted to make a charitable psychologists, coming gift, they naturally chose into this field has had psychology’s philanthropic a significant positive arm, the American influence on their lives,” Psychological Foundation. Norman Anderson says. “APF is a wonderful “I know that has been The Andersons’ gift provides a significant boost to APF’s Campaign organization that does true for me, and it is a to Transform the Future, which as of July had raised $4.4 million. great work on behalf of our privilege to be able to give field,” Anderson says. This grants for research, and having APF something back.” year, the couple made a commitment grants available to young scientists can Since federal funding is scarce, 90 of $100,000 to APF’s Visionary Fund, be a critical boost to their careers and percent of APF’s applicants go unfunded. which supports innovative research increase their chances of funding from But gifts like this one can make a and intervention work in four areas: the National Science Foundation or the huge difference, says APF Executive understanding the connection between National Institutes of Health.” Vice President and Executive Director behavior and health; reducing stigma and The Andersons’ gift provides Elisabeth R. Straus. prejudice; understanding and preventing a significant boost to APF’s larger “Their gift will help launch careers violence; and addressing psychological Campaign to Transform the Future, the and enable psychology to address some needs in the aftermath of a disaster. foundation’s effort to raise $6.5 million of society’s thorniest problems,” Straus The fund’s ability to seed innovation by 2016. As of July, the campaign had says. “We are truly grateful.” n and jump-start research careers was raised $4.4 million. particularly appealing, Anderson says. Before becoming APA’s CEO in 2003, For information on applying for a “We really have appreciated the Anderson was the founding director of Visionary Grant of up to $20,000, visit diversity of topics the foundation has NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social www.apa.org/apf/funding/visionary.aspx. supported, especially grants to new Sciences Research and held faculty For more information on donating to up-and-coming scientists,” he says. positions at Duke University Medical APF, go to www.apa.org/apf/giving/ “It’s very difficult now to get federal School and Harvard University School of index.aspx.
A
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 9 1
Foundation AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Grants and opportunities Two types of APF grants enable students to present at APA’s convention The foundation offers two types of scholarships that helped to pay for students to travel to last month’s APA Annual Convention in Washington, D.C. Thanks to the APF Ungerleider/ Zimbardo Travel Scholarships, eight psychology graduate students traveled to D.C. They are: • Adriene M. Beltz of the Pennsylvania State University, who presented her research on prenatal androgen influences on children’s samesex play. • Natania A. Crane of the University
of Illinois at Chicago, who presented findings that sex differences may alter neuropsychological functioning in cannabis users. • Ewa K. Czyz of the University of Michigan, who presented her prospective examination of a theoretical model of suicidal behavior among adolescents in a psychiatric unit. • Dylan G. Gee of the University of California, Los Angeles, who discussed her research on amygdala-prefrontal interactions in the development of psychopathology. • Ben D. Sawyer of the University of Central Florida, who presented his findings that over time, people who
APF thanks members who support the foundation on their dues statements Thanks to the hundreds of APA members who support APF through their dues statement check-off each year. By contributing to APF in this way, you are investing in the next generation of our field and increasing psychology’s ability to improve our world. Donors like you enabled APF to give away more than $800,000 in grants and scholarships in 2014. These gifts support early career psychologists like Rezarta Bilali, PhD, whose research aims to help groups with a history of violence, human rights violations or other injustices to accept responsibility for these acts and to learn how to prevent such situations from recurring. She is but one example of the transformative work made possible by APA member donations. Still, many worthy proposals go unfunded. Last year, APF had to turn away 90 percent of the proposals we received from the many graduate students and early career psychologists who applied. One of the simplest ways you can help us to ensure the best and brightest receive the support they need is by continuing to give through your APA dues statement. For those who have not given to APF before, consider including a gift to the foundation through your dues statement this year. With the check of a box, you can increase the body of knowledge, build psychology’s future and launch careers in our field. For more information about APF and how your gift will make an impact, visit www.apa.org/apf, or contact us at (202) 336-5843.
92
monitor government and military networks for signs of cyber intrusion become less vigilant in their work. • Katherine Stavropoulos of the University of California, San Diego, who presented her research on reward anticipation of social versus nonsocial stimuli in children with autism spectrum disorders. • Christa L. Taylor of the University at Albany, State University of New York, who presented a poster of the first stages of development of the Creative Trait Motivation scale, which assesses individual differences in motivation to engage in creative behavior in three domains (artistic, scientific and everyday). • Darya L. Zabelina of Northwestern University, who organized an APA symposium on the neuroscience of creativity. In addition, two students received grants from the Paul E. Henkin Travel Grant Program, which provides funding to student members of APA Div. 16 (School) to help offset registration, lodging and transportation costs of attending APA’s convention. The program aims to enrich the field of school psychology by supporting its promising younger members, as well as facilitating the growth of aspiring school psychology professionals through the opportunities at APA’s convention. This year’s recipients, who each received $1,000, are: • Kerri Nowell, a fourth-year school psychology doctoral student at the University of Houston. Her research and clinical interests focus broadly on individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). She is continues on page 94
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Honoring lifetime accomplishments APF presents its 2014 Gold Medal Awards for Life Achievement.
D
uring APA’s 2014 Annual Convention, APF honored the winners of its 2014 Gold Medals for Life Achievement. They are: Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology: Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., PhD Bouchard has forever changed the way people understand individual differences in human behavior. His signature work, Bouchard Jr. the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, demonstrated that genetic influence is pervasive, affecting virtually all measured traits. The study findings shaped the efforts of countless colleagues and graduate students, furthering and launching many careers and accomplishments. Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology: Gilbert O. Sanders, EdD Sanders has served as the point person for developing integrated programs of psychology and medicine in Alaska, California, Germany and Sanders Vietnam. His
leadership in psychotherapy and psychopharmacology earned him the rank of captain, the highest rank authorized for psychologists in the U.S. Public Health Service. His contributions to public health and the military have improved fitness for duty of government personnel, reduced costs and improved health care for the military and their families. Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology: Richard M. Lerner, PhD Lerner’s theoretical and empirical contributions have provided foundations for the fields of lifespan human development and applied Lerner developmental science, as well as adolescence and positive youth development. He has mentored scores of scholars who share his vision of how applying developmental science can promote health and positive development among the diverse youth of America and the world. Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest: Bonnie R. Strickland, PhD Strickland’s contributions in research, scholarship and teaching have had a profound effect on the impact of
psychology in the public interest. Her research across neglected groups, such as black children, social activists, and gays and lesbians, has Strickland legitimized the scientific and scholarly study of previously ignored areas. Her contributions have identified solutions for social problems and advanced social justice in relation to the provision of psychological science and services. Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award: Mary Kite, PhD Kite’s commitment to teaching is reflected in her contributions to the science of psychology, excellence in teaching and Kite exemplary service to the discipline. As a scholar, Kite has conducted groundbreaking work in gender-associated stereotyping that is internationally recognized. She has viewed her leadership roles as opportunities to advocate for the many students and colleagues she has mentored throughout her career. n
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 9 3
Foundation continues from page 92 particularly passionate about improving collaboration across professions to help ensure people with IDD and their families get effective interventions. She is also interested in how cultural factors influence understanding and treatment of those with autism spectrum disorders. • Stephanie Brunner, a second-year doctoral student in the school psychology program at the University of Minnesota. Brunner is interested in studying school readiness, particularly socialemotional development, among children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. For her thesis, which she presented at APA’s convention, Brunner examined how early learning experiences mediate the sociodemographic risk
factors for poor social-emotional outcomes at school entry. Serving others with a gift to APF As valedictorian of her high school class, Annette Urso Rickel, PhD, focused her graduation speech on promoting a life of service — a desire that first led her to psychology. After earning her PhD from the University of Michigan and completing Rickel her postdoc at Columbia University, Rickel became
Upcoming deadlines October Lizette Peterson Homer Memorial Research Grant: Oct. 1 APF/AAPA Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation Fellowship: Oct. 1 Scott and Paul Pearsall Scholarship: Oct. 1 November Roy Scrivner Memorial Grant: Nov. 1 Theodore Blau Early Career Award: Nov. 1 Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology: Nov. 1 Annette Urso Rickel Scholarship: Nov. 1 Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowships: Nov. 15 December Gold Medal Awards for Life Achievement: Dec. 1 Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award: Dec. 1 Pearson Early Career Grant: Dec. 31 For more information about APF’s funding programs, visit www. apa.org/apf or contact APF Program Officer Samantha Edington at [email protected] or (202) 336-5984.
94
a university professor, researching and conducting preventive clinical interventions with high-risk populations. Her career then expanded into the realm of public policy. She served as a senior congressional fellow and member of the public policy staff of U.S. Sen. Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Michigan), was appointed to President Clinton’s Task Force for National Health Care Reform, and worked as education programs officer for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Through all her endeavors, Rickel has valued engagement in charitable work. She established her own foundation to award scholarships to students majoring in math and science, and contributes to numerous organizations, including APF. Her latest gift of $10,000 to APF’s Campaign to Transform the Future renews her 2008 commitment to the foundation, which established the Annette U. Rickel Dissertation Award for Public Policy. The award supports dissertation research on public policy, which has the potential to improve services for children and families facing psychosocial issues. “Helping young people realize their potential is something all psychologists should strive for,” Rickel says. “Not only is it rewarding to give, it is rewarding to see what these young psychologists can go on to achieve.” n
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Sashkinw/Thinkstock
AMERICAN
Personalities
n The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has named Karina W. Davidson, PhD, to its U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which guides the agency on evidencebased Davidson preventive care, such as screenings and preventive medicines. Davidson is a professor in the departments of medicine and psychiatry and director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. n APA and the United Nations’ department of public information partnered to host a briefing on “Global Violence: Psychological Perspectives, Prevention, Intervention and Future Trends” at the United Nations in June. The briefing was moderated by Kean University’s Juneau Gary, PsyD, and featured a panel of psychologists from three psychological associations including APA who discussed the psychological impact of violence, as well as psychologically informed prevention and intervention strategies to mitigate it. To watch a webcast of the briefing, go to http://on.apa.org/1kEFEnE
n The Scientist Professional Advisory Committee of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) named CDR Jeffrey Goodie, PhD,
the 2014 Derek Dunn Memorial Senior Scientist of the Year for his professional achievements, leadership and commitment
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS FOR YOU
Make the most of your membership with the Discounts Program. Bank of America
Subscription Services
Elavon
UPS
(checking and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, money market, and CD accounts) www.apa.org/membership/finance.aspx (credit card and payment processing) 1-800-546-1831 ext. 5434 www.apapracticecentral.org/ce/tools/ payment-processing.aspx
Hewlett-Packard
(magazines for your home and office) 1-800-603-5602 [email protected] www.buymags.com/apa 1-800-636-2377 www.savewithups.com/apa
Therapy Sites
(866) 597-2674 Promo Code: APAPO www.therapysites.com
(computers, printers, and imaging solutions) 1-800-888-3124, mention APA www.hp.com/go/apa
ID Theft Assist
(office supplies and services) 201-253-5215 www.apa.org/membership/office.aspx [email protected] www.twitter.com/ APAbenefits
www.idetheftassist.com/pages/ affiliates/APA (866) MY-ID-911 For more information:
A benefits program operated by APAPO for all APA members and affiliates
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 • M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y 9 5
Personalities to the PHS Commissioned Corps. Goodie is an associate professor in the department of family medicine at Uniformed Goodie Services University’s F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine and interim director of clinical training in the university’s medical and clinical psychology department. n Kansas University has named psychology professor Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, PhD, as director of its Center for Teaching Excellence, a university-wide resource center that supports faculty. Greenhoot conducts research on autobiographical memory as well as ways instructors can use cognitive and developmental science to inform their teaching and improve and assess student learning. n Georgia State University has named John Lutzker, PhD, a Distinguished University Professor, the university’s highest award. Lutzker, who directs the Center for Healthy Development Lutzker at the Georgia 96
Psychologists elected to National Academy of Sciences Three psychologists are among the 2014 class of new members of the National Academy of Sciences. They are: • Marcia K. Johnson, PhD, Yale University. • Helen J. Neville, PhD, University of Oregon (elected as foreign associate). • David R. Williams, PhD, University of Rochester. Election to the National Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the United States for scientists who pursue original research. A total of 105 scientists were elected as new members (or foreign associates) this year.
State University School of Public Health and is a leading expert in child neglect and maltreatment prevention, is honored for his sustained excellence in research, teaching and service. n Social psychologist Deborah Prentice, PhD, is the new dean of faculty at Princeton University. She has chaired the university’s psychology department since 2002. In her research, Prentice Prentice studies how social norms can affect behavior change. n Northern Arizona University named Andrew S. Walters, PhD, MPH, its 2014 President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow, the institution’s highest teaching award, for his impact on undergraduate learning. Walters is a professor in the
department of psychological sciences who studies gender performance, sexuality and sexual health in underrepresented Walters and ethnic minority populations. The three-year appointment allows him to serve on the board of the Northern Arizona University Teaching Academy. n
Join us on Twitter Get your fix of psychology stories, news and research by following the APA Monitor on Twitter at @APA_Monitor. We welcome feedback, story ideas and the opportunity to connect with sources.
M O N I TO R O N P S YC H O LO G Y • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
Advertising: The following are guidelines for use in composing and responding to advertisements to be placed in the Career Opportunities section of the Monitor on Psychology. By vote of the Council, 1974, listings will be accepted from academic institutions under censure by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). However, these listings are identified in this publication by the placement of the symbol (•) preceding line classified career opportunities (and by an editor’s note located in these guidelines for classified display ads) in order to advise applicants that the employing institution, or its administration, which includes the administrative officers and the governing board of the institution, has been censured by the AAUP, and that further information may be obtained from the relevant AAUP Bulletin. Department of Defense advertisements for positions requiring military service must include the following disclaimer: Eligibility for military service requires certain physical abilities and attributes including age, height, weight, and physical ability requirements. APA policy on the use of the title “psychologist” is contained in the General Guidelines for Providers of Psychological Services, which defines the term “professional psychologist” as follows: “Psychologists have a doctoral degree in psychology from an organized, sequential program in a regionally accredited university or professional school.” APA is not responsible for the specific title or wording of any particular career opportunities, but it is general practice to refer to master’s-level positions as counselors, specialists, clinicians, and so forth (rather than as “psychologists”). In addition, it is general practice to refer to APA-accredited programs as “APA-accredited” rather than “APA-approved.” The position as described must be in conformity with the statute regulating the use of the title psychologist and the practice of psychology in the state in which the job is available. Employers are required to include any limits or restrictions on career opportunities in advertisements, including any restrictions on the basis of geographical, age, and/or religious factors. Advertisements should be written to convey the following information: • Job title with area of specialization required. • Name of employer. (Blind or box ads cannot be accepted.) • Description of position, responsibilities involved, permanent or temporary, tenure-track or not, etc. • Minimum qualifications required, including any restrictions on the basis of geographical, age, and/or religious factors.
Advertising Guidelines MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY CLASSIFIED ADS
• Salary range and period covered. • Closing date for applications and date position will commence. • Indication if interview expenses are not to be fully paid. • List of documents to accompany initial letter of application, e.g., vitae, names of references, etc. • Name and address of person to whom application should be directed. Placement of an advertisement implies that: • Jobs exist as described. • There is/are no prescribed candidate(s). • Employer will acknowledge receipt of applicant’s material. • It is recommended that advertisers inform an applicant when (s)he is eliminated from consideration or when the position is filled. Responding to an advertisement implies that: • Training experience and interests are accurately represented by letter of application and supporting material and are consonant with those specified in the advertisement. • Applicant should notify prospective employer if (s)he no longer wishes to be considered for the position. Equal Employment Opportunity The American Psychological Association endorses equal employment opportunity practices and accepts only ads that are not discriminatory on the basis of race, color, gender identity and expression, religion, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, or physical disability. In keeping with this policy, the use of “recent Ph.D.” in APA advertising is not allowed on the basis that it is potentially age-discriminatory (see U.S. Department of Labor prohibition on use of “recent graduate”). The term “beginning-level salary” may be used. Positions may also be defined in terms of teaching load, specified number of years away from a tenure decision, or requirements of certain skills. We reserve the right to edit all copy and to refuse ads that are not in consonance with the principles of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Veterans’ Reemployment Rights Act Handicap Bias, the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, in addition to Public Law 100-238, makes specific legally permissible exceptions to discrimination in hiring by religious institutions, Indian tribes, and federal correctional facilities. For this reason, certain position opening advertisements will include job opening restrictions on the basis of religious, racial, and age factors. Without limiting PsycCareers’s terms, conditions, and policies, PsycCareers in accordance with Department of Justice guidelines: 1) Prohibits any job
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
posting that requires U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residence in the U.S. as a condition of employment, unless otherwise required in order to comply with law, regulation, executive order, or government contract. 2) Prohibits any job requirement or criterion in connection with a job posting that discriminates on the basis of citizenship status or national origin. You can review more information at http://www.justice.gov/ crt/about/osc/htm/best_practices.php. For complete EEO guidelines please refer to the following resource: http://www. justice.gov/crt/osc/. Policy concerning advertisements appearing in APA publications: The publication of any advertisement by the American Psychological Association (APA) is an endorsement neither of the advertiser nor of the products or services advertised. APA is not responsible for any claims made in an advertisement. Advertisers may not, without prior consent, incorporate in a subsequent advertisement or promotional piece the fact that a product or service has been advertised in an APA publication. The Monitor on Psychology is received midmonth by readers. APA recommends that response deadlines in advertisements be no earlier than the 15th of the month following the month of publication. The acceptability of an ad for publication in APA publications is based upon legal, social, professional, and ethical considerations. All advertising must be in keeping with the generally scholarly and professional nature of the publication. In addition, the association reserves the right to refuse advertising submitted for the purpose of airing either side of controversial, social, or professional issues. The general policy is stated as follows: “The publications of the APA are published for and on behalf of the membership to advance psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare. The Association, therefore, reserves the right to unilaterally REJECT, OMIT, OR CANCEL advertising which it deems to be not in the best interest of these objectives, or which by its tone, content, or appearance is not in keeping with the essentially scientific, scholarly, and professional nature of its publications. Conditions, printed or otherwise, which conflict with this policy will not be binding on the publisher.” Classified Rate/Payment Terms 2014 Rates: $12.25 per line for Career Opportunities and Availability Notices, $14.00 per line for all other advertising. Minimum order is six lines. Each line contains approximately 32 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Purchase Orders should accompany advertisements from colleges, universities, or government agencies. All other classified advertising orders must be prepaid prior to publishing with the exception of either member advertising agencies of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) or agencies listed in the Standard Directory of Advertising Agencies. Line classified advertisements are not subject to frequency or agency discounts.
Deadlines: All new ads, ad cancellations, and corrections, as well as instructions to rerun a previous advertisement, must be received in writing. Classified advertisements can be submitted online at www.PsycCareers. com. Nonrecruitment advertising can be submitted by e-mail to [email protected]. Closing dates are as follows: October August 28 November September 25 October August 28 December October 27 American Psychological Association classified ads on APA’s Online Career Center: Line-for-line and display classified advertisements published in the Monitor on Psychology also appear on PsycCareers. This service is provided at no additional cost to the reader or the advertiser. The advertisements are easily located. They are arranged by category—e.g., by the state in which the position is available, by specialty area, and also under other topical headings such as conferences and workshops. Updated advertisements are released on PsycCareers approximately the first of the month of issue. Early online postings are now available for $10.00 per day up to publication date. Select this option when submitting a line ad at www.PsycCareers. com, or include a request when placing a display ad. Online-only ads on PsycCareers: Those classified advertisers who miss the current deadline for publication in the Monitor on Psychology, or who wish to run an online-only ad, can submit their classified advertisement for release on PsycCareers. 30-day postings are $550, 60-day postings are $925, and 90-day postings are $1,122. Visit www.PsycCareers.com. For recruitments and classified advertising, contact: Amelia Dodson Advertising Sales Department American Psychological Association Phone: (202) 336-5564 Fax: (202) 216-7610 E-mail: [email protected] Corey Bockhaus Advertising Sales Department American Psychological Association Phone: (202) 336-5567 Fax: (202) 216-7610 E-mail: [email protected] Classified Advertising Index: Career Opportunities Practice Opportunities Practice for Sale Office Space Available Publications & Others Directory Dissertation Consulting Workshops & Conferences Advertising Index
97–118 119 119 119 119 119 119 119 119
Visit PsycCareers, APA’s Online Career Center at www.PsycCareers.com 97
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
US OPENINGS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP IN BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE (DIABETES): Bringing Science Home is funding at least two postdoctoral fellowships in behavioral medicine with a focus on diabetes. The goals of this fellowship are to increase the number of qualified psychologists working in the specialty area of diabetes, train fellows to conduct innovative diabetes research that has individual and public health significance, and train fellows to deliver evidence-based psychological care for people with diabetes. The two fellowships will be offered at the following institutions (program director listed as well): University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida: Nicole Johnson, Dr.P.H., Stanford University, Palo Alto, California: Korey K. Hood, Ph.D., There is the possibility of a third fellowship in Chicago. Salary is commensurate with NIH fellow training levels. Excellent benefits at each site. If interested in applying for a fellowship, send a cover letter indicating your interest and the site you prefer, your curriculum vitae, and a list of three referees we can contact about your training and commitment to work in diabetes. E-mail Dr. Nicole Johnson at njohnso3@health.
usf.edu and Dr. Korey Hood at [email protected]. Send to both e-mail addresses and include all of your documents as a single PDF. LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST POSITION—DEER OAKS: Psychologists are needed to provide individual, family, supportive therapy, and assessment services on-site at long term care facilities in various US locations. Our staff enjoy working as part of a multi-disciplinary team to improve the quality of life for the older adults they serve. Providing geropsych services is challenging but amazing work. Some of the cases involve intimate situations, raw emotions, resolving unfinished business, preparing for death, respecting the knowledge behind the dementia, and helping individuals find purpose/ meaning in their current stage of life. Currently, we have staff and subcontractor opportunities in the following regions: Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Wyoming. If you would like to join our team and learn more about opportunities with Deer Oaks, contact e-mail [email protected] or by phone at (210) 378-1926.
ALABAMA PROFESSOR AND DEPARTMENT CHAIR: The Psychology Department at the University of South Alabama invites applications for the position of Professor and Department Chair (appointment at associate or full professor rank) to
begin August 15, 2015. The Ph.D. in any area of psychology from an accredited university is required. The ideal candidate will be an accomplished scholar, Associate or Full Professor, in any area of psychology who is committed to excellence in teaching and research;
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Brewer-Porch Children’s Center The College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama announces an opening for an Executive Director of the BrewerPorch Children’s Center, a specialized treatment facility in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Executive Director will have the primary responsibilities for personnel, budget, and facilities management for Brewer-Porch. The Brewer-Porch Children’s Center (BPCC) was established by the Alabama legislature in 1970 to provide a model treatment program for Alabama’s special needs children, adolescents and their families, and the program is based within the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama. The BPCC is named after Albert Brewer, a former governor of Alabama, and Ralph Porch, a former legislator, and is located on 60 acres of land near the Tuscaloosa Veterans Hospital. Treatment in the BPCC programs is based on an interdisciplinary approach, and involves professionals from psychology, education, nursing, psychiatry, social work and counseling. BPCC operates six programs. These programs are the Intensive Residential Program (ages 6-18), Short Term Treatment and Evaluation Program (ages 6-12), Therapeutic Foster Care Program (ages 6-21), Community Autism Program (ages 3-12), Outpatient Day Treatment Program (ages 6-12), and Adolescent Adaptive Skills Program (ages 12-18). BPCC also provides educational and research experiences to graduate and undergraduate students from The University of Alabama, the flagship campus of a three-campus system. The University is located in Tuscaloosa, a city of approximately 100,000. The position is scheduled to begin on or before January 1, 2015. The applicant must have at least five years of post-master’s progressive managerial experience in a mental health treatment setting, and must have had successful experience with writing and securing federal or state contracts and/or grants. Candidates should have a Ph.D. in a mental health or related field from an accredited institution of higher learning prior to December 2014. As part of their application, candidates should submit a letter outlining their qualifications, including their administrative philosophy, leadership style, experience working in mental health, and any other relevant experience. Applications should also include a current resume and three letters of recommendation. Application review will begin in August and will continue until the position is filled. With the exception of letters of recommendation, all materials should be submitted online at http://staffjobs.ua.edu/?job=497816. Letters of recommendation should be mailed directly to Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Chair, Brewer-Porch Search Committee, Associate Dean, the College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Alabama, Box 870268, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0268. For more information about Brewer Porch, please visit us on the web at http://bpcc.ua.edu or contact Katherine Watkins, Human Resources Director, at 205-3489345 or via e-mail at [email protected]. The University of Alabama is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer, and actively seeks diversity among its employees. Minority and women candidates are especially encouraged to apply.
t o u ch in g liv e s
98
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
has exceptional verbal, organizational, and interpersonal skills; has a demonstrated record of administrative effectiveness; and possesses the vision and desire to lead this outstanding department. The Department offers a B.A. degree in Psychology, a M.S. degree in psychology, and a Ph.D. degree in a clinical and counseling psychology, which is administered jointly by the Colleges of Arts and Sciences and Education. The ability to collaborate effectively across disciplines, colleges, and administrative structures is essential. The ideal candidate will have administrative experience in departments with doctoral-level programs. Exceptional candidates with less administrative experience, but a strong desire to transition to administration, are also encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit a letter of application, a statement of teaching and research interests, a statement of leadership and administrative skills, curriculum vitae, names of five individuals willing to provide letters of reference, official transcripts, and a sample of scholarly work. Official transcripts and three original letters of recommendation will be required prior to appointment. Address materials, nominations, and inquiries to Dr. Roma Hanks, Chair, Psychology Chair Search Committee, Department of Psychology, UCOM 1201, 75 S University Blvd., University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36608. Review of applications will begin November 17, 2014, and continue until the position is filled. Information: http://www.southalabama. edu/psychology/employment.html. The University of South Alabama is an Equal Opportunity Employer/ M/W/V/D. CALIFORNIA ASSISTANT PROFESSOR TENURE-TRACK POSITION IN INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL/ SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: California State University, East Bay, The Department of Psychology invites applications for an assistant professor, tenure-track position in Industrial/Organizational/Social Psychology to begin in fall 2015. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in psychology and a record of peerreviewed scholarship in the area of attitudes, decision making, or leadership. Candidates with skills in applied measurement preferred. Duties for the position include: teaching Survey and Test Construction, experimental methods, and other undergraduate lecture and laboratory courses in the candidate’s area of expertise. Candidates should have outstanding teaching skills, be enthusiastic about working with a diverse student body, and have a systematic program of research. Laboratory space is available and faculty development funds for research are awarded on a com-
petitive basis. The potential for outside funding is desired. Teaching assignments will be at our main campus and our satellite campus in Contra Costa County. For additional information, visit our department’s website (http://www. sci.csueastbay.edu /psychology). Review of applications will begin October 1, 2014. Submit a letter of application that addresses the qualifications noted in the position announcement, complete and current curriculum vitae, teaching and research statements, copies of major publications or preprints, and three letters of recommendation at https://my.csueastbay.edu/psp/ psp db1/ employe e / h r m s / c / h r s _ hramhrs_ce.gbl. (•)ASSISTANT PROFESSOR— THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHO LOGY AT LOMA LINDA UNIVERSITY: Invites applications for two tenure-track faculty positions at the rank of assistant professor (other ranks considered). All applicants must hold a Ph.D. or Psy.D. from an APA-accredited program, have completed an APA-accredited internship, and hold a California psychology license or be license-eligible. Clinical area of specialization is open for one position and for the sec-
Have you considered a VA Advanced Fellowship in Women’s Health?
The VA Advanced Fellowship in Women’s Health is seeking eligible physicians and clinical PhD applicants interested in the advancement of healthcare for women veterans. The 2-year post-residency/postdoctoral fellowship offers research, education, and clinical learning opportunities. There are 8 site locations: Boston, MA; Madison and Milwaukee, WI; Pittsburgh, PA; San Francisco, San Diego and Sepulveda, CA; and West Haven, CT. To learn more please visit http://www.va.gov/oaa/specialfellows/programs/ SF_WomensVets.asp
JOIN THE NATION’S PREMIER TELEMEDICINE PRACTICE
Psychologists: Paid Therapy Sessions over Video Work from home, flexible hours and great pay Flex hours available in ALL 50 states email [email protected] to learn more...
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
99
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Marriage and Family Therapy and Professional Clinical Counseling Saint Mary’s College invites applications and nominations for a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department in the College’s Kalmanovitz School of Education beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year. The work is collegial in a highly collaborative and culturally diverse campus environment. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to the mission of the College, which is informed, animated, and expressed through its Catholic, Lasallian, and Liberal Arts traditions.
Responsibilities: • Teach a variety of graduate counseling courses, including foundational core courses and advanced specialization courses. The Assistant Professor may be assigned by the Department Chair to participate in other teaching-related activities equivalent to 18 semester units in an academic year. • Work collegially and actively with other Counseling Department faculty on program/curriculum evaluation, assessment, development, and other projects and tasks, along with assessment and student evaluation in terms of Counseling Department Competencies, State of California CTC standards and BBS educational requirements, and WASC requirements. • Assist the Department Chair and other counseling department faculty in meeting California accreditation standards for Pupil Personnel Services Credentials in School Counseling and School Psychology and/or the Board of Behavioral Sciences (LMFT/LPCC). • Serve as advisor to assigned students. Post and hold a minimum of four office hours per week to accommodate the schedules of students and advisees. • Participate in department and Kalmanovitz School of Education activities, meetings, and committees. • Serve on College committees, and attend general Academic Senate meetings, Commencements, and other special convocations or College events, when possible. • Perform instruction substitution for faculty colleagues. • Participate in student admissions interviews and decision-making. • Engage in scholarly and professional activities, along with attending conferences, workshops, and meetings consistent with professional and scholarly development. • Develop effective and collaborative relationships within the program, school, and with other areas of the College.
Experience and Qualifications: • Hold a doctoral degree in counseling, clinical or counseling psychology, counselor education, marriage and family therapy, or a closely related discipline, by December 31, 2014. • Have a minimum of 2 years full-time experience (or the equivalent) working as a psychotherapist or counselor (LMFT or LPCC preferred). • Demonstrate a strong commitment to student-centered learning and holistic and humanistic counseling and education. • Demonstrate a commitment to rigorous graduate level teaching and counselor education and training. Ability to teach foundational core courses and advanced specialization courses. • Experience teaching in one or both of the following specializations (highly desirable): Community mental health, clinical counseling, and/or couples and family therapy. • Knowledge of and/or willingness to learn relevant state and national standards that pertain to counseling specialization(s) [e.g., California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Pupil Personnel Services credentials), Board of Behavioral Sciences (LMFT & LPCC), CAMFT/CALPCC, AAMFT, ACA, NBCC, ASCA, NASP]. • Demonstrate commitment to diverse multicultural populations and to social justice. At least 2 years of experience working effectively with ethnically and culturally diverse students in k-12, higher education, psychotherapy/ counseling, or social service delivery setting. • Evidence of research trajectory and scholarly activity in the field, along with a commitment to scholarship and professional activity at state, national, and international levels. • Demonstrate an appreciation of and deep respect for the learning/teaching environment and for the students, staff, and faculty who comprise it. Willingness to embrace the mission of Saint Mary’s College of California and its Lasallian, Catholic, and Liberal Arts traditions. Consideration and review of applications will begin immediately and continue until October 1, 2014. For more information and to apply, visit http://apptrkr.com/484767 Equal Opportunity Employer
100
ond position we are seeking a child clinical psychologist, or pediatric psychologist, or pediatric neuropsychologist. Both positions are pending budgetary approval. Candidates would be primarily responsible for research mentoring, teaching, and clinical supervision. Ideally, applicants will have an active research program, publication track record, and prior experience teaching/supervising graduate students. A demonstrated ability/potential to pursue extramural research funding is also desirable. Loma Linda University is a health sciences university and its Medical Center, one of the main health-care institutions in Southern California, is the flagship of a system of hundreds of Adventist health care institutions around the world. The Department of Psychology is housed within the School of Behavioral Health and includes only APA-accredited Ph.D. and Psy.D. programs in clinical psychology. Loma Linda is conveniently situated near the San Bernardino/San Gabriel mountains, San Diego/Orange County beaches, Palm Springs, and downtown Los Angeles. Loma Linda University is sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist church. Applicants must be supportive of the LLU mission statement, and preference will be given to members of the sponsoring church. http:// www.llu.edu/central/mission.page. Applicants should send a letter of interest, vitae, representative reprints/preprints, and names/contact information for at least three references to: Dr. Kelly Morton, Chair, Faculty Search Committee, [email protected]; or, Loma Linda University, Department of Psychology, 11130 Anderson St., Loma Linda, California 92350 by October 1, 2014. The Faculty Search Committee may request supplemental application materials from applicants. Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. For more information, visit: http:// www.llu.edu / behavioral-health / psychology/index.page. Loma Linda University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer. Women and individuals from diverse backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply. ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR—AMERICAN SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL PSYCHO LOGY, ARGOSY UNIVERSITY: Southern California is seeking an assistant or associate professor-level core faculty member for the Psy.D. program in clinical psychology (APA-accredited) with strong academic training in the following areas: statistics and research methods, cognitive and affective processes, physiological psychology, psychopharmacology, and history and systems of psychology. Position available September 2014. Apply online at: https://edmc.hua. hrsmart.com /ats /js_ job_details. php?reqid=27141.
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, TENU R E -T R A C K — C A L I F O R N I A STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON: The Department of Psychology invites applications for a tenuretrack Assistant Professor position in Clinical Psychology. The position begins in August 2015. Completed applications received by October 6, 2014 will receive full consideration. For more information on the position, Department, and University, visit: http://psychology.fullerton. edu/faculty/fac_position.asp. LICENSED CLINICAL SUPERVISOR: Casa Pacifica provides hope and help for abused, neglected or at-risk youth and their families. We believe children of all ages are capable of great achievement, a notion reflected in our programs. Our programs protect, engage and teach children and their families how to develop the competence and confidence they need to manage their own lives and achieve great potential. We meet kids and families at the most challenging times of their lives and help them overcome some of life’s most difficult circumstances, abuse and neglect, complex emotional and behavioral issues, family crises. We restore hope, help children find joy in daily living, and improve families’ chances at making a better life for themselves and at finding a place in their community where they can be successful. Casa Pacifica is committed to children unconditionally over time and through all of life’s ups and downs. Rapidly growing COA accredited agency with an APA internship program has immediate employment opportunities with competitive salary and generous benefits package including retirement (401k), paid time off, insurance benefits and extensive on-going training. Headquartered on a rural 24-acre campus five miles from the Pacific Ocean halfway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Casa Pacifica serves abused and neglected children and adolescents, and those with severe emotional, social, behavioral, and mental health challenges. Our primary service area is California’s Central Coast, but referrals come from all over. We provide a comprehensive array of state of the art services to meet the varied and complex needs of children, youth and emerging adults in our care. On-site services include a non-public school, a 28-bed residential treatment program for adolescents and a 45-bed emergency shelter program for youth 0–18 years, a certified Health Clinic, intensive day treatment program, and a Parent Child Interactive Therapy Center. Community based services include a Therapeutic Behavioral Services program, Wraparound, and a Children’s Emergency Mobile Crisis Team. Employment opportunities: One full-time and one parttime Licensed Clinical Supervisor Residential Program/Emergency Shelter. In addition to carrying a small caseload of clients, oversees the therapy milieu for a residential
treatment program and supervises interns and postdoctoral fellows. Candidate for position must have valid California psychology license, have
strong leadership skills, training in evidence based practices with children and adolescents, and eligible to supervise interns in our APA intern-
ship program as well as postdoctoral fellowship program. Experience in working with youth with severe behavioral and emotional challenges in
Tenure Track Assistant Professor in School Psychology Counseling Department Saint Mary’s College invites applications and nominations for a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department in the College’s Kalmanovitz School of Education beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year. The work is collegial in a highly collaborative and culturally diverse campus environment. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to the mission of the College, which is informed, animated, and expressed through its Catholic, Lasallian, and Liberal Arts traditions.
Responsibilities: • •
• • • • • • • •
Teach a variety of graduate counseling courses, including foundational core courses and advanced specialization courses. The Assistant Professor may be assigned by the Department Chair to participate in other teachingrelated activities equivalent to 18 semester units in an academic year. Work collegially and actively with other Counseling Department faculty on program/curriculum evaluation, assessment, development, and other projects and tasks, along with assessment and student evaluation in terms of Counseling Department Competencies, State of California CTC standards and BBS educational requirements, and WASC requirements. Assist the Department Chair and other counseling department faculty in meeting California accreditation standards for Pupil Personnel Services Credentials in School Counseling and School Psychology and/or the Board of Behavioral Sciences (LMFT/LPCC). Serve as advisor to assigned students. Post and hold a minimum of four office hours per week to accommodate the schedules of students and advisees. Participate in department and Kalmanovitz School of Education activities, meetings, and committees. Serve on College committees, and attend general Academic Senate meetings, Commencements, and other special convocations or College events, when possible. Perform instruction substitution for faculty colleagues. Participate in student admissions interviews and decision-making. Engage in scholarly and professional activities, along with attending conferences, workshops, and meetings consistent with professional and scholarly development. Develop effective and collaborative relationships within the program, school, and with other areas of the College
Experience and Qualifications: • • • • • • • • •
Hold a doctoral degree in counseling, clinical or counseling psychology, counselor education, educational psychology, school psychology, or a closely related discipline, by December 31, 2014. Have a minimum of two years full-time experience (or the equivalent) working as a credentialed school psychologist (preferred). Demonstrate a strong commitment to student-centered learning and holistic and humanistic counseling and education. Demonstrate a commitment to rigorous graduate level teaching and counselor education and training. Ability to teach foundational core courses and advanced specialization courses. Experience teaching school psychology or related coursework in a graduate counseling program (highly desirable). Knowledge of and/or willingness to learn relevant state and national standards that pertain to counseling specialization(s) [e.g., California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Pupil Personnel Services credentials), Board of Behavioral Sciences (LMFT & LPCC), CAMFT/CALPCC, AAMFT, ACA, NBCC, ASCA, NASP]. Demonstrated commitment to diverse multicultural populations and to social justice. At least 2 years of experience working effectively with ethnically and culturally diverse students in k-12, higher education, psychotherapy/ counseling, or social service delivery setting. Evidence of research trajectory and scholarly activity in the field, along with a commitment to scholarship and professional activity at state, national, and international levels. Demonstrate an appreciation of and deep respect for the learning/teaching environment and for the students, staff, and faculty who comprise it. Willingness to embrace the mission of Saint Mary’s College of California and its Lasallian, Catholic, and Liberal Arts traditions.
Consideration and review of applications will begin immediately and continue until October 1, 2014. For more information and to apply, visit http://apptrkr.com/484732 Equal Opportunity Employer
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
101
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
a residential setting is highly desired. Responsibilities include: providing and implementing individual, group and family therapy for adolescents, completing evaluations and assessments, providing case management within a multidisciplinary treatment team environment and supervising interns and postdoctoral fellows. Position also involves liaison activities with placement agencies, mental health and child protective services. Work with youth in a cognitive behavioral setting, assisting in the development of family based programs. Contact: Leslie Singer, Ph.D., Associate Director of Clinical Services, 1722 South Lewis Road, Camarillo, CA 93012. lsinger@ casapacifica.org and www.casa pacifica.org. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGIST, OPEN-LEVEL PROFESSOR: Claremont McKenna College (CMC) invites applications for a tenured or tenure-track position (assistant, associate, or full professor level) in cognitive psychology. Research topics of particular interest include any area of cognition as well as critical thinking. In addition to teaching undergraduate courses on cognitive psychology and critical thinking, the successful applicant will be able to teach core courses such as introduction to psychology, statistics, or research methods, and to maintain a senior leadership position in the department. Professors at CMC are expected to teach four courses a year and to engage undergraduates in meaningful research. Faculty are also able to work with graduate students in the Psychology doctoral program at Claremont Graduate University. The deadline for applications (excluding receipt of letters of recommendation) is October 1, 2014. Requests for letters of recommendation will be generated automatically once the online application is completed. The deadline for letters of recommendation is October 15, 2014. Claremont McKenna College is a highly selective undergraduate institution ranked among the top liberal arts colleges nationally. CMC is a member of The Claremont Colleges (Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, Harvey Mudd, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute). Collectively, The Claremont Colleges constitute an academic community of 6,000 students. Claremont is located 35-miles east of downtown Los Angeles, near the San Gabriel Mountains. For further information and to apply online, visit https:// webapps.cmc.edu /jobs /faculty/ home.php. Include a cover letter, a statement of research and teaching interests (including a summary of past teaching evaluations if applicable), curriculum vitae, names and e-mail addresses of three references, and copies of relevant publications, when uploading materials. Specific questions about the position, if neces102
sary, can be addressed by the chair of the search committee, Gabriel Cook by calling (909) 607-0493. Claremont McKenna College is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and minority candidates are encouraged to apply. OPEN AREA PSYCHOLOGIST WITH EMPHASIS IN HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: Claremont McKenna College (CMC) invites applications for a tenure-track position (assistant professor level) in cognitive, neuroscience, social, developmental, or clinical psychology with an emphasis in health psychology. The successful applicant may come from any domain in Psychology, but is expected to demonstrate a focus on the use of experimental methods to examine questions related to health, health care, and behavioral medicine. Research topics of particular interest include decision-making in health and/or health care, and/or the role of social, cultural, and developmental factors in health and/or health care choices. In addition to teaching undergraduate courses in health psychology and a seminar in their specialty area, the successful applicant will be expected to develop and sustain an on-campus research program that engages undergraduates in meaningful research. Professors at CMC teach four courses a year, including core courses such as introduction to psychology and research methods, in a liberal arts setting characterized by small class sizes and high levels of student interaction. There is also the option of working with graduate students in the psychology doctoral program at Claremont Graduate University. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in psychology by the time of the appointment. The deadline for uploading applications is October 1, 2014 so that requests for letters of recommendation may be automatically generated and letters received by October 15, 2014. Claremont McKenna College is a highly selective undergraduate institution ranked among the top liberal arts colleges nationally. CMC is a member of The Claremont Colleges (Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, Harvey Mudd, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute). Collectively, The Claremont Colleges constitute an academic community of 6,000 students. Claremont is located 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, near the San Gabriel Mountains. For further information and to apply online, visit https://webapps.cmc.edu/jobs/faculty/ home.php. Include a cover letter, a statement of research and teaching interests (including a summary of past teaching evaluations if applicable), curriculum vitae, names and e-mail addresses of three references, and copies of relevant publications, when uploading materials. If you have any questions regarding the position, contact Wei-Chin Hwang (the chair of the search committee) at (909) 607-2762. Claremont McKenna College is an Equal Op-
portunity Employer. Women and minority candidates are encouraged to apply. ASSOCIATE OR FULL PROFESSOR, COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY/ HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION: The Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz invites applications for a tenured Professor in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We welcome candidates at the tenured level of Associate Professor or Full Professor with a proven record of leadership to head a proposed cluster hire in HCI. The candidate’s interdisciplinary research should address topics such as computer mediated communication, digital memory, assistive technology, media multitasking, brain computer interfaces, immersive environments, augmented reality, and cognitive modeling of computer usage among others. We are also interested in candidates who study the effects of computer usage on psychological processes of cognition, learning, and emotion, or use computational methods to study fundamental psychological processes. We seek a colleague who will complement our existing strengths in memory, language, and perception, using behavioral, computational, and/or psychophysiological methods. We welcome candidates with interests in collaborating across the social sciences and with sciences, engineering, arts, and/or humanities. Applicants should be capable of teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, with experience of mentoring graduate students, and should be actively engaged in research with promise of continued research productivity. We are especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of our academic community through their research, teaching, and/or service. Basic qualifications: Applicants must have a Ph.D. or equivalent foreign degree in Psychology or related field, and a record of research and teaching. Position available: July 1, 2015, with academic year beginning September 2015. Closing date: Review of applications will begin on October 31, 2014. To ensure full consideration, applications should be complete by this date. The position will remain open until filled, but not later than June 30, 2015. To apply, visit http://apptrkr. com/501258. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in cognitive psychology, beginning July 1, 2015. We seek applicants whose research examines language learning, at any time scale, and/or bilingualism. The ideal candidate will contribute to our emerging emphasis in experience-dependent change. Applicants should demonstrate a record of research excellence using methodological approaches involving hu-
man behavior, neuroimaging, and/ or computational modeling. Applicants should be committed to excellence in undergraduate and graduate education. The Ph.D. degree is required at time of hire. Salary will be commensurate with education and experience. Review of completed applications begins October 10, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. Interested candidates should send a cover letter describing research and teaching interests, their curriculum vitae, reprints and preprints, and arrange to have three letters of recommendation provided, all using the following link: https:// aprecruit.ucr.edu/apply/JPF00159. Questions about the position should be directed to christine.chiarello@ ucr.edu. The Riverside campus of the University of California is growing rapidly and has an excellent psychology department with a strong record of success in research, teaching and extramural funding. For information on the Department of Psychology, see our website at: www. psych.ucr.edu. The campus is centrally located in Southern California, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles and less than an hour’s drive from the area’s mountains, deserts and beaches. The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST—DEPARTMENT OF STATE HOSPITALS, ATASCADERO (DSH-A): Psychologist positions are available in the California Department of State Hospitals, Atascadero which is located on California’s Central Coast, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. DSH-A is a maximum security, Joint Commission accredited forensic facility designed for the care and treatment of mentally ill men either charged with crimes or previously convicted of crimes. Atascadero employs over 1,800 people and has 1,250-beds. Clinical psychologists at the hospital provide the following duties: psychological assessment, psychological treatment, treatment planning, forensic reviews and evaluations, and behavioral interventions. Clinical psychologists are part of a multidisciplinary treatment team, including psychiatry, social work, rehabilitation therapists, dieticians, pharmacists, registered nurses, and psychiatric technicians. Salaries for licensed psychologists range from $96,000–$107,160 per year, and for unlicensed psychologists salaries range from $81,324– $88,416 per year. Our benefit package is valued at an additional 35%, which includes retirement plans (including safety retirement), health plans, professional liability coverage, paid holidays, educational leave, and generous annual leave. In addition, there are options for life insur-
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
ance, retirement, investment options, and a free 24-hour employee fitness center. Requirements for licensed or unlicensed applicants include: an American Psychological Association (APA)-accredited Doctoral Program, an American Psychological Association (APA)-accredited internship or an Association of Psychological Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) listed internship and at least six months working with the severely mentally ill. If hired, you must obtain California licensure as a psychologist within three years. To begin the application process or if you have questions regarding the hiring process, submit your questions and/ or curriculum vitae to: Robin Hallett, [email protected]; it will be forwarded to the Credentials Committee for review. If you have questions regarding the position, contact: Diane Imrem, Psy.D., Chief of Psychology, at (805) 468-2854. RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGIST: Seeking lower overhead, more freedom, and no teaching or advising? The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, 501(c)(3) research institute in San Diego area, is looking for researchers with existing grants or who wish to apply for new grants. HHS registered IRB, distinguished Scientific Advisory Board. Curriculum vitae and questions to rrobertson@aibrt. org. COLORADO SENIOR PEDIATRIC PSYCHOLOGIST: The Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, The Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO) invites applications for the position of senior pediatric psychologist in the Section of Pediatric Behavioral Health. Job responsibilities: The senior pediatric psychologist must demonstrate expertise in the use of evidence-based treatment approaches for children and adolescents. Specifically, this position will work with all of the pediatric psychologists throughout CHCO to provide appropriate support including review of charts, billing and documentation assistance, recruitment and hiring and expertise and advice. Approximately 60 psychologists operate in many different departments throughout CHCO. This is a new position intended to help create an administrative structure to support those departments and psychologists. In addition to this administrative role, the senior pediatric psychologist will provide clinical care. The appropriate candidate will collaborate with families, physicians, and other providers to ensure the continuum of care for the child and optimal clinical services. The successful candidate will demonstrate the ability to develop administrative processes and work collaboratively across servic-
es with multiple providers, as well as supervise trainees and work to develop processes, procedures, and program materials. Required qualifications: Applicants must possess a Colorado psychologist license or be eligible for licensure within the state of Colorado. Must have significant prior experience in a psychiatric setting serving children and adolescents, have completed an APA-accredited Ph.D. or Psy.D. training program, including an APA-accredited internship. Must obtain Medical staff privileges at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Preferred qualifications: a minimum of six years of experience after completion of postdoctoral fellowship in child and adolescent psychology clinical and administrative work. Experience working in an APA-accredited training program. Applications are accepted electronically at https://www. jobsatcu.com, Job Posting #F01231. Questions should be directed to: [email protected]. A background investigation is required for all prospective employees prior to their employment. The University of Colorado is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: Metropolitan State University of Denver, Department of Psychology invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor faculty position (F192) in clinical and counseling psychology to begin fall 2015. The teaching load consists of four courses (12 hours) per semester in such undergraduate courses as clinical/counseling psychology, abnormal psychology, theories of personality, forensic psychology, introductory psychology, statistics and research methodology courses, and other courses as needed. Other responsibilities include: engaging in scholarly activities related to psychology; advising students; performing departmental, university, and professional service; participating in course and program development; performing other duties as assigned by the Department Chair. Required qualifications: doctorate in psychology completed no later than June 1, 2015. Deadline date for application: October 15, 2014. All applications must be submitted through https://www.msudenver jobs.com. MSU Denver is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR—TRAUMA PSYCHOLOGY: The University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) is seeking applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor faculty position in Clinical Psychology, beginning August 2015. Candidates must have a Ph.D. from an APA accredited program and be licensed or eligible for licensure in the State of Colorado. Experience with evidence based trauma treatments is required.
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
Responsibilities include: teaching primarily graduate courses in a new Trauma Psychology curricular focus, supervising clinical work in the Veteran Health and Trauma Clinic, supervising student research activities, and conducting active programmatic research including seeking external funding. Area of research within Trauma Psychology is open, but experience with military trauma would be a positive. The clinical Ph.D. program is adding a curricular focus in Trauma Psychology and will begin enrolling students in fall 2015. Review of applications begins September 1, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. To apply for this position, go to www. jobsatcu.com and refer to posting number F01599. BEHAVIOR ANALYST: This position will provide professional behavioral assessment and intervention programs for children from birth through age 18. The behavior analyst is responsible for providing consultation, training, technical assistance and direct services in the area of behavioral support strategies to a full client caseload. The behavior analyst will provide positive behavioral supports to individuals with developmental disabilities living in a variety of community based residential settings or their family home. They will focus on children and family services to support children and young adults with autism or other behavioral needs. Behavioral supports include functional assessment, program development, direct intervention, training/coaching and program monitoring. Minimum qualifications: master’s degree in behavior analysis, psychology, education or related field, two-years experience in the field of developmental disabilities, national certification in Behavior Analysis and/or license to practice in a mental health field (e.g., psychologist, LCSW, LPC) in the State of Colorado and a valid driver’s license and proof of auto insurance. Contact: Rocky Mountain Human Services (RMHS) by e-mail at [email protected]. QUANTITATIVE PSYCHOLOGY: The University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) is seeking applicants for a faculty position with expertise in quantitative psychology, beginning August 2015. Candidates must have a Ph.D. and demonstrated potential for excellence in research and teaching. Responsibilities include: teaching a variety of graduate and undergraduate-level courses in research methodology and statistics, supervising student research activities and theses and maintaining an active and productive program of empirical research. The specific area of research specialization is open and people with demonstrated quantitative expertise are encouraged to apply, whether their Ph.D. is in quantitative psychology or a different sub-field of psychology. UCCS
faculty are committed to excellence in teaching and research, with the expectation that faculty maintain a productive program of research with commitment to obtain external funding. The Psychology Department currently offers a B.A. in psychology, an M.A. with tracks in psychological science and clinical psychology and a Ph.D. with tracks in geropsychology and trauma psychology. Review of applications begins October 1, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. More info can be found at www.uccs.edu/psych. To apply for this position, go to www.jobsatcu. com and refer to posting number F01575. PREDOCTORAL PSYCHOLOGY INTERNSHIP AT COLORADO MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE AT PUEBLO(CMHIP) (APA-ACCREDITED): The CMHIP predoctoral internship provides trainees with varied experiences treating seriously mentally ill civil and forensic patients in a state hospital setting. CMHIP adheres to the local clinical scientist training model with a forensic emphasis. We specialize in training interns to apply evidencebased practices in assessment and treatment with a multicultural and clinically diverse patient population in a multidisciplinary team setting. Our internship year consists of three major rotations (refer to website) and two 12-month minor rotations (Assessment & Individual Therapy). Our application deadline for March 2015 will be announced at a later date. All members of under represented groups are encouraged to apply. For additional information, consult the APPIC Directory Online, contact: Peggy A. Hicks Ed.D. Director of Internship Training at (719) 546-4552, or visit our website at www.cmhip.org and click on the Clinical Psychology Internship tab. CONNECTICUT SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY WITH CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY EMPHASIS—TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD, CT: The Department of Psychology seeks to fill a tenuretrack position in social psychology with a subspecialty in cultural psychology. The position is at the level of assistant professor and will start in August 2015. We are looking for a Ph.D. (or Ph.D. expected) from an accredited graduate program in social psychology, who will develop and maintain a program of excellent empirical research that will engage bright, motivated students in that research. The primary research area should focus on cultural issues. Teaching responsibilities will include: a core course in social psychology, advanced courses in social and cultural psychology, introduc tory psychology, and research design and analysis. There are many opportunities to participate in collegewide urban and global initiatives 103
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
both on and off campus. Review of application materials will begin on October 15, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. Submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, a statement of your research and teaching interests, three letters of reference, evidence of teaching effectiveness, graduate school transcript, and representative research papers at: https://trincoll.people admin.com/. Inquiries may be directed to dina.anselmi@trincoll. edu. Trinity College is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer committed to attracting and supporting a faculty of women and men who fully represent the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the United States. Contact: Rocky Mountain Human Services (RMHS) by email at jgordon@ rmhumanservices.org. TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology at Wesleyan University seeks to appoint at the tenure-track assistant professor level a cognitive psychologist. The ideal candidate will have a high quality research program that incorporates undergraduates and will be prepared to teach an introductory course in cognitive psychology, two specialized courses in an area of expertise, and one course in introductory psychology, statistics, or research methods. The department currently has 16 fulltime faculty members in the areas of cognitive, neuroscience, psychopathology, developmental, cultural, and social psychology. Department members also contribute to interdisciplinary programs in neuroscience and behavior, science and society, and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and participate in a postdoctoral program. Wesleyan faculty have a strong commitment to scholarship and undergraduate teaching. The appointment will begin July 1, 2015. Review of applications will begin October 1, 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Inquiries regarding Title IX, Section 504, or any other non-discrimination policies should be directed to: Antonio Farias, Ph.D., Chief Diversity Officer, (860) 685-3927. Submit the following: curriculum vitae, reprints, a statement of research plans, teaching interests, and e-mail addresses for three recommenders to http://careers.wesleyan.edu/ postings/4384. Wesleyan University is an Equal Opportunity Employer who welcomes applications from women and historically underrepresented minority groups. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DEPUTY DIRECTOR AND DIRECTOR OF CLINICAL TRAINING: The Professional Psychology Program at George Washington University invites applications for an associate to full professor position as 104
deputy director and director of clinical training beginning July 2015. We are a university-based APAaccredited clinical Psy.D. program characterized by a high degree of collegiality among students, faculty, and professional staff. Program information is available at http://psyd. columbian.gwu.edu/. Basic qualifications: Applicants must have an earned doctoral degree in clinical psychology from an APA-accredited program. Licensure or immediate license eligibility as a psychologist in the District of Columbia is required. Applicants are required to have a minimum of seven years of graduate teaching experience (including supervision of clinical work) evidenced by evaluations indicating teaching excellence. Applicants must have experience supervising doctoral-level scholarship and have clinical practice experience using psychodynamic and/or psychoanalytic approaches. Applicants must demonstrate a commitment to scholarly research and discovery as evidenced by an ongoing record of peer-reviewed publications. Academic rank will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Application procedure: To be considered, apply through the GW employment portal (http:// www.gwu.jobs/postings/22723). Include a cover letter stating your interest and qualifications, curriculum vitae with citations to your published work and complete contact information for three references. Review of applications will begin on October 1 and continue until the position is filled. Only complete applications will be considered. The university is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer that does not unlawfully discriminate in any of its programs or activities on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity expression, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law. FLORIDA DISTINGUISHED ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH: The Florida State University College of Medicine, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine seeks candidates for a full-time, tenure-track faculty position at the full or associate rank to fill the Distinguished Endowed Professorship in Mental Health. The applicant should have either a Ph.D. or comparable degree in the social or behavioral sciences, or Public Health, or an M.D. with Mental Health Research Emphasis. The successful candidate will be expected to continue an independent line of extramurally funded research, a strong publication record, as well as teaching, and service accomplishments. Research topic should generally be in the area of mental health with a focus on minority and/or underserved populations. Research expertise may include (but not lim-
ited to) patient centered outcomes research, health services, clinical, translational, or community-based research. The FSU College of Medicine (COM) aims to provide community-based medical education that emphasizes the biopsychosocial model, primary care, and care for underserved populations. The COM is located on the campus of Florida State University and strives for a collaborative culture across departments and University-Wide. FSU faculty are distributed in other sectors of the university, and across six regional COM campuses in Tallahassee, Sarasota, Orlando, Daytona Beach, Ft. Pierce, and Pensacola, Florida. A clinical research network is currently being developed in association with the regional campuses involving training relationships with approximately 1,800 community physician-clinical faculty members who practice throughout the state of Florida. In addition to excellent facilities, the COM also has a state-of-the-art translational science laboratory. Additional information about the College of Medicine may be found at www.med.fsu. edu. The successful candidate will join a multidisciplinary faculty with expertise and interest in psychology, behavioral health, public health, epidemiology, bioethics, philosophy, history, and medical Spanish, who engage in research and teaching of medical students and residents as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Consideration of candidates and interviews will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. The salary is nationally competitive and commensurate with qualifications. FSU offers excellent employee benefits. FSU values diversity and is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants of all backgrounds are encouraged to apply. To apply, send curriculum vitae, cover letter, and list of references to Dr. Heather A. Flynn, Vice Chair for Research, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, at mhss@med. fsu.edu. Electronic materials are preferred, but paper materials may be sent to the College of Medicine, 1115 West Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4300. An Equal Opportunity/Access/Affirmative Action/ Pro Disabled & Veteran Employer. FSU’s Equal Opportunity Statement can be viewed at: http://www.hr.fsu. edu /PDF/Publications /diversity/ EEO_Statement.pdf. PSYCHOLOGIST OR SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST (FLORIDA LICENSED OR LICENSE ELIGIBLE): Busy family psychological practice seeking an additional practitioner to take on an overflow of clients. Experience with children/adolescents required. Adult experience and strong assessment skills preferred. Will consider a recent graduate who requires licensure supervision. Billing, data entry and administrative support provided. Contact: [email protected].
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST— MULTIPLE LOCATIONS: Catalyst Professional Services, Inc. is seeking Clinical Psychologists to provide services at Naval Hospital Corpus Christi, TX and Naval Hospital Jacksonville, FL. Great opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who serve our country! Competitive pay and benefits, with a great PTO plan! Call (301) 518-3490 or e-mail megan.heath@catalystpsi. com. LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST OPENINGS—VERICARE: Are you looking for rewarding and fulfilling employment? Vericare is a leader in geropsychology, providing multidisciplinary behavioral interventions in long-term care facilities. Our professionals provide a spectrum of therapies including individual psychotherapy, short-term solution-focused therapy and behavior management. Vericare has opportunities throughout Florida. Experience with medical/inpatient settings and multi-disciplinary teams preferred. For more information, apply online at www. vericare.com or contact: Sanel Lekic at (800) 257-8715 ext. 1166. Vericare is offering a $500 “Thank You” referral bonus for any colleagues you refer that get hired. Feel free to call us for details. GEORGIA ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY (APPLIED COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT EMPHASIS): The Department of Educational Psychology at The University of Georgia announces a tenure-track assistant professor position to begin August 2015 with emphases in applied cognition, development, or motivation and a focus in mathematics or science education. Qualifications include: an earned doctorate in educational, developmental, or experimental psychology or related field, a record of scholarly research, and evidence of potential to secure external funding to support research. Ability to maintain an active research program, mentor students, direct theses and dissertations, seek and obtain external funding, and participate in faculty governance. Required teaching of two graduatelevel courses per semester. Review of applications begins November 15, 2014 with complete applications by that date assured consideration. Applicants should submit: a letter of interest that addresses qualifications, current curriculum vitae, reprints of published research articles, and a list of the names of three professional references. Reference letters should be sent directly to the department by referees. Materials should be sent to Professor Martha Carr, Search Committee Chair, 323 Aderhold Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602; phone: (706) 542-4110 (http://www. coe.uga.edu/epsy/). Electronic ap-
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
plications should be sent to phales@ uga.edu. The University of Georgia is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Georgia is an Open Records state. Individuals needing reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act to participate in the search process should notify the search chair. IDAHO PSYCHOLOGIST: Innercept, LLC, Coeur d’ Alene, ID, is seeking a fulltime psychologist who is licensed or license-eligible in the State of Idaho. Innercept is a residential treatment center which uses principles of integral psychology and integrative mental health. Innercept is a clinically intensive, team oriented provider of residential services to adolescents and young adults from the United States and abroad. Interested psychologists should contact: Tina Laguna at [email protected]. Innercept, LLC provides a full-continuum of residential treatment for adolescents and young adults. Our residents experience opportunities to improve functioning through the development of their own life practice. ILLINOIS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR— NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVER SITY: The Department of Psychology at Northern Illinois University anticipates making a tenure-track appointment in child clinical psychology for fall 2015 at the rank of assistant professor. The department is looking to hire faculty whose research interests will complement and extend the mission of NIU’s Center for the Study of Family Violence and Sexual Assault (http://www.niu.edu/fvsa/). Potential overlap includes, but is not limited to research related to childhood trauma, child maltreatment, harsh parenting, and family violence. Preference will be given to candidates who can train students in the trauma and developmental psychopathology foci of the clinical psychology program (see http:// w w w.n iu.e du / PSYC /g r a du at e / clinical/ for more details about the program). Requirements include: Ph.D. in psychology, an APAaccredited internship in clinical psychology, evidence of scholarly productivity commensurate with experience, and potential to establish and maintain an independent program of research. Successful candidates will be expected to supervise theses and dissertations, teach graduate and undergraduate courses, provide clinical supervision (including, but not limited to, child and family cases), actively
seek extramural funding for their research program, and serve as a role model for Ph.D. students in a scientist-practitioner program with a strong research emphasis. Northern Illinois University is committed to supporting our inclusive and diverse institution and seeks candidates with potential to contribute positively to its diverse community. A letter of application, curriculum vitae, reprints/preprints, and three letters of recommendation should be sent to: Dr. Laura Pittman, Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115. Complete applications will be reviewed starting October 1, 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Competitive salary and benefit package. Pre-employment criminal background investigation required. An Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Institution. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, FO RENSIC PSYCHOLOGY: Roosevelt University is a diverse, non-sectarian, private, non-profit institution founded on principles of social justice. The Department of Psychology, the largest in the University, includes a faculty of over 25 committed scholar-teachers, providing a strong and balanced foundation to meet student goals. Roosevelt University’s Department of Psychology invites applications for an Assistant Professor in Forensic Psychology for a tenure-track appointment effective August 2015. This position is located on the Chicago campus. The assistant professor will lead the undergraduate Forensic Psychology concentration and will teach undergraduate and graduate psychology courses. Additional responsibilities include: mentoring student research and maintaining a productive research program. Applicants from clinical psychology doctoral programs with a forensic emphasis are strongly encouraged to apply. All applications must be submitted online via the Roosevelt Careers webpage at jobs.roosevelt.edu. Roosevelt University is an Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes women, LGBTQ, disabled, veterans, international and minorityclassified individuals as applicants for all positions. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR— NORTHERN ILLINIOS UNIVER SITY: The Department of Psychology at Northern Illinois University anticipates making a tenure-track appointment in child clinical psychology for fall 2015 at the rank of assistant professor. The department is looking to hire faculty whose research interests will complement and extend the mission of NIU’s Center for the Study of Family Violence and Sexual Assault (http://www.niu.edu/ fvsa/). Potential overlap includes, but is not limited to, research related to childhood trauma, child maltreatment, harsh parenting, and family violence. Preference will be given to
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
candidates who can train students in the trauma and developmental psychopathology foci of the clinical psychology program (see http://www. niu.edu/PSYC/graduate/clinical/ for more details about the program). Requirements include: the Ph.D. in psychology, an APA-accredited internship in clinical psychology, evidence of scholarly productivity commensurate with experience, and potential to establish and maintain an independent program of research. Successful candidates will be expected to supervise theses and dissertations, teach graduate and undergraduate courses, provide clinical supervision (including, but not limited to, child and family cases), actively seek extramural funding for their research program, and serve as a role model for Ph.D. students in a scientist-practitioner program with a strong research emphasis. Northern Illinois University is committed to supporting our inclusive and diverse institution and seeks candidates with potential to contribute positively to its diverse community. A letter of application, curriculum vitae, reprints/preprints, and three letters of recommendation must be sent electronically to: Dr. Laura Pittman, [email protected]. Mailing address if needed: Dr. Laura Pittman, Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115. Complete applications will be reviewed starting October 1, 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Competitive salary and benefit package. Preemployment criminal background investigation required. Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution. ILLINOIS LICENSED CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Seeking an Illinois licensed clinical psychologist as an independent contractor to join our team of independent mental health professionals. Offices in Naperville and Yorkville, a full-time or part-time position is available. Submit resume to: Spalding Clinical Services, 1831 Bay Scott Circle #105, Naperville, IL 60540 or e-mail to: spclinical@ sbcglobal.net. PSYCHOLOGIST POSITION IN A GROUP PRACTICE: The Gersten Center for Behavioral Health is an outpatient psychology group practice with four locations in Chicago, Evanston, Skokie, and Melrose Park. We are hiring candidates with a broad range of experience for full-time licensed psychologist positions as well as full time postdoctoral positions to work with patients of all ages and clinical needs. Send your curriculum vitae to: Dr. Deborah Liebling: dliebling@gersten center.com and visit us at www. gerstencenter.com. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN CLIN ICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor in clinical psychology, to begin September 2015. We are in-
terested in outstanding applicants from all areas of clinical psychology, or whose research is applicable to clinical psychology. Qualifications include: outstanding research and teaching ability. Interested candidates should submit electronically a statement of research interests, curriculum vitae, and copies of recent publications through the online application found at http:// www.psychology.northwestern.edu/ people/faculty/job-opportunities. html. Three letters of recommendation will also be required, and can be submitted by letter writers directly through the same website or can be e-mailed to jrclinpsych [email protected]. Inquiries may also be addressed to: jrclinpsychjobsearch@northwest ern.edu. Our department has a strong commitment to the principle of diversity and especially encourages women and minority applicants to apply. Applications are due October 1, 2014. An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. LICENSED CLINICAL PSYCHOL OGISTS, FULL-TIME AND PARTTIME: Licensed clinical psychologists needed for multiple job openings working in skilled nursing facilities throughout Metro Chicago and Northern Illinois. Excellent pay. Flexible scheduling. Part-time and full-time with benefits. Send cover letter and resume to: Dr. Parisi at [email protected] or fax to (847) 299-4952. PSYCHOLOGISTS WITH ILLI NOIS LICENSE: Needed for fulltime or part-time positions in Chicagoland and surrounding suburbs and the Springfield area with Davken Associates, P.C., a well-established group. E-mail at: artoffugue16@ gmail.com with resume/questions. SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR IN EHEALTH/MHEALTH: The Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs), www.cbits.north western.edu in the Department of Preventive Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University seeks a faculty member to serve as scientific director. CBITs is a multidisciplinary center, including faculty with backgrounds in behavioral science, computer science, engineering, statistics, and implementation science focused on developing and evaluating innovative eHealth/ mHealth technologies to support behavior change related health, mental health, and wellness. CBITs is a rapidly growing center of research in this area, with more than 25 funded NIH grants and an additional 30 projects funded through other sources. The Scientific Director will assist in strategic planning and oversee the grants development and funding pipeline, working with faculty to develop grants, define specifications of their applications, and assist in grant writing. There are also opportunities to develop an independent program of research. The successful candi105
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
date will have an understanding of the design of health/mental health applications, excellent writing skills (preferably grant writing), leadership abilities, and an appropriate record of scholarly productivity, funding, and independent research in eHealth/ mHealth. Send a letter explaining your career goals, curriculum vitae, and a list of three references to the attention of David C. Mohr, Ph.D., c/o Lisette Rubio, at l-rubio@ northwestern.edu. Northwestern University is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and ethnic minorities are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the U.S. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, invites applications for an associate professor in Clinical Psychology to begin September 2015. We are interested in outstanding applicants from all areas of clinical psychology. Qualifications include: outstanding research and teaching ability (ability to teach graduate assessment is desirable). Interested candidates should submit electronically a statement of research interests, curriculum vitae, copies of recent publications through the online application found at http://www.psychology. northwestern.edu/people/faculty/ job-opportunities.html. Candidates can wait to have letters of recommendation sent until it becomes clear that we have interest in their application. Inquiries may be addressed to clinicalpsychjobsearch@ northwestern.edu. Our department has a strong commitment to the principle of diversity and especially encourages women and minority applicants to apply. Applications received before November 1, 2014 will receive higher priority. An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. INDIANA ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) invites applications for a tenure-track position in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology at the assistant professor rank to begin August 2015. The Psychology Department has a highly selective, researchintensive master’s program in I/O and is advancing a proposal for a doctoral program in applied organizational psychology. We are seeking an outstanding researcher and teacher to complement the current faculty and contribute to the development and growth of our proposed doctoral program. The area of specialization is open, but candidates with expertise in organizational topics at all levels of analyses (e.g., micro, meso, macro) will be given strongest consideration. Most importantly, we are looking for someone who will be able to 106
maintain a productive research program that is recognized by external funding, demonstrate excellence in teaching and supervising graduate and undergraduate students, and contribute to and participate in the mission of the program and department. The candidate would be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the I/O curriculum and/ or courses within their area of expertise. A reduced initial teaching load and generous startup funds are provided. The department has 27 fulltime faculty, 500 undergraduate majors, and approximately 60 graduate students enrolled in programs in Industrial/Organizational (M.S.), clinical (Ph.D.), and addiction neuroscience (Ph.D.). Additional information about the department and I/O program may be found at www.psych. iupui.edu. IUPUI was ranked 5th by U.S. News and World Report in Upand-Coming National Universities in 2014 and was awarded INSIGHT into Diversity magazine’s Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award in 2012. IUPUI is a campus renowned for service learning and civic engagement as well as life sciences research. It is also Indiana’s premier urban public research institution, with more than 200 degree programs enrolling over 30,000 students (www.iupui. edu). IUPUI is located near downtown Indianapolis, the 12th largest city in the United States. The city uniquely combines the cultural amenities of urban life with the residential qualities of smaller communities, and at the same time is highly affordable. As the major center for industry and government within the state, Indianapolis has a wide variety of research and training sites. Applications from women and from minority candidates are strongly encouraged. IUPUI is committed to the development of a multicultural environment. We seek greater diversity in our faculty and staff to broaden the academic experience and enrich our University. Review of the applications will begin on October 1, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. Applicants should send electronic copies of a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, and up to three representative publications to: [email protected] with I/O Search in the subject line. Also, applicants should arrange to have three letters of reference submitted separately by the writers to the same e-mail address. ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY—PURDUE UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES: The Department of Educational Studies at Purdue University is currently accepting applications for a tenure-track assistant/ associate professor position in its APA-accredited counseling psychology program, beginning fall 2015. We are seeking applicants who can contribute to our college mission of effecting positive change in a diverse society in the areas of discovery,
teaching, and engagement. See the program website at http://www.edst. purdue.edu/counseling_psychology. Responsibilities: Maintain an active research program with a record of, or potential to attract, external funding; teach courses in counseling psychology and supervise practicum; advise domestic and international doctoral students, share program leadership, and provide department, college, and university service. The Purdue Counseling Psychology program is a dynamic program with selective admissions; small, full-time cohorts; and exciting opportunities to partner with local agencies and campus initiatives around diversity, global issues, career development, grief and loss, health disparities, and student access and success. According to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, Purdue University is a very high research activity campus and is the nation’s fourth best place to work in academia (The Scientist, November 2007). Qualifications: Candidates must hold an earned doctorate in Counseling Psychology from an accredited program, demonstrate a history of scholarly productivity, and demonstrate a history of (or potential to attract) external funding. Psychology licensure or license eligibility in the State of Indiana is required. Applicants are expected to demonstrate excellence in both teaching and research. Teaching and research interests are open. Application procedure: Review of applications will begin on October 1, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. Applicants submit one pdf document containing a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and statement of professional goals relevant to position responsibilities, qualifications, and the College of Education strategic plan (http:// www.education.purdue.edu /pdf/ COE_StrategicPlan2009-2014Full Text.pdf). Three letters of recommendation should be e-mailed as separate pdf documents by letter writers. Send materials to: Sandi Olson ([email protected]); address to: M. Carole Pistole, Chair, Counseling Psychology Faculty Search Committee, Department of Educational Studies, BRNG, 100 N. University Street, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098. For questions, contact: M. Carole Pistole, [email protected] (765) 494-9744. A background check is required for employment in this position. Purdue University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer fully committed to achieving a diverse workforce. All individuals, including minorities, women, individuals with disabilities, and protected veterans are encouraged to apply. LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST OPENINGS—VERICARE: Are you looking for rewarding and fulfilling employment? Vericare is a leader in geropsychology, providing multidisciplinary behavioral interventions in long-term care facilities. Our professionals provide a
spectrum of therapies including individual psychotherapy, short-term solution-focused therapy and behavior management. Vericare has opportunities throughout Indiana. Experience with medical/inpatient settings and multi-disciplinary teams preferred. For more information, apply online at www.vericare.com or contact Sanel Lekic at (800) 2578715 ext. 1166. Vericare is offering a $500 “Thank You” referral bonus for any colleagues you refer that get hired. Feel free to call us for details. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR— ADDICTION NEUROSCIENCE: The Department of Psychology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) invites applications for an assistant professor, tenure-track position in addiction neuroscience, supporting psychology and neuroscience graduate and undergraduate programs, to begin no later than August 1, 2015. The program seeks an individual who will expand and complement the addiction neuroscience program’s basic and translational research efforts in alcohol and drug abuse, addictions, and neuroplasticity. We seek applicants who fit well with and expand the program’s strengths in the behavioral, cognitive, neurobiological, genetic, developmental, and therapeutic aspects of addictive behavior, and who bring expertise suited for collaborative initiatives serving the life sciences mission of the IUPUI campus. The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an active, externally-funded research program while being committed to graduate and undergraduate education. All applicants should provide evidence of strong potential to establish a successful independent program of research that is competitive for external funding. Prior teaching experience in psychology and/or neuroscience is preferred. Applicants should send in electronic form a cover letter, curriculum vitae, a detailed description of their research program, a statement of teaching (interests, experience, and philosophy) and three representative pdfs of reprints or preprints to: Dr. Charles Goodlett, Search Committee Chair, at [email protected]. Applicants should arrange to have three letters of reference submitted separately by the writers to the same e-mail address above. Review of the applications will begin October 1, 2014, and continue until the position is filled. The Department of Psychology offers a Ph.D. in addiction neuroscience and an interdisciplinary B.S. in neuroscience (see www.psych.iupui. edu and www.neuroscience.iupui. edu). Fitting with its life-science focus, many faculty in the department have strong links with the School of Medicine on the same campus, and pursue strong, externally funded, programmatic research. The successful applicant will have laboratory space in our brand new, state-of-theart building. The department also offers a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Psychology, and B.A. and B.S. in Psychology. IUPUI is Indiana’s premier urban public research institution, with 22 schools enrolling over 30,000 students. The second largest campus in the Indiana University system, IUPUI is considered a researchintensive institution and is the main campus for state-wide programs in the health and life sciences including the IU School of Medicine (http:// medicine.iu.edu/); the campus accounts for more than 65% of the funded external awards of the Indiana University system. IUPUI is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer with a strong commitment to increasing faculty diversity. We seek to attract a diverse applicant pool for this position, including women and members of minority groups. IOWA IOWA LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST: Psychology Health Group is seeking full-time psychologists to join well established group practice. Child and adult positions available. Both therapy and assessment skills required. Fax (536) 359-4069 or e-mail Dr. Elizabeth Lonning at: [email protected]. KANSAS CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Tenure-track assistant professor position in our APA-accredited, communityoriented, clinical Ph.D. program, beginning August 2015. Applicants must have a Psychology Ph.D. from an APA-accredited clinical program, have completed an APA- or APPIC-accredited internship, and have credentials to be licensed in Kansas. We are seeking a productive clinical researcher who is able to attract external funding, is collegial, and committed to clinical practice and teaching. Salary is competitive, negotiable, and commensurate with qualifications. Application review is ongoing and will continue until the position is filled. Employment offers are contingent upon satisfactory criminal background check required by the Board of Regents. Apply at https://jobs.wichita. edu. Three letters of recommendation should be e-mailed to: Dr. Alex Chaparro (alex.chaparro@ wichita.edu). WSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to excellence through diversity. KANSAS—CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST OR POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW: Acumen Assessments is seeking a full-time licensed or licenseeligible psychologist to join our clinical and forensic practice specializing in the evaluation of licensed professionals in the context of professional health and regulatory/ licensure difficulties. Applicants will have significant training and experience in administering and in-
terpreting personality and cognitive tests and in performing multidisciplinary team-based diagnostic evaluations. Supervision and training available if required for licensure. The position includes the possibility of associate and eventual partnership status in the practice. See our website for practice description: www.acu menassessments.com. Lawrence, KS is a charming and vibrant college town 40 minutes from Kansas City. Forward curriculum vitae and cover letter to dhockett@ acumenassessments.com. Compensation commensurate with level of experience. This position includes various benefits. LOUISIANA ASSISTANT PROFESSOR COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY TENURETRACK FACULTY/ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: The Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at Louisiana Tech University invites applications for a tenure-track position in counseling psychology for an immediate opening. Primary responsibilities include: graduate and undergraduate teaching, establishing a research program that incorporates student mentoring, and clinical supervision. The position is at the assistant professor level, although exceptional candidates may be considered for the rank of associate professor. Previous university teaching experience is preferred. Candidates should hold a doctorate from an APA-accredited counseling psychology program, have completed an APA-accredited internship by the time of hire, and be license-eligible in Louisiana. In addition, the candidate should demonstrate the ability to work effectively with diverse populations and to teach courses that integrate culturally diverse content. See our website for more specific information about the department (www.latech.edu/ education/psychology). Review of applications will begin immediately. Send a letter of application describing research, experience, and teaching interests, curriculum vitae, three letters of recommendation (sent directly from authors) and contact information for references, and up to two samples of scholarship to: Lore M. Dickey, Ph.D. at: [email protected] or P.O. Box 10048, Ruston, LA 71272. Louisiana Tech is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action/ADA Employer and places a high priority on the creation of an environment supportive of ethnic minorities, women, veterans, and persons with disabilities. MARYLAND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, CHILD CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY: Tenure-track, 10-month assistant professor position in child clinical psychology, with a preference expertise in developmental psychopa-
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
thology, in the Psychology Department beginning August 2015. Ph.D. in clinical psychology or related field. Teach undergraduate courses such as introduction to psychology, abnormal psychology and other courses related to youth development and psychopathology. Review of applications begins October 1, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. For detailed information, application instructions, and contact information for this position, visit: http://www.towson.edu/ odeo/employmentatTU/academic_ positions.asp. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Clinical Psychologist needed to provide therapy to residents of nursing homes and assisted living centers. Make your own hours and decide where to go in our network of centers. Fax curriculum vitae to Advanced Behavioral Care at (302) 227-3516 or e-mail Stielperiii@aol. com. ASSISTANT OR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY: Tenure-track, 10-month assistant or associate professor position in counseling psychology in the Psychology Department beginning August 2015. Ph.D. in counseling psychology from an APA-accredited program and license-eligible in the State of Maryland. Teach graduate courses in the counseling psychology program such as group
counseling, research methods, advanced counseling techniques, and practicum and internship with potential to teach undergraduate courses in the clinical area, such as abnormal psychology and systems of psychotherapy. The position will require an active service commitment to the administration of the counseling program, with the potential for a leadership role. Review of applications begins October 1, 2014 and continues until the position is filled. For detailed information, application instructions, and contact information for this position, visit: http://www.towson.edu/ odeo/employmentatTU/academic_ positions.asp. MASSACHUSETTS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology of Boston College invites applications for a tenure-track position as assistant professor in developmental psychology to begin July 1, 2015. For an outstanding candidate, appointment at the associate or full professor level is possible. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research is in the area of cognitive or social-cognitive development or developmental neuroscience. Applicants will be evaluated on their potential to establish a prominent, externally funded research program
Division of Developmental Medicine Boston Children’s Hospital Harvard Medical School Position available: Senior Clinical Research Psychologist The Developmental Medicine Center (DMC) in the Division of Developmental Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital seek a full time clinical research psychologist to work synergistically with our existing faculty and programs, to provide scientific leadership and mentorship to the DMC psychology faculty. This position is partially supported by an endowed Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital. The Developmental Medicine Center (DMC) is one of the largest clinical programs for the diagnosis and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders in the world, and is dedicated to promoting research, teaching, and service innovations designed to improve the lives of children, adolescents, and families. The DMC provides services for children from infancy through adolescence who present with complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders, medical and genetic conditions, intellectual disabilities, and learning, attentional, behavioral and regulatory disorders. The DMC has a large, well-developed clinical research infrastructure and a large portfolio of ongoing extramurally funded studies. There are many opportunities to be involved in research and psychologists are actively involved in the education of psychology postdoctoral fellows, developmental and behavioral pediatric fellows, and medical students. Applicants must possess a Massachusetts health service provider license in psychology prior to assuming the position, and preferably have ten or more years of experience. Successful candidate must be able to qualify as an Associate or Full Professor at Harvard Medical School based on their clinical and research qualifications. Graduates of APA/CPA-accredited doctoral programs and internships are preferred. In addition to an application letter, please enclose a curriculum vitae and arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to the search committee. Send applications to: Search Committee, Attention: Sandra Maislen, Administrative Director, Division of Developmental Medicine, Fegan 10, Boston Children’s Hospital, 300 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA 02115. Boston Children’s Hospital is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We place a strong emphasis on the values of equality and diversity.
107
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
and to excel in teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Applicants should apply at http:// apply.interfolio.com/25022 and provide PDFs of a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research statement, and teaching statement outlining teaching experience and philosophy. Applicants should also arrange to have three letters of reference submitted. These references should be named in the cover letter. All materials must be submitted on or before October 1, 2014 for full consideration. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled. Boston College is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, nation, origin, disability, protected veteran status, or other legally protected status. To learn more about how BC supports diversity and inclusion throughout the university visit the Office for Institutional Diversity at http://www.bc.edu/offices/diversity. LECTURER POSITION, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology at Tufts University is seeking applicants for a full-time, nontenure-track lecturer position in clinical psychology to begin July 1, 2015. Tufts University has a unique undergraduate Clinical Psychology major that culminates in a supervised fieldwork capstone experience in which seniors volunteer in psychiatry or psycholo-
gy clinics and/or mental health/human service facilities in the Boston area. We are looking for a lecturer who can coordinate these supervised fieldwork placements across the Boston area, advise students, and act as the primary instructor for both introductory and advanced undergraduate clinical courses, including abnormal psychology, clinical assessment (e.g., interviewing and neuropsychological methods), statistics, and clinical research methods. The successful candidate will have a doctorate (or be ABD), ideally in clinical psychology, as well as teaching, clinical, and administrative/organizational experience. Teaching load will be six courses per year, with management and administration of the fieldwork placements counting for at least one course. Applicants should submit curriculum vitae including details regarding prior teaching and clinical psychology experience, a statement of teaching philosophy, teaching evaluations, and three letters of recommendation to https://apply. interfolio.com/25451. Statements of clinical research experience are also welcome. Questions about the position may be directed to Natalie Wallace, Department Manager: [email protected]. Review of applications will begin October 15, 2014, and will continue until the position is filled. Tufts University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employ-
Developmental Medicine Center Harvard Medical School The Developmental Medicine Center (DMC) and the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital seeks a full-time or part-time clinical research psychologist with training in differential diagnosis of children to aide in administering an extensive battery of neuropsychological measures for research subjects (including children and adults). Additional responsibilities could include grant writing; the design, conduct and write up of research projects; and the training and supervision of research assistants in a growing research lab. The lab research emphasizes developmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorders and newly described genetic disorders. The DMC is one of the largest clinical programs for the diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders in the US, and is involved in clinical care and research as well as the training of pediatricians and psychologists. The applicants will need to possess a Massachusetts health service provider license in psychology prior to assuming the position. Academic appointments at Harvard Medical School will likely be at either the Instructor or Assistant Professor level. Graduates of APA/CPA-accredited doctoral programs and internships are preferred. In addition to an application letter, please submit a curriculum vitae and arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to the search committee. Send applications to: Ellen Hanson, PhD, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, 1295 Boylston St, Suite 320, Boston, MA 02215 Boston Children’s Hospital is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We place a strong emphasis on the values of equality and diversity.
108
er. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty. Women and members of underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE: The Department of Psychology at Boston College invites applications for a tenure-track position as assistant professor in cognitive neuroscience to begin July 1, 2015. For an outstanding candidate, appointment at the associate or full professor level is possible. We are particularly interested in candidates who seek to understand core issues in cognitive psychology using methods that include the study of neural processes. Applicants will be evaluated on their potential to establish a prominent, externally funded research program and to excel in teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Applicants should apply at http:// apply.interfolio.com/25079 and provide PDFs of a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research statement, and teaching statement outlining teaching experience and philosophy. Applicants should also arrange to have three letters of reference submitted directly by their letter writers, using the “request recommendations” link on Interfolio. These letter writers should be named in the cover letter. All materials must be submitted on or before October 1, 2014, to guarantee full consideration. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled. Boston College is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or other legally protected status. To learn more about how BC supports diversity and inclusion throughout the university visit the Office for Institutional Diversity at http://www.bc.edu/ offices/diversity. NEUROPSYCHIOLOGIST OPPORTUNITY IN THE BEAUTIFUL BERKSHIRES: Berkshire Health Systems is currently seeking a fulltime neuropsychologist, to join a highly integrated clinical collaboration among Psychiatry, Primary Care, and Medical Specialty Services. This is an excellent opportunity to work at the interface of primary care, neurology and psychiatry to become part of a multidisciplinary team providing clinical services. Competitive salary/benefits package, including relocation. Teaching psychiatric residents and medical students, and research opportunities are also possible. Berkshire Medical Center, BHS’s 302-bed community teaching hospital is a major teaching affiliate of the University of Massa chusetts Medical School. With the latest technology and a system-wide electronic health record, BHS is the region’s leading provider of compre-
hensive healthcare services. We understand the importance of balancing work with a healthy personal lifestyle. The Berkshires, a four-season resort community with endless cultural opportunities, offers world renowned music, art, theater, and museums, as well as year round recreational activities from skiing to kayaking. Excellent public and private schools make this an ideal family location with easy access to both Boston and New York City. This is a great opportunity to practice in a beautiful and culturally rich area while being affiliated with a health system with award winning programs, nationally recognized physicians, and world class technology. Apply online at www. berkshirehealthsystems.org. Interested candidates are invited to contact: Antoinette Lentine, Physician Recruiter, Phone: (413) 395-7866. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE: The Department of Psychology at Tufts University is seeking applicants at the assistant professor level for a tenure-track position in Cognitive Neuroscience, broadly defined, to begin September 2015. The successful candidate will have a doctorate and evidence of an active research program capable of supporting extramural funding. Area of specialization is open. In this regard the successful candidate should have research interests that bridge to those of other members of the program. Research interest in language, memory, cognitive aging, attention, vision, emotion/affect, and spatial cognition are examples of those that directly align with research interests in the program. However, other areas will also be considered. Applicants should be willing and able to teach introductory and advanced courses in their interest area, contribute to quantitatively-oriented laboratory courses, and participate in our Ph.D. program. Teaching load will be four courses per year. Applicants should submit curriculum vitae, a research synopsis, a statement of teaching philosophy, teaching evaluations, three letters of recommendation, and copies of up to three representative scholarly works to https:// apply.interfolio.com/25384. Review of applications will begin October 15, 2014, and will continue until the position is filled. Tufts University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty. Women and members of underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology invites applications for a tenure-track position in psychology at the assistant professor level. Successful candidates will demonstrate a commitment to working in a department in which students are broadly diverse with regard to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality,
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES area of expertise. Other courses that would be desirable include introductory psychology, research methods, and statistics. A willingness to support undergraduate and graduate research is expected. Candidates for this position must have earned a Ph.D. degree or equivalent in psychology by September 1, 2015. Applicants should contact: Dr. Pam McAuslan (pmcausla@ umich.edu) or Dr. Robert Hymes ([email protected]) for more information. Application materials (letter of intent, curriculum vitae, statements of teaching and research interests, evidence of teaching performance, and three letters of recommendation) should be sent to: Dr. Pam McAuslan, Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI 48128. Electronic submission of materials is preferred. Review of applications will begin November 1, 2014 and continue until the position has been filled. Background screening: The University of Michigan conducts background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer and may use a third party administrator to conduct background checks. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The University of Michigan Dearborn is a non-discriminatory, Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer.
FACULTY, PSYCHOLOGY, COUNSELING, FULL-TIME, TENURETRACK, FALL 2015: Applicants for this position should be prepared to teach graduate courses in the MS counseling program; maintain an active program of research; demonstrate commitment to infusing multicultural content and social justice principles across all course work, research, supervision, and training; and contribute to and support efforts to seek and maintain accreditation for the MS Counseling Program. Visit at careers-salemstate.icims. com to view the entire posting.
FULLY LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST: Seniors Wellness Group has been the leading provider of geropsychological services to extended care facilities in the State of Michigan for the past 20 years. We currently have opportunities for fulltime and part-time psychologists in Metropolitan Detroit/Southeastern Michigan, as well as Toledo/Northwestern Ohio. Primary duties include: diagnostic evaluations, psychotherapy, and behavior management programming. Full benefits package for full-time staff, competitive salary, and flexible scheduling. Forward curriculum vitae to: Executive Director, 221 S. Main St., Suite 201, Royal Oak, MI 48067; Fax: (248) 398-6459; e-mail: gkotlarz@ swgmi.com. MINNESOTA POSTDOCTURAL FELLOWSHIP IN HUMAN SEXUALITY: The Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota Medical School is seeking two applicants to join a vibrant team of faculty and postdoctoral fellows for a two-year fellowship program. Fellows would provide individual, family, couple and group psychotherapy for a wide range of sexual dysfunctions and problems including: relationship and sexual problems, transgender issues, sexual orientation concerns, compulsive sexual behavior, paraphilias, sexual offending, and HIV
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Fulltime position for a doctoral-level or master’s prepared psychologist, or licensed professional in related field, to practice in a physician-owned multispecialty clinic. Candidate must have experience in providing psychotherapy to adults, adolescents, and children; have training in diagnostic procedures and testing;
and be able to function independently in a busy medical setting. For further information contact: Kari Bredberg, Affiliated Community Medical Centers, at (320) 231-6366, [email protected], www.acmc.com. MISSISSIPPI CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Clinical Psychologist position at Meridian Naval Hospital in Mississippi. Monday–Friday shift with generous amount of paid time off. Contact [email protected] for info. MISSOURI ASSOCIATE/FULL PROFESSOR IN PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY: Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Psychology, is seeking candidates for a tenuretrack endowed professorship position in personality psychology, at either the associate or full professor level. The individual in this position would teach psychology or related courses, conduct research, publish in peer-reviewed journals, advise students, and participate in department governance and university service. A Ph.D. in this field is required. The Saul and Louise Rosenzweig Professorship in personality science was created from the estate of Saul Rozensweig. We seek candidates at the associate or full professor level who are doing outstanding research in the area of
Online Advertising Opportunities It’s all about interactivity with APA! With opportunities for run of site and targeted ad positions you can reach the APA audience in mass or in specific areas. Market your distance learning courses to students by running campaigns on gradPSYCH Online or the Student home page. Reach thousands of decision makers through the Monitor on Psychology home page and articles. Do recruiting or search resumes through PsycCareers or cover the spectrum in Psychology Topics where we have more than 30 special interest areas. For assistance, contact: James Boston Advertising Sales Department (202) 336-5714 E-mail: [email protected] www.PsycCareers.com
MICHIGAN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYTENURE TRACK: The Department of Behavioral Sciences (Psychology Discipline) at the University of Michigan-Dearborn invites applications for a tenure-track, assistant professor position in applied social psychology, to begin September 1, 2015. Evidence of teaching excellence and research potential is required. The ideal candidate will have research expertise in an area that will complement existing faculty and programs (e.g., environmental, health, social justice, psychology of law). Candidates will be expected to teach general courses in social psychology and applied social Psychology, as well as a course in their
counseling. The clinic serves a diverse group of patients (an average of 1,300 visits per month), including children, adolescents, minorities, disabled individuals, and clients with chronic medical or mental health problems. The training will help the fellow develop skills in addressing sexual issues in any clinical setting and conducting psychosexual evaluations. In addition to sex therapy, treatment addresses a wide variety of Axis I and Axis II disorders. This kind of diversity makes for an exciting and stimulating fellowship! Fellows complete a research project that is tailored to their own interests. Applicants must have their Ph.D., Psy.D. or M.D. The fellowship helps individuals gain licensure. The fellowship includes a competitive salary, excellent benefits, and a professional travel stipend. We are looking to fill two positions by fall 2014. Interested candidates should submit a copy of their curriculum vitae and cover letter as soon as possible to the Program in Human Sexuality, attn. Eli Coleman 1300 S. 2nd St., Suite 180, Minneapolis, MN 55454.
APA Monitor on Psychology
sexual orientation, and religion. We are seeking an individual who has completed all of the requisites, including dissertation, for the doctoral degree in clinical, cognitive, or social psychology. We are particularly interested in a candidate with a research program that focuses on issues of diversity. Responsibilities include: establishing an active program of research and publication, teaching two courses per semester, and supervising senior honors research projects. Courses taught will include introductory psychology, statistics and/or methods, and intermediate and upper-level classes in the candidate’s area of specialization. Candidates should submit electronically to https://apply. interfolio.com/25359 a cover letter; curriculum vitae; a statement of teaching philosophy, including evidence of effectiveness in the classroom; a research statement that describes how undergraduates will participate in the candidate’s research program; sample preprints/ reprints; and three confidential letters of recommendation. Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. Candidates who submit their materials by October 1, 2014, will be assured full consideration. Amherst College is an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages women, persons of color, and persons with disabilities to apply.
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
109
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
personality psychology, broadly defined. All areas of personality science will be considered. However, we are especially interested in candidates doing research related to Rosenzweig’s interests, including personality theory and assessment, the study of lives over time, empirical studies of mental processing, or the analysis of lives marked by exceptional creativity. The primary qualification for this position is demonstrated excellence in empirical research and teaching. We especially and strongly encourage applications from women and members of minority groups. Send curriculum vitae, reprints, a short statement of research interests and teaching experience to our website at https://jobs.wustl.edu, and apply to job posting number 28373. Also, arrange for three letters of reference to be e-mailed to: Cheri B. Casanova at: cbcasano@wustl. edu. The Search Committee will begin the formal review process November 1, 2014; applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Washington University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Employment eligibility verification required upon hire. MONTANA CLINICAL DIRECTOR: Duties: responsible for the professional development, supervision and management of seven therapists who facilitate the daily operation of our therapeutic environment for approximately 65 students, as well as communication with parents. Oversee the schools RN and three support staff. Create relationships with the students, run group therapy sessions and keep a positive peer culture. Responsibilities also include: participation in a multidisciplinary management team, and general
oversight of the personal development and parent communication components of our program. Requirements: Ph.D. in related field plus five years experience in a management position. Prefer an outgoing, hands-on director who understands the value of building relationships with students, families, faculty and outside professionals. Monarch School is a Co-ed, creative arts, therapeutic boarding school for student’s grade 9–12, with an emphasis on personal development, a supportive therapeutic milieu, and rigorous academic curriculum. Monarch School is located near the mountain community of Sandpoint, ID a premier resort town with a local ski resort and deep water lake for year round recreation. E-mail resume and cover letter to: sabrina.mcafee@ monarchschool.com. Mail to: Monarch School P.O. Box 1048 Sandpoint, ID 83864. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Clinical Psychologist position available at the Malmstrom AFB, Great Falls, MT. Must have Doctorate and APA-accredited internship. For more information contact Erica Simpson at esimpson@ saratogamed.com. NEW HAMPSHIRE CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS: Seeking two psychologists, full-time or part-time positions. Clients are direct pay and third party reimbursement. Full-time employees eligible for some benefits. Interested applicants must be New Hampshire licensed/eligible. Preference given to experienced child clinicians and psychological assessors. LaMora Psychological Associates is a private group practice with two offices in Nashua and Bedford, New Hampshire. Send curriculum vitae and
St. Louis Public Radio Part-Time Announcer (Weekend Backup/On-Call) Assistant Professor
Brain and Behavior
THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI – ST. LOUIS invites applicants for a tenuretrack assistant professor in BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR conducting human research. Areas of specialization of particular interest are stress physiology, experimental neuropsychology, neuroscience of substance abuse or addiction, or other related areas in the field of behavioral neuroscience. We seek scholars with a strong research program, potential to attract extramural funding for their research, and a commitment to excellent mentoring and teaching. The ability to complement and expand the current strengths of Psychological Sciences faculty is essential. The start date is August 2015; salary is competitive and commensurate with level of experience. Review of applications will begin 15 October 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. More information about the position and the application procedure may be found at the following: umsl.jobs The University of Missouri is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/Americans with Disabilities Act Employer. Women and members of minority groups underrepresented in academia are especially encouraged to apply.
110
cover letter to: Phillips@lamora psych.com. NEW JERSEY THE KOCH CENTER—POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP: The Koch Center, Englewood & Waldwick, New Jersey is hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow–DBT, eating disorder, child/ family therapy experience a plus. E-mail curriculum vitae and cover letter to [email protected]. NEW YORK ASSISTANT OR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, TENURE-TRACK: The Clinical Psychology Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, a scientist-practitioner training program, is seeking candidates with expertise in the areas of child/adolescent psychopathology, treatment, and/or risk and resilience in youth and families to fill a tenure-track Assistant/Associate Professor position. For a full position description, as well as application details, visit
our Faculty Searches page online at www.tc.edu/provost. (•) COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: The Department of Psychology at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, invites applications for a faculty position in cognitive psychology at the assistant professor (tenure-track) rank. Area of research is open, but applicants with interests in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive and/or language development, and quantitative methods are encouraged to apply. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research would make logical connections with our existing strengths, including perception, language, metacognition, comparative cognition, categorization, learning, music cognition, and embodied cognition. Applicants are expected to have an active, visible research program, to publish theoretical and empirical research in top-tier journals, to have a strong potential for extramural research funding, and to contribute to teaching and supervision of both graduate and undergraduate students.
Assistant Professor of Social Psychology Department of Psychology
The Psychology Department at the University of New Hampshire invites applications for a tenure-track position in Social Psychology at the Assistant Professor Level to begin Fall 2015. Area within social psychology is open. We are interested in recruiting someone with a strong background in statistics, specifically structural equation modeling and/or multilevel modeling. Competitive applicants must have a history or strong potential for external funding. Applicants should have a demonstrated commitment to sustaining and advancing the institution’s goals of diversity of students, faculty, and staff. Requirements: Ph.D. in Psychology with a record of teaching and research. The successful applicant will teach courses in specialty areas and in other areas of need in the department. All faculty are expected to teach a course in Introductory Psychology, Statistics, or Research Methods; supervise doctoral and undergraduate student research; and advise undergraduate students. Review of applications begins October, 1st and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants must upload a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statement describing research and teaching interests, reprints, and teaching evaluations to https://jobs.usnh.edu. Three letters from referees are to be sent by mail or email to: Dr. Ellen S. Cohn, Chair of Social Psychology Search Committee, Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, or [email protected]. The University of New Hampshire is a major research institution, providing comprehensive, high-quality undergraduate programs and graduate programs of distinction. UNH is located in Durham on a 188acre campus, 60 miles north of Boston and 8 miles from the Atlantic coast. There is a student enrollment of 13,000 students, with a fulltime faculty of over 600, offering 90 undergraduate and more than 70 graduate programs. The Department offers B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology. The University seeks excellence through diversity among its administrators, faculty, staff, and students. The university prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, veteran status, or marital status, Application by members of all underrepresented groups is encouraged.
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Candidates should have a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Initial review of applications will begin on October 15, 2014, and will continue until the position has been filled. The electronic application process will require you to upload a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and statements of research and teaching interests, and will require you to enter the names and e-mail addresses for three references. Your application will be considered incomplete if this information is missing. Your application is required to be submitted online at https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/ applicants / Central?quick Find = 57251. Questions may be directed via e-mail to Paul Luce, Cognitive Search Committee Chair, at luce@ buffalo.edu. Information about the Department can be found at http:// www.psychology.buffalo.edu/. The University at Buffalo is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Recruiter. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. BROOKLYN COLLEGE TWO TENURE-TRACK POSITIONS— PSYCHOLOGY: The Department of Psychology at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York invites applications for two tenure track positions beginning in August 2015: Assistant/Associate Professor in Industrial/Organizational Psychology: Applicants should have a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology or a closely related discipline. Research area is open. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute teaching, mentoring and program development in the I/O psychology master’s programs offered by the department. Assistant Professor in Quantitative Psychology. Candidates should have a Ph.D. in quantitative psychology or a closely related discipline. Research area is open and all candidates with evidence of exceptional scholarship in research methodology and advanced techniques in data analysis and modeling will be considered. Candidates for both positions should have a strong record of scholarly activity and a commitment to developing a recognized, funded research program. Responsibilities include: undergraduate and graduate teaching, academic program development, and participation in the CUNY Psychology Doctoral Program. Brooklyn College/CUNY is an urban, public institution situated in one of the most dynamic and diverse communities in the country. The Psychology Department is part of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and, in addition to undergraduate B.A. and B.S. degrees, minors and concentrations, it offers master’s-level training in Experimental Psychology, Mental Health Counseling, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology (two programs), and doctoral training through the CUNY Psychology Doctoral program. Successful candidates will join a research-active
department of 35 faculty. The Department has experienced significant recent growth and research activities and experimental facilities of many faculty are supported by internal and external funding. Lab space and start-up funds for research will be provided for successful candidates. Both positions are tenure-track with competitive salary and benefits. The recruitment of diverse faculty is a high priority of both the College and the Department and we encourage applications from members of underrepresented groups. Review of applications will begin on October 16, 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Interested applicants should submit an application online by visiting www. brooklyn.cuny.edu/facultyjobs. Inquiries may be addressed to Chairperson Margaret-Ellen (Mel) Pipe by e-mail at [email protected]. edu. Brooklyn College is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST— PH.D./PSY.D.; NYS LICENSE REQUIRED: Work with older adults in Nassau, Suffolk, Brooklyn, Bronx, Westchester or Fairfield (CT) County at Aging Matters Psychological Services, P.C. Rewarding population, flexible schedule, collegial atmosphere, supportive supervision. Excellent clinical/administrative skills. Send curriculum vitae to: [email protected]. LICENSED PSYCHOLOGISTS— SUBURBAN LONG ISLAND PRIVATE PRACTICE: 1099 status. Supervision provided, if necessary. 40% children. CBT/BEH Interventions. 15–40 sessions per week. Dr. Baumgarten: [email protected]; (631) 669-3735. POSTDOCTORAL PSYCHOLOGY FELLOWSHIP: The VA Center for Integrated Healthcare is pleased to offer a two-year fellowship (75% research/25% clinical) in Primary Care-Mental Health Integration. Positions are available in Buffalo and Syracuse, New York; flexible start July 1–September 1, 2014. Requirements include: U.S. citizenship and completion of doctoral degree from APA-accredited program and internship. Applications due December 1, 2014. Visit our website to find our program description and brochure, as well as detailed application instructions. http://www.mirecc.va.gov/ cih-visn2/fellowship2.asp. NORTH CAROLINA PSYCHOLOGIST: Child and Family Development is a multidisciplinary pediatric private practice in Charlotte established in 1980. We are seeking a psychologist to join our team in providing comprehensive, integrated, and quality services to children and fami-
lies. We offer a flexible, collaborative work environment, strong income potential, and competitive benefits. Assesses and diagnoses cognitive and psychological functioning; develops quality treatment options for children and families; provides consultative services for clients in the community; incorporates inter-disciplinary treatment options and collaborates with edu-
cational specialists and therapists as needed. Requires doctoral degree in psychology, North Carolina license, and two-years of pediatric experience. The successful candidate will be able to work independently, communicate well both orally and in writing, and develop strong collaborative working relationships. Visit our website: www. childandfamilydevelopment.com
ALL TITLES REQUIRE BUDGET APPROVAL TO FILL
Sunmount DDSO is hiring:
Psychologist Must have a Doctoral degree in Psychology which prepares graduates for positions in clinical, forensic, or community health settings. Excellent NYS benefit package. For more information contact: Arlene T. Mace, Office of Human Resources Services Sunmount DSO, 2445 State, Route 30, Tupper Lake, NY 12986 [email protected] • (518) 359-4155 An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
CLINICAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AND ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR Psychology Department ARTS AND SCIENCE The Department of Psychology in Arts and Science at New York University seeks applicants for a full-time, non-tenure track faculty position in the Masters Program starting as early as January 2015 or by Fall 2015, pending budgetary and administrative approval. The ideal candidate will have expertise in research methods and statistical methods, and a subject matter specialization in one of the following areas is preferred: social psychology, consumer behavior, or cognitive psychology. Teaching responsibilities will include graduate-level courses in areas such as Statistics and Research Methods, and content areas specialization courses. Preference will be given to candidates with teaching experience at the graduate level. Administrative duties will include assisting with the recruitment and selection of both MA student applicants and external adjunct faculty, and applying administrative policies and procedures to manage the oversight of student progress through MA degree completion, including thesis research, internship development, and placements. An earned completed Ph.D. in Psychology is required. The successful candidate should have demonstrated administrative experience, a collaborative approach with other faculty, a strong commitment to teaching excellence and the mentoring of students from a diverse global population. Materials submitted must include evidence of scholarly and teaching ability, a letter of interest (including career goals, educational philosophy, research and/or practice areas of interest), curriculum vitae, and sample research or professional work samples demonstrating subject matter expertise. Evidence of educational administrative experience, particularly in an academic setting should be described and documented. These materials, as well as three reference letters, must be submitted to our web-based application system. To apply, see the “Job Openings” link at the NYU Department of Psychology web site, http://www.psych.nyu.edu/.Review of applications will begin September 1st, 2014, and will continue until the position is filled.
NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
111
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
or contact: Jennifer Petrie at (704) 332-4834 or jpetrie@childand familydevelopment.com. CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGIST (FUN) (LICENSED PREFERABLE): Is it possible to find a job where you get paid to have fun? We think so. Thriving child/adolescent practice in Cary, NC. High energy, laughs, and passion! Custody/ divorce expertise is a plus. Flexible schedule. E-mail curriculum vitae. Visit WynnsFamilyPsychology.com for information. PRE-HIRE AND POST-HIRE PSYCH EVALUATIONS: Parttime opportunity for doctoral psychologist, preferably with forensic or police/public safety background. Conduct pre-employment, fitness for duty, and related evaluations for public safety (law, fire, EMS) applicants in our Charlotte (Matthews) office. Appointments are scheduled every other week on Thursdays and Fridays, and range from one to six or more evaluations, paid by the evaluation. Minimal paperwork, no on-call, and a great chance to promote wellness awareness in a public safety workforce. For more info: www.fmrt.com. If interested send curriculum vitae to: elizabeth@ fmrt.org. OHIO PSYCHOLOGIST: Northwest Ohio Psychiatric Hospital is part of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (Ohio MHAS), providing outstanding services to our patients. We offer a competitive salary with excellent benefits, including 10 paid holidays, paid vacation and sick time, and retirement through the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS). Applications for the following position may be submitted through the Ohio
Hiring Management System at www. Ohio.gov. Psychologist provides inpatient psychological services to patients of NOPH, assuring compliance with Medicare, Medicaid and Joint Commission standards. Performs assessments including interviewing, administering, scoring, interpreting, and reporting results of psychological tests; provides psychological interventions to individuals and groups including psychotherapy, behavioral interventions, psychosocial rehabilitation, skills training, and family intervention. Participates in and consults with treatment teams to ensure needs for psychological services for all patients are met; writes treatment plans and works with teams to ensure treatment plans relevant to psychology services are well developed; provides psychological services called for in treatment plans. Independently develops and works with other staff in developing and implementing programs of mental health services; develops structured and integrated programs such as behavior therapy, psychosocial rehabilitation and family programs. There is an opportunity to provide training and supervision of psychology extern or interns who are completing rotations. NOPH and the OhioMHAS provides a collegial working environment that will support you in your career and objectives. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. For more information contact: Mychail Scheramic, Psy.D., MBA, Chief Executive Officer or Thomas Osinowo, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at (419) 381-1881. Application submission online is available at the Ohio Hiring Management System at www.Ohio.gov. CLEVELAND VA POSITIONS: The Psychology Service of the Louis Stokes Cleveland DVA Medical Center encourages diversity among applicants for our staff psychologist vacancies, postdoctoral residencies, and doctoral internships. We would
St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center Licensed or Associate Psychologist The St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center is seeking qualified candidates for a Licensed or Associate Psychologist in the Sex Offender Treatment Program. Excellent NYS Benefits to include medical/dental/vision insurance, paid vacation/holiday/sick time, an excellent retirement plan, and educational and professional leaves. Minimum Qualifications: Licensed Psychologist: NYS license; Associate Psychologist: Doctoral degree in a field of Psychology AND either a one-year, full-time clinical internship or traineeship OR one year of psychology experience in a clinical setting under the supervision of a Licensed Psychologist. Applications are available by calling (315) 541-2179 or send resume to: Personnel Office, St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, 1 Chimney Point Drive, Ogdensburg, NY 13669-2291 or to Heather Cunningham at [email protected]. SLPC is a fully accredited Joint Commission program and an EO/AA Employer
112
like to extend a special invitation to ethnic minority psychologists to apply for staff psychologist openings. Announcements of periodic vacancies for staff positions, as they become available, may be found on www.USAjobs.com. We currently employ 71 psychologists in a wide variety of in- and outpatient, mental health and medical treatment programs emphasizing interdisciplinary care. Brochures describing our four separately APA-accredited Postdoctoral Residency programs (Clinical Psychology, Clinical Neuropsychology, Clinical Health Psychology, and Rehabilitation Psychology) and our APA-accredited Doctoral Internship program may be accessed on our internet site at www.cleveland.va.gov. The application deadline for our 2015–2016 Internship is November 14, 2014. The application deadline for our 2015–2016 Residencies is January 2, 2015.
MARKET DIRECTOR FOR PROGRAMS EXCELLENCE: Mercy Health in Toledo, OH. The Director will lead program implementation and innovation in behavioral services for population health in the market. The Director will oversee the implementation of evidence based practice into inpatient, PHP, IOP and primary care integration. Analysis of data and research will be used to support and inform organizational decision making. The applicant must be license-eligible in Ohio and able to supervise the clinical work of psychologists and social workers. They will demonstrate a proven record of working closely with physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and other mental health professionals to promote best practices in organizational functioning and patient care. Doctorate preferred. Respond with resume promptly to: mmeurer@ health-partners.org or apply at e-mercy.com. An Equal Opportunity Employer.
by helping our students discover theirs Assistant Professor, Clinical Health Psychology The Department of Psychology at Ohio University is seeking to fill a tenure-track position in Clinical Health Psychology at the Assistant Professor level. The successful candidate will demonstrate evidence of programmatic research in any area of health psychology or behavioral medicine. At time of appointment, candidates must have completed a Ph.D. from an APA/CPA accredited clinical program, completed an APA/CPA accredited clinical internship, and intend to pursue clinical licensure in the state of Ohio. Inquiries about the position can be directed to Christopher France, PhD ([email protected]), Chair, Clinical Health Psychology Search Committee, Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, 45701. Research in the Department of Psychology at Ohio University is focused in three areas: health psychology, intervention design and outcome evaluation, and social judgment and behavioral decision making. Reflecting the department’s commitment to collaborative, crossdisciplinary research, these areas cut across both the experimental and clinical psychology programs. Our clinical program is APA accredited, follows the scientist-practitioner model of training, and maintains an onsite training clinic that provides ample opportunities for clinical research. Applicants must apply online at http://www.ohiouniversity jobs.com/postings/10255 and should submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, copies of recent publications, statements of research and teaching interests, and three letters of recommendation. Any materials that cannot be attached as part of the online application should be directed to the search committee chair at the address above. For full consideration, a completed application must be received by November 30, 2014. However, applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled.
Ohio University is committed to creating a respectful and inclusive educational and workplace environment. Ohio University is an equal access/equal opportunity and affirmative action employer with a strong commitment to building and maintaining a diverse workforce. Women, persons of color, persons with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply.
WWW.OHIO.EDU MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
APA M Issue: Due: Size: Cost:
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
OKLAHOMA PRIVATE PRACTICE POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP: General practice postdoc position starting October 2014. $36k, HI/DI, 401k match, paid leave, etc. Possible staff position after. Send curriculum vitae to: [email protected]. OREGON TENURE-LINE POSITION, ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE RANK SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY—UNIVERSITY OF OREGON: The University of Oregon’s College of Education is recruiting applicants for a tenure track faculty position in School Psychology at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor. Preference will be given to applicants who focus on diversity (e.g., race, culture, language, and socioeconomic diversity) and school psychology. Candidates from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. The position start date is September 16, 2015. Review of applications will begin October 1, 2014. For full job posting and application directions, see http://jobs.uoregon.edu/ unclassified.php?id= 4793. The UO is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/Veterans/Disability Institution committed to cultural diversity. TENURE-LINE POSITION, ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE RANK SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY: The University of Oregon’s College of Education is recruiting applicants for a tenure track faculty position in school psychology at the rank of assistant or associate professor. Area of scholarly expertise is open. Candidates from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. The position start date is September 16, 2015. Review of applications will begin October 1, 2014. For full job posting and application directions, see http://jobs.uoregon.edu/ unclassified.php?id=4745. The UO is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/ADA Institution committed to cultural diversity. PENNSYLVANIA OPEN RANK, PSYCHOLOGIST, DEPARTMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY AND WOMEN’S STUDIES: The Department of Psychology at Penn State (http://psych.la.psu. edu/) is recruiting (rank open) for a psychologist to participate in the Psychology-Women’s Studies dual degree graduate program commencing August 2015. The ideal candidate will hold an advanced degree or graduate specialization in women’s studies/gender studies as well as psychology and have a research program within one of our core areas of graduate training (adult or child clinical, social, cognitive, developmental, industrial/organizational). The ideal candidate will
also participate actively in the Department of Women’s Studies, probably as a joint-budgeted faculty with a minority appointment in Women’s Studies. We welcome candidates who can contribute to one or more of the cross-cutting emphases within our department: Culture and Context, Neuroscience/Biological Bases of Behavior, and Applied/Translational Research. Rich opportunities exist for collaboration within the department and across the campus. Applicants who can contribute to an overarching department initiative to enhance diversity and our understanding of diversity are particularly encouraged to apply. Candidates are expected to have a record of excellence in research and teaching, and a history or promise of external funding. Review of applications will begin October 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Candidates should submit a letter of application including concise statements of research and teaching interests, curriculum vitae, and selected (p)reprints at https://app2.ohr. psu.edu /Jobs /External/EVMS2_ External/currentap1.cfm #52132. Arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent electronically to: [email protected] with the subject line of Wm Studies. Questions regarding the application process can be e-mailed to Judy Bowman, [email protected], and questions regarding the position can be sent to Stephanie A. Shields, sashields@ psu.edu. Campus Security Crime Statistics: For more about safety at Penn State, and to review the Annual Security Report which contains information about crime statistics and other safety and security matters, go to http://www.police.psu. edu/clery/, which will also provide you with detail on how to request a hard copy of the Annual Security Report. Penn State is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, and is committed to providing employment opportunities to minorities, women, veterans, disabled individuals, and other protected groups. TWO OPEN RANK, PSYCHOLOGY POSITIONS: The Department of Psychology in the College of the Liberal Arts at The Pennsylvania State University (http://psych.la.psu. edu/) announces two open rank tenure line faculty positions to start in fall 2014. For one position, we seek a candidate with research focused on the dynamics of child maltreatment from a biobehavioral perspective, with a strong preference for candidates who take a developmental psychopathology approach. Possible areas of research include (but are not limited to) the impact of trauma exposure on child, adolescent, or later adult neurobiological, physiological, social-emotional, or cognitive functioning. Also of interest is research on the context of maltreatment, including child and parenting factors, family dynamics, or community risks associated with the per-
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
petration of maltreatment and/or affecting the impact of trauma exposure. For the other position, we seek a candidate engaged in translational research focused on preventive or therapeutic interventions for children, parents, and/or adults affected by child maltreatment. Possible areas of research include (but are not limited to) parent- or family-focused interventions designed to treat or prevent maltreatment, or trauma-focused treatments designed to address and diminish the consequences of being a victim of child maltreatment. Also of interest is research designed to improve the use of evidence-based intervention strategies by service agencies, or to explore innovations in intervention approaches and delivery strategies. We seek faculty members who are interested in and committed to participating in an inter-disciplinary community of scholars at Penn State contributing to the mission of the PSU Network on Child Protection and Well-being. These positions will be supported by the Child Study Center (CSC), which is housed in the Department of Psychology and functions as a university-wide trans-
lational research center, supporting advances in developmental science aimed at promoting positive educational, health, and mental health outcomes for children, adolescents, and families. Strong collaborative links exist with the other centers that form the Network, as well as with the PSU Psychological Clinic and satellite centers in urban areas throughout the state. Candidates should submit a letter of application, statements of research and teaching interests, curriculum vitae, and selected (p)reprints at https://app2.ohr.psu.edu/Jobs/ External/EVMS2_External/current ap1.cfm#51939. Arrange to have at least three letters of recommendation mailed to Child Maltreatment Search Committee, Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. Complete applications will be reviewed as they are received until the position is filled. For more information, contact: Karen Bierman ([email protected]). Campus Security Crime Statistics: For more about safety at Penn State, and to review the Annual Security Report which contains information about crime
PsycCareers A PA’s O n l i n e C a re e r C e n t e r
Job Seekers In-depth career services, professional development, interview and job searching tips Jobs at all levels: fellowships, internships, early career and experienced Work in a wide range of psychology disciplines, international jobs, and part-time opportunities Opportunities in practice, at world renowned institutions, and with industry leaders
Employers Access to the largest database of psychology candidates Tools to help you recruit and retain the best employees Resources and information on hiring, benefits and healthy workplace Salary and employment surveys, flexible schedules, psychologically healthy workplace awards
Visit www.PsycCareers.com and get connected to the premier career resource for psychologists and employers.
113
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
statistics and other safety and security matters, go to: http://www. police.psu.edu/clery/, which will also provide you with detail on how to request a hard copy of the Annual Security Report. Penn State is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, and is committed to providing employment opportunities to minorities, women, veterans, disabled individuals, and other protected groups. POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY—UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: The Department of Psychology of the University of Pennsylvania intends to make an appointment in the area of positive psychology. Our primary focus is at the junior, assistant professor level, but we will consider candidates at the level of associate professor without tenure. The research interests of the successful candidate should contribute to the agenda of the Positive Psychology Center, but preference will be given to candidates whose interests also strengthen our programs in clinical, developmental, evolutionary, health, neuroscience, personality or social psychology. Candidates must provide evidence of excellence in research and teaching. Applications are to be submitted online at http://facultysearches. provost.upenn.edu /postings /273 and include curriculum vitae, statements of research and teaching interests, and the names of
three referees whom we may contact for an appraisal. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. The Department of Psychology is strongly committed to Penn’s Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence and to creating a more diverse faculty (for more information see: http://www.upenn.edu /almanac / volumes /v58 /n02 /diversityplan. html). The University of Pennsylvania is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Minorities/Women/Individuals with disabilities/Protected Veterans are encouraged to apply. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE: The Psychology Department of Villanova University invites applications for a tenure-track position (assistant professor), starting August 2015, in the area of behavioral neuroscience. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in psychology or a related discipline. Particular attention will be paid to candidates using molecular or genomic techniques to understand behavior. Candidates should have a strong publication record, the ability to generate a high-quality research program, and a commitment to teaching in both the graduate psychology (M.S.) program and the undergraduate programs in psychology and in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. Responsibilities include: direction of master’s theses
in our rigorous, research-oriented program and teaching courses related to one’s specialty, as well as more general courses, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. For more information, see http://www.villanova. edu/artsci/psychology. Applications must be submitted at https://jobs. villanova.edu/, and must include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, other supporting documents, and three letters of recommendation as detailed at the website. Review of applications will begin on October 1, 2014, and continue until the position is filled. The search committee can be contacted by e-mail at psychsearch@ villanova.edu or by mail at the following address: Chairperson, Search Committee, Psychology Department, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Ave., Villanova, PA 19085. Villanova University is a Catholic University sponsored by the Augustinian Order. Diversity and inclusion have been and will continue to be an integral component of Villanova University’s mission. The University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and seeks candidates who understand, respect and can contribute to the University’s mission and values. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: The Department of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College invites applications for a full-time, tenuretrack, beginning or advanced assistant professor position in develop-
mental psychology to start August 1, 2015. Area of specialization in developmental psychology is open but candidates with interests in social/cultural or a biological/neuroscience focus are especially encouraged to apply. The teaching responsibilities include: developmental psychology, a departmental service course (e.g., introductory psychology, statistics, or senior seminar), a seminar and lab course in the candidate’s area of expertise, and supervision of senior research. An essential aspect of the position is an independent research program that can meaningfully incorporate undergraduates. We seek a broadly trained colleague who can contribute to the department’s connections with other departments and interdisciplinary initiatives. Candidates must have the Ph.D. in hand by the start date. Applicants should submit as single pdf documents a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and a statement of teaching and research interests (including how undergraduate students will be involved in research) by October 10, 2014 to the Psychology Department Search Committee via Interfolio at: http://apply. interfolio.com/25198. Applicants should arrange for three letters of recommendation to be submitted via Interfolio to the Psychology Department Search Committee. Applications received by October 10, 2014 will receive full consid-
POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP IN CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY WESTERN PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE AND CLINIC UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF MEDICINE At Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, we have available positions in a 2-year, NIMH-funded post-doctoral training program in clinical research in child and adolescent psychiatry. Fellows have an opportunity to work with productive faculty interested in providing mentorship in one of the strongest clinical and research child psychiatry programs in the United States. We seek creative and energetic individuals with a doctorate in a mental-health related discipline (MD or PhD) who are interested in developing an independent line of clinical research. Our faculty provides mentorship in a broad array of approaches and methods, including genetics and fMRI, clinical trials, and services research that encompasses the range of major psychiatric disorders encountered in child and adolescent psychiatry. A large proportion of our graduates are successful in securing external funding and many have gone on to become outstanding leaders in child mental health research. Our Clinical Research Training in Child Psychiatry program provides the opportunity to work and study with some of the country’s leading clinical researchers. Potential mentors include:
Boris Birmaher, M.D. – Mood & Anxiety Disorders David Brent, M.D.- Mood & Anxiety Disorders and Suicidal Behavior Bernie Devlin, Ph.D. – Psychiatric Genetics Patricia Documet, M.D., Dr.P.H. – Healthcare Disparities Erika Forbes, Ph.D. – Mood & Substance Abuse Disorders Tina Goldstein, Ph.D. – Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Amy Herschell, Ph.D. – Treatment Implementation & Dissemination Alison Hipwell, Ph.D. – Disruptive and Depressive Disorders Satish Iyengar, Ph.D. – Statistics, Meta-Analysis David Kolko, Ph.D. – Conduct Disorders Maria Kovacs, Ph.D. – Child Depression and Predictors of Onset Beatriz Luna, Ph.D. – fMRI Michael Marshal, Ph.D. – LGBT Youth Nancy Minshew, M.D. – Autism
Brooke Molina, Ph.D. – ADHD Dustin Pardini, Ph.D. – Disruptive Disorders Bambang Parmanto, Ph.D. – Chronic Illness and Development of
Health-Oriented Phone Apps Mary Phillips, M.D., Ph.D. – Neuroimaging for Mood and Anxiety Disorders Brian Primack, M.D., Ph.D. – Substance Abuse and Mood Disorders Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. – Neuropsychology and Research Ethics Neal Ryan, M.D. – Mood & Anxiety Disorders Greg Siegle, PhD. – Mood & Anxiety Disorders Jennifer Silk, Ph.D. – Pediatric Mood Disorders Brad Stein, M.D. – Quality of Care for Pediatric Psychopharmacology Eva Szigethy, M.D., Ph.D. – Treatment of Depression in Inflammatory Bowel Disease
US citizenship or a green card is required to be eligible for consideration. Please submit vita and three letters of recommendation to:
Candice L. Biernesser, LSW,MPH, Program Administrator Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 312 Bellefield Towers 100 N. Bellefield Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412 586-9064 ● [email protected] For more information or to apply online, please visit our website at www.childpsychresearch.com
114
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
eration. Located in metropolitan Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr College is a distinguished liberal arts college for women and has strong consortial relationships with Haverford College, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr has a student body of 1,300 undergraduates, as well as 350 graduate students in coeducational graduate programs in social work, humanities and science. We are a diverse and international community of faculty, students and staff who share an intense commitment to intellectual inquiry and a desire to make meaningful contributions to the world. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching and is committed to social justice and inclusion in the classroom and in the community at large. Bryn Mawr College is an Equal Opportunity Employer; candidates from underrepresented groups and women are especially encouraged to apply.
full-time psychologist to work with our pain patients. Primary duties include: psychological evaluations to determine risks for long-term opiate use and any psychological variables that might interfere with utilization of a dorsal column stimulator or intrathecal pain pump. In addition, behavioral health counseling is utilized to help patients develop nonpharmacological strategies and coping skills for chronic pain and other health-related issues. The pain psychology candidate would need to have a Ph.D. in psychology and be licensed or eligible for licensure in Tennessee as a minimal requirement. Prefer psychologists who have experience in pain management and behavioral health. Salary commensurate with training and experience. Send curriculum vitae to: Mark Cooper, Ph.D., Director of Psychological Services, 101 MedTech Pky, Suite 200, Johnson City, TN 37604, or e-mail tbays@painmed associates.com.
TENNESSEE LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST OPENINGS—VERICARE: Are you looking for rewarding and fulfilling employment? Vericare is a leader in geropsychology, providing multidisciplinary behavioral interventions in long-term care facilities. Our professionals provide a spectrum of therapies including individual psychotherapy, short-term solution-focused therapy and behavior management. Vericare has opportunities throughout Tennessee. Experience with medical/inpatient settings and multidisciplinary teams preferred. For more information, apply online at www. vericare.com or contact: Sanel Lekic at (800) 257-8715 ext. 1166. Vericare is offering a $500 “Thank You” referral bonus for any colleagues you refer that get hired. Feel free to call us for details.
TEXAS PSYCHOLOGIST, PROVISIONALLY LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST: The Ludden Group, P.C. has over 25 years of experience and is a Christian Psychology and Counseling Group Private Practice of independent contractors. Psychological assessments, office and nursing home testing and psychotherapy; Rockwall, Dallas, Texas area. We are seeking students/interns that are on a psychology/counseling career path. Part-time and full-time positions available. Salaries are on a contract basis. Apply by faxing your curriculum vitae to (972) 771-4505 or e-mail lindaluddensivils@gmail. com.
PRIVATE PRACTICE OPPORTUNITY: Opportunity to join a private practice in Murfreesboro TN, located within the second fast growing county in the state. Priority given to licensed psychologist who is already on insurance panels. Interest in pediatric psychologist is desired. Office space with support services are provided in house with excellent office staff to schedule, credential, bill insurance and manage charts. Willingness to become part of the community and to develop community referral sources is a must for this position. This is an independent contractor position. You make your own hours. Contact: Dr. Mathis at [email protected]. PAIN PSYCHOLOGIST: Pain Medicine Associates is a multidisciplinary pain program in East Tennessee. We offer a wide range of pain management services, including both traditional and complementary treatment programs. Currently we are searching for another
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST— MULTIPLE LOCATIONS: Catalyst Professional Services, Inc. is seeking Clinical Psychologists to provide services at Naval Hospital Corpus Christi, TX and Naval Hospital Jacksonville, FL. Great opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who serve our country! Competitive pay and benefits, with a great PTO plan! Call (301) 518-3490 or e-mail megan.heath@catalystpsi. com. LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST OPENINGS—VERICARE: Are you looking for rewarding and fulfilling employment? Vericare is a leader in geropsychology, providing multidisciplinary behavioral interventions in long-term care facilities. Our professionals provide a spectrum of therapies including individual psychotherapy, short-term solution-focused therapy and behavior management. Vericare has opportunities throughout Texas. Experience with medical/inpatient settings and multi-disciplinary teams preferred. For more information, apply online at www.vericare.com or contact Sanel Lekic at (800) 257-8715 ext.
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
1166. Vericare is offering a $500 “Thank You” referral bonus for any colleagues you refer that get hired. Feel free to call us for details. TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY—FACULTY SEARCH MULTIPLE POSITIONS: The Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University is undergoing an exciting period of expansion. As part of this expansion, we have begun four searches at the assistant professor rank to start in the fall 2015. The current hiring initiative is designed to enhance translational work within our Department’s core and emerging research strengths, which include neuroscience, individual differences, affective science and diversity science. Affective Science (two positions): To enhance our affective science research cluster, we have two positions. The first is for candidates with expertise in functional neuroimaging. The University has created a state of the art research facility consisting of both an fMRI and PET scanner to support recruitment for this hiring initiative. The second position is for a candidate whose research incorporates neuroscience and other physiological techniques in human or animal models of affect (e.g., electroencephalography, functional genomics, functional neuroimaging, pharmaco- or optogenetic methods, transcranial stimulation) and/or to those candidates whose affective science research builds on departmental strengths in the study of individual differences. For both positions, the specific research area is focused on emotion regulation, broadly speaking. Diversity Science (one position): to enhance our existing translational core of researchers focused on issues of diversity and well-being, we have one position. This position is for a candidate whose work is informed by novel conceptual and methodological perspectives to understanding relationships between structural, cultural, and psychological factors that promote (or impede) well-being and/or candidates who investigate intersectionality. Specific area of specialty for the current position is open, within the broad category of diversity science. fMRI (one position): to strengthen our existing cadre of researchers using fMRI technology, we have one position. This position is for an individual who has an established line of experimental fMRI research, and who has also demonstrated expertise in developing or utilizing innovative quantitative methods for collecting and analyzing fMRI data. The specific area of research is open, although we are interested in a candidate who can enhance our existing strengths in one or more of the following areas: learning and memory, pain, development and aging, addiction, personality, criminality, and neuroeconomics. All four positions should be able to contribute to one or more of our graduate programs in Cognitive, Clinical, Developmental, Industrial/Organizations, Neuroscience, and Social psychology. The search committee will be-
gin reviewing applicants starting September 15, 2014 and will continue to review new applications until the position is filled. The individual job ads for each of the aforementioned positions, along with details for applying can be found at http://psychology.tamu.edu. Texas A&M is located in the twin cities of Bryan and College Station, with a population of more than 170,000, and is conveniently located in a triangle formed by Dallas, Houston and Austin. The area boasts a low cost of living, great schools, moderate winters, and a vibrant, growing community. Texas A&M has more than 50,000 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled. Texas A&M University is an Equal Opportunity Employer and has a policy of being responsive to the needs of dual-career couples. UTAH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY/NEUROSCIENCE: The Psychology Department at Weber State University (http://weber.edu/psychology) invites applications for a tenure-track position in biological psychology/ neuroscience at the assistant professor level. The successful candidate will demonstrate a willingness and interest to teach introductory psychology and courses in our biological area (biopsychology, drugs and behavior, and perception), as well as courses in the neuroscience program (see http://weber.edu/ neuroscience). We seek a candidate with a strong commitment to undergraduate education and an interest in involving students in research, as well as willingness to teach other Psychology core courses. ABDs will be considered. Preference will be given to candidates with a Ph.D. by the appointment date of July 1, 2015. Weber State University is located in Ogden, UT, 35 miles north of Salt Lake City, at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. The area is rich in yearround outdoor recreational activities, with Snowbasin (Olympic skiing venue) less than 20 minutes away. The salary is competitive with excellent benefits. Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants must complete the online faculty/staff data form at jobs.weber.edu/applicants/ Central?quickFind=58817 and attach a letter of application, statements describing teaching interests, teaching philosophy, and research interests, reprints/preprints, curriculum vitae, graduate transcripts, evidence of teaching excellence (e.g., course evaluations). Additionally, letters of recommendation must be sent by the letter writer to the Psychology Department Search Committee, c/o Department of Psychology, Weber State University, 1299 Edvalson St. Department 1202, Ogden Utah 84408-1202. An Equal Opportunity Employer/Minorities/Females/Vet/ Disability. 115
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
VERMONT THE SOUTHERN VERMONT DOCTORAL INTERNSHIP IN PSYCHOLOGY: The Southern Vermont Doctoral Internship in Psychology, formerly known as the Southwestern Vermont Psychology Consortium, is recruiting candidates for the 2015–2016 internship year. The SVDIP is a one-year, 2000-hour internship based at The Memory Clinic in Bennington, VT that meets all requirements for APPIC membership and is in the process of applying for APA-accreditation. Candidates must demonstrate interest in neuropsychological assessment and intervention in an older adult population and will have completed at least one year-long practicum or externship dedicated to the administration, scoring, and interpretation of neuropsychological tests. Ideal candidates will have completed a preliminary dissertation defense
prior to the start date of the internship (September 1, 2015). A competitive stipend of $30,000 will be offered, as well as opportunities for research and professional development. Individuals who identify as members of disadvantaged ethnic or cultural groups are strongly encouraged to apply. Applications must be submitted via the APPIC website by December 1, 2014. Contact: [email protected] for information.
VIRGINIA CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: The Cognitive Behavior Therapy Center seeks two clinical psychologists. Must be trained in CBT and licenseeligible in Virginia. Growing private practice. Retirement plan and partnership opportunity. Contact: [email protected].
HIV PREVENTION RESEARCH FACULTY RECRUITMENT Center for AIDS Intervention Research (CAIR) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin The Center for AIDS Intervention Research (CAIR) at the Medical College of Wisconsin is recruiting for two faculty investigators in HIV prevention research. Although interest areas are open, we particularly seek applications from candidates with established and successful lines of research in the areas of: (1) HIV medication adherence and linkage to care; (2) integrated biomedical, behavioral, and social approaches to HIV prevention; (3) use of social media and technology in HIV prevention and adherence interventions; or (4) qualitative social science research in HIV/AIDS. Positions will carry tenure-track faculty appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine. Rank is open, but we prefer candidates with well-established and productive records of research and extramural funding, and we will appoint at an advanced academic rank for an individual with an exceptional record. CAIR is an established, multidisciplinary research center which values diversity and has the scientific missions of developing and evaluating high-impact HIV prevention interventions, carrying out interventions to improve the health of persons living with HIV, and disseminating Center findings to providers. The Medical College of Wisconsin is located in Milwaukee (85 miles north of Chicago), which has a diverse metropolitan population of 1.2 million, a high Midwestern quality of life, and a reasonable cost of living.
Interested persons should submit their CV and also a detailed cover letter to: Jeffrey A. Kelly, Ph.D. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Director, Center for AIDS Intervention Research (CAIR) Medical College of Wisconsin 2071 North Summit Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53202 email: [email protected] An Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer, M/F/D/V
116
LICENSED CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Full-time licensed clinical psychologist position available with growing private practice in Alexandria, VA to provide therapy and testing. Spanish speaking a plus. Flexible schedule. Contact nathalie@ potomaccenter-inc.com. FULL-TIME ASSISTANT/ ASSO CIATE PROFESSOR IN TENURE-TRACK FACULTY POSITION IN PSYCHOLOGY: Eastern Mennonite University announces a full-time assistant or associate professor in tenure-track faculty position in psychology beginning mid-August 2015. Ph.D. in clinical psychology with research base or in social psychology; teaching experience in psychology; scholarly research, and additional generalist qualifications desirable. Teaching responsibilities (typically four courses per semester) include all levels of undergraduate courses and the possibility of teaching at the graduate level in the Biomedicine Program. Preference will be given to those with teaching expertise in abnormal psychology, testing and assessment, and neuropsychology. Other courses will be determined based on need and candidate preference. Applicants must have a strong commitment to high quality undergraduate teaching and be enthusiastic about mentoring and supervising internships, directing undergraduate research projects, and advising undergraduates. Engagement in ongoing scholarly activity and departmental and university service expected. Nine-month contract, salary determined by education and experience. EMU uses a tenure-with-review contract system. Review begins immediately. Send letter of application, curriculum vitae, transcripts (unofficial acceptable), and three letters of reference to: Dr. Deirdre Smeltzer, Vice President & Undergraduate Academic Dean, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA 22802. E-mail ugdean@ emu.edu; http://www.emu.edu. Applicants will be acknowledged by letter or email. Applicants will be asked to respond to questions specific to EMU’s mission after the initial inquiry. EMU reserves the right to fill the position at any time or keep the position open. An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. WASHINGTON TWO POSITIONS—BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE/HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY: Northwest Neurobehavioral Institute is a thriving private practice in Spokane, WA seeking a Behavioral Medicine specialist and a Neuropsychologist (with two year post doc). We can quickly build your practice. Earning potential in first year is $90,000–$100,000. Post docs encouraged to apply. We offer health benefits, retirement acct, flexible schedule, lap top, full office support for scheduling, billing, and insurance company creden-
tialing. Supportive, collegial environment with regular clinical consultation. Contact: dr.guzzardo@ spokanebrain.com. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, TENURETRACK—SEATTLE PACIFIC UNIVERSITY: Opening for an 11-month, full-time, tenure-track faculty position at the rank of assistant professor in the APA-accredited clinical psychology Ph.D. program. This position begins September 2015. We seek an individual with a specialty in clinical health psychology. Responsibilities: graduate-level teaching; establishing a research team to facilitate graduate-student research; research supervision; and clinical consultation and supervision. Required qualifications: doctorate in clinical psychology and predoctoral internship from APA-accredited programs by the appointment date. License eligibility in Washington State. As a Christian University, SPU is clearly evangelical, genuinely ecumenical and distinctively Wesleyan, and seeks applicants who are committed to its Christian mission. Women and ethnic minorities are especially encouraged to apply. Application deadline: November 1, 2014. The University reserves the right to fill the position before the deadline or to extend the deadline as circumstances may warrant. http://www.spu.edu/depts/aao/ facultyvacancies.asp Address inquiries to: David G. Stewart, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Clinical Psychology, Seattle Pacific University, 3307 Third Ave. W, Suite 107, Seattle, WA 98119-1922, (206) 2812660, E-mail: [email protected]. Information about SPU http://www. spu.edu/. WEST VIRGINIA PSYCHOLOGY FACULTY: The West Virginia University School of Medicine Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry has an immediate opening for a faculty psychologist in their Division of Public Sector Psychiatry at William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital in Weston, WV. For details see: http://www. hsc.wvu.edu /som / Recr uitment / Faculty/Main-Campus/BehavioralMedicine/BMED-19-PsychologistWSJH.aspx. WVU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer /M/W/D/V, and is the recipient of an NSF ADVANCE award for gender equity. WISCONSIN PEDIATRIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Our Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Center has a full-time opening-beginning immediately. The Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Center staff work with a range of presenting problems including adjustment to health conditions, general child
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
and adolescent psychology/psychiatry, and child maltreatment. We are looking to fill the following position: Pediatric Psychologist that Provides child health psychology services focusing on GI and feeding disorders. This position provides the opportunity to work in a thriving multidisciplinary feeding clinic with ongoing participation in both clinical and research arenas. Opportunities for inpatient consultation and liaison outside of feeding are also possible. Specialized training, including fellowship in pediatric psychology is desirable. Although this is a primarily clinical position, opportunities for research and teaching exist. The positions require a Ph.D. or Psy.D. in clinical child psychology (including an APA-accredited internship) and a Wisconsin license (or eligibility). Specialized training in child clinical psychology required. For more information, contact: Elizabeth Fischer, Ph.D. at (414) 266-6149 or e-mail at [email protected]. Interested applicants should forward curriculum vitae and three letters of reference to: Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin (attention Elizabeth Fischer, Ph.D.), PO Box 1997, B510, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1997. LEAD THERAPIST: Achieving Collaborative Treatment (ACT) is a provider of behavioral therapy services for children on the autism spectrum. We are a young company based in Madison, WI and are committed to improving services and quality of life for our clients and their families. ACT is seeking a creative and motivated Licensed Psychologist or Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) to join our treatment team. Position offers a flexible schedule, competitive pay, a great benefit package, and opportunity to be part of a growing company. Qualifications: Ph.D. or master’s degree from APA-accredited program. BCBA or licensed/license-eligible psychologist in Wisconsin with experience in assessment and autism treatment. 1500 or more hours of training or supervised experience in the practice and implementation of empirically driven, behaviorally-based, therapy models consistent with research and best practice with individuals on the autism spectrum. Description: supervision of a caseload of clients and their therapeutic teams, Implementation of case specific therapeutic goals, creating and participating in on-going staff training, conduct FBA’s and assist in the creation of Behavioral Plans of Support, generating Treatment Plans and evaluations, provide treatment related training to the family. To apply, submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, three letters of reference to: ACT PO, 6400 Gisholt Drive Madison, WI 53713. To request additional information, contact: ACT at (608) 271-7053 or e-mail Matt Nonemacher matt.nonemacher@ actreatment.com
WYOMING PSYCHOLOGIST: University Counseling Center at the University of Wyoming has an opening for a Psychologist. Background investigations are conducted on all prospective employees. Application deadline is September 21, 2014 at 11:59 pm. Obtain more information and apply at: http://uwyo.edu/hr/. University of Wyoming is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. CANADA YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH UNIT DIRECTOR: The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR), affiliated with the University of Ottawa, invites applications for a leadership position in the IMHR’s Youth Mental Health Research Unit. This full-time leadership position offers the exciting opportunity to develop a signature research program at the world-class facilities at the IMHR, and to provide leadership in building interdisciplinary partnerships across The Royal, CHEO (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario), the Ottawa Hospital, the University of Ottawa and other stakeholders. The IMHR is seeking an individual with a reputation for international excellence in research on mental health disorders focused on transitional youth (age 15–25). The incumbent should hold an M.D., Ph.D., or M.D./Ph.D., with an academic affiliation (associate professor level or higher) and have an academic record of distinction (i.e. high impact publications and grant capture). He/she should be prepared to develop a compelling vision of a multidisciplinary and collaborative Youth mental health research environment in Ottawa. Ottawa, Canada’s capital has been described as one of the most beautiful capitals in the world and one of the best places to live in Canada. Ottawa has the second highest quality of living of any city in the Americas, and 14th highest in the world according to the “Mercer Human Resource Consulting Quality of Living Survey.” It is also considered the fourth cleanest city in the world by Forbes magazine. Ottawa is a bilingual, culturally rich city with a metropolitan population of about one million people, yet it still maintains the accessibility and atmosphere of a smaller city. Less than an hour’s drive from the American border, Ottawa/Gatineau is centrally located with access to Montreal and Toronto. The following would be seen as favorable: Clinical research focused on early detection, intervention and/or prevention of mental health disorders, Depression and related comorbidities (e.g. substance use disorders), Suicide research (prevention, intervention and ideation), Research involving Brain imaging and Bilingualism (English/French). With a growing research institute currently com-
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
prised of over 30 active researchers and over 110 trainees, the IMHR continually strives to promote, support, integrate and disseminate basic and clinical research knowledge through collaboration efforts and networks. Examples of such efforts include the successful launch of The Royal’s one-of-a-kind Depression Research Centre (DRC), the “twinning” of The Royal’s DRC with the Michigan Depression Centre and the IMHR’s leadership role in the development and launch of the Canadian Depression Research and Intervention Network (CDRIN). Applicants are asked to submit curriculum vitae and a vision statement of their research and teaching/training interests, along with the names of three references to: Search and Selection Committee Chair c/o Chantale Hendley, 5433-1145 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1Z 7K4, or by e-mail at chantale.hendley@ theroyal.ca. For any inquiries about the position, contact Chantale Hendley at (613) 722-6521 ext. 6551. Review of applications is ongoing and will continue until such a time as the position is filled. An acknowledgement of receipt will be provided to each applicant. FACULTY POSITION IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY—UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA: Located in Victoria, British Columbia close to Vancouver and Seattle, the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the assistant professor level in clinical psychology. The successful candidate’s areas of specialty will fall within the field of clinical psychology. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research and clinical skills incorporate a behavioral perspective, broadly defined, including normal and abnormal behavioural processes across the lifespan, as well as behaviorally-based assessment and intervention approaches. The position will contribute to our CPA- and APA-accredited graduate program in clinical psychology. The position begins on July 1, 2015. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from a CPA- or APAaccredited program, and must have completed a 12-month CPA- or APA-accredited internship. Applicants should be eligible for registration as a Psychologist in British Columbia. If the candidate is not presently registered, they will be required to apply for registration as soon as possible after they are hired, as registration in BC is a requirement for the position. We are seeking candidates with the ability to actively contribute to the operation of our Clinical Psychology Graduate Program. Candidates must demonstrate a strong research trajectory as evidenced by publications and grant funding appropriate to level of experience. Applicants must also present evidence for potential excellence in teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Candidates must
have an interest and ability to contribute to teaching graduate courses in some of the following areas: evidence-based behavioral interventions, child and adolescent therapy, clinical assessment, and/or psychometrics. Duties will include: maintaining a successful program of research (as evidenced by publications and external grant support), teaching and student supervision at the graduate and undergraduate levels, clinical supervision, and contributions to the collegiality, reputation, and dayto-day operation of the graduate program in clinical psychology, Department, and University. In addition to excellence in Clinical Psychology, the Department of Psychology offers opportunities for research collaborations with colleagues in the Lifespan Development Program (http:// web.uvic.ca/psyc/), the Cognition and Brain Sciences Program (http:// web.uvic.ca/psyc/cognitive/main. html), and the University’s Centre for Youth and Society (www.youth. society.uvic.ca), Centre on Aging (www.coag.uvic.ca), Centre for Addictions Research of BC (www. carbc.ca), and CanAssist (www. canassist.ca). Ongoing areas of research interest within the Department of Psychology include: Addictions, Adolescent Risk and Resilience, Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Culture and Development, Executive Functions, Family Processes and Transitions, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, Interpersonal Violence, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Self-Regulation. To apply, send the following application materials: curriculum vitae (including citizenship status), a description of research and teaching experience and plans, copies of relevant scholarly publications, available evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three letters of reference. Your application should be addressed as follows: Chair, Clinical Psychology Search Committee Department of Psychology University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 2Y2. Application review will begin on October 15, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. The University of Victoria is an equity employer and encourages applications from women, persons with disabilities, visible minorities, Aboriginal Peoples, people of all sexual orientations and genders, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of the University. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. The University of Victoria, one of Canada’s leading universities, provides students and faculty with a rich learning environment. Widely recognized for leadership in research, inspired teaching, and community involvement, UVic provides innovative programs, real-life experiences and a diverse and welcoming West Coast environment. 117
PsycCareers.com
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
TENURE-TRACK POSITION IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The University of Regina is a vibrant and growing campus in a province with a booming economy (Saskatchewan has the lowest rate of unemployment in Canada). As part of a faculty renewal initiative in the liberal arts, the Department of Psychology at the University of Regina is seeking applications for a tenure-track position in clinical psychology at the rank of Assistant Professor. Area of clinical research specialization is open. Anticipated date of commencement is July 1, 2015 or September 1, 2015, depending on the availability of the successful candidate. Applicants should have a PhD in clinical psychology
from a CPA- or APA-accredited program (or be in a position to complete all Ph.D. requirements no later than six months from the date of appointment). Also, applicants should be registered as a Psychologist in Saskatchewan or apply for provisional registration as soon as possible after they are hired. The successful candidate should show clear promise of excellence in research, teaching, and clinical work. Duties of the successful candidate will include: teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level, honors and graduate thesis supervision, clinical supervision, and participation in departmental activities. The successful candidate is expected to develop an independent
New Zealand! Thinking of a positive career and lifestyle change? We are recruiting licensed and experienced clinical psychologists for Community Mental Health Centres and our Department of Corrections to come to New Zealand to live and work for a minimum of two years. Are you at the point in your life where you’re ready for a new adventure? If yes, then email your CV to us at [email protected] for a prompt reply and more information on the exciting career opportunities we have on offer. Look us up in the Employers Section at APA 2014 Convention in Washington, DC for a face-to-face meeting with an Align representative.
program of research in clinical psychology that would be eligible for Tri-Council and/or Canada Foundation for Innovation funding. The program in Clinical Psychology at the University of Regina is committed to the scientist-practitioner model and is accredited by the Canadian Psychological Association. The Department maintains good relations with a number of health care, research, and other educational facilities both within Regina and throughout the province. The Psychology Department has recently received major funding to build a new state-of-the-art Psychology Training Clinic due to open this fall. Review of applications will begin in September 2014 and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants must electronically submit via http://www.uregina.ca/hr/ careers the following documents: a covering letter providing a statement of research and teaching activities, a statement of clinical strengths and interests, a current curriculum vita, evidence of teaching effectiveness, reprints or preprints, course outlines (if available), and unofficial transcripts. Candidates must also arrange for three (3) current letters of reference and certified degree transcripts to be sent directly by the referees and granting institutions to Dr Richard Kleer, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S 0A2. For more
information on the Faculty of Arts, refer to http://www.arts.uregina.ca. Academic inquiries may be addressed to: Dr Richard MacLennan, Head, Department of Psychology; phone: (306) 585-4157; e-mail: [email protected]. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. The University of Regina is committed to achieving a representative workforce. Qualified diversity group members are encouraged to self-identify on their applications. SWITZERLAND APA-IUPSYS GLOBAL MENTAL HEALTH FELLOWSHIP: Psychologists with research experience and leadership in areas related to the World Health Organization (WHO) Mental Health Action Plan are invited to consider a 1-year Fellowship working in Geneva Switzerland at WHO headquarters in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, beginning fall 2015. Fellows are expected to bring their own core salary funding. Supplemental funds for travel and accommodation will be provided (pending funding approval). Application deadline is November 30, 2014. See full announcement at www.apa.org/about/awards/ global-health-fellowship.aspx.
I t ’s A l l A b o u t
T
PEOPLE!
oday’s savvy marketer knows it takes more than one medium to inform people. Online, Print, and Events, are essential to promoting a product or service to your target audience. The APA’s Web site, magazines, and convention opportunities achieve just that. Reaching people in the right way at the right time with the right information. Let us show you how the APA family of products can help you deliver true branding and direct response messages while working with you to achieve the most effective return on your investment. We have the readers, the audience, and the impressions to make your marketing campaign a success! Find out more call (202) 336-5714 or e-mail [email protected]
PsycCareers.com APA’s Online Career Center
Online, In Print, In Person... A winning combination! 118
MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • SEPTEMBER 2014
Practice
Publications
OPPORTUNITIES
PRACTICE FOR SALE S.W. PORTLAND, OR: 35+ years child, family, ADHD, school practice, with furniture, client handouts, and tests. Will stay to transition referrals. E-mail: swpsychology [email protected]. SPACE AVAILABLE SPACE IN MOUNTAIN BROOK, AL: for licensed psychologist to share office suite and services with established practice. $1800/month. Fee negotiable for period of practice building. Contact: Alabama Psychotherapy & Wellness Center, P.C. at (205) 912-2002. DOVER, DE: Very well located, 1,600 SF office condo in Walker Square, close to State offices and schools. The second floor walkup offers 5 private offices, 2 bathrooms, kitchenette, file room and very large reception area. Plenty of parking available with public transportation nearby. Nice suite for psychologists or counselors.
AND OTHERS
$179,000. Call: Eric Howlett with Keller Williams Central Delaware at (800) 677-0092. STERLING HEIGHTS, MI: Office Space to Rent. Psychotherapist office, spacious, furnished, large windows, shared waiting room, private. For more information call (586) 260-5565. BAYSIDE (BAY TERRACE)— QUEENS, NY: Part-time or fulltime psych office available within shared psych suite in the Bayside Medical Arts Center, directly opposite the upscale Bay Terrace Shopping Center. Furnished/unfurnished, newly reno va ted. Best lo cation, signa ge/exposure, onsite valet parking, onsite super. Easy access to LIRR/bus/LIE/Cross Island Parkway/Clearview Expy. Ideal setting to relocate your practice or open satellite office. Call: Manage ment Professional Enter prises Organization, Inc. (718) 2293598; www.2391bell.com.
Advertising Page
AATBS. . . . . . . . . . . . Back Cover Academic Review . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Back Cover Align International Recruitment Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . 117 APA Books Best Sellers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Counseling Psychology Third Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 APA Handbook of Psychology and Religious Diversity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 New Releases. . . . . . . . . . . . 27 APA Continuing Education— Call for 2015 Convention Proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 APA Continuing Education— Clinician’s Corner . . . . . . . . 65 APA Member Benefits. . . . . . . 95 APA Monitor Digital. . . . . . . . 53 APA Membership ECP Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . 85 APA Membership Renewal . . . 89 Boston Children’s Hospital. . . . . . . . . . . . . 107, 108 Civilian Corp U.S. Army Medical Command. . . . . . . . 98 Doctor On Demand . . . . . . . . . 99
Advertisers
EDITING SERVICES: Excellent, reasonable editing of psychology manuscripts, dissertations, and other professional and/or academic documents using APA style. MA in English. Contact: Suzanne Frost at [email protected]. DIRECTORY PSYCHOLOGISTS DIRECTORY: Get referrals from our directory of psychologists in America. Free listing in all 50 states in
the USA. Visit our website at: http://www.psychologistsin america.com for further information. CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS: International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) – 32nd Annual Conference: The Depth of Dreams: June 5–9, 2015 at the Virginia Beach Resort Hotel and Conference Center with beach frontage and resident schools of dolphins! Seeking proposals related to Dreams and Dreaming, for Papers, Workshops, and Panels. Submission themes may focus on: Clinical, Research, Theory, Arts, Education, Spiritual, PSI, Health, Mental Imagery, Anthropology and Cultural Diversity. Conference attendees can earn up to 25 CE credits. IASD is approved by the APA to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. IASD maintains responsibility for the program and its content. Submissions: Go to asdreams. org/2015 and select the “call for presentations.” Deadline: December 1, 2014.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
INDEX
Advertisers
DISSERTATION CONSULTING THE PSYCHOLOGISTS IN DISSERTATION METHODOLOGY AND STATISTICAL CONSULTING: Services include data analysis plan, sample size justification, accurately assessed assumptions and conducted analyses with clear explanation. Analyses range from descriptive statistics, t-tests, regression, SEM, and everything in between. We assist with all universities IRB/URR. Privacy and confidentiality of consultation and data are ensured. Call or visit us for a free 30-minute consultation (877) 437-8622 or www.Statistics Solutions.com.
Page
Jobelephantcom, Inc (St. Mary’s College). . . 100, 101 Medical College of Wisconsin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Multi-Health Systems, Inc. (MHS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19, 44 New York University . . . . . . . . . . 111 Ohio University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Pearson. . . . . . . . . . C2, 1, 17, 25, 49 PsycCareers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 First Choice Practice— Southern California. . . . . . . . . 119 St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center. 112 Sunmount DDSO. . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 The Trust. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 University of Alabama. . . . . . . 98 University of New Hampshire.110 University of Missouri— St. Louis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine . . . . . . . 114 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. . . . . . . . . . 99 Western Psychological Services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
SEPTEMBER 2014 • MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY
Workshops AND CONFERENCES
PSYCHOLOGIST PRACTICE FOR SALE Seller Retiring Affluent Orange County Beach Area
THE 24TH ANNUAL RENFREW CENTER FOUNDATION EATING DISORDERS CONFERENCE FOR PROFESSIONALS: Feminist Relational Perspectives and Beyond — The “Practice” of Practice. November 14–16, 2014. Philadelphia, PA. 17.5 CEUs. www.renfrew conference.com.
ONLINE
ADVERTISING
Solid 30-year referral base. Multi-specialty practice with high growth potential. Practice valued at $350,000, averaging last five years revenue. Call for details: First Choice Practice Sales Broker. Contact: Evelyn Iannini at (949) 548-4559. BRE No. 01255718.
OPPORTUNITIES
It’s all about interactivity with APA! With opportunities for run of site and targeted ad positions you can reach the APA audience in mass or in specific areas. Market your distance learning courses to students by running campaigns on gradPSYCH Online or the Student home page. Reach thousands of decision makers through the Monitor on Psychology home page and articles. Do recruiting or search resumes through PsycCareers or cover the spectrum in Psychology Topics where we have more than 30 special interest areas. For assistance,contact: James Boston Advertising Sales Department (202) 336-5714 E-mail: [email protected]; www.apa.org
119
HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY SECOND EDITION Edited by P. Scott Richards and Allen E. Bergin The growing awareness that religion and spirituality are important aspects of human diversity has encouraged many psychotherapists to seek deeper understanding of the spiritual orientations of their clients. The guiding purpose of the second edition of this well-received book is to help students and practicing psychotherapists more fully honor and utilize the religious beliefs and spiritual resources of their clients. Each chapter offers therapeutic suggestions and guidelines, along with helpful examples, for psychotherapists to work sensitively with the religious and spiritual beliefs of their clients. 2014. 488 pages. Hardcover. List: $89.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $59.95 | ISBN 978-1-4338-1735-9 | Item # 4317338
CONTENTS
Preface | Acknowledgments | I. Introduction and Overview | Chapter 1. Toward Religious and Spiritual Competency for Mental Health Professionals, P. Scott Richards and Allen E. Bergin | Chapter 2. Religious Diversity in North America, Roger R. Keller | II. Christianity | Chapter 3. Psychotherapy With Roman Catholics, Edward P. Shafranske | Chapter 4. Psychotherapy With Eastern Orthodox, George Morelli | Chapter 5. Psychotherapy With Mainline Protestants, Everett L. Worthington Jr., James D. Berry, Joshua N. Hook, Don E. Davis, Jennifer S. Ripley, and Chelsea L. Greer | Chapter 6. Psychotherapy With Evangelical Protestants, Nancy S. Thurston and Wintson Seegobin | Chapter 7. Psychotherapy With Pentecostal Protestants, Richard D. Dobbins | Chapter 8. Psychotherapy With Latter-Day Saints, Wendy L. Ulrich, P. Scott Richards, Kristin L. Hansen, and Allen E. Bergin | Chapter 9. Psychotherapy With Seventh-Day Adventists, Carole A. Rayburn | III. Judaism | Chapter 10. Psychotherapy With Orthodox Jews, Aaron Rabinowitz | Chapter 11. Psychotherapy With Conservative and Reform Jews, Lisa Miller, Yakov A. Barton, Marina Mazur, and Robert J. Lovinger | IV. Islam | Chapter 12. Psychotherapy With Muslims, Zari Hedayat-Diba | V. Eastern Traditions | Chapter 13. Psychotherapy With Hindus | Anu R. Sharma and Pratyusha Tummala-Narra | Chapter 14. Psychotherapy With Buddhists, Mark Finn and Jeffrey B. Rubin | VI. Ethnic-Centered Spirituality | Chapter 15. Psychotherapy With Members of AfricanAmerican Churches and Spiritual Traditions, Donelda A. Cook and Christine Y. Wiley | Chapter 16. Psychotherapy With Members of Latino/ Latina Churches and Spiritual Traditions, Fayth M. Parks, Maria Cecilia Zea, and Michael A. Mason | Chapter 17. Psychotherapy With Members of Asian-American Churches and Spiritual Traditions, Siang-Yang Tan and Natalie J. Dong | Chapter 18. North American Indian and Alaska Native Spirituality and Psychotherapy, Jeff King, Joseph E. Trimble, Gayle Morse, and Lisa Rey Thomas | VII. Afterword | Chapter 19. Religious Diversity and Psychotherapy: Conclusions, Recommendations, and Future Directions, P. Scott Richards and Allen E. Bergin | Index | About the Editors
ALSO OF INTEREST
APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality Volume 1. Context, Theory, and Research Volume 2. An Applied Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Editor-in-Chief Kenneth I. Pargament 2009. 778 pages. Paperback. • Series: APA Handbooks in Psychology®
Spiritually Oriented Interventions for Counseling and Psychotherapy
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON KINDLE®
Spiritual Interventions in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Edited by Donald F. Walker and William L. Hathaway 2013. 282 pages. Hardcover.
Edited by Jamie D. Aten, Mark R. McMinn, and Everett L. Worthington, Jr. 2011. 368 pages. Hardcover.
List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-1218-7 | Item # 4317296
List: $59.95 | APA Member/Affiliate: $49.95 ISBN 978-1-4338-0946-0 | Item # 4317258 Visit us online to watch a video interview with author Mark R. McMinn!
List: $495.00 | APA Member/Affiliate: $249.00 ISBN 978-1-4338-1077-0 | Item # 4311506
APA BOOKS ORDERING INFORMATION: 800-374-2721 • www.apa.org/pubs/books In Washington, DC, call: 202-336-5510 • TDD/TTY: 202-336-6123 • Fax: 202-336-5502 In Europe, Africa, or the Middle East, call: +44 (0) 1767 604972
AD2728
EVERY STUDY TOOL YOU NEED, NOW IN ONE PLACE
EVERY TOOL. AT ONE LOW PRICE P SYC H O LO GY
H O M E S T U DY PROGRAM
$549 3-Month Access
Rationales within Quizzes and Exams with links definitions and concepts for an efficient and enhanced learning experience. Our new “ Learning Through Testing” system! Get instant access to Online Study Volumes, Domain Quizzes, Mock Exams, and Flashcards No activation fee, no add-on’s, and no hidden costs An all-inclusive, online Home Study Program
STUDY ANYWHERE
|
i don't know
|
"Who wrote 'This be the Verse', starting famously ""They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad, They may not mean to, but they do...""?"
|
'Philip Larkin': A small, sad man who wrote great poetry? - CSMonitor.com
'Philip Larkin': A small, sad man who wrote great poetry?
Latest News
Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love
By James Booth
View Caption
of
Outside of his poetry – and, for the most part, within it – Philip Larkin presented to the public a mild, modest façade. He made a career as a responsible, dedicated, even talented librarian, and his quiet, self-effacing demeanor seemed to adhere more to the stereotypes attached to that profession than to those that govern our expectations of poets. After a liberating stint in Belfast, away from his family, he settled in the English city of Hull, living there from 1955 until the end of his life in 1985. “It is a little on the edge of things,” he said of Hull. “I rather like being on the edge of things.” Larkin traveled little, made few public appearances, regarded the fame that eventually came to him with bemused skepticism, and mostly stayed home, polishing his precise and perfect poems, doing his own laundry, and (you likely could have guessed this part) composing letters to his mother.
His considerable reputation as a poet rested on a slim corpus. During his lifetime his poems appeared in four full-length volumes: "The North Ship" (1945), "The Less Deceived" (1955), "The Whitsun Weddings" (1964), and "High Windows" (1974). The first is apprentice work, pleasant but mostly unremarkable. All four are very modest in length. When a "Collected Poems" appeared in 1988, edited by Larkin’s friend Anthony Thwaite, many were surprised by how large a book it was; Thwaite had added a large number of unpublished poems or poems that had not been collected in the “official” volumes. He had also, controversially, organized the poems by date of composition, an act of daring about which some literary scholars are still prone to lose sleep.
There were other surprises in store, and more controversies to come. Larkin thought a lot about sex, as it turns out, wrote about it in his letters, and talked about it to his friends and coworkers, sometimes in terms that were, one presumes, not entirely in line with accepted standards of professional conduct. James Booth, in his new biography of Larkin, relates that at the University of Hull, "[t]he Librarian’s office was on the ground floor overlooking a huge sunken lawn known as the 'soup-plate.' Betty [Mackereth, Larkin's secretary] recalls that in the summer Larkin would hold a lens in each hand and adjust them at different distances from his eye to view the women students lying around in the sun. Playing astutely on his youth he allowed his own romantic affections to become the subject of collective interest among his staff, and dramatized his lusts for particular students. One such student, Maeve [Brennan] remembers, “was of Amazonian build – Philip entertained a fantasy about well-proportioned women – and he named a tiny room in the new Library after her, where, the idea was, he would be able to seduce her.” For a time this was known as “Miss Porter’s room.”
Recommended: Poetry quiz: Can you match the poet to the poem?
It was of course a different age; such behavior by a university librarian would likely not be so kindly looked upon now. Larkin also had an interest in pornography, including, it seems, some violent and bondage-themed pornography; after his death his solicitor, Terry Wheldon, removed two large cardboard boxes of it from his residence, so as not to leave the bereaved to deal with and be disturbed by it. (It was, it appears, a courtesy Wheldon provided to many of his clients.) Larkin shared his enthusiasm for pornography with his friends Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest; his letters to them contain numerous sexist remarks. They are also racist, in multiple places, or at the very least they appear to be. Indeed, reading the selection of his letters published in 1992, one begins to feel that the Larkin who pined for the glory days of the Empire was pining, in part, for the era when England was something close to a whites-only club.
What are you reading? Tell us about the book that's currenly on your bedside table.
Again we must say: it was a different age. Such sentiments were not at all unusual in Larkin’s social context, and his objectifying views of women, and fear of them, were in part reflections of and in part reactions against the rigid and stultifying system of middle-class expectations that shaped English life during that period. Larkin fought his whole life to evade the perceived requirements of conventional middle-class existence; skittish even of minor commitments, he did his best to avoid, as he put it in a letter to James Sutton, “furniture and loans from the bank.” Along with them, he avoided both marriage and, for the most part, monogamy. For much of his life he carried on simultaneous romantic relationships with his colleague Maeve Brennan and with Monica Jones, a university lecturer at Leicester. Brennan, who was traditional and Catholic, hoped he would marry her; Jones, whose more modern sensibility shared some of the resistance Larkin felt toward the institution of marriage, was more ambivalent. A handful of other women also formed romantic attachments with the poet, some of which overlapped with Jones’s and Brennan’s. The most significant, perhaps, was another colleague, Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary at the University of Hull. Their affair did not become known to either Jones or Brennan until after Larkin’s death.
The complications of Larkin’s personal life found their way, inevitably, into the poems. Some of them are love poems, directed toward various beloveds. The lovely “Broadcast,” for example, has Larkin listening, on the radio, to a concert that Monica Jones is attending in person, partly as a way of making contact with her; the poem is addressed to her, and the end of the musical program leaves him “desperate to pick out / Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.” “Self’s the Man” begins with Larkin comparing his bachelorhood, favorably, to an imagined married man:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk ...
though it ends on a note of characteristic Larkinesque doubt:
So he and I are the same,
Only I’m a better hand
At knowing what I can stand
Without them sending a van —
Or I suppose I can.
But could he? The messiness of his personal life – hinted at but not made fully manifest in the poems – surely caused both inconvenience and a not insignificant amount of emotional distress to all the participants, Larkin included. And at least some of his lovers, Maeve Brennan chief among them, felt rather deceived when his letters became available: the crass, rude, rowdy, and raunchy Larkin that kept up a correspondence with Kingsley Amis was not the refined and genteel Larkin she felt she knew. Still, those commentators who saw the posthumous backlash against Larkin, particularly when it focused on his personal romantic attachments, as excessively judgmental and narrow-minded must be acknowledged to have a point. He was, for the most part, not duplicitous, and on the whole seemed to treat his lovers with genuine consideration and care.
The small-minded and offensive political sentiments expressed in his letters ought, perhaps, to disturb us more, though there is always the difficulty of knowing when Larkin was being ironic (he frequently was) and when he was being sincere. He did not intend the letters for wide distribution, and he might well have expected those for whom they were meant to be able to tell the difference. And after all, he did enjoy shocking his readers and could do so to great literary effect; he often did so in his very best poems, as in his deployments of obscenity in the brutally hilarious “This Be the Verse.” (“They f**k you up, your mum and dad” is the famous opening line).
He was a poet, then, who reveled in mixing the high and the low, the sacred and the profane. So why not simply put the issue of personal evaluation aside? Surely the poems are one thing, and the poet another, so that we can take pleasure in the former without making up our minds to approve of the latter? This is an attractive stance, but Booth – whose new biography of Larkin seems intended, in large part, as an exercise in rehabilitation, a book that will make it possible again to admire the poems without turning away from their author – is skeptical of the attempt to separate the two: "There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous. But we might ask whether art and life can have been so deeply at odds with each other that the poet who composed the heart-rending 'Love Songs in Age,' the euphoric 'For Sidney Bechet,' and the effervescent 'Annus Mirabilis' had no emotions, or was a s**t in real life."
One can sympathize with this, up to a point. Art and life are not entirely isolated from each other. It would be surprising, if one knew their poems but nothing about their lives, to be told that Wordsworth did not enjoy the outdoors or that John Berryman was a teetotaler with a low sex drive. On the other hand, while the composition of heartrending and effervescent poems may serve as evidence that the poet was not without emotions, it hardly seems to show he was a likable person or that he was free of racist prejudices. And it would be all too easy to turn Booth’s argument against him just by choosing other poems. Can art and life be so deeply at odds that the poet who composed “Self’s the Man” wasn’t a bit of a misogynist?
Booth is right to remind us that some of Larkin’s more outrageous remarks were surely intended ironically, but it is difficult to sympathize with his apparent desire to dismiss every potentially offensive comment in that way. At a certain point one wants to shout “Enough! Surely the man meant it at least some of the time!” Moreover, his overgenerosity extends past the poet himself and to his body of work. Good as they are – and the best of them are quite fine indeed – Larkin’s poems cannot quite live up to the grand claims Booth makes on their behalf.
The fact is that to many contemporary readers, they will inevitably come across as a bit stale, a bit staid. Larkin would have regarded such apparent faults as virtues; he had little interest in radical, progressive, or experimental notions of what poetry ought to be, and mostly seemed to look back longingly to a tradition that rejected all of the more radical aspects of literary modernism. But whether by design or not, the effect of this conservative stance is that in comparison with such early 20th-century modernists as Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Crane — not to mention such contemporaries of Larkin as Allen Ginsberg (whose revolutionary "Howl!" was composed and first read in public in 1955, the year 'The Less Deceived' came out) or John Ashbery (whose first book, "Some Trees," was published the following year, and whose "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was published the year after Larkin’s final collection, "High Windows") – Larkin’s work can come across as fussy, quaint, perhaps a bit retrogressive.
If Larkin had any curiosity about what was going on in the wider poetry world, there is almost no evidence of it. In fact he often seemed proud of his parochialism. He never tired of complaining about any art that seemed to him remotely avant-garde – Picasso and "Finnegans Wake" were “crazy”; John Coltrane’s music was “a pain between the ears” – or crabbily pining for the good old days when “painting represented what anyone with normal vision sees, and music was an affair of nice noises rather than nasty ones.” On multiple occasions, moreover, he expressed a principled lack of interest in work written in languages other than English or, at times, in countries other than England. Asked in a Paris Review interview about his fellow poet-librarian, Jorge Luis Borges, he responded, “Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?” Later in that same interview, when asked to compare American with British poetry, he brushes the question aside, stating “I’m afraid I know very little about American poetry.”
Near the end of the interview he goes still further, suggesting that even in his home country there is only one poet that interests him: “I’ve never been much interested in other people’s poetry.” And when the interviewer inquires about his previously stated view that he has no curiosity regarding poetry not written in English, he replies, "I don’t see how one can ever know a foreign language well enough to make reading poems in it worthwhile. Foreigners’ ideas of good English poems are dreadfully crude: Byron and Poe and so on. The Russians liking Burns. But deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant. If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or whatever. 'Hautes Fenêtres,' my God! A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him."
There is a self-satisfied smallness here that is hard to get past (particularly if, like me, you rather like Byron and Poe), and that runs so deep in Larkin that Booth, for all his efforts, cannot render his subject genuinely likable or even, much of the time, genuinely interesting. Despite the complications of his romantic life, Larkin’s day-to-day existence does not make for compelling reading. Or at any rate it would take a more inspired writer than Booth to make it come across as such. Add this to the facts that multiple biographies of and books about Larkin already exist, that the furor over the poet’s various personal deficiencies seems mostly to have died down some time ago, and that Larkin’s poetic reputation is at any rate stable and secure, and it becomes difficult not to see this new biography as a somewhat unnecessary endeavor.
The overriding impression Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love leaves one with is that its subject was a small person, and sad. Perhaps Larkin himself, the man who famously said, “Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” would not have objected to this depiction. It cannot be denied that death, the ultimate deprivation, was one of Larkin’s great subjects. It inspired some of the most powerful of his poems, including the brilliant “Aubade,” the last major poem Larkin achieved. It was also a kind of obsession for him, providing a deep and pervasive injustice about which to complain, a cosmic villain to rebel against. Even as a young man he seems to have felt the looming and terrifying presence of old age and of what lay beyond old age. In “Age,” a poem from "The Less Deceived," he is already, at the age of 33, lamenting, “By now so much has flown / From the nest here of my head that I needs must turn / To know what prints I leave.”
“I don’t want to transcend the commonplace,” Larkin told John Haffenden in 1981. “I love the commonplace. I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.” It makes sense that someone who so loved everyday life would cling fiercely to life and fear death so intensely. But by his mid-40s his fear of becoming an old man seems to have helped turn him into one. (His heavy drinking and steadily increasing weight also contributed.) From then on his life slid heavily downhill, both physically and emotionally. “His poetry had become a widely spaced series of ever more subtly successful poems about failure,” Booth observes. After the publication of "High Windows" he felt that his life as a writer had also reached its end, and he wrote almost nothing, though he lingered for more than a decade, occupying himself in other ways. His mental state in these years must have resembled that described in what is perhaps my favorite of his poems, “Sad Steps,” which begins with the poet “[g]roping back to bed after a piss” and ends with him staring through a window at the moon:
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Next up
Get the Monitor stories you care about delivered to your inbox.
Daily
|
Philip Larkin
|
Brazil's first ever football match as a national team was in 1914 at Laranjeiras stadium, Rio de Janeiro state, against?
|
My favorite quotes
My favorite quotes
Go to my TV quotes page
I started collecting quotes about two years ago. I started writing them down in a journal. (the one my nephew is holding in that picture)I have since filled that journal and started a new one. I have therefore, spent countless hours searching the web for quotes. (I know I have no life, so keep your comments to yourselves) Also I find quotes from (but not limited to) books I read, T.V. shows, movies and from people I actually know. This page has all the quotes that don't fit in the song, movie TV or people I know quote sections. I will update this page whenever I feel like it. Enjoy. Or don't. I don't care either way. -Amber "The Quote Mistress" "The Quote Whore" "The Weirdo"-But I digress.
***WARNING!!!! These quotes may contain naughty words***
The newest quotes are at the top of the page
"This above all; to thine ownself be true"
---William Shakespeare
"Your mountain is waiting so......get on your way!"
---All from "Oh the places you'll go!" By Dr Seuss
"That I'm not quite tall enough to peer over the fences of distraction"-Aaron Thomson
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
---Winston Churchill
"The concerts you enjoy together/ Neighbors you annoy together/ Children you destroy together, / that keep marriage in tact." -Stephen Sondheim
If you refuse to talk to me because of what I'm wearing, it was worth it.
It's such a straightforward sort of colour. I never squint at a black tee shirt, wondering if it goes with my black jeans. I never have to get up in the morning, thinking "I wonder what colour I'll wear today." And black goes with anything. As long as the anything is black. - Neil Gaiman (on black clothing)
Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And Love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But Hating, my boy, is an Art.
-- Ogden Nash
Cogita tute - think for yourself.
"A minority of one"... the definition of insanity. George Orwell 1984
Human beings never think for themselves... For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity... We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Michael Crichton The Lost World
When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night... - Romeo and Juliet � Shakespeare
"People told her she hadn't changed much, in a tone which hinted they were surprised and a little disappointed she hadn't." - L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
The whole point of fashion is wearing ridiculous clothing and not be taken for and idiot, because it's Designated Ridiculous Clothing.- Sabina Tang
A chicken and an egg are laying down in bed. The egg is angrily muttering to itself, while the chicken is contentedly smoking a cigarette. The chicken leans over and says to the egg, "Well, I guess that answers THAT question..."
I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long. (Shelley Winters)
'Be yourself' is the worst advice you can give to some people. (Tom Masson)
You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance! (Edward Flaherty)
Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
Tell him I've been too fucking busy...or vice versa. (Dorothy Parker)
"Just because I'm evil doesn't mean I'm not nice." --Charlie Fulton
"I'm not OK, you're not OK, and that's OK." - William Sloane Coffin
The cynics are right 9 times out of 10." - H. L. Mencken
"Suicide is not chosen---it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain" - Author Unknown
"I discovered that I scream the same way whether I'm about to be devoured by a Great White or if a piece of seaweed touches my foot." - Kevin James
"Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive." - Author Unknown
" I'm the face you hoped you'd never see
But always knew you would
I'm the one thing you knew you shouldn't do
But did because you could.�
Never a lip is curved with pain, That can't be kissed into smiles again. --Bret Harte
"The internet is evil. I love the internet."
"I slept with a woman once... and I thought, 'Am I gay? Am I straight?' Then I realized... I'm just slutty! Where's *my* parade?" - Margaret Cho
If you're crazy, there's two things you can do to make yourself feel better: one is to get yourself cured. The other is to make everyone you have to deal with crazy." -- Alan Dean Foster
I want to be like all the other nonconformists...
I live like I type - fast and with a lot of mistakes
Do you know where your towel is?
You're so cute when you're cynical
Oh there's my heterosexuality, it was under the couch cushions this whole time
When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and say, "Why do you want to know?"-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
You non-conformists are all alike.
I myself get nauseous when confronted with the state of Ohio
Don't give me that kinkier-than-thou attitude
I'm going crazy. Want to come along?
Never do anything that you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics.
You know that place between asleep and awake? The place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I will always love you. ~ Tinkerbell
First I gave up recreational drugs. Then I gave up smoking. Then I gave up drinking. Then it was *sex*. Now I just sit in the corner and eat crackers and giggle.-Sarah Barlow
you should wear with pride the scars on your skin. They're a map of the adventures, and the places you've been
Some people have a genuine gift of poetry, a way with words that surpasses beauty and touches the deepest parts of one's soul... and some people, um, thingy.
If two past lovers remain friends, they are still in love or they never were
`What's so unpleasent about being drunk?' `You ask a glass of water.'"-HGTTG
"Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care."- Jimmy Buffett
"Hug O' War
I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
I'd hate to have a kid like me.-Calvin
Reality continues to ruin my life.-Calvin
I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal-Calvin
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.-Calvin
You know you love someone when you want them to be happy even if their happiness means that you're not a part of it.
Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel. - Samuel Johnson
To me, there is no greater act of courage than being the one who kisses first. - Janeane Garafolo
Sleep is something that always seems more important the morning after than the night before.
No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her. -- Henry Louis Mencken
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. -- Albert Camus
Hell is when there is no reason to live and no courage to die. - William Markiewicz
"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?" HGTTG
"People like you are the reason people like me take pills!" --Neva Faith Linn
Forget about the mind. The clitoris is a terrible thing to waste.- Lisa Kogan
There's nothing stupider than an unpaid whore.- Laura Schlessinger
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. ~Chapman Cohen
After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands. ~Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1888
To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals. ~Don Schrader
There are two things in the world that can never get together - religion and common sense. ~George W. Foote
sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love. ~Butch Hancock
Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers. ~Bruce Calvert
If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you. ~As seen on a button
Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders? ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Life. Loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." - Douglas Adams
"Indecision may, or may not, be my problem"-Jimmy Buffett
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me
"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy." - Cynthia Nelms
"If you can't convince them, confuse them." - Harry S. Truman
"Never go to bed angry. Stay up and fight." - Phyllis Diller
"All life is an experiment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why get married and make one man miserable when I can stay single and make thousands miserable?" - Carrie Snow
"Don't cry over anyone who won't cry over you." � Anonymous
"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." - Horace Walpole
�Women rule the world. They just haven�t figured it out yet. When they do, and they will, we�re all in big, big trouble.�
�God gave us a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.� � Robin Williams
�Some mornings it just doesn�t pay to wake up and chew through the straps.�� Emo Phillips
It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one�s doubts.�� G. B. Burgin
"Damn, Jesus was one sexy Jew, I'd nail him."
The scars will take me far, they always do.-Henry Rollins
"FRIEND: A member of the opposite sex in your acquaintance who has some flaw which makes sleeping with him/her totally unappealing."
"Why is it that all non-conformists look the same?" -Billy Corgan
"'Beep beep beep.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Oh, I'm sorry, that was my bullshit alarm going off.'"
-David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
"The best thing a man can do for his children," he said, "is to love their mother."
"I want to meet a woman that will make me stop and listen to what she has to say. I want a woman who will make my jaw drop in awe. A woman that has little time for me. One who does not throw herself at me. One who respects herself who has a sense of herself. Where is she?" - From Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins
Isn't it pathetic that we can fuck but we can't look each other in the eyes?-Henry Rollins
To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what's really important. -Henry Rollins
Hating someone is giving them too much, just leave them alone. -Henry Rollins
"Somewhere, someone isn't impressed by your looks. Not all men jump through the hoops of your fire. You're unbelievably boring to more people than you'll ever know." - From Solipsist by Henry Rollins
"What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She had overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness." - From the Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"After awhile an animal - a deer perhaps - would appear from out of the trees and watch him cautiously. Ford would continue to smile at it, his eyes would soften and shine, and he would seem to radiate a deep and universal love, a love which reached out to embrace all of creation. A wonderful quietness would descend on the surrounding countryside, peaceful and serene, emanating from this transfigured man. Slowly the deer would approach, step by step, until it was almost nuzzling him, whereupon Ford Prefect would reach out to it and break its neck." - From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
"Fuck that bullshit that they told you in school, "YOU'RE SPECIAL!" Bullshit. You're not. I don't think I'm special, superior or smarter than anyone else. We all may be unique, but that doesn't mean special. This whole social structure of status, class, and wealth is a crock of shit. It's all just based on luck and who you blow and/or know." � Stile
Nothing Brings People together more, then mutual hatred - Henry Rollins
It is hard to be alone, but it is harder to be with you.- Henry Rollins
Everyone in the world is retarded, Except for me of course. Henry Rollins
"To understand a man, you must know his memories." --Old Chinese saying
People told me I'd never make it to Normal, well they were wrong. --Bob Dylan to the crowd in Normal, Illinois
"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.-the bell jar
F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise "I don�t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
"I waited but you never came."-Words on a Gravestone
Depression is so much more interesting than medicated happiness.
She is beautiful.
I am drawn to her.
She is kind.
She never tells me "there is no time".
She never says "No!"
And I think about her
Every time
I fuck you.- Henry Rollins
"I have plenty of common sense; I just choose to ignore it." - Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes
"If you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe we'll just have to make some!" - Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes
*Greetings, Sir.
You may know me already
I'm there at every party, always willing to join you for dinner or a movie.
You may remember something I once said,
but I doubt you could spell my name correctly.
I could discuss any topic with you,
but I'm not an expert in anything.
In your favorite photograph, I'm the passer-by in the background.
I'm the one who pulls up at the same time as you at the stop sign.
I'm the one you share an elevator with.
I'm the one you tip. I'm the one you call Sir.
I am usually the runner-up in a contest, sometimes on purpose.
I'm everyone's companion, but nobody's friend.
I probably had a crush on you at one point, but now I value our friendship.
You may have complemented me once, but I changed the subject.
I don't seek the Truth, and you probably laughed when I said: "Fuck the Ideal."
I probably won't contribute anything great to this world; but then again, who really can?
I love each and every one of you, and
I couldn't imagine life without you.
In a world with billions of people, I am alive. Don't you ever tell me otherwise.*?*?*?*
If you were in the street on fire, I'd put you out with gasoline --Henry Rollins
People are never too busy to tell you all that they have to do.
Here's to the perfect girl,
I couldn't ask for more.
She's deaf 'n dumb, oversexed,
And owns a liquor store.
---Irish Drinking Toast
The worst thing about censorship is [deleted by censorship Bureau].
I couldn't help myself. They were so big and round and beautiful, I just had to touch them! Then she started screaming "My eyes! My eyes!" and ruined the mood.
Quid quid latine dictums sit altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
Come on! We're all friends here. Not to each other, but to someone.
Dave Attell: Have you ever made fun of someone so much you want to thank them for all the good times you had at their expense?
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete stangers to kill again." ~ TV listing for the "Wizard of Oz"
Some people are against porno movies, and I say hey, Ohio, Kentucky, and Iran: I say, hey - whatever a man, and a woman, and another woman with a penis and a midget do to a donkey, that's their garsh-darn bidness.-Dave Attell
If you're lonely, but only because you killed all your friends, then maybe you deserve to be lonely. --Jacquelyn Benson
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
I don't care what they say. If you haven't been stalked, you haven't been loved.--Troy Roberson
Ladies and gentleman, hoboes and tramps, cross-eyed mosquitoes, and bowlegged ants. I stand here before you, not behind you, to tell you something I know nothing about. Last night about 6:00 this morning, an empty truck loaded with bricks almost killed my dead cat. We rushed him to the hospital, slow as we could, only to find King Arthur, sitting at the fourth corners of the round table eating vinegar with a fork
"Nice shoes, wanna fuck?"
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. --Rodney Dangerfield
Here's to hell - may the stay there be as much fun as the way there.�unknown
How many legs does a dog have, if you call his tail a leg? The answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.-Abraham Lincoln
By "Christmas" we mean Hanukkah, kwanza, eat-yellow-snow-day, get-atheist-gifts-day, hit-yourself-over-the-head-while-trying-to-bring-home-a-big-ass-tree-which-for-some-reason-you-want-to-put-in-your-living-room-instead-of-in-the-outdoors-where-it-belongs-day, and all other winter related holidays, festivals, and occasions-where-you-try-to-be-nice-to-family-members-you'd-rather-were-sleeping-with-the-fishies. So, no flames about how your [insert feelings/religion/other-beef] is being compromised, hurt, or in other ways belittled. Thank you.--Sluggy.net
"We've found Jesus; he was behind the sofa the whole time."
"I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on." -Beryl Pfizer
"Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else -- and usually it's reading his own handwriting." -G. Norman Collie
"I'm still living by the 3 M's: money, music, and mmmmmpussy." -Steven Tyler
"I got nailed; now it's your turn."-jesus'pickup lines
"Remember that time you were quiet? Can you do that again?"
"Drink your school. Stay in drugs. Don't do milk." ~Mr. T
"I believe that how much fun someone is to hang out with is directly proportional to the amount of time they spend singing in their car."
"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I'd rather taste blood, yours or mine, flowing from a sudden slash, then cut all day with blunt scissors on the dotted lines like the teacher told."
"I am sofa king we Todd did."(say it outloud)
�Ass, gas, or grass. No one rides for free.�Thanks to GREG again for correcting me)
I guess we were all guilty. We all shot him, We all skinned him, and we all got a complimentary Bumper sticker that said, "I killed Bob"
Richard Jeni "The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'"
"I'm not weird, odd, or strange... I'm normality impaired"--J.C. Cohen
"A relationship is a good way to kill a good friendship" -J.C. Cohen
We're all a little weird. And life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible With ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually Satisfying weirdness - and call it love.-Robert Fulgham
Everson's Constant: For every subject X, there are 3 Geocities Pages saying 'X is Cool,' 2 saying 'X suX,' and at least 1 'X ate my balls.' -RJ Bertsche
Love is like pork rinds. At first, it seems disgusting. Then, you try it, and it seems okay. Then you find out What goes into it, and you realize that you were right The first time. Except love isn't crunchy.-Johanna Bobrow
You should wear with pride the scars on your skin. They're a map of the adventures, and the places You�ve been.-"U Li La Lu" by Poi Dog Pondering
And now, if anyone wants to talk, I'll be over There in the corner trying to restuff this crap Back in the matching three piece luggage set I Drag my emotional baggage around in.
I'm a patriot. I love my decadent, cosmopolitan, Self-indulgent, racially-mixed, godless, Intellectually dilettante, drug-abusing, promiscuous, Queer-loving country. And its flag is the Stars and Stripes.-Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Adventure can be a puffy sticker out of a vending machine, if people are looking at it the right way.
Don't dare to be different, dare to be yourself - If that doesn't make you different then something is Wrong. -Laura Baker
Save the apartheid boycott of the lesbian Nazi lettuce Growers for Jesus of the nuclear whale! -slogan on a T-shirt from Bangkok
"Is that seat saved?"
"No, but we're praying for it."
This isn't hell. This is where you get sent when You�ve been bad in hell. I'll never understand why someone might pay To wear a corporate logo. To me, all such shirts Read ALL MY OTHER CLOTHES ARE DIRTY or UNTIL WHICH TIME, IF EVER, I DEVELOP A PERSONALITY OF MY OWN, THIS T-SHIRT HAS OFFERED TO SPEAK ON MY BEHALF.-David Sedaris, New York Magazine
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't Pet the sweaty things.
A hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong.
I'm one of those bad things that happen to good people.
We're Virgin Destroyers - We won't go down In history, but we will go down on your Little sister
Apathetics of the world ... ah, forget it.
Candy is dandy, but sex won't rot your teeth. But on second thought, M&M's won't give you herpes.
"I admit, I have a bit of penis envy. They're ridiculous, but they�re cool."- k.d.lang
"No Gods, No Masters...well, okay, maybe a Master or two, but that's it..."
"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"A small town is a vast hell." -- Argentinean proverb
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
- The Serenity Prayer
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people who pissed me off.
Non sum qualis eram.(I am not what I used to be)
The stars get their brightness from the surrounding dark. -Dante
I'm already dead; I just have to wait for my body to realize this.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up these defenses; you build this whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own any more. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. not just in the mind. It's a soul hurt, a body hurt, a real gets inside you and rips you apart pain. I hate love--Neil Gaiman
Mad; adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.-Ambrose Bierce
Hobbes, do you think human nature is good or evil? I mean, do you think people are basically good, with a few bad tendencies, or basically bad, with a few good tendencies? Or, as a third possibility, do you think people are just crazy and who knows why they do anything?--Calvin
Freaks make life interesting for all you 'normals.' --Craig Miller
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.--Ernest Hemmingway
What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction. Chuck Palahniuk-Choke
"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -- Arthur HHGTTG
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind."HHGTTG
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. Douglas Adams
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. -Douglas Adams
Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast. -Douglas Adams
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. -Douglas Adams
Nothing is illegal until you get caught.
The ultimate reason is "because."
Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest.
I will never understand why they cook on TV. I can't smell it. Can't eat it. Can't taste it. The end of the show they hold it up to the camera, "Well, here it is. You can't have any. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.-Jerry Seinfeld
There's a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don't know if that's true, but I know white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work--Lance Crouther
If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone. --Robert Fulghum
"My body's like--'Damn! Where'd the sex go?'" --Francesca, "Obfuscation"
I am a living soap opera. --Virginia Graham
I'm a nice girl. I hate it on the first date when I accidentally have sex.-Emmy Gay
You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over? Movie day.-Jay Mohr
You sleep with a guy once and next thing you know he wants to take you to dinner.-Yori Meyers
Don't worry, it only seems kinky the first time. Unfortunately, some people don't hear you until you scream.-Stefanie Powers
I dated a girl who liked the whole goth thing. Eventually she dumped me for making her happy. --Ryan, "Conspirare"
If that's what she needs, that's what I'll be for her. -Jim Profit
You may engage in a specific perversion once, and it can be chalked up to curiousity. But if you do it again, it must be presumed that you are a pervert. -Oscar Wilde
As repellant as something is to some people it can be downright adorable to others.
Love doesn't have a point. Love is the point.-Alan Moore
You can never be too high or too thin.-Maureen Slatery
Maybe I should have wrapped my panties in bacon?-Maureen Slatery
If I were a teacher, I would commit suicide every day of my life.-Ryan Malloy
It is better to have loved and lost than to have loved and caught something.-Too Much Coffee Man
I don't understand why Christians wear crosses. Do you think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross again?-Bill Hicks
"You can't have someone who's never had sex or drugs telling you it's wrong."-Marilyn Manson
It aint the size, it's.... no, it's the size.
If there is anything the non-conformist hates worse than a conformist it's another non-conformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of non-conformity.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.- W. Somerset Maugham
I will always love the false image I had of you.- Ashleigh Brilliant
If you have something to do, and you put it off long enough, chances are someone else will do it for you. - Clyde F. Adams
That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.-Marvin, "Life, the Universe, and Everything" by Douglas Adams
There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30. - Cleveland Amory
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
There is only one sin in this world, and you have definately committed it: It is the Sin of Not Understanding Humor When It Slaps You Upside The Head. - Pete Berger
Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story.-Ashleigh Brilliant
Beauty�s tears are lovelier than her smile.-Campbell
I do not take drugs. I am drugs.-Salvador Dali
Nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria; (There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in misery, the time when we were happy.) - Dante
Saturday night in Toledo Ohio, Is like being nowhere at all, All through the day how the hours rush by, You sit in the park and you watch the grass die. - John Denver, Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio
Quem metuunt, oderunt. (They hate whom they fear.) - Ennius (239-169 BC)
Todd, drugs. Drugs, Todd ... oh, I see you�ve already met. - Will Fran
A chic type, a rough type, an odd type -- but never a stereotype-Jean-Michel Jarre
When a student actually does a homework problem, the instructor will not ask for it.-M. M. Johnston
I once complained to my father that I didn�t seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad�s advice? �Margo, don�t be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.�-Margo Kaufman
The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform.-Alfred Kinsey
I�ve found thats it�s not good to talk about your troubles. Eighty percent of the people who hear them don�t care and the other twenty percent are glad your having trouble.-Tommy LaSorda
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You, too? I thought I was the only one." -C. S. Lewis
I happened to see you passing through my life, so I thought I�d love you.
"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: 'It's a girl.'" -Shirley Chisholm
you smiled at me in the dark.
And I died a new type of death.
I actually did care. I didn't want anybody else to hurt you. Only me.
I laugh, I smile, and I take Prozac -Anonymous
We ignore the ones who adore us, and adore the ones who ignore us.-Anonymous
"Just a little case of mood poisoning... Must be something I hate."-David Warner, Wild Palms
"I have said nothing because there is nothing I can say that would describe how I feel as perfectly as you deserve it." -Kyle Schmidt
When the sun comes up, I have morals again. --Elayne Boosler
Two tears in a bucket, mother fuck it. [colloquialism] Rough translation, "Shit happens, but we carry on.�
"If it wasn't for my horse I wouldn't have spent that year in college... if you think about that for more than 3 minutes blood will squirt out your nose!"- Lewis Black
From childhood's hour
As others were -- I have not seen
As others saw.
(Edgar Allan Poe)
But whats real? You cant find the truth. You just pick the lie you like best. As long as you know everythings a lie, you can't hurt yourself--Marilyn Manson
I think you're the opposite of a paranoid. I think you go around with the insane delusion that people like you. (Woody Allen)
You have to remember that one person's porn site is another person's social life. (Duke, Gary Trudeau character)
I decided my life would be a success if I could make just one person happy. I picked me.(Frank and Ernest)
From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way. (Calvin and Hobbes)
As a math atheist, I should be excused from this. (Calvin and Hobbes)
It's better to have a morning after, than to have never had a night before. (Andy Capp)
"Pot is a plant that grows in the ground.
If god didn't want it
It wouldn't be around
So all of you fuckers that don't get high
shut the fuck up and give it a try."
--Dennis Leary
"Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted." - Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted
I will be right back. keep your pants off.
A 'friend' is the sort of person you could safely entrust the proofreading of your suicide note to. There are depressingly few of them out there." - Mats Andtbacka
"When suicide becomes the answer, what the hell was the question?" � Unknown
"People tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity." - Marilyn Manson
"People are sheep. They should be called sheople." - Seth Christenson
So You hate Your job. Theres a support group for that; Its called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar!" (Drew Carey)
"You were born an original, don't die a copy"
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." (Oscar Wilde)
It used to be that being crazy meant something... now everybody's crazy.� Charles Manson
"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."� The Mentor, The Hacker's Manifesto
'Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do... is ignore them - because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world...are the ones who do.' � Apple Computers advert
"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." � PAT ROBERTSON, failing to realize the positive side to all of the above points...
Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living. � (Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead)
"He looks like a girl." --Marlon Brando, on Leonardo DiCaprio
"Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music..." � Kristian Wilson, CEO, Nintendo Gaming Corporation, Inc, 1989
ERICA (extract from Scars and Bruises girl-zine): The sorrys, the supposed warmth. None of it means anything. And I'm still afraid of losing you even Though I'm not sure I want you anymore because this hurts like fuck, it hurts too much. So I'll come back and I won't say shit because I can release my pain. I can release my pain. I can release my pain another way. And I'm hurting myself and I'm laughing and my body is yours.
"This Be The Verse"
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
they may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
� Philip Larkin
"An English professor wrote the words, "Woman without her man is nothing," on the blackboard and directed the students to punctuate it correctly. The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is nothing." The women wrote: "Woman! Without her, man is nothing."
"I was very involved with the very early punk scene. I remember meeting Johnny Rotten when he was known as Jack Overripe." -Kermit the Frog
Rules of Success:
1) Strength needs no excuse
2) The past is pointless
3) Just because it happened to you does not make it interesting
4) The things you apologize for are the things you really want
"When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies." - Sir James M. Barrie in Peter Pan
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, But, I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not really what I meant."
"When I get down on my knees it is not to pray." - Madonna
I believe in a Goddess named Destiny, but she can never make up her mind.-Unknown
jesus is coming, open your mouth
Evil is in the face of every frat guy that ever raised a beer cup and went "whoooooo!"-Janeane Garofalo
i'm gonna draw a picture, a picture on my wrist. i'll draw it with a razor, i'll do it just like this. and when i draw this picture, a fountain will appear, and all my fuckin problems will slowly disappear ----kidtwist
"To smile is to lie, for your bloody hands give you away." --Eric Helfrich Famous last words to a High school yearbook.
"Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is so desolate;
And all that once was so beautiful is dead."
-- Conrad Aiken "Bread and Music"
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." --Anton LaVey
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.-Douglas Adams
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.-Kingsley Amis I married beneath me. All women do.-Lady Nancy Astor, attributed
These childhood memories - I have them often, but can usually keep them under control with the use of drugs. -- Dave Barry
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life. -Andrew Brown
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. -James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.-G. K. Chesterton
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. -Clarence Darrow
It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it. -- Fran�ois de La Rouchefoucauld
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.- Rose Franken
Choose a wife by your ear than your eye.-Thomas Fuller, 1732
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.-Olin Miller
The trouble with a kitten is
THAT
CAT.
-Ogden Nash
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.-P. J. O'Rourke
The course of true love never did run smooth. --William Shakespeare
Where am I going? And why am I in this HANDBASKET? --Anonymous
Byron Elbows' two rules of human nature:
* No one is as weird as they think they are.
* Everyone is weirder than others think they are.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.-Pogo, character in "Pogo," comic strip by Walt Kelly
I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again.-Bart Simpson
For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.-Winnie the Pooh
"Arthur: 'It's at times like this I wish I'd listened to my mother.'
Ford : 'Why, what did she say?'
Arthur: 'I don't know, I never listened.'" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"...Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also optional." -- Professor Brian Quinn
"...only drugs make you feel as good as people in TV ads appear to be." -- Hakim Bey
"A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are." -- Victor Lownes
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
"Excuse me. This life isn't working. I want to exchange it."
"Have you tried plugging it in?"
"Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by the dullness of that person." -- J. D. Griffin
"He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed." -H.H. Munro
"I didn't think; I experimented." -Wilhelm Roentgen
"I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you."--Edward Albee
"I think it would be totally inappropriate for me to even contemplate what I am thinking about." -- Don Mazankowski
"It isn't premarital sex if you don't get married." -- Michael Juster
"It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it." -- Tallulah Bankhead
"Ron and Nancy got the house, but Sid and Nancy rule." -- Dar Williams
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." � Maugham
"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships."-Sharon Stone
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
I Dreamed A Dream-Les Miserables
If you are a dreamer
Come in.
If you are a dreamer,
A wisher,
Come sit by my fire,
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in! Come in!- Shel Silverstein
Teachers aren't Einsteins.-Gabrielle, age 14
Teachers are the best people in the whole world.-Natka, age 14
Heaven doesn't want me and hell is scared I am going to take over.-Eve Toth
Cogita tute - think for yourself
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.-Issac Asimov
Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all. -Heinrich Heine
If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.-Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
If someone were to prove to me - right this minute - that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior. -Luis Buquel
If you don't control your mind, someone else will. -John Allston
A man without a religion is like a fish without a bicycle
Love - It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye or gets pregnant-Jim Cole
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. --English Professor--Ohio University
Wouldn't it be odd if you died and went to heaven and the first thing you said was, "Well, I'll be damned."
If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. --Catherine Aird
Smile. Tomorrow will be worse.
Procrastination is like masturbation, it feels good while you're doing it, but then you realize you are only fucking yourself.
Nothing seems interesting when it belongs to you, only when it doesn't.-Natalie Rabbitt,Tuck Everlasting
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
We all enter this world in the same way: naked, screaming, soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there. -Dana Gould
Hell will always be inside of me, or at least for as long as I continue to give Satan blowjobs anyway. -Chloe Irving
Tragedy is if I cut my finger, comedy is if I walk into an open sewer and die.-Mel Brooks
I am amazed at radio DJ's today. I am firmly convinced that AM on my radio stands for Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM stands for.-Jasper Carrott
A girl is a person who screams at the mouse and smiles at the wolf.-Shyam Kapoor
"If I ever meet myself, I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me." - Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"Just say no" prevents teenage pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression.
Some people have a way with words, others not have way.
"I'm not cute, dammit. I'm evil. Evil, I say." -Diablo, "Goats" (comic)
Hell, suicide is all wrong. Why kill yourself when there are others that are *so much more deserving*?
.. Your sense of humor called today... it said it misses you.
I seem to remember smiling. --Maya Angelou, I almost remember
If I let go of the feelings which cause me pain, I would have no feelings at all. �Dan Goodman
"I shot myself because I love you / if I loved myself / I'd be shooting you." -- Karen Finley
I don't think you can consider somebody a platonic friend if you repeatedly bring them to orgasm.
"In the 60s people took Acid to make the world look weird. Now the world is weird, people take Prozac to make it look normal." -Damon Albarn
"A girl who actually thinks she is pretty is unbearably vain." -Anastasia P Wong
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. -T.P.
"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless" - John Ruskin
Without obsession, life is nothing. --John Waters
"The masses are asses"--Alexander Hamilton
"The hardest battle in life is to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else." -E.E.Cummings
"I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half-empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."--Janeane Garofalo
She wouldn't need/ the stale/ Fake/ heat of others/ if only she/ could find/ her own."-Icarus
"Love can't make you strong 'till love has made you weak."-Catie Curtis
You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it."-J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
"It was against my principles and all, but I was feeling so depressed I didn't even think. That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think."-J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
"...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me."-Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
"If women knew, if they even had the slightest idea of what men were thinking, they'd never stop slapping us."-Larry Miller
Going crazy/ take a pill/ I'm depressed/ aren't we all/ a little kind/ elf told me/ what to be./ Cutting wrists/ stop the pain/ how ironic/ oxymoron/ civil war and honest lawyers/ fall apart."-Amanda Jones
"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."-Pablo Neruda
"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it."-William Shakespeare
"From the moment he looked me in my eyes and saw what no one else did, I loved him."
"Revenge is best served cold with a side of sin."-Rynn Fox
"I will not let my dress size determine my self worth."
"Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up."-Katherine Dunn
I'd never fallen in love...although I'd stepped in it a few times."-Rita Rudner
If God doesn't like the way I live, let Him tell me, not you
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field. I'll meet you there."-Rumi
"What good is five minutes of happiness when you're gonna spend the rest of your life crying?"-Tabitha Maler
"I/ I walk down the street./ There is a deep hole in the sidewalk./ I fall in/ I am lost...I am helpless/ It isn't my fault./ It takes forever to find a way out./ II/ I walk down the same street/ There is a deep hole in the sidewalk./ I pretend I don't see it./ I fall in again./ I can't believe I am in the same place./ But it isn't my fault./ It still takes a long time to get out./ III/ I walk down the same street/ There is a deep hole in the sidewalk/ I see it is there./ I still fall in...it's a habit./ My eyes are open/ I know where I am/ It is my fault./ I get out immediately./ IV/ I walk down the/ Same street./ There is a deep hole/ in the sidewalk./ I walk around it./ V/ I walk down another/ Street."
-Portia Nelson, "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters"
"'I hurt.'/ 'So what?' said the mother. / 'I grieve.'/ 'Your point?' said the dad./ I tell them all about my pain,/ And how I feel quite sad./ But no one really listens,/ No one really sees,/ No one was really quite prepared,/ Cause it was only me./ 'Oh my heart, my heart!'/ Cries the mother. / 'Oh damn, God Damn!'/ Cries the dad. / As they see my broken body. / They thought depression was a fad."
-Beth Coulter, "Broken Toy"
"Guys are not perfect, but we're simple. If we don't call you back, we really don't like you. If we don't call you back, but do all of a sudden, we want sex."-Chicks Suck Guy
"The way I see it, the men that I'm with, whoever they are, it's like look, you have to accept that I like ice cream, and I know it shows up on my hips but if you can't accept that, then leave. Go away. Toodles. It is non-negotiable."-Tori Amos
"If you really love someone it shouldn't matter what's been in their orifices."
I need to find myself today before I ever find my way back to you.
We like to be disturbed by delight."-Sophia Grojsman
"I too was frightened the first time I felt I hated my father. I felt like a criminal. But could I help it what was inside of me? I had to feel what I felt even if it killed me."-Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
Why should we strive, with cynic frown/ to knock their fairy castles down?-Eliza Cook
I always have a quotation for everything -- it saves original thinking.-Dorothy L. Sayers
"The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes."-Alain de Botton
"Quod me nutrit me destruit." (What nourishes me destroys me.)
I've got two x chromosomes and I'm not afraid to use them �Ellen
"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."-Katharine Hepburn
Nothing spoils the taste of peanut butter like unrequited love."-Charlie Brown
"You can get around to meaningful conversations more quickly in the dark than with the sun tickling your face."-Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
"A child's kiss is magic. Why else would they be so stingy with them?"-Harvey Fierstein Marion
"I'm too tall to be a girl, I never had enough dresses to be a lady, and I wouldn't call myself a woman. I'm somewhere between a chick and a broad."-Julia Roberts
"I'm a hopeless romantic trapped in a cynic's body."-Ariel Bierbaum
"Sometimes I think I'd be better off dead. No, wait. Not me, you." - Jack Handey
"The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms" - Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
"I'm going to be assertive... if that's okay with you." - Dr. Robert Anthony, Think Again
"Mothers are all slightly insane" - J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
"My feeling is that labels are for canned food...I am what I am - - and I know what I am." -Michael Stipe
Cat: We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.
Alice: How do you know I'm mad?
Cat: You must be... or you wouldn't have come here.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say" - Cyril Connolly
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. And there was a knock at the door..." - Anonymous, The World's Shortest Horror Story
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened" - Douglas Adams
Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome." - Chinese Proverb
"I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point." - Calvin and Hobbes
"Hey Santa, how much for your list of naughty girls?" - Anonymous
"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." - H.L. Mencken
"There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness.'" - Dave Barry
"See my eyes - are they safe? Are they even sane?" - Tim Rice, Chess
"I can't go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." -Lewis Carroll
1) Children are not pets.
2) The life they actually live and the life you perceive them to be living is not the same life.
3) Don't take what your children do too personally.
4) Don't keep scorecards on them - a short memory is useful.
5) Dirt and mess are a breeding ground for wellbeing.
6) Stay out of their rooms after puberty.
7) Stay out of their friendships and love-life unless invited in.
8) Don't worry that they never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
9) Learn from them; they have much to teach you.
10) Love them long; let them go early."
- Robert Fulghum, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It
"I am the kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." - J.D. Salinger
"I bet people would like me more if my sense of self-deprecating humor didn't suck so much." - Jenna Morris "People have learned to ignore Web ads that don't move, so lately advertisers are only willing to pay for pop-up ads. Someday, after you learn to ignore pop-up ads too, then the advertisers will have to drive to your house and tattoo ads directly on your body. You'll be nostalgic for the good old days of pop-up ads. Enjoy them while you can." - Scott Adams
"Some people think its holding on that makes one strong, but sometimes it's letting go."
"Pooh sidled up to Piglet from behind.�Pooh,' he whispered.�Yes Piglet?' 'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"-A. A. Milne
"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."--unknown
"Pain is nature's way of saying 'Don't do that stupid.�--unknown
"If two people think exactly alike, one of them is unnecessary."
"If I can be of any help, you're in worse trouble than I thought."
"I've told you for the fifty-thousandth time, stop exaggerating."
It is such a secret place, the land of tears. - The Little Prince
"If you never have you should, these things are fun and fun is good." -Dr. Seuss
"Kiss me and you will see how important I am." -Sylvia Plath
"It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for."
Never open a book before 4 p.m. Sunday.
(Rule of Weekend Studying)
On one issue, at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women. -H. L. Mencken
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. - Clifton Fadiman
The thought of suicide is a great comfort. It's helped me through many a bad night. - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Somebody's boring me; I think it's me."--Dylan Thomas
"Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously, and change the subject."�Unknown
Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then - one day - you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe." - Denis Leary
I feel that I need some kind of break from being funny.
"You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us." --Sappho
I've learned:
-- that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
-- that no matter how much I care, some people are just assholes.
-- That it takes years to build up trust, and only suspicion, not proof, to destroy it.
-- That you shouldn't compare yourself to others - they are more fucked up than you think
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30."
"The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola ---THGTTG-pt.4
...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness... - Jack Kerouac
"It takes a unique woman to see me as any sort of catch." -- MOBY
I used to be an atheist, until I realized I was God
Psychiatrists say that 1 of 4 people is mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it
I�m going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
FOR ALL OF YOU WHO TALK ABOUT ME THANKS FOR MAKING ME THE CENTER OF YOUR WORLD!
What do you do when the only person who can make you stop crying is the person who made you cry?
"In a world of cheerios, why not be a fruit loop?"
"Why do we love the ones that hurt us and hurt the ones that love us?"
When all else fails, look cute
I'm not shy; I just don't like you
Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once!
SMILE! It scares people...
|
i don't know
|
The UHF wireless technology developed by Eriksson in 1994 for data transfer between devices in close proximity is?
|
A Study of Wireless Technology Based Pilgrim Tracking Systems
A Study of Wireless Technology Based Pilgrim Tracking Systems
Upcoming SlideShare
Show related SlideShares at end
WordPress Shortcode
A Study of Wireless Technology Based Pilgrim Tracking Systems
1,395 views
Published on
Oct 28, 2014
This report studies various technologies which can be used for people tracking and crowd management. During any pilgrimage session, the events like losing a group member, medical emergencies, and stampede are very common. In case of disasters like flood, fire, earthquake pilgrims are often left stranded as they have a little knowledge about that area. To address these concerns, the authorities need information about the location and direction of movement of the pilgrims. Sometime, it may be necessary to identify a person in cases like a lost child, unconscious or dead person. Researchers have proposed a number of solutions using the wireless technology which includes RFID tags, NFC, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. An introduction about the technologies and how they can be used to design systems for people identification and tracking is presented. The various systems using a set of technologies have been studied in terms of their effectiveness and the cost.
...
|
Bluetooth
|
What is the '1c Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
|
Patent US7748636 - Portable identity card reader system for physical and logical access - Google Patents
Portable identity card reader system for physical and logical access
US 7748636 B2
Abstract
A portable RFID reader apparatus having a contactless interface and slots or recesses for insertion of contactless smart card fobs, including ID card, and having a wireless interface for communicating with a token plugged into a computer, provides physical and logical access.
Images(3)
1. A portable RFID reader/card system for physical access or logical access comprising:
a generally rectangular reader body;
circuitry disposed within the reader body;
a contactless ID card disposed in close proximity to the reader body;
an antenna positioned around the perimeter of the reader body which can act as a compensating antenna or to communicate with the contactless ID card;
at least one antenna coil disposed in the reader body for communicating with corresponding at least one contactless fob inserted into the reader body in a contactless mode.
2. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 1
, wherein:
the circuitry is arranged to communicate with the contactless ID card in a contactless mode and with an external reader in a wireless mode.
3. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 2
, wherein:
the contactless ID card is disposed in a recess in a surface of the body portion.
4. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 2
, wherein:
the contactless ID card is clipped to a lanyard which is attached to the body portion.
5. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 1
a contact interface for an SD card inserted into the reader.
6. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 1
, wherein:
the at least one antenna coil comprises two antenna coils for communicating with corresponding two contactless fobs inserted into the reader body in the contactless mode.
7. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 1
an additional antenna for communicating via a wireless token plugged into a user's computer.
8. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 1
9. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 8
, wherein:
the contactless interface is selected from the group consisting of ISO 14443, ISO 15693, NFC, and any similar interface.
10. The portable RFID reader/card system of
claim 8
, wherein:
the wireless interface is selected from the group consisting of IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wibree, and any similar interface.
11. A method of using a contactless ID card for physical entry comprising:
disposing the ID card in close proximity to a portable reader system; and
presenting the combination of card and reader apparatus to a mullion reader;
wherein the portable reader system comprises:
a generally rectangular reader body;
circuitry disposed within the reader body;
a contactless ID card disposed in close proximity to the reader body;
an antenna positioned around the perimeter of the reader body which can act as a compensating antenna or to communicate with the contactless ID card;
at least one antenna coil disposed in the reader body for communicating with corresponding at least one contactless fob inserted into the reader body in a contactless mode.
12. A method of using a contactless ID card for logical access comprising:
disposing the ID card in close proximity to a portable reader system; and
presenting the combination of card and reader apparatus to a wireless token associated with a personal computer;
wherein the portable reader system comprises:
a generally rectangular reader body;
circuitry disposed within the reader body;
a contactless ID card disposed in close proximity to the reader body;
an antenna positioned around the perimeter of the reader body which can act as a compensating antenna or to communicate with the contactless ID card;
at least one antenna coil disposed in the reader body for communicating with corresponding at least one contactless fob inserted into the reader body in a contactless mode.
13. The method of
claim 12
, wherein:
when the user is in the vicinity of their computer, a communication event is opened up between the wireless token and combination of reader and ID card, thereby allowing the user to access a network after checking the credentials on the proximity (ID) card via the reader/card system.
14. The method of
claim 13
, further comprising:
when the user moves away from their computer, the communication signal between the reader/card system and the wireless token deteriorates, and the computer automatically logs-off from the network or goes into password protected security mode, once the reader/card system carried by the user is out of range of the Zigbee/Bluetooth.
15. The method of
claim 13
, wherein the token uses a standard selected from the group consisting of Zigbee, Bluetooth, and Wibree.
Description
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
This patent application claims benefit of the following U.S. Provisional and/or non-provisional patent applications, all of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety herein:
This is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 11/420,747 filed 27 May 2006 by Finn (hereinafter “C16”).
This is a non-provisional filing of 60/832,799 filed 24 Jul. 2006 by Finn (hereinafter “C18”).
This is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 11/355,264 filed Feb. 15, 2006 by Finn (hereinafter “C11”), which is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 10/990,296 filed Nov. 16, 2004 by Ryan et al. (hereinafter “C4”, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,766 issued May 8, 2007).
TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to contactless smart card technology and to RFID (radio frequency identification) reader technology.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
U.S. Pat. No. 6,913,196 discloses a dual mode smart card controller (USB and ISO7816) that determines the type of card that is inserted into a slot. If the smart card is a USB smart card, the controller is adapted to pass control of the smart card to an external PC host USB hub circuit. If the smart card is an ISO7816 card, then control is handled by the dual mode controller. In another embodiment, the controller includes an embedded USB hub circuit to permit the controller to directly control both USB and ISO7816 smart cards. Exemplary control sequencing includes monitoring a C4 signal line for a pre-selected time period, or generating an enable signal if a USB smart card is detected. See also U.S. Pat. No. 7,150,397
US patent publication 2006/0226217 discloses a sleeve for electronic transaction card. A sleeve provides communications between an electronic transaction card and an intelligent electronic device. The intelligent electronic device may be a mobile phone or other device with or without network connectivity. The electronic transaction card may have magnetic field producing circuitry compatible with magnetic card readers, smartcard circuitry, other point-of-sale interfaces, or any combination thereof.
US patent publication 2005/0269402 discloses a financial transaction system utilizing multi-factor authentication to secure financial transactions. The following is claimed:
1. A portable transaction device comprising: memory to hold information regarding a financial card; a slot to interface with a re-programmable card; and software to generate single use transaction numbers.
2. The portable transaction device of claim 1 further comprising a biometric scanner where the portable transaction device is configured to combine biometric information with one or more additional authentication factors to secure financial transactions.
3. The portable transaction device of claim 1 further comprising a wireless interface to communicate with a secondary wireless device for an additional authentication factor.
US patent application 2006/0213982 discloses a smartcard-enabled BPID Security Device integrates a smartcard reader with a biometric authentication component to provide secured access to electronic systems. The device allows for an individual to insert a smartcard into an aperture in the physical enclosure of the BPID Security Device, allowing the smartcard and the BPID Security Device to electronically communicate with each other. The smartcard-enabled BPID Security Device is based on a custom application specific integrated circuit that incorporates smartcard terminals, such that the BPID Security Device can communicate directly with an inserted smartcard. In an alternative embodiment of the invention, the smartcard-enabled BPID Security Device is based on a commercial off-the-shelf microprocessor, and may communicate with a commercial off-the-shelf microprocessor smartcard receiver using a serial, USB, or other type of communication protocol. The device allows for enrolling a user's credentials onto the smartcard-enabled BPID Security Device. The device also allows for authenticating an individual using the smartcard-enabled BPID Security Device.
US patent application 2006/0230437 discloses a secure and transparent digital credential sharing arrangement which utilizes one or more cryptographic levels of indirection to obfuscate a sharing entity's credentials from those entities authorized to share the credentials. A security policy table is provided which allows the sharing entity to selectively authorize or revoke digital credential sharing among a plurality of entities. Various embodiments of the invention provide for secure storage and retrieval of digital credentials from security tokens such as smart cards. The secure sharing arrangement may be implemented in hierarchical or non-hierarchical embodiments as desired.)
Glossary & Definitions
Unless otherwise noted, or as may be evident from the context of their usage, any terms, abbreviations, acronyms or scientific symbols and notations used herein are to be given their ordinary meaning in the technical discipline to which the disclosure most nearly pertains. The following terms, abbreviations and acronyms may be used throughout the descriptions presented herein and should generally be given the following meaning unless contradicted or elaborated upon by other descriptions set forth herein. Some of the terms set forth below may be registered trademarks (�).
Energy harvesting Also known as power harvesting, energy scavenging is the process by which energy may be captured and stored. Frequently this term is applied when speaking about small autonomous devices, like those used in sensor networks. A variety of different methods exist for harvesting energy, such as solar power, ocean tides, piezoelectricity, thermoelectricity, and physical motion.
Lanyard A lanyard, also spelled laniard, is a rope or cord often worn around the neck or wrist to carry something. Lanyards have started to appear on consumer electronics devices. With increasing miniaturization, many digital cameras, MP3 players, and USB memory sticks include lanyards, providing easy portability, and insurance against loss or dropping.
Proximity Card Proximity card is a generic name for contactless integrated circuit devices used for security access or payment systems. It can refer to the older 125 KHz devices or the newer 13.56 MHz contactless RFID cards, most commonly known as contactless smartcards. Modern proximity cards are covered by the ISO 14443 (Proximity Card) standard. There is also a related ISO 15693 (Vicinity Card) standard. Proximity cards use an LC circuit. An IC, capacitor, and coil are connected in series. The card reader presents a field that excites the coil and charges the capacitor, which in turn energizes the IC. IC then transmits the card number via the coil to the card reader. The card readers communicate in Wiegand protocol that consists of a data 0 and a data 1 circuit. The earliest cards were 26 bit. As demand has increased bit size has increased to continue to provide unique numbers. Often, the first several bits can be made identical. These are called facility or site code. The idea is that company “Alice” has a facility code of xn and a card set of 0001 through 1000 and company “Bob” has a facility code of yn and a card set also of 0001 through 1000.
USB CCID USB is short for Universal Serial Bus. CCID is short for Chip/Smart Card Interface Devices. ICCD is short for Integrated Circuit(s) Card Devices). CCID is intended to use one generic device driver for different types of Smart Card readers without the need of each vendor having to supply its own software driver.
Wiegand refer to the following paragraphs regarding the Wiegand effect, Wiegand interface, Wiegand protocol, Wiegand wire.
The Wiegand effect is a pulse-generating phenomenon in a special alloy wire that is processed in such a way as to create two distinct magnetic regions in the same homogeneous piece of wire, referred to as a shell and a core. It occurs when such a specially processed wire (a “Wiegand wire”) is moved past a magnetic field. The two distinct magnetic regions react differently to any applied magnetic field: the shell requires a strong magnetic field to reverse its magnetic polarity, whereas the core will revert under weaker field conditions. The polarity of the wire will very rapidly shift and generate strong, short (˜10 μs) electrical pulses without any additional external power being supplied. This is known as the “Barkhausen jump” or “Barkhausen effect”. The Barkhausen jump can be detected by a coil wrapped around the material, when the small amount of voltage described above is generated.
The Wiegand interface is a defacto wiring standard, which arose from the popularity of Wigand effect RFID card readers in the 1980's. A Wiegand-compatible reader is normally connected to a Wiegand-compatible security panel.
The Wiegand interface uses two signal lines, termed data0 and data1. To transmit a zero bit, the data0 line is pulsed from 5V to 0V. To transmit a one bit, the data1 line is pulsed.
Wiegand protocol is a name for a system of sending data from a sensor such as a card reader or proximity sensor. It is commonly used to connect a card swipe mechanism to the rest of an electronic entry system. The sensor in such a system is often a Wiegand wire based on the Wiegand effect discovered by John R. Wiegand. The Wiegand protocol is apparently not formally defined in any one place.
The Wiegand protocol consists of three wires, one of which is a common ground, and two data transmission wires, usually called DATA0 and DATA1, but sometimes also labeled Data High and Data Low. When no data is being sent both DATA0 and DATA1 are at the high voltage. When a 0 is sent, the Data Low wire (also called DATA0) is at a low voltage while the Data High wire (also called DATA1) stays at the high voltage. When a 1 is sent, Data High is at the low voltage while Data Low stays at the high voltage. The high and low voltage levels are usually the TTL (transistor-transistor logic) voltage levels. A series of bits are sent, followed by a parity bit or bits. The number of bits sent at once varies according to the device, with 26 bits being common.
Contact Interfaces
As used herein, “contact interfaces” (or “mechanical interface”) refers to mechanical (wired) connections between one device and another, such as via a cable or inserting a module into a socket. The following are examples of contact interfaces and/or devices that typically connect via a contact interface.
Ethernet A local-area network (LAN) architecture developed by Xerox Corporation in cooperation with DEC and Intel in 1976. Ethernet uses a bus or star topology and supports data transfer rates of 10 Mbps. The Ethernet specification served as the basis for the IEEE 802.3 standard, which specifies the physical and lower software layers. Ethernet uses the CSMA/CD access method to handle simultaneous demands. It is one of the most widely implemented LAN standards. A newer version of Ethernet, called 100Base-T (or Fast Ethernet), supports data transfer rates of 100 Mbps. And the newest version, Gigabit Ethernet supports data rates of 1 gigabit (1,000 megabits) per second.
IEEE 1394 IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire� and iLINK™) is a high-bandwidth isochronous (real-time) interface for computers, peripherals, and consumer electronics products such as camcorders, VCRs, printers, PCs, TVs, and digital cameras. With IEEE 1394-compatible products and systems, users can transfer video or still images from a camera or camcorder to a printer, PC, or television (TV), with no image degradation.
ISO 7816 ISO7816 defines specification of smart card contact interface IC chip and IC card. The main ISO standard relating to smart cards is ISO7816: “Identification cards: integrated circuit cards with contacts”.
SD Short for “Secure Digital”. SD is a technology standard for providing portable devices with non-volatile memory/storage and peripheral I/O expansion capability. On some devices this standard is implemented in the form of SD memory expansion cards, used to store digital information like applications, databases, photos, text, audio, video or MP3 music files, and an SD/SDIO expansion slot. The SD standard makes it possible to transfer information between devices that support SD expansion cards (e.g. transfer photos between a digital camera and a PDA by exchanging the SD expansion card), assuming both devices support the file format used for the transferred information (e.g. JPEG image file).
SDIO Short for “Secure Digital Input/Output”. SDIO is a part of the SD memory specification. It enables I/O (input/output) expansion for add-ons such as serial, modem, camera or GPS (global positioning system) cards. Whereas SD is only used for storage expansion cards, an SDIO capable expansion slot can also support SD expansion cards, while an SD-capable slot may not support an SDIO expansion card.
SIM Short for “Secure Identity Module” or “Subscriber Identification/Identity Module”. A SIM card inscribed with a customer's information and designed to be inserted into any mobile telephone. Usually SIM card phones work by GSM technology. The SIM card contains a user's GSM mobile account information. SIM cards are portable between GSM devices—the user's mobile subscriber information moves to whatever device houses the SIM.
USB Short for “Universal Serial Bus”. USB is a serial bus standard (standardized communications protocol) that enables data exchange between electronic devices. USB supports data transfer rates of up to 12 Mbps (megabits per second). A single USB port can be used to connect up to 127 peripheral devices, such as mice, modems, and keyboards. USB also supports plug-and-play installation and “hot plugging”. USB is expected to completely replace serial and parallel ports. Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0) similar to FireWire technology, supports data rates up to 480 Mbps.
Wireless Interfaces
As used herein, “wireless interfaces” refers to ultra-high radio frequency (RF) connections between one device and another, typically over a moderate distance, such as up to 100 meters, and in some cases (such as WiMAX) over long distances such as 50 km. The following are examples of wireless interfaces and/or devices that typically connect via a wireless interface.
WirelessTechnology that allows a user to communicate and/or connect to the Internet or mobile phone networks without physical wires. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth�, CDMA and GSM are all examples of wireless technology.
Bluetooth A wireless technology developed by Ericsson, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba that specifies how mobile phones, computers and PDAs interconnect with each other, with computers, and with office or home phones. The technology enables data connections between electronic devices in the 2.4 GHz range at 720 Kbps (kilo bits per second) within a 10 meter range. Bluetooth uses low-power radio frequencies to transfer information wirelessly between similarly equipped devices. A Bluetooth interface typically has a range of up to 10 meters, and is typically intended for private/personal communications such as connecting a user's mobile phone with his computer, or with a Bluetooth headset. Bluetooth bandwidth is specified at 720 Kbps.
IEEE 802.11 The IEEE standard for wireless Local Area Networks (LANs). It uses three different physical layers, 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g.
PAN short for private area network. Using a wireless connection such as Bluetooth, a PAN has a range of only several meters, such as up to 10 meters.
UWB UWB is short for “Ultra Wide Band”. UWB is a wireless communications technology that transmits data in short pulses which are spread out over a wide swath of spectrum. Because the technology does not use a single frequency, UWB enjoys several potential advantages over single-frequency transmissions. For one, it can transmit data in large bursts because data is moving on several channels at once. Another advantage is that it can share frequencies, which is used by other applications because it transmits only for extremely short periods, which do not last long enough to cause interference with other signals.
UWB is a signaling technique using very short pulses to achieve very high transfer speeds. UWB it is not limited to wireless communication, UWB can also use mains-wiring, coaxial cable or twisted-pair cables to communicate. In a wireless mode, UWB may be similar in range to Bluetooth (typically up to 10 meters), but with a much greater bandwidth. Theoretically, WAN can achieve transfer speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s, versus only up to 3 Mbps for Bluetooth.
WAN short for wireless area network. Using a WAN connection such as 802.11, a WAN has a range of up to approximately 100 meters.
Wibree Wirebee is a digital radio technology (intended to become an open standard of wireless communications) designed for ultra low power consumption (button cell batteries) within a short range (10 meters/30 feet) based around low-cost transceiver microchips in each device. Wibree is designed to work side-by-side with and complement Bluetooth. It operates in 2.4 GHz ISM band with physical layer bit rate of 1 Mbps. Main applications include devices such as wrist watches, wireless keyboards, toys and sports sensors where low power-consumption is a key design requirement. The technology was announced 2006 Oct. 3 by Nokia. Partners that currently license the technology and cooperate in defining the specification are Nordic Semiconductor, Broadcom Corporation, CSR and Epson.
Wi-Fi Short for “Wireless Fidelity”. Wireless technology, also known as 802.11b, enables you to access the Internet, to send and receive email, and browse the Web anywhere within range of a Wi-Fi access point, or HotSpot. Wi-Fi typically has a range of up to 100 meters, and is typically intended for connectivity to an Internet-capable appliance at a hot-spot. Wi-Fi bandwidth is specified at up to 54 Mbps (802.11a-5.0 GHz or 802.11b/g-2.4 GHz).
WiMAX short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. (IEEE 802.16) WiMAX is a standards-based wireless technology that provides high-throughput broadband connections over long distances, such as several kilometers (up to 50 km with direct line-of-sight, up to 8 km without direct line-of-sight). WiMAX can be used for a number of applications, including “last mile” broadband connections, hotspots and cellular backhaul, and high-speed enterprise connectivity for business.
WLAN Short for “wireless local-area network”. Also referred to as LAWN. A WLAN is a type of local-area network that uses high-frequency radio waves rather than wires for communication between nodes (e.g., between PCs).
ZigBee ZigBee is the name of a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). ZigBee is targeted at RF applications that require a low data rate, long battery life, and secure networking.
Contactless Interfaces
As used herein, “contactless interfaces” refers to high radio frequency (RF) connections between one device and another, typically over a very short distance, such as only up to 50 cm. The following are examples of contactless interfaces and/or devices that typically connect via a contactless interface.
ISO 14443 ISO 14443 RFID cards; contactless proximity cards operating at 13.56 MHz with a read/write range of up to 10 cm. ISO 14443 defines the contactless interface smart card technical specification.
ISO 15693 ISO standard for contactless integrated circuits, such as used in RF-ID tags. ISO 15693 RFID cards; contactless vicinity cards operating at 13.56 MHz with a read/write range of up to 100 cm. (ISO 15693 is typically not used for financial transactions because of its relatively long range as compared with ISO 14443.)
NFC Short for “Near Field Communication”. NFC is a contactless connectivity technology that enables short-range communication between electronic devices. If two devices are held close together (for example, a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant), NFC interfaces establish a peer-to-peer protocol, and information such as phone book details can be passed freely between them. NFC devices can be linked to contactless smart cards, and can operate like a contactless smart card, even when powered down. This means that a mobile phone can operate like a transportation card, and enable fare payment and access to the subway. NFC is an open platform technology standardized in ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) 340 as well as ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) TS 102 190 V1.1.1 and ISO/IEC 18092. These standards specify the modulation schemes, coding, transfer speeds, and frame format of the RF interface of NFC devices, as well as initialization schemes and conditions required for data collision-control during initialization—for both passive and active modes.
RFID Short for “Radio Frequency Identification”. An RFID device interacts, typically at a limited distance, with a “reader”, and may be either “passive” (powered by the reader) or “active” (having its own power source, such as a battery).
Wireless Versus Contactless Interfaces
Wireless and Contactless are two types of radio frequency (RF) interfaces. In a most general sense, both are “wireless” in that they do not require wires, and that they use RF. However, in the art to which this invention most nearly pertains, the terms “wireless” and “contactless” have two very different meanings and two very different functionalities.
The wireless interfaces of interest in the present invention are principally WLAN, Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wibree and UWB. These wireless interfaces operate at a distance of several meters, generally for avoiding “cable spaghetti” for example, Bluetooth for headsets and other computer peripherals. WLAN is typically used for networking several computers in an office.
The contactless interfaces of interest in the present invention are principally RFID contactless interfaces such as ISO 14443, 15693 and NFC. RFID operates at a maximum distance of 100 cm for the purpose of identification in applications such as access control. In a payment (financial transaction) application, the distance is restricted to 10 cm. For example, a contactless RFID smart card protocol according to ISO 14443 can be used for private, secure financial transactions in “real world” applications such as payment at a retailer.
Wireless and contactless use different communications protocols with different capabilities and are typically used for very different purposes. Note, for example, that 100 cm (ISO 15693, an RFID contactless protocol) is considered to be too great a distance to provide appropriate security for (contactless) financial transactions. But 100 cm would not be enough to provide a (wireless) network between office computers! Additionally, generally, contactless technology is primarily passive (having no power source of its own), deriving power to operate from the electromagnetic field generated by a nearby reader. Also, contactless technology, using the smart card protocol, is used for secure identification, authentication and payment. Wireless technologies, on the other hand, generally require their own power source (either batteries, or plugged in) to operate. Contactless is different than wireless; different protocol, different signal characteristics, different utility, different energy requirements, different capabilities, different purposes, different advantages, different limitations.
Further Distinctions Between Wireless Interfaces
A distinction has been made between contactless interfaces operating at very short distances (such as only up to 10 cm, 50 cm or 100 cm) such as for secure financial transactions, and wireless interfaces operating at moderate distance, such as up to 100 m.
A further distinction can be made within the definition of wireless (short distances, such as up to 10 meters) between wireless connections for a private area network (PAN) operating at close range of only several meters (and ensuring a reasonable level of privacy), and wireless connections for a wireless area network (WAN) operating at a medium/moderate range of up to 100 meters to provide public access to the Internet, at hot spots, or to set up a wireless LAN within an office environment.
Thus, for purposes of this disclosure there are identified (and defined) 4 different “levels” (or types) of communication interfaces using radio frequency (RF) for transferring data between compatible devices, as follows:
“contactless”, for very short distances, up to 100 cm (less than one meter), such as for performing secure applications such as access control, or financial transactions. (When carrying a smart card, a user needs to feel confident that the contents of the card cannot be snooped or skimmed from a nearby stranger wielding a laptop.) Within contactless, a further distinction can be made between extremely short distances (such as ISO 14443 operating at up to 10 cm distance, and useful for secure financial transactions) and moderately short distances (such as ISO 15693 having a read/write range of up to 100 cm, and useful for RFID used to collect tolls electronically).
“PAN wireless”, effective at short distances, up to several meters (such as 10 meters), for providing a personal network, generally for a single user (telephone, computer, Bluetooth headset, computer peripherals), and providing a small measure of privacy based on the limited range of the signal. Also, Infrared (optical transmission), Zigbee, Bluetooth and UWB are used in private area networks.
“WAN wireless”, effective at moderate distances, such as up to 100 meters, such as for networking computers in an office environment.
“WiMAX wireless”, effective at long distances, such as up to 50 kilometers, for providing broadband access to the public (simultaneously to many users), which can hardly be considered to be private, without accompanying encryption of data/signal packets.
PRIOR ART PUBLICATIONS
The following patents and applications are incorporated by reference in their entirety herein. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,763,315; 6,745,042; 6,560,711; 6,307,471; 6,070,240; 6,456,958. US patent application nos. 20050044424, 20020104012, 20020069030, 20020065625.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to an embodiment of the invention, a portable RFID reader/card system comprises: a generally rectangular body; circuitry disposed within the body portion; and a contactless ID card disposed in close proximity to the body portion. The circuitry may be arranged to communicate with the contactless ID card in a contactless mode and with an external reader in a wireless mode. The contactless ID card may be disposed in a recess in a surface of the body portion. The contactless ID card may be clipped to a lanyard which is attached to the body portion.
According to an embodiment of the invention, a method of using a contactless ID card for physical entry comprises: disposing the ID card in close proximity to a portable reader system; and presenting the combination of card and reader apparatus to a mullion reader.
According to an embodiment of the invention, a method of using a contactless ID card for logical access comprises: disposing the ID card in close proximity to a portable reader system; and presenting the combination of card and reader apparatus to a wireless token associated with a personal computer. When the user is in the vicinity of their computer, a communication event may be opened up between the wireless token and combination of reader and ID card, thereby allowing the user to access a network after checking the credentials on the proximity (ID) card via the reader/card system. When the user moves away from their computer, the communication signal between the reader/card system and the wireless token deteriorates, and the computer automatically logs-off from the network or goes into password protected security mode. Once the reader/card system carried by the user is out of range of the Zigbee/Bluetooth The token may use a standard selected from the group consisting of Zigbee, Bluetooth, and Wibree.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
Reference will be made in detail to embodiments of the disclosure, examples of which may be illustrated in the accompanying drawing figures (FIGs). The figures are intended to be illustrative, not limiting. Although the invention is generally described in the context of these embodiments, it should be understood that it is not intended to limit the invention to these particular embodiments.
Certain elements in selected ones of the figures may be illustrated not-to-scale, for illustrative clarity. The cross-sectional views, if any, presented herein may be in the form of “slices”, or “near-sighted” cross-sectional views, omitting certain background lines which would otherwise be visible in a true cross-sectional view, for illustrative clarity. In some cases, hidden lines may be drawn as dashed lines (this is conventional), but in other cases they may be drawn as solid lines.
If shading or cross-hatching is used, it is intended to be of use in distinguishing one element from another (such as a cross-hatched element from a neighboring un-shaded element). It should be understood that it is not intended to limit the disclosure due to shading or cross-hatching in the drawing figures.
Elements of the figures may (or may not) be numbered as follows. The most significant digits (hundreds) of the reference number correspond to the figure number. For example, elements of
FIG. 1
an Internet connected PC via it's mechanical (contact) interface such as USB,
an external RFID terminal via it's contactless interface,
an external dongle or token plugged into a PC via it's Zigbee/Bluetooth/Wibree interface (PAN),
a mobile device via it's NFC/Bluetooth interface, and with a WiFi network (WAN) via it's wireless interface.
The communication protocol between the RFID reader apparatus 400/Contactless smart card fob 116 and an external (see
FIG. 3
) RFID reader, terminal, handheld or kiosk can include transponder information or electronic value residing in the memory of the contactless chip and/or an authorization signal with encrypted keys (generated by matching a stored biometric template with a live fingerprint or thumbprint scan).
A downside to existing authentication devices such as “One-Time-Password” tokens is that they do not replace facility access badges, and cannot be issued or administrated directly from the physical access control system console.
The portable identity card/reader system disclosed herein allows employees, contractors, customers and business partners to securely access corporate facilities and IT resources. Via the wireless interface, the apparatus can be used by network administrators to manage user privileges and access to services; register, activate, and revoke certificates of authentication as required; and ensure that all digital certificates are valid and enforced.
The portable identity card/reader system disclosed herein can generate a new pass code every sixty seconds based on the HOTP algorithm endorsed by the Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH).
Via the wireless interface, the portable identity card/reader system disclosed herein can receive time- and event-based messages.
Using the wireless interface, data and applications can be added, removed, or changed after the portable Identity Card/Reader system has been issued, eliminating the time and cost of reissuing new devices. Applications can range from cafeteria payments to enterprise network sign-on. In a single process, employee access to areas such as gated entrances, buildings, or networks can be updated or revoked.
Users can securely login to a remote server using the Identity Card/Reader system and be protected against password snooping, man-in-the-middle, keyboard logging, spoofing, phishing, pharming and Trojan attacks
In telephone banking, callers flagged as high risk can be challenged with authentication in the form of one-time passwords, biometric voiceprint samples, or additional content match questions. The portable Identity Card/Reader system 400 can be provided with a speaker microphone interface 440 and speech recognition facility 442. This can provide a level of personalization, such as for sending a password via a wireless network.
Access to the in-built timer in synchronization with an Internet Atomic clock or server clock allows applications such as temporary web-coupons or the use of time based PINs.
For long range communication such as in garage access, the standard IEEE 802.15.4 in-vehicle gate access solution (400 MHz) can be applied.
Form Factor
The portable identity card/reader system may have the form factor of a card body, but other form factors such as watch, wrist band, key fob or belt clip design are also possible.
Energy Harvesting
In a building, the portable identity card/reader system can draw energy from the environment, such as picking up the electrical energy (50/60 Hertz) and using it to charge up its internal battery. Alternatively, the energy can be drawn from the office lights (using a photovoltaic cell, such as is common in card-size calculators).
The invention has been illustrated and described in a manner that should be considered as exemplary rather than restrictive in character—it being understood that only preferred embodiments have been shown and described, and that all changes and modifications that come within the spirit of the invention are desired to be protected. Undoubtedly, many other “variations” on the techniques set forth hereinabove will occur to one having ordinary skill in the art to which the present invention most nearly pertains, and such variations are intended to be within the scope of the invention, as disclosed herein.
Patent Citations
|
i don't know
|
A circular partner-swapping ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader, is the?
|
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League: 4th November The Questions
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League
Set by The Lamb Inn
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
1. Q. Offenbach’s barcarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ is a famous piece of music, but what is a barcarolle ?
A. A BOATING SONG (Accept any reference to boats).
2. Q. Which Gilbert & Sullivan operetta contains the song generally known as ‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ ?
A. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE.
3. Q. Which TV presenter is the daughter of Newspaper Editor and Columnist Eve Pollard ?
A. CLAUDIA WINKELMAN.
4. Q. Who created the statue of ‘St.Michael’s victory over the Devil’ on Coventry Cathedral ?
A. JACOB EPSTEIN.
5. Q. Which artist painted the work entitled ‘Guernica’ ?
A. PABLO PICASSO.
6. Q. In the TV series ‘Inspector Morse’, who wrote the theme tune ?
A. BARRINGTON PHELOUNG
7. Q. Mark McManus of ‘Taggart’ fame had a famous singing half-brother. Who is he ?
A. BRIAN CONNOLLY (Lead singer of The Sweet).
8. Q. Who composed the music for the films ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘The Mission’ ?
A. ENNIO MORRICONE.
(a) Q. Which piece of music preceded TV’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ ?
A. THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE (Giaochino Rossini)
(b) Q. Who is the mother of actress Joely Richardson ?
A. VANESSA REDGRAVE.
(c) Q. In which play does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
A. THE RIVALS (by Sheridan)
1) What is the capital of Croatia ? (A) Zagreb
2) Which river runs through Leicester ? (A) Soar
3) What is described as : a U-shaped body of water that forms when a wide meander from the main river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water ? (A) Ox Bow Lake
4) What is the largest lake in Europe ? (A) Lake Lagoda (14th largest in the world.)
5) What is a line on a map or chart joining points of equal height or depth called ? (A) Contour
6) Which city is the capital of Canada ? (A) Ottawa
7) Which river runs through Ipswich ? (A) Orwell
8) Yosemite National Park is in which US State ? (A) California
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Greenland belongs to which country ? (A) Denmark.
(b) In which country are the largest waterfalls measured by flow-rate in Europe ?
(A) Switzerland (Rhine falls)
1. Q. Which statesman married Miss Clementine Hosier in 1908 ?
A. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
2. Q. Who founded The National Viewers & Listeners Association in 1965 ?
A. MARY WHITEHOUSE.
3. Q. In which year did the first human heart transplant take place ?
A. 1967 (allow 1966-1968).
4. Q. Where was Princess Elizabeth staying when she was given the news of her accession to the throne in 1558 ?
A. HATFIELD HOUSE in Hertfordshire.
5. Q. Give a year in the life of Ivan the Terrible.
A. 1530 – 1584
6. Q. The Rolls Royce ‘Thrust Measuring Rig’ developed in the 1950’s took off vertically, but what was its nickname ?
A. THE FLYING BEDSTEAD.
7. Q. Whose London monument by Edward Bailey is guarded by Edwin Landseer’s lions?
A. NELSON
8. Q. What, infamously, happened at Yekaterinburg on July 17th 1918 ?
A. THE ASSASINATION OF THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY
(THE ROMANOVS)
(a) Q. What was the code-name for planned German invasion of Britain ?
A. OPERATION SEA LION.
(b) Q. What is the connection between a large fish-eating bird and Drake’s ship ?
A. PELICAN (Name of Drakes ship before becoming The Golden Hind).
SCIENCE
1. Q. What is the tradename of the Du Pont synthetic fibre of high-tensile strength used mainly in rubber products, notably tyres and bullet-proof vests ?
A. KEVLAR.
2. Q. In astronomy, where would you find the ‘Cassini Division’ ?
A. SATURNS RINGS.
3. Q. As a percentage, what is the average salinity of sea water ?
A. 3.5% (accept 3% to 4%)
4. Q. What name is given to static discharges visible on aircraft wing tips and the tops of ships masts ?
A. ST. ELMO’S FIRE.
5. Q. In what device in the home would you find a magnetron ?
A. MICROWAVE OVEN.
6. Q. Traditionally, how have teachers always used sticks of calcium sulphate ?
A. BLACKBOARD CHALK.
7. Q. Why is sodium carbonate sometimes added to a water supply ?
A. TO REDUCE NATURAL HARDNESS.
8. Q. Which element is common to all acids ?
A. HYDROGEN.
(a) Q. By what name is deuterium oxide also known ?
A. HEAVY WATER.
(b) Q. Why is a compound of sulphur called ethyl mercaptan added to LPG cooking gas ?
A. TO GIVE THIS ODOURLESS GAS A DETECTABLE SMELL.
(c) Q. Bauxite is the main ore of which metal ?
A. ALUMINIUM.
1) Which horse won the 2014 Grand National ? (A) Pineau de Re.
2) In which year did Manchester United last win the FACup ? (A) 2004.
3) Who is currently England’s leading wicket taker in test matches? (A) I.T. Botham (383).
4) Who was the captain of the British women’s gold medal winning curling team in the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City ? (A) Rhona Martin.
5) Which was the last year that The Ryder Cup was played in an 'odd year'?
(A) 1999. (it was due to be played in 2001 and was cancelled due to ‘9/11’ and played in 2002 instead).
6) In which sport is the Lance Todd trophy awarded ? (A) Rugby League. (to the Cup Final Man of the Match).
7) Which team knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 2014 FACup?
(A) Sheffield Wednesday in a 3rd round replay.
8) Jessicca Ennis and Mo Farah were two thirds of Team GB's 'super Saturday' at the 2012 London Olympics. Which athlete completed the set of Gold Medals ?
(A) Greg Rutherford (Long jump).
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Where are the 2018 World Cup finals being held ? (A) Russia.
(b) On which golf course was the 2014 Ryder Cup held ? (A) Gleneagles.
FIND THE CAR
The answer to every question is a make of car, some of which are no longer manufactured.
1. Q. A position in which to meditate.
A. LOTUS
2. Q. American city famous for its Boot Hill cemetery.
A. DODGE
3. Q. City and Rovers.
A. BRISTOL.
4. Q. English country dancers, usually men.
A. MORRIS.
5. Q. No-one to carry your golf clubs ?
A. CADILLAC.
6. Q. U.S. army general purpose vehicle.
A. JEEP. (named from shortened GPV - General Purpose Vehicle)
7. Q. Forename of a current McClaren F1 driver.
A. JENSEN. (Button)
8. Q. Complete the line of the hymn ‘Jesus wants me for a ?’
A. SUNBEAM.
(a) Q. Impish eastern county town.
A. LINCOLN.
(b) Q. Area in south London originally famous for its gardens.
A. VAUXHALL.
(c) Q. Its only future was in ‘Back to the Future’.
A. DE LOREAN.
HORSEY BUSINESS
1) In the 2011 Academy nominated film 'War Horse' directed by Stephen Spielberg, what was the name of the main equine character ? (A) Joey
2) What was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse ? (A) Bucephalus
3) Esha Ness won the Grand National that never was. It was cancelled due to a false start ! In which year was this ? (A) 1993 (allow 92-94)
4) Who wrote the play 'Equus' in 1973 ? (A) Peter Shaffer
5) A filly is a female horse under the age of 4. What is a female horse over the age of 4 called ? (A) Mare
6) What is the gestation period of a horse in days ? (A) 340 (allow 330-350)
7) Who, famously, rode a horse called Marengo named after a battle in Italy ?
(A) Napoleon Bonaparte
8) The Horse of the Year show was first held in 1949 at Harringay Arena. Which enue now plays host ? (A) NEC in Birmingham (accept Birmingham)
(Note : It was at Wembley Arena from 1959-2002)
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) What was the Duke of Wellington's most remembered horse called ?
(A) Copenhagen
(b) ‘They shoot horses don't they’ was a UK No.14 hit for which welsh band in 1977 ? (A) Racing Cars
The answer to each question is a number.
1) How many Oscars did the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ win in 1981 ? (A) 4
2) How many lines are there in a sonnet ? (A) 14
3) What is the value of Pi to three decimal points ? (A) 3.142 (3.1415926)
4) How many feet are there in a chain ? (A) 66 (22 yards)
5) How many football world cups have there been ? (A) 20
6) At what speed did the DeLorean car need to travel, to go 'Back to the future' in the film of the same name ? (A) 88mph accept 86-90
7) How many Olympic gold medals did GB win at London 2012 (not including Paralympics) ? (A) 29 accept 28-30
8) How many books are there in the New Testament (A) 27 accept 26-28
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) How many players per team are there in a Water Polo team ? (A) 7
(b) How many counties make up Northern Ireland ? (A) 6
General Knowledge Questions as set by the Plough Horntails
1. Who is the current Secretary of State for Justice?
a. Chris Grayling
2. Which gas makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus?
a. Carbon dioxide (96%).
3. In architecture, what is a corbel?
a. a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall, a type of bracket.
4. Who is the current Secretary of State for transport?
a. Patrick McCloughlin
5. In which UK town does Honda assemble cars?
a. Swindon
6. Who is currently the manager of Sunderland football club?
a. Gus Poyet
7. Which F1 racing circuit has features called ‘Rascasse’ and ‘Sainte Devote’?
a. Monaco
8. What is the science of time measurement called?
a. Horology
(NB - not chronology which is to do with the ordering of events in time)
9. Mark Reckless was the MP for which constituency?
a. Rochester and Strood
10. What’s the name of the UK politician who embarrassed the Government by stating that disabled people could be paid £2 / hour?
a. Lord Freud
11. In architecture, what is a caryatid?
a. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
12. In which UK town does Morgan assemble cars?
a. Malvern
13. Who is the current presenter of Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’?
a. Nick Hewer
14. What was the name of the British policewoman killed in the 1984 Libyan embassy protest?
a. Yvonne Fletcher
15. Who was the first English king from the House of Lancaster?
a. Henry IV
16. Who preceded Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany?
a. Gerhard Schröder.
17. In which county is the Forest of Dean?
a. Gloucestershire.
18. Who is currently the manager of Swansea football club?
a. Gary Monk
19. Who wrote the book “King Solomon’s Mines?
a. H. Rider Haggard
20. Which was the first motorway service area to open in the UK?
a. Watford Gap (2 November 1959)
21. Who was the second man to orbit the Earth ?
a. Herman Titov
22. Currently, Sandi Toksvig presents 15-1 on TV. Who was her fore-runner?
a. William G. Stewart.
23. In which novel does the character Humbert Humbert appear?
a. Lolita
24. What material was invented by William Harbutt in 1897?
a. Plasticine.
25. Who is the current presenter of the TV celebrity quiz programme ‘Would I lie to you?’
a. Rob Brydon
26. The island of Trinidad lies off the coast of which South American country?
a. Venezuela.
27. In the TV series ‘Some Mothers do have ‘em’, Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford. What’s the name of the actress who played Betty, Frank’s wife?
a. Michele Dotrice
28. Which everyday British objects bear a design by Matthew Dent?
a. Coins (He is responsible for the post 2008 design).
29. In which county is Long Lartin prison?
a. Worcestershire.
30. What’s the name of the famous Harlem nightclub where the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie both had residencies in the 1930s?
a. The Cotton Club
31. For which literary genre are Hugo awards given?
a. Science fiction (accept fantasy which are also included)
32. Who was the first President of Israel?
a. Chaim Weizmann
33. Which member of the British royal family competed at Wimbledon in 1926?
a. George (Duke of York) – later King George VI
34. What do atheists do in court instead of swearing on the bible?
a. They affirm
35. What is ombrophobia a fear of?
a. Rain
36. What are young turkeys called?
a. Poults
37. Which city was the first in the world to have an underground transport system?
a. London
38. How many hoops are used in a game of croquet?
a. 6
39. Whose second symphony is known as “The Little Russian”?
a. Tchaikovsky
40. The Eiffel tower was the main exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair), held to commemorate what event?
a. The centenary of the start of the French Revolution
41. Which of the Bronté sisters wrote the novel “Shirley” which included descriptions of Luddite activities in a Yorkshire woollen mill?
a. Charlotte
42. What is the name of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?
a. Antonio
43. Which part of the body is involved if you suffer from glossitis?
a. The tongue
What is the '1 cent Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A. Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
45. What’s the name of the UHF wireless technology developed for data transfer between devices in close proximity by Eriksson in 1994?
a. Bluetooth
What’s the name of the circular, partner-swapping, ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader?
Paul Jones (after Admiral John Paul Jones)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
49. What was the name of the 1991 film that featured the Wilson Pickett song ‘Mustang Sally’?
a. The Commitments
50. What’s the name of the first presenter of the TV series University Challenge?
a. Bamber Gascoigne
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
The volcano Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on which planet?
Mars
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to do what?
Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous watch manufacturer has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
What dental term refers to the appearance of new teeth in the mouth?
Eruption
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP?
Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at £10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What is the old common name for Hamamelis or Winterbloom and its extract, used for skin/bruises/acne treatment (and dowsing)?
Witch Hazel
Edward VII was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 9th August 1902. What was the name of his Queen?
Alexandra
60. If a track marshal at an F1 race waves a blue flag during a race, what does this indicate?
a. Warns a driver that he is about to be lapped / overtaken by a faster car. (N.B. can also be indicated by a flashing blue light…)
61. What is “Fats” Domino’s real first name?
a. Antoine
62. Vegemite was originally made in which country?
a. Australia (The company is now part of Kraft)
63. Which company makes Marmite?
a. Unilever.
64. In which British city would you find the National Space Centre?
a. Leicester.
65. What would you buy from a Costermonger?
a. Fruit and vegetables,
66. Which British architect was responsible for the creation of the Welsh village of Portmeirion?
a. Clough Williams-Ellis.
67. For what reasons are Darwin Awards are given annually?
a. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions. (accept anything with death and gene pool)
68. The Fields Medal is an International Medal that is awarded for outstanding discoveries in which area of endeavour?
a. Mathematics
69. What’s the chemical name for the liquid that is commonly used as battery acid?
A. Sulphuric acid
70. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 200 years ago (i.e.1814)
a. George III ( ruled from 1760 to 1820)
71. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 500 years ago (i.e. 1514)
a. Henry VIII ( ruled from 1509 to 1547)
72. What’s the chemical name for the substance sometimes called salt petre?
Potassium Nitrate
HMS Bulldog became famous during 1941 for capturing what German secret items?
The Enigma Machine and codebooks ( accept Enigma machine)
During WWII, Bletchley Park was the central site of the’ Government Code & Cipher School’. In which UK county is this site?
Buckinghamshire
In humans, the 4 basic taste sensations are: sweet, sour, bitter and which other?
Salty (another ‘taste’ called umami has been discussed in scientific cirecles, but this is probably not one of the basis sensations)
What’s the name of the current Prime Minister in France?
Manuel Valls
77. Who is the current (as of 23-Oct-14) Head of the European Central Bank?
a. Mario Draghi
78. What name is given to the wife of an Earl??
a. Countess.
79. In the TV series ‘Steptoe & Son’, young Mr. Steptoe called his Dad ‘… you dirty old man’. What was the name of the street where their dirty old yard was situated? a. Oil Drum Lane
80. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top are the names given to which elementary particles?
a. Quarks.
81. The first British Colony to be granted ‘independence’ on March 6th 1957 was ‘The Gold Coast’. What was this country called after becoming independent?
a. Ghana
82. Which company manufactures all of the tyres that must be used by all Formula 1 car race teams in current season?
a. Pirelli
83. In India, the rupee is the major unit of currency. Rupees can also be divided into 100 parts. What are these parts called?
a. Paise. (used to be naye paise but the naye, which means new, has been dropped)
84. As of April 2014, 2 people are shown on the rear of new UK £50 note. Name one of them.
a. Matthew Boulton & James Watt
85. Name the person: He was the son of a French tanner; he died in 1895: he gained pre-eminence as a biologist, and studied destruction of undesirable organisms.
a. Louis Pasteur (hence Pasteurisation...)
86. Died 1874, this Swedish physicist carried out research into solar radiation and aurora borealis. His name gives rise to a unit of spectroscopic length of one ten millionth of a millimetre.
a. Anders Jonas Ångström
87. What’s the surname of the twins who won gold and bronze medals in the men’s triathlon at the 2012 Olympics in London?
a. Brownlee (Johnny and Alistair)
88. What venue was used for the archery at the 2012 Olympics?
a. Lords Cricket Ground
89. Which actor played MP Jim Hacker in the shows 'Yes Minister' and 'Yes Prime Minister'?
a. Paul Eddington
90. In 1960, the forerunner to the current MOT test was introduced in the UK. At that time, how old did vehicles have to be before they were the subjected to this test?
a. 10 years
91. Where would you most likely come across the use of the term Research Octane Number (RON)?
a. In a petrol station. (It is a measure of the performance of fuel e.g. petrol for cars)
92. In the game of chess, what’s the name of the move where the king can move more than one square at a time?
a. The process of castling. (accept to castle)
93. Where or when would you most likely come across an APGAR score?
a. At the birth of a child. (It’s the name of the very first test given to a newborn child. Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration)
94. In which state was the trans-continental railway across USA first opened on May 10th 1869?
a. Utah. (at Promontory Point)
95. In the game of chess, what are the only pieces on the board that can’t move backwards?
a. Pawns
96. Which F1 racing circuit has ‘features’ called ‘Parabolica’ and ‘Nordcurve’?
a. Hockenheim
Spares/supplementaries:
1. Mort Sahl famously said …’this American president won because he ran against Jimmy Carter; if he'd run unopposed he would have lost.’ Who was the American president?
a. Ronald Reagan
2. In which UK city was the Pharmaceutical company ‘Boots’ started?
a. Nottingham
3. Which UK based Pharmaceutical company has manufacturing facilities in Worthing, Barnard Castle & Grange-Over-Sands?
a. GSK (Glaxo SmithKline)
4. British novelist AS Byatt is the sister of another woman novelist, author of “A Summer Bird-cage”. Name her.
a. Margaret Drabble
5. In which state of the USA was the Battle of Gettysburg?
a. Pennsylvania
6. Which writer said ‘I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’
a. Mark Twain
|
Paul Jones
|
Originally a French portmanteau word combining a shoe and boot, what means 'wilfully destroy'?
|
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League: 4th November The Questions
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League
Set by The Lamb Inn
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
1. Q. Offenbach’s barcarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ is a famous piece of music, but what is a barcarolle ?
A. A BOATING SONG (Accept any reference to boats).
2. Q. Which Gilbert & Sullivan operetta contains the song generally known as ‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ ?
A. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE.
3. Q. Which TV presenter is the daughter of Newspaper Editor and Columnist Eve Pollard ?
A. CLAUDIA WINKELMAN.
4. Q. Who created the statue of ‘St.Michael’s victory over the Devil’ on Coventry Cathedral ?
A. JACOB EPSTEIN.
5. Q. Which artist painted the work entitled ‘Guernica’ ?
A. PABLO PICASSO.
6. Q. In the TV series ‘Inspector Morse’, who wrote the theme tune ?
A. BARRINGTON PHELOUNG
7. Q. Mark McManus of ‘Taggart’ fame had a famous singing half-brother. Who is he ?
A. BRIAN CONNOLLY (Lead singer of The Sweet).
8. Q. Who composed the music for the films ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘The Mission’ ?
A. ENNIO MORRICONE.
(a) Q. Which piece of music preceded TV’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ ?
A. THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE (Giaochino Rossini)
(b) Q. Who is the mother of actress Joely Richardson ?
A. VANESSA REDGRAVE.
(c) Q. In which play does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
A. THE RIVALS (by Sheridan)
1) What is the capital of Croatia ? (A) Zagreb
2) Which river runs through Leicester ? (A) Soar
3) What is described as : a U-shaped body of water that forms when a wide meander from the main river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water ? (A) Ox Bow Lake
4) What is the largest lake in Europe ? (A) Lake Lagoda (14th largest in the world.)
5) What is a line on a map or chart joining points of equal height or depth called ? (A) Contour
6) Which city is the capital of Canada ? (A) Ottawa
7) Which river runs through Ipswich ? (A) Orwell
8) Yosemite National Park is in which US State ? (A) California
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Greenland belongs to which country ? (A) Denmark.
(b) In which country are the largest waterfalls measured by flow-rate in Europe ?
(A) Switzerland (Rhine falls)
1. Q. Which statesman married Miss Clementine Hosier in 1908 ?
A. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
2. Q. Who founded The National Viewers & Listeners Association in 1965 ?
A. MARY WHITEHOUSE.
3. Q. In which year did the first human heart transplant take place ?
A. 1967 (allow 1966-1968).
4. Q. Where was Princess Elizabeth staying when she was given the news of her accession to the throne in 1558 ?
A. HATFIELD HOUSE in Hertfordshire.
5. Q. Give a year in the life of Ivan the Terrible.
A. 1530 – 1584
6. Q. The Rolls Royce ‘Thrust Measuring Rig’ developed in the 1950’s took off vertically, but what was its nickname ?
A. THE FLYING BEDSTEAD.
7. Q. Whose London monument by Edward Bailey is guarded by Edwin Landseer’s lions?
A. NELSON
8. Q. What, infamously, happened at Yekaterinburg on July 17th 1918 ?
A. THE ASSASINATION OF THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY
(THE ROMANOVS)
(a) Q. What was the code-name for planned German invasion of Britain ?
A. OPERATION SEA LION.
(b) Q. What is the connection between a large fish-eating bird and Drake’s ship ?
A. PELICAN (Name of Drakes ship before becoming The Golden Hind).
SCIENCE
1. Q. What is the tradename of the Du Pont synthetic fibre of high-tensile strength used mainly in rubber products, notably tyres and bullet-proof vests ?
A. KEVLAR.
2. Q. In astronomy, where would you find the ‘Cassini Division’ ?
A. SATURNS RINGS.
3. Q. As a percentage, what is the average salinity of sea water ?
A. 3.5% (accept 3% to 4%)
4. Q. What name is given to static discharges visible on aircraft wing tips and the tops of ships masts ?
A. ST. ELMO’S FIRE.
5. Q. In what device in the home would you find a magnetron ?
A. MICROWAVE OVEN.
6. Q. Traditionally, how have teachers always used sticks of calcium sulphate ?
A. BLACKBOARD CHALK.
7. Q. Why is sodium carbonate sometimes added to a water supply ?
A. TO REDUCE NATURAL HARDNESS.
8. Q. Which element is common to all acids ?
A. HYDROGEN.
(a) Q. By what name is deuterium oxide also known ?
A. HEAVY WATER.
(b) Q. Why is a compound of sulphur called ethyl mercaptan added to LPG cooking gas ?
A. TO GIVE THIS ODOURLESS GAS A DETECTABLE SMELL.
(c) Q. Bauxite is the main ore of which metal ?
A. ALUMINIUM.
1) Which horse won the 2014 Grand National ? (A) Pineau de Re.
2) In which year did Manchester United last win the FACup ? (A) 2004.
3) Who is currently England’s leading wicket taker in test matches? (A) I.T. Botham (383).
4) Who was the captain of the British women’s gold medal winning curling team in the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City ? (A) Rhona Martin.
5) Which was the last year that The Ryder Cup was played in an 'odd year'?
(A) 1999. (it was due to be played in 2001 and was cancelled due to ‘9/11’ and played in 2002 instead).
6) In which sport is the Lance Todd trophy awarded ? (A) Rugby League. (to the Cup Final Man of the Match).
7) Which team knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 2014 FACup?
(A) Sheffield Wednesday in a 3rd round replay.
8) Jessicca Ennis and Mo Farah were two thirds of Team GB's 'super Saturday' at the 2012 London Olympics. Which athlete completed the set of Gold Medals ?
(A) Greg Rutherford (Long jump).
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Where are the 2018 World Cup finals being held ? (A) Russia.
(b) On which golf course was the 2014 Ryder Cup held ? (A) Gleneagles.
FIND THE CAR
The answer to every question is a make of car, some of which are no longer manufactured.
1. Q. A position in which to meditate.
A. LOTUS
2. Q. American city famous for its Boot Hill cemetery.
A. DODGE
3. Q. City and Rovers.
A. BRISTOL.
4. Q. English country dancers, usually men.
A. MORRIS.
5. Q. No-one to carry your golf clubs ?
A. CADILLAC.
6. Q. U.S. army general purpose vehicle.
A. JEEP. (named from shortened GPV - General Purpose Vehicle)
7. Q. Forename of a current McClaren F1 driver.
A. JENSEN. (Button)
8. Q. Complete the line of the hymn ‘Jesus wants me for a ?’
A. SUNBEAM.
(a) Q. Impish eastern county town.
A. LINCOLN.
(b) Q. Area in south London originally famous for its gardens.
A. VAUXHALL.
(c) Q. Its only future was in ‘Back to the Future’.
A. DE LOREAN.
HORSEY BUSINESS
1) In the 2011 Academy nominated film 'War Horse' directed by Stephen Spielberg, what was the name of the main equine character ? (A) Joey
2) What was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse ? (A) Bucephalus
3) Esha Ness won the Grand National that never was. It was cancelled due to a false start ! In which year was this ? (A) 1993 (allow 92-94)
4) Who wrote the play 'Equus' in 1973 ? (A) Peter Shaffer
5) A filly is a female horse under the age of 4. What is a female horse over the age of 4 called ? (A) Mare
6) What is the gestation period of a horse in days ? (A) 340 (allow 330-350)
7) Who, famously, rode a horse called Marengo named after a battle in Italy ?
(A) Napoleon Bonaparte
8) The Horse of the Year show was first held in 1949 at Harringay Arena. Which enue now plays host ? (A) NEC in Birmingham (accept Birmingham)
(Note : It was at Wembley Arena from 1959-2002)
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) What was the Duke of Wellington's most remembered horse called ?
(A) Copenhagen
(b) ‘They shoot horses don't they’ was a UK No.14 hit for which welsh band in 1977 ? (A) Racing Cars
The answer to each question is a number.
1) How many Oscars did the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ win in 1981 ? (A) 4
2) How many lines are there in a sonnet ? (A) 14
3) What is the value of Pi to three decimal points ? (A) 3.142 (3.1415926)
4) How many feet are there in a chain ? (A) 66 (22 yards)
5) How many football world cups have there been ? (A) 20
6) At what speed did the DeLorean car need to travel, to go 'Back to the future' in the film of the same name ? (A) 88mph accept 86-90
7) How many Olympic gold medals did GB win at London 2012 (not including Paralympics) ? (A) 29 accept 28-30
8) How many books are there in the New Testament (A) 27 accept 26-28
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) How many players per team are there in a Water Polo team ? (A) 7
(b) How many counties make up Northern Ireland ? (A) 6
General Knowledge Questions as set by the Plough Horntails
1. Who is the current Secretary of State for Justice?
a. Chris Grayling
2. Which gas makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus?
a. Carbon dioxide (96%).
3. In architecture, what is a corbel?
a. a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall, a type of bracket.
4. Who is the current Secretary of State for transport?
a. Patrick McCloughlin
5. In which UK town does Honda assemble cars?
a. Swindon
6. Who is currently the manager of Sunderland football club?
a. Gus Poyet
7. Which F1 racing circuit has features called ‘Rascasse’ and ‘Sainte Devote’?
a. Monaco
8. What is the science of time measurement called?
a. Horology
(NB - not chronology which is to do with the ordering of events in time)
9. Mark Reckless was the MP for which constituency?
a. Rochester and Strood
10. What’s the name of the UK politician who embarrassed the Government by stating that disabled people could be paid £2 / hour?
a. Lord Freud
11. In architecture, what is a caryatid?
a. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
12. In which UK town does Morgan assemble cars?
a. Malvern
13. Who is the current presenter of Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’?
a. Nick Hewer
14. What was the name of the British policewoman killed in the 1984 Libyan embassy protest?
a. Yvonne Fletcher
15. Who was the first English king from the House of Lancaster?
a. Henry IV
16. Who preceded Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany?
a. Gerhard Schröder.
17. In which county is the Forest of Dean?
a. Gloucestershire.
18. Who is currently the manager of Swansea football club?
a. Gary Monk
19. Who wrote the book “King Solomon’s Mines?
a. H. Rider Haggard
20. Which was the first motorway service area to open in the UK?
a. Watford Gap (2 November 1959)
21. Who was the second man to orbit the Earth ?
a. Herman Titov
22. Currently, Sandi Toksvig presents 15-1 on TV. Who was her fore-runner?
a. William G. Stewart.
23. In which novel does the character Humbert Humbert appear?
a. Lolita
24. What material was invented by William Harbutt in 1897?
a. Plasticine.
25. Who is the current presenter of the TV celebrity quiz programme ‘Would I lie to you?’
a. Rob Brydon
26. The island of Trinidad lies off the coast of which South American country?
a. Venezuela.
27. In the TV series ‘Some Mothers do have ‘em’, Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford. What’s the name of the actress who played Betty, Frank’s wife?
a. Michele Dotrice
28. Which everyday British objects bear a design by Matthew Dent?
a. Coins (He is responsible for the post 2008 design).
29. In which county is Long Lartin prison?
a. Worcestershire.
30. What’s the name of the famous Harlem nightclub where the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie both had residencies in the 1930s?
a. The Cotton Club
31. For which literary genre are Hugo awards given?
a. Science fiction (accept fantasy which are also included)
32. Who was the first President of Israel?
a. Chaim Weizmann
33. Which member of the British royal family competed at Wimbledon in 1926?
a. George (Duke of York) – later King George VI
34. What do atheists do in court instead of swearing on the bible?
a. They affirm
35. What is ombrophobia a fear of?
a. Rain
36. What are young turkeys called?
a. Poults
37. Which city was the first in the world to have an underground transport system?
a. London
38. How many hoops are used in a game of croquet?
a. 6
39. Whose second symphony is known as “The Little Russian”?
a. Tchaikovsky
40. The Eiffel tower was the main exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair), held to commemorate what event?
a. The centenary of the start of the French Revolution
41. Which of the Bronté sisters wrote the novel “Shirley” which included descriptions of Luddite activities in a Yorkshire woollen mill?
a. Charlotte
42. What is the name of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?
a. Antonio
43. Which part of the body is involved if you suffer from glossitis?
a. The tongue
What is the '1 cent Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A. Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
45. What’s the name of the UHF wireless technology developed for data transfer between devices in close proximity by Eriksson in 1994?
a. Bluetooth
What’s the name of the circular, partner-swapping, ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader?
Paul Jones (after Admiral John Paul Jones)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
49. What was the name of the 1991 film that featured the Wilson Pickett song ‘Mustang Sally’?
a. The Commitments
50. What’s the name of the first presenter of the TV series University Challenge?
a. Bamber Gascoigne
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
The volcano Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on which planet?
Mars
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to do what?
Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous watch manufacturer has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
What dental term refers to the appearance of new teeth in the mouth?
Eruption
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP?
Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at £10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What is the old common name for Hamamelis or Winterbloom and its extract, used for skin/bruises/acne treatment (and dowsing)?
Witch Hazel
Edward VII was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 9th August 1902. What was the name of his Queen?
Alexandra
60. If a track marshal at an F1 race waves a blue flag during a race, what does this indicate?
a. Warns a driver that he is about to be lapped / overtaken by a faster car. (N.B. can also be indicated by a flashing blue light…)
61. What is “Fats” Domino’s real first name?
a. Antoine
62. Vegemite was originally made in which country?
a. Australia (The company is now part of Kraft)
63. Which company makes Marmite?
a. Unilever.
64. In which British city would you find the National Space Centre?
a. Leicester.
65. What would you buy from a Costermonger?
a. Fruit and vegetables,
66. Which British architect was responsible for the creation of the Welsh village of Portmeirion?
a. Clough Williams-Ellis.
67. For what reasons are Darwin Awards are given annually?
a. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions. (accept anything with death and gene pool)
68. The Fields Medal is an International Medal that is awarded for outstanding discoveries in which area of endeavour?
a. Mathematics
69. What’s the chemical name for the liquid that is commonly used as battery acid?
A. Sulphuric acid
70. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 200 years ago (i.e.1814)
a. George III ( ruled from 1760 to 1820)
71. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 500 years ago (i.e. 1514)
a. Henry VIII ( ruled from 1509 to 1547)
72. What’s the chemical name for the substance sometimes called salt petre?
Potassium Nitrate
HMS Bulldog became famous during 1941 for capturing what German secret items?
The Enigma Machine and codebooks ( accept Enigma machine)
During WWII, Bletchley Park was the central site of the’ Government Code & Cipher School’. In which UK county is this site?
Buckinghamshire
In humans, the 4 basic taste sensations are: sweet, sour, bitter and which other?
Salty (another ‘taste’ called umami has been discussed in scientific cirecles, but this is probably not one of the basis sensations)
What’s the name of the current Prime Minister in France?
Manuel Valls
77. Who is the current (as of 23-Oct-14) Head of the European Central Bank?
a. Mario Draghi
78. What name is given to the wife of an Earl??
a. Countess.
79. In the TV series ‘Steptoe & Son’, young Mr. Steptoe called his Dad ‘… you dirty old man’. What was the name of the street where their dirty old yard was situated? a. Oil Drum Lane
80. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top are the names given to which elementary particles?
a. Quarks.
81. The first British Colony to be granted ‘independence’ on March 6th 1957 was ‘The Gold Coast’. What was this country called after becoming independent?
a. Ghana
82. Which company manufactures all of the tyres that must be used by all Formula 1 car race teams in current season?
a. Pirelli
83. In India, the rupee is the major unit of currency. Rupees can also be divided into 100 parts. What are these parts called?
a. Paise. (used to be naye paise but the naye, which means new, has been dropped)
84. As of April 2014, 2 people are shown on the rear of new UK £50 note. Name one of them.
a. Matthew Boulton & James Watt
85. Name the person: He was the son of a French tanner; he died in 1895: he gained pre-eminence as a biologist, and studied destruction of undesirable organisms.
a. Louis Pasteur (hence Pasteurisation...)
86. Died 1874, this Swedish physicist carried out research into solar radiation and aurora borealis. His name gives rise to a unit of spectroscopic length of one ten millionth of a millimetre.
a. Anders Jonas Ångström
87. What’s the surname of the twins who won gold and bronze medals in the men’s triathlon at the 2012 Olympics in London?
a. Brownlee (Johnny and Alistair)
88. What venue was used for the archery at the 2012 Olympics?
a. Lords Cricket Ground
89. Which actor played MP Jim Hacker in the shows 'Yes Minister' and 'Yes Prime Minister'?
a. Paul Eddington
90. In 1960, the forerunner to the current MOT test was introduced in the UK. At that time, how old did vehicles have to be before they were the subjected to this test?
a. 10 years
91. Where would you most likely come across the use of the term Research Octane Number (RON)?
a. In a petrol station. (It is a measure of the performance of fuel e.g. petrol for cars)
92. In the game of chess, what’s the name of the move where the king can move more than one square at a time?
a. The process of castling. (accept to castle)
93. Where or when would you most likely come across an APGAR score?
a. At the birth of a child. (It’s the name of the very first test given to a newborn child. Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration)
94. In which state was the trans-continental railway across USA first opened on May 10th 1869?
a. Utah. (at Promontory Point)
95. In the game of chess, what are the only pieces on the board that can’t move backwards?
a. Pawns
96. Which F1 racing circuit has ‘features’ called ‘Parabolica’ and ‘Nordcurve’?
a. Hockenheim
Spares/supplementaries:
1. Mort Sahl famously said …’this American president won because he ran against Jimmy Carter; if he'd run unopposed he would have lost.’ Who was the American president?
a. Ronald Reagan
2. In which UK city was the Pharmaceutical company ‘Boots’ started?
a. Nottingham
3. Which UK based Pharmaceutical company has manufacturing facilities in Worthing, Barnard Castle & Grange-Over-Sands?
a. GSK (Glaxo SmithKline)
4. British novelist AS Byatt is the sister of another woman novelist, author of “A Summer Bird-cage”. Name her.
a. Margaret Drabble
5. In which state of the USA was the Battle of Gettysburg?
a. Pennsylvania
6. Which writer said ‘I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’
a. Mark Twain
|
i don't know
|
What is the recurring number when two-thirds is expressed as a decimal?
|
What is two thirds as a decimal? | Reference.com
What is two thirds as a decimal?
A:
Quick Answer
Two-thirds expressed as a decimal is 0.6, with a line over or under the six, indicating that the six repeats indefinitely, or as 0.666, which is accurate to three decimals. To convert a fraction to a decimal, divide the numerator, the top number, by the denominator, the bottom number.
|
6
|
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
|
Can irrational numbers (in the decimal system) become rational in a binary, octal or hexadecimal number system? - Quora
Quora
Numbers (mathematics)
Can irrational numbers (in the decimal system) become rational in a binary, octal or hexadecimal number system?
If we say that irrational numbers are those which are non recurring and non terminating, can we convert them to terminating or recurring using other number systems and hence make them rational?
No.
A simple argumentative proof :
Rational numbers can be expressed as p/q, while irrational numbers cannot be. So if base is same, rational and irrational numbers form a disjoint set.
If a number can be expressed in form of p/q in any number system with fixed base b then it can be expressed in form of x/y in any other number system with a different base. (p and both are integers. Conversation from one base to another)
Hence a number of the form p/q in any number system will remain in the same form.
So if a number which is rational in at least one base will also be rational in all other bases, whether hexa, deci or binary.
Hence a number is either rational or irrational in all bases.
□
Written Apr 22, 2014
No. It can be shown easily that any number which is terminating or recurring in binary, octal or hexadecimal number system is a rational number (i.e. terminates or recurs in decimal number system). And since rational and irrational are completely disjoint sets, an irrational number cannot have a terminating or recurring notation in binary or any other number system.
Proof (written for binary and can be extended):
Case (1): Consider any number which terminates in binary number system.
Let us try and convert this number to a decimal number.
Then it will be a finite summation of integral powers of two.
Since all of the integral powers of two are rational, the summation is rational. Thus every terminating no. in binary is rational.
Thus if any irrational no. has a terminating representation in binary,it will become rational and irrational at the same time after conversion to the decimal no. system.
Thus an irrational no. cannot have a terminating binary representation.
Case (2): Let's say it recurs.
Let the recurring string of numbers have length n.
Consider only the recurring stream (say 110001 or anything like that, here n=6). It can be converted to decimal representation x (as 1+2^4 +2^5 =49).
The original number can be represented in decimal system as:
2^(-n) *(x) +2^(-2n) *(x)+........ Which is an infinite GP with common ratio 2^(-n).
Since n>1, this GP converges to a finite sum.
=x*(2^(-n))/(1-2^(-n)) Which is rational as n is integer.
(Thus 0.110001110001....... can be represented as 2^(-6) *(49) +2^(-12)*(49)+.....
=49*(2^-(6))/(1-2^(-6)) = 0.7777..... =7/9.)
Thus every recurring no. in binary is rational.
Thus if any irrational no. has a recurring representation in binary, it will be rational and irrational at the same time.
Thus any irrational no. cannot have a recurring representation in binary.
Hence Proved.
Updated Apr 25, 2014
The answer given by Ameya above is great. But allow me to give a simpler and less rigorous answer. If you wish to make an irrational number (say 2^0.5) in a particular number system(say decimal) be a rational number in some other number system, one thing you can do is take this irrational number to be the base of the new number system. Hence the representation of 2^0.5 (decimal system) in a number system with base=2^0.5 will be simply 10. Now all the irrational numbers like 2*(2^0.5),3*(2^0.5),...,n*(2^0.5) are rational in this representation because they have a terminating representation.
But the problem is there are infinitely more types of irrational numbers like 3^0.5 or 5^0.3 and so on which will still have a non terminating, non recurring representation in the system considered above. Hence coming back to your question NO irrational numbers cannot become rational in a binary, octal or hexadecimal number system. Certain kinds of irrational numbers can be made rational in specialized number systems that have an irrational base. There exists no number system that does not have irrational numbers in it because irrespective of the base you choose there are still infinitely many irrational numbers that can not be expressed as a linear combination of the base number you considered.
|
i don't know
|
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
|
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League: 4th November The Questions
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League
Set by The Lamb Inn
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
1. Q. Offenbach’s barcarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ is a famous piece of music, but what is a barcarolle ?
A. A BOATING SONG (Accept any reference to boats).
2. Q. Which Gilbert & Sullivan operetta contains the song generally known as ‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ ?
A. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE.
3. Q. Which TV presenter is the daughter of Newspaper Editor and Columnist Eve Pollard ?
A. CLAUDIA WINKELMAN.
4. Q. Who created the statue of ‘St.Michael’s victory over the Devil’ on Coventry Cathedral ?
A. JACOB EPSTEIN.
5. Q. Which artist painted the work entitled ‘Guernica’ ?
A. PABLO PICASSO.
6. Q. In the TV series ‘Inspector Morse’, who wrote the theme tune ?
A. BARRINGTON PHELOUNG
7. Q. Mark McManus of ‘Taggart’ fame had a famous singing half-brother. Who is he ?
A. BRIAN CONNOLLY (Lead singer of The Sweet).
8. Q. Who composed the music for the films ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘The Mission’ ?
A. ENNIO MORRICONE.
(a) Q. Which piece of music preceded TV’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ ?
A. THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE (Giaochino Rossini)
(b) Q. Who is the mother of actress Joely Richardson ?
A. VANESSA REDGRAVE.
(c) Q. In which play does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
A. THE RIVALS (by Sheridan)
1) What is the capital of Croatia ? (A) Zagreb
2) Which river runs through Leicester ? (A) Soar
3) What is described as : a U-shaped body of water that forms when a wide meander from the main river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water ? (A) Ox Bow Lake
4) What is the largest lake in Europe ? (A) Lake Lagoda (14th largest in the world.)
5) What is a line on a map or chart joining points of equal height or depth called ? (A) Contour
6) Which city is the capital of Canada ? (A) Ottawa
7) Which river runs through Ipswich ? (A) Orwell
8) Yosemite National Park is in which US State ? (A) California
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Greenland belongs to which country ? (A) Denmark.
(b) In which country are the largest waterfalls measured by flow-rate in Europe ?
(A) Switzerland (Rhine falls)
1. Q. Which statesman married Miss Clementine Hosier in 1908 ?
A. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
2. Q. Who founded The National Viewers & Listeners Association in 1965 ?
A. MARY WHITEHOUSE.
3. Q. In which year did the first human heart transplant take place ?
A. 1967 (allow 1966-1968).
4. Q. Where was Princess Elizabeth staying when she was given the news of her accession to the throne in 1558 ?
A. HATFIELD HOUSE in Hertfordshire.
5. Q. Give a year in the life of Ivan the Terrible.
A. 1530 – 1584
6. Q. The Rolls Royce ‘Thrust Measuring Rig’ developed in the 1950’s took off vertically, but what was its nickname ?
A. THE FLYING BEDSTEAD.
7. Q. Whose London monument by Edward Bailey is guarded by Edwin Landseer’s lions?
A. NELSON
8. Q. What, infamously, happened at Yekaterinburg on July 17th 1918 ?
A. THE ASSASINATION OF THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY
(THE ROMANOVS)
(a) Q. What was the code-name for planned German invasion of Britain ?
A. OPERATION SEA LION.
(b) Q. What is the connection between a large fish-eating bird and Drake’s ship ?
A. PELICAN (Name of Drakes ship before becoming The Golden Hind).
SCIENCE
1. Q. What is the tradename of the Du Pont synthetic fibre of high-tensile strength used mainly in rubber products, notably tyres and bullet-proof vests ?
A. KEVLAR.
2. Q. In astronomy, where would you find the ‘Cassini Division’ ?
A. SATURNS RINGS.
3. Q. As a percentage, what is the average salinity of sea water ?
A. 3.5% (accept 3% to 4%)
4. Q. What name is given to static discharges visible on aircraft wing tips and the tops of ships masts ?
A. ST. ELMO’S FIRE.
5. Q. In what device in the home would you find a magnetron ?
A. MICROWAVE OVEN.
6. Q. Traditionally, how have teachers always used sticks of calcium sulphate ?
A. BLACKBOARD CHALK.
7. Q. Why is sodium carbonate sometimes added to a water supply ?
A. TO REDUCE NATURAL HARDNESS.
8. Q. Which element is common to all acids ?
A. HYDROGEN.
(a) Q. By what name is deuterium oxide also known ?
A. HEAVY WATER.
(b) Q. Why is a compound of sulphur called ethyl mercaptan added to LPG cooking gas ?
A. TO GIVE THIS ODOURLESS GAS A DETECTABLE SMELL.
(c) Q. Bauxite is the main ore of which metal ?
A. ALUMINIUM.
1) Which horse won the 2014 Grand National ? (A) Pineau de Re.
2) In which year did Manchester United last win the FACup ? (A) 2004.
3) Who is currently England’s leading wicket taker in test matches? (A) I.T. Botham (383).
4) Who was the captain of the British women’s gold medal winning curling team in the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City ? (A) Rhona Martin.
5) Which was the last year that The Ryder Cup was played in an 'odd year'?
(A) 1999. (it was due to be played in 2001 and was cancelled due to ‘9/11’ and played in 2002 instead).
6) In which sport is the Lance Todd trophy awarded ? (A) Rugby League. (to the Cup Final Man of the Match).
7) Which team knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 2014 FACup?
(A) Sheffield Wednesday in a 3rd round replay.
8) Jessicca Ennis and Mo Farah were two thirds of Team GB's 'super Saturday' at the 2012 London Olympics. Which athlete completed the set of Gold Medals ?
(A) Greg Rutherford (Long jump).
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Where are the 2018 World Cup finals being held ? (A) Russia.
(b) On which golf course was the 2014 Ryder Cup held ? (A) Gleneagles.
FIND THE CAR
The answer to every question is a make of car, some of which are no longer manufactured.
1. Q. A position in which to meditate.
A. LOTUS
2. Q. American city famous for its Boot Hill cemetery.
A. DODGE
3. Q. City and Rovers.
A. BRISTOL.
4. Q. English country dancers, usually men.
A. MORRIS.
5. Q. No-one to carry your golf clubs ?
A. CADILLAC.
6. Q. U.S. army general purpose vehicle.
A. JEEP. (named from shortened GPV - General Purpose Vehicle)
7. Q. Forename of a current McClaren F1 driver.
A. JENSEN. (Button)
8. Q. Complete the line of the hymn ‘Jesus wants me for a ?’
A. SUNBEAM.
(a) Q. Impish eastern county town.
A. LINCOLN.
(b) Q. Area in south London originally famous for its gardens.
A. VAUXHALL.
(c) Q. Its only future was in ‘Back to the Future’.
A. DE LOREAN.
HORSEY BUSINESS
1) In the 2011 Academy nominated film 'War Horse' directed by Stephen Spielberg, what was the name of the main equine character ? (A) Joey
2) What was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse ? (A) Bucephalus
3) Esha Ness won the Grand National that never was. It was cancelled due to a false start ! In which year was this ? (A) 1993 (allow 92-94)
4) Who wrote the play 'Equus' in 1973 ? (A) Peter Shaffer
5) A filly is a female horse under the age of 4. What is a female horse over the age of 4 called ? (A) Mare
6) What is the gestation period of a horse in days ? (A) 340 (allow 330-350)
7) Who, famously, rode a horse called Marengo named after a battle in Italy ?
(A) Napoleon Bonaparte
8) The Horse of the Year show was first held in 1949 at Harringay Arena. Which enue now plays host ? (A) NEC in Birmingham (accept Birmingham)
(Note : It was at Wembley Arena from 1959-2002)
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) What was the Duke of Wellington's most remembered horse called ?
(A) Copenhagen
(b) ‘They shoot horses don't they’ was a UK No.14 hit for which welsh band in 1977 ? (A) Racing Cars
The answer to each question is a number.
1) How many Oscars did the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ win in 1981 ? (A) 4
2) How many lines are there in a sonnet ? (A) 14
3) What is the value of Pi to three decimal points ? (A) 3.142 (3.1415926)
4) How many feet are there in a chain ? (A) 66 (22 yards)
5) How many football world cups have there been ? (A) 20
6) At what speed did the DeLorean car need to travel, to go 'Back to the future' in the film of the same name ? (A) 88mph accept 86-90
7) How many Olympic gold medals did GB win at London 2012 (not including Paralympics) ? (A) 29 accept 28-30
8) How many books are there in the New Testament (A) 27 accept 26-28
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) How many players per team are there in a Water Polo team ? (A) 7
(b) How many counties make up Northern Ireland ? (A) 6
General Knowledge Questions as set by the Plough Horntails
1. Who is the current Secretary of State for Justice?
a. Chris Grayling
2. Which gas makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus?
a. Carbon dioxide (96%).
3. In architecture, what is a corbel?
a. a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall, a type of bracket.
4. Who is the current Secretary of State for transport?
a. Patrick McCloughlin
5. In which UK town does Honda assemble cars?
a. Swindon
6. Who is currently the manager of Sunderland football club?
a. Gus Poyet
7. Which F1 racing circuit has features called ‘Rascasse’ and ‘Sainte Devote’?
a. Monaco
8. What is the science of time measurement called?
a. Horology
(NB - not chronology which is to do with the ordering of events in time)
9. Mark Reckless was the MP for which constituency?
a. Rochester and Strood
10. What’s the name of the UK politician who embarrassed the Government by stating that disabled people could be paid £2 / hour?
a. Lord Freud
11. In architecture, what is a caryatid?
a. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
12. In which UK town does Morgan assemble cars?
a. Malvern
13. Who is the current presenter of Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’?
a. Nick Hewer
14. What was the name of the British policewoman killed in the 1984 Libyan embassy protest?
a. Yvonne Fletcher
15. Who was the first English king from the House of Lancaster?
a. Henry IV
16. Who preceded Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany?
a. Gerhard Schröder.
17. In which county is the Forest of Dean?
a. Gloucestershire.
18. Who is currently the manager of Swansea football club?
a. Gary Monk
19. Who wrote the book “King Solomon’s Mines?
a. H. Rider Haggard
20. Which was the first motorway service area to open in the UK?
a. Watford Gap (2 November 1959)
21. Who was the second man to orbit the Earth ?
a. Herman Titov
22. Currently, Sandi Toksvig presents 15-1 on TV. Who was her fore-runner?
a. William G. Stewart.
23. In which novel does the character Humbert Humbert appear?
a. Lolita
24. What material was invented by William Harbutt in 1897?
a. Plasticine.
25. Who is the current presenter of the TV celebrity quiz programme ‘Would I lie to you?’
a. Rob Brydon
26. The island of Trinidad lies off the coast of which South American country?
a. Venezuela.
27. In the TV series ‘Some Mothers do have ‘em’, Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford. What’s the name of the actress who played Betty, Frank’s wife?
a. Michele Dotrice
28. Which everyday British objects bear a design by Matthew Dent?
a. Coins (He is responsible for the post 2008 design).
29. In which county is Long Lartin prison?
a. Worcestershire.
30. What’s the name of the famous Harlem nightclub where the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie both had residencies in the 1930s?
a. The Cotton Club
31. For which literary genre are Hugo awards given?
a. Science fiction (accept fantasy which are also included)
32. Who was the first President of Israel?
a. Chaim Weizmann
33. Which member of the British royal family competed at Wimbledon in 1926?
a. George (Duke of York) – later King George VI
34. What do atheists do in court instead of swearing on the bible?
a. They affirm
35. What is ombrophobia a fear of?
a. Rain
36. What are young turkeys called?
a. Poults
37. Which city was the first in the world to have an underground transport system?
a. London
38. How many hoops are used in a game of croquet?
a. 6
39. Whose second symphony is known as “The Little Russian”?
a. Tchaikovsky
40. The Eiffel tower was the main exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair), held to commemorate what event?
a. The centenary of the start of the French Revolution
41. Which of the Bronté sisters wrote the novel “Shirley” which included descriptions of Luddite activities in a Yorkshire woollen mill?
a. Charlotte
42. What is the name of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?
a. Antonio
43. Which part of the body is involved if you suffer from glossitis?
a. The tongue
What is the '1 cent Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A. Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
45. What’s the name of the UHF wireless technology developed for data transfer between devices in close proximity by Eriksson in 1994?
a. Bluetooth
What’s the name of the circular, partner-swapping, ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader?
Paul Jones (after Admiral John Paul Jones)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
49. What was the name of the 1991 film that featured the Wilson Pickett song ‘Mustang Sally’?
a. The Commitments
50. What’s the name of the first presenter of the TV series University Challenge?
a. Bamber Gascoigne
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
The volcano Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on which planet?
Mars
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to do what?
Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous watch manufacturer has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
What dental term refers to the appearance of new teeth in the mouth?
Eruption
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP?
Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at £10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What is the old common name for Hamamelis or Winterbloom and its extract, used for skin/bruises/acne treatment (and dowsing)?
Witch Hazel
Edward VII was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 9th August 1902. What was the name of his Queen?
Alexandra
60. If a track marshal at an F1 race waves a blue flag during a race, what does this indicate?
a. Warns a driver that he is about to be lapped / overtaken by a faster car. (N.B. can also be indicated by a flashing blue light…)
61. What is “Fats” Domino’s real first name?
a. Antoine
62. Vegemite was originally made in which country?
a. Australia (The company is now part of Kraft)
63. Which company makes Marmite?
a. Unilever.
64. In which British city would you find the National Space Centre?
a. Leicester.
65. What would you buy from a Costermonger?
a. Fruit and vegetables,
66. Which British architect was responsible for the creation of the Welsh village of Portmeirion?
a. Clough Williams-Ellis.
67. For what reasons are Darwin Awards are given annually?
a. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions. (accept anything with death and gene pool)
68. The Fields Medal is an International Medal that is awarded for outstanding discoveries in which area of endeavour?
a. Mathematics
69. What’s the chemical name for the liquid that is commonly used as battery acid?
A. Sulphuric acid
70. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 200 years ago (i.e.1814)
a. George III ( ruled from 1760 to 1820)
71. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 500 years ago (i.e. 1514)
a. Henry VIII ( ruled from 1509 to 1547)
72. What’s the chemical name for the substance sometimes called salt petre?
Potassium Nitrate
HMS Bulldog became famous during 1941 for capturing what German secret items?
The Enigma Machine and codebooks ( accept Enigma machine)
During WWII, Bletchley Park was the central site of the’ Government Code & Cipher School’. In which UK county is this site?
Buckinghamshire
In humans, the 4 basic taste sensations are: sweet, sour, bitter and which other?
Salty (another ‘taste’ called umami has been discussed in scientific cirecles, but this is probably not one of the basis sensations)
What’s the name of the current Prime Minister in France?
Manuel Valls
77. Who is the current (as of 23-Oct-14) Head of the European Central Bank?
a. Mario Draghi
78. What name is given to the wife of an Earl??
a. Countess.
79. In the TV series ‘Steptoe & Son’, young Mr. Steptoe called his Dad ‘… you dirty old man’. What was the name of the street where their dirty old yard was situated? a. Oil Drum Lane
80. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top are the names given to which elementary particles?
a. Quarks.
81. The first British Colony to be granted ‘independence’ on March 6th 1957 was ‘The Gold Coast’. What was this country called after becoming independent?
a. Ghana
82. Which company manufactures all of the tyres that must be used by all Formula 1 car race teams in current season?
a. Pirelli
83. In India, the rupee is the major unit of currency. Rupees can also be divided into 100 parts. What are these parts called?
a. Paise. (used to be naye paise but the naye, which means new, has been dropped)
84. As of April 2014, 2 people are shown on the rear of new UK £50 note. Name one of them.
a. Matthew Boulton & James Watt
85. Name the person: He was the son of a French tanner; he died in 1895: he gained pre-eminence as a biologist, and studied destruction of undesirable organisms.
a. Louis Pasteur (hence Pasteurisation...)
86. Died 1874, this Swedish physicist carried out research into solar radiation and aurora borealis. His name gives rise to a unit of spectroscopic length of one ten millionth of a millimetre.
a. Anders Jonas Ångström
87. What’s the surname of the twins who won gold and bronze medals in the men’s triathlon at the 2012 Olympics in London?
a. Brownlee (Johnny and Alistair)
88. What venue was used for the archery at the 2012 Olympics?
a. Lords Cricket Ground
89. Which actor played MP Jim Hacker in the shows 'Yes Minister' and 'Yes Prime Minister'?
a. Paul Eddington
90. In 1960, the forerunner to the current MOT test was introduced in the UK. At that time, how old did vehicles have to be before they were the subjected to this test?
a. 10 years
91. Where would you most likely come across the use of the term Research Octane Number (RON)?
a. In a petrol station. (It is a measure of the performance of fuel e.g. petrol for cars)
92. In the game of chess, what’s the name of the move where the king can move more than one square at a time?
a. The process of castling. (accept to castle)
93. Where or when would you most likely come across an APGAR score?
a. At the birth of a child. (It’s the name of the very first test given to a newborn child. Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration)
94. In which state was the trans-continental railway across USA first opened on May 10th 1869?
a. Utah. (at Promontory Point)
95. In the game of chess, what are the only pieces on the board that can’t move backwards?
a. Pawns
96. Which F1 racing circuit has ‘features’ called ‘Parabolica’ and ‘Nordcurve’?
a. Hockenheim
Spares/supplementaries:
1. Mort Sahl famously said …’this American president won because he ran against Jimmy Carter; if he'd run unopposed he would have lost.’ Who was the American president?
a. Ronald Reagan
2. In which UK city was the Pharmaceutical company ‘Boots’ started?
a. Nottingham
3. Which UK based Pharmaceutical company has manufacturing facilities in Worthing, Barnard Castle & Grange-Over-Sands?
a. GSK (Glaxo SmithKline)
4. British novelist AS Byatt is the sister of another woman novelist, author of “A Summer Bird-cage”. Name her.
a. Margaret Drabble
5. In which state of the USA was the Battle of Gettysburg?
a. Pennsylvania
6. Which writer said ‘I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’
a. Mark Twain
|
Bernie Ecclestone
|
What abbreviated term refers to songs/music used in film, TV, adverts, games etc?
|
Putin is right to take hard line on homosexuality says F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone | Daily Mail Online
Putin is right to take a hard line on homosexuality says F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone on the same day judge in '£10m bribery' case brands him corrupt
Mr Ecclestone said he 'complete agrees' with Vladimir Putin's anti-gay stance
Hours before the interview emerged a judge ruled Mr Ecclestone paid a bribe to a senior German banker
But he won his High Court fight against German media company because they did not lose out as a result of his 'corrupt' deal
Constantin Medien was trying to claim £80million in damages
The Formula 1 boss is facing a separate bribery trial in Germany this year
|
i don't know
|
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
|
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League: 4th November The Questions
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League
Set by The Lamb Inn
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
1. Q. Offenbach’s barcarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ is a famous piece of music, but what is a barcarolle ?
A. A BOATING SONG (Accept any reference to boats).
2. Q. Which Gilbert & Sullivan operetta contains the song generally known as ‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ ?
A. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE.
3. Q. Which TV presenter is the daughter of Newspaper Editor and Columnist Eve Pollard ?
A. CLAUDIA WINKELMAN.
4. Q. Who created the statue of ‘St.Michael’s victory over the Devil’ on Coventry Cathedral ?
A. JACOB EPSTEIN.
5. Q. Which artist painted the work entitled ‘Guernica’ ?
A. PABLO PICASSO.
6. Q. In the TV series ‘Inspector Morse’, who wrote the theme tune ?
A. BARRINGTON PHELOUNG
7. Q. Mark McManus of ‘Taggart’ fame had a famous singing half-brother. Who is he ?
A. BRIAN CONNOLLY (Lead singer of The Sweet).
8. Q. Who composed the music for the films ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘The Mission’ ?
A. ENNIO MORRICONE.
(a) Q. Which piece of music preceded TV’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ ?
A. THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE (Giaochino Rossini)
(b) Q. Who is the mother of actress Joely Richardson ?
A. VANESSA REDGRAVE.
(c) Q. In which play does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
A. THE RIVALS (by Sheridan)
1) What is the capital of Croatia ? (A) Zagreb
2) Which river runs through Leicester ? (A) Soar
3) What is described as : a U-shaped body of water that forms when a wide meander from the main river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water ? (A) Ox Bow Lake
4) What is the largest lake in Europe ? (A) Lake Lagoda (14th largest in the world.)
5) What is a line on a map or chart joining points of equal height or depth called ? (A) Contour
6) Which city is the capital of Canada ? (A) Ottawa
7) Which river runs through Ipswich ? (A) Orwell
8) Yosemite National Park is in which US State ? (A) California
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Greenland belongs to which country ? (A) Denmark.
(b) In which country are the largest waterfalls measured by flow-rate in Europe ?
(A) Switzerland (Rhine falls)
1. Q. Which statesman married Miss Clementine Hosier in 1908 ?
A. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
2. Q. Who founded The National Viewers & Listeners Association in 1965 ?
A. MARY WHITEHOUSE.
3. Q. In which year did the first human heart transplant take place ?
A. 1967 (allow 1966-1968).
4. Q. Where was Princess Elizabeth staying when she was given the news of her accession to the throne in 1558 ?
A. HATFIELD HOUSE in Hertfordshire.
5. Q. Give a year in the life of Ivan the Terrible.
A. 1530 – 1584
6. Q. The Rolls Royce ‘Thrust Measuring Rig’ developed in the 1950’s took off vertically, but what was its nickname ?
A. THE FLYING BEDSTEAD.
7. Q. Whose London monument by Edward Bailey is guarded by Edwin Landseer’s lions?
A. NELSON
8. Q. What, infamously, happened at Yekaterinburg on July 17th 1918 ?
A. THE ASSASINATION OF THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY
(THE ROMANOVS)
(a) Q. What was the code-name for planned German invasion of Britain ?
A. OPERATION SEA LION.
(b) Q. What is the connection between a large fish-eating bird and Drake’s ship ?
A. PELICAN (Name of Drakes ship before becoming The Golden Hind).
SCIENCE
1. Q. What is the tradename of the Du Pont synthetic fibre of high-tensile strength used mainly in rubber products, notably tyres and bullet-proof vests ?
A. KEVLAR.
2. Q. In astronomy, where would you find the ‘Cassini Division’ ?
A. SATURNS RINGS.
3. Q. As a percentage, what is the average salinity of sea water ?
A. 3.5% (accept 3% to 4%)
4. Q. What name is given to static discharges visible on aircraft wing tips and the tops of ships masts ?
A. ST. ELMO’S FIRE.
5. Q. In what device in the home would you find a magnetron ?
A. MICROWAVE OVEN.
6. Q. Traditionally, how have teachers always used sticks of calcium sulphate ?
A. BLACKBOARD CHALK.
7. Q. Why is sodium carbonate sometimes added to a water supply ?
A. TO REDUCE NATURAL HARDNESS.
8. Q. Which element is common to all acids ?
A. HYDROGEN.
(a) Q. By what name is deuterium oxide also known ?
A. HEAVY WATER.
(b) Q. Why is a compound of sulphur called ethyl mercaptan added to LPG cooking gas ?
A. TO GIVE THIS ODOURLESS GAS A DETECTABLE SMELL.
(c) Q. Bauxite is the main ore of which metal ?
A. ALUMINIUM.
1) Which horse won the 2014 Grand National ? (A) Pineau de Re.
2) In which year did Manchester United last win the FACup ? (A) 2004.
3) Who is currently England’s leading wicket taker in test matches? (A) I.T. Botham (383).
4) Who was the captain of the British women’s gold medal winning curling team in the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City ? (A) Rhona Martin.
5) Which was the last year that The Ryder Cup was played in an 'odd year'?
(A) 1999. (it was due to be played in 2001 and was cancelled due to ‘9/11’ and played in 2002 instead).
6) In which sport is the Lance Todd trophy awarded ? (A) Rugby League. (to the Cup Final Man of the Match).
7) Which team knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 2014 FACup?
(A) Sheffield Wednesday in a 3rd round replay.
8) Jessicca Ennis and Mo Farah were two thirds of Team GB's 'super Saturday' at the 2012 London Olympics. Which athlete completed the set of Gold Medals ?
(A) Greg Rutherford (Long jump).
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Where are the 2018 World Cup finals being held ? (A) Russia.
(b) On which golf course was the 2014 Ryder Cup held ? (A) Gleneagles.
FIND THE CAR
The answer to every question is a make of car, some of which are no longer manufactured.
1. Q. A position in which to meditate.
A. LOTUS
2. Q. American city famous for its Boot Hill cemetery.
A. DODGE
3. Q. City and Rovers.
A. BRISTOL.
4. Q. English country dancers, usually men.
A. MORRIS.
5. Q. No-one to carry your golf clubs ?
A. CADILLAC.
6. Q. U.S. army general purpose vehicle.
A. JEEP. (named from shortened GPV - General Purpose Vehicle)
7. Q. Forename of a current McClaren F1 driver.
A. JENSEN. (Button)
8. Q. Complete the line of the hymn ‘Jesus wants me for a ?’
A. SUNBEAM.
(a) Q. Impish eastern county town.
A. LINCOLN.
(b) Q. Area in south London originally famous for its gardens.
A. VAUXHALL.
(c) Q. Its only future was in ‘Back to the Future’.
A. DE LOREAN.
HORSEY BUSINESS
1) In the 2011 Academy nominated film 'War Horse' directed by Stephen Spielberg, what was the name of the main equine character ? (A) Joey
2) What was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse ? (A) Bucephalus
3) Esha Ness won the Grand National that never was. It was cancelled due to a false start ! In which year was this ? (A) 1993 (allow 92-94)
4) Who wrote the play 'Equus' in 1973 ? (A) Peter Shaffer
5) A filly is a female horse under the age of 4. What is a female horse over the age of 4 called ? (A) Mare
6) What is the gestation period of a horse in days ? (A) 340 (allow 330-350)
7) Who, famously, rode a horse called Marengo named after a battle in Italy ?
(A) Napoleon Bonaparte
8) The Horse of the Year show was first held in 1949 at Harringay Arena. Which enue now plays host ? (A) NEC in Birmingham (accept Birmingham)
(Note : It was at Wembley Arena from 1959-2002)
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) What was the Duke of Wellington's most remembered horse called ?
(A) Copenhagen
(b) ‘They shoot horses don't they’ was a UK No.14 hit for which welsh band in 1977 ? (A) Racing Cars
The answer to each question is a number.
1) How many Oscars did the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ win in 1981 ? (A) 4
2) How many lines are there in a sonnet ? (A) 14
3) What is the value of Pi to three decimal points ? (A) 3.142 (3.1415926)
4) How many feet are there in a chain ? (A) 66 (22 yards)
5) How many football world cups have there been ? (A) 20
6) At what speed did the DeLorean car need to travel, to go 'Back to the future' in the film of the same name ? (A) 88mph accept 86-90
7) How many Olympic gold medals did GB win at London 2012 (not including Paralympics) ? (A) 29 accept 28-30
8) How many books are there in the New Testament (A) 27 accept 26-28
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) How many players per team are there in a Water Polo team ? (A) 7
(b) How many counties make up Northern Ireland ? (A) 6
General Knowledge Questions as set by the Plough Horntails
1. Who is the current Secretary of State for Justice?
a. Chris Grayling
2. Which gas makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus?
a. Carbon dioxide (96%).
3. In architecture, what is a corbel?
a. a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall, a type of bracket.
4. Who is the current Secretary of State for transport?
a. Patrick McCloughlin
5. In which UK town does Honda assemble cars?
a. Swindon
6. Who is currently the manager of Sunderland football club?
a. Gus Poyet
7. Which F1 racing circuit has features called ‘Rascasse’ and ‘Sainte Devote’?
a. Monaco
8. What is the science of time measurement called?
a. Horology
(NB - not chronology which is to do with the ordering of events in time)
9. Mark Reckless was the MP for which constituency?
a. Rochester and Strood
10. What’s the name of the UK politician who embarrassed the Government by stating that disabled people could be paid £2 / hour?
a. Lord Freud
11. In architecture, what is a caryatid?
a. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
12. In which UK town does Morgan assemble cars?
a. Malvern
13. Who is the current presenter of Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’?
a. Nick Hewer
14. What was the name of the British policewoman killed in the 1984 Libyan embassy protest?
a. Yvonne Fletcher
15. Who was the first English king from the House of Lancaster?
a. Henry IV
16. Who preceded Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany?
a. Gerhard Schröder.
17. In which county is the Forest of Dean?
a. Gloucestershire.
18. Who is currently the manager of Swansea football club?
a. Gary Monk
19. Who wrote the book “King Solomon’s Mines?
a. H. Rider Haggard
20. Which was the first motorway service area to open in the UK?
a. Watford Gap (2 November 1959)
21. Who was the second man to orbit the Earth ?
a. Herman Titov
22. Currently, Sandi Toksvig presents 15-1 on TV. Who was her fore-runner?
a. William G. Stewart.
23. In which novel does the character Humbert Humbert appear?
a. Lolita
24. What material was invented by William Harbutt in 1897?
a. Plasticine.
25. Who is the current presenter of the TV celebrity quiz programme ‘Would I lie to you?’
a. Rob Brydon
26. The island of Trinidad lies off the coast of which South American country?
a. Venezuela.
27. In the TV series ‘Some Mothers do have ‘em’, Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford. What’s the name of the actress who played Betty, Frank’s wife?
a. Michele Dotrice
28. Which everyday British objects bear a design by Matthew Dent?
a. Coins (He is responsible for the post 2008 design).
29. In which county is Long Lartin prison?
a. Worcestershire.
30. What’s the name of the famous Harlem nightclub where the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie both had residencies in the 1930s?
a. The Cotton Club
31. For which literary genre are Hugo awards given?
a. Science fiction (accept fantasy which are also included)
32. Who was the first President of Israel?
a. Chaim Weizmann
33. Which member of the British royal family competed at Wimbledon in 1926?
a. George (Duke of York) – later King George VI
34. What do atheists do in court instead of swearing on the bible?
a. They affirm
35. What is ombrophobia a fear of?
a. Rain
36. What are young turkeys called?
a. Poults
37. Which city was the first in the world to have an underground transport system?
a. London
38. How many hoops are used in a game of croquet?
a. 6
39. Whose second symphony is known as “The Little Russian”?
a. Tchaikovsky
40. The Eiffel tower was the main exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair), held to commemorate what event?
a. The centenary of the start of the French Revolution
41. Which of the Bronté sisters wrote the novel “Shirley” which included descriptions of Luddite activities in a Yorkshire woollen mill?
a. Charlotte
42. What is the name of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?
a. Antonio
43. Which part of the body is involved if you suffer from glossitis?
a. The tongue
What is the '1 cent Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A. Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
45. What’s the name of the UHF wireless technology developed for data transfer between devices in close proximity by Eriksson in 1994?
a. Bluetooth
What’s the name of the circular, partner-swapping, ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader?
Paul Jones (after Admiral John Paul Jones)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
49. What was the name of the 1991 film that featured the Wilson Pickett song ‘Mustang Sally’?
a. The Commitments
50. What’s the name of the first presenter of the TV series University Challenge?
a. Bamber Gascoigne
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
The volcano Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on which planet?
Mars
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to do what?
Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous watch manufacturer has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
What dental term refers to the appearance of new teeth in the mouth?
Eruption
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP?
Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at £10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What is the old common name for Hamamelis or Winterbloom and its extract, used for skin/bruises/acne treatment (and dowsing)?
Witch Hazel
Edward VII was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 9th August 1902. What was the name of his Queen?
Alexandra
60. If a track marshal at an F1 race waves a blue flag during a race, what does this indicate?
a. Warns a driver that he is about to be lapped / overtaken by a faster car. (N.B. can also be indicated by a flashing blue light…)
61. What is “Fats” Domino’s real first name?
a. Antoine
62. Vegemite was originally made in which country?
a. Australia (The company is now part of Kraft)
63. Which company makes Marmite?
a. Unilever.
64. In which British city would you find the National Space Centre?
a. Leicester.
65. What would you buy from a Costermonger?
a. Fruit and vegetables,
66. Which British architect was responsible for the creation of the Welsh village of Portmeirion?
a. Clough Williams-Ellis.
67. For what reasons are Darwin Awards are given annually?
a. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions. (accept anything with death and gene pool)
68. The Fields Medal is an International Medal that is awarded for outstanding discoveries in which area of endeavour?
a. Mathematics
69. What’s the chemical name for the liquid that is commonly used as battery acid?
A. Sulphuric acid
70. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 200 years ago (i.e.1814)
a. George III ( ruled from 1760 to 1820)
71. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 500 years ago (i.e. 1514)
a. Henry VIII ( ruled from 1509 to 1547)
72. What’s the chemical name for the substance sometimes called salt petre?
Potassium Nitrate
HMS Bulldog became famous during 1941 for capturing what German secret items?
The Enigma Machine and codebooks ( accept Enigma machine)
During WWII, Bletchley Park was the central site of the’ Government Code & Cipher School’. In which UK county is this site?
Buckinghamshire
In humans, the 4 basic taste sensations are: sweet, sour, bitter and which other?
Salty (another ‘taste’ called umami has been discussed in scientific cirecles, but this is probably not one of the basis sensations)
What’s the name of the current Prime Minister in France?
Manuel Valls
77. Who is the current (as of 23-Oct-14) Head of the European Central Bank?
a. Mario Draghi
78. What name is given to the wife of an Earl??
a. Countess.
79. In the TV series ‘Steptoe & Son’, young Mr. Steptoe called his Dad ‘… you dirty old man’. What was the name of the street where their dirty old yard was situated? a. Oil Drum Lane
80. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top are the names given to which elementary particles?
a. Quarks.
81. The first British Colony to be granted ‘independence’ on March 6th 1957 was ‘The Gold Coast’. What was this country called after becoming independent?
a. Ghana
82. Which company manufactures all of the tyres that must be used by all Formula 1 car race teams in current season?
a. Pirelli
83. In India, the rupee is the major unit of currency. Rupees can also be divided into 100 parts. What are these parts called?
a. Paise. (used to be naye paise but the naye, which means new, has been dropped)
84. As of April 2014, 2 people are shown on the rear of new UK £50 note. Name one of them.
a. Matthew Boulton & James Watt
85. Name the person: He was the son of a French tanner; he died in 1895: he gained pre-eminence as a biologist, and studied destruction of undesirable organisms.
a. Louis Pasteur (hence Pasteurisation...)
86. Died 1874, this Swedish physicist carried out research into solar radiation and aurora borealis. His name gives rise to a unit of spectroscopic length of one ten millionth of a millimetre.
a. Anders Jonas Ångström
87. What’s the surname of the twins who won gold and bronze medals in the men’s triathlon at the 2012 Olympics in London?
a. Brownlee (Johnny and Alistair)
88. What venue was used for the archery at the 2012 Olympics?
a. Lords Cricket Ground
89. Which actor played MP Jim Hacker in the shows 'Yes Minister' and 'Yes Prime Minister'?
a. Paul Eddington
90. In 1960, the forerunner to the current MOT test was introduced in the UK. At that time, how old did vehicles have to be before they were the subjected to this test?
a. 10 years
91. Where would you most likely come across the use of the term Research Octane Number (RON)?
a. In a petrol station. (It is a measure of the performance of fuel e.g. petrol for cars)
92. In the game of chess, what’s the name of the move where the king can move more than one square at a time?
a. The process of castling. (accept to castle)
93. Where or when would you most likely come across an APGAR score?
a. At the birth of a child. (It’s the name of the very first test given to a newborn child. Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration)
94. In which state was the trans-continental railway across USA first opened on May 10th 1869?
a. Utah. (at Promontory Point)
95. In the game of chess, what are the only pieces on the board that can’t move backwards?
a. Pawns
96. Which F1 racing circuit has ‘features’ called ‘Parabolica’ and ‘Nordcurve’?
a. Hockenheim
Spares/supplementaries:
1. Mort Sahl famously said …’this American president won because he ran against Jimmy Carter; if he'd run unopposed he would have lost.’ Who was the American president?
a. Ronald Reagan
2. In which UK city was the Pharmaceutical company ‘Boots’ started?
a. Nottingham
3. Which UK based Pharmaceutical company has manufacturing facilities in Worthing, Barnard Castle & Grange-Over-Sands?
a. GSK (Glaxo SmithKline)
4. British novelist AS Byatt is the sister of another woman novelist, author of “A Summer Bird-cage”. Name her.
a. Margaret Drabble
5. In which state of the USA was the Battle of Gettysburg?
a. Pennsylvania
6. Which writer said ‘I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’
a. Mark Twain
|
Stigma
|
Which famous sports-sponsoring organization has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
|
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League: 4th November The Questions
Macclesfield Pub Quiz League
Set by The Lamb Inn
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
1. Q. Offenbach’s barcarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ is a famous piece of music, but what is a barcarolle ?
A. A BOATING SONG (Accept any reference to boats).
2. Q. Which Gilbert & Sullivan operetta contains the song generally known as ‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ ?
A. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE.
3. Q. Which TV presenter is the daughter of Newspaper Editor and Columnist Eve Pollard ?
A. CLAUDIA WINKELMAN.
4. Q. Who created the statue of ‘St.Michael’s victory over the Devil’ on Coventry Cathedral ?
A. JACOB EPSTEIN.
5. Q. Which artist painted the work entitled ‘Guernica’ ?
A. PABLO PICASSO.
6. Q. In the TV series ‘Inspector Morse’, who wrote the theme tune ?
A. BARRINGTON PHELOUNG
7. Q. Mark McManus of ‘Taggart’ fame had a famous singing half-brother. Who is he ?
A. BRIAN CONNOLLY (Lead singer of The Sweet).
8. Q. Who composed the music for the films ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘The Mission’ ?
A. ENNIO MORRICONE.
(a) Q. Which piece of music preceded TV’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ ?
A. THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE (Giaochino Rossini)
(b) Q. Who is the mother of actress Joely Richardson ?
A. VANESSA REDGRAVE.
(c) Q. In which play does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
A. THE RIVALS (by Sheridan)
1) What is the capital of Croatia ? (A) Zagreb
2) Which river runs through Leicester ? (A) Soar
3) What is described as : a U-shaped body of water that forms when a wide meander from the main river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water ? (A) Ox Bow Lake
4) What is the largest lake in Europe ? (A) Lake Lagoda (14th largest in the world.)
5) What is a line on a map or chart joining points of equal height or depth called ? (A) Contour
6) Which city is the capital of Canada ? (A) Ottawa
7) Which river runs through Ipswich ? (A) Orwell
8) Yosemite National Park is in which US State ? (A) California
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Greenland belongs to which country ? (A) Denmark.
(b) In which country are the largest waterfalls measured by flow-rate in Europe ?
(A) Switzerland (Rhine falls)
1. Q. Which statesman married Miss Clementine Hosier in 1908 ?
A. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
2. Q. Who founded The National Viewers & Listeners Association in 1965 ?
A. MARY WHITEHOUSE.
3. Q. In which year did the first human heart transplant take place ?
A. 1967 (allow 1966-1968).
4. Q. Where was Princess Elizabeth staying when she was given the news of her accession to the throne in 1558 ?
A. HATFIELD HOUSE in Hertfordshire.
5. Q. Give a year in the life of Ivan the Terrible.
A. 1530 – 1584
6. Q. The Rolls Royce ‘Thrust Measuring Rig’ developed in the 1950’s took off vertically, but what was its nickname ?
A. THE FLYING BEDSTEAD.
7. Q. Whose London monument by Edward Bailey is guarded by Edwin Landseer’s lions?
A. NELSON
8. Q. What, infamously, happened at Yekaterinburg on July 17th 1918 ?
A. THE ASSASINATION OF THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY
(THE ROMANOVS)
(a) Q. What was the code-name for planned German invasion of Britain ?
A. OPERATION SEA LION.
(b) Q. What is the connection between a large fish-eating bird and Drake’s ship ?
A. PELICAN (Name of Drakes ship before becoming The Golden Hind).
SCIENCE
1. Q. What is the tradename of the Du Pont synthetic fibre of high-tensile strength used mainly in rubber products, notably tyres and bullet-proof vests ?
A. KEVLAR.
2. Q. In astronomy, where would you find the ‘Cassini Division’ ?
A. SATURNS RINGS.
3. Q. As a percentage, what is the average salinity of sea water ?
A. 3.5% (accept 3% to 4%)
4. Q. What name is given to static discharges visible on aircraft wing tips and the tops of ships masts ?
A. ST. ELMO’S FIRE.
5. Q. In what device in the home would you find a magnetron ?
A. MICROWAVE OVEN.
6. Q. Traditionally, how have teachers always used sticks of calcium sulphate ?
A. BLACKBOARD CHALK.
7. Q. Why is sodium carbonate sometimes added to a water supply ?
A. TO REDUCE NATURAL HARDNESS.
8. Q. Which element is common to all acids ?
A. HYDROGEN.
(a) Q. By what name is deuterium oxide also known ?
A. HEAVY WATER.
(b) Q. Why is a compound of sulphur called ethyl mercaptan added to LPG cooking gas ?
A. TO GIVE THIS ODOURLESS GAS A DETECTABLE SMELL.
(c) Q. Bauxite is the main ore of which metal ?
A. ALUMINIUM.
1) Which horse won the 2014 Grand National ? (A) Pineau de Re.
2) In which year did Manchester United last win the FACup ? (A) 2004.
3) Who is currently England’s leading wicket taker in test matches? (A) I.T. Botham (383).
4) Who was the captain of the British women’s gold medal winning curling team in the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City ? (A) Rhona Martin.
5) Which was the last year that The Ryder Cup was played in an 'odd year'?
(A) 1999. (it was due to be played in 2001 and was cancelled due to ‘9/11’ and played in 2002 instead).
6) In which sport is the Lance Todd trophy awarded ? (A) Rugby League. (to the Cup Final Man of the Match).
7) Which team knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 2014 FACup?
(A) Sheffield Wednesday in a 3rd round replay.
8) Jessicca Ennis and Mo Farah were two thirds of Team GB's 'super Saturday' at the 2012 London Olympics. Which athlete completed the set of Gold Medals ?
(A) Greg Rutherford (Long jump).
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) Where are the 2018 World Cup finals being held ? (A) Russia.
(b) On which golf course was the 2014 Ryder Cup held ? (A) Gleneagles.
FIND THE CAR
The answer to every question is a make of car, some of which are no longer manufactured.
1. Q. A position in which to meditate.
A. LOTUS
2. Q. American city famous for its Boot Hill cemetery.
A. DODGE
3. Q. City and Rovers.
A. BRISTOL.
4. Q. English country dancers, usually men.
A. MORRIS.
5. Q. No-one to carry your golf clubs ?
A. CADILLAC.
6. Q. U.S. army general purpose vehicle.
A. JEEP. (named from shortened GPV - General Purpose Vehicle)
7. Q. Forename of a current McClaren F1 driver.
A. JENSEN. (Button)
8. Q. Complete the line of the hymn ‘Jesus wants me for a ?’
A. SUNBEAM.
(a) Q. Impish eastern county town.
A. LINCOLN.
(b) Q. Area in south London originally famous for its gardens.
A. VAUXHALL.
(c) Q. Its only future was in ‘Back to the Future’.
A. DE LOREAN.
HORSEY BUSINESS
1) In the 2011 Academy nominated film 'War Horse' directed by Stephen Spielberg, what was the name of the main equine character ? (A) Joey
2) What was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse ? (A) Bucephalus
3) Esha Ness won the Grand National that never was. It was cancelled due to a false start ! In which year was this ? (A) 1993 (allow 92-94)
4) Who wrote the play 'Equus' in 1973 ? (A) Peter Shaffer
5) A filly is a female horse under the age of 4. What is a female horse over the age of 4 called ? (A) Mare
6) What is the gestation period of a horse in days ? (A) 340 (allow 330-350)
7) Who, famously, rode a horse called Marengo named after a battle in Italy ?
(A) Napoleon Bonaparte
8) The Horse of the Year show was first held in 1949 at Harringay Arena. Which enue now plays host ? (A) NEC in Birmingham (accept Birmingham)
(Note : It was at Wembley Arena from 1959-2002)
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) What was the Duke of Wellington's most remembered horse called ?
(A) Copenhagen
(b) ‘They shoot horses don't they’ was a UK No.14 hit for which welsh band in 1977 ? (A) Racing Cars
The answer to each question is a number.
1) How many Oscars did the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ win in 1981 ? (A) 4
2) How many lines are there in a sonnet ? (A) 14
3) What is the value of Pi to three decimal points ? (A) 3.142 (3.1415926)
4) How many feet are there in a chain ? (A) 66 (22 yards)
5) How many football world cups have there been ? (A) 20
6) At what speed did the DeLorean car need to travel, to go 'Back to the future' in the film of the same name ? (A) 88mph accept 86-90
7) How many Olympic gold medals did GB win at London 2012 (not including Paralympics) ? (A) 29 accept 28-30
8) How many books are there in the New Testament (A) 27 accept 26-28
SUPPLEMENTARIES
(a) How many players per team are there in a Water Polo team ? (A) 7
(b) How many counties make up Northern Ireland ? (A) 6
General Knowledge Questions as set by the Plough Horntails
1. Who is the current Secretary of State for Justice?
a. Chris Grayling
2. Which gas makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus?
a. Carbon dioxide (96%).
3. In architecture, what is a corbel?
a. a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall, a type of bracket.
4. Who is the current Secretary of State for transport?
a. Patrick McCloughlin
5. In which UK town does Honda assemble cars?
a. Swindon
6. Who is currently the manager of Sunderland football club?
a. Gus Poyet
7. Which F1 racing circuit has features called ‘Rascasse’ and ‘Sainte Devote’?
a. Monaco
8. What is the science of time measurement called?
a. Horology
(NB - not chronology which is to do with the ordering of events in time)
9. Mark Reckless was the MP for which constituency?
a. Rochester and Strood
10. What’s the name of the UK politician who embarrassed the Government by stating that disabled people could be paid £2 / hour?
a. Lord Freud
11. In architecture, what is a caryatid?
a. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
12. In which UK town does Morgan assemble cars?
a. Malvern
13. Who is the current presenter of Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’?
a. Nick Hewer
14. What was the name of the British policewoman killed in the 1984 Libyan embassy protest?
a. Yvonne Fletcher
15. Who was the first English king from the House of Lancaster?
a. Henry IV
16. Who preceded Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany?
a. Gerhard Schröder.
17. In which county is the Forest of Dean?
a. Gloucestershire.
18. Who is currently the manager of Swansea football club?
a. Gary Monk
19. Who wrote the book “King Solomon’s Mines?
a. H. Rider Haggard
20. Which was the first motorway service area to open in the UK?
a. Watford Gap (2 November 1959)
21. Who was the second man to orbit the Earth ?
a. Herman Titov
22. Currently, Sandi Toksvig presents 15-1 on TV. Who was her fore-runner?
a. William G. Stewart.
23. In which novel does the character Humbert Humbert appear?
a. Lolita
24. What material was invented by William Harbutt in 1897?
a. Plasticine.
25. Who is the current presenter of the TV celebrity quiz programme ‘Would I lie to you?’
a. Rob Brydon
26. The island of Trinidad lies off the coast of which South American country?
a. Venezuela.
27. In the TV series ‘Some Mothers do have ‘em’, Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford. What’s the name of the actress who played Betty, Frank’s wife?
a. Michele Dotrice
28. Which everyday British objects bear a design by Matthew Dent?
a. Coins (He is responsible for the post 2008 design).
29. In which county is Long Lartin prison?
a. Worcestershire.
30. What’s the name of the famous Harlem nightclub where the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie both had residencies in the 1930s?
a. The Cotton Club
31. For which literary genre are Hugo awards given?
a. Science fiction (accept fantasy which are also included)
32. Who was the first President of Israel?
a. Chaim Weizmann
33. Which member of the British royal family competed at Wimbledon in 1926?
a. George (Duke of York) – later King George VI
34. What do atheists do in court instead of swearing on the bible?
a. They affirm
35. What is ombrophobia a fear of?
a. Rain
36. What are young turkeys called?
a. Poults
37. Which city was the first in the world to have an underground transport system?
a. London
38. How many hoops are used in a game of croquet?
a. 6
39. Whose second symphony is known as “The Little Russian”?
a. Tchaikovsky
40. The Eiffel tower was the main exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair), held to commemorate what event?
a. The centenary of the start of the French Revolution
41. Which of the Bronté sisters wrote the novel “Shirley” which included descriptions of Luddite activities in a Yorkshire woollen mill?
a. Charlotte
42. What is the name of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?
a. Antonio
43. Which part of the body is involved if you suffer from glossitis?
a. The tongue
What is the '1 cent Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A. Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
45. What’s the name of the UHF wireless technology developed for data transfer between devices in close proximity by Eriksson in 1994?
a. Bluetooth
What’s the name of the circular, partner-swapping, ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader?
Paul Jones (after Admiral John Paul Jones)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
49. What was the name of the 1991 film that featured the Wilson Pickett song ‘Mustang Sally’?
a. The Commitments
50. What’s the name of the first presenter of the TV series University Challenge?
a. Bamber Gascoigne
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
The volcano Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on which planet?
Mars
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to do what?
Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous watch manufacturer has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
What dental term refers to the appearance of new teeth in the mouth?
Eruption
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP?
Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at £10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What is the old common name for Hamamelis or Winterbloom and its extract, used for skin/bruises/acne treatment (and dowsing)?
Witch Hazel
Edward VII was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 9th August 1902. What was the name of his Queen?
Alexandra
60. If a track marshal at an F1 race waves a blue flag during a race, what does this indicate?
a. Warns a driver that he is about to be lapped / overtaken by a faster car. (N.B. can also be indicated by a flashing blue light…)
61. What is “Fats” Domino’s real first name?
a. Antoine
62. Vegemite was originally made in which country?
a. Australia (The company is now part of Kraft)
63. Which company makes Marmite?
a. Unilever.
64. In which British city would you find the National Space Centre?
a. Leicester.
65. What would you buy from a Costermonger?
a. Fruit and vegetables,
66. Which British architect was responsible for the creation of the Welsh village of Portmeirion?
a. Clough Williams-Ellis.
67. For what reasons are Darwin Awards are given annually?
a. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions. (accept anything with death and gene pool)
68. The Fields Medal is an International Medal that is awarded for outstanding discoveries in which area of endeavour?
a. Mathematics
69. What’s the chemical name for the liquid that is commonly used as battery acid?
A. Sulphuric acid
70. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 200 years ago (i.e.1814)
a. George III ( ruled from 1760 to 1820)
71. Who was the ruling monarch in Britain 500 years ago (i.e. 1514)
a. Henry VIII ( ruled from 1509 to 1547)
72. What’s the chemical name for the substance sometimes called salt petre?
Potassium Nitrate
HMS Bulldog became famous during 1941 for capturing what German secret items?
The Enigma Machine and codebooks ( accept Enigma machine)
During WWII, Bletchley Park was the central site of the’ Government Code & Cipher School’. In which UK county is this site?
Buckinghamshire
In humans, the 4 basic taste sensations are: sweet, sour, bitter and which other?
Salty (another ‘taste’ called umami has been discussed in scientific cirecles, but this is probably not one of the basis sensations)
What’s the name of the current Prime Minister in France?
Manuel Valls
77. Who is the current (as of 23-Oct-14) Head of the European Central Bank?
a. Mario Draghi
78. What name is given to the wife of an Earl??
a. Countess.
79. In the TV series ‘Steptoe & Son’, young Mr. Steptoe called his Dad ‘… you dirty old man’. What was the name of the street where their dirty old yard was situated? a. Oil Drum Lane
80. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top are the names given to which elementary particles?
a. Quarks.
81. The first British Colony to be granted ‘independence’ on March 6th 1957 was ‘The Gold Coast’. What was this country called after becoming independent?
a. Ghana
82. Which company manufactures all of the tyres that must be used by all Formula 1 car race teams in current season?
a. Pirelli
83. In India, the rupee is the major unit of currency. Rupees can also be divided into 100 parts. What are these parts called?
a. Paise. (used to be naye paise but the naye, which means new, has been dropped)
84. As of April 2014, 2 people are shown on the rear of new UK £50 note. Name one of them.
a. Matthew Boulton & James Watt
85. Name the person: He was the son of a French tanner; he died in 1895: he gained pre-eminence as a biologist, and studied destruction of undesirable organisms.
a. Louis Pasteur (hence Pasteurisation...)
86. Died 1874, this Swedish physicist carried out research into solar radiation and aurora borealis. His name gives rise to a unit of spectroscopic length of one ten millionth of a millimetre.
a. Anders Jonas Ångström
87. What’s the surname of the twins who won gold and bronze medals in the men’s triathlon at the 2012 Olympics in London?
a. Brownlee (Johnny and Alistair)
88. What venue was used for the archery at the 2012 Olympics?
a. Lords Cricket Ground
89. Which actor played MP Jim Hacker in the shows 'Yes Minister' and 'Yes Prime Minister'?
a. Paul Eddington
90. In 1960, the forerunner to the current MOT test was introduced in the UK. At that time, how old did vehicles have to be before they were the subjected to this test?
a. 10 years
91. Where would you most likely come across the use of the term Research Octane Number (RON)?
a. In a petrol station. (It is a measure of the performance of fuel e.g. petrol for cars)
92. In the game of chess, what’s the name of the move where the king can move more than one square at a time?
a. The process of castling. (accept to castle)
93. Where or when would you most likely come across an APGAR score?
a. At the birth of a child. (It’s the name of the very first test given to a newborn child. Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration)
94. In which state was the trans-continental railway across USA first opened on May 10th 1869?
a. Utah. (at Promontory Point)
95. In the game of chess, what are the only pieces on the board that can’t move backwards?
a. Pawns
96. Which F1 racing circuit has ‘features’ called ‘Parabolica’ and ‘Nordcurve’?
a. Hockenheim
Spares/supplementaries:
1. Mort Sahl famously said …’this American president won because he ran against Jimmy Carter; if he'd run unopposed he would have lost.’ Who was the American president?
a. Ronald Reagan
2. In which UK city was the Pharmaceutical company ‘Boots’ started?
a. Nottingham
3. Which UK based Pharmaceutical company has manufacturing facilities in Worthing, Barnard Castle & Grange-Over-Sands?
a. GSK (Glaxo SmithKline)
4. British novelist AS Byatt is the sister of another woman novelist, author of “A Summer Bird-cage”. Name her.
a. Margaret Drabble
5. In which state of the USA was the Battle of Gettysburg?
a. Pennsylvania
6. Which writer said ‘I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’
a. Mark Twain
|
i don't know
|
What word is punningly used to describe serious campers?
|
Learn The Lingo At Camp Wicosuta
LIT (Leader-In-Training): 10th
Tweekers: two-week campers, also 1st time campers in grades 2nd-5th
Evening Activity (EAs): Evening Activities begin at 7:30PM and last until 8:30 or 9PM depending on the activity and age group. EAs may be for the whole camp, for several age groups, or just one age group. Some examples include: Gold Rush (lower camp), Panic (each age group), Candy Horse Races (lower camp), Casino Night (upper camp), Campfire (weeklyall camp).
Selective: Selective is the last period of the day. It is the only choice period for all age groups (including Oskis & Cascos). During selective we offer traditional AND non-traditional activities. Examples include: flag football, Frisbee, quiet reading outside, cheerleading, etc. Upper Camper campers may opt to have bunk time during selective as long as there is a counselor in their cabin.
Spirit Days & Brave Week: Spirit Days is a week of special/theme days at camp. Spirits Days does not interrupt or conflict with program. Each day during that week has a theme or spin. Highlights include: friendship day, theme dinners, and Brave Week.
Brave Week: Is a chance to meet someone new at camp and serve as a "secret" friend. All campers and staff are matched up with a big and little brave. Big braves do nice things for their little braves such as: make their beds, make things for them in arts & crafts, or send them cards through secret messengers. Brave Week breakout is a secret coordinated by the Totems to surprise the rest of camp. Big braves are revealed at the end of the week at flag lowering. Campers get very excited for Brave Week-- breakout could be at any time, so be prepared.
Campfire: Campfires take place once a week up at the "Old Pine" (Wicosuta's founding spot under an old pine tree). Campfires are lead by the Totems. Campfires are quiet and serious at times, and also lots of fun. After the ceremony, we sing camp songs and play games. Each campfire has a theme such as friendship or new beginnings, and campers have the opportunity to speak about the theme. There is also a log that is passed along through different bunks throughout the summer. Each bunk that receives the log creates a poem describing the previous week, and they pass along the log to a bunk of their choice. There are delicious chocolate chip cookies and milk following campfire before bedtime. Always a big hit!
Carnival: Each bunk is responsible for a booth that is set up on the soccer field. Examples include: coke/pepsi challenge, cake walk, tattoos, count the candy, as well as lots of water-based rides/activities: a dunk tank, slip 'n' slide, sponge toss, etc. The carnival lasts most of the afternoon. Carnival ends will a HUGE water-balloon toss!
Monster Mash: It's Halloween during the summer! This spooky activity is for lower camp and takes place in the Gymnastics Pavilion. All campers and counselors use their resources to dress up in costume, and campers have the opportunity to perform skits they have created. Priscilla tells (not-so-scary) ghost stories and provides special, ghostly snacks!
Upper Camp Beach Party: An event designed for Upper Camp (Kineo-Totem) only. Put on your favorite bathing suit, grab a lei and some luau gear and go down to the waterfront for dinner and evening activity/dance party!
Gold Rush: An evening activity for lower camp and Totems. It involves counselors dressing up and playing the following roles: bankers, bandits, sheriffs, and kissing sisters. Tennis balls serve as "gold" and campers try to get as many as possible off the soccer field without getting caught by bandits and kissing sisters. The more gold your bunk has, the better chance you have to win the prize you choose at the auction after the event!
Candy Horse Races: This is a lower camp evening activity where campers get to bet (fake money) on their favorite horse/counselor. This usually takes place in the dining hall and each horse has a theme. Some themes include: luau horse, sporty horse, celebrity horse, etc. The campers with the most winnings receive prizes.
Project Morry Swimathon: Project Morry is a not-for-profit organization that sends children to camp anchored by a year-round experience. Wico's week-long swimathon raises money for Project Morry. Campers and staff swim laps and parents may sponsor their campers. The Zunis (2nd to oldest campers) run the event and are responsible for publicity, lap counting, and spirit.
Dance Marathon: Dance Marathon is put together by the Zunis and is a camp-wide event to raise breast cancer awareness. In addition to dancing, campers create arts & crafts projects to be donated to Faulkner Sagoff Breast Centre in Boston and shared with their patients (cards, bracelets, quilts, etc).
Wico Challenge Cup (1st Session): You'll never know when WCC is going to "break" or start. The camp is divided into 4 teams-red, blue, yellow, and green. The Totems create team themes (i.e. Red Dorothy, Yellow Lion, Green Witch & Blue Tinman). Each team has several counselor leaders and Totem leaders. WCC is 3 days of intense and spirited competition including sports, arts and crafts, and other activities. There is a "sing" at the end with a team mascot competition and counselor farewell. There is no way to describe the spirit and intensity of WCC until you actually experience it, so get ready to paint yourself either red, yellow, green or blue.
Color War (2nd Session): Color war break out is a top-secret event that the leadership staff plans, so that the campers & counselors will be caught off guard. Once it happens, everyone joins in the social hall for the announcement of the 2 teams: Blue Mohawk and Green Tashmoo. Teams elect a Totem Captain and captains for the younger age groups. Each team has age group advisors and a general (a staff member) who is the team leader. Color war involves 3 days of competition. Totems develop themes (Mohawk Centaurs/Tashmoo Phoenix) and create the songs for the culminating activity, an all team sing. Counselors are responsible for a farewell song during the sing. There is no way to describe the spirit and intensity of color war until you actually experience it, so get ready to paint yourself either green or blue.
Talent Shows: There are two talent shows throughout each session. They provide opportunities for campers to get on stage and show us their amazing abilities. Totems act as emcees. Counselors are encouraged to join in with their campers! Remember, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it!!
LOOKING FOR A BOYS' CAMP?
Check out our brother camp CAMP WINAUKEE
Located on beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee
|
Intense
|
The word soccer derives from?
|
Learn The Lingo At Camp Wicosuta
LIT (Leader-In-Training): 10th
Tweekers: two-week campers, also 1st time campers in grades 2nd-5th
Evening Activity (EAs): Evening Activities begin at 7:30PM and last until 8:30 or 9PM depending on the activity and age group. EAs may be for the whole camp, for several age groups, or just one age group. Some examples include: Gold Rush (lower camp), Panic (each age group), Candy Horse Races (lower camp), Casino Night (upper camp), Campfire (weeklyall camp).
Selective: Selective is the last period of the day. It is the only choice period for all age groups (including Oskis & Cascos). During selective we offer traditional AND non-traditional activities. Examples include: flag football, Frisbee, quiet reading outside, cheerleading, etc. Upper Camper campers may opt to have bunk time during selective as long as there is a counselor in their cabin.
Spirit Days & Brave Week: Spirit Days is a week of special/theme days at camp. Spirits Days does not interrupt or conflict with program. Each day during that week has a theme or spin. Highlights include: friendship day, theme dinners, and Brave Week.
Brave Week: Is a chance to meet someone new at camp and serve as a "secret" friend. All campers and staff are matched up with a big and little brave. Big braves do nice things for their little braves such as: make their beds, make things for them in arts & crafts, or send them cards through secret messengers. Brave Week breakout is a secret coordinated by the Totems to surprise the rest of camp. Big braves are revealed at the end of the week at flag lowering. Campers get very excited for Brave Week-- breakout could be at any time, so be prepared.
Campfire: Campfires take place once a week up at the "Old Pine" (Wicosuta's founding spot under an old pine tree). Campfires are lead by the Totems. Campfires are quiet and serious at times, and also lots of fun. After the ceremony, we sing camp songs and play games. Each campfire has a theme such as friendship or new beginnings, and campers have the opportunity to speak about the theme. There is also a log that is passed along through different bunks throughout the summer. Each bunk that receives the log creates a poem describing the previous week, and they pass along the log to a bunk of their choice. There are delicious chocolate chip cookies and milk following campfire before bedtime. Always a big hit!
Carnival: Each bunk is responsible for a booth that is set up on the soccer field. Examples include: coke/pepsi challenge, cake walk, tattoos, count the candy, as well as lots of water-based rides/activities: a dunk tank, slip 'n' slide, sponge toss, etc. The carnival lasts most of the afternoon. Carnival ends will a HUGE water-balloon toss!
Monster Mash: It's Halloween during the summer! This spooky activity is for lower camp and takes place in the Gymnastics Pavilion. All campers and counselors use their resources to dress up in costume, and campers have the opportunity to perform skits they have created. Priscilla tells (not-so-scary) ghost stories and provides special, ghostly snacks!
Upper Camp Beach Party: An event designed for Upper Camp (Kineo-Totem) only. Put on your favorite bathing suit, grab a lei and some luau gear and go down to the waterfront for dinner and evening activity/dance party!
Gold Rush: An evening activity for lower camp and Totems. It involves counselors dressing up and playing the following roles: bankers, bandits, sheriffs, and kissing sisters. Tennis balls serve as "gold" and campers try to get as many as possible off the soccer field without getting caught by bandits and kissing sisters. The more gold your bunk has, the better chance you have to win the prize you choose at the auction after the event!
Candy Horse Races: This is a lower camp evening activity where campers get to bet (fake money) on their favorite horse/counselor. This usually takes place in the dining hall and each horse has a theme. Some themes include: luau horse, sporty horse, celebrity horse, etc. The campers with the most winnings receive prizes.
Project Morry Swimathon: Project Morry is a not-for-profit organization that sends children to camp anchored by a year-round experience. Wico's week-long swimathon raises money for Project Morry. Campers and staff swim laps and parents may sponsor their campers. The Zunis (2nd to oldest campers) run the event and are responsible for publicity, lap counting, and spirit.
Dance Marathon: Dance Marathon is put together by the Zunis and is a camp-wide event to raise breast cancer awareness. In addition to dancing, campers create arts & crafts projects to be donated to Faulkner Sagoff Breast Centre in Boston and shared with their patients (cards, bracelets, quilts, etc).
Wico Challenge Cup (1st Session): You'll never know when WCC is going to "break" or start. The camp is divided into 4 teams-red, blue, yellow, and green. The Totems create team themes (i.e. Red Dorothy, Yellow Lion, Green Witch & Blue Tinman). Each team has several counselor leaders and Totem leaders. WCC is 3 days of intense and spirited competition including sports, arts and crafts, and other activities. There is a "sing" at the end with a team mascot competition and counselor farewell. There is no way to describe the spirit and intensity of WCC until you actually experience it, so get ready to paint yourself either red, yellow, green or blue.
Color War (2nd Session): Color war break out is a top-secret event that the leadership staff plans, so that the campers & counselors will be caught off guard. Once it happens, everyone joins in the social hall for the announcement of the 2 teams: Blue Mohawk and Green Tashmoo. Teams elect a Totem Captain and captains for the younger age groups. Each team has age group advisors and a general (a staff member) who is the team leader. Color war involves 3 days of competition. Totems develop themes (Mohawk Centaurs/Tashmoo Phoenix) and create the songs for the culminating activity, an all team sing. Counselors are responsible for a farewell song during the sing. There is no way to describe the spirit and intensity of color war until you actually experience it, so get ready to paint yourself either green or blue.
Talent Shows: There are two talent shows throughout each session. They provide opportunities for campers to get on stage and show us their amazing abilities. Totems act as emcees. Counselors are encouraged to join in with their campers! Remember, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it!!
LOOKING FOR A BOYS' CAMP?
Check out our brother camp CAMP WINAUKEE
Located on beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee
|
i don't know
|
What city/club football rules, which spread widely in the late 1800s, introduced heading, corners, throw-ins, changing ends, and the goal crossbar?
|
Index-a
This Week's Puzzles
So You Think You Know Soccer
A soccer goal is what dimensions, yards wide and feet high: 8x7; 7x8; 8x8 or 9x8?
According to FIFA World Cup rules which flag must be displayed inside each match stadium besides those of FIFA/Fair Play, and the two competing nations?
Approximately how many million people play regular organized football in the world (at the early 2000s): 5; 25; 65; or 250?
The word soccer derives from: Sock; Association; Kosher; or Socrates?
What is not required by the rules of soccer: Goal net; Penalty spot; Specified ball pressure; or Shin guards?
The 2014 World Cup Finals allocated European and African teams respectively how many places: 3 and 9; 4 and 10; 5 and 13; or 6 and 15?
What city/club football rules, which spread widely in the late 1800s, introduced heading, corners, throw-ins, changing ends, and the goal crossbar: Sheffield; Paris; Milan; or Berlin?
FIFA's 2014 World Cup Finals/Qualifying rules dictate a match squad of how many players: 18; 23; 26; or 30?
In the 2010 World Cup Final, Jo'bulani was the: Winner's national anthem; Winning goalscorer; Ball; or Trumpet-like horn blown by fans?
The minimum rest-period between two games for any team at the 2014 World Cup is how many hours: 24; 36; 48; or 72?
Soccer rules award what after an 'own goal' directly from a throw-in: Goal; Penalty; Corner; or Drop-ball?
The headquarters of FIFA are in Brussels; London; Zurich, or Oslo?
Who has made the World Cup footballs since 1970: Adidas; Puma; Umbro; or Nike?
The World Cup Qualifiying matches between El Salvador v Honduras in 1969 coincided with what mutual event: Independence; Earthquake; Drought; or War?
The first ever �100,000 (or above) football transfer, in 1961, was: Bobby Moore; Pele; Dennis Law; or Eusebio?
A white ball was first used in a World Cup in: 1930; 1950; 1966; or 1982?
The centre circle of a soccer pitch is used only at kick-offs/re-starts, and in which other game feature?
Matthias Sammer, Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo, and Luis Figo won what between 1990-2002: European Cup; World Cup; Golden Boot; or European Footballer of the Year?
The first, second and third placed teams at the 2014 World Cup receive how many medals: 20; 30; 40 or 50?
Soccer has been an Olympic event since: 1900; 1964; 1992; or 2002?
PAGE 6
|
Sheffield
|
FIFA's 2014 World Cup Finals/Qualifying rules dictate a match squad of how many players?
|
CityPagesKuwait July 2014 Issue by CityPages Kuwait - issuu
issuu
RASHED Striving to set a new standard in healthcare issuu.com/citypageskuwait
pinterest.com/citypagesmag/
Scan this QR code with your smart phone /tablet and enjoy reading CityPages. To read it on your computer, simply visit the web link above.
Scan this QR code with your smart phone /tablet and enjoy reading and sharing slective pages from this issue of CityPages. To read it on your computer, simply visit the web link above.
LIFESTYLE / PEOPLE / EVENTS / FASHION
summer’14
مجمع االفنيوز The Mall - Mezanine ميزانني- ذا مول The Avenues mall. Phase 3 High Street هاي سرتيت The Mall – High Street Mezzanine Phone: 22200650 22200650 :هاتف Shop Nº 140A The Avenues mall
Fifth Ring Rd Telephone: 22200650 KUWAIT
@TRUCCOKW
P NCE O C NG
MI
E CAR R I A H
E CAR N I K S
E CAR R O COL
ﺻﺒ
ﻐﺔ ا ﻟ ﺒ ﺮ و ﺗ ﻴﻦ
facebook/spaandmore
@spaandmore
Jabriya - Tel:. +965 25353248 - Fax: +965 25353249 Email: [email protected] Opening Soon at Symphony Mall, Salmiya www.spaandmore.net
ﺷﺮﻛــﺔ ﺳﺒــــﺎ آﻧــﺪ ﻣــــــﻮر ﻣﺘﺨﺼﺼﻮن ﻓﻲ ﺗﺠﻬﻴﺰ اﻟﺼﺎﻟﻮﻧﺎت وﻣﺮاﻛﺰ اﻟﺘﺠﻤﻴﻞ واﻟﻤﻌﺎﻫﺪ اﻟﺼﺤﻴﺔ
ISSUE 55, VOLUME 4, JULY 2014
70
INTERVIEW
66 ARTronauts Noraiz Arshad
34 Dr. Habeeb Azhar 58 Safira CSR 70 Rashed S. AlFadala 84 Asrar AlAnsari 90 StopMotion Kuwait 102 Geoffroy d'Anglejan
AUTO
52 Semi-Permanent MakeUp 56 Skin Problems? No, Thank You!
ENTERTAINMENT
74 July Movie Releases 76 Top Music Charts 77 Music with MJB
84
LITERATURE
FASHION
80 Arabic Poetry by Tassnim 81 Poetry by Nada Faris 82 July 2014 Book Releases 88 The Upcoming Summer
111 JNBY-A new take on modernity in K-town 113 Fashion News
FEATURE 18 Maya Angelou -Renaissance Woman 20 Be Humble but Not Humiliated 22 في املسامحة راحة 24 A Mindful Life 26 FIFA Exposed 28 Paying It Forward 30 The Australian College Of Kuwait -
89 Short Stories by Nadia AlHassan
Celebrating 10 Years Of Graduating Successful Students
32 When Charity Begins At Home 54 Scents & Memories 78 Desert films
106
48 Green in The City
44 Fit remedies that will keep you healthy and well this Ramadan season
106 Nat 's Kitchen Tales... With Love
HEALTH 38 Cataracts
50 One-On-One with Kinda AlFaris 62 Tea with T 64 City Guide 68 Know About Your Birthstone 83 CP Book Club by Nada Soliman 133 Events 132 Press 140 Say Cheez with CityPages 144 Horoscopes 146 Homework for GrownUps
102
42 A Holistic Approach to Wellbeing
100 LiveLove-Eat with Sherifa Alasousi
40 Eating Healthy during Eid 46 Going Green
REGULARS
TECHNOLOGY 94 Cool New Gadgets 96 TECH Updates & News 99 شهر اخلير و العطاء
Dear Readers‌ Dhari Al-Muhareb Editor-in-Chief
Jameel Arif
General Manager & Editor
Abeer Al-Abduljalil
Before we introduce this issue, allow me to once again wish you and your families a very blessed Ramadan and I hope you are enjoying it as much as we are while putting this issue together. This is our 55th issue. Yes, another milestone achieved. It's a moment of celebration for all of us at CityPages
Managing Editor
and an opportunity to renew our commitment to ourselves and to our valued readers to continue working
Kinda Al-Faris
with the same zest and passion and to provide you with even better and quality content in the coming issues.
Executive Editor
Muhammed Altaf Sr. Sales Manager
Claudia Farias
This month we bring you some exciting new interviews. Our cover interview is with Mr. Rashed S. AlFadala who is Striving to set a new standard in healthcare services in Kuwait. It was a great opportunity to meet this very committed and dedicated young man. We also had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Geoffroy d'Anglejan
Content Supervisor
who was in town for the opening of the first store of La Maison Du Chocolat and it was an interesting
Tanya Burns
conversation with him as he was a chocolate lover like myself and both of us were actually enjoying different
Creative Director
flavored chocolates during the interview.
Graphic Designers Mohammed Syed Khaled Al-Enezi
As CityPages is always committed to spreading good messages and supporting as many awareness campaigns, this month we participate in the CERVICAL CANCER AWARENESS campaign of Safira CSR and had the
Contributing Team Abdullah Y. Shams AlDeen Mohammad Al-Sharrah Abdulaziz Al-Khamis Nadia Al-Hassan Abdalla AlMuzaini Nada Soliman Adnan Najeeb Al-Abbar Nada Faris Ahmed Al-Ragum Nour Al-Zaabi Ali - DJ RAVEN Oussama T. Hussein ARTRONAUTS ASAMA Perfumes Reshmi Revi BirthKuwait Sanaa Abdul Hamid Dr. Nazia Nausheen Sandra Bakhamian Eng. Homoud AlMuhareb Sherihan A. Hassabo Faisal Al-Dhofari Talah Alabdulaaly Khaled Al-Zawawi Layla Harmony Zahra Ashkanani Maha Al-Rashed Zahra Taqi Photography Team Abdulaziz AlSoraya Shahbaz Hussain Abdulaziz AlShayaji Abdullah Hamadah Ahmad Emad Othman AlMishaan Natalia Sitcai
opportunity to meet with the founder and managing director - Ms. Maha A. AlBaghli and know more about Safira CSR and their latest initiatives. Our cooking section is growing and I am sure you will find plenty of new dishes to try this month. I will leave you with this to explore more yourself and as we are almost close to Eid, I would like to wish all our readers, fans, followers, and supporters a very happy and joyful Eid. As you all know by now that we do not take any rest, we will be back with our August issue. Stay tuned and keep reading CityPages and Spreading the message of love and peace.
Jameel Arif General Manager & Editor
[email protected]
Bulk Distribution Team V. Rajan S. V. Gopal
Corporate Copies and Subscriptions Distributed through:
DISCLAIMER
Extra care has been used to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this magazine. However, the publisher will not accept responsibility for errors and omissions in the publication. In addition, the views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the publisher. Photos have been altered to comply with the Laws of Kuwait. All rights reserved. No part of this publication including pictures, articles, artworks, and overall design may be reproduced, copied, transmitted, transcribed, stored in a retrieval system, or translated in any language in any form or means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the written permission of the editor or the publisher. 12 citypageskuwait.com Copyright Š July 2014
On the Cover: Rashed S. AlFadala Photographer: Hassan Younes
July, 2014
Free Copies of CityPages are Available at:
Hawally - Zawya Center
Hello Our Beautiful Readers!
Dear CityPages Readers,
By the time you will be reading this issue of CityPages Magazine, the Holy month of Ramadan will be approaching its last quarter. People will be
www.citypageskuwait.com
getting ready about their Eid shopping. Events make our lives special and give us the chance to enjoy our lives. I hope all of you will have a great time
/Citypageskuwait
during Ramadan and I pray you can have wonderful moments on Eid as well.
66973003
Same is the case with weather, we are almost at the verge of ending the blistering heat and are about to enter the humid climate. Keep yourself safe from
CityPages
this hot season and adopt all the precautionary measures which are required. CityPages‘s July issue is also very much suited to the
@citypageskuwait
weather. Lot of new articles, interviews and plenty of other interesting facts are just waiting for your
@citypageskuwait
attention. Each and every word has been selected with utmost care. Do provide us with your valued feedback. Advance Eid Mubarak to all of you people.
FOR ADVERTISING E-mail: [email protected]
FOR PRESS COVERAGE & PRESS RELEASES E-mail: [email protected]
TO INVITE CITYPAGES TEAM TO YOUR EVENTS E-mail: [email protected]
I hope that you are all faring well during this hot month of Ramadan, and must say how brave we are to be fasting, working and carrying on our daily lives in this climate; but it’s being done so Kudos to all. WHEW! I’m all World Cupped out, what a whirlwind that was. Having seen how many people are into the game, made me feel extremely left out for I love to kick the ball around much more than watch Messi do it (no offence Messi, good game! I think). Our issue this month falls between the Ramadan and Eid season so we are all en masse probably raring to head out on our summer holidays and I have a feeling Kuwait is going to be left empty this year. This month’s issue is jam packed with interviews and good readings supplied by our ever expanding team of contributors; what a proud feeling I get just saying that. As for me, the highlight was meeting and interviewing Jairek Robbins, one of the youngest most inspiring people I have met to date. I hope he comes back to Kuwait for more engagements in the future. Special thanks goes out to Vigor Events for always exposing us to new and interesting people. I wish everyone a lovely summer ahead and Eid Mubarak to all. Remember to pack light to avoid excess baggage charges (random bit of advice there).
Till the next issue...
40 ml
NOTHING IS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL!
BLEMISH BALM. The Original, was developed in 1967 by cosmetician Christine Schrammek that now, almost half a century later, has become a worldwide cosmetic trend. BLEMISH BALM Keeps your skin tone and leaves your skin looking fine and smooth. Its unique combination of ingredients has soothing, regenerative and anti inflammatory effect. It not only conceals impurities, but helps regulate dysfunctional skin process and The power of medical beauty. alleviate skin problems.The It’s power a solution to all your skin problems and can be used as a preventive measure also. of medical beauty.
Exclusive Distributor & Trainer - Kuwait & UAE www.schrammek.com
New LAFEM Salon & Beauty Co.
Salmiya - Hamad AlMubarak Street, Block 9, Bldg. 33, 1st Floor
Tel.: 25722507 / 8 - 66733222 - 66711140
www.schrammek.com
July, 2014
17
Maya Angelou, Renaissance Woman It might be rather naïve to ask if one needed to be a good man or woman to be a good poet. Reading the scandalous, chaotic and painfilled private lives of some American poets, whose luminous poetry is both lovable and achingly sad is a window into the chasms of the soul and also the creative spark so often found there. Are poets prophetic? Can they simulate the prophetic voice without the gift of prophecy? Put simply, can a poet fake the emotion of language convincingly enough to fool the average reader? Of course they can. But, if they do, there is an unsatisfying shallowness to the waters – one cannot bathe in its cool depths. A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. Well done. Your memory has served you well. Yes, the last is a quote from the work of one of the first global renaissance women, Maya Angelou. Pages and books of pages will have been written since May 28, 2014, when she passed quietly away at home in Winston-Salem. Few leave treasures of such value behind as she. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928 in St Louis, Missouri. Her childhood was difficult. Sent to live with her paternal grandmother in rural Arkansas after the break up of her parents’ marriage, she experienced the toxicity of racial prejudice, family murder and juvenile rape. The trauma caused her simply to stop speaking and she remained virtually mute for almost five years. She described herself as a “volunteer mute” during that period, saying that “I had voice, but refused to use it.” I have long supposed that the rich inner life she undoubtedly 18
citypageskuwait.com
created for herself during that period served as the fuel for the lush prose, the explosive creativity which later came into being. Ultimately, her voice was coaxed into life by a friend of her grandmother’s, who, discerning a passion for poetry, told her “you will never love poetry until you actually feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.” The Second World War found her in California, with a scholarship to study dance and acting at the California Labor School. She gave birth to a son in 1944 after, it is said, a night of loveless passion principally motivated by nothing more than a spirit of inquiry. Six years later she married a Greek sailor and aspirant musician from whom she apparently took her professional name, a chic amalgam of her own childhood nickname and his surname. Other husbands were acquired and apparently later discarded, a detail about which she remained charmingly vague for the rest of her life. With a young son to support, she worked amongst other things, and in no particular order, as a recording artist, nightclub dancer, a prostitute and a short-order cook, later performing and singing on and off Broadway. Words, however, were never very far away. In the 1960’s she moved to Egypt then Ghana during the decolonization of Africa, working as an editor and freelancer. To our modern, well-travelled eyes, much of this seems colorful but not particularly remarkable. So far, we are confronted with a story of a woman from humble circumstances using all the skills she had to try to better herself. It stands, however, as testament to the strength of will, determination and a willingness to seize opportunity that characterized her life during the twenty years before major success came her way. She was an active member of the Civil Rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. MLK became a close friend and when he was assassinated on her birthday
by: John McArthur
(April 4) in 1968. Maya stopped celebrating her birthday for years afterward, and sent flowers to King's widow, Coretta Scott King, for more than thirty years, until Coretta's death in 2006. Maya was encouraged by friend and fellow writer James Baldwin to write about her life experiences. Her efforts resulted in the wildly successful 1969 memoir about her childhood and young adult years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first non-fiction bestseller by an African-American woman. Its structure is thematic rather than chronological, the character of Maya has been described as “symbolic … for every black girl growing up in America”, and therefore, by inference, a voice for everyone who has been subjected to arcane, outdated and redundant social models, a chorus of voices learning to cry out in the wilderness. It made her an international star, remaining on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller lists for over two years, a record that stands to this day. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya discusses deep aspects of her personal life in a funny, tough, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a glorious psalm of endurance. Idiosyncratic, hilarious and alive, it was the voice of a generation. She was admired and respected as a spokesperson for both black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of what subsequently became known as Black culture. Attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries, presumably because to some a clear evocation of Black identity and culture was perceived as a threat, but her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Despite the efforts of some to fictionalize her work under the genre “autobiographical fiction”, her groundbreaking effort was to deliberately attempt to challenge the common structure
of the autobiography, pushing the envelope of the genre. Her books contain themes like racism, identity, family, and travel. These themes are common to us all and so many shouted a resounding “yes” after having read her work. She wrote several autobiographies throughout her career, including All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), but Caged Bird continues to be regarded as her most popular autobiographical work. Her storytelling style and dazzlingly rich imagery revealed breathtaking intellectual range and artistry, borne on lilting, almost musical rhythms almost as if a haunting blues backbeat accompanies the words. It is ironic that of the very few negative reviews of her work, the very modernity that makes it so readable is challenged as being manipulatively melodramatic and metaphorically muddled. Most agree that the sweeping amalgam of metaphor is what causes the prose to speak so clearly, and its power is still felt as keenly by a modern reader as it was a generation ago. Her first love was almost certainly poetry. She has published several collections, including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. One of her most famous works is the poem "On the Pulse of Morning," which she wrote especially for and recited at President Bill Clinton's inaugural ceremony in January 1993—marking the first inaugural recitation
since 1961, when Robert Frost delivered his poem "The Gift Outright" at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Maya went on to win a Grammy Award (best spoken word album) for the audio version of the poem.
Facedown in ignorance,
I don’t think she would mind if I copied down some of it here for you, since the world still weeps for the peace and justice it so clearly calls for.
The Rock cries out to us today,
“A Rock, A River, A Tree
…
Hosts to species long since departed,
Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House Inc., 1994)
Marked the mastodon,
Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter.
You may stand upon me, But do not hide your face.”
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow, I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness Have lain too long
Some of you, especially if you’re neither Black nor American – I think it’s safe to use the words – might never have read Dr Angelou’s work. If you have not, then, perhaps I might be allowed to make a gentle suggestion. Read a little. If you do, you may very well find yourself a little more forgiving, a little more tolerant, a little more loving, a little more aware of the others. Maya wrote prolifically, so a single summative quote is hard to find, but, how about this? In 2011, she was moved to tears on television while reading aloud a passage she had written about her mother and forgiveness. Maya was contagiously kind, perhaps something she learned from her… “Forgiveness is the greatest gift you can give yourself. It’s not for the other person… I release my tormentors from my care.” A great tree has fallen in the forest. Maya Angelou, rest in peace. July, 2014
19
Be Humble but Not Humiliated What do women want?: A question that had been asked long time ago by Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalytic philosopher. However, the very same question that was initially introduced back in the 18th Century is still echoing itself till now; in the 21st century. Long time ago, women all over the world struggled for their recognition, their rights, & their value as human beings. They mainly asked for equality to Men's social, political, & economical rights. However, if we consider this matter now, we'll straightforwardly observe the enormous difference between those suppressed women of the earlier period & these untied ones of nowadays. Undeniably, there has been a change; the rules by which women are treated had been altered, the perspective through which men observe women now is unquestionably poles apart from that which was previously exercised, and women have almost acquired all what they demanded on many humanitarian levels. Yet, we are still discussing the problematical issue of gender equality. Regardless of the wide ranges of the social, political & many other levels of equality; I shall discuss this concept in accordance of our standard ordinary daily lives, and our tangible men-women Sherihan A. Hassabo Sherihan A. Hassabo is a passionate writer who started expressing her opinion about controversial subjects when she was 14. When she is not directing events, she likes to investigate the interesting relationships' controversy in our Eastern society. Every month, and from real life experience; Sherihan will share a story, an idea, opinion, or a simple advice for men and women to live happily ever after.
20
citypageskuwait.com
relationships. What's Equality?? The acknowledged definition of equality is the equivalence, the sameness, the fairness, the impartiality, and the correspondence of two or more objects. Relevantly to the issue under discussion, Equality is to be identified as equal rights, equal opportunities, & equal treatment for both sexes. Women demand equal rights & responsibilities to men's; they want to work like men, behave like men, be treated like men, & even talk like men. Women require equality without the slightest recognition that this very requirement in itself is the strongest proof that men are superior to women. They keep asking for having what men have, for doing what men do, and for being what men are. Well, it's a fact that no one can deny that men & women aren't treated equally all over the world generally & in our eastern society specifically. WHY?? The simple answer for this knotty question is that men aren't women, and women are not men. We are different creatures; we can never be identical simply because God created us differently: physically, emotionally, & mentally. We even invented the term of OPPOSITTE SEXES by ourselves, because we are absolutely certain that a man & a woman are categorically opposite & can by no means be equal. On a closer observation of the psychological dissimilarity between both sexes, both men & women follow extremely neat psychological systems genuinely: the basic statistics shows that men's system obliges them to rely most of their actions on their minds. It's a sort of priorities: primarily men are concerned with "Achievement" which is mainly represented by their working fields, then comes "Health" as their second concern, followed by the "Social & Communal Acceptance" which is for the most part comes in material form of the family life. While women's list of priorities initiates with "Social & Communal Acceptance", "Health", and then "Achievement" is their least
concern. However, these different systems aren't created haphazardly because, in fact, a man should care for his work & his health in order to be capable of providing a secure life for his family at the end. While a woman must be socially accepted, using her flowing emotions to bring up her children & provide love & care in her home which always comes first in a woman's life; don't all women even say "My house, my kingdom"? Even in the common man-woman relations, difference is required & needed. This is simply emphasized by a very small example: if we get two magnets, similar poles will space out, while different ones will magnetize. Isn't this an enough proof? At this point I conclude, totally aware that many men who read this would misunderstand my point of view or rather misuse it, that's why I'd like to tell men a little concluding advice: A man once said " Pleasure is the portion of the inferior; but glory, virtue, heaven for man designed" I respect the reason why you are against equality & I respect the facts which forbid you to accept it; but women are not pleasure objects created just to please men, women are bottomless meanings of loving, caring, & giving & your duty is to explore & discover them. If a man respects his woman & know exactly how to treat her, I guarantee she'll come one day offering her inferiority. Addressing women, I'd like to say that with this article I'm not betraying my own sex, I'm just being honest with myself. I believe what we have now is enough & the way the world perceives women now is fairly comforting. We don't need more equality to keep asking for it till eternity. I myself want to be a woman & when I get married, I'd like to get married to a man, not to myself. So my one & only advice to women is to try to be humble but not humiliated; because "Humble" may be a little hard but "Humiliated" can roughly destroy.
في المسامحة راحة
كثير
فهم وظن بالمواضيع المتعلقة بالتنمية البشرية والذاتية ،ويعتقدون انها ( خزعبالت وخرابيط ) ،مع العلم أن افضل منهج للتنمية الذاتية هو القرآن الكريم و السنة النبوية وافضل من تكلم عنها د. جاسم المطوع.
ما نتكلم ونسمع كلمة تسامح وكل ينصحون المدربين بالتسامح ،لكن لم نعرف لماذا علينا أن نسامح ،وما فائدة التسامح ،وكيف نسامح؟ بعض األشخاص يحبون معرفة نتيجة الشي قبل أن يتم تطبيقه .. هل هناك دليل للتسامح بالدين االسالمي؟ ال َر ُس ُ التسامح فضيلة مو فرض لكن أثرها كبير نعم َ ،ق َ س َّل َم َ " :ر ِح َم ول ال َّل ِه َص َّلى ال َّل ُه َع َل ْي ِه َو َ اع َ ،و َس ْم ًحا ِإ َذا ْ على الشخص المتسامح نفسه.. اش َت َرى َ ،و َس ْم ًحا ال َّل ُه َع ْب ًدا َس ْم ًحا ِإ َذا َب َ س ْم ًحا ِإ َذا ْ ضى " . اق َت َ ِإ َذا َق َ ضى َ ،و َ ما هو التسامح؟ هو نسيانك للماضي او المواقف المؤلمة ودليل القرآن الكريم بإرادتك. اظ ِمينَ ا ْل َغ ْي َظ اء َو َّ اء َوا ْل َك ِ الض َّر ِ الس َّر ِ {الَّ ِذينَ ي ُ ْن ِف ُقونَ ِفي َّ ينَ س ِنينَ } ح ي ه ل ال و اس ن ال ن ع اف ع ل ا و َّ َّ ْ ب ا ْل ُم ْح ِ ِ ِ َ َ َ َ ِ ِ ُ ُ ُّ كيف أتسامح؟ انسى واتقبل. آيات التسامح والغفران كثيرة ابحث عنها حين تكون شخص متسامح يعني انك انت شخص متسامح مع نفسك .. ما هي فائدة التسامح ؟ الكلمة لها تأثير قوي عليك وعلى حياتك وستشعر حين نتكلم عن التسامح فنحن نتكلم عن بالراحة النفسية وأمور حياتك تكون أفضل.. الذات وهو اي علوم تتعلق بالذات والتنمية والتطوير. في موقف حصل للدكتور محمد العوضي حيث كان مع مجموعة من المفكرين وتم إلتقاط له صورة كثير من االشخاص اصبح لديهم سوء معهم ..انتشرت الصورة و قام احد االشخاص في
الحديث بسوء عن الدكتور كيف يصور معهم واهو كان بخالف معهم ،،الحادثة كانت في عام ١٩٨٢ والصورة في ٢٠١٢تقريبًا ،رد الدكتور وقال ببساطة الني سامحته ،سامحت نفسي ونسيت الموضوع، فليس من المعقول ان اكتم الكره والحقد سنين بسبب غلطة او موقف.. نحن بشر فمن طبيعتنا أن نخطيء و لو ما كنا نغلط كان كنا من المالئكة. ول ال َّل ِهَ -ص َّلى ال َّل ُه َع ْن أ َ ِبي ُه َر ْي َر َة رَ ِض َ س ِ ي ال َّل ُه َع ْن ُه َع ْن رَ ُ َ َ ال: " لَ ْو أنَّ ُك ْم لَا ت ُ ْخ ِطئُونَ لَأتَى ال َّل ُه س َّل َمَ -ق َ َع َل ْي ِه َوآ ِل ِه َو َ ِب َق ْو ٍم ي ُ ْخ ِطئُونَ يَ ْغ ِفرُ لَ ُه ْم ". انوي ان تسامح نفسك اوالً والناس والمواقف واالحداث التي ضايقتك او تعيقكك عن الراحة ،ردد ( اللهم انك عفو تحب العفو فاعف عني وعنهم) Nour AlZaabi
Nour holds a Master in Business Administration and a Bachelor in Marketing and is a Member at The Kuwait Economic Society and British Council Entrepreneur Network in Kuwait. Stay tuned for her articles and features in the CityPages magazine.
citypageskuwait.com
July, 2014
23
A Mindful Life “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Everyday we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
When Ramadan started (Happy and blessed Ramadan by the way!) I posted about it being my favorite time of the year and how it was the perfect time to practice the art of gratitude, mindfulness and humility. Since then, I have gotten an overwhelming response on what do I mean by mindfulness and how does one practice such an art? Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them, good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience. Now that you know what mindfulness is, you are probably wondering why would I want any one to practice it? Here is the bottom line: Mindfulness has the power to change your life! How? Here are some ways: -Mindfulness will improve your mental health. Many psychotherapists have turned to mindful meditation to treat numerous mental health problems such as depression, Zahra Taqi Zahra is a Certified Professional Coach and the President of Milestones Coaching. She would love to hear back from you. So please feel free to drop her a line on her email: [email protected] or find her on FB: http://www.facebook. com/MilestonesCoaching or twitter: @ MilestonesCoach
24
citypageskuwait.com
anxiety disorders, eating disorders and substance abuse. Some experts believe that mindfulness works by helping people accept their experiences rather than reacting to them. It is becoming increasingly popular for therapists to combine psychotherapy with the practice of mindfulness to help people gain perspective on irrational and self-defeating thoughts. -Mindfulness will improve your physical health. Recent research has shown that mindfulness helps to relieve stress, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain and improve sleep. Still not convinced? Consider this: When you concentrate on your present moment and allow yourself to get out of your own head and concentrate on the here and now, you will start to perceive life in a completely different way. As we engage ourselves in the moment, others take notice. As the opposite party take notice, that in itself creates gravity, drawing both parties closer to each other. As we become present, we realize that others are inviting us in, to interact and build meaningful relationships, because at the end of the day people want to be around those who are willing to invest time with them! Also when we are focusing on the moment we are in, our senses are heightened, allowing us to take in more beauty; the colors of nature are more crisp, the sounds are somehow clearer resulting in us marveling at the immense beauty around us. Becoming mindfully present is a miracle, but an attainable one, and one we can all experience, each and every day, surrounded by the ones we love. If walking on water is a miracle, your everyday life is just as much a miracle as that. Stop, take notice and listen; you are on your way.
July, 2014
25
FIFA Exposed Corruption, Brazil & Qatar’s World Cup 2022
Over a billion dollars in reserve while operating in legal limbo with minimal to virtually non-existant accountability, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association better known as FIFA, is a non-profit organization. It is a self-appointed, self-regulated body with little legal accountability and massive revenues. Recently, FIFA has come under heavy criticism of its methods that reek of corruption from its top executives, including living fossil FIFA president Sepp Blatter. FIFA and its officials are treated as royalty, after all, the power they posses cannot be underestimated in terms of the socioeconomic benefits and the light it shines on its host nation. According to Brazil’s Internal Revenue Service, FIFA is getting tax exemptions worth more $250 million. It pays no taxes and all revenues from the World Cup goes straight into their Swiss vaults. Why is an organisation with a reported reserve of $1.4 billion receiving such tax benefits? Nonprofit status. In addition to that, having your headquarters in Switzerland definitely is a comfort, no questions asked. The heart of the matter is, FIFA is a business and should be treated like one no matter how much joy football brings us. Why are they, along with the IOC ($5 billion in revenues 2009-2012) NFL ($9.1 billion in 2013), NHL ($3.1 billion in 2011) and many others, exempt from the rules, regulations and taxes that other businesses around the world have to pay? 26
citypageskuwait.com
Much has been reported on the massive overspending in Brazil, around 3.4 billion U.S. dollars alone on stadium construction and renovation and an estimated $14 billion in total, the highest in World Cup history. This, deservedly, among many issue has enraged the less fortunate among the people of Brazil. With accusations of bribery and corruption casting a shadow on Qatar’s winning bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the pressure on Blatter seems to be mounting.
Over $200 million spent on the stadium in the Amazonian city of Manaus, where only four World Cup games took place and no local team to take over. Many economic analysts believe that the financial benefits from hosting this prestigious tournament will be short-lived. Local business, shops and vendors might get a financial boost for a little while, but the fact is that no proceeds whatsoever from the World Cup in Brazil is going to its people in any direct way.
Surprisingly so, Blatter, 78, who has been supreme leader of FIFA since 1998 has disgustingly decided to run for a fifth term. Unbelievable. Sepp has been meeting with representatives from FIFA’s 209 member nations to gather support for next year’s vote after reversing a decision to stand aside. His campaign comes at a time of immense pressure from sponsors over corruption claims linked to the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.
All revenues of every FIFA World Cup go directly to FIFA. Like the unseen blood sucking parasite they are, FIFA selects its host then lays down “demands” for new stadiums with alcohol consumption during games and imposing requiring anything that they wish the host country to do. As reported by HBO’s John Oliver, from swift action taking FIFA World Cup Courts in 2010, to imposing alcoholic beverage consumption in stadiums while ignoring the fact that Brazil banned alcohol from its stadiums back in 2003 for safety reasons, due to alcohol related deaths. Brazil 2014 FIFA doesn't care, what matters is money and Brazilians are exceptionally passionate keeping your commercial partners grinning, about football, but they are equally focused in this case “Budweiser”. on eradicating inequalities in their country. A great deal of disappointment is evident regarding the widespread government Qatar’s 2022 Bid negligence, and the absence of necessary Like many of us in the region, I was initially investment in the country's infrastructure, surprised and ecstatic that Qatar won the hospitals and public education system. bid for hosting the 2022 World Cup. Having Mass evictions of poor Brazilians from their such a grand event of this magnitude homes positioned within a several blocks taking place virtually in your back yard of stadiums and other fan zone hot spots would be spectacular. We know that the by unprecedented amounts of government Qataris are not short on cash, they can build forces. Most of the evictions were simply for the most innovative, modern as well as the tourists’ own peace of mind, more like futuristic stadiums and venues for the event, sweeping the dirt under the rug before the providing an unforgettable experience of an Arab country hosting this truly magical arrival of an important guest. The people of Brazil are justly concerned international sporting event. about the fact that most of the stadiums As time passed, so did my initial excitement. built for the purposes of the FIFA World It began to sink in, how did Qatar win the bid? Cup will be empty after the competition. Who voted for Qatar and why would they?
Allegations as well as evidence began to surface recently that Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup was awash in bribes and multiple payments to that helped secure the win. FIFA ethics prosecutor Michael Garcia said he had prior access to the "vast majority" of data recently disclosed by media, which reportedly reveal millions of dollars in bribes to help Qatar secure the 2022 World Cup. Qatar has promised Garcia "full cooperation" after football’s global governing body was engulfed in new scandal following Britain’s Sunday Times damning investigation into the bidding process for the World Cup finals. The story alleges a Qatari official paid more than $5 million in an attempt to secure support for his country's successful bid to host the 2022 tournament that could cost Qatar close to $200 billion. The Sunday Times alleges that Qatari citizen Mohamed bin Hammam made secret payments to football officials in the run up to the controversial ballot. Bin Hammam, the former president of the Asian Football Confederation, was a member of FIFA's all powerful 24-person executive committee charged with voting on who hosted the finals at the time of the vote back in 2010. Despite the country's small size a technical report from FIFA calling its bid "high risk"
with summer temperature highs exceeding 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), Qatar shocked the world by winning the right to host the 2022 finals defeating strong bids by the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea. FIFA vice-president Jim Boyce has said he would back a re-vote, potentially opening the possibility of the U.S. staging the 2022 tournament,” completely opposite of what Blatter was quoted saying last year.
of deaths among Qatar’s migrant workers indicate that the country must urgently adhere to human rights and labor policies. International outcry is prevalent, demands to strip Qatar of hosting the World Cup or imposing a temporary ban until certain FIFA regulations are met (Qatar will agree to anything to host) is also a possibility and of course a revote. Allegations of inhumane working conditions clear offer some explanation for unusually high death rates amongst migrant workers in Qatar. Investigators from The Guardian found that workers were forced to work in scorching 50 Celsius heat, refused drinking water, and left to sleep in makeshift housing in unfinished stadiums most with as many as 12 men crammed in a room.
The probe also consisted of interviews with members of all the bidding teams for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, as well as with the members of FIFA's executive committee at the time of the 2010 vote. German football legend Franz Beckenbauer, an executive committee member at the time, is reportedly facing sanctions for failing to cooperate with the investigation. Garcia finished his probe on the matter, and is due to submit his report to the judicial chamber of FIFA's ethics Workers from Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka committee in the coming weeks according to and other relatively poor countries often the AFP. arrive with debts to their recruiters or through employer sponsorships (Kafala), World Cup 2022 Working Conditions which in reality means they cannot simply The cost of the 2022 World Cup is more than stop working, or seek a better job. Alleged just about finances, it costs lives too. There control of wages and seizure of passports are nearly 1.4 million workers living in Qatar also explain why these migrant workers are at the moment. Most of us are familiar with the effectively trapped in Qatar with few options “Kafala” or sponsorship system for desperate but to either flee the country or endure labour workers. The International Trade dangerous working conditions risking their Union Confederation, a group dedicated to protecting labor and human rights around lives. This is not exclusive to Qatar, the entire the world, released a report claiming that if GCC needs radical labour rights reforms. A current conditions remain unchanged, at labour laws reality check of some sorts. least 4,000 migrant workers will die before a Someone mentioned to me that perhaps it single ball is kicked at the 2022 World Cup. might be too culturally embedded? Maybe. Reports from The Guardian’s investigation into Qatar’s labour practices are especially Although, if that is the case, something has to troubling when compared to the death change. As the richest country per capita in rates during preparation for other similar the world with an unprecedented 220 billion international sporting events. In perspective, dollar budget for the World Cup, there is no there were 25 casualties associated with the reason why Qatar cannot allocate adequate construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in funds to fair labor practices. The intensity of Sochi, Russia. This summer’s World Cup in international attention demands for change, Brazil has caused just six deaths during its and accountability will determine whether 11 years of preparation. The high numbers unacceptable labor conditions persist during preparation for the 2022 World Cup. FIFA as of yet has done nothing yet, no Arab should be proud of a World Cup built at the expense of 4,000 lives, which would have a much higher death toll than 9/11. It remains to be seen how FIFA deals with this mounting pressure from every side. Abdullah Y. Shams Al-Deen Abdullah is a graduate with a B.A. in Journalism/Public Relations from California State University at Northridge - Los Angeles, California. Abdullah was a columnist for the National Union of Kuwaiti Students in America, Nebras E-zine for almost 4 years covering a wide range of topics from the oil industry and technology to sports and culture. An investigative Journalist at heart, researching and presenting intriguing, inspirational and important topics that otherwise do not find the light of day gives his great satisfaction. Follow Abdullah on Instagram: @a_shamsideen
July, 2014
27
Paying It Forward
First released in October 2000, and featuring the acting talents of Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment, and Helen Hunt, the feature film “Pay It Forward” has long since been one of my favourites. It seems to be screened on local TV channels with increasing regularity, but I have to limit the number of times I watch because, much to the amusement of my friends, there is one scene near the end of the movie which never fails to have me reaching for the Kleenex! For the few of you who may not have seen the movie I shall not spoil things by saying too much, but the storyline is about a young boy (Trevor) who, troubled by his mother's alcoholism and fears of his abusive but absent father, is inspired by an intriguing assignment from his new social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet. The assignment: to think of something to change the world, and put it into action. Trevor conjures the notion of paying a favour not back, but forwards; repaying good deeds not with payback, but instead with fresh good deeds carried out for the benefit of three new people. Trevor's efforts to make good on his idea bring a revolution not only in the lives of himself, his mother and his physically-and-emotionallyscarred teacher, but also in the lives of an ever-widening circle of people completely unknown to him. Of course, the whole concept to “pay it forward” was not a new idea created for or by the movie. A quick check on Wikipedia suggests that 28
citypageskuwait.com
by: Paul Turnbridge
“Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor. The concept is old, but the phrase may have been coined by Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book ‘In the Garden of Delight’.” The online font of all knowledge then lists numerous works of literature through the ages (both before and after the work of Lily Hardy Hammond) that has featured the Pay It Forward philosophy. However, it was a 2000 novel penned by Catherine Ryan Hyde that was turned into the award-winning film that has made the most significant impact in recent years, promoting the idea as an obligation to do three good deeds for others in response to a good deed that one receives. Such good deeds should accomplish things that the other person cannot accomplish on their own. In this way, the practice of helping one another can spread geometrically through society at a ratio of three to one, creating a social movement with an admirable impact of making the world a better place. And, spawned from the movie, a Pay it Forward Movement and Foundation was founded in the USA helping to start a ripple effect of kindness acts around the world. Yet, even so, I am reminded (especially in this period of Ramadan) of the true origins of such a commendable philosophy. After all, is not one of the Five Pillars of Islam about giving Zakat - support for the needy? I am aware that there are companies and organisations which, during Ramadan, provide meals at the end of the daily fast for total strangers; I have Muslim friends who (not just during Ramadan but throughout the year) give selflessly to people-in-need that they have never met before. Such love for others is of course at the centre of all religions; Christianity is based on the belief that God gave his only Son as payment for
the sins of all others – surely the original and ultimate Pay It Forward for those of the Christian faith! Good and charitable deeds are evidence of the best side of human nature, so it’s good to highlight and celebrate them as encouragement and inspiration to others. Former US President Ronald Reagan once wisely said “We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.” Diana, Princess of Wales, advised to “Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, in the knowledge that one day, someone might do the same for you.” In the (translated) words of an old Arabic proverb, “If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.” The world isn’t always fair and, in fact, there are many, many times when it’s unfair and it feels like other people are “out to get you”. That’s why it’s important also to remember the positive aspects and experiences of life. Whether as random acts of kindness or as deeds undertaken essentially to “Pay It Forward”, there will always be complete strangers who help each other out for no reason other than to be good people. It is this sort of kindness that renews our faith in the world, and in other people. Whilst researching for this article I read numerous accounts of good deeds, and it became clear to me that the world really isn’t the bad place that some people would have you believe it to be! Don’t let this world get you down. There are plenty of good people out there who will help you if you stumble. Feel good about other people and share this article – it’ll spread the happiness. Finally I shall leave you with one of my alltime favourite quotes, from Country singer/ songwriter Miss Dolly Parton ….”If you see someone without a smile on their face, give ‘em yours!”
ت ما4 فتتا160 ح ف266 رع2
ح3/ ويل6160 6 22
اﻟﻤﺬاق اﻟﻬﻨﺪي ا ﺻﻴﻞ THE REAL INDIAN TASTE
C O M P A N Y
á«©ªL ∫ƒe - 2á©£b - ¿ÉØ«c 1 QhódG ójó÷G ¿ÉØ«c 24914081 - 24914082 :¿ƒØ∏J
∑QÉÑŸG ⁄É°S ´QÉ°T - á«ŸÉ°ùdG 4 QhódG ¢ùcÉe ¥ƒa 25721717 - 25721818 :¿ƒØ∏J
¢SƒHódG ´QÉ°T - π«ë«ëØdG 16 QhódG ô°†NC’G êÈdG 25456100 - 25456969 :¿ƒØ∏J
www.6alabat.com
ôØîŸG ´QÉ°T - á«fGhôØdG »æWƒdG ∂æÑdG ¥ƒa 24726164 - 24725558 :¿ƒØ∏J
The Australian College Of Kuwait Celebrating 10 Years Of Graduating Successful Students Since 2004, ACK has empowered students with the finest international higher education in Kuwait, offering both Diplomas and Bachelor degrees in several fields. The Australian Vocational Education System is the solution for students searching for an experience that is not only enriching but also challenging, allowing them to be prepared for the future workforce. This exceptional educational system specializes in providing a theoretical and practical approach allowing students to apply their knowledge in their work places, thus experiencing the best of both worlds. Graduates from the esteemed ACK have successfully majored in several fields – engineering, aviation and business to name a few. Happy 10 Years ACK!
Department of Aviation: ACK offers the Diploma of Aircraft Maintenance and the Bachelors of Engineering Technology (Mechanical or Electronics) to those wishing to gain employment in the aerospace industry as aircraft trainee mechanics or trainee engineers. Students gain a one of a kind experience by learning and practicing aircraft training via the facilities available which include: a real Boeing 737-200 aircraft, an integral training hangar, variety of training aids for on-aircraft practical training, avionics laboratory, mechanical and sheet metal workshops and much more. After pursing a diploma in Aircraft Maintenance Engineering, and whether they decide to continue onto a Bachelor’s in either Mechanical or Electrical Engineering or not, students have the ability to join the workforce locally or internationally with hands-on experience not available at any other institution. As ACK is associated with international leading organizations such as Lufthansa Technical Training (Germany), Kangan Institute (Australia) and the European Aviation Maintenance Training Committee (Netherland), the College is able to offer its students one of the finest curriculums in the field of Aviation.
School of Business: ACK’s School of Business strives to inspire students to think critically, communicate effectively, utilize technology, develop problem-solving skills and behave with virtue and accountability. The Diploma of Management provides students with the finest business management education and practical knowledge to pursue professional managerial careers. Students who continue with Bachelors in Management have the ability to tackle challenges and are rewarded with future opportunities in supervisory and administrative positions in the public and private sector. For those who wish to obtain hands-on experience and theoretical 30
citypageskuwait.com
understanding of marketing management, they apply for the Diploma of Marketing. Continuing with the Bachelor Degrees in Marketing offers the students a strong focus on creating and delivering exceptional value by fulfilling the needs and desires of different target markets.
the Private Universities Council of Kuwait. If you are looking for an educational environment that will provide you with the knowledge along with the preparation you need for the work force or if you are seeking great facilities or if you are seeking versatility in majors, ACK is the answer.
School of Engineering: The School of Engineering offers a unique and innovative curriculum to prepare students for modern engineering practices. It offers 4 types of programs that complement Kuwait’s main infrastructure needs, such as: Petroleum Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electronics & Control Engineering and Civil Engineering. As the Oil and Gas sector has been flourishing locally and regionally, ACK is educating its students through theoretical knowledge, competency based training, teamwork and high work ethics. As for Electronics & Control Engineering, this industry is known for its rapid changes thus, ACK provides the necessary skills and expertise to encounter future industry changes on the local level. All Engineering programs are accredited by
To know more about ACK and the programs offered, visit www.ack.edu.kw and fill in your application or call the Admissions & Registration department on: 1828 225 ext. 4018. Follow ACK on: Twitter: @ACK_Live Facebook: ACKLive Instagram: ACK_Live
When Charity Begins At Home
by: Paul Turnbridge
Having lived in Kuwait for almost seven years, one thing I miss is my garden! I had designed and nurtured gardens at a number of different houses where I lived in England, and in The Netherlands, and enjoyed de-stressing at the end of a busy day in the office by some simple planting, weeding and general pottering in my outdoor rooms (weatherpermitting, of course). Nowadays, I have to content myself with looking at photos on the internet of other peoples’ gardening achievements or, if I’m lucky enough to schedule my vacations in Spring or Summer months, I might enjoy visits to one of the big garden shows or exhibitions, or to one of the private gardens opened to the public to raise money for charity, which is the project I want to bring to your attention. The National Gardens Scheme has a rich and interesting history that is closely connected with nursing in the UK. It was many years ago, in 1859, that William Rathbone, a Liverpool merchant, employed a nurse to care for his wife in their home. After his wife’s death, Rathbone retained the nurse to help poor people in the neighbourhood, and he later raised funds for the recruitment, training and employment of nurses to go into the deprived areas of the city. Based on the idea of local nursing that was established by Rathbone, “District” nursing quickly spread across the country. With support from Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, the movement became a national voluntary organisation which set standards and trained nurses. 32
citypageskuwait.com
In 1926, the organisation decided to raise a special fund in memory of their patron, Queen Alexandra, who had recently died. The fund would pay for training and would also support nurses who were retiring. A council member, Miss Elsie Wagg, came up with the idea of raising money for charity through the nation’s obsession with gardening, by asking people to open their gardens to visitors and charging a modest entry fee that would be donated. And so, in the following year, The National Gardens Scheme was founded. Individual householders were asked to open their gardens for 'a shilling a head'. In the first year 609 gardens raised over £8,000. By 1931, a network of volunteer County Organisers had been established and over 1,000 private gardens were open for viewing. Country Life magazine produced a handbook that would become known
as "The Yellow Book" because of its bright cover. This book continues to be published annually, and lists the locations and opening dates and times of all gardens participating in the scheme. After the Second World War, the National Health Service took on the District Nursing Service, but money was still needed to care for retired nurses and invest in training. The National Gardens Scheme (NGS) offered to donate funding to the National Trust to restore and preserve important gardens. In return, the National Trust opened many of its most prestigious gardens for the NGS. During the 1970s, entrance fees were raised to more realistic and useful levels, having been held at one shilling despite much inflation, and the gardens began to raise significant donations. The National Gardens Scheme Charitable
Trust was established as an independent charity and, in 1984, Macmillan Cancer Support joined the list of beneficiary charities. In 1996 Marie Curie Cancer Care, Help the Hospices and Crossroads (now Carers Trust) also became beneficiary charities. Since 2010, a different annual ‘guest’ charity has been chosen from
recommendations of NGS volunteers.
and flourish.
Since its foundation, the National Gardens Scheme has donated over £42.5 million to its beneficiary charities, of which nearly £23 million has been donated within the last ten years. The National Gardens Scheme’s commitment to nursing and caring remains constant, and the charity continues to grow
The photos which accompany this article are of the beautiful garden belonging to one of my old school friends, Peter, who opens his gardens to the public each year. His entry in the official Yellow Guide includes the following...
North Lodge, 51 Bowthorpe Road, Norwich, Norfolk NR2 3TN Opening dates and times - Sunday 22, Sunday 29 June (11-5pm) Admission £3, children free Refreshments - Home-made teas Town garden of almost 1/5 acre on difficult triangular plot surrounding Victorian Gothic Cemetery Lodge (not open). Strong structure and attention to internal vista with Gothic conservatory, formal ponds and water features, pergola, classical-style summerhouse and 80ft deep well! Predominantly herbaceous planting. Self guided walk around associated historic parkland cemetery also available House extension nominated for architectural award. Slide show of house and garden history Featured in Sunday Times, and on Radio Norfolk
So, if you are visiting the UK any time this summer, why not take time out and see if there’s a garden open near where you are staying? July, 2014
33
Dr. Habeeb Azhar The most precious thing we have in life is health, and therefore we can only entrust it to the best professionals, whose knowledge and experience are obvious. Recently, we had the opportunity to meet one of such professionals – Dr. Habeeb Azhar. He is the Consultant and Orthopedic Surgeon at Dar Al Shifa hospital for the last 14 years. Dr. Habeeb has been awarded ‘Certificate of Excellence’ during annual appraisal program of Dar Al Shifa Hospital and is the only Indian consultant in orthopedic surgery in Kuwait. Here he discusses a wide range of topics related to orthopedic field including the most common orthopedic problems in Kuwait, latest techniques and various misconceptions about orthopedic surgery.
34
citypageskuwait.com
Kindly introduce yourself to our readers and tell us about your education. I am Dr. Habeeb Azhar, Consultant Orthopedic Surgeon, working in Dar Al Shifa Hospital for the last 14 years. I did my MBBS (medical graduation) and MS Orthopedic surgery from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. I did almost six years of residency training in orthopedic surgery at the same institute. I then completed my MCH Orthopedics from University of Dundee, Scotland, UK. Why and how did you choose orthopedic as a specialization? Early from my childhood I used to watch people suffering from road traffic accidents, bone injuries and geriatric people suffering from joint pains which impaired their quality of life that had an impact on my heart. When I completed my medical graduation, I had an insight to do orthopedic surgery as my specialization. What are some of the most common problems patients in Kuwait have? Since football is a popular sport in Kuwait, the youth suffer from knee, ankle and foot injuries. The middle aged and elderly people suffer from primary osteoarthritis of joints, tendinopathies and common foot problems. Although low back pain and sciatica are also vert common in young adults and elderly. In neonates and infants, developmental dysplasia is quite common. What are the surgical and non-surgical options available for patients? Surgical options are: lArthroscopic-aided ligament econstruction, meniscal repair /excision. lPrimary hip, knee and shoulder arthroplasty lShoulder decompression and rotator cuff repair lSurgery for recurrent dislocation of shoulder lSpine- Microdisciectomies, decompression and fusion, correction of spinal deformity lFixation of long bone fractures, intraarticular fracture Non-surgical options: lAs the first line of management for common tendon, bone and joint disorders are medication, physiotherapy, intra-articular injections (hyaluronic acid, steroids and prp injections) lOf course, stress upon weight reduction and fitness.
Can you describe how advanced is the Orthopedic Department at Dar Al Shifa Hospital? The Orthopedic Department has well-trained and experienced team of surgeons and is equipped with state-of-the-art modern facilities covering sports injuries, joint replacements, spine, pediatric orthopedic, fractures, general bone and joint disorders. What are the factors that are considered before deciding that surgical intervention is the only option? Surgical intervention depends upon many factors like absolute indication due to the nature of the disease. Other factors are failure of conservative treatment, age, functional needs, disability, psycho-social status and general fitness for surgery, etc. What misconceptions do people have about surgery? First of all, there is a general misbelief among the people that any major operation done in Kuwait would be a failure due to lack of expertise. Secondly, people are scared of rare complications. Some people think that surgery may worsen their condition. Can you share with us some of your most unforgettable moments of your professional life? My first independent surgery to stabilize an open long bone fracture in a patient with road traffic accident where the limb had diminished vascularity and the survival of the limb was in doubt. Fortunately, after stabilization and constant monitoring, blood supply improved and the limb survived. What is the duration of a typical orthopedic surgery and which is the longest surgery that you have ever performed? Minor cases may take up to 30 minutes to 1 hour. Major cases may take up to 2 to 3 hours. I have assisted in scoliosis surgery which took almost 6 hours. What are some of the latest techniques in orthopedic field? lMinimal invasive spine surgery lMinimal invasive joint arthroplasty lMIPPO and LISS fracture stabilization procedures lArticular cartilage regeneration with stem cells lMeniscal transplant
lLimb
lengthening procedures
What are some of your hobbies? Daily workout at gym for 1 hour, listening to music, reading my profession related articles and journals, and watching daily news. Tell us about some of your achievements: To get a seat at AIIMS, New Delhi is itself a big achievement amongst tough competition. I have presented various scientific papers at orthopedic conferences, achieved certificate of excellence during annual appraisal program of Dar Al Shifa Hospital, and I am the only Indian consultant in orthopedic surgery in Kuwait. What are your goals/plans for the future? be among the elite group of surgeons in Kuwait accessible to all communities in Kuwait. lAttend more conferences. lAttend hands-on training courses to upgrade my surgical skills. lWould like to do research activities in my field. lTo
What are the routine clinical tests in orthopedic field? Are MRI Scans a useful option? Proper history taking and clinical examination are very important, supported by x- rays, blood tests, CT scan and MRI scan if needed. Musculoskeletal MRI is very helpful in the diagnosis and treatment of bone and joint disorders where x-rays and CT scans are not conclusive especially imaging of spinal disorders, joint injuries, bone and soft tissue tumors. MRI has low risk of radiation than x-rays and CT scans. . What advice do you have for students currently studying orthopedic? Just be a regular reader of the subject. Handson training of basic and advanced surgical skills is very important. Always upgrade knowledge by reading articles, journals and keep yourself involved in Continued Medical Education (CME). Your message for us at CityPages Magazine: First of all, I thank CityPages Magazine for interviewing me and hope my message goes to both locals and expatriates in whichever language they are comfortable with. I will be quite happy to interact with CityPages Magazine for any queries or further assistance.
July, 2014
35
Make the Most of Your Epidural The majority of birthing mothers at private hospitals today decide to get an epidural. Sometimes, this is a decision made before labor ever began or a change in plans after a long and drawn out labor. The great thing about an epidural is it allows women to be awake and aware yet free from pain during labor and birth. It allows an exhausted mother to rest or sleep. And while an epidural’s usual effect is to slow labor, the profound relaxation they offer can sometimes put a stalled labor back on track. However, epidurals, like all medical interventions, come with inherent risks, including the increased risk of a vacuum or forceps assisted delivery, an increased risk of an episiotomy or tear, an increased risk in a drop in blood pressure, possible nausea and itching as side effects of the narcotics, and the possibility of problems with breastfeeding. A very small percentage of mothers may experience life-threatening complications. Some mothers may also feel more anxious or stressed by all of the cords and beeps and noises associated with the epidural, and the common side effects (drop in blood pressure, difficulty breathing or swallowing) may cause temporary psychological distress.
First, choose a care provider with a cesarean surgery rate of 15% or less. Studies show that in the hands of care providers with low rates, epidurals do not increase cesarean odds. Practitioners who have vaginal birth as a goal will have more patience and manage labor and epidurals differently than others.
Second, delay an epidural until active, progressive labor (around 5-6 cm). This will help prevent two problems: running a fever, which becomes more likely the longer the epidural is in place, and the baby persisting in the occiput posterior position (head down, facing the mother’s belly). These complications increase the likelihood of cesarean or instrumental vaginal delivery. And because epidural-related fever cannot be distinguished from fevers caused by infection, babies are more likely to be kept in But most women experience the nursery for observation, undergo blood epidurals as they are meant to be: tests and possibly a spinal tap, and be given almost complete pain relief with precautionary I.V. antibiotics. minimal side effects. To make sure you get the most out of your Third, move every 30-60 minutes by rotating epidural and lower your risk of from your left to right side. If your baby is in an complications, I would suggest the anterior position, keeping a pillow between following: your legs will be sufficient. If your baby is in a posterior position, trying extending your Sarah Paksima Sarah Paksima is a Board Member of BirthKuwait and top leg far over the bottom leg and lie with a a Doula, Childbirth Educator. pillow supporting your top shoulder and arm so that you are almost lying on your belly BirthKuwait is a non-profit organization operating as (but obviously not fully on your belly!!) This part of The Voluntary Health Association.For more information, visit their website: www.birthkuwait.com often helps the baby to navigate the pelvis or Instagram: @birthkuwait during a posterior birth. 36
citypageskuwait.com
Fourth, many mothers begin to shake and their teeth chatter as the hormones of birth, including adrenaline, fill their body. A wise midwife once showed me a way to help keep a mother “centered” during these episodes and help the shaking to stop. Place the father’s (or other support person) hand over the mother’s heart, directly on her skin, providing firm pressure over her heart chakra. Encourage the mother to draw on the strength of her partner or other support person to become centered and grounded once again and to reestablish calm and steady breathing. Keep the firm pressure of the hand over the heart for as long as needed or every time the shaking returns. Finally, whether an epidural is Plan A or B, take classes that prepare you for coping with labor without one and consider hiring a doula. You will want a variety of comfort measures and coping strategies at your fingertips. For one thing, you may need them if you are delaying an epidural until active labor. For another, the anesthesiologist may not be available when you want your epidural, or you may be among the 1 in 10 women for whom it does not work. It is also possible that labor will turn out to be easier than you thought and you decide you don’t need one after all. Epidurals can be a great medical tool when used wisely and with caution for mothers who are informed and supported.
July, 2014 June,
37
Cataracts cataracts due to infection, injury or poor development in the womb. Congenital cataracts can also develop during childhood. Medical conditions such as diabetes or exposure to toxic substances, certain drugs, ultraviolet light or radiation can cause secondary cataracts. Traumatic cataracts Behind the iris and the pupil lies form after severe injury to the eye. the eye’s natural lens. It is made up Which symptoms you experience and how mostly of water and protein. The soon they will occur depends on the type of precise arrangement of the protein cataract you have. Since cataracts usually keeps the lens clear and allows form slowly, they cause few symptoms until light to pass through it. The lens works similar to a camera lens, and they noticeably block light. These symptoms by adjusting the eye’s focus, lets can include: us see things clearly both up close • Cloudy, blurry or foggy vision and far away. Light entering the eye is focused by the lens onto the • Changes in color perception due to the retina. In a normal eye, the lens is filter effect of the discolored lens transparent allowing the retina to • Increased sensitivity to light and glare receive a sharp image. As we age, some of the protein may • Problems while driving at night especially clump together and start to cloud a glare from oncoming headlights small area of the lens. The clouding of the lens is called a cataract, locally known as “Mai Abyad”. It can grow larger over time and covering more of the lens. Once the lens becomes cloudy, it prevents light from passing through leading to blurred and foggy vision. If left untreated and not removed, cataracts are the most common cause of vision loss in people over age 40 and are the principal cause of blindness in the world. In fact, there are more cases of cataracts worldwide than there are of glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy combined. The majority of cataracts are related to aging, usually beginning development around the age of 40 to 50 years. However, during the middle age, most cataracts are small and do not cause a noticeable effect to the vision. It is after age 60 that vision begins to decrease significantly. There are several types of cataracts, with age-related cataracts being the most common. As the names suggests, this type of cataract develops as a result of aging. Often babies are born with congenital Erika Habig Erika Habig is an optometrist and contact lens specialist at International Optique. She studied at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany and has a Bachelor of Science degree in Optometry and Dispensing Optics. For more information contact International Optique. Tel: 25714007 – 97234787, www.intoptic.com – [email protected], Instagram: @intoptique
38
citypageskuwait.com
• Frequent and sudden changes in optical prescription When symptoms begin to appear, you may be able to improve your near vision to an acceptable level by using new glasses with more magnification and improving lighting conditions. Cataract surgery is necessary once the cataracts have progressed enough to impair your vision and affect your daily life. The surgery is very successful in restoring vision and involves removing the cloudy lens and replacing it with an artificial plastic intraocular lens (IOL). Since each case of cataract is individual, your ophthalmologist can inform you about your personal benefits and risks of cataract surgery, and will recommend the best time to undergo treatment. Since cataracts are common in older adults, it’s essential to have your eyes examined on a regular basis. This is particularly important if you have risk factors such as diabetes or a family history of eye problems.
速
Eating Healthy during Eid
By: Sarah Salem
Following the days of fasting in the Holy month of Ramadan, Eid Al Fitr is one of the most awaited and celebrated times of the year. It is the time of celebration, happiness and joy for everyone in the Muslim world. Of course, celebration wouldn’t be complete without all the signature foods and dishes of Eid. After Ramadan try your best to go back to the non-fasting days’ healthy routine. On the first day of Eid, start with a light breakfast and try to eat your main meals at specific times, this will help your body gradually go back to normal eating habits. Another problem we face on Eid is Sweets. Watch your sweets intake on Eid: 1. Control your portion size. 2. If prepared at home, use light ingredients like low-fat milk instead of full-fat, sweeteners instead of sugar, low-fat butter instead of ghee or normal butter. 40
citypageskuwait.com
3. Skip dessert all together and opt for lowfat fruit yoghurt with fresh fruits that will save you calories, fat and sugar. When you are surrounded by food, it is easy to lose track. Here are some tips to help you stay in control: lLimit
portion sizes to decrease the chances of having indigestion and heart burn, especially when it comes to fatty and fried food. lFocus on fruits and vegetables daily. Make fruits and vegetables your priority with every meal. lAim
for healthy homemade food at the beginning or at least until you get used to the daily routine. lAvoid
fast foods.
lDo not deviate from No-Calorie drinks to avoid empty calories. Also make water your first choice. lDivide
your plate to: 1/2 portion for salad, 1/3 portion for protein and the least for carbohydrates. No refill! lDon’t
forget to exercise. Fit the time for
exercise in your busy Eid schedule. Healthy diet choices for Eid: lHaving a snack, preferably a fruit before Eid prayers. lDairy
product like a cup of milk or Laban after prayers. lA moderately light breakfast can follow. Example: 2 boiled eggs and 2 brown toasts with a generous quantity of vegetables. lAnother
fruit as a snack.
lEnjoy your lunch at a restaurant with your friends or family by choosing healthy choices e.g. grilled seafood, fish or chicken with a salad (dressing on the side). lThis Eid is coming in summer. Satisfy your craving for sweet with one scoop of ice cream or share your dessert with your friends. lBreakfast for dinner with 2 slices of brown toast and turkey+ vegetables.
Health is the key to happiness and what you eat is affecting your health whether you are fasting or not fasting. Keep Track!
July, 2014
41
A Holistic Approach to Wellbeing
There are many approaches to a person’s wellbeing, whether it be medical or holistic the ultimate goal for each human being is to be the healthiest and well balanced. I am more interested in the holistic approach rather than the conventional medical approach to wellbeing. I believe that a person’s mindset can have a huge impact on their overall wellbeing. Studying under Paul Chek, we look at what he refers to as the “Four Doctors”, and I will be spending the next few months discussing these doctors in more detail. If you would truly like to be able to help yourself attain a life of wellbeing, we must go back in time and look at how the ancient Greek physicians approached wellbeing. Hippocrates and Galen approached more situations with three out of the four doctors in mind; their emphasis were on Dr. Happiness, Dr. Quiet and Dr. Diet, Paul Chek added the fourth and final doctor, and that is Dr. Movement. Looking at most illnesses today, somehow the root is related to either poor diet, stress, happiness or lack of movement, and so the Four Doctors Maha AlRashed
Maha AlRashed is a CHEK Certified Exercise Coach and a regular contributor for CityPages magazine.
42
citypageskuwait.com
were born. We will begin the first of the four doctors, Dr. Quiet. Dr. Quiet refers to the time a person spends alone reflecting, relaxing and recovering. This is the doctor that keeps us grounded. Without any time to reflect on your goals and priorities, we begin to believe that it is the material things that matter. It is not easy to be able to sit and reflect and perhaps unwind, however, I suggest to everyone I meet that at least one hour a day of “alone” time will help create a balance, and sometimes just keep us sane. Perhaps that quiet “alone” time can be during a meal, which brings us to Dr. Diet. Dr. Diet reminds us that we are what we eat. Whatever we put into our bodies is what is used to help protect us from illness. Every second of the day the body renews its cells, and the body uses the nutrients from the food to renew these cells; the question lies then on a person’s personal choice, would they like the nutrients from a fast food burger to be used for their cell’s renewal? Or would they prefer some organic meat and vegetables with an organic fat? Let us not forget that most food today is ingested with hormones and chemicals as opposed to the organic foods that are hormone and antibiotic free. It is important to keep in mind that the four doctors work hand in hand, as seen Dr. Quiet and Dr. Diet have a unique connection that will also be shown when we begin discussing Dr. Movement and Dr. Happiness in the next month’s article. Just remember, spend some time during your day to reflect and make sure you eat healthy!
Fit remedies that will keep you healthy and well this Ramadan season There’s something exotically be quite a physical challenge to your body, fasting and training at the same time. Shucks, special about Ramadan. The mornings are busy in when I do my morning cardio without any the supermarkets with the water to adhere to Ramadan, everything preparation of the lavish feasts to seems a tad more challenging. The last be had come sunset, the variety 1km on my run has got the soundtrack of of dates triple-fold, and the main the “Never Ending Story,” movie mockingly streets are quite ghost-town playing in my head. Most of my clients tell like come futoor. By nightfall, me that the first 3 days, they’re besieged with Ktown city comes alive and such headaches. That is normal as your body is a commotion reminds me that trying to adapt to the environmental change. truly, there ain’t no other place Hence, easy does it. If you do not feel well, stop. If you’re planning on doing cardiolike this… based activities while fasting, start off with a It’s quite a different chaos short duration and build it up slowly. altogether in fitness in Ktown. The gyms here tend to undergo 2-cycles of madness during Ramadan. It’s horribly packed one hour before futoor. Gymgoers around this time tend to be doing more cardio-based activity (the notion: cardio on an empty stomach boosts your metabolism, burns bodyfat as one’s in a fasted-state). Fitness centers here then peak again with activity around 10.30pm onwards. This time, fitness fanatics are seen doing more resistance-based workouts (the idea that now you’ve eaten, one can resume their lifting workout as usual). If you are wanting to maintain your fitness activity during the Holy Month, here are some tips to help you get by:
Headaches are no fun Yes, you are an awesome individual full of enthusiasm and determination. However, it can Reshmi Revi Certified Professional Trainer
Reshmi Revi is the Deputy General Manager for MultiWorks Personal Training. She is also an IFBB Bikini Competitor and passionate about fitness! Follow her on Instagram @Q8MissFit
44
citypageskuwait.com
Add a little boost to your hydration
Two-thirds of your fine self is made up of water. It only takes a water loss of 1-2% of your body’s water content to cause dehydration. So drink up when you can. Now I don’t advocate binging on water all in one go. Rather from futoor to suhoor, sip your way silly. I sometimes would advocate to clients to add electrolyte tablets (tablets that have essential salts and minerals) to their water as this would give them a mineral boost. As we live in a hot country, we tend to sweat and this sweat-fest includes your body sweating out essential minerals like magnesium and zinc (magnesium and zinc are needed by your body to help with your immune system, calcium absorption and to help with bone density). If you can’t find electrolyte tablets, try sprucing up your water with wedges of lemon as it helps alkalize your pH levels. Again, your body being in an alkaline state ensures your health and wellbeing not to mention helps with your immune system. Research has further shown that illnesses and physical inflammation tend to put the body in a more acidic state. So get drinking folks! During suhoor time, I would advocate drinking close to a litre or so as this will ensure your body’s getting its last window of opportunity at hydration. This will also help flush out toxins and unwanted waste too.
Eat to live, not to binge Ever heard of the idiom, one’s eyes are bigger than one’s stomach? It’s only natural to want to gobble down on everything come futoor-time but this will just leave you feeling ill with a tummy ache to boot. There’s a reason why culture tells the story of the Prophet Mohammad breaking his fast with dates and yogurt. From a fitness and health standpoint, this is a great way to ease your body from its fasting state as it has a good portion of protein and carbohydrates to initially quell your hunger. From there, wait an hour or so and graze throughout the night with small portions of food (use the palm of your hand as a sizing guide). I usually advocate in having quantity of starchy carbs (brown rice, oats, sweet potato) earlier in the evening and to wean this out as the night progresses to dawn. That way, your body doesn’t sleep on a full stomach load of dense food and subsequently stores it.
Going Green
Green smoothies are all the rage these days with people consuming them multiple times a week. Instagramer and food bloggers have all been experimenting with green smoothies for a while. Leading celebrity nutritionists prescribe it to their loyal clients and there are plenty other followers such as fitness gurus, naturopaths, Yogi’s and so on. And below are the reasons why. Benefits of Green Smoothie:
Bowels. 9.Nutrient dense: High in calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, folic acid, chlorophyll, zinc and Vitamins A,C,E, and K. Basically, it is the perfect way to eat your green by making it taste more appealing by disguising its pungent flavour with fruits or protein powder (if you want to have this as your pre or post workout smoothie). You will without doubt experience the positive effects of greens. Not only can you expect a healthy skin but it will improve your overall health and well-being.
1.It is a powerful blood purifier 2.Helps strengthen your immune system
Tricks and tips to make the perfect Green smoothie
3.Improves your circulation
1..Use frozen fruits. You need a frozen component for your smoothie, so this is perfect without having to add extra ice. Frozen mixed berries or Banana add perfect sweetness to your smoothie and help mask the strong flavours of the greens. When freezing your Banana (make sure it is ripe), peel and chop them before you freeze them. A sandwich bag or a plastic Tupperware is ideal to store frozen fruits.
4.Promotes weight loss 5.Promotes digestion 6.Improves the function of your organs such as Liver, Gall bladder and Kidney 7.Boosts your antioxidant intake = cancer prevention 8.Good source of fibre = Healthy Sanaa Abdul Hamid Sanaa holds Masters of Clinical Dietetics from University of Queensland, Australia and is a Clinical dietitian at Hadi Hospital. Sanaa is a also a blogger and very active on Instagram. Read more from Sanaa at: Blog: www.fit-n-fancy.com , Instagram: Sanaa_dietitian
46
citypageskuwait.com
2.If you are not able to stand the taste of the greens, a good idea is to start off with small amount and then slowly work your way up to adding larger amounts. Typically, spinach has a more tolerable flavour compared to collards and kale so you can start off with spinach as your main green ingredient initially.
3.If you want to make this a permanent habit and want to save time when preparing green smoothie, pre-measure and portion out the frozen fruit component into sandwich bags or Tupperware. 4.Use a good high–powered blender to get a smooth consistency. 5.You can use stevia or protein powder of your choice to help sweeten up your green smoothie (e.g. Vanilla flavoured protein powder). 6.If you have made more than a glass, pour the remainder into a jar which has a lid e.g. mason jar and refrigerate it to enjoy later in the day. Recipe: 1 Frozen Banana 1 tablespoon PB2 or peanut Butter Vanilla Almond Milk (unsweetened) 2 handfuls of baby spinach ( I started with 1 to get used to the taste) 1 teaspoon chia seeds Method: Blend all the ingredients until smooth.
@jaxcocokuwait
IN THE CITY
By: HAMAD J. ALKULAIB
How Kuwait and Mars grow together Being green dictates using our natural resources wisely and sustainably, learning from our most experienced teacher Nature, the master sustainer.
Babylon. Nature lovers back then used mass irrigation with some plants surviving only with nutrient rich water underneath (nutrient film technique).
Our need for food has greatly increased and is projected to rise as populations are exploding. The current dominant methods of agriculture greatly stress land through monoculture, planting one crop commercially on fertile land destroying its biological diversity.
Elsewhere on earth, native tribes of the Americas circa 1000 BC had a Newton apple smack on the head discovery. Seeds of certain non-water food crops left on floating log boats near nutrient rich and oxygenated waterfalls mistakenly sprouted and thrived. This discovery led the civilization to create floating farms called Chinampas, solving their food issues.
Webster’s describes hydroponics simply as: ” A method of growing plants without soil; in water containing dissolved nutrients.” Hydroponics is not a new science or method. Many plants existing in nature are truly hydroponic like rice, water plants, watercress and others. One of the first examples in recorded history for its use by humans was right around the neighborhood in the hanging gardens of 48
citypageskuwait.com
Soilless agriculture is key to farming in extreme conditions that lack fertile soil. This includes deserts, the frozen poles and even in space! Yes, our desert environment is comparable to Mars and any person who has experienced a dust storm will know what I mean. When done right, hydroculture breaks the notion that deserts are infertile lands turning
them into the world’s premier food source. You might be surprised and doubtful about this technology, opting to just put a seed in sand with no investment rather than bother to spend time and money on hydroponic systems. I truly believe the former statement is wrong if we look at the facts. Occupied Palestine grew their own produce creating self-sustainability and excess export to Europe from the Negev desert before I was even born (1978). The United States leased the technology through the environmental laboratory in Arizona State University, leading a third of tomatoes consumed by its population as hydroponically grown in Arizona’s highland deserts. The list goes on so it always breaks my heart when I hear my fellow citizens who, blessed with Kuwait’s share of our mighty Sun, limited but available freshwater supply and subsidized electricity, eluded that we are an importing country because of conditional limitations. The truth is our only limiting factor is will
and lack of education on the subject matter.
Why Go Hydro? Control and conservation of nutrients You control what your plants eat by providing optimum nutrition required for the intended crop. We feed the plants what they need to grow good tasting, highly nutritious food and in turn using less nutrient and get more fruits. A high NCR (nutrient conversion rationutrients in/food out) follows. This saves our environment from the excess waste water run-off current agricultural methods produce.
Conservation of water In re-circulating hydroponics systems, the only way for water out is through plant uptake saving 80-90% of wastewater versus best practice agriculture. In Kuwait, evaporation due to high heat and overwatering attributed to sand’s inept water holding capacity makes that number climb to an astounding saving of 1000% and more. Better health and faster growth rate reducing need for pesticides The word pesticide is a marketing illusion; the true name is life killer or biocide. If people call them what they are, sales would reflect people’s concerns. Although the public would not buy a poison, they would buy an enemy, a.k.a pest killer. A poison does not select what it kills hence the disappearance of the honeybee. Their effect on large bodied mammals are debatable only from their makers. One must admit that recent trends in diseases at early ages raises more than an eyebrow. In hydroponics, we solve the problem of “pests” from its roots by removing what approximately 60% unwanted bugs call a dream home, humid soil, and therefore nulling reproduction. No need for herbicides A weed is what we call any crop that grows in a place we do not want it to. In hydroponic
systems, there is only room for the intended crop to grow in plastic channels. Weeds are not an issue at all, leaving them to do what they do best, colonize the land saved from mass agriculture. This removes the need for herbicides or more appropriately named plant killers used to save labor of hand weeding. Optimum utilization of plant genetic ability Providing the optimum conditions and nutrition to plants results in the best performance under the plants genetic ability. Increased size and quality of crops is not a result of an unnatural system, rather a well-fed and happy crop living in a plant’s dream conditions all year long.
Access to roots Provides many benefits to various root crops but the biggest benefit is seeing the health of the plant and its roots rather than wait for the plant to show stress signs which is usually too late to act.
Growing crops in Extreme conditions Because hydroponics does not need fertile land, extreme conditions including deserts, the poles and space are optimum locales for this crop production method. Treating deserts as fertile land only results in vast wastage of water. Nature made deserts for obvious reasons. To change that definition, one must think outside the box that made it. .
Why we didn’t go hydro?
country that imports a very high percentage of its food and has high income. A more relatable example is investing in high-end automatic box making machines versus opting to hire 10 unskilled laborers to cut and fold paper into boxes. One year later, the 10 laborers are outperformed by the consistency and high production rate of the well run machine. Forgetting to put paper in the efficient machine creates the issue for the next limitation. The last and most important limitation is that plants have no protection from our mistakes and blame. Nature created a buffering capacity in soil making it withstand the random chaotic conditions needed for her R&D, all the while protecting the root from sudden changes. The microorganisms in soil such as fungi and bacteria quickly reestablish balance saving the plant from excess and other factors. In hydroponics, we limit buffering ability to provide what is needed fast. Good intentions and lack of experience turns the pro speed of delivery into a con. We read and try until results prove otherwise. It is not a forgiving system to our mistakes. To learn one must have many. Patience and gradual changes are important for gradual growth. I leave you dear readers with an amendment on the words of Confucius as the remedy to the biggest limitation Hydroponics and many other fields face in our beloved Kuwait. Good Growing Kuwait and lets all do and fail more.
Hydroponics comes with its own set of limitations too. It is not recommended in an environment that can sustain seasonal soil growing unless the demand on the production of the land is high, which will result in the destruction of what nature made sustainable. Higher initial cost of the systems is an entry barrier to many. Persistence and time show that the return on investment is high if executed well especially in Kuwait. A
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. I fail and I learn” July, 2014
49
Robbins
A man behind creative solutions for accelerated results
Jairek Robbins is a young and talented motivational and performance speaker as well as a dedicated philanthropist. He is the son of well-renowned American motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. Jairek has followed in his father’s footsteps and successfully branched out into his own coaching and development path Jairek Robbins Companies, and has put his unique fingerprint and methodology on his theme when performance coaching; referred to as Rapid Results. Jairek received the Congressional Award Gold medal for personal achievement as well; this award is given out by the US Congress recognizing initiative among young adults.
Available online on Pinterest.com
50
citypageskuwait.com
Born in 1984 in Santa Monica, Jairek earned his degree in Psychology and started his professional career with the Anthony Robbins Foundation where he honed his skills and developed his own methodology for inspiring others to achieve what he refers to as “rapid results”. Influenced by his own adventures around the world such as Rwanda, Morocco, Egypt, Tanzania, India, Thailand among a few conducting humanitarian work, Jairek learned to incorporate the lessons and experiences he got into his coaching techniques. Jairek also hosts a weekly YouTube segment called JRCtv. He speaks about inner well being, whether in one’s personal life or on the job, and is also a TEDx speaker delivering a talk held in New York City last year entitled "A Simple Formula To Inspire the World To Live Their Dreams”. He also has a book scheduled for release in September of 2014 entitled “Live It, Achieve Success By Living With Purpose". “My goal is to assist people in the process of rapidly achieving their goals so they are able to live the life of their dreams. My hope is that they will eventually pay-it-forward and help those that they care about the most do the same” An inspirational man, who at only 30 years old has achieved more than three men could in a lifetime, Jairek not only coaches, but also partakes in a large amount of philanthropic work as well, something that he is apparently extremely passionate about. He has frequently volunteered in many underdeveloped countries and is a board member of the Just Like My Child Foundation, designed to help build better lives for children in Africa. Jairek was recently invited as a guest speaker to Kuwait by Vigor Events Knowledge Club initiative. His seminar was entitled “Achieving Rapid Results in your Life and Business”, where we at CityPages had the opportunity to meet with and speak with him. The team definitely went home armed with a few new tricks to practice in our lives at work, however the one piece of advice he gave us and which he stresses is to learn to love what you do, including the menial aspects of the task. He is quite sure that if people learned to love every aspect of their jobs, they’d never be stumped by obstacles that
occur from not knowing how things work a-z. His experiences with blue collar workers across the world taught him how to appreciate what one does no matter the task, such as the story of the janitor who swept the floors at a hosipital in Africa. There was plenty more where that came from and we hope to be able to one day invite him back. Jairek can be contacted via [email protected], or you can find him on LinkedIn.com/JairekRobbins and instagram.com/ JairekRobbins. July, 2014
51
Semi-Permanent MakeUp mixed to suit their coloring. An airbrush type gun is used to add pigments to the top layer of the skin (the dermal layer) and often a numbing cream will be applied to the area before this happens. For the first couple of days the pigment may appear darker than it will eventually look. The surrounding area may also be slightly red but scabbing is infrequent. A retouch might be scheduled for a few weeks time to achieve a perfect result. All products used on the face are naturally made.
Have you ever spent an entire morning trying to get the lines of your eye liner equal on both sides? Or are you tired of spending too much time getting your make-up done in the morning? If yes then you have come to the right place! Semi-permanent makeup is just for you. When beauty blends with art and technology it creates success. Semi-permanent makeup can be the solution to so many of our beauty worries, from filling out an ageing lip line to restoring the natural look of breasts after cancer surgery. As a means of enhancing a youthful appearance semi-permanent makeup is often a great alternative to fillers and Botox and is used for a wide range of treatments such as lip enhancement, eyebrow tattoos and scar coverage. The reason it is called semipermanent make up is because it can go, it's not permanent. It's not done on the fourth layer of the skin where it's permanent. The process has no blood and no pain, as all the work is being done on the top layer of the skin causing no permanent damage or side effects. Most treatments start with a consultation and color analysis to discover what the best makeup look for each individual is. Pharmaceutical grade pigments will then be custom Hanan Al-Fawal
Skin and Body Care (Semi-permanent beauty make-up) Specialized Boushahri Polyclinic
Hotline: 66129444 Tel : 1888877 Ext:130 / 131
52
citypageskuwait.com
Most often asked question is "How long does it stay?" The color will stay in the skin for a number of years, gradually breaking down and fading with time, although the longevity of the results will depend on the age and skin type. A virtually limitless choice of colors is available. The procedure can take two to two and a half hours (max) per patient. If the client didn't like it, in around 3 months or less (according to your skin type) it will start to disappear leaving no mark. But if the client liked the result then they come for a retouch to maintain the fresh new appearance of their enhancement. Well filled out eyebrows and a perfectly drawn eye-liner can take years off of the face and semi permanent makeup doesn't carry the risks associated with invasive cosmetic surgery. If nothing else, semi-permanent makeup is a great time saving device – you'll never need to worry about popping to the toilet to reapply your lipstick or eyeliner because you know you'll always have a perfectly fresh face.
Baghdad Street – Building 38 same as Boushahri Seema Pharmacy, Opposite Suleiman Al-Luhaib Mosque - Tel : 1888877
www.boushahricp.com
53
Scents & Memories
Scent, more than anything else, has the power to evoke memories most of the time. Perfume is like a time machine, they make you remember places, events or memories long forgotten in just few seconds. It can easily transport you to that time and have you recall the feelings you have back then. That’s why selecting a fragrance with significant qualities and elements will link to that major occasion each time. Scent is captivating and gives exquisite feeling of individuality. Most people would like to stay fragrant and feel confident about their self so it’s no wonder why a lot of people choose to wear them. Some people however find it tough to pick the right fragrance and that’s what this article is for. Various aromatic oils are classified into four major fragrance groups - Fresh, Floral, Oriental/ Spicy and Woody. Try listing your favorite smells from newly-mown grass, sea breeze, floral bouquet, vanilla or even fresh tobacco leaves.
notes. Fresh scents are clean, zesty, and sparkling. Fresh Citrus are overflowing with ripe fruits, such as mandarin, grapefruit, lemon, lime and other citrus oils that leave a lively and energetic smell. Some are delicately spiked with hints of musk and wood, making them sensual. Fresh Green is bursting with crisp greens, such as fresh herbs, violet leaves, fresh cut grass and green tea leaves which give these fragrances a clean, sporty attitude. While Fresh Water/Aquatic provides refreshing cooling scents, such as sea breeze and fresh dew. The notes are dewy, icy, airy and watery. Floral, the most popular fragrance family is a blend of mixed bouquets of rose, gardenia, jasmine, lavender and tuberose. These fragrances are either flowery and pure, or subtly warmed with a trace of fruit or spice for a powdery, and soft finish.
Floral scents are traditional, feminine and romantic fragrances. Romantic and sweet, these scents are the "good girls" of the fragrance lane and often create a typical feminine charm. Orientals are one of the more powerful, long-lasting fragrance groups and often gives a rich, sensual, The key is to think of the scents that exotic, knockout scent. They draw their mean something to you so you can fullness from aromatic ingredients and lean decide on a perfume with similar towards being rich and regal. Woody Oriental combines warm rosewood, soft sandalwood ASAMA Perfumes mixed with rich, deep, heady patchouli; some The creative method gave ASAMA Perfumes the time and the opportunity to craft soft blossoms and a touch of spice make fragrances while working with the highest quality ingredients in a bottle and using Arabic this sensual scent category. Floral Oriental and Western scents as a unique concept is packed with vanilla, white pepper, sweet point for the fragrances. They welcome your comments at [email protected] spices and orange wrapped with floral make Follow them on Instagram and Twitter @ ASAMAPerfumes a strikingly sensual scent with complexity 54
citypageskuwait.com
and depth. Soft Oriental blends musk, amber and the enigmatic notes of incense then imbued with spice and soft floral to produce an ethereal yet sophisticated aroma. Gourmand fragrances have the concept of centering fragrances on edible notes. A gourmand scent may have notes such as chocolate, vanilla, honey, cinnamon and amber to form scents that are usually "relaxing" and pleasant. Woody scents are made on base notes of moss and bark thus give warm, earthy smells. While more unisex than other perfume types it still exude no-nonsense womanliness. Woody Oriental is from the mix of exotic woods of sandalwood, cedar and amber and at times smoky and leathery notes are combined with a dash of patchouli, making an appealing fragrance. Dry Wood fuses cedar wood, tobacco, leather, incense, peppery spices and occasionally revitalized by a small splash of citrus. Mossy Wood scents conjure a picture of a forest. Notes might include deep green scents, warm earthy scents, oak moss, and sandalwood with possibly a bit of crisp citrus to perk up the overall scent. Now choosing the right type of perfume shouldn't be as hard as before. Just remember when choosing any scent take your time and never buy on a whim. There’s nothing worse than purchasing a fragrance that does not smell appealing on you. Ramadan Tip: It is best to set the room temperature between 19 – 21 degrees Celsius to reanimate the aroma, specially when using water perfume and Bakhour (smoke perfume) in the room.
SKIN PROBLEMS? NO, THANK YOU!
Teenager or Adults; we all have had our share of acne, comedones, pastules and papules or a highlighted oily skin area and we surely know how much it affects our inner confidence and our sense of well being. While some of us have got a permanent solution to this problem, there are still some who suffers with this skin disorder. To solve this problem, an intensive research was conducted by Dr. med. Christine Schrammek to introduce the Regulating series that combines soothing and effective ingredients to regulate and normalize the skin functions. Since majority of those affected suffer from mild cases, the problem can be treated with the right skin care and healthy lifestyle choices. Let’s first answer a few of the most common questions:
HOW?
WHAT?
Usually normal skin produces oil (sebum) just enough to keep your skin soft and supple. But when your skin is disturbed excessive oil is produced causing the pores or the hair follicle canal to get blocked. As a result the sebum is built up forming comedones (blackhead / whitehead). The more sebum your skin produces, the greasier your skin will feel. This likely will result in severe acne. Bacteria find it favorable to multiply in an unhealthy skin environment affecting the immune system and resulting in inflammation and redness. This develops into papules and pustules. In some cases those who have oily, greasy hair or dandruff also can experience impure skin disorder.
Dandruff Medication Poor hygiene Stress & Anxiety Hormonal changes Unhealthy or Crash Diets Vitamin-Mineral deficiency Environmental influences Wrong skin products & cosmetics
If skin impurities are not treated in time, your skin will undergo adverse after-effects like enlarged pores, post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation which is not pleasant at all. This is why, a professional detailed skin consultation is important before your skin condition shifts from mild to worst. 56
citypageskuwait.com
The Journey from IMPURE SKIN to HEALTHY SKIN nUse the right skin care products formulated for your skin type that will help to balance the skin to its normal state without dehydrating your skin. Do not mistake oily skin to be hydrated.
nAvoid using makeup which is oil or cream based as it will aggravate the skin condition. Get hold of oil free, mineral based, light weight foundations which offer matte finish that absorb the excess oil and help create a barrier against heat and humidity. Opt for Blemish Balm Perfect Beauty Fluid as an alternative to Foundations, a two-in-one product that treats impure skin and gives a flawless coverage. nIf you have dandruff, excessive oily or greasy scalp, get consulted to treat your scalp condition as this will worsen your skin condition. nYour skin is a true reflection of your inner health. Anything wrong inside your body is bound to reflect on the outside. Supply your body with sufficient vital substances such as fruits, vegetables and water and cut down on foods with high level of dairy, sugar and fat. Food rich in Zinc, Iron, Folic Acid and Biotin are considered enemies of impure skin.
DAY & NIGHT RITUAL FOR IMPURE SKIN nTreat your skin professionally with effective sessions of dermatological treatments where the excess sebum production is reduced, calloused spots are smoothed away and impurities are eliminated. Additionally, it helps to combat inflammations and maintain the skin’s moisture content. The derma.cosmetics treatment offer nature oriented skincare rituals that treat the impure skin holistically.
So try to include Pumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts, Tomatoes, Legumes, Kale, Avocado, Alfalfa Sprouts, Broccoli, Artichoke, Mackerel & Salmon, Berries & Red Grapes, Sweet Potato, Tofu and the most important of them all is Water. You can also opt to have a relaxing cup of Peppermint or Green Tea instead of your regular tea or coffee.
VITAMIN BOOSTER FOR YOUR SKIN ½ pineapple, 3 carrots, 1 apple, 1 kiwi, ½ tbs. rapeseed oil. Juice the pineapple at a low speed. Peel kiwi and juice with the carrot and apple at high speed. Mix the juice and oil together. - Pineapple contains vital elements and enzymes with detoxifying effect. Kiwi gives an extra vitamin C boost. The beta-carotene in the carrots contributes to a healthy skin tone. Cheers to having a Clear Skin!
Anisaa New LaFem Salon & Beauty Co.
CLEAR BALANCE TREATMENT ACTIVE CLEARING TREATMENT GREEN PEEL® HERBAL BEAUTY “PURE” TREATMENT
Anisaa is an Aesthetic Consultant and Trainer with New Lafem Salon & Beauty Co. You can follow them on Facebook and Instagram at: @lafemsalonq8 July, 2014
57
Mastering the art of waking people up - cultivating awareness
When and how did the idea of starting Safira CSR develop? During the 16 years of my professional career, I have worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Central Florida, UCF, I have worked as a Project Engineer at Kuwait University, I have worked in 5 different companies and I have been active in different civil society organizations such as Kuwait Economic Society, Business & Professional Women Organization, Middle East Partnership Initiative Alumni and others. So after working in the public sector, private sector and being active in several NGOs, I found myself more passionate and happy working on projects that affect the society through spreading awareness, organizing events that support social initiatives and supporting the concept of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). I do believe it is the way forward to have better communities and therefore a better world. So, in January 2014, I decided to quit my last job and establish my own social entrepreneurship business. Please describe the concept of Safira CSR: Safira CSR Company is the first social entrepreneurship company in Kuwait. The main concept behind this type of companies
58
citypageskuwait.com
internationally is the process of pursuing innovative solutions to social problems. More specifically, social entrepreneurs adopt a mission to create and sustain social value. They draw upon appropriate thinking in both the business and nonprofit worlds and operate in a variety of organizations. Please introduce the team behind Safira: I am proud of the 5 ladies in my team, who I chose because each of them has unique skills that support Safira concept and because I found them as passionate as myself about improving our community. 1.Bedoor AlSumait is the Business Development Manager. 2.Mashael AlAsousi is the Client Relation Manager. 3.Abeer AlRashed is the Operation Manager. 4.Amani Sharaf Aldin is a Public Relation Manager. 5.Mona AlBaghli is the IT Manager. What distinguishes Safira and makes it special? At Safira, we focus on women. Since our vision is to be the best company in the Middle East that enhances the success and
happiness of modern women. Our mission is to excel in planning and managing events, specialized programs and activities that enhance women lifestyle and boost their success, independency and happiness. What kind of support and initiative do you provide the women? We plan, manage and organize events, campaigns, and activities such as workshops, camps, trips etc. And the end product of our activities is always enhancing women in one or more ways. Our activities promote women health and beauty awareness, women arts and culture awareness, women financial independence, women professional excellence, and women leading a happy and successful life. Can you tell us more about the projects that Safira has initiated so far? Safira’s first project was planning, managing and organizing the “National Small Business Forum” in February 2014 at Al Babtain Central Library for Arabic Poetry in cooperation with the Business & Professional Women Club and the Small Business Consultancy Group. It was a two-day forum and we made sure that the number of women speakers on
Maha A. AlBaghli
Founder & Managing Director of Safira CSR Company
July, 2014
stage is equal to number of men speakers during the whole event.
at Safira and took the initiative to create a national awareness campaign.
Our second project was establishing and launching a commercial small business incubator for women in May 2014.
What is cervical cancer and what are the statistics for cervical cancer in Kuwait?
Now we are working on our third project which is the Cervical Cancer Prevention awareness campaign (CCP Campaign). What are some of the challenges that you face? When we started the company, with the vision of making an impact on society, and bigger than life goals of involving big corporate and government organization in our initiatives, we were disappointed by the responses! However, we were lucky and overwhelmed by the support we received from the individuals, youth associations and smaller businesses such as the kind Media Sponsor by CityPages, Diva Glam Group, Laura Mercier, Maestro Visuals, and Kuwait University Medical Student Association. What are your future plans? For 2014, we are planning a couple of workshops to enhance women knowledge of wealth management and provide them with right tools and skills to promote women financial independence. Also, we will continue with our health campaign and will plan for another health awareness campaign for 2015. What benefits do you provide to a small business owners or women entrepreneurs? Our projects and activities focus on empowering women in different fields. Whether she is a business owner who needs help improving her skills to manage and promote her business or if she is a professional women who needs to have better communication and leadership skills or even a house wife who wants to be happy, healthy and a better home manager. You are currently working on the Cervical Cancer Awareness campaign, please tell us more about it: I have to say that the person who inspired me to choose cervical cancer as Safira’s first health awareness campaign was my friend Mai Al Faraj. It was my first time hearing about cervical cancer, and that this fatal disease can be easily prevented by vaccine and a regular screening test. And I was shocked that none of my friends or women I know has heard about it either! So I read more about the disease, what causes it, who is at risk to get it and how to prevent it. I also talked to a few medical doctors to get more information and statistics about cases in Kuwait. Then, we made it our cause 60
citypageskuwait.com
Cervical cancer occurs when abnormal cells develop and spread in the cervix, the lower part of the uterus. When cervical cells first become abnormal, there are rarely any warning signs. And that what makes it a silent killer and can get you off guard if you don’t check up regularly. Worldwide, over 90% of cervical cancers are caused by an HPV infection (human papillomavirus). The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a large group of viruses. About 40 types can infect the genital areas, and some have high risk for cervical cancer. Genital HPV infections usually clear up on their own. If one becomes chronic, it can cause changes in the cells of the cervix. And it's these changes that may lead to cancer. HPV infections usually have no symptoms and go away on their own. The dangerous types of HPV can stay in the body for years without causing any symptoms.
Abeer AlRashed
At least one case of HPV is detected daily in Kuwait according to Dr. Walid AlJassar, Head of Gynecology at AlSabah hospital. What are the precautionary measures against cervical cancer and what support will be provided through the campaign? The Pap test is one of the great success stories in early detection. A swab of the cervix can reveal abnormal cells, often before cancer appears. At age 21, women should start having a Pap test every three years. From age 30 to 65, women who get both a Pap test and an HPV test can go up to five years between testing. Also vaccines are now available to ward off the two types of HPV most strongly linked to cervical cancer. Both Cervarix and Gardasil require three doses over a six-month period. Studies suggest the vaccines are effective at preventing chronic infections with the two types of HPV that cause 70% of cervical cancers.
Abeer Al Abduljaleel
What would you like to achieve at the end of the campaign? Our goal is to increase awareness about cervical cancer, and encourage all women to check regularly by a simple, painless and quick test that can save their lives. Also to inform the public about the vaccine that prevents HPV causing the cervical cancer. Who are the sponsors and supporters of the campaign? Kuwait University Medical Student Association (KUMSA) volunteered to support the campaign and formed a special
team headed by Ms. Mais Kartam. They were a great help in preparing the information flyers for the campaign and conducting a survey to measure the public awareness of cervical cancer before and after the campaign and therefore measuring the success of the campaign itself. Diva Glam Group represented by Ms. Abeer Al Abduljaleel and Ms. Fatemah Al Nasser are also supporting the campaign by managing a production visual media material with
Mona AlBaghli
bloggers and social media influencers to promote the campaign.
international color for cervical cancer) during this month.
Maestro Visuals represented by Mrs. Faith Al Fahad kindly sponsored the campaign video and photo production.
Also CityPages was kind enough to be the exclusive media sponsor of the CCP Campaign and we highly appreciate that.
Laura Mercier is also supporting our CCP campaign by dedicating 5% of their sales in Kuwait during the month of July 2014 to the campaign. Also they are creatively promoting the awareness of CCP by having their sales ladies wearing blue lipstick (the
Your message for our readers: My message to every girl and woman is “Don’t turn your back on Cervical Cancer, and go screen today. You owe it to yourself and the people who love you”
Your message for us at CityPages: I read CityPages and follow your Instagram account, and I like how the topics are always informative and entertaining and cover different interests. We at Safira CSR Co. value the support of CityPages magazine in promoting this campaign
and
causes in the society. July, 2014
61
By Tamara Qabazard Hangry: When you are so hungry that your fitoor together. Yes, she was cooking, as in, lack of food causes you to become angry, she had food in her face the entire day. frustrated, or both. What about the help you keep who are slaving To celebrate the month of Ramadan, let away in the kitchen and yet suffering from a us avoid having hanger rear its ugly head lack of sleep because they still have to clean and consume us during our day. I feel the house after the soiree? Again, it is not that Ramadan’s focus has shifted from because we are fasting that we disrupt the patience and generosity (which we should lives of others. I remember we were taught be practicing daily regardless of month) to that our freedom ends when it impedes the entitlement and gluttony. Yes, we respect the freedom of others. fasting but also let us respect those who are Granted, this is not for everyone. Not not fasting instead of shoving our ideals onto everyone does this while they are fasting. them. But, be mindful. Be respectful. Let me clarify, I don’t fast anymore. I would rather donate money or food to those in need but I did fast every Ramadan for over 12 years including during competitive sports seasons. So I do know what it’s like to be sitting in a room with hanger. And throwing a tantrum. I was guilty of many of the points I will make. We are human and fallible by nature but why not have one highly opinionated woman remind you?
I have watched people who are fasting scold those who aren’t for eating or drinking in front of them. If you are voluntarily fasting, to exercise patience, please understand the irony of that entire situation. Furthermore, let us not flip flop the entire day. What is the point of being asleep from sun up to about an hour before fitoor and then eating until suhoor? My grandmother did it best. She broke her fast with a date and some laban, went to pray, let everything sit and settle and then she would eat a little bit and eat three to four hours later. She would then sleep, wake up before sunrise, and eat. Also, I had never seen her lose her temper and she spent most of the day cooking for the family to enjoy 62
citypageskuwait.com
I think the entire purpose of Ramadan is to show people their capabilities. Look how generous and wonderful you can be, why limit it to only a month of the year? Why not carrying out this patience and gratitude throughout your entire life? Through out the year? If you see that young man cleaning up the garbage your fellow citizens threw into the street, in 52C heat, give them a little. Not only during Ramadan or Eid, but throughout the year. But honestly, we should really be trying to change that entire system but that is not something to touch on in this article. Show gratitude. These people left their homes and families for better opportunities and are helping us maintain our country. Let’s not sell ourselves short. We are capable of being wonderful. When you feel that hanger rising and about to lash out onto someone, count to ten, take a breath, remember that you chose to fast to show your devotion, and then smile. If you smile, maybe it will go away. We are blessed to have what we have and we are blessed to have the luxury to fast for only one month of the year instead of having that as our permanent state of living.
July, 2014
63
Croatia, Dubrovnik Where to Stay
From hostels, to private rooms, to five star hotels a wide variety of accommodation is available. In addition to that, some hotels offer you private beaches and swimming areas to enjoy fully your stay. Hotel Bellevue A 15-minute walk away from the Old Town, the Bellevue hotel is set on a cliff overlooking Miramare Bay on the Adriatic Sea. The hotel features 24-hour room service, two restaurants, three bars, a pool, a little gym and a spa.
Destroyed during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubrovnik has been restored to become once again a chic destination and a celebrity magnet.
What To Do
Catch the ferry to Lokrum: the island is 10-minute ferry ride away; it is quiet and peaceful, and at one end of the island is a pretty saltwater pool known as Mrtvo More, the Dead Sea. On the east coast of the island, there is the small harbor Portoć, where most of the small excursion boats can be found, while on the southern part you can visit the Fort Royal Castle, an abandoned Benedictine monastery, and a small botanical garden.
the second largest defensive wall in Europe There’s also plenty of opportunity for day trips to nearby islands – such as the Elafiti islands or Mljet, and other nearby resorts such as Cavtat.
Adventures Hilton Imperial Dubrovnik This luxurious hotel is surrounded by many tourist attractions such as Lovrijenac Fortress, Onofrio's Fountain, and Franciscan Monastery. Hilton Imperial Dubrovnik is situated in the heart of Dubrovnik.
Church of St Blaise: Designed by Marino Gropelli, the church of St Blaise is the most beloved one in Dubrovnik. Among the most interesting attractions at the church, the staircase is probably the most noteworthy. However, make sure to take a look at the marble altar too, which has a sculpture of St Blaise sitting at the top. City walls: Dubrovnik's legendary fortifications; there are 3 access points to the city walls: at the Aquarium on Kneza Damjana Jude; via the Pile Gate; and from the Dominican Monastery. Once there, you can enjoy the magnificent views.
For the more adventurous amongst you, you can also take day-trips to visit the plitvice lakes where sixteen interconnecting waterfalls, and beautiful flora and fauna, are waiting for you to enjoy a unique experience and krka national park, located in Central Dalmatia of Croatia, the national park is best known for its numerous gushing waterfalls and natural pools of clear, bluegreen waters. Moreover, you can cross over the international border to discover the neighboring countries of Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Dubrovnik Palace Situated on a private beach in Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik Palace is within easy reach of Lapad Beach and Copacabana Beach. At Dubrovnik Palace you can cool off in one of the 3 outdoor swimming pools and indulge in a pampering afternoon at the full-service spa .
Villa Agave A beautifully resorted house commanding fabulous views of Lokrum and the city walls. Now it is a sumptuous bolt hole and party venue for visiting VIPs. 64
citypageskuwait.com
Cetina River Rafting Adventure From Dubrovnik: This delightful route takes you along the most beautiful part of the Adriatic coast and shows you its islands, towns and peninsulas. After your rafting adventure, enjoy lunch in Radmanove Mlinice, an openair restaurant situated in a beautiful old water mill. Island of Korcula Enjoy a stunning drive along the delicate Dalmatian Coast, and take a boat to the medieval village of Korcula. Tour a magnificent Cathedral from the Gothic period and view the evocative religious art at the Treasury. Stop for a memorable wine tasting on the Pelješac Peninsula and see the fortified town of Ston, which is encircled by
Best Festivals
Throughout the summer there are open-air cultural festivals, the best known being the Dubrovnik Summer Festival (dubrovnikfestival.hr), which runs from July 10 to August 25 and attracts soloists from around the world who perform in some of the Old City's most beautiful buildings. There are also plenty of contemporary music festivals. They include : IN Music Festival in Zagreb, Festival of Dalmatian Klapa , Pula Film Festival, Split Summer Festival staged from July 14 to August 14, and Avvantura Festival Zadar from August 23 to August 29.
Bon voyage!
65
ArtoNaut - Noraiz Arshad CREATE.SHARE.INSPIRE
I’ve studied Architecture from London Southbank University and graduated in 2013. It was a very exciting journey which made me learn many things about art and architecture. Learning architecture has changed my life. Currently, I am working at an architecture consulting office as a junior training architect. Working has been very challenging but I am enjoying this part of my life as I am sure this will help in future. As for the future, my goal is to learn as much as I can about architecture and enjoy it. Beside that I am a member of ARTronauts - a group which now does not need any introduction. The group had many events since I joined. One of the event was at Sulaibikhat organized by en.v earth and K'S Path and volunteered by ARTronauts. This event was about collecting plastic from shore or seaside by local schools inorder to encourage them to make a better use of plastic. ARTronauts members helped the event and made art from plastic together to give a message about plastic. The message is to use the plastic in a better way. The next event was to help one of the ARTronauts member, Antonio. He was exhibiting the art about the culture 66
citypageskuwait.com
of Kuwait. He showed it by their clothes hanging like in a laundry. The art was very interesting and had attracted many people around the area. After this, another event was organized. The event was held at The Scientific Center at their anniversary. The event was organised by en.v earth and sponsored by Zain telecommunications. The event was to showcase a whale which was seven meters in height and five meters long. It was made from steel wire frame. The ARTronauts group were given the chance to make this whale into art by wrapping it with plastic to extend a message of using plastic in a better way as it is harming the sea life. ARTronauts group helped in many ways for this event to make it successful. This event was only for three days. The whale was not only meant to stay at The Scientific Center forever but also will move around Kuwait, spreading the message about use of plastic in a better way. The event organizer has contacted ARTronauts to redesign the whale. It’s a great opportunity for the group. In conclusion, ARTronauts group has given me many opportunities to express my art in an architectural way and I hope to learn more in the future with this group.
A Course for Developing Your Market Position, Message, Media, Testimonials, Advertising, and Customer Retention. By the end of this course you will understand how to: nPosition Your Business To Eliminate Competition. nCreate A Compelling Marketing Message. nExpand Your Marketing Media Channels And Track Their Success. nLearn How To Gather And Use Customer Testimonials To Increase Sales. nCreate An Advertising Plan That Maximizes Your Return On Investment. nLower Your Customer Acquisition Costs By Retaining More Customers.
Tel. 67696474 / 66973003 - Email: [email protected] -
@itikuwait
JULY BIRTHSTONE IS the RUBY By: Oussama T. Hussein Giving a piece of jewelry containing a birthstone gem will bring the wearer with good luck and protection. Monthly birthstones symbolize the month of birth according to the Gregorian Calendar. What is the Birth stone for July? The following old poem provides the answer! "The gleaming Ruby should adorn, All those who in July are born, For thus they'll be exempt and free, From lover's doubts and anxiety." Properties of the Ruby
Zodiac Sign
For those who were born in the month of July the Ruby is the traditional birthstone. The July birthstone poem reflects some of the properties with which the Ruby is associated - devotion, integrity, courage and happiness. The Traditional Metaphysical Properties for the July Birthstone Ruby are vitality, confidence and strength. The healing properties of the July birthstone are reputed to be effective for health problems relating to the blood and infection and increasing positive thought patterns. The Ruby is also used to enhance energy, generosity and to bring prosperity and success.
The twelve Zodiac signs are an astrological version of birthstones in addition to the twelve calendar months. The July birthstone of the Ruby is considered to be the birthstone for Cancer (The sign of the Crab) and relate to those born between June 22-July 22. The Zodiac sign of Cancer also responds to Emerald, Sardonyx, Ruby, Pearl and Moonstone.
Where are Rubys found?
Color of the Ruby The traditional color associated with the Ruby is the deep red color and was strongly favored as a popular gem in Victorian jewelry. The meaning of colors through the ages represented many aspects of life. Social, religious, biblical and Christian symbolism were all reflected in the color Red! The symbolic meaning of the color red was was of fire and was associated with power and importance.
Tropical Zodiac
The popular July Birthstone of the Ruby is found in the following countries: Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, Cambodia, Afghanistan and India
Definition of the Ruby: Definition of Ruby, the July birth stone: The word Ruby is derived from the Latin word "ruber" which means "red" which reflecting the color of the stone. A precious stone of a carmine red color, sometimes verging to violet. It is a red crystallized variety of corundum. The Ruby is a member of the Corundum (aluminum oxide) family. Crystal structure of the Ruby, the July birthstone, is Hexagonal (trigonal), dipyramidal. Rubies are extremely hard, second only to diamonds. 68
citypageskuwait.com
Rashed S. AlFadala Striving to set a new standard in healthcare
Hi, please introduce yourself to our readers:
help out the family but later got so involved and interested that I My name is Rashed Sanad AlFadala. I am the Chief Operating Officer thought of enhancing my education further and went back to USA to (COO) at Taiba Hospital and Project Director of our other projects like do Masters in Healthcare Administration which I completed in 2006 Taiba Specialized Clinics in Fintas, Taiba Medical Spa in Farwaniya, from Simmons College in Boston. It also gave me an opportunity to get hands on experience through internship at various American and our latest project: The Salhiya Medical Pavilion. hospitals and to find out how medical facilities in US are operating as compared to Kuwait. Tell us about your educational background and what made you decide to join the family business? Please tell us more about Taiba Hospital’s history like how and I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Bryant College in when did it start? 2002 and joined Taiba Clinic in August 2002, soon after completion of my Bachelors in the US. At that time, Taiba Clinic was in the last stages of construction and was due to open in December 2002. As the last four months were very crucial so I got involved in setting up the administrative processes like recruitment, purchasing IT systems, and human resource management. In the first year, I worked at every level of the operation such as opening files at the reception, receiving financial reports, setting up marketing campaigns and initiatives, dealing with HR issues, and got involved in developing the Hospital Information Systems. In the beginning, I joined just to 70
citypageskuwait.com
Taiba Hospital started off as “Taiba Clinic” and officially opened its doors in December 2002 as the first day-case surgery center in Kuwait. After 4 extraordinary years of operating successfully at "Taiba Clinic", we decided to expand our facility even further so we got a license for general hospital in 2006 and became Taiba Hospital – the first hospital in Mubarak Al-Kabeer governorate. In December 2010, Taiba Hospital attained the Joint Commission International Accreditation (JCIA) with the highest scores in its first attempt. Let me say we scored the highest in the entire region; we missed
July, 2014
71
Photographer: Hassan Younes
only 12 measurable elements out of 1300. Then we were reaccredited with highest scores in 2013. In 2011, NBK Capital joined Taiba Hospital as a partner. It was a proud moment for us as it showed that NBK trusted our vision and believed in the management and that’s why it chose Taiba Hospital for its investment in the medical field in Kuwait amongst all other available options in the medical market. What have been the greatest challenges? Clinical staffing like nurses, paramedics and especially doctors is the biggest challenge for the healthcare industry. This challenge is far greater in Kuwait for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, the talent pool available here is very limited. One has to pick up human resources from other regions of the world. Secondly, the “bureaucracy” of the credentialing and licensing process. This means that after we have recruited a good doctor, it could take minimum of 6 months to get his license to practice in Kuwait from the health department as compared to other countries in the GCC and this way we lose many doctors to other countries as they prefer to go where they can start their job fast and without much trouble. What are the misperceptions about private medical sector? There is a popular misperception that private hospitals are here just to make money and they do not care about quality. This is not true, we (private health sector) truly believe in improving the quality of our services and we constantly invest in improving the quality of our services and development of our personnel. It is also proved by the fact that 5 private hospitals are accredited by international organizations, 2 by JCI and 4 by Canadian body of accrediting hospitals. The question why private medical care in Kuwait is expensive? The answer is because we invest constantly in upgrading our services in terms of quality and technology and that is expensive but it is still comparatively less expensive than Europe and America. There is also another misperception that private hospitals refer or send the complicated cases to the ministry of health’s hospitals. Again, that is not true. 80 percent of the cases are sent on patients’ requests as the ICU and CCU costs are high and are unaffordable for them and not because of the quality of healthcare provided in the private hospitals. What are your future plans? Our upcoming project is The Salhiya Medical 72
citypageskuwait.com
Pavilion. It is a totally new concept from the medical and patient/guest’s experience perspective. We will hire only western origin doctors i.e. USA, France, Canada, UK and prominent Kuwaiti doctors. The main reason for this is the fact that many Kuwaitis travel abroad for medical treatment or they get medical help through visiting doctor programs. So we decided to arrange this here on a permanent basis for the community of Kuwait. It will be equipped with the best and the most advanced facilities in treatment, equipment and diagnosis with a special focus on guests getting 7 star services. It will surely be a new experience. Since you are majorly involved in hospital business so how do you keep yourself abreast with the new developments in this field? American College of Health Executives organizes conferences, seminars and
we truly believe in improving the quality of our services and we constantly invest in improving the quality of our services and development of our personnel" lectures on different aspects of healthcare operations every year and I try not to miss them. It gives me an opportunity to meet executives from around the world and share our experiences. We also enhance the knowledge of our healthcare executives by sending them to western, reputable institutions such as Cleveland Clinic, Ohio for two weeks per year for special training and knowledge transfer. What are your hobbies? Honestly, unfortunately being a political activist takes up a lot of my time. I can’t see corruption and stay still; it is the future of my children at stake! What is your favorite travel destination? It depends on the time of year, when its
winter time in Kuwait, I love visiting Maldives because I admire the beach there and so does my family. While in summer, I would rather go to Europe and drive around from one country to another while enjoying the beautiful scenery of the mountains and the magical nature. What type of music do you listen to? I have liked different types of music in different phase of my life, for example, when I was in high school I used to admire Um Kalthoum, during college I used to like Rap, but now I am in a stage where I enjoy lounge and jazz music. What are the 3 keys to success according to you? Patience, Persistence, Proactive What is your favorite food? I am definitely a burger guy, I always seek trying new burger joints in and outside Kuwait. What is your favorite App on your iPhone? TED Which personality of the present or past, you are most inspired by? On a personal level, I have always looked up to my father since he has been an amazing role model for me when it comes to treating people and how open minded a person should be. When it comes to politics, my brother Khalid AlFadala has always inspired me with his persistence and how he wants to bring a change in his country. My wife has been a great inspiration on how to raise my children and be a good parent. Your message for our readers: I would like to quote “the power of the people is stronger than people in power”. Believe in yourself, believe in your capabilities, you deserve the best so strive for the best. Your message for us at CityPages: It is an amazing concept that highlights the Kuwaiti talent. Kuwait has many educated, cultured and talented people and CityPages brings them out of their enforced shells.
July, 2014
JULY Movie Releases THE GIVER
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Director: James Guillermo Director: Gunndel Toro
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Alexander Skarsgard, Taylor Swift, Katie Holmes
Starring: Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, Michael Rooker, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro
Genres: Fantasy, Action, Sci-Fi, Adventure, Drama Synopsis: In a perfect world where there is
no conflict, racism or sickness, every member of society has a specific role, and 16-yearold Jonas is selected to be the Receiver of Memories. As Jonas uncovers the truth behind his world's past, he discovers that many years earlier his forefathers gave up humanity in order to have a stable society.
Genres: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Action, Superhero Synopsis: Features an unlikely cast of characters who must team up in order to defeat a cosmic force of epic proportions.
An American pilot ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants.
INTO THE STORM
Synopsis: In the span of a single day,
Synopsis: Miles of twisting catacombs lie
Synopsis: A couple are quickly trying to
beneath the streets of Paris, the eternal home to countless souls. When a team of explorers ventures into the uncharted maze of bones, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. A journey into madness and terror, As Above, So Below reaches deep into the human psyche to reveal the personal demons that come back to haunt us all.
get to their home before The Purge starts but their car runs out of gas, the radio announces the beginning of The Purge, the couple have no choice but to leave their car, a couple of meters away stand a group of Purgers on motorcycles. The couple try to survive and fight the purgers.
LET'S BE COPS
GET ON UP
the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. The entire town is at the mercy of the erratic and deadly cyclones, even as storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come. Most people seek shelter, while others run towards the vortex, testing how far a storm chaser will go for that once-in-a-lifetime shot. Told through the eyes and lenses of professional storm chasers, thrill-seeking amateurs, and courageous townspeople, Into the Storm throws you directly into the eye of the storm to experience Mother Nature at her most extreme.
THE EXPENDABLES 3
Director: Chris Miller, Phil Lord
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Nicolas Cage, Jackie Chan, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren
Starring: Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Steven Yeun, Archie Panjabi, Cara Seymour
Starring: Megan Fox, Alan Ritchson, Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, Noel Fisher, Will Arnett
Genres: Adventure, Action, Sequel
Synopsis: Continuing with the franchise,
Synopsis: The film follows a molecular
Genres: Family, Comedy, Action, Adventurel
The Expendables 3 is about the Expendables needing to save the President of the United States. While on their mission, they clash with several younger, technology oriented action heroes. In The Expendables 3, Barney, Christmas and the rest of the team comes faceto-face with Conrad Stonebanks, who years ago co-founded The Expendables with Barney. Stonebanks subsequently became a ruthless arms trader and someone who Barney was forced to kill‌ or so he thought. Stonebanks, who eluded death once before, now is making it his mission to end The Expendables but Barney has other plans. Barney decides that he has to fight old blood with new blood, and brings in a new era of Expendables team members, recruiting individuals who are younger, faster and more tech-savvy. 74
I ORIGINS
citypageskuwait.com
biologist whose study of the human eye points to evidence with far reaching implications about our scientific and spiritual beliefs.
Synopsis: The reboot story centers on the turtle crime fighters, which include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael, as well as their master Splinter. Rumored to involve the return of Shredder.
Director: Luke Greenfield Starring: Damon Wayans Jr., Jake Johnson, James D'Arcy, Nina Dobrev, Andy Garcia, Olia Voronkova
Director: Tate Taylor Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis, Dan Aykroyd, Octavia Spencer, Nelsan Ellis,Jill Scott
Genres: Comedy
Synopsis: It's the ultimate buddy cop
Synopsis: Based on the incredible life story
movie except for one thing: they're not cops. When two struggling pals dress as police officers for a costume party, they become neighborhood sensations. But when these newly-minted "heroes" get tangled in a real life web of mobsters and dirty detectives, they must put their fake badges on the line.
of the Godfather of Soul, the film will give a fearless look inside the music, moves and moods of James Brown, taking audiences on the journey from his impoverished childhood to his evolution into one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Travel Made Easy THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY
CALVARY
Starring: Om Puri, Helen Mirren, Manish Dayal, Charlotte Le Bon
Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Chris O'Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran, M. Emmet Walsh
Genres: Drama
Synopsis: Tells the story of an Indian boy
Synopsis: Set in Sligo, Ireland, Calvary
In The Hundred-Foot Journey, Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal) is a culinary ingénue with the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Displaced from their native India, the Kadam family, led by Papa (Om Puri), settles in the quaint village of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in the south of France. Filled with charm, it is both picturesque and elegant – the ideal place to settle down and open an Indian restaurant, the Maison Mumbai. That is, until the chilly chef proprietress of Le Saule Pleureur, a Michelin starred, classical French restaurant run by Madame Mallory (Academy Award®winner Helen Mirren), gets wind of it.
Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a good priest who is faced with sinister and troubling circumstances brought about by a mysterious member of his parish. Although he continues to comfort his own fragile daughter (Kelly Reilly) and reach out to help members of his church with their various scurrilous moral and often comic - problems, he feels sinister and troubling forces closing in, and begins to wonder if he will have the courage to face his own personal Calvary.
living in France who becomes the culinary apprentice to his father's rival.
LUCY
Director: Luc Besson Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi
is a blackly comic drama about a good priest tormented by various member of his community.
VERY GOOD GIRLS
Director: Naomi Foner Starring: Dakota Fanning, Elizabeth Olsen, Peter Sarsgaard, Dustin Hoffman, Sissy Spacek, Demi Moore
Genres: Action, Thriller
Genres: Drama, Teen
Synopsis: An action-thriller that tracks a woman (Scarlett Johansson) accidentally caught in a dark deal who turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
Synopsis: Best friends Lily (Dakota Fanning)
and Gerry (Elizabeth Olsen), home for one last New York summer, make a pact to lose their virginity before leaving for college. But when they both fall for the same handsome artist (Boyd Holbrook) and Lily starts seeing him in secret, a lifelong friendship is tested.
facebook.com/pearlassist
Whether you are arriving, departing or transiting at Kuwait International Airport, Hala Kuwait is there to make your journey easy. From the moment you get to the airport, our team is there to take care of your every need whether it is using our Fast Track immigration, dedicated check in area, Pearl Lounge, private transportation, or our Meet & Assist Service to guide you every step of the way.
@pearlassist
Member of the National Aviation Services Group
Member of the National Aviation Services Group
TOP MUSIC CHARTS DJ Raven 1
2
Lil Wayne & Drake Justin Timberlake Sia
5 Seconds Of Summer Shawn Mendes
Tinashe Kenny Chesney Eric Church
Blake Shelton Becky G
Kiss Me Kiss Me My Eyes
Luke Bryan Aloe Blacc
Star of the Month QUICK FACTS
with MJB
NAME: Rihanna OCCUPATION: Singer BIRTH DATE: February 20, 1988 EDUCATION: Combermere School PLACE OF BIRTH: Barbados FULL NAME: Robyn Rihanna Fenty ZODIAC SIGN: Pisces
Here are some albums that you can pre-order on iTunes: Album title: YES! Artist: Jason Mraz Expected: Jul, 15 2014 The star of this month is Rihanna. Rihanna was born on February 20, 1988 in Barbados and she is the eldest of three children. Rihanna formed a girl group with two others; when they were only 15 years old. Her group went to an audition with music producer Evan Rodgers, who was visiting the island with his wife. That time, Rodgers fell in love with Rihanna’s performance. Less than a year later, Rihanna went to Connecticut to record a demo album. In January 2005, Rihanna auditioned for Def Jam Records, that time, Jay-Z was the newly minted president. Jay Z was wowed by Rihanna’s amazing voice and signed her on the spot. Only eight months later, in August 2005, Rihanna released her first single “Pon de Replay.” Her first album, “Music of the Sun”, released later that month, reached No.10 on the Billboard albums chart and featured the single “If It’s Loving that you Want.” Rihanna released her second album, “A Girl Like Me” the next year and featured both “Unfaithful” and “SOS”. In 2007, Rihanna’s style has transformed from the cute teen pop princess to the
fully fledged superstar with her third album, “Good Girl Gone Bad”, including the smash hit “Umbrella” featuring Jay-Z. “Umbrella” topped the billboard singles chart and earned Rihanna her first Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. The album reached No.2 on the charts and featured “Don’t Stop the Music” and “Shut Up and Drive.” Rihanna released Rated R in 2009 with the singles "Hard" and "Rude Boy." Her 2010 album, Loud, was once again an enormous commercial and critical success behind the songs "What's My Name," "Only Girl (In the World)" and "S&M." Rihanna is also featured on many mega hits by other artists, including Jay-Z's "Run this Town," Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie" and Kanye West's "All of the Lights."In 2011, Rihanna released her sixth studio album: Talk That Talk. The album included the song "We Found Love," which features DJ Calvin Harris and won the 2013 Grammy Award for best short form music video. Rihanna gained huge success on her 2012 hit album Unapologetic, this album included hits such as “Diamonds” and “Stay.” Source: biography.com
Album title: Paula Artist: Robin Thicke Expected: Jul 1, 2014 Album title: Trigga Artist: Trey Songz Expected: Jul 1, 2014
Some interesting facts! 1-The best way to improve your physical performance is to listen to music while working-out ! 2-None of the Beatles could read music ! July, 2014
77
Bitter Victory (1957) Director Nicholas Ray
Warfare in the heat and dust has inspired some compellingly desiccated dramas, from Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo (1943) to David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999). Nicholas Ray’s bleak masterpiece Bitter Victory is one of the most searingly pessimistic, a tale of breakdown and cowardice under the Saharan sun. Set during the Western Desert Campaign of the second world war, it teams military man Curd Jürgens with local expert Richard Burton on a mission to raid Rommel’s desert HQ. Cinematographer Michel Kelber’s widescreen compositions feel unforgivably stark in black and white, pinioning the film’s feuding protagonists against the infinite undulations of the Libyan dunes.
Daratt (2006)
Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun One of several incredible films commissioned as part as of the New Crowned Hope project, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s revenge drama Daratt is (very) loosely inspired by the themes of Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito. Haroun’s film is set in Chad against a background of ongoing civil war, and features Ali-Bacha Barkai as a young man, Atim, bent on revenge for the death of his father at the hands of a brutal soldier. ‘Daratt’ means ‘dry season’, and as Peter Bradshaw remarked in his review of the film for The Guardian: “Everything in the film is hot and dusty and thirsty – the kind of thirst that can only be slaked by blood.” Haroun builds a pressure-cooker atmosphere as Atim’s bloodlust and humanity do battle inside him, culminating in a gripping finale out in the Sahara.
Fata Morgana (1971) Director Werner Herzog
Ever drawn to the earth’s wild, extreme places, Werner Herzog’s cinematic expeditions to the desert have included his outback drama Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) and his Gulf War fantasia Lessons of Darkness (1992). At the time of writing, he’s at work on a biopic of Middle East adventurer Gertrude Bell entitled Queen of the Desert, starring Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence. His early film Fata Morgana, named after a kind of mirage, is one of his most beautiful. Shot in the southern Sahara in the late 60s, Herzog’s film was conceived as a kind of non-narrative science-fiction film, with the earth standing in for another planet. With Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack, together with intonations from a Mayan creation myth, it’s a heady concoction, very much of its time. But the succession of images is hypnotic, with Herzog’s eye frequently drawn to the incongruous human detritus that litters the Sahara’s nowhere places.
Gerry (2002)
Director Gus van Sant Filmed variously in Argentina, Death Valley and 78
citypageskuwait.com
the salt flats of Utah, Gus Van Sant’s defiantly meandering Gerry is the ultimate lost-in-thedesert film. Casey Affleck and Matt Damon play two friends, both called Gerry, who set out on a hike without food or water and quickly lose all sense of direction or even purpose. Made under the influence of the syrup-slow tracking shots of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, but also calling to mind Samuel Beckett and Michelangelo Antonioni, Van Sant’s film is either a pretentious bore or a trance-inducing masterpiece, depending on your viewpoint. Watched with patience, it’s as spellbinding as a mirage.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Director Sergio Leone
The list of westerns to have made great use of desert locations is as long and endless as a distant horizon: think of James Stewart being ambushed on desolate salt flats in Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955), or the arid vistas in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which David Lean reportedly watched over and over in preparation for Lawrence of Arabia. In the third part of Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars trilogy’, the desert is used as a kind of torture, when bandit Tuco (Eli Wallach), sheltering himself under a frilly pink parasol, sadistically leads the captive Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) across a searingly hot landscape. Denied water until perilously close to death, Eastwood’s face itself soon begins to resemble parched ground, cracking up with extreme dehydration. As in Leone’s other spaghetti westerns, the Tabernas desert in Almeria, Spain stood in for the American West.
Greed (1924)
Director Erich von Stroheim Silent master Erich von Stroheim’s magnum opus Greed begins in early 20th century San Francisco and tells of relationships destroyed by avarice after the winning of a lottery ticket. Adapted from Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague, it was an audacious experiment in physical and psychological realism that for its climax involved the crew filming in the forbidding flats of Death Valley’s Badwater Basin – one of the world’s hottest places. As local paper The Inyo Independent reported at the time: The temperature was 130 degrees by a properly shaded thermometer, and the heat radiation from the scorching, sun-baked sand of the desert made the trousers of the men so hot as far up as their knees that many were compelled to wrap bandages around their calves to keep the cloth from touching the skin.
Ice Cold in Alex (1958) Director J. Lee Thompson
One of the great British war films of the 1950s, J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex is a gripping thriller about an ambulance commander (John Mills) and his efforts to transport two nurses through treacherous, enemy-occupied North
Africa – not realising that there’s a German spy in his midst. Shot in Libyan parts of the Sahara, the film bears comparison with the French truck-driving thriller The Wages of Fear (1953) in its use of inhospitable locations to ratchet up the tension. Particularly memorable moments include the group’s nailbiting traversal of a minefield, peril by quicksand, and the iconic final scene of the survivors sharing a cold beer in Alexandria – possibly the most thirst-quenching drinks in cinema.
Walkabout (1971)
Director Nicolas Roeg
In Australia when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the Walkabout. This is the story of a Walkabout. So begins Nicolas Roeg’s solo debut as director. It’s the hallucinatory tale of two English siblings (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg), abandoned in the Australian bush by their father, who must then make their way back to civilisation, guided by an Aborigine boy embarking on his own rite of passage. Featuring cutaways to the weird and wonderful flora and fauna of the desert, Roeg’s film is a primal adventure movie in which the edifices of culture and propriety are left in tatters in the outback.
Woman of the Dunes (1964) Director Hiroshi Teshigahara
“There has never been sand photography like this (no, not even in Lawrence of Arabia),” critic Roger Ebert wrote of Woman of the Dunes. This enigmatic Japanese classic is the story of an insect collector (Eiji Okada) who becomes trapped at the bottom of a vast sand pit, where he is forced to help a lonely widow (Kyoko Kishida) in her endless task of digging away the falling sands. Though Japan isn’t known for its deserts, 37-yearold director Hiroshi Teshigahara filmed in the rolling dunes of the Tottori prefecture in the west of the country – the terrain that inspired Kobo Abe’s celebrated source novel.
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Director Michelangelo Antonioni Zabriskie Point is a rainbow-coloured spot in Death Valley, where layers of multi-hued sediment in the jagged crests of rock create the impression of a
sand picture given three dimensions. It was a location that enticed Michelangelo Antonioni
when MGM lured the hip Italian director to make a film in the States. The result, which begins almost as a documentary on radical student politics before becoming a story about disillusioned youth and an escape to the nullity of the desert, was rubbished in many quarters as a shallow attempt to get to grips with the hippy scene. Never mind, Zabriskie Point survives as a richly poetic ode to emptiness in American life and landscape, full of indelible images such as a writhing orgy in the dust.
“David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago does for snow what his Lawrence of Arabia did for sand,” quipped one reviewer upon the 1965 release of Lean’s wintry Russian Revolution epic. While his point was facetious, it spoke to the fact that – for all Lawrence of Arabia’s other strengths – cinema-goers had truly never seen dunes and desert quite like Lean showed them. Like T.E. Lawrence, his adventuring protagonist, Lean was a “desert-loving Englishman” and his images of Arabia – captured with astonishing precision and scale in Super Panavision 70 by cinematographer Freddie Young – remain a benchmark in landscape filmmaking. But Lean was neither the first nor the last director to be drawn to the world’s parched, barren wildernesses. Hollywood itself was built on Californian land reclaimed from arid desert terrain, and its production companies have always capitalised on the proximity of the Mojave and Death Valley for westerns, adventure films, biblical epics, and science fiction.
Photography by: @abdullah_hamadah at @seventyseven_kw studio
More recently, filmmakers the world over have used the desert as shorthand in narratives of existential isolation, revelling in empty, sun-scorched topographies where characters can lose themselves mentally and geographically, far from civilisation and at the mercy of the elements.
Desert films June, 2014
79
ألنها أمي Because she is my Mother الحزن خيما ألشالء أبنائها تلك التي تنصب ُ تلك التي ترش الدمع ،ياسمنًا على قبورنا
تلك التي تذرف شمسًا ،كلما أغبننا سرمد الليل... تلك التي أبكت الدبابة و أرهبت البارود،
و تفتت القم َر لتدسه في وسائدنا ريشًا وياسمنا ...هي امي
بارودهم وبرودهم هي أمي...
شرفات تلك التي تعصر السهاد لتزرعه على ُ رموشنا حلمًا جميال
تلك التي تلوك اآلهات لتزرع في ذاكرتنا ورد ًة بيضاء...
ليال تلك التي تزف خيباتنا المتزاحمة الى ٍ ملئ باألمل...
الصمت لتخط لنا في المدى تلك التي ترشف َ دربًا آخ َر
تلك التي تحشو الغيم رصاصا فيمطرنا بردًا و قب ً ال...
لحن ،فنرقص كلنا و تغني آهاتها ،بال ٍ طربًا ...أمي
برائحة تلك التي تحرق التاريخ ،لتخط آخر ِ كف ّيها.. و ترمم أرصفة أحالمنا بكل ما أوتيت من فجيعة ...أمي ٍ
تلك التي تستنطق الحجر والشجر والزيتون تلك التي شيدت لنا للتو بين الوطن والوطن ،وطنا آخر هي أمي!!!...
citypageskuwait.com
80
Poetry by Nada Faris A Kernel of Despair I see popped kernels of desire curling in despair. Is it fair I retire broken, wreathing in pain? You approach on occasions, your halo gleaming, its rays refracting off the beaming dagger you hide behind soft curves. What empathy you dote on monsters, you preserve in my grace. For I’m the fiend who hurt you most by kneeling in place, and dotting the back of my neck with red ink, marking your assail. You hail me as your murderer in the public square and gather everyone around us to ascertain your closure, you say, I dismembered our union, you say, I lacked all compassion, and worse, I pollute history with false narratives portrayed in verse. But truth was never a subject of poetry, its words gain substance only with growth of numbers. The marauding masses in the square attest to your claims, refashioning truth in quantity and volume and threats. I gave you liberty, when you were shaking in your bedroom. What’s not to hate about indebtedness? What’s not to vilify in my eagerness to carve your pedestal with miracles, each one surpassing the other in order of reverence? You called me home once, but now I’m the villain to whom you lost your innocence. Nada Faris Nada Faris is a Kuwaiti who writes poetry, articles, and fiction in English. Her latest book, Before Young Adult Fiction, is a collection of short, award-winning articles, poems, and short stories that shaped her writing voice. Reach her at: www.nadafaris.com or @nadafaris
Photo by Greg Bal
Yet in the grand scheme of things, both you and I are nothing more than grains in the cosmos of despair. July, 2014
81
JULY Book Releases
Looking for the latest summer reads? This July 2014 new releases calendar covers the books that are expected to be popular -- from debuts to thrillers to domestic fiction. Pick the genre that appeals to you and enjoy your summer vacation!
The Girls from Corona Del Mar Rufi Thorpe
The Girls from Corona Del Mar is a literary debut about friendship between women and how childhood relationships evolve over time. The story is not primarily about youth or coming of age. It is told from adulthood and is primarily about the life of one of the girls, as told by her best friend. Advance praise has made this a book to watch.
Lucky Us Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom's second novel is the story of two half-sisters in search of fame and fortune as they travel across America during the 1940s. It is filled with family drama and life drama that is billed as both funny and moving.
The Book of Life
Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harkness made it big with her debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, which came out in 2011. Discovery of Witches was the first book in a supernatural suspense and romance trilogy. Book of Life brings that trilogy to a conclusion. If you have not read the first two books, start there. If you have, this is the book you've been waiting for.
The City
Dean Koontz
The City is a novel that jumps back and forth through time and is told by a talented musician. He relates that events that happened in his city starting in 1967, when he was ten. Good and evil and events "terrible and wonderful" all take place in this city, with a host of characters for readers to enjoy.
The Great Glass Sea
Josh Weil
Josh Weil's second novel is a science fiction story with a focus on two brothers in a dysfunctional family. The premise of The Great Glass Sea is that the Russian government has put mirrors in space that reflect sunlight back to earth at night, creating perpetual daylight for a sub-Arctic community in Russia that contains huge greenhouses. The science fiction part of the story explores how this perpetual sunlight affects people. The domestic part of the story explores the relationship between two brothers.
One Plus One
The Hundred Year House is Makkai's second novel, although she is
One Plus One is the sort of zany love story that is perfect for the middle of summer. A single mother has a son who is being bullied and a math whiz daughter who has the chance to compete in a major contest that the family can't afford. Enter the nerdy millionaire whose house the mom is employed to clean. He decides to help the daughter get to the competition, and the rest is romantic comedy history.
well known for her short stories, which have been featured in The Best American Short Stories for several years. The Hundred Year House is about an old money family and their estate, which used to be an arts colony. citypageskuwait.com
When Nick Harkaway burst onto the scene in 2008, we said of his debut novel, The Gone Away World, "I’m all for zany sci-fi with a sharp wit and things like ninjas and mimes thrown in. But some readers will rightfully not want to take the time to get lost in such a kaleidoscope of ideas." That still sums up Harkaway. Tigerman is described in ways that sound both domestic and absurd. The writer who described his work asexistential pulp hit it on the head. You have to decide whether that's more intriguing or frustrating for you.
The Hundred Year House Rebecca Makkai
82
Jojo Moyes
BOOK CLUB
100 Years of Sheaffer 100 Years of Sheaffer (2013) is a tribute book by Sheaffer Company that was published in the past year to celebrate the 100th year anniversary of the company being in business since 1913 by its founder Walter A. Sheaffer. In Kuwait, the pen has penetrated the market years and years ago, it was known as the pen with the white dot, which is the long life warranty mark and it is what differentiates Sheaffer from its competitors to date. Sheaffer Pen is a leading worldwide provider of quality fine writing instruments. Today, Sheaffer forges ahead with the same commitment to excellence, quality and craftsmanship that put the brand on the map 100 years ago. What is so special about this book is that it consists of never seen before photos and images of the writing instruments that never made it to the market, as well as the old advertisements, black and white and colored that was used throughout the years. Also, the book has written statements from Bruno Bich, Chairman of BIC S. A. (since Sheaffer is a brand of BIC group since 1997), John D. Sheaffer, grandson of Walter Sheaffer and former Senior Manager of Sheaffer Pen Company as well as Sheaffer current General Manager Tim Williams. The book covers the timeline from 1913 until 2013 with really interesting and important milestones in the Sheaffer stories, such as: The Sheaffer Family Story, The Invention of the Lever Filling System, Birth of the White Dot, Sheafer and BIC and many more milestones covered in the book. “We can all think of famous international corporations which have been in existence for
many years. But in fact very few companies can trace their lineage for 100 years. It is exceptional for any organization to maintain name and trademark recognition for so long a period. It is remarkable that Sheaffer quality has an international image. Great credit is due Sheaffer and BIC management for broadening the Sheaffer ® product line of gift merchandise which sends a message of elegance and style. Walter A. Sheaffer, founder of the Sheaffer Pen Company 100 years ago-my grandfather whom I loved and knew well- would be as excited about Sheaffer ® products today as he was then. I speak for all of us when I say the Sheaffer name is in good hands and Sheaffer products exude beauty, ingenuity, and craftsmanship. The many hundreds of individuals who take great pride in their personal workmanship and endeavors must also share in the Sheaffer story.” John D. Sheaffer Grandson of Walter Sheaffer, And former Senior Manager at the Sheaffer Pen Company
Nada Soliman
[email protected]
Meet Nada, our team member is simply a book savvy. Every month Nada picks her favourite book and shares with you its review. Please feel free to contact Nada to discuss your opinion or ask her opinion on your favourite book or author.
July, 2014
83
Asrar AlAnsari Creating a world of emotions to be held in hands
Please introduce yourself to our readers: Asrar Zakaria Al-Ansari, born on 5th of December 1988, I currently work in Public Relations & Media department in the Ministry of State for Youth Affairs. Tell us about your education: I am a Public Relations and Advertising graduate from Gulf University for Science and Technology. Do you recall how your interest in writing originated? I had a passion for writing since I was a little girl. I am from a family who’s well known for its deep interest and contributions to both education and literature, so the environment was really motivating especially when my parents noticed my interest in writing. What inspired you to write your first book? I wanted to create a world of emotions to be held in hands. Peoples’ stories, secrets and 84
citypageskuwait.com
experiences were my source of inspiration. And, as I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a family that loves literature, reading and writing, I wanted to be the new author in the family who looks up to be just like her uncles and aunties. Do you have a specific writing style? I write in Classic Arabic, smooth understandable phrases and words are what I choose. I strongly believe that what comes out of the heart will definitely reach other hearts. How did you come up with the title? Since my name is Asrar which means Secrets, adding an ‘I’ at the end of my name would mean “My Secrets”... I believe that every story written in the book is a beautiful secret from people who believed in my writing skills enough to trust me by sharing their personal experiences just to see them beautifully written and shared through my Twitter account, that was in the phase of writing and publishing the stories. Then
comes the “working on the book” and editing phase, after organizing the stacked up stories in chapters I wrote after each chapter an article sharing my personal thoughts, my personal beliefs and preferences, and I titled each article by the word “Secret” adding an object I love for example “The Secret of the Rain – The Secret of the Full Moon” so we’ll end up with a number of Secrets. Therefore, I consider every word written in this book whether it was about me or about others MY SECRETS, “Asrari”. Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp? There are a lot of hidden messages between the lines, but my main message I wrote clearly at the end of the book and it revolves around being yourself, believing strongly in yourself, and reminding everyone that each and every one of us is here in this world for a reason, to add something to the society we live in and we all must seek for the reason within ourselves and start the journey of a decent life.
July, 2014
85
How much of the book is realistic? From cover to cover. Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life? I started writing the stories of people I know, then other people whom I don’t even know their name came flowing in, they sent me their personal experiences through my e-mail and Ask.fm account which allows people to write to you without revealing their identity.
What books have influenced your life the expect this huge amount of acceptance and most? appreciation from people. “Nesyan” by Ahlam Mustaghanmi, “La Tahzan” by Dr. Ayedh Al Qarni, Sherry Is there anything you find particularly Argov’s Books, and “Think like a man act like challenging in your writing? a lady” by Steve Harvey. My only challenge right now is that I want to improve my writing skills day by day. Are there any new authors that have Another challenge was to write people’s grasped your interest? stories in 140 characters, yes, and each story Mentioning names may be unfair to some, is 140 characters long to fit in a tweet, it was but since I am a number one reader so every that crazy! I wanted to be different so I had to writer that cares for what he publishes from work hard to be it! every aspect will certainly grasp my interest. Who is your favorite author and what is it Do you see writing as a career? What else that really strikes you about his/her work? do you do? My favorite is the Algerian writer Ahlam No, I write when I feel the need to express Mustaghanmi; she expresses me in so many something from my heart and it really ways! fascinates me that what came straight out of my heart turned to be a book. I work in Who designed the covers? the Public Relations field and I really love The talented graphic designer Mohammed what I am doing, therefore I am a reader Sharaf, can you believe that the details inside by day, a writer by night and I socialize the mask were my doodles one day! in between. If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your book? Not a word, I love how everything happened even though I did not plan for it this way and I did not
What was the hardest part of writing your book? Choosing and organizing the stories in chapters; I had to choose 500 out of 1600 stories that I wrote from all my heart, I really loved them all but I didn’t want the book to exceed 250 pages! The process was really tiring especially when I had to organize them in chapters because they weren’t organized at all. Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it? Dreams do come true, but you have to believe in yourself first, and the more you believe in yourself the more everyone else will believe in you! Do you have any advice for other writers? For those who have published their work; keep going and don’t forget to improve yourself. And those who are afraid and have no courage; give yourself a chance when you are ready, believe in yourself and start turning your dream into reality. Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers? Stick to doing what you love, believe in the beauty of your dreams because nothing is impossible in the eye of a dreamer. Your message for us at CityPages magazine: Thank you for being there at my book signing and thank you for this interview. What I really admire about your magazine is your wonderful support and kind hearts. Keep going, you are the best!
86
87
How to improve your Ramadan
Ramadan is Muslim's holy month of virtue, where merits are doubled, but so are vices. And it is evident that throughout the past Ramadhans, we have done our best to become the most pious by devoting our times for good deeds and trying to avoid misconduct. While most of us know what Ramadan is, some of us with the least amount of self control think that Ramadan is that special month in which Muslims restrain themselves from eating till the dusk prayer is called; and sadly, this belief is becoming the dominant one among us, even if it was not as literal as I may have put it.. Most people nowadays are unorganized and generally unfocused, so Ramadan comes in heavily for them. But that's the problem: If more time was dedicated to self-development than to mindless piety and following customs, we would have lived more comfortable lives. Adnan Najeeb Al-Abbar Adnan is studying Theoretical Physics at the college of Sciences and Technology in Kuwait University. His Hobbies include Anime, manga, heavy metal, jazz, gaming, writing, and reading. In Writing field he is into Reviews, critiques, essays, plays, and short short-stories. Adnan can be contacted by email: [email protected]
88
citypageskuwait.com
I do not object to prayer, but it must be accompanied with hard work, and regulation of the mind. One of the benefits of prayer is that it makes us patient, calm, and gives us self-control. The Qur'aan makes us wiser, and Zakaat teaches us generousity and altruism. If we practice these in Ramadan but do not learn from them, it becomes clear that either something is wrong with our understanding, or that we do not have enough devoution. What if Ramadan was that month that would change us all into better people in terms of honesty, integrity, intelligence, wisdom, and self-discipline? It's not an impossible dream at all. In fact, it's easy to accomplish. All we need to do is to revise our actions in Ramadan, and see why we do what we do, how can our actions be improved, and what must be done to improve our behaviour. Ramadan hasn't passed yet, as we're halfway through, so there is always hope for change (into what is better), and what better time to improve ourselves than today? Developing a clearer and better understanding of the Quran, taking better care of our health, strengthening family and friendly relations, and controlling our desires seem to be core concepts of what Ramadan truly is all about, so why not start and focus on these? I wish you all a Ramadan mubarak. Ramadan kareem to all, and be blessed.
The English Woman In Saudi Arabia Part 2
I travelled across the world to be with the man I love, who was Arab and I was just an ordinary blue-eyed English woman. I was delighted to see him at the airport, feelings rushed over me again and I ran over to give him a hug. "Kate," he said with a stern look on his face. I backed away and I felt a little embarrassed. He gave a small but warm smile and said, "You cannot hug me here in Saudi Arabia, it is against the law as we are not allowed to hug women who we are not related to or not married to," he Nadia AlHassan
Nadia Al-Hassan is a student in Ireland, studying Journalism. She is passionate about writing stories and poetry. Nadia loves helping people with her stories. She believes that words are beautiful and powerful.
explained. I nodded my head and looked at the ground, I felt a little bit shy and a bit stupid for coming all the way here. He was the same man that I fell in love with in England, yet he was different, if that even made sense. I said goodbye to the Arab woman who comforted me while I had been waiting for Yousef, we exchanged numbers and I promised to keep in contact. Yousef led me over to his car, I was quite thirsty so I took my water bottle out of my bag to drink. Yousef started to say, "la, la, la," which I remember him telling me in England it meant no. I was confused and looked at him with a blank expression, why was he saying no? He then took the water bottle out of my hands and threw it away. "Its Ramadan Kate, we do not drink or eat during daylight hours and if anybody saw you they would cause a huge fuss." I sat in the car and we drove quietly, not a single word muttered. I looked out the
window and admired the beauty of the country, It wasn't just all desert which I had expected it to be, I honestly didn't think that there would have been buildings. I laughed silently to myself, Yousef asked me what was on my mind and I told him how I thoughts all Arabs lived in tents. We both laughed. "Kate, I love you," he said. "But we must get married if you want to stay with me." I think I started to panic then, I didn't expect to get married this fast. But then yet again, I didn't expect any of this. I was a young woman who came all the way to Saudi Arabia to be with the love of my life. My parents still had no clue where I was and if I got married without them knowing, they would never forgive me again. I looked at him for a long while and then said, "Lets get married then," I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I was in love. July, 2014
89
Hussain Al-Ayoub and Mohammad Al-Ayoub
StopMotion Kuwait
Photography by: @abdullah_hamadah at @seventyseven_kw studio
Mastering the advanced art of stop-motion animation
July, 2014
91
Please introduce yourself to our readers: Hussain and Mohammad Al Ayoub, we are the creators and founders of StopMotion Kuwait
Tell us about your educational backgrounds? We both come from different educational backgrounds. I graduated from Kuwait University with a major in Political Science and minor in Psychology. Hussain is a GUST graduate majored in Marketing.
We are excited to know, how and when did the idea of StopMotion come up? We have seen the proliferation of social media in Kuwait in the last few years, from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The growth of small businesses over social media was exponential and we have all witnessed the rise of social media “celebrities/bloggers” in Kuwait. Instagram was growing in Kuwait surpassing its neighbors, might I dare say outpacing the US back then. Businesses, small and large, started using Instagram to advertise their products and services. Instagram provided something that no other social media could do before, it was visual. When Instagram launched its 15 seconds video capability, possibilities were limitless. Telling a story in 15 seconds was both inspiring and challenging. Hussain has a creative mind and in his quest for searching for something new, he saw ADIDAS stop motion add. Then, a bulb flickered just like the cartoon “This is what we should bring to Kuwait”.
Photography by: @abdullah_hamadah at @seventyseven_kw studio
We didn’t know what we are getting ourselves into. The first stop-motion took a lot of time and effort from both of us, drawing these still pictures and moving them with the music to reveal an idea and above all make it all realistic.
What role do each of you play? Hussain is the creative dynamo while I manage the business and clients; we both work together to brainstorm and to translate ideas that are sometimes unclear to a concept that best represent the business or portrays the person (in case of bloggers). Some of our customers are clear on what they want, while others are not. This is where we can help them with our experience and knowledge what works and what doesn’t.
Who was your first client and did you approach and convince them? Our first client was surprisingly not from Kuwait but from neighboring Qatar “Football team”. He approached us after he saw our videos on Instagram. Surprisingly, people didn’t need convincing; reception was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. We relied mainly on Instagram to build our fan base.
Tell us about some of your clients? We have a big client list ranging from top companies such as NBK, Zain, Boubyan, Al-Ghanim Industries, Abyat, Chewy Goowy, Al-Jazeera Perfumes and Al Baghli to social media bloggers, small businesses and even home businesses. 92
citypageskuwait.com
We also have government clients such as ministry of electricity and water (MOEW) and NGO clients as well.
Where do you get your inspiration from? We strive to understand our clients’ needs and build the story board accordingly. We try to be unique and distinctive in every stop-motion we make in order to avoid becoming boring. Our minds are thinking non-stop, always browsing the internet and social media for new inspirations. Quality is our slogan.
Can you explain the process of completing a project from the beginning? How long does it take you to complete a project? The whole process takes 3-4 weeks. Meeting the client, generating ideas, developing the story board, selecting the music until all this is finally assembled into the 15 seconds video you enjoy. People thought at first that it is an application that you can download and use. It is NOT. It takes 80-100 drawings to make a realistic good quality 15 seconds videos; these are not pictures but drawings, similar to how cartoons are developed. It requires precision and accuracy and this is what distinguishes us. Quality is our Slogan; if we are not happy with the quality we do not present it to the client.
How do you decide the music for your animations? Sometimes the client provides us with the music but many times we do select the music based on the story and the type of business. We try to make it fun but relevant.
Which project or video is your personal favorite and why? Mohammad - @mmkuwair from Qatar Hussain - @zain
What are some of the challenges you face with your business? Satisfying our customers is our biggest challenge; we strive to make our customers happy.
What are your future plans? We currently have clients in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. So our future plans are to expand in the Gulf and Middle East. At present this is a two man show but we need to expand to meet our future plans.
Your message for us at CityPages Magazine: We have competitors but we differentiate ourselves with quality; that is our slogan. Trust of the big companies is attestation of our quality. We create our own mark in our videos; when you see one of our videos you would know, it is us: StopMotion Kuwait.
July, 2014
to add to your wishlist
Get on your toy-car A-game because this one comes with an interchangeable suspension
SnapPower SnapRays Guidelight Traditional nightlights can hog one or more outlets, so SnapPower embedded three LEDs into the Guidelight’s faceplate. The clever design keeps both outlets free.
Whirlpool Microwave with AccuPop Making popcorn is stressful: A few extra seconds and you have inedible charred chunks. Sound sensors in the new Whirlpool measure the duration between pops and adjust cooking time to ensure the perfect batch every time.
HTC One (M8) This smartphone could make you a better photographer. Two rear-facing lenses serve distinct purposes: one captures the image; the other, depth information. Users can refocus images even after they’ve taken the shot.
Modarri A driver’s license may be years away for many toy-car owners, but that’s no reason why their vehicles shouldn’t handle like the real thing. Each Modarri car has an interchangeable suspension and front-wheel steering.
94
citypageskuwait.com
Philips Hue LuminaireGuidelight Connected LED bulbs aren’t much to look at, which is why we tend to hide them beneath lampshades. But Philips’s 3-D–printed luminaires are bulb and shade in one high-design package.
Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Metro Mini Metro is like The Sims for transit geeks with nerves of steel. In this multiplatform game, players satisfy demanding passengers by redesigning subway-system layouts to suit ever-changing needs.
Deep Quirky + GE Aros Until now, apartment dwellers have been mostly left out of the smarthome revolution. No longer. The Aros A/C window unit pairs with an app to learn a user’s behavior, power itself down when appropriate, and help keep energy bills in check.
James Nestor’s book Deep begins above the ocean surface, steadily working down to researchers camped out at 60 feet below. It bottoms out at 28,700 feet, where autonomous bots comb deep trenches.
Black & Decker AutoSense Drill This wireless drill is the first to stop itself before it strips heads or cracks surfaces. A microprocessor senses the changing torque of the screw as it bores into wood and signals the motor to stop in time.
RoboReel Water Hose Stop playing tug-of-war with your garden hose. RoboReel senses when you pull on the hose and starts a motor to help you unwind it. When you’re done watering, press a button to initiate retraction. July, 2014
95
وهم الخصوصية قرآنا مقالة تتحدث عن وهم الخصوصة عبر االنترنت وكيف كانت انت تختفي تحدث الكاتب عن ان مهما حاولت ان تبتعد عن االنترنت.“تقريبا” نهائيا تحدث عن قانون. فأنهم سيجدون وسيلة لتعقبك،وتقطع اتصالك باالنترنت ” وانهم كانوا يجمعونNSA“ ” التي تبنته وكالة االمن القومي اآلمريكيةPRISM“ الصور و يتجسسون على مكالماتك، الفيديوهات،الرسائل االلكتزونية الشركات الكبرى.الهاتفية والمكالمات التي تجريها عن ��ريق االنترنت ايضا هذا القانون فقط.قالوا انهم ال يعرفون عن هذا القانون والبعض يعرف عنه في أمريكا ولكن نعتقد ان في منطقتنا اكبر من هذا القانون لعدم وجود ثغرة “الهارتبليد” التي، باالضافة الى ذلك.قوانين لتحافظ على خصوصيتنا من سيرفرات االنترنت والتي سهلت للهاكرز سهولة الدخول٪١٨ اصابت ان الثغرة كانت بمثابة.للسيرفرات المحمية وارقامك السرية بنفس الوقت نحن.الكابوس على االنترنت وايضا كانت صحوة لشركات األنترنت وصناعتها .نعتقد ان خصوصية االنترنت انتهت او بالكاد متمسكة بحبل أمل خفيف لهذا. اإلنترنت مصممة كوسيط لتوصيل األجهزة وليس إلخفاء البيانات:رؤيتنا ولكن يمكنهم.نستخدم أنظمة التشفير في المتصفحات والبريد اإللكتروني يمكنك تأخيرهم لمدة معينة ولكن في.الوصول إليك إذا ما أرادوا ذلك .نهاية المطاف سيحصلون على بعض البيانات حول نشاطك على اإلنترنت (بعيدا عن رأي كاتب المقالة) فإنه من المعيب إستخدام اإلنترنت الصطيادك وابق على، واذا لم يكن أي شيء تخفيه فأنت بالجانب اآلمن.والتجسس عليك .هذا النحو
The illusion of privacy We read an article that talks about the illusion of online privacy and how to disappear almost completely. The writer was talking about no matter how you try to stay away from the internet and cutting your connections online there will be a way to track you down. He talked about the NSA's PRISM program that was collecting your emails, videos, photos and spying on your call and VoIP data as well. The big companies said they don’t know about it and some did knew. It's all in the US but we think in our region it's bigger than that with no acts or rules to save our privacy. Moreover, The Heartbleed bug that hit almost 18% of the internet servers and enabled hackers to easily access both secure servers and your passwords at the same time. It is one of the internet nightmares and a wake-up call to the internet industry. We highly think that the online privacy is dead or its barely still hanging on a thin thread. Our insight: The internet designed to communicate
between devices not for hiding information. That’s why we use the encryption protocol in web browsers and email apps. But, if they want you they can get you. You can delay them for awhile but they will find some metadata about your online activities. (Despite the political opinion we have) this is just a shame for using the internet to hunt you and spy on you. But, if you don’t have nothing to hide then you are on the safe side, and keep it that way. Yousif AlSaeed Saad Almseikan A burger lover who works as a Computer Technician during the day. Saad has a curious mind that likes to discover everything new that's related to computers, hardware, gadgets and technology. You'll most probably find him holding a burger while playing with a new gadget. He is 27 years old, loves Mixed Martial Arts. Music is what keeps him going especially Rock & Roll.
96
citypageskuwait.com
Yousif holds a BSc. in Information Technology & Computing Degree and is a Teacher and Software Developer. He loves sharing the latest technology news and gadgets with people. Yousif believes that behind everything in the tech-world is a great story. He spends most of his time reading technology blogs and self development.
Google I/O 2014 Google I/O is an annual developer-focused conference by Google features the latest releases, informations about Android, Chrome web browser, Chrome OS, Google APIs and Apps. At first, They announce “Android One” phone. It will be under 100$ for the people who can’t afford 600$+ smartphones. Google announce the next version of the Android operating system, It will be named “L” and its a functional overhaul of the Google new ecosystem. It will connect all your android enabled devices together and make them all sync seamlessly. The new design of Android going beyond the mobile phone to the tablet, TV screen, watch and even the car. These are some of the many features that the new Android have: Android Wear: Motorla, LG and Samsung, Google puts them together as key players before Apple. Android Gear using the same tools as phones and tablets and they going to release Android Wear SDK. Android TV: A TV with Android L OS. Android TV will bring your search results from your smartphone or smart watch. For gamers, You can stream and play your favourites games from your Android to your Android TV. Android Auto: A redesigned Android dedicated for cars. So you can plug your Android phone into the car system and it will mirror your phone to your car`s system display. The Google map app is just amazing in this Android version. Its gonna be available in the near future in almost all the auto companies. Its Apple`s CarPlay competitor. Chromcast: A lot of features added like mirroring your Android device and bringing your photos to your TV. Chromebook: Connecting your phone with your Chromebook, getting calls and messages notification, unlocking your chrome if your phone is near you without putting your password (thanks to the authentication feature). Also, Google announce they are working to enable Chrome OS to run Android apps (no specific date). After brief review about the new Android L and ChromeOS, let’s talk about the other services from Google: Google Cloud: The cloud engine has been improved. Developers now can debug their apps and monitor their performances while running on hundreds of servers. Google Fit: It’s an open, multi-OS API for fitness apps and devices. It will put all the user’s fitness data into one place. Google Play: Gamers can create profile to show/follow their game progress, leaderboards and quests.
Fire Phone, Amazon's first smartphone Well, why not they say. They already have a great line-up of tablets and one-of-a-kind reading tablet “Paperwhite”, so why not a phone! With customer care in their sight and putting it first, with focus on Amazon Prime. With “Dynamic Perspective” technology that responds to how you hold, view, and move your phone. “FireFly” Technology that quickly identify items, products, texts, sounds, phone numbers, QR codes and over 100 million items with a single dedicated button. The hardware is quite good, A 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, combined with 2GB of RAM. 4.7” HD Display, 13MP camera with optical image stabilisation, and free unlimited cloud storage. So far the phone is for use in the US only, hopefully it will be available to the world very soon.
June, 2014
98
citypageskuwait.com
شهر الخير و العطاء نحمد اهلل تعالى جميعًا الذي أبلغنا شهر رمضان هذا العام ونحن على احسن حال ،نبدأ بالدعاء لليوم فيه َع ْن َن ْو َم ِة فيه مينَ ،و َن ِّب ْهني ِ مينَ ،و ِقيامي ِ اج َع ْل ِصيامي ِ قيام ا ْلقا ِئ َ الصا ِئ َ األول " اَل ّل ُ يام ّ ـه َّم ْ َ فيه ِص َ ُ ْ ُ َ مين" . ر مج ل ا ن ع يًا عاف يا ّي ن ع ف اع و ، مين ل عا ل ا لـه ا يا فيه مي ر ج لى ب ه و ا ْل ِ ِ َ ْ ْ ِ َ غاف َ ِ ِ َ َ َ ْ لينْ َ َ ، ُ ْ َ كلنا نرغب اآلن بتقديم التهاني لعائلتنا الكريمة واألقارب واألصدقاء وبالطبع التكنولوجيا دائما تحت أيدينا ،لذلك يمكنك بسهولة تحميل تطبيق " تهاني رمضان" على االندرويد أو االبستور .ومن خالله ً يمكنك ارسال التهاني عن طريق ال SMSو البريد االلكتروني والفيسبوك والتويتر والوتساب .باالضافة الى امكانية استغالل التكنولوجيا لهاتفك الذكي بتحميل تطبيق القرآن الكريم وأدعية رمضان اليومية و أوقات الصلوات .ولفت انتباهي تطبيق يستحق تحميله يحمل اسم " مساجد الكويت" فهو
يتيح لك معرفة المساجد القريبة منك بسهولة تامة ،حيث يتمتع بخاصية ال" "�Navi "gationلسهولة الوصول الى المسجد ،ويعرض لك الوقت المتبقي للصالة التالية وامكانية البحث باسم المسجد. رمضان فرصة عظيمة لخلق أجواء دينية في العائله واألبناء ،ويمكنك تحميل تطبيق قصص األنبياء لتعليم االطفال على تاريخ األنبياء حيث يحتوي التطبيق على قصص األنبياء بالفيديو ويمكنهم أيضا قراءتها .ويمكن لألم أيضا بتحميل تطبيقات خاصة بالمطبخ والطعام ،حيث يسهل عليها اعداد وصفات جديدة في شهر رمضان . تطبيقات التواصل االجتماعية مثل الفيسبوك ,جوجل بلس ,واالنستغرام .تزيد تفاعال ونشاطا خالل هذا الشهر الفضيل ,فليكن تواصلنا بالخير والعطاء .واالبتعاد عن االستخدام السيئ من خالل هذه التطبيقات أو غيرها. مع تمنياتي لكم بأيام مليئة بالخير والعطاء وأن يتقبل اهلل طاعتكم ،،، 99
July, 2014
Faisal Ben Dhofari General manager / Owner Click integrated Media Solutions
My name is Sherifa AlAsousi. I am a chef .and owner of Sugar Box Bakery. My concept is to travel the world looking for exotic flavors. I plan to make a change in one dish at a time. I live, love, eat and enjoy every moment and that's how I do it! From the city of spices: Location: Mumbai, India Inspiration: Cinnamon & Coconut Dish: Spinach Rice & Shrimp Curry Namaste from Mumbai - the city of spices; A place where colors are everywhere. How can you resist a colorful dish coming from a colorful culture. I can't! And that's what inspired me to create my own dish that takes me back to Mumbai every time I have it. Lets start ... 100
citypageskuwait.com
Shrimp Curry: You will need: n2
cups of medium size shrimps (frozen or fresh)
nLemon
of cinnamon powder / salt / pepper all added to taste
nCilantro nHail
for garnish
seeds
Directions: 1.Heat olive oil in a medium sized sauté pan on medium heat. Add the chopped onion & garlic. Cook for about 5 minutes. Add the curry powder, cardamom & salt Cook for two more minutes.
Spinach Rice: You will need: n1
cup of rice. (for two person)
nfrozen
chopped spinach, thawed and drained (about 1 cup)
2.Slowly blend the coconut powder with whipped cream in a separate bowl (add milk if the mixture is to thick) 3. Add the mixture to your sauté pan and blend gently. 4.Add the marinated shrimps to the curry sauce and spread out evenly in the pan. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the shrimp has turned from grey to pink and is just cooked through. Do not overcook or the shrimp will be rubbery.
n½
small onion, roughly chopped (about ½ cup)
n¼
cup fresh cilantro
5.Throw in 2 hail seeds & 2 cinnamon sticks & cover the pan leaving it for 2 minutes on slow fire (keep in mind not to over cook the shrimps)
n¼
Serve with cilantro for garnish.
n¼
small garlic, roughly chopped
Note: marinate the Shrimp an hour before with lemon sauce & cinnamon powder and keep in fridge.
nsalt,
garlic powder, coriander (all added to taste)
nOlive
oil
Directions: 1.Add 1 cup water, spinach, onion, cilantro, and garlic to bowl of blender. Puree until mixture is bright green and smooth, about 2 minutes; set aside. 2.Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium-high heat; add rice. Cook, stirring occasionally, until rice is coated in oil, about 1 minute. Add reserved spinach mixture. Stir to distribute rice evenly. Bring liquid to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer, covered, until rice is tender and water is absorbed, about 25 minutes. 3.Remove pot from heat. Gently stir in cheese. Serve warm. July, 2014
101
Geoffroy d'Anglejan Managing Director - La Maison du Chocolat
Leading the company on a trajectory of expansion La Maison du Chocolat has expanded in the Middle East with the opening of a new boutique in The Avenues, Kuwait. The exclusive French chocolatier will be showcasing its savoir-faire and craftsmanship through its legendary chocolates, each created by hand with inimitable know-how and limitless innovation. The Kuwaiti boutique is the Maison’s second in the region, following the opening in Dubai last year. Geoffroy d'Anglejan, Managing Director of La Maison du Chocolat, came himself for the inauguration ceremony. Of those satisfied not just with optimizing the status quo but rather seeking constant development. Since joining La Maison du Chocolat in 1995, under his impetus and with the support of those around him, Geoffroy d'Anglejan forged an artisanal enterprise into an international luxury brand. CityPages had a chance to meet him in person. Here he tells us why La Maison du Chocolat is not just any chocolate brand. Read on to know more about it.
102
July, 2014 June,
103
Can you please tell us a little about the the signature taste of our Maison, where the New Jersey - Japan: Tokyo and Osaka - Hong focus is always on chocolate. history of the brand? Kong - GCC: Dubai and Kuwait) and has La Maison du Chocolat started from humble but noble beginnings in a basement shop in Paris in 1977. The founder Robert Linxe was the first person to dare open a shop purely devoted to the creation of chocolates. Many thought him mad at the time, when typically chocolate was only consumed at Easter and Xmas. The second store opened again in Paris ten years later and then in 1990 the company ventured overseas to New York where simultaneously it launched its now famous chocolate ĂŠclair. In 1998 the first store opened in Japan, in Omote Sando. Today La Maison du Chocolat has boutiques throughout the world.
What goes into crafting at La Maison du Chocolat? In our Maison, the products are made in an artisan tradition. We nurture a ‘savoir-faire’ of taste and technique for all our products and all our creations. This has been the key to the success of our Maison for the last 36years. Our chocolates exemplify the utmost quality in line with our values of craftsmanship and 104
citypageskuwait.com
38 boutiques with the most selective and What differentiates La Maison du prestigious addresses worldwide, in the heart of major cities, department stores, and Chocolat from others? retail areas of airports. In France, Robert Linxe with La Maison du Chocolat is recognized as the innovator of timeless, luxury chocolate, offering How many of different varieties of exceptional products year round. Robert chocolate do you store in one location? Linxe inspired many French chocolatier On an average, 35 types of chocolate vocations. They in turn attribute to him the are presented in the display cases in the finesse of unique construction, the art of boutiques, configured as follows: 9 pralines, balance and excellence of taste. 6 plain ganaches, 11 flavoured ganaches and The signature Maison taste reveals its difference with the competition with a threepart approach to the art of degustation. For La Maison du Chocolat, the sensations succeed each other but must never mask the chocolate: 1 chocolate 2- fruit, spice, or infusion 3- chocolate.
How many worldwide?
do
you
9 gourmandises. Each year about a dozen seasonal chocolates are offered destined for family holidays, seasonal coffrets, and prestigious pieces. Among the 35 different types of chocolate 1/3 are made of milk chocolate and 2/3 of dark chocolate.
According to you how important is the have location for your brand?
It is a very good question. In France we Today La Maison du Chocolat is located in say "three things are very important for seven countries (France: Paris, Cannes and business and trading i.e. location, location, Airports - UK: London - USA: New York and and location". And that is also the case with
chocolate and for brand like ours I would say we have two goals first we like a place that supports peoples’ traffic and second is environment so location should have these two elements and this location in The Avenues best supports these two important requirements.
cacao butter and by not adding too much sugar.
Are there any specific challenges that you face with your business?
As we are developing the brand step by step so the main challenge for now is to maintain the high standard in manufacturing chocolate, creating new recipes and opening Are you planning to offer any special new shops. We have to take care of all the details and maintain the quality. services for the Kuwaiti market? Yes, as we all know that weddings are big occasions in the Middle East. So we will add a new service especially designed for this part of the world where people will be able to bring their own trays and crystals to us and we will fill them with chocolates. And very soon we will have our own crystal ware and trays.
Your message for our readers:
First of all, I would like to thank you for this interview and I would say that I am very happy to be here in Kuwait. We have a lot of Kuwaiti customers in France and we are here because of their popular demand. We are happy that finally we have a shop in Kuwait as well to give Kuwaiti community a It is a common belief that chocolate memorable experience.
is not healthy. Did you face any difficulties because of this belief?
It is a very important question in our business. Chocolate in itself is healthy, it is the excessive sugar and other additives that makes it unhealthy. We take care of it by choosing best raw materials i.e. cacao beans, July, 2014
105
PORTUGAL Despite being relatively restricted to an Atlantic sustenance, Portuguese cuisine has many Mediterranean influences, especially in the wide variety of spices used. These spices include piri piri (small, fiery chilli peppers) and black pepper, as well as cinnamon, vanilla and saffron. Olive oil is one of the bases of Portuguese cuisine both for cooking and flavouring meals. This month we are transporting you to Portugal for a sweet and savory taste adventure and we will be exploring with some of these spices, such as vanilla, black pepper and of course Olive Oil. Both of these dishes are so easy to make and takes about an hour to prepare‌. and will be devoured within 5 minutes of serving. Enjoy with loved ones!
106
PORTUGUESE DATE ROLLS A.K.A. DIABLOS
PASTEIS DE NATA – PORTUGUESE CUSTARD TARTS
These salty sweet bites are so easy to make and is very moreish, perfect for an appetizer or just a snack with friends at a laid back dinner party.
A childhood favorite amongst many of my friends, and an easy and delicious sweet treat to enjoy after Iftar. I cheated a bit with the puff pastry as it is a time consuming task but don’t worry, it still tastes amazing.
INGREDIENTS: INGREDIENTS: 24 dates – pitted 12 slices of turkey bacon (breakfast slices) 1 tsp chili flakes (piri piri chilis are not readily available in Kuwait) 1 clove garlic chopped 1 tablespoon olive oil METHOD: 1. Slice turkey bacon in half, vertically 2. Wrap whole date in bacon and secure with a toothpick 3. Heat olive oil in a shallow pan 4. Add chili flakes and garlic to olive oil 5. Sauté the bacon wrapped dates until golden brown
1 cup milk 3 tablespoons cornstarch 1/2 vanilla bean 1 cup white sugar 6 egg yolks 1 (17.5 ounce) package frozen puff pastry, thawed METHOD 1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees C. Lightly grease 12 muffin cups and line bottom and sides with puff pastry. 2. In a saucepan, combine milk, cornstarch, sugar and vanilla. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Place egg yolks in a medium bowl. Slowly whisk 1/2 cup of hot milk mixture into egg yolks. Gradually add egg yolk mixture back to remaining milk mixture, whisking constantly. Cook, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes, or until thickened. Remove vanilla bean. 3. Fill pastry-lined muffin cups with mixture and bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes, or until crust is golden brown and filling is lightly browned on top.
July, 2014
107
Explore a harmony of Ramadan delights with Dean & Deluca
Enjoy world-famous gourmet food in the café, at home or while visiting Dean & Deluca, the defining brand in gourmet food around the world, is celebrating the holy month of Ramadan this year with inviting food items across their café and take home departments, as well as their signature line of coveted products. Whether cooking at home, visiting loved ones or dining at the café, customers can savor the purveyor of fine food’s traditional delicacies and global gourmet delights. From iftar to suhoor, Dean & Deluca has all you need to enjoy the special flavors of this month. Customers can gather at the café with friends and family to savor a truly exceptional feast for iftar, or satisfy their cravings with a special selection for ghabga and suhoor. The rich selection of starters and mezze, including fresh salads and tempting hot and cold appetizers, and an assortment of sumptuous main courses including items such as stuffed vine leaves, Basha w’ Asakrow, and Dean & Deluca’s exceptional Lamb Freekah and Rice Mansaf, are certainly not to be missed. Enticing delicious desserts round off the truly unique festival of tastes, featuring essential Ramadan treats such as Qataief and Kunafeh Kursi Al’sultan.
108
citypageskuwait.com
When you are visiting loved ones, Dean & Deluca has the perfect offering of traditional Arabian sweets, handmade in store from premium ingredients and widely beloved as both a gift and indulgent treat, such as Lgaimat, Maamoul and freshly made Baklawas. With over 500 new products available in store including the finest extra virgin olive oils from Italy, roasted coffee beans from Cuba, beautiful blue cheeses from France and hand carved wild smoked Salmon from Scotland, Dean & Deluca can provide exceptional gift baskets, either ready-made or individually customized with a personal selection of the brand’s fine gourmet foods. Featuring a selection of delectable goodies and mouthwatering treats like handcrafted chocolates, a wide range of savories, the finest dried fruits, nuts and teas, the baskets can be accompanied with the best selection of exquisite dates in trays or boxes, making Dean & Deluca the perfect choice for every visit. Explore the harmony of Ramadan offerings available in Dean & Deluca at 2nd Avenue -The Avenues.
July, 2014
109
A new take on modernity in K-town
“MODERN” is a term so routinely invoked in fashion-speak that it lost its meaning long ago. But without quite intending it, JNBY, which stands for Just Naturally Be Yourself, a contemporary fashion apparel brand, has revitalized that concept, lending “modern” a nearprophetic ring. The name JNBY (‘Just Naturally Be Yourself’) is rather Chinglishy, but the look is fashion-forward and innovative, and it has a significant presence overseas, with more than 700 retail stores throughout Asia, Europe and the US. With a contemporary aesthetic based on using all natural materials, Chinese label JNBY is one of the first all-sustainable fashion brands to open a flagship in Kuwait. Launched in 1994 in China’s textile capital Hangzhou by designer Li Lin, the brand has an edgy, postmodernist vibe and is inspired by music, art and architecture. Today, JNBY is an international specialty retailer that operates with a linear business module to incorporate all aspects from product development, production, logistics to retail and customer service. It is one of the most influential brands in China, and has successfully gained recognition in foreign markets with the support of its clients. Some of you have heard of clothing with personality, well then JNBY 110
citypageskuwait.com
is the place to get them. JNBY combines innovative style and design, inspired by fashion trends, art and industrial design. Beyond the boundary of age and the concept of a wardrobe JNBY targets females aspiring creativity through all life aspects. According to Arwa AlGhanim, the Owner of JNBY Kuwait, “Our targets are the fashion oriented modern women.” If you’re in search of casual, chic, and comfortable styles in the clothing you wear, then JNBY is the place to be. In a value driven economy, JNBY designs are unique and multi-functional allowing the customer to wear their pieces in several different ways, creating added value while offering a high level of quality for a more reasonable price, allowing for a wider range of customers.“JNBY offers products that are both wearable and alluring ”Arwa goes on, “If you compare it to other brands, it’s much wallet-friendly and we have a vast selection of apparel and accessories for women, kids, and men”. Men collection will be launched in September so stay tuned!”. JNBY is located at Shuwaikh's Lily Center, Old Shuwaikh Area Pepsi Cola Street. Opening hours are from 10am to 1pm and from 4:30pm to 9:30pm. Follow them on Instagram @JNBYKUWAIT for latest fashion and news.
July, 2014
JUICY COUTURE FALL 2014 COLLECTION RETURN TO HOLLYWOOD
112
citypageskuwait.com
FALL 2014 FALL 2014 the modern day Halston woman – she is chic, The Fall 14 Halston Heritage collection was inspired by dressing confident, and empowered by the clothes she wears. With a focus on effortless glamour and feminine dressing, Halston classics are reinterpreted in simple, minimal styles and elegant drapes. Statement making hardware touches, modern tailoring, new necklines, and subtle peeks of skin create something unexpected.!!
Building on our iconic DNA, the Fall 14 Halston Heritage collection was inspired by dressing the modern day Halston woman Ð she is chic, conÞdent, and empowered by the clothes she wears. With a focus on effortless glamour and feminine dressing, Halston classics are reinterpreted in simple, minimal styles and elegant drapes. Statement making hardware touches, modern tailoring, new necklines, and subtle peeks of skin create something unexpected.! ! Organic drapes in soft, ßuid fabrics and contrasts of matte with shine and sheer with opaque make for understated sensual styles. Asymmetrical, ßowing drapes are contrasted with sexy slits and leather accents, while peek-a-boo details reveal subtle slivers of skin in necklines, sleeves, and back. French binding on sleeves and hem add a luxurious Þnish to tops, dresses, and bottoms. Shimmering sequins and slight touches of fur add an element of opulence for the season. ! ! The palette is rich and sophisticated. Deep crimsons, teals, and navy are reminiscent of the 70ʼs Halston era, accented with touches of pink and bright blues. Luxe neutrals and cool greyʼs keep the palette feeling fresh and modern. A dash of metallic gold offers added dimension and a luxurious touch. Prints have a natural, organic feel that add texture and lightness to the palette. ! ! ! July, 2014 ! !
113
شركة داغر و حناوي تطلق العالمة التجارية الفرنسية "كارول"
أطلقت شركة داغر وحناوي العالمة التجارية الفرنسية (كارول) للمالبس اجلاهزة في الكويت ليكون بذلك أول متجر مت إفتتاحه في دول اخلليج العربي ،تتميز العالمة التجارية بتشكيلة أزياء كالسيكية مع ملسات عصرية وألوان متنوعة تناسب جميع األزواق ،مت إنشاء وإفتتاح أول بوتيك للعالمة التجارية (كارول) عام 1963في باريس ،ومن خالل مؤسسوا العالمة رافاييل ليفي وجوزيف بيجيو لتصبح مع الوقت عالمة جتارية عاملية حيث يتواجد األن 462متجر لكارول حول العالم .وأفتتحت الشركة أول متاجرها لعالمة (كارول) في األفنيوز مول ،املرحلة األولى الطابق األول ،ليكون بدوره إضافة جديدة وفريدة من نوعها لعالم جمال املرأة، تضمن متجر (كارول) تشكيلة منوعة ومميزه من مالبس النساء لربيع وصيف أحدث صيحات املوضة الفرنسية ،2014حلظات ال تنسى من اجلمال تظهر عبر أزياء ساحرة تدهش كل من يراها .وقد إستعانت الشركة بالستايلست ومصممة األزياء الكويتية سها العوضي صاحبة ماركة ( )the drezzواحلاصلة على شهادة موثقه لتجهيز العرائس في يوم اإلفتتاح للتركيز على أحدث صيحات املوضة ،وقد مت جتهيز قسم خاص داخل املتجر حيث تقوم سها العوضي بعرض مختاراتها من (كارول) مبا يتناسب مع املوضة بدولة الكويت. citypageskuwait.com
114
Emporio Armani New Fall / Winter 2014/2015 Campaign
July, 2014
115
The Rado Esenza Ceramic Touch Fibonacci Diamonds Limited Edition At Baselworld 2013 Rado presented a world first in watchmaking with the Rado Esenza Ceramic Touch. Now the Esenza Ceramic Touch returns and it is more glamorous than ever before. The gleaming black high-tech ceramic case is a sleek and subtle background with its gently curved, sensuous oval shape. Smooth, strokable and scratch-resistant it is the perfect material to showcase the 534 individual diamonds that adorn the dial of this innovative model.
dition
The glittering gems, set in a Fibonacci spiral, call to mind the organic patterns seen in nature in flowers, and underline the kaleidoscopic beauty of this ladies model. This mesmerising mathematical marvel also alludes to the technology behind this outstanding piece of functional jewellery.
esented a world Esenza Ceramic
ckground with its resistant it is the n the dial of this
patterns seen in dies model. This gy behind this
of the case – left e turned back in
arried out under success of the
combination of nacci Diamonds
Max unveils the latest Summer Collection
WOMEN’S PRE-FALL 2014
OrquĂdeas Stunning jewels of extraordinary beauty
The New Allegra Bracelet Collection in de GRISOGONO boutique Enter the world of infinite spirals and colorful rainbows. Diamonds, sapphires, Emeralds, tsavorites create spontaneous swirls of light and luster, like the leaping flames of a bonfire, high-energy, high style. The Allegra Bracelet shares a woman’s most treasured moments, a cool and relaxed day or an intimate candlelight dinner. These precious and unforgettable memories belong to her and her Allegra Bracelet. Named after the eldest daughter of Fawaz Gruosi, the new Allegra Bracelet Collection comes in pink and white gold, with a leather band offered in a variety of 10 colors.
July, 2014
117
The latest generation of this extravagant 911 variant now combines the classic Targa concept with highly advanced roof-activating convenience. Just like the legendary original Targa, the new model has the characteristic wide bar instead of the B pillars, a moving roof part above the front seats and a wrap-around rear window without C pillars. Unlike in the older classic models, the roof panel is now opened and closed at the press of a button. The fully automatic roof system stows the roof behind the rear seats in a spectacular way. The latest version of the 911 features the typical Porsche PTM all-wheel drive system that by design transfers proportionately more power to the rear wheels. This system guarantees maxi mum driving performance on a variety of road surfaces and in all weather conditions. Two model versions with all-wheel drive exclusively Like its predecessor, the new generation Targa is launching onto the market in two variants with all-wheel drive exclusively. In the 911 Targa 4, the heart of a 3.4-litre flat-six engine beats with a power output of 257 kW (350 hp). Fitted with PDK and the Sport Chrono package, the new 911 Targa accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.8 seconds and, reaches a top speed of 282 km/h with a manual transmission. NEDC fuel consumption is between 9.5 and 8.7 l/100 km (223-204 g/km CO2), depending on the transmission fitted. The top model is the 911 Targa 4S which develops 294 kW (400 hp) from a 3.8-litre engine. Its top speed is 296 km/h, and it handles the benchmark sprint to 100 km/h in 4.4 seconds when equipped with PDK and the Sport Chrono package. Fuel consumption ranges from 10.0 to 9.2 l/100 km (237-214 g/km CO2), depending on the transmission fitted. So, the car’s en gine and vehicle performance data as well as fuel efficiency are equivalent to those of the 911 Carrera 4 Cabriolet. Both sports cars are certified to the Euro-6 standard.
118
citypageskuwait.com
Beetle Mania builds as Behbehani Motors Company, Volkswagen reveals its special range
The Beetle S is the entry level model and features a multi-function leather wrapped steering wheel; FenderÂŽ Audio System and eight speakers (including dual tuner); an automatic air condition "Climatronic" with dual zone climate control, which can be separately controlled and parking distance control that provides acoustic warning signals at the front and rear of the vehicle.
has a number of distinguishing features including 18-inch alloy "Twister" wheels; a multi-function leather-wrapped steering wheel with gear shift; a transparent tilt/slide sunroof, which is 80 per cent larger (glass surface area) than its predecessor and insulates 99 per cent of UV radiation and 92 per cent of heat energy; bi-xenon headlights including 15 LEDs frame the xenon module on the outer perimeters of the headlights.
The mid entry model, the Beetle SE,
The top line model, Beetle SEL, offers the
features of the S and SEL models but comes with 19-inch alloy “Tornado� wheels; a keyless locking and starting system and the leading radio navigation system - the RNS 510 and the seat centres and inner sides of side bolsters are wrapped in "Vienna" leather. It also offers additional refinements including a 6.5-inch touchscreen, DVD player, voice control, SD card slot, 30 Gigabyte hard drive and a mobile device interface with ipod/iphone adapter cable. July, 2014
119
At the Thank You Dinner Hosted by Amirah AlShaalan
At the Launch fo the New Collection of the Bella Clear Vision Lenses
120
At the Launch of the New BMW BMW i8 in Kuwait.
At the Zain Social Media Day
July, 2014
At the Ramadan Ghabqa for Media at the Marina Hotel
At the Ramadan Ghabqa for Media at the J. W. Marriott Hotel
At the Opening of Pizza Milano at the Avenues Mall
July, 2014
At the Ramadan Collection Preview of The Blue Door Boutique
At the Ramadan Ghabqa for Media at the Marriott Hotel
At the New Store Opening of RIVA Fashion at the Gate Mall
130
At Whats The Occassion - Ramadan and Eid Exo at 360 Mall
CONTACT US FOR LIVE COVERAGE OF YOUR EVENTS [email protected]
July, 2014
131
FROM THE PRESS
Shaikha Dana Nasser Al-Sabah Honors AUK Staff and Faculty in Commemoration of the University’s 10th Anniversary KidZania Kuwait Starts 1st Birthday Celebrations With International Award Recognition
Celebrations for the first birthday of KidZania Kuwait started early this month when the exciting kid-sized metropolis received international recognition at the Global Retail & Leisure International (RLI) Awards, held in London on 5th June. The prestigious awards recognise global excellence within the retail and leisure industry. For an amazing sixth year in a row KidZania, which was established in Mexico in 1999, and which opened in Kuwait on 17 June 2013, was announced as the overall ‘Global Leisure Operator’ winner. The award celebrated the innovative nature of KidZania’s offer to its young customers, as well as recognising the strength of its global performance and international brand recognition. KidZania Kuwait, located at The Mall - The Avenues, allows children between the ages of 4 and 14 to role-play over 80 different realworld jobs in a safe, child-sized city complete with scaled down buildings, streets and vehicles. In its first year the park has been pleased to welcome thousands of young visitors to enjoy its unique ‘edutainment’ offer. In recognition of the ‘extraordinary experience it has delivered to kids across Kuwait’, the RLI judges presented KidZania Kuwait with a ‘Highly Commended’ ranking in the ‘Most Innovative Retail and Leisure Concept’ award category. Commenting on KidZania Kuwait’s dual award wins, Fernando Medroa, Vice President of Leisure & Entertainment at M.H. Alshaya Co., said: “We have worked very hard, in collaboration with our industry parties, to create an unequalled leisure experience at KidZania Kuwait. It is great to have received global recognition for our efforts and receiving these awards, just as we celebrate our first anniversary, is perfect timing. The whole KidZania team look forward to celebrating this success with our visitors. ” KidZania Kuwait marks its first anniversary in Kuwait with a 10 day celebration running from June 12 to June 21. This will feature an exciting range of events that will be announced shortly.
132
citypageskuwait.com
Ford Builds on Advanced Materials Use in All-New F-150 with Lightweight Concept Car
In a remarkable banquet held at Shaikha Salwa Al-Sabah Ballroom, the American University of Kuwait celebrated its decade of accomplishments with its Board of Trustees, management, faculty and staff. The highlight of this year’s event was a keynote speech given by Shaikha Dana Nasser Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah, Founder and Chair of the AUK Broad of Trustees, in which she acknowledged the AUK faculty and staff for their “commitment, service and effort” throughout the past 10 years. During her commemorative speech, Al Sabah analogized the AUK start-up phase to giving birth to a new human being. “AUK was born out of sheer will and determination. Similar to the experience of every mother, I and others felt a huge responsibility toward its growth and success,” said Al Sabah, who described the 10year journey of AUK as “everything but easy”. As a founder of AUK, Al Sabah looked back at the 10-year life of AUK as a collaborative endeavor that “many hands and minds” helped to create. “For all of us AUK was a first. We labored, guided, made good and sometimes not so good decisions, we tried to correct, we were successful in part, and were challenged by the expected, as well as the unexpected. But despite all of the ups and downs, we moved forward, and we made every attempt at holding the course and the direction,” she said Al Sabah concluded her speech by a notable statement that encapsulated the mission of AUK, saying that “Through our students and alumni, we have given this nation an opportunity to Learn, Think and Become.” Held at the end of each academic year, the AUK Annual Dinner brings together the University management, faculty and staff members in celebration of their dedicated services. During the event, “10 Years of Service” and “5 Years of Service” awards are presented to employees who completed the relevant service years at AUK. This year, two additional award categories were added to include; the “AUK Start-up Team” award- granted to the 19 faculty and staff members who joined AUK before it started its operations in 2003; and the “AUK Board of Trustees” award granted to the found members of the AUK Board of Trustees. In addition to the awards ceremony, the evening also featured a special documentary exclusively produced for the event, and chronicling AUK’s achievements through the eyes of its alumni. The ambiance of the evening was enriched by a live piano performance presented by AUK student Faisal Al-Buhairi.
Ford Motor Company recently unveiled its Lightweight Concept vehicle, which uses advanced materials to explore future weightreduction solutions that could improve performance and fuel efficiency while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The vehicle represents the latest phase of Ford’s research into developing sustainable technology solutions that are affordable for consumers and can be produced in large volumes across the product lineup. This research has also led to dramatic weight reductions of up to 700 pounds in the all-new F-150. The 2015 F-150 sheds weight through the use of high-strength steel and aluminum, enabling it to tow more, haul more, accelerate quicker and stop shorter – all with improved gas mileage. “Consumers today want better fuel efficiency, but they also want more technology and features in the car, which usually adds weight to the vehicle,” said Raj Nair, Ford group vice president, Global Product Development. “A focus on light-weighting will be fundamental to our industry for years to come, and we are investigating many advanced materials applications as possible solutions for weight reduction in our vehicles.” Light-weighting is a key component in Ford’s Blueprint for Sustainability, which integrates sustainability into the business plan for the long-term preservation and enhancement of environmental, social and financial capital. The introduction and incorporation of lightweight materials into vehicle construction helps meet the goal of reducing weight to achieve better fuel economy for consumers while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ford research into improved efficiency through weight reduction with advanced materials including new metals, alloys and composites began more than 25 years ago. This research produced the breakthrough Aluminum Intensive Vehicle program in 1992 and all-aluminum highperformance Ford GT in 2005. Along with other fuel-efficiency technologies, light-weighting is fundamental to Ford’s efforts to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million – the level many scientists, businesses and governmental agencies believe may avoid the most serious effects of climate change.
Diabetes and Tuberculosis: Preventing
and Managing a Double Burden - An International Technical Meeting at Dasman Diabetes Institute
This week the Dasman Diabetes Institute, which was established by Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS), and the International Centre for Migration Health and Development (ICMHD) concluded a twoday meeting on the subject of diabetes and tuberculosis. The meeting, which was opened by Dr Hilal Al-Sayer, former minister of health, was held at the Dasman Diabetes Institute on 22-23 June, 2014. It brought together over 60 participants from health professions including experts from China, Qatar, the UK and USA as well as Kuwait. The meeting was called because of the growing global problem of diabetes and TB and the need for urgent action to prevent the situation from becoming worse. Over 350 million people in the world are now living with diabetes and the number of people being disabled and dying from diabetes-associated causes is growing. Kuwait is one of the 10 most affected countries in the world. Globally tuberculosis is also on the increase again and in Geneva the World Health Organization has declared the situation a global emergency and appealed to governments to take action. The experts discussed the relationship between diabetes and tuberculosis and concluded that the evidence from many countries confirms that people living with diabetes are three to four times more likely to develop tuberculosis than other people. The implications of this double burden are enormous for the patients concerned, their families and the health care systems in the countries they live in. The number of work days lost and the impact on family life is far-reaching, and the cost of treatment is escalating. If action is not taken quickly the combination of these two diseases could easily threaten the development of countries, including Kuwait. In view of the seriousness of the emerging situation the experts recommended that diabetes and tuberculosis specialists in Kuwait should immediately begin to work more closely together to share information and develop new and common strategies to fight these diseases. They recommended that Dasman Diabetes Institute and the Ministry of Health should help develop guidelines and standard operating procedures that can be followed by all medical staff dealing with diabetes and tuberculosis. They specifically asked Dasman Diabetes Institute to develop research initiatives that encompass the basic science, clinical management, and public health aspects of the problem, and specifically asked Dasman Diabetes Institute to immediately assess how big of a problem Kuwait is faced with and how best to intervene to prevent it from becoming worse in the surrounding regions as well as in Kuwait. In this regard they commended the growing international prominence of Dasman Diabetes Institute and the fact that it has recently been designated as the GCC Referral Centre for diabetes.
TWO NEWCOMERS JOIN THE INGENIEUR WATCH LINE FROM IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN
IWC Schaffhausen unveils two magnificent new additions to the Ingenieurwatch family. In its role as Official Engineering Partner of the MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS Formula One™ Team, the Swiss watch manufacturer has been inspired to create new works of haute horlogerie.Limited to an edition of just 1,000, the Ingenieur Automatic Carbon Performance Ceramic, for example,features materials typically found in motor racing.The Ingenieur Dual Time has a second display that enables the wearer to retain his orientation despite the constant changes of time zone during the racing season. The new models take to the grid in two different designs: the Ingenieur Automatic Carbon Performance Ceramic (Ref. IW322404) is a thoroughbred sports watch with a case inspired by the materials used in FORMULA ONE motor racing, while the Ingenieur Dual Time (Ref. IW324402/ IW324404), a powerful-looking timepiece in a stainlesssteel case, has a rather more classic appearance. Quintessentially purist, functional and technically sophisticated, the two new watches embody the best of the IWC Ingenieurline’s 60-year history.
American University School of Kuwait celebrates the end of its first year
The American University School of Kuwait (AUS), the country’s most technologicallyadvanced 21st century creative learning private school, celebrated the end of the school year with promotion ceremonies for the 104 students enrolled in Pre-Kindergarten to grade 5 last week. These promotion ceremonies marked the first year of the school’s establishment, where it recognized the achievements of some of Kuwait’s future leaders as they advanced to their next grade level. AUS invited parents to share the accomplishments of their child in a ceremony that highlighted each student’s milestone efforts this school year. AUS Founding Director, Jennifer J. Beckwith, Ph.D., said, “We are very proud of the achievements of our young students in this first year of our school. AUS was established to offer parents a better educational choice for their children in a 21st century environment that is reinforced with cutting edge educational tools and technologies, and world-class educators who are committed to the progress and success of every child in their classrooms. On behalf of everyone at AUS we thank our parents for putting their trust in us during our inaugural year.” In addition to new and inventive software, AUS uses technological innovations, student tablets, interactive smart boards, child-scaled open classroom areas, to help students excel in an environment that is similar to the digital world they are familiar with today.
فندق هوليداي إن الكويت داون تاون – أجمل األجواء والليالي الرمضانية .بإنتظاركم
.مبارك عليكم الشهر وعساكم من عوادة يهنىء فندق هوليداي إن الكويت داون تاون جميع ضيوفه الكرام بحلول شهر رمضان الكرمي أعاده .اهلل علينا وعلى الكويت باخلير واليمن والبركات وبهذه املناسبة يعلن الفندق عن بدأ إستقبال الضيوف الكرام خالل الشهر الفضيل بخيمة ليالي الشرق الرمضانية بالفندق والتي ستقدم يوميا ً بوفيه إفطار عاملي وشرقي يشمل أطيب املأكوالت واألطباق واحللويات واملشروبات الرمضانية باإلضافة إلى توافر خدمة األرجيلة بأجواء وديكورات اخليمة الرمضانية مع شاشات .عرض كبيرة أيضا سيكون هناك يوميا قائمة إفطار خاصة مبطعم وقهوة فلة الكويتية والتي سنقدم من .خاللها أجمل املأكوالت الكويتية الرائعة
July, 2014
134
citypageskuwait.com
Chocolate lovers rejoice – NIVEA launches Cocoa Butter Lotion & Cream for intensively nourished skin all day long
روائع املطبخ االيطالي اآلن في قلب ""االفنيوز "اجملموعة الثنائية العاملية تفتتح "بيتزا ميالنو بفرعه الثاني عامليا في الكويت
Every woman wants silky, glowing skin that looks healthy, and smooth to the touch. Introducing new NIVEA Cocoa Butter Body Lotion and Cream which not only makes your skin feel well moisturized, but provides richest care and cocoa indulgence. The irresistibly scented range instantly smoothes away dry skin for intensive and long-lasting moisture which keeps skin soft and radiant. According to NIVEA skincare experts, to lock in moisture, you need ingredients that boost the skin’s natural moisture and improve its moistureretaining capacity. The non-sticky innovative formula combines NIVEA’s exclusive Hydra IQ technology with nature identical mositurining ingredients of Cocoa Butter and Vitamin E. All of which gives you irresistibly soft skin, long-lasting skin and a natural healthy glow. Cocoa Butter, a favored body care ingredient of women in the region, is indulgent and intensively nourishes your skin with deep, long-lasting moisture to smooth away dullness. A derivative of the cacao bean, cocoa is commenly used in making chocolate but is also the pefect natural ingredient to use in body lotions, due to its glourious sweet scent, moisturizing properties and skin-smoothing benefits. It remains one of the most popular natural skin moisturising ingredients because it easily melts into the skin and effectively soothes and restores the skin’s natural protective barrier. Due to the high concentration of natural fats within the cocoa bean this ingredient melts easily at body temperature and is rapidly absorbed to retain invisible moisture. When Cocoa Butter lotion is massaged into the skin, it also provides an aroma therapy experience, as the delicious feminine scent envelopes the senses with notes of ylang-ylang, jasmine, warm sensual vanilla and cocoa which further promotes the feelings of relaxation and well-being. Vitamin E, a natural skin-conditioning vitamin with both antioxidant and anti-ageing benefits also enhances the moisture retaining function of the product which can easily be worked into the skin. The NIVEA Cocoa Butter Body Lotion is ideal for many of the skin care needs as it is the perfect solution to deeply nourish dry skin. The NIVEA Natural Cocoa Butter Body Lotion is available in all leading supermarkets
في مركز التسوق االكبر واالشهر في الكويت (االفينيوز) افتتحت اجملموعة الثنائية العاملية الفرع الثاني ملطعم بيتزا ميالنو احد سلسلة مطاعم مجموعة بيتشي االيطالية العاملية مبفهومه االيطالي وبتصميم ديكوره املستوحي من مطاعم مدينة ميالنو األنيقة حيث تضم قائمته أشعى االطباق االيطالية التقليدية والعاملية الفريدة في أجواء مريحة وبإطاللة رائعة على منطقة اجلراند .أفينيو ،وفي افتتاح رسمي ملطعم "بيتزا ميالنو" اجلديد حفل ضم ومدراء شركة اجملموعة الثنائية العاملية وكيل مجموعة بيتشي العاملية في الكويت على أحمد مساعد/رأسهم مدير عام الشركة السيد ،العميري وعدد كبير من رجال الصحافة واالعالم وجمع احلفل بني تقدمي اشهى االطباق االيطالية املعدة من افضل املكونات الطازجة ومهارة اعداد الطعام على ايدي طباخني ايطاليني متمرسني واالستمتاع باملوسيقى االيطالية على أوتار اجليتار لنمنح احلضور الفرصة لالستمتاع بالطعم .واالجواء الساحرة وتضم قائمة طعام "بيتزا ميالنو" تشكيلة متنوعة من املقبالت والسلطات واحلساء ذي باإلضافة الى اطباق الباستا،النكهات املتنوعة ،الشهية والبيتزا التي متثل جوهر تخصص املطعم فضالً عن أطباق الريزوتو واالطباق الرئيسية من .اللحوم والدجاج واألجبان اإليطالية الطازجة تصل اجلودة في،وعند االنتقال الى قائمة احللويات حيث يوفر مطعم،الوصفات االيطالية الى اوجها "بيتزا ميالنو" املتخصص في كافة الوجبات تشكيلة متنوعة من احللويات،االيطالية الشهية التي تختتم امسية الطعام الشهي بنكهات ال .تقارن تترك مذاق ال ينسى ويعد هذا هو الفرع الثاني لـ "بيتزا ميالنو" في حيث يتواجد املطعم في برج احلمرا،الكويت العميري عن االعمال/ فيما كشف السيد،للتسوق سيتم االعالن عنه،اجلارية الفتتاح مطعم ثالث ملزيد من التوسع وليكون قريب،خالل الفترة املقبلة من عشاق الطعم االيطالي الشهي في كافة .مناطق الكويت أعرب عن سعادته باالقبال الكبير،ومن جهته "الذي شهده حفل افتتاح مطعم "بيتزا ميالنو ً مشيرا،بنسخته الثانية في مبجمع االفنيوز ،الى املكانة الكبيرة التي توصل اليها املطعم املتخصص في جميع االكالت االيطالية من نبع . بفضل زبائنه وعمالئه،مدينة ميالنو "ووعد املير العام بأن يظل يقدم "بيتزا ميالنو العديد والعديد من املفاجئات واالطباق املتميزة مبينا ً انه،واالكالت الشهية التي يعشقها زبائنه اال ان،رغم تعدد املطاعم االيطالية في الكويت االفضلية تظل للمتميز والقادر على تقدمي اجلودة في اسمى اشكالها الى ايدي محبي الطعم .االصيل
Paul at Tavern ll launches Ramadan Menu - “The Iftar at Paul is like no others!!!”
Swarovski Women’s Watch Collection 2014
The Maison De Qualité PAUL in its new branch at Tavern ll, greets the Kuwaiti community during the occasion of the Holy month of Ramadan and offers a unique mouthwatering menu inspired from the tradition of this month. The authentic French cuisine, worldly renowned for its state of the art diversified menu offers a delicious Iftar with a rich choice of tasteful Ramadan specialties. The restaurant visitors will enjoy breaking their fasting with the Ramadan drink the Jallab then indulge themselves with either the red capsicum soup or the traditional lentil soup. At PAUL, the Ramadan menu will feature Kuwait favorite meals inspired by his “In Search of Perfection”, including the salads of choice which varies from the Salade de Patates, a combination of tasty ingredients of baby potato, cherry tomato, artichoke hearts, fresh mushroom, asparagus, goat cheese, green salad, topped up with vinaigrette dressing and the Salade de quinoa et crevettes with quinoa, boiled shrimp, cherry tomato, grilled marrow, broccoli, and green beans served with balsamic pesto dressing. Upon first glance at the menu, visitors alike will also recognize the diversity of the main course matching different tastes including the famous French specialty Boeuf Bourguignon and the Loup de mer grillé, a grilled sea bass filet and a rich assortment of vegetables served with rice and the Poitrine de poulet grillé served with pasta, spinach and feta cheese. After a long day of fasting, PAUL treats its customers with a Tarte campagnarde aux dattes and a Tarte campagnarde aux noix et raisins secs with the true taste of the French pastries! At PAUL, we offer a delicious Iftar menu in a unique atmosphere; said Christian Salloum, PAUL Senior brand manager. “ While designing the new Iftar menu, we were keen to cater to the different culinary preferences reflecting a balanced healthy meal, and we are hoping we’ve created French twisted dishes that will appeal to everyone during the Holy month of Ramadan.
Combining a rich jewelry heritage, a spirit for innovation and the high precision of Swiss watch making, Swarovski offers impeccable timepieces infused with an inimitable touch of glamour. Be it for everyday wear or for special occasions, the watch collection comprises pieces that reflect Swarovski’s esthetic codes, expert crystal faceting, and a true passion for the detail. Swarovski unveils at Baselword three new lines for 2014 as well as re-colorings of many popular designs.
July, 2014
135
Lebanese Embassy honors its employees
The Lebanese ambassador in Kuwait his Excellency Dr. Khodr Helweh & Embassy members hosted a Farewell lunch to the following staff: Mrs. Renee Barakat - 39 years of service and Mr. Mounir Haidar- 34 years of service and Mrs. Rania Khatib Soweid -20 years of service. On this occasion his excellency thanked the staff & presented trophies in recognition of their efforts, commitment as well as their years of services in the Lebanese Embassy- Kuwait.
136
citypageskuwait.com
Diet Care launches its scrumptious Ramadan Kitchenhaus, A Brand New Collection menu In A Brand New Showroom Celebrate Ramadan With Al Mulla & Behbehani Motor Company’s Most Generous Offers Ever
Al Mulla & Behbehani Motor Co. (MBMC), the sole distributor of Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep®, Ram and Mopar® in Kuwait, has announced a special programme of Ramadan offers that includes exceptional financing offers and discounts of up to KD 4,000. “Every year, we celebrate the Holy month of Ramadan by offering customers really special added value deals,” said Maher Abu-Shaaban, Assistant General Manager - Sales and Marketing at MBMC. “We’re confident that our deals this year represent our most generous Ramadan offers ever, and with Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models that meet every driving requirement, there’s a great deal for everyone.” decades of off-road dominance, Jeep is synonymous with freedom, adventure, authenticity and passion and renowned globally for the unique “go anywhere, do anything” capability of its vehicles,” said Abu-Shaaban. The latest generation of the legendary Wrangler, with new features added to the interior, adds improved comfort to its long list of benefits - the result is an untouched level of capability off-road, combined with on-road dynamics, fuel efficiency and interior comfort that make it the perfect vehicle for fun daily driving, weekend trail-running or extreme off-roading. Available in 2 and 4 door models and boasting an untouchable combination of efficient design, open-air freedom, significant towing capability, improved real-world drivability, and unique 4x4 systems that deliver unmatched off-road prowess, Jeep Wrangler maintains its position as the benchmark off-road vehicle and offers consumers the ultimate vehicle for any driving adventure, and is available at MBMC this Ramadan from just KD 7,699.
Diet Care, Kuwait’s leading provider of health and nutritional programs and services today launched its special Ramadan menu 2014 making sure that every customer will have a healthier lifestyle during the holy month with the new mouth-watering menu. The menu features more than 200 varieties of meals and includes a number of Ramadan dishes for families to choose from Customers can select from 4 customized programs named “Healthy Choices”. These include various options from Fotor, Sohour and Ghabka and fall under the names of “Healthy Choice Lifestyle”, “Healthy Choice Fotur”, Healthy Choice Sohur” and “Healthy Choice Fotur+Sohur”. Meal options have combinations of dates, soups, salads, dairy products and desserts; and are from different cuisines including Kuwaiti specialties and Arabic food from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. The menu will also provide International food lovers with a wide range of choices from Italy, Mexico, America and India. During the month of Ramadan Diet Care will also be the first to introduce a low fat, low calories ice cream. The new ice cream offering will be available in three different flavors with only 99 calories a serving. Commenting on the Ramadan menu, Sarah Dimashkieh, Director of Clinical Operations, Diet Care said: “Diet Care said: ���We are extremely happy to present our special Ramadan menu. During the holy month we want to empower customers with the tools and guidance they need to better manage their health and live a more balanced life.” “With our healthy menu options, our customers can reduce the risk of obesity and many chronic diseases among children, adolescents and adults in our society. At Diet Care we are proud to offer a resource that will help people make smart choices every day" concluded Sarah Families can gather together for Fotor, Sohor and Ghabka and enjoy the Ramadan meals which are healthy and also filled with taste. The menu reflects a fresh attitude towards healthy eating and promotes good health and wellbeing through incorporating a healthy and nutritious diet during the holy month. Diet Care was among the first companies in Kuwait committed to helping people manage their weight. The new Ramadan menus are available throughout the three Diet care branches and 16 boutiques across Kuwait.
Kitchenhaus, a divison of Alshaya Trading Company and provider of German-made kitchens, has recently launched its new 2014 collection in the Kuwait market. Complementing the new collection is Kitchenhaus showroom’s completely new and revamped look which hosts a remarkable display of 21 brand new kitchens featuring several highlights including improved designs and new technological solutions which offer a range of whole new possibilities. Commenting on the 2014 collection launch, Jens Svendsen, COO of Alshaya Trading Co said, “Following the launch of Profi+ drawer system in 2013, the 2014 collection takes new market trends into consideration and carries elements of design, improved functionality all combined with unparalleled diversity and outstanding value for money which further repositions quality and perfection of the products. With Kitchenhaus’ consistent upgrades, the new collection has once again raised the standards to an even higher level of quality with affordable prices.” The new product developments fall into three areas namely; SENSYS, LASER and LINE N which highlight sophisticated design orientation, innovation, new colors and fronts. The showroom offers a remarkable variety from a range of ultra-high gloss to vintage styled wood, from natural to dark solid colors to bright tones, lasered edges, matt LASER fronts, and from modern designs to an urban cottage look. Moreover, the expanded assortments of accessories add on to the concept of modern home living and lifestyle to provide you and your families with unforgettable experience as you gather them in the heart of your home. Kitchenhaus can be visited in Al Shaya Plaza beside KDD on Street 17 in Shuwaikh.
Address of Hospitality and Original Taste
24747789 - 24747798 : تلفون. الدور السابع- برج امللتقى, دوار املخفر:الفروانية
Farwaniya: Police Station Roundabout, AlMultaqa Tower, 7th Floor. Tel: 24847789 - 24747798
@aghakuwait
@agha_kuwait July, 2014
137
Flex Fitness Executive organizes a fitness competition To contribute to the general health and wellness of the Kuwaiti society
Center for Continuing Education (CCE) launches “Leadership Development Program” with Burgan Bank
Enter a World Of Joyful Giving The Body Shop Reveals Great Gifts For The Special Times
Indulge your loved ones with luxuriously lavish gifts at these special times. Step into The Body Shop to enter a wonderful world of joyful giving. Discover a world of sumptuous gift sets, many of which have been specially created for this festive time of year. Elegantly packaged, they’re brimming with exquisite fragrances, gorgeous body care goodies and must-have makeup. Each decadent-looking gift set will be cherished by friends and family. Be inspired by the world. Capturing the beauty of the planet, many of The Body Shop fine fragrances will transport your senses to a distant place. From the mesmerising allure of India to the tranquillity of an English garden, you can give a whole world of delight. Bring joy to the world. Giving a gift from The Body Shop helps to spread joy near and far. All the special-edition gift sets feature highquality Community Fair Trade ingredients that have been ethically sourced from marginalised communities across the world. So by pampering the precious people in your life, you’re also helping to enrich the lives of others. Also, The Body Shop fragrances contain Community Fair Trade organic essence of sugarcane from Ecuador. This is sourced from CADO, a co-operative of over 200 smallholder family farmers. The Body Shop trade helps to give members a steady income, making it easier for them to pay for essentials like food, health and education.
138
citypageskuwait.com
A month of rewarding customers! This Ramadan, Baroue rewards its customers through its daily offers and cash-back campaign
Flex Real Estate & Resorts provides an enhancing fitness experience, by priding itself in an advanced network. Their ambition is to deliver a healthy life strategy across their progressive fitness and scientifically observed diet programs, to create an environment in which an individual can reach his best physical and mental levels. From that belief Flex organized a one day event of Athletes’ Fitness Competition. On the 25th of June 2014, from 4:00pm to 9:00pm, Flex Fitness Executive will be hosting a fitness competition dedicated to promote fitness and strength. The invitation is open to all fitness enthusiasts to participate in the challenges and win cash prices, cheer on their friends and other contestants, find out latest fitness trends and developments, and have fun. The activities consist of circuit challenges, squat and press, elevated pushups, walking lunges, bicep curls and sit ups. Flex Gourmet will be presenting healthy snacks and a dietician will be present for quick checkups and will be able to answer any of your nutritional concerns. There will be a live DJ. This event introduces the new Ramadan promotions that Flex has to offer, encourages youngsters to be active and healthy through fun sports and fitness challenges in a safe environment before the start of the month of Ramadan and through it and to spread awareness about the correct bodybuilding ways under supervision of Flex instructors and trainers. This event is one of the many other events that Flex Fitness Executive organizes to promote the importance of fitness practices. Flex will continue to contribute to the general health and wellness of the Kuwaiti society.
The Center for Continuing Education (CCE) at AUK and Burgan Bank launched an intensive “Leadership Development Program” for all emerging leaders within the bank at AUK. The “Leadership Development Program” launch included talks by AUK President, Professor Dr. Nizar Hamzeh, Mr. Eduardo Eguren, Group Chief Executive Officer at Burgan Bank; and Burgan Bank management. The “Leadership Development Program” is an innovative 3-month intensive program which takes an integrated, highly interactive approach to provide participants with distinct but interrelated skill sets. The program has been designed specifically for Burgan Bank and will cater for all their high potential middle-level managers and supervisors. The holistic nature of the CCE leadership development program goes in line with Burgan Bank’s successive planning strategy that emphasizes permanent learning and employee empowerment. Ms. Halah El Sherbini – Group Chief Human Resources and Development Officer said: “Human Capital is our most valued asset; we truly believe that it is our responsibility to build a culture that accelerates the build-up of tomorrow’s leaders. We at Burgan Bank do not spare any efforts in investing on our people through targeted and planned training and development programs. ” Throughout the program, supervisors learned the practical and analytical skills to manage a team of employees, exploring various leadership themes while simultaneously learning to define a clear and compelling team purpose to create and maintain proven success systems. “Through our partnership with Burgan Bank, we both got the opportunity to develop and coach the next line of leaders and enable them to perform and deliver at global professional standards”. “I believe that there is a leader in each one of us and through effective training, CCE will provide participants with distinct leadership attributes that will positively enhance their performance at Burgan Bank and ultimately, the professional society of Kuwait,” said Buthaina Alkhubaizi, CCE Director.
Baroue – Let’s Play! has launched two campaigns that reward customers for their loyalty. Baroue has a number of daily items reduced up to 50%. One day it’s one thing and the next day, it’s something completely different. And Baroue’s Ramadan Daily Offers aren’t just limited to the Toys and Fashion departments only; daily offers are applicable to the Entertainment department (including the Sea Serpent and party bookings) as well as the Arcades and Candy Station. For the latest Daily Ramadan Offers, make sure to take your calendar from any of our stores. Over and above our Daily Ramadan Offers, we are also running a storewide cash-back campaign. For every KD25 spent at any of our stores, our customers will received a KD5 voucher that can be redeem anytime up to the 9th of August, 2014. Rewarding our customers, with incredible daily offers and cash back, over Ramadan is one of our ways for thanking them for their loyalty. For more customer-centric offers and deals, follow Baroue on Instagram @Baroue_Kuwait or on Facebook on Baroue.Kuwait.
July, 2014
Dalal AlDughaishem
Website: www.saycheeez.net Email: [email protected] Twitter & flicker & instagram: @saycheeez_photo phone number (only Whats App): 55062262
Dalal is a professional photographer specializing in Kids and Babies Photography. Contact us if you wish to feature your Kids brand in CityPages magazine.
June, 2014
141
1. What is the next prime number after 7? 2. The perimeter of a circle is also known as what? 3. 65 – 43 = ? 4. True or false? A convex shape curves outwards. 5. What does the square root of 144 equal? 6. True or false? Pi can be correctly written as a fraction. 7. What comes after a million, billion and trillion? 8. 52 divided by 4 equals what? 9. What is the bigger number, a googol or a billion? 10. True or false? Opposite angles of a parallelogram are equal.
6.False, 7.A quadrillion , 8.13, 9.A googol, 10.True
ANSWERS: 1.11, 2.The circumference, 3.22 , 4.True , 5.12,
FUN RIDDLES
1. What gets wetter as it dries? 2. Why did the boy bury his flashlight? 3. Which letter of the alphabet has the most water? 4. What starts with a ‘P’, ends with an ‘E’ and has thousands of letters? 5. What has to be broken before you can use it? 6. Why can’t a man living in New York be buried in Chicago? 7. What begins with T, ends with T and has T in it? 8. How many letters are there in the English alphabet?
ANSWERS: 1. A towel, 2. Because the batteries died, 3. The C, 4. The Post Office, 5. An egg, 6. Because he’s still living, 7. A teapot, 8. There are 18: 3 in ‘the’, 7 in ‘English’ and 8 in ‘alphabet’ 142
citypageskuwait.com
JUMBLED WORDS 1. TBA 2. LMIAAN 3. EMTI 4. RTWAE 5. AFSO 6. UPC 7. RODO 8. SGSLA 9. PMAC 10. TPO 11. LATEP 12. XBO
= = = = = = = = = = = =
ANSWERS: 1.BAT, 2.ANIMAL, 3.TIME, 4.WATER, 5.SOFA, 6.CUP, 7.DOOR, 8.GLASS, 9.CAMP, 10.POT, 11.PETAL, 12. BOX
MATHS QUIZ
FUN FACTS ABOUT FOOTBALL • Football originated generally in its present form in Britain. • The largest attendance for a Football match ever was 199,854 people - Brazil v. Uruguay in the World Cup at the Maracana Municipal Stadium, Rio de Janeiro, July 1950. • In the largest Football tournament ever, no less than 5,098 teams competed in 1999 for the second Bangkok League Seven-a-Side Competition. Over 35,000 players involved! • Based on video evidence, one of the fastest ever scored was in 2.8 seconds by Ricardo Olivera (Uruguay) in December 1998. • The international governing body of Football is the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), based in Zurich, Switzerland. • Diego Maradona was only 16 when he made his debut for Argentina. • Football goalies didn't have to wear different colored shirts from their teammates until 1913. • Football players run an average of six miles during every game. • Football is the most popular sport in the world. Over one billion fans watch World Cup Football on television. • Every year except for two (1930 and 1950) European Teams have reached every World Cup final. • The Football World Cup is played every four years. • The fewest number of fans to watch a World Cup Football game was the 300 in Uruguay in 1930. • The most World Cups have been won by Brazil--5 with the last in 2002.
July, 2014
143
JULY HOROSCOPES On July 1 Mercury moves into direct motion in his own sign and can trigger a wild move as he changes direction. Weary of the straight and narrow, any projects or ideas that have been on hold are given the go ahead with Gemini glee and abandon. Similar to a genie in a bottle, the Full Moon of July 12 could be a dream realized and you grab for its anything-can-happen energy. July 26 could see your status soaring upward when the New Moon in Leo aligns you with those who can help further your highest ambitions. You'll find all the right words to give your project the dramatic set-up it needs.
ARIES (March 21 - April 19)
The Fourth of July weekend doesn't have to set off any fireworks in your family or love life. Be active, enjoy some sports, and have some laughs with strangers. Whatever you do, don't take anything too seriously or too personally, because it isn't. The Full Moon on July 12 shines on your career efforts and plans. Don't be shy or hesitant about doing your best. Home life may be happier and it could be hard to get yourself to go out. The New Moon on July 26 looks to be a wild and crazy Saturday. Enjoy, but try to keep things under control.
TAURUS
VIRGO (March 21 - April 19)
Mental fog and confusion dissipate as the month begins, and it gets easier to think straight about even the most convoluted of things. You don't have to tackle anything big unless you'd like that. Take your happiness and high spirits to the streets with the Full Moon on July 12. Radiate creativity and don't let any dissenting voices slow you down. The New Moon on July 26 can bring you great good luck in ways that haven't quite surfaced yet. Be patient and optimistic. The New Moon in Leo does things in a big way, but it might not be instantaneous.
SAGITTARIUS (November 22 - December 21)
July 8 and July 9 may prove challenging, but you can make them fun and lucky. Work your magic and reassure friends. It's back to basics for the Full Moon on July 12. Find the answer to a big question, even if it's someone else's, and know that you're doing fine no matter how it feels. July 24 offers opportunities that only you can see. Be modest but move quickly. The New Moon on July 26 could open your eyes to a whole huge new world if you turn down the psychodrama and don't promise more than any one human can deliver.
CAPRICORN (December 22 - January 19)
The second week of July, starting July 7, may be uncomfortable when people around you are more stressed than normal for reasons that make no sense to you. Let it pass and don't catch the nervousness. Love comes your way with the Full Moon on July 12. Open your eyes and heart, be willing to look close to home, and see past any temporary personal unhappiness. The New Moon on July 26 positions you to benefit from other people's good intentions. Make sure you've paid it forward as much as you can, then graciously be ready to receive what you've already earned.
GEMINI
(September 23 - October 22)
(January 20 - February 18)
Finances could take a lucky turn for you at the July 12 Full Moon. Concentrate on being responsible at home and don't be tweaked by unreasonable demands or other people's fears. July 21 and July 22 could get super busy, so save a little energy from the weekend to keep things going. Watch out for any extra unexpected expenses, too. Sometimes the absolute best is over the top. Your words are golden at the July 26 New Moon. Suggest only what you really want to do, because people will agree to anything. Enjoy something new, different, and glamorous.
July 5 and July 6, the first weekend of the month, could be fractious and full of sensitive, frustrated people. If anyone you love insists on setting off sparks and starting a fire, take them aside and offer marshmallows. May no good spark go to waste. Any dissatisfaction or friction at home won't tarnish the bright good luck you have at work at the July 12 Full Moon. Relax and be great in public. Lots of friends and fun come to you with the New Moon on July 26. Ration your energy, choose what (and whom) appeals most, and go have a blast.
The Full Moon on July 12 is edgy for you. Imaginary fears or low selfesteem could cost you a lot of happiness and good luck in your daily life. Don't go there. Let it pass. Work at fine-tuning that daily routine, then go out and join the happy crowd. The weekend of July 19 has surprises, possibly big, but short-lived. Avoid confrontations. A shining new romance or ideal partner could flash across your horizon with the July 26 New Moon. If you're looking for sexy excitement or some other great new partner, both of you can turn up the heat this month.
CANCER
(October 23 - November 21)
(March 21 - April 19)
The July 12 Full Moon puts you in the spotlight. People (especially a nervous or insecure partner) may expect you to take care of everything. July 23 and July 24 have many sweet encounters, some sweet nothings, and perhaps delusions, but pleasant nonetheless. You'll have no trouble separating fact from fiction. Enjoy good times before Friday night, July 25, when life may take a serious turn. Money prospects look good for the July 26 New Moon. If there isn't a windfall or good news about income, it can still be a lucky time to make financial plans. citypageskuwait.com
The Full Moon on July 12 could be privately very lucky, a great enlightenment moment rather than a winning lottery ticket. Relax, don't fret, and know that all lost cats will find their way home. The July 26 New Moon is all you, so look and feel your best and project your best image. People will be seeing you everywhere they turn, so be ready. Things could turn very lucky for you, starting Tuesday, July 22, through to month's end. Keep expectations low, work ethic and passions high. Let the Universe amaze you, and refuse to be jaded by the world.
(April 20 - May 20)
The July 12 Full Moon brings plenty of opportunities for fun and big-time celebrations. However, watch out for confusion or misunderstandings and the rash judgments and wrong assumptions that can follow. Not everyone will be thinking straight all the time. The weekend of July 19 is yours to enjoy in all the elegant, cozy ways that please you best. There's no need to frugally stay home or book that cruise to Antarctica. You know what you like. The July 26 New Moon brightens everything at home. Make that change, start that next big, beautiful, domestic thing, throw that party.
144
LEO (July 23 - August 22)
Big things will be easy and small things not quite so much at the Full Moon on July 12. Don't get overly ambitious, though. Let most of the small things take care of themselves. Thursday and Friday, July 24 and July 25, set you up for a high-powered weekend that starts light and lucky but can morph into very serious. Be patient with yourself and others, and don't let anything set you off. The New Moon on July 26 impacts your career and public presence. A lot of people will be grateful and even like you if you give them half a chance.
Be creative, playful, and inspired by your family, or family of friends, at the July 12 Full Moon. Remember, what pleases you doesn't have to please everybody else. The whole world may not be your audience. Don't dream away the middle of the month and decide that you just don't care. This may feel the strongest around July 14 and July 15. The July 26 New Moon highlights the countless perfect little things that only you really appreciate. People will notice and you may wake them up to more satisfaction in their lives. It doesn't sound like much, but it's huge.
*All the Illustrations on this page are done by: Sandra Bakhamian @ SandraBakhamian and are Copyrighted
July, 2014
145
HOMEWORK FOR GROWN UPS EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED AT SCHOOL... BUT CAN YOU REMEMBER? Football Quiz 1.A soccer goal is what dimensions, yards wide and feet high: 8x7; 7x8; 8x8 or 9x8? 2.According to FIFA World Cup rules which flag must be displayed inside each match stadium besides those of FIFA/Fair Play, and the two competing nations? 3.Approximately how many million people play regular organized football in the world (at the early 2000s): 5; 25; 65; or 250?
Test Your Vocabulary There is an immediate intervention to control the symptoms, followed by a plan of treatment to help restore strength and flexibility and to address any underlying deficits that might________ the patient to re-injury
1. predispose
4. assuage
4.The word soccer derives from: Sock; Association; Kosher; or Socrates?
6.The 2014 World Cup Finals allocated European and African teams respectively how many places: 3 and 9; 4 and 10; 5 and 13; or 6 and 15? 7.What city/club football rules, which spread widely in the late 1800s, introduced heading, corners, throw-ins, changing ends, and the goal crossbar: Sheffield; Paris;
ANSWER: Predispose means to have a tendency toward something. Some people believe that just being born in Canada willpredispose you to love ice hockey.
pressure; or Shin guards?
Many situations or events can predispose you to have a particular reaction, opinion, or feeling. Being bitten by a dog as a child could predispose you to having a fear of dogs. Having ancestors with great athletic ability might predispose you to enjoy running. If you want to predispose your father to liking your new boyfriend, be sure to tell him about volunteering at the food bank and leave out the bits about his arrest and dropping out of school. drawing meant to be funny.
5.What is not required by the rules of soccer: Goal net; Penalty spot; Specified ball
Milan; or Berlin? 8.FIFA's 2014 World Cup Finals/Qualifying rules dictate a match squad of how many players: 18; 23; 26; or 30? 9.In the 2010 World Cup Final, Jo'bulani was the: Winner's national anthem; Winning goalscorer; Ball; or Trumpet-like horn blown by fans?
Choose the Right Symbol In a bicycle wheel if there would have been 10 more spokes, the angle between them would have shortened by six degrees. Can you find out the number of spokes in that wheel ?
10.The minimum rest-period between two games for any team at the 2014 World Cup is how many hours: 24; 36; 48; or 72? 11.Soccer rules award what after an 'own goal' directly from a throw-in: Goal; Penalty; Corner; or Drop-ball? 12.The headquarters of FIFA are in Brussels; London; Zurich, or Oslo? 13.Who has made the World Cup footballs since 1970: Adidas; Puma; Umbro; or Nike? 360/(S +10) = A - 6
14.The World Cup Qualifiying matches between El Salvador v Honduras in 1969
360/S = A
|
i don't know
|
In the 2010 World Cup Final, Jo'bulani was the?
|
Jabulani Wold Cup Ball 2010
�JABULANI�, the Official Match Ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa.
Jabulani - means �to celebrate� in isiZulu
On December 4th, adidas and FIFA officially unveiled the adidas �JABULANI�, the Official Match Ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. The �JABULANI�, which means �to celebrate� in isiZulu, features a South African inspired design and radically new technology. The new match ball will be available in retail from December 5th onwards.
The newly developed �Grip�n�Groove� profile provides the best players in the world with a ball allowing an exceptionally stable flight and perfect grip under all conditions. Comprising only eight, completely new, thermally bonded 3-D panels, which for the first time are spherically molded, the ball is perfectly round and even more accurate than ever before.
The name:
The name �JABULANI� originates from the indigenous language isiZulu, one of the eleven official languages of the Republic of South Africa, which is spoken by almost 25% of the population. Literally translated, �JABULANI� means �to celebrate�. Football is a passion that unites the world. The name of the new match ball appropriately pays tribute to the passionate football celebration international fans will enjoy in South Africa next summer.
The design:
Eleven different colors are used in the Adidas �JABULANI�, the eleventh Adidas World Cup ball. These 11 colors represent the 11 players in every team, the 11 official languages of South Africa and the 11 South African communities that make the country one of the most ethnologically diverse countries on the African continent. The colorful design brings together the tremendous diversity of the country in harmonious unity. Four triangle-shaped design elements on a white background lend the ball a unique appearance in African spirit. And like the outer facade of Johannesburg�s Soccer City Stadium, individual design elements also capture the colorfulness of South Africa.
3-D panel shapes:
The Match Ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup features a completely new, ground-breaking technology. Eight 3-D spherically formed EVA and TPU panels are moulded together, harmoniously enveloping the inner carcass. The result is an energetic unit combined with perfect roundness. Following the first tests, players all over the world are enthusiastic and are promising many goals with the new ball.
What did the players have to say:
Michael Ballack: �Fantastic, the ball does exactly what I want it to.�
Petr Cech: �You can feel the energy coming towards you, like a shot.�
Frank Lampard: �A very strong ball, true to hit.�
Kak�: �For me, contact with the ball is all-important, and that�s just great with this ball.�
Grip'n'Groove profile
Aero Grooves:
Aero grooves create the clearly visible profile on the ball's surface. The Grip'n'Groove profile circles around the entire ball in an optimal aerodynamic way. The integrated grooves provide unmatched flight characteristics, making this the most stable and most accurate Adidas ball ever. The ground breaking performance features of the "Jabulani" have been confirmed in comprehensive comparison tests at Loughborough University in England and countless checks in wind tunnel and the Adidas football laboratory in Scheinfeld, Germany.
Grip:
Since the introduction of the "goose bumps" surface for the last European Championship ball, the microtexture of the new ball's outer skin has also been given a visible facelift. The Jabulani has futuristic texture with fantastic grip, giving players full control over the ball under all weather conditions.
Adidas always involves world-class athletes in the development and testing of its products. For the Adidas Jabulani, Adidas partners AC Milan, FC Bayern Munchen, the Orlando Pirates and Ajax Cape Town tested the ball in 2008, contributing to improvements in the surface structure and material composition. The involvement of players will continue to help bring the best football products to market going forward.
If you have more information or want to review this ball, please contact us!
Thank you Jacques Barralon for the above two pictures.
GOLD FINAL Jo'bulani Match Ball
|
Ball
|
The minimum rest-period between two games for any team at the 2014 World Cup is how many hours?
|
Jabulani Ball | FIFA World Cup South Africa 2010 Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
FIFA World Cup South Africa 2010 Wiki
Share
Ad blocker interference detected!
Wikia is a free-to-use site that makes money from advertising. We have a modified experience for viewers using ad blockers
Wikia is not accessible if you’ve made further modifications. Remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected.
Jabulani, the official match ball of the 2010 FIFA World Cup
The Adidas Jabulani is the official match ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup . The ball was unveiled in Cape Town , South Africa on December 4, 2009. Jabulani means "rejoice" in Zulu , and was developed at Loughborough University , UK .
The ball was also used as the match ball of 2009 FIFA Club World Cup in the United Arab Emirates , and a special version of the ball, the Jabulani Angola, was the match ball of the 2010 African Cup of Nations . This ball is also used in the 2010 Clausura Tournament of Argentina as well as the 2010 MLS season in the USA in the league's colours of blue and green.
Contents
Edit
The ball is constructed using a new design, consisting of eight (down from 14 in the last World Cup) thermally-bonded, three-dimensional panels. These are spherically-moulded from ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) and thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU). The surface of the ball is textured with grooves, a technology developed by Adidas called GripnGroove [1] that are intended to improve the ball's aerodynamics. The design has received considerable academic input, being developed in partnership with researchers from Loughborough University , United Kingdom . [2]
Colouring
Edit
The ball has four triangular design elements on a white background. Eleven different colours are used, representing the eleven players on a football team, the eleven official languages of South Africa , and the eleven South African communities. [3] The Jabulani Angola, used at the 2010 African Cup of Nations in Angola , was coloured to represent the yellow, red, and black of the host nation's flag . [4] For the final to be held in Johannesburg on 11 July, a special match ball will be used with gold panels. The ball will be called the "Jo'bulani", playing off the Johannesburg nickname of "The Golden City".
Manufacturing
The balls are made in China, using latex bladders made in India, thermoplastic polyurethane-elastomer from Taiwan, ethylene vinyl acetate, isotropic polyester/cotton fabric, glue, and ink from China. [5]
World Cup Final Ball
Edit
A gold version of the Jabulani ball, the Jo'bulani, was announced as the ball for the World Cup Final. The name of the ball inspired by the city of Johannesburg , which is often nicknamed Jo'burg and will be the site of the 2010 Final. This is the second World Cup Final ball to be produced, the other for the 2006 World Cup. The only teams able to use it will be the two teams in the final.
Reception
Edit
Following recent tradition, as with the Adidas Fevernova and Adidas Teamgeist at the two previous tournaments, the ball has received pre-tournement criticism primarily from goalkeepers [6] . Brazil goalkeeper Júlio César said the ball felt horrible, comparing it to a "supermarket" ball that favored strikers and worked against goalkeepers. [7] Giampaolo Pazzini from Italy labelled it "a disaster". [8] Chile's goalkeeper, Claudio Bravo , complained about the ball, saying "it was made to prejudice goalkeepers." Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas also branded the ball "appalling". [9] Italian keeper Gigi Buffon said, "it is very sad that a competition so important as the world championship will be played with such a horrible ball." [10] Brazilian striker Luís Fabiano called the ball "supernatural", as it unpredictably changed direction when travelling through the air, adding that none of the players of the Brazilian squad reacted in favor of the ball. In the same interview, Brazilian Júlio Baptista said the ball worked against strikers and goalkeepers, as it moved in different and unintended directions after a kick. [11] Joe Hart of England , after training with the ball for a number of days, said the "balls have been doing anything but staying in my gloves." [12] . He did, however, describe the ball as "good fun" to use, even though it is hard work for goalkeepers to cope with. [13] It was suggested the ball behaved "completely different" at altitude by England coach Fabio Capello . [14] Denmark coach Morten Olsen after their 1-0 friendly defeat at the hands of Australia: "We played with an impossible ball and we need to get used to it." [15] Brazilian striker Robinho stated, "for sure the guy who designed this ball never played football. But there is nothing we can do, we have to play with it." [16] English goalkeeper David James said that "the ball is dreadful. It's horrible, but it's horrible for everyone." [17] Marcus Hahnemann replied to the ballmaker Adidas saying that "Technology is not everything; scientists came up with the atom bomb, doesn't mean we should have invented it."
On the other hand, the American Striker Clint Dempsey has spoken in favor of the ball, declaring that "If you just hit it solid, you can get a good knuckle on the ball (...) you've just got to pay a little bit more, you know, attention when you pass the ball sometimes". [18]
Adidas has said that the ball had been used since January of 2010 , and that most feedback from players had been positive. A spokesperson said the company was "surprised" by the negative reaction to the ball, and highlighted that the frequent pre-tournament criticism a new ball receives inevitably dies down as the tournament proceeds [19]
|
i don't know
|
Soccer rules award what after an 'own goal' directly from a throw-in?
|
Soccer Rules - Throw Ins
Soccer Rules
Youth Modifications:
Referees often will stop the match if a throw-in is done incorrectly.
However, many times at younger ages, the players are given an opportunity to try and do it the right way.
A throw-in is a method of restarting play.
A throw-in is awarded to the opponents of the player who last touched
the ball when the whole of the ball crosses the touch line, either on
the ground or in the air.
A goal cannot be scored directly from a throw-in.
At the moment of delivering the ball, the thrower:
• faces the field of play
• has part of each foot either on the touch line or on the ground
outside the touch line
• holds the ball with both hands
• delivers the ball from behind and over his head
• delivers the ball from the point where it left the field of play
All opponents must stand no less than 2 m (2 yds) from the point at
which the throw-in is taken.
The ball is in play when it enters the field of play.
After delivering the ball, the thrower must not touch the ball again
until it has touched another player.
The Referees are reminded that opponents may be no closer than 2 metres
from the point at which the throw-in is taken. Where necessary, the
referee must warn any player within this distance before the throw-in
is taken and caution the player if he subsequently fails to retreat to
the correct distance. Play is restarted with a throw-in.
If a player, while correctly taking a throw-in, intentionally throws the
ball at an opponent in order to play the ball again but neither in a
careless nor a reckless manner nor using excessive force, the referee
must allow play to continue.
If the ball enters the opponents’ goal directly from a throw-in, the
referee must award a goal kick. If the ball enters the thrower’s own
goal directly from a throw-in, the referee must award a corner kick.
If the ball touches the ground before entering the field of play, the
throw-in is retaken by the same team from the same position provided
that it was taken in line with the correct procedure. If the throw-in
is not taken in line with the correct procedure, it is retaken by the
opposing team.
Throw-in taken by a player other than the goalkeeper
If, after the ball is in play, the thrower touches the ball again (except
with his hands) before it has touched another player:
• an indirect free kick is awarded to the opposing team, the kick to
be taken from the place where the infringement occurred (see Law
13 – Position of Free Kick)
If, after the ball is in play, the thrower deliberately handles the ball
before it has touched another player:
• a direct free kick is awarded to the opposing team, the kick to be
taken from the place where the infringement occurred (see Law
13 – Position of Free Kick)
• a penalty kick is awarded if the infringement occurred inside the
thrower’s penalty area
Throw-in taken by the goalkeeper
If, after the ball is in play, the goalkeeper touches the ball again (except
with his hands), before it has touched another player:
• an indirect free kick is awarded to the opposing team, the kick to
be taken from the place where the infringement occurred (see Law
13 – Position of Free Kick)
If, after the ball is in play, the goalkeeper deliberately handles the ball
before it has touched another player:
• a direct free kick is awarded to the opposing team if the infringement
occurred outside the goalkeeper’s penalty area, the kick to be taken
from the place where the infringement occurred (see Law 13 –
Position of Free Kick)
• an indirect free kick is awarded to the opposing team if the
infringement occurred inside the goalkeeper’s penalty area, the
kick to be taken from the place where the infringement occurred
(see Law 13 – Position of Free Kick)
If an opponent unfairly distracts or impedes the thrower:
• he is cautioned for unsporting behavior
For any other infringement of this Law:
• the throw-in is taken by a player of the opposing team
|
Corner
|
The headquarters of FIFA are in Brussels; London; Zurich, or Oslo?
|
Soccer - Soccer Rules: Players Sport & Social Group - Chicago, IL
11 players on the field
Two 40 minute halves, running clock
Each team shall field 11 players on the field at one time. PSSG rules allow a team to play a legal game shorthanded with a minimum of 7 players. Teams may have as many players on their roster as they want. All rosters must be finalized by the second week of the regular season. Players added after the second week that are not on the team roster or waiver will not be eligible for playoffs. Players may only be on one roster per league. During the regular season a game will be considered played in full when second half starts. No games will be rescheduled for weather or for any other reasons once the second half starts in any game.
11 players on the field (7 males/4 females)
Two 25 minute halves, running clock
Each team shall field 11 players on the field at one time (no more than 7 men). PSSG rules allow a team to play a legal game shorthanded with a minimum of 7 players, with at least 2 female. Teams may have as many players on their roster as they want. There is no maximum limit on the amount of females on the field at one time. All rosters must be finalized by the second week of the regular season. Players may only be on one roster per league. During the regular season it is ok for team captains to ask players from other teams to “Sub or Fill In” open slots on game day, to avoid forfeit. In the playoffs, a player can only participate and play for one team. If a player is found playing on two or more teams in the playoffs all games are subject to forfeit.
EQUIPMENT
Shin-guards are strongly recommended. We also require matching colored shirts. We can supply them, but if you have jerseys let us know. Referees will check for dangerous equipment, referee's opinion is final. Players will not be allowed to enter play until correction has been made.
FORFEITS
Teams will have until 10 minutes past the designated start time to field a legal team. Shorthanded teams may play a legal game with a minimum of 7 players, with at least 2 of them being females. Teams fielding less than 7 players or without at least 2 women will receive a forfeit. Exception: Teams may play a “legal game” with less than 7 players or less than 2 females with the opposing teams consent. Teams who agree to play under these conditions will loose the option of receiving a forfeit win. Teams may pick up players during the regular season in order to field a full team. Substitutes will not be allowed during playoffs.
If your team forfeits a match during the season, the following rules apply:
First Offense: Game recorded as loss and warning issued.
Second Offense: Game recorded as loss and PSSG staff reserves the right to remove team from league and playoffs with no refund for games not played.
Third Offense: Removal from the league and playoffs with no refund for games not played.
If you know in advance that your team is going to forfeit a game, we encourage you to call our office so as to help us schedule your opponent a game. However, this does not mean that your team will not receive the loss as a forfeit.
COIN FLIP/BEGINNING OF GAME
The beginning of the game will start with the PSG staff using an “odd/even”, or coin flip. The winning team will choose a goal to defend and the loser will kick-off.
KICKOFF
Consists of the ball being placed at midfield on the center spot. The ball is in play once it is touched forward by any player.
SUBSTITUTIONS
Teams may not substitute “on the fly”. All substitute players must notify the referee before entering the game. Substitutions may occur during the following instances:
Throw-ins (for either team)
Injured player (1 for 1)
Yellow card (1 for 1)
Any dead ball in special instances with the referee's permission
Players involved in an illegal substitution are subject to a caution (yellow card) if the referee deems necessary. If a team is currently playing a game shorthanded and has a player arrive late, the entering player must receive permission from the referee before entering the field and may not enter during play. The referee has the right to deny permission to teams wishing to substitute on the other teams' throw ins if he/she believes that the substitution is for time wasting purposes or if stopping play will deny the other team a chance at a direct chance at scoring. There is no limit on the amount of substitutions per team/per game. During the course of the regular season teams are allowed to “pick up” players that are not on their roster in order to field a full team. In playoffs no non-roster players will be allowed to play.
TIME
Play will be divided into two (2) 25 minute halves for coed and two (2) 40 minute halves for men's leagues, separated by a very brief halftime. There will be a running clock maintained by the referee. The clock will stop only during serious injury time-outs. Any delay tactics, (kicking the ball far out of bounds) will allow the referee (at his/her discretion) to stop the clock. If time wasting is being employed by a team, the offending player may be cautioned (yellow card), at referee's discretion. A game will be considered played in full when second half starts. No games will be rescheduled for weather or for any other reasons once the second half starts in any game.
FOULS, PENALTIES, and RESTARTS
DIRECT KICKS - The ball is to be placed at the point of the infraction and to be put in play by any player on the affected team. No opposing player is allowed to be within 10 paces/yards of ball prior to kick. A player stepping unnecessarily close in front of an opposing free kick may be cautioned, however, 10 paces/yards will only be granted if asked for by a member of the team with the free kick. Goals may be scored on direct kicks.
A direct kick will occur when a player commits the following "penal" fouls:
kicks or attempts to kick an opponent
trips or attempts to trip an opponent
jumps at an opponent
strikes or attempts to strike an opponent
pushes an opponent
slide tackling (coed only)
Penal fouls committed inside the penalty area by the defense will result in a penalty kick 12 paces/yards out. All players on the field (other than the goalie) must be behind the ball and outside of the penalty area until it is kicked. The goalie must remain on the goal line until the ball is kicked.
INDIRECT KICKS: The ball is to be placed at the point of the infraction and to be put in play by any player on the affected team. No opposing player is allowed to be within 10 paces/yards of ball prior to kick. A player stepping unnecessarily close in front of an opposing free kick may be cautioned, however, 10 paces/yards will only be granted if asked for by a member of the team with the free kick. An indirect free kick must be touched by a player (of either team) other than the person who takes the kick before a goal is scored.
Indirect kicks will occur when the goalkeeper:
takes more than 6 seconds to release the ball from his/her hands
touches the ball again with his/her hands after it has been released by his/her possession without touching another player
touches the ball with his/her hands after it has been deliberately kicked to him/her by a teammate
touches the ball with his/her hands after he/she has received the ball directly from a throw in by a teammate
Indirect kicks will occur when any player:
plays in a dangerous manner
impedes the progress of an opponent (obstruction)
prevents the goalkeeper from releasing the ball from his/her hands
a player is called offsides
OFFSIDES: - It is not an offence in itself to be in an offsides position
A player is in an offsides position if:
He/she is nearer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second last opponent
A player is not in an offsides position if:
He or she is in his/her own half of the field of play
He/she is not nearer to his/her opponents goal line than at least two of his/her opponents
He/she is even with the ball or the second defender
A player in an offsides position is only penalized if, at the moment the ball touches, or is played by one of his teammates, he/she is, in the opinion of the referee, involved in active play by:
interfering with the play
gaining an advantage by being in that position
A player can not be deemed offsides by receiving a pass directly from a:
goal kick
corner kick
throw in
OUT OF BOUNDS: Anytime the ball goes completely over either sideline, out of bounds, a throw-in will ensue. The person throwing in the ball must throw the ball overhead with both hands and keep both feet remaining on the ground out-of-bounds or on the line until the ball is released.
Anytime the ball crosses an end line, a corner kick or goal kick will ensue.
Last touched by a defender - a corner kick. Ball is placed on nearest corner and kicked in by offensive team. Goals may be scored directly on corner kicks.
Last touched by attacker. A goal kick by the defense. The ball must be placed anywhere in or on the line of the goal area box.
FIGHTING
Fighting is not allowed and will NOT be tolerated. All parties involved in fighting will be sent off (red carded) from the game and subject to ejection from the league at PSG staff discretion.
CAUTIONS AND EJECTIONS
Two yellow cards in the same game or one red card require the ejected player to leave the field and surrounding area. Any player who receives a red card will receive an automatic 1 game suspension for the team's next scheduled game. Multiple game suspensions for fighting, severe fouls, or extreme unsportsmanlike behavior are up to the discretion of Players Sport & Social Group.
PLAYOFFS
Playoffs will follow the last week of regular season and will be single elimination.
SEEDING Teams will be seeded for the playoffs based on a points system. Teams will be awarded 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss. In most cases all teams will advance to playoffs. Ties (same amount of points) at the end of the season are broken by the following criteria:
Head to head result (ties with 2 teams only)
Least amount of forfeits (forfeits are recorded 5-0)
Goal differential (max of 5 goal differential per game)
Most goals scored
Registration date
Coin flip or random drawing of numbers if more than two teams
PLAYOFF GAMES Playoff games will follow the same format during regulation as the regular season. If teams are tied at the end of regulation in the playoffs, sudden death will be used. A sudden death play-off will involve 6 men and 3 women from each team for a one five-minute overtime. A coin toss or even/odd will be used to start the overtime. Winner of the toss chooses if they would like to choose sides or kick off. If neither team scores after the sudden death overtime period, teams will go into a shootout. During the playoffs any league with 12 or more teams will be split into a Flight A and Flight B Playoff Bracket.
All leagues that have 12 or more teams will be split into a Flight A & Flight B Playoff Bracket. At the end of the season all captains are responsible for confirming their team’s end of season team record. Once playoff brackets are posted and playoff games are played the tournament seeding will not be changed. If there is an incorrect score posted for your team, the captain is responsible for notifying the league office prior to the playoffs being played.
SHOOTOUT SPECIFICS
Each team selects 5 players (3 males, 2 females)- players do not have to have been playing at the end of regulation to kick. A coin toss will decide which team shoots first. The referee will decide which goal to shoot at.
Teams will alternate taking direct penalty shots from 12 paces off the goal line. (No guy/girl shooting order is necessary)
If tied after the 1st round, the 2nd round will be SUDDEN DEATH i.e. 1st player from Team A scores & 1st player from Team B misses - Team A wins. Players who shot in the 1st shootout are not eligible to shoot again until all remaining players present have shot. If and when 1 team begins to utilize players for the second time, the other team may “recycle” players as well. Thus, some players on the team with more people present, may or may not shoot. After the original five kickers from each team have kicked, no guy/girl shooting order is necessary. Teams may send any unused players to kick at this time.
Normal rules and penalties of FIFA apply unless exceptions have been made herein.
STANDINGS
Standings will be posted on-line with the season schedule. View your standings and schedule at www.playerssports.net .
OUTDOOR SOCCER RULES (6 v 6 & 5 v 5)
All proceeding rules for 11v11 apply unless stated or clarified below. Normal soccer laws apply with the exception that 6 v 6 is played on a smaller field with a smaller goals and the following rules:
Teams have a total of 6 or 5 players on the field at a time including goalie (4 men and 2 women for coed leagues). Teams can have more women than two as long as a team does not have more than four men on the field. Teams need a total of 4 players (and at least one woman) for an official game.
There will be two 22 minute halves with a running clock with a 1-2 minute halftime.
Shin guards strongly recommended.
There is no "offsides" rule.
Defenders must be 5 yards from the ball for free kicks upon request from team taking the kick. Jumping in front of the ball to prevent a quick free kick may result in a yellow card.
Penal fouls inside the penalty area result in a penalty kick to be taken 8 yards from the goal line. All players other than the goalkeeper must be behind the ball until it is kicked.
Goal kicks may be taken from anywhere inside the penalty area.
Out of bounds results in a kick-in for the team not to touch the ball last. Kick-ins are direct kicks.
Teams may sub on the fly at any time. The player leaving the field must be off the field before a new player enters the field. Players must sub from about the middle line. Both teams should keep their gear and sub from the same side of the field.
There is no slide tackling and will result in a direct kick for the opposing team. Repeated offenses may result in a yellow or red card.
OUTDOOR SOCCER RULES (8 v 8) & (7 v 7)
All proceeding rules for 11v11 apply unless stated or clarified below. Normal soccer laws apply with the exception that (8 v 8) & (7 v 7) is played on a smaller field with a standard goals and the following rules:
Teams have a total of 8 players on the field at a time including goalie (6 men and 2 women for coed leagues). Teams can have more women than two as long as a team does not have more than six men on the field. Teams need a total of 6 players (and at least one woman) for an official game.
There will be two 22 minute halves with a running clock with a 1-2 minute halftime.
Shin guards strongly recommended.
Kicking the ball backwards is allowed for the kick-off at Hawthorne School.
The offside rule is enforced at Hawthorne School, but there is no offside offense if a player receives the ball directly from a goal kick.
Permanent out of bounds lines are not allowed the Hawthorne School.
Therefore whole ball needs to be out of bounds, which is defined by cones. When in doubt keep playing until referee blows the whistle for out of bounds.
A goal kick should be taken no more than 6 yards from the goal line.
A goal can be scored directly from the kick-off or goal kick.
Teams may sub on the fly at any time. The player leaving the field must be off the field before a new player enters the field. Players must sub from about the middle line. Both teams should keep their gear and sub from the same side of the field.
There is NO SLIDE TACKLING, Violation is a direct free kick, and possibly a PK if within on penalty area. Repeated offenses will result in a yellow or red card.
FUTSAL RULES (5 v 5)
***Any rule not addressed in this section shall be governed by the 6 on 6 outdoor rules above***
Maximum Number of Players to Start Match: 5, one of whom shall be a goalkeeper
Minimum Number of Players to start a Match: 3
Substitution Method: "Flying substitution" (all players but the goalkeeper can enter and leave as they please; goalkeeper substitutions can only be made when the ball is out of play and with a referee's consent)
Duration of the Game
Duration: Two 20 minutes running halves; the clock will not stop when a ball is out of play.
Half-time: Maximum of 5 minutes
The Difference between Soccer and Futsal
We will use a size #4 ball which has approx. 30% less bounce to it.
Kick ins will be used in place of throw ins.
Goal clearance (throw) will be used to replace goal kicks.
Absolutely NO shoulder charges or slide tackling!
4 second time limit on restarts - same applies for amount of time a goalie can hold ball.
Any of the above rules are subject to change at any time without notice at the discretion of Players Sports Group. 01/20/12 SB.
Indoor Rules (Chicago Fire Soccer Center, Windy City Fieldhouse, Mercy Soccer Center, CIS & CFA)
EQUIPMENT
Shin guards are strongly recomended for play in PSSG leagues. All teams must wear unifying colors, either the t-shirts that PSSG provides or their own jerseys.For facilities with artificial turf grass, shoes with cleats must be soccer shoes. Football shoes or other shoes with a front cleat are not permitted. All teams should bring a game ball to play with.
BEGINNING OF GAME
The winner of the coin toss (or odd/even choice) chooses which side to defend. The losing captain’s team will kick off. At the beginning of the second half, the teams will switch sides and the team that did not kickoff at the beginning of the game will kickoff. A game will be considered played in full when second half starts. No games will be rescheduled for reasons once the second half starts in any game.
TIME
Each game will consist of two 20, 25 or 28 minute halves (depending on league) with a running clock. Halftime is about 1 minute long. The clock may be stopped for injuries and situations under the discretion of the referee. If the referee determines that a team is intentionally delaying the game, he/she may stop the clock and/or award a free kick to the other team. However, facility time requirements will sometimes dictate that shortened halves and/or a constantly running clock be used.
KICKOFFS
Kickoffs are taken from the center spot and may be kicked directly backwards. A player other than the one who takes the kickoff (from either team) must touch the ball before the kicker can touch it a second time. A violation of this rule will result in a re-kick. Kickoffs are direct kicks and a goal can be scored directly.
FOULS/PENALTIES
A foul may be called and a direct free kick may be awarded when a player commits or attempts to commit any of the following:
kicks or attempts to kick an opponent
trips or attempts to trip an opponent
jumps at an opponent
checking along the wall
excessive use of hands on the wall
When the free kick is taken, the penalized team shall give the kicker at least 5 yards clearance. If the spot of the infraction is within 5 steps of the goal, the penalized team may stand on the goal line. Players may not step directly (within about 3 yards) in front of the ball to prevent a team from taking a free kick. Doing so may result in a yellow card. However, a full 5 yards does not have to be granted unless the team taking the kick asks the referee for it. By asking the ref to walk off 5 paces, the kicking team must wait for the whistle to put the ball in play.
SLIDE TACKLE CLARIFICATION
Slide tackles by field players are not allowed. However, a player may touch a knee to the ground in an attempt to block a shot/pass, as long as it is a controlled movement and he/she immediately returns to a standing position. Repeated slide tackles may result in a yellow or red card. A slide to save a ball when an opponent is not in the immediate vicinity is legal. Goalkeepers may slide tackle within their own penalty area only.
OFFSIDES
There is no offsides.
DIRECT KICKS
All kicks (free kicks, corner kicks, goal kicks, kickoffs, kick-ins) are direct. However non-penal fouls that occur within the penalty area will bring the ball out to the top of the box for a direct kick (not a penalty kick).
OBVIOUS SCORING OPPORTUNITY
If a player commits a foul to take away an obvious scoring opportunity, the player should be cautioned or sent off. If in the opinion of the referee that the foul was not intentional, he may yellow card the player. If a player commits an intentional foul to prevent an obvious goal scoring opportunity he may be sent off.
TWO MINUTE PENALTY (Yellow Card)
If, in the referee's judgment, a player exhibits particularly dangerous or aggressive behavior, or repeatedly commits fouls that threaten the safety of other players (persistent infringement), that player may be given a yellow card and a two minute penalty. A yellow card for anything is an automatic 2 minute penalty for the player shown the card except the goalkeeper. Another field player may serve the 2 minute penalty on behalf of the keeper. During this penalty, his/her team will play one player short. If a goal is scored against the short-handed team during the penalty, the penalty is over and the penalized player may return to the game. If a two minute penalty is called against the same amount of players on both teams at the same time, each team may replace the penalized players for at least two minutes and play at full strength.
FIVE MINUTE PENALTY (Red Card)
If in the event of a second yellow card to the same player or a serious penalty or offence, deemed so by the referee, that player will be red carded and the team is given a five minute penalty. During this penalty, his/her team will play one player short for 5 minutes. If a goal is scored against the short-handed team during the penalty, the penalty is over and the penalized team may return to full strength. The player who receives a red card is out for the remainder of the game and is automatically out for his/her team's next game. Extended suspensions are possible for fighting or severe conduct as well. If a five minute penalty is called against the same amount of players on both teams at the same time, each team may replace the penalized players and play at full strength.
FIGHTING
Fighting will absolutely not be tolerated. Any player who instigates/participates in fighting or aggressive behavior will be removed from the game with no warning and will miss at least the remainder of that game and the next game. Additional game suspensions will be enforced by the PSG office staff.
SEEDING
At the end of the regular season teams will be seeded for a single elimination tournament. During the season, wins are worth 3 points, ties are worth 1 point, and a loss is 0 points. Teams with the same amount of points are separated by the following criteria:
1. Head to head result (ties with 2 teams only)
2. Least amount of forfeits (forfeits are recorded 5-0)
3. Goal differential (max of 5 per game)
4. Most goals scored
5. Coin flip or random drawing of numbers
If there is a tie involving 3 or more teams and one of them has a forfeit, that team loses the tiebreaker and the tie breaking criteria starts over with head to head result for the remaining two (or more) teams.
TIE GAMES
During the regular season, tie games will stand. In the playoffs, games that end in a tie will NOT PLAY AN OVERTIME PERIOD. Instead, games will go into a shootout.
Shootout Details at Mercy and Windy City Field House
Each team will choose 5 players (minimum 2 females for coed leagues) to shoot in the first round. If a team is playing shorthanded with only one female, she may shoot twice in the first round of five. Any player is eligible to participate in the shootout regardless of whether they were on the field at the end of the game or not. Shots will be taken on an empty net from 20 paces out (at WCF) and regular pk’s using goalies are taken at Mercy. Teams will take turns shooting. At the end of the first 5 shooters, the team with the most goals wins. If the score is tied after 5 shooters, the shootout turns into sudden death. There is no guy/girl requirement at this point. Once a team is done using all of their players, both teams may start over and use players for a second time. The referee has the complete discretion to increase the distance of the shot (at WCF only) if he decides it is in the interest of finalizing the game.
Shootout Details at Chicago Fire Soccer Center, Chicago Indoor Soccer & Chicago Futsal Academy
Each team will choose 1 player (a female must be selected every third shooter); the overtime is a sudden death shootout. In the coed league male or female players can shoot in any order (1st, 2nd, or 3rd shooter). Any player is eligible to participate in the shootout regardless of whether they were on the field at the end of the game or not. Shots will be taken using regular pk’s. The first team to score and defend the opponent from scoring in the same round wins.
FORFEITS:
If your team forfeits a match during the season, the following rules apply:
First Offense:game recorded as loss and warning issued.
Second Offense:game recorded as loss and PSSG staff reserves the right to remove team from league and playoffs with no refund for games not played.
Third Offense:Removal from the league and playoffs with no refund for games not played.
If you know in advance that your team is going to forfeit a game, we encourage you to call our office at 773-528-1999 so we can let your opponent know. However, this does not mean that your team will not receive the loss as a forfeit.
PROTESTS
There are no protests for any reason whatsoever. The referee's decision is final.
During the regular season it is ok for team captains to ask players from other teams to “Sub or Fill In” open slots on game day, to avoid forfeit.
In the playoffs, a player can only participate and play for one team. If a player is found playing on two or more teams in the playoffs all games are subject to forfeit.
FIFA RULES
FIFA rules are used in the instance that a specific law is not listed. Any specified rules listed herein supersede the FIFA laws of the game.
Indoor Soccer Rules (Chicago Indoor & Chicago Fire Soccer Center Local Rules)
TIME
Each game will consist of two 20 minute halves with a running clock. Halftime is no more than 1 minute.
MINIMUM NUMBER OF PLAYERS
For coed leagues, each team shall field 7 players, with a minimum of 2 females. If a team does not have 2 females, it may play with 1 female and 5 males. The minimum number of players needed to play a game is 5 (minimum 1 female). Men's teams may play with a minimum of 5 total players.
SUBSTITUTIONS
Teams may substitute "on the fly" at any point during the game. A player entering the game may not step onto the field until the player he/she is replacing is IMMEDIATELY in front of them and away from the ball. Players must enter and exit from their own bench only.
OUT OF BOUNDS/BALL IN PLAY
When the ball leaves the field of play on the sides of the field, a kick-in is awarded to the other team. The ball must be kicked in at the point that the ball left the field no further than 1 yard from the netting or boards. Corner kicks are taken at the corner of the field that was closest to where the ball left the field (there is a white dot to designate the restart spot). Goal kicks may be taken from anywhere in a team’s own penalty area and must leave the area completely before touching another player.
If the ball touches the top net, a direct free kick is awarded at the spot directly below where it hit. If the ball hits the ceiling inside the attacking 1/3 for either team (inside the red lines), the ball is brought back to the first red line and should be restarted at the red dot.
THREE LINES
The ball may not travel forward completely over the defending team's red line, the center line, and the opponent's red line in the air without touching another player from either team, the ceiling, or the walls. This rule includes throws or kicks by the goalkeeper. A direct free kick is awarded for a "three lines" call and should be placed in the middle of the offending team's red line. Players may pass the ball backwards over three lines without penalty.
GOALKEEPING
Goalies may not pick up a pass directly passed to them by a teammate. Deflections and passes not intended (in the opinion of the referee) for the goalkeeper by the same team may be picked up. Goalkeepers have a maximum of 6 seconds to release the ball from their hands. Once the ball is released from the goalkeeper’s hands the ball must leave the penalty area and touch at least one other player before the keeper may pick it up again. The restart for either of the above infractions results in a direct kick at the top of the arc. Defenders may be inside the penalty area as long as they are 5 yards away from the ball.
Goalkeepers are the only player that may slide tackle (within their own penalty area only).
PENALTY KICK
A penalty kick is awarded for any penal foul (infractions involving a goalie illegally using his/her hands in his/her penalty area or for taking more than 6 seconds or other non-penal fouls are not included) in the penalty area. All players besides the goalkeeper must stand behind the ball and may not enter the penalty area until the ball is touched. The penalty spot at CIS is the small white dash about 8 paces from the goal line. A missed penalty shot is a live ball.
Indoor Soccer Rules (Mercy Local Rules)
TIME
Each game will consist of two 20 minute halves with a running clock. Halftime is no more than 1 minute.
MINIMUM NUMBER OF PLAYERS
For coed leagues, each team shall field 6 players, with a minimum of 2 females. If a team does not have 2 females, it may play with 1 female and 4 males. The minimum number of players needed to play a game is 4 (minimum 1 female). Men’s teams may play with a minimum of 4 players for an official game.
SUBSTITUTIONS
Teams may substitute "on the fly" at any point during the game. A player entering the game may not step onto the field until the player he/she is replacing is IMMEDIATELY in front of them and away from the ball. Players must enter and exit from the designated sub area on the tunnel side of the field. For a diagram of the substitution area, go to: http://www.playerssports.net/_images_sports/MercyDiagram.pdf
OUT OF BOUNDS/BALL IN PLAY
When the ball leaves the field of play and doesn’t return, a kick-in is awarded to the other team. The ball must be kicked in at the point that the ball left the field at on the touch line or just behind it. Corner kicks are taken at the corner of the field that was closest to where the ball left the field or touched the net or back stays of the goal frame. The ball must be placed on the corner of the touch line and goal line. Goal kicks may be taken from anywhere in a team’s own penalty area and must leave the area completely before touching another player.
If the ball touches the rafters or ceiling, a direct free kick is awarded at that spot. If the ball hits the rafters or ceiling in either area past the yellow dot (by the goals), the ball is brought back to be restarted at the yellow dot. Because the top nets at Mercy droop a bit, balls that make contact with the top net will continue to be played. The referee reserves the right to call a ball "out" if purposely kicked into the ceiling net.
All walls are in play. The ball is dead if it touches the back stays or net of the goal. A goal kick or corner kick is then awarded. The ball is also dead and restarted with a kick-in if the ball touches the black pads covering the electrical switches in the NW corner or goes in the entrance tunnel. The substitution area on the tunnel side of the field is out of bounds whether the ball goes into the area on the ground, in the air, or off the wall inside this area.
GOALKEEPING
Goalies may not pick up a pass directly passed to them by a teammate. Deflections and passes not intended (in the opinion of the referee) for the goalkeeper by the same team (that are not deflected) may be picked up. Goalkeepers have a maximum of 6 seconds to release the ball from their hands. Once the ball is released from the goalkeeper’s hands the ball must leave the penalty area and touch at least one other player before the keeper may pick it up again. The restart for either of the above infractions results in a direct kick at the top of the imaginary arc (about 2 yards outside of the box). Defenders may be inside the penalty area as long as they are 5 yards away from the ball.
Goalkeepers are the only player that may slide tackle (within their own penalty area only).
PENALTY AREA
The penalty area extends behind the goal following the lines for the sides of the existing penalty area. The goalkeeper may pick up the ball in this area and fouls in this area are treated as if they are inside the penalty area.
PENALTY KICK
A penalty kick is awarded for any penal foul (infractions involving a goalie illegally using his/her hands in his/her penalty area or for taking more than 6 seconds or other non-penal fouls are not included) in the team's own penalty area. All players besides the goalkeeper must stand behind the ball and may not enter the penalty area until the ball is touched. A missed penalty shot is a live ball.
SEMI CIRCLE
There is not a semi circle or arc painted at the top of the penalty area, so players must move to give the shooter an unobstructed path to the ball on a penalty kick. Placement of restarts for goalkeeper infractions is two yards from the top of the penalty area.
Indoor Soccer Rules (WCF Local Rules)
TIME
|
i don't know
|
Who has made the World Cup footballs since 1970?
|
1970 World Cup ball (adidas Telstar)
THE ARRIVAL OF ADIDAS TO THE WORLD CUPS
The German Adidas, founded by Bavarian Adolf (Adi) Dassler, was already famous for its excellent shoes, now adopted by Europe’s most prestigious football teams: the black Adidas boots with the famous three white stripes. Before devoting himself fully to football, Dassler provided running shoes to the black American sprinter Jesse Owens, Olympic hero of Berlin in 1936. In the post war era, he manufactured legendary football boots with cleats for the German national team, which had a crucial share of the German victory over Hungary on a rainy pitch and Germany became World Champions for the first time in Adidas boots. Adidas started to produce footballs in 1963 (their first ball was called Santiago) and the company supplied the official balls for the 1968 European Cup and soon after, the Olympic Games held in Mexico. Due to this, the Mexican federal championship also adopted Adidas balls. Thanks to these positive references and with the recommendation of the Mexican Football Federation, in June of 1969 FIFA decided that the balls to be used in the 1970 World Cup should be made by Adidas and are no longer produced by the host nation.
THE OFFICIAL BALL: ADIDAS TELSTAR DURLAST
On January 10th 1970, at a conference in Mexico City, Adidas presented three balls: one black and white, one pure white and one pure orange. The black and white one was selected as the official ball of the 1970 World Cup. It was called “Telstar”, coming from the union of two words: television and star. It was said at that time, that this combination and contrast would amplify the visibility of the balls on both colour and black and white televisions, given that the Mexican World Cup was the first World Cup to be broadcast on TV world wide. Telstar was also the name of the satellite which was used in the TV transmissions of this World Cup. This “coincidence” could also be the hypothetical influence which inspired Adidas in selecting the name Telstar. Whatever the true origin of the name, the new Adidas ball represented a real revolution in the manufacturing of footballs.
The Telstar consisted of 32 panels (20 white regular hexagonal and 12 black regular pentagonal) of high quality leather, processed, coloured and sewn by hand. Inside the ball the latest generation latex rubber bladder with an air valve was used. On the outer surface, a special plastic coating was applied and called “Durlast”. This helped the ball to protect the leather more than previously on any surface and to help keep it waterproof. The 1970 Telstar was a high quality ball, manufactured with the most modern technology, which guaranteed the best sphericity never before reached by any other football. Adidas introduced the black and white 32 panel ball for the first time in the World Cup and it was destined to become an icon in football history.
We still associate football with this classic black and white 32 panel ball. However, adidas were not the first manufacturer to create a 32 panel ball. The first company to apply this structure on footballs was a Danish company called Select, who manufactured this type of ball back in the fifties. These balls were already used in Germany around the 1960’s, and the Swedish ball supplier of the 1958 World Cup ( Sydsvenska Laderoch Remfabriken) presented an identical 32 black and white panel ball in their catalogue, long before the Mexican World Cup. The black and white ball grew in popularity after it was also used in the 1965 European Cup final match in Milan, between Internazionale and Benfica, so again: this design was not invented for the Mexican World Cup by adidas.
THE CHILE BALLS
At the conference in Mexico City on January 1970, along with the Telstar, Adidas introduced two other single coloured balls: one completely white and one completely orange; both were denominated “Chile”. Just like the Telstar, the two single coloured balls were also made of 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal panels sewn by hand and their interior was a modern air chamber made of latex rubber. However, the „Durlast” plastic film was not applied on these two balls. They were made of leather with a plastic treatment, making them more resistant and durable, suitable for hard and dry terrain. They were labelled „Elast” in reference to the membrane coating which was applied to the surface and they were much harder than the Telstar balls, which were softer due to the Durlast film protection they had. Adidas created these two balls in commemoration of the 1962 World Cup and called them „Chile” for this reason. During the Mexican World Cup the orange Chile was used in the quarter final match between Germany and England, whilst the white Chile ball was used during the first 23 minutes of the famous semi-final between Italy and Germany. It was replaced during the match because it deflated.
BALLS USED IN THE WORLD CUP
For most of the 32 matches during the 1970 World Cup, the black and white Telstar ball was mainly used, while the Elast balls were the alternative, substitute pair. Very few games were played with the white Chile (perhaps only two), while the orange Chile ball was used at least in five matches. For some reason only the white Chile model was advertised and shown in catalogues, while the orange model was never sold on the market, this is why it is the most rare adidas ball ever. The regular black and white Telstar Durlast ball was the most heavily advertised ball and therefore it was sold in the highest volume.
Adidas provided a total of 500 anonymous balls (so no print branding / text on them) for the 1970 World Cup, all manufactured in France. The balls were distributed as follows : 300 Telstar, 100 white Chile, and 100 orange Chile. The 500 balls were destined for the 5 Mexican stadiums, in proportionate quantities to the number of matches that each stadium would host and they were only supplied for official match use. Balls with print were available from sports stores and the players could use these during training sessions.
At the time of the Mexican World Cup, there were different companies in the world who manufactured Adidas footballs under license. Normally, the models considered as “official” were the ones produced in France or Spain; but only the ones made in France were destined for the World Cup. This practice continued until the 1994 World Cup. After this tournament, Adidas footballs were produced first in Morocco, and later in Asia (Pakistan, Thailand, Korea, etc.).
THE AFTERLIFE OF THE BALLS
Since the adidas Telstar Durlast balls were put into the market before and after the World Cup, you could easily buy them in sport shops. But keep in mind that the balls in retail were not the anonymous versions of the ball used in actual matches of the World Cup, but the printed versions with the famous golden letters. This is why the very large majority of collectors only have the branded, printed models. Only a very few balls from the Mexico World Cup without print remain in existence in private collections. One of them is owned by Alfonso Larena in Mexico. The real value of this ball is extremely high with even the printed versions selling for huge sums of money between collectors. As an example, an original „made in France” adidas Telstar Durlast Mexico ball with gold print lettering was sold through an auction on ebay (the world’s largest online auction website) on 8th May, 2013 for 4210 EUR (!) and this ball was not even in unused, perfect condition. Just imagine the value of the real, unbranded version…
Clealry if you ever intend to have a full collection of the original adidas World Cup balls, you will need to acquire the very first model, the „made in France” adidas Telstar Durlast Mexico ball. So you have to be prepared to pay a lot for this ball as it is on the „wish list” of many collectors all over the world, meaning that if one did become available, there would be a lot of competition for it.
However as an alternative, for the price of an original 1970 Telstar, you can buy the entire replica World Cup match ball set, including the 8 pre-adidas models. As you can see, collecting balls is an investment (balls never seem to lose their value, long term) and it is a question of your personal preference, your patience and the money that you have available which will influence whether you wish to collect original world cup balls or the modern reproductions.
The 1970 adidas Telstar Durlast ball was made in many different reproduction versions for the adidas historical matchballset. This one does not indicate where it was made in
The 1970 adidas Telstar Durlast ball was made in many different reproduction versions for the adidas historical matchballset. This one does not indicate where it was made in
This version says it was made in France and misses the "1970" as seen on the previous version. This ball was exhibited in Spain along with many other balls and football memorabilia
This version says it was made in France and misses the "1970" as seen on the previous version. This ball was exhibited in Spain along with many other balls and football memorabilia
This version has the "made in France" texture but it also has the "1970" print on it. These balls are great for display no matter which variations you find, unless you can afford the old, authentic models
This version has the "made in France" texture but it also has the "1970" print on it. These balls are great for display no matter which variations you find, unless you can afford the old, authentic models
This adidas Telstar Durlast ball was made in 1995 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of adidas being the official match ball supplier of the FIFA World Cups
This adidas Telstar Durlast ball was made in 1995 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of adidas being the official match ball supplier of the FIFA World Cups
These are the old matchballs of the 1970 FIFA World Cup. The replica version doesn't always have the "made in France" or the "made in Spain" text under the adida logo and it has an additional "1970" year printed on it
These are the old matchballs of the 1970 FIFA World Cup. The replica version doesn't always have the "made in France" or the "made in Spain" text under the adida logo and it has an additional "1970" year printed on it
This site has an eBay Shop where you can find many balls (including all the World Cup balls 1930-2010) for sale. Click here to see the available balls that the site offers for sale on eBay.
The eBay Shop of the site operates since 2004, during the past few years it has earned the Top Rated Seller and the PowerSeller awards, it has over 500 positive feedbacks and the feedback rate is 100%, all the buyers have been satisfied with their purchases. Payment with paypal and combined shipping is also possible. 14 days money back guarantee is provided as well. World wide shipping is possible.
The site has an official YouTube channel, click here if you wish to see the videos that are uploaded by the site. If you would not like to miss any new video the site has uploaded, please subscribe on YouTube.
Here is the first video of our collections - just to show you an example. More will follow later on.
|
Adidas
|
The World Cup Qualifiying matches between El Salvador v Honduras in 1969 coincided with what mutual event?
|
FIFA Partners - FIFA.com
FIFA Partners
adidas
Being the most popular sport worldwide, football is clearly one of adidas’ key strategic priorities. For over 60 years, adidas has led all major developments in boot, ball and apparel technologies. This dedication to the sport and its close relationships with athletes and teams enabled adidas to become an integral part of the history, the present and the future of football.
Building on its success around major sporting events, the brand strives to increase its leadership position in Football by continuously creating the industry’s top products and fully leveraging its outstanding portfolio of sports marketing partners. Partners include leading football associations (e.g. FIFA, UEFA) and their respective events (FIFA World Cup™, UEFA EURO 2012 & 2016, UEFA Champions League), national federations (e.g. reigning FIFA World Cup™ champion Spain, Germany, Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Greece), leagues (e.g. Major League Soccer in the USA), clubs (e.g. Real Madrid, AC Milan, Chelsea FC, FC Bayern Munich) and individual players (e.g. three-time FIFA World Player of the Year Lionel Messi, Xavi, Thomas Müller, David Villa, Nani, Robin van Persie and David Beckham).
The relationship between FIFA and adidas dates back more than 40 years. Since 1970, adidas has been supplying the official match ball for all FIFA World Cup™ matches. It goes without saying that for every FIFA World Cup™, adidas designers and developers aim at devising the perfect ball by combining innovative technology and exciting and unique design to make the Official Match Ball the true icon of every FIFA World Cup™.
Among the adidas line of legendary balls were the Tango (1982), the first ball to successfully combine leather and polyurethane, the Azteca (1986), the first fully synthetic ball, the Questra (1994), the polyurethane foam-based ball, the Tricolore (1998) which introduced a syntactic foam layer and the +Teamgeist (2006) that has set new standards with its innovative and highly iconic design and panel-technology.
Besides the FIFA World Cup™, adidas is also involved in all other FIFA events, for instance the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013, the FIFA U-20 World Cups for women and men as well as the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup, to name just a few. At all these events, FIFA officials, referees, volunteers and the entire Youth Programme (player escort, ball crew, flag bearers) wear adidas products from head to toe.
Fully in line with FIFA’s mission 'Develop the game, touch the world, build a better future', adidas is also actively contributing by providing product for numerous development courses and CSR initiatives around the world.
For more information on adidas and its products please visit: www.adidas.com or join the conversation at www.facebook.com/adidasfootball or on Twitter: @adidasfootball
adidas is part of the adidas Group, a global leader in the sporting goods industry offering a wide range of products around the three core segments of adidas, Reebok and TaylorMade-adidas Golf. Headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, the Group has more than 46,000 employees worldwide and generated sales of € 13.3 billion in 2011.
English
|
i don't know
|
A white ball was first used in a World Cup in?
|
The footballs during the FIFA World Cup™
2014 Brazil
The brazuca, which means 'Brazilian' and refers to the Brazilian way of life, is the most-tested adidas ball in history. It was, over a two-and-a-half-year period, tried out by over 600 of the world’s top players or former players including Iker Casillas, Dani Alves, Lionel Messi, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Zinedine Zidane, and 30 teams in ten countries across three continents. The brazuca was also used at a selection of international football matches, albeit with a different design, including a friendly between Sweden and Argentina last February.
The brazuca’s colours and ribbon design of the ball panels symbolise the traditional multi-coloured wish bracelets worn in the country, in addition to reflecting the vibrancy and fun associated with football in the South American country. It has a new structural innovation, with a unique symmetry of six identical panels alongside a different surface structure will provide improved grip, touch, stability and aerodynamics on the pitch.
2010 South Africa
The adidas Jabulani, which means ‘to celebrate’ in isiZulu, was the official match ball of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ and is already the 11th edition of adidas's FIFA World Cup balls. The 11 colours that are present on the Jabulani pay tribute to both football and the country in which Africa’s first-ever FIFA World Cup will be held.
Grip 'n' groove
Jabulani ushers in some major advances in football technology. The grip ’n’ groove’s profile circles twist around round the entire ball in an optimal aerodynamic way and the integrated grooves provide unmatched flight characteristics, making this the most stable and most accurate adidas ball ever.
Minimal seam, more perfection
As opposed to the flat-paneled molding of previous adidas footballs, Jabulani comprises eight thermally bonded 3D panels that have been, for the first time ever, spherically molded to make this ball a perfectly round football that is more accurate than ever before.
2006 Germany
More than three years of extensive research and development were needed to present the adidas +Teamgeist™, the company’s best performing ball ever. Thanks to a revolutionary 14-panel ball configuration, players were able to show their true skills, as the quality and performance characteristics were identical every time they kicked the ball.
The adidas Innovation Team (a.i.t) rigorously tested the new ball for the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™, first under the toughest laboratory conditions possible, later also with professional players and clubs on the field of play. Scientific tests were conducted together with the Sports Technology Research Group of the University of Loughborough, one of the leading institutions of its kind worldwide. These tests confirmed that the adidas +Teamgeist™ was more round, precise and consistent than any top competitor’s match ball.
Italy won their fourth world crown in Germany, beating France on penalties in Berlin. If Zinedine Zidane's red card was the final's defining image, Italy's triumph will be remembered as a team effort, with ten different Azzurri players finding the net during the course of the tournament.
2002 Korea/Japan
The ball for the FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan™ was known as the “Fevernova”. It was the result of three years of improvement on the “Tricolore” at the adidas research centre in Scheinfeld in southern Germany. The material consisted of six layers or coatings starting with a natural latex bladder inside, then a three-ply Raschel knitted fabric, syntactic foam, a polyurethane layer, a protected iriodine print and finally transparent polyurethane abrasion-resistant coating. The adidas triad design had now become two single, enlarged triads with the points turning into clockwise arrows in the colours of grey, red and gold. The background was no longer a traditional pure white but more of a champagne colour. Over 2,500 balls were supplied for the finals and an estimated six million of the high-quality match balls and replica-quality balls were sold worldwide.
The final was between the two most successful FIFA World Cup™ nations of all time – Brazil and Germany. Ronaldo’s two second-half goals gave Brazil their fifth FIFA World Cup™ title and firmly put the ghosts of the France ’98 final to rest. It was a hard-fought and equal match befitting a clash of two of world football’s titans, but Ronaldo had the touch of greatness that separated the two teams in Yokohama, Japan.
1998 France
The “Tricolore” used in 1998 was the first coloured ball to be designed for the FIFA World Cup™. Its triads incorporated the symbols of the host nation, France, i.e. a cockerel, a high-speed train and a turbine. The ball itself was based on an entirely new synthetic material featuring “syntactic foam”, claiming to give better compression and more explosive rebound characteristics than its predecessor. The foam was made up of gas-filled micro-bubbles that distributed energy equally when the ball was kicked.
This was the final that everyone had hoped for. The world champions against the home nation, but it was a strangely subdued Brazil who took the field, the crowd rife with rumours that there was a fitness problem with Brazil’s star player Ronaldo.
France were determined to win on home territory, and they did so easily with two headed goals from their future World Player of the Year, Zinedine Zidane.
Emmanuel Petit added a third to make it 3-0. So, at last France, the home of Jules Rimet, the creator of the FIFA World Cup™ and the team that had been an unlucky semi-finalist in both 1982 and 1986, had got their just deserts and the country partied the night away.
1994 USA
The ball was called the “Questra” to indicate the USA’s quest for the stars, so the shapes were incorporated into the triads. The ball itself was developed in France and then thoroughly tested by teams and players in both Europe and the USA. The ball was manufactured from five different materials with a final durable but flexible outer layer made from polyurethane.
Brazil met Italy in the final – a repeat of 1970. Brazil were unable to break down the Italian defence even though there were some near misses. Roberto Baggio had been Italy’s star striker in the earlier rounds, but he was suffering with a hamstring injury and was not at his best. At the end of 120 minutes, the score was 0-0.
So for the first time, a World Cup final was decided on penalties. Brazil’s Marcio Santos missed, as did Baresi and Massaro for Italy. Up stepped Baggio to try and level the scores but he fired the ball straight over the top of Taffarel’s goal and Brazil had won their fourth FIFA World Cup™.
1990 Italy
The “Etrusco” triads featured an Etruscan lion within their design. The ball was again manufactured entirely from fully synthetic fibre layers, including one of latex to create stability and resistance to tearing, a layer of neoprene to make the ball water-tight and an outer skin of polyurethane for abrasion resistance and good rebound qualities.
Argentina met Germany FR – for the second World Cup running – in the final.
The only goal in a very poor game came from an 85th-minute penalty after Völler had been brought down in the area. Brehme’s spot kick won the match for the Germans.
Two Argentinians were sent off – Monzon for a tackle on Klinsmann and, in the 87th minute, Dezotti was shown the red card when he tried to wrestle the ball off Kohler, whom he considered was trying to waste time. Franz Beckenbauer became only the second man to win a World Cup both as a player and a manager.
1986 Mexico
The “Azteca” was a completely new model made of synthetic material in layers, each with different properties to give strength to the ball, help it retain its shape and be fully waterproof. This was also the first ball to feature a unique FIFA World Cup™ design – the triads were based on an Aztec mural.
The final was between a workmanlike Germany FR, coached by former captain Franz Beckenbauer, and an inspired Argentina.
Argentina were 2-0 up in the second half and appeared to be coasting to victory, but German determination shone through – not for the first time in a World Cup final – and by the 82nd minute they had levelled the score.
Willed on by the crowd, Argentina surged forward and captain Maradona sent a perfectly weighted pass into space for Burruchaga, who confidently slotted the ball past Schumacher to make it 3-2. Maradona did not score in the final itself but there was no doubt about who had now inherited the title of the world’s best player.
1982 Spain
The “Tango España” designed for Spain 1982 was the first to be made of a mix of real leather and synthetic material. It had a polyurethane coating to provide a more efficient water repellent.
No one could accuse Italy of using their traditional defensive tactics in the final against Germany FR. Although they had one of the world’s finest-ever goalkeepers, 40-year-old Dino Zoff, their constant attack left the Germans outclassed.
In the 59th minute, Paolo Rossi, who had already scored five goals in the previous two games, put Italy in the lead, diving to head home from a Gentile cross. Italy won 3-1 and missed a penalty to boot!
1978 Argentina
By this time, adidas were well into the pattern of choosing names appropriate for the host nation, so “Tango” was the name chosen for the ball used in Argentina in 1978. It was the first to feature the adidas trademark, which was a printed design of interconnected curved-edge triangles known as “triads”.
The home team arrived five minutes late on the pitch for the final in Buenos Aires. This incensed the Dutch, who abandoned their “total football” for a more aggressive game, which was matched by Argentina.
It was the ball control of Kempes that made the difference. His second goal was the best, and it came in extra time when he skipped past two defenders and the goalkeeper, beat two more defenders on the line and slotted the ball into the net. Luque scored the final goal to make it 3-1.
The Netherlands had the world’s sympathy after losing their second consecutive final, but it was Argentina who lifted the cup in a storm of blue-and-white ticker tape.
1974 Germany
The World Cup in Germany FR in 1974 saw a similar design called “Telstar Durlast”.
In the final, the hosts were up against the world’s most talented team, the Netherlands. The great Johan Cruyff began the game sensationally with a run from one end of the pitch to the other without a German touching the ball until he was tripped by Hoeness.
After scoring from the ensuing penalty, the Dutch, perhaps now overconfident, began to play the ball around the bemused Germans. But suddenly a penalty was awarded against them when Jansen tripped Breitner – 1-1. Each team then bombarded the other’s goal until just before half time when Bonhof raced down the wing and crossed for Müller to seal the match with his 68th goal for his country ... and to allow that other great German player, Franz Beckenbauer, to lift the FIFA World Cup Trophy at the third attempt.
1970 Mexico
Mexico saw the dawn of a new era when adidas began its long-standing partnership with FIFA to supply footballs for all FIFA tournaments. It was also the first time a ball had been given a unique FIFA World Cup™ name appropriate to the time. “Telstar” was a small spherical communications satellite launched from Florida in 1962, but it probably became the most famous satellite of all time partly because of the pop instrumental of the same name, which was a worldwide hit for The Tornados. The 32-panel leather ball with white hexagons and black pentagons bore a strong resemblance to the satellite, which had a light background covered in dark panels. Many designs have superseded the “Telstar” but it still remains the definitive design used by artists, graphic designers and cartoonists when they want to illustrate a football. adidas delivered a mere 20 balls for use in the finals and sold an estimated 600,000 match balls and replica balls following the tournament.
Brazil v. Italy matched attack against defence in the final. Brazil took the lead when Pelé rose high above the defence to score with a spectacular header. A careless back-heel from Clodoaldo let Italy back into the match but soon Gerson hit a low shot to make it 2-1. Jairzinho, the only player to score in every round, ran the ball into the net for a third and captain Carlos Alberto thundered in the fourth with a magnificent, powerful drive.
Having won their third final, Brazil rightly claimed the Jules Rimet Trophy as their own.
1966 England
The FIFA World Cup™ was held in England in 1966 and The Football Association invited the top manufacturers to supply an unmarked ball each, from which the final choice would be made.
Slazenger, a sports manufacturer based in Dewsbury in Yorkshire, was one of the chosen few. It was decided that Malcolm Wainwright, then 32, who had been making balls since he was 15 and was regarded as the firm’s best stitcher, would produce the sample ball. “I made about 20 balls all told,” he said. “They were 24-panel balls, which meant that there were six panels made up of three long strips of leather but the centre panels of these three strips had a further seam at right angles just to give more strength. I was asked to take extra care over them.”
“They checked them for weight but then the manager would also check them over visually. Simply by using his eyes and his experience, he could tell see whether or not the shape was completely round and the seams were perfect. Anyway, he took the best one and sent it down to London.”
The balls were laid out on a table in at FA headquarters in London. None were branded, but merely numbered, and were then examined by experts for circumference, loss of pressure, weight, bounce and so on. Happily for Slazenger, their ball was chosen.
Wainwright and seven others were tasked with stitching the 300 balls needed for the 1966 FIFA World Cup™. Each would have written his name inside the ball. This was normal practice for the stitchers because, before sewing the final seam, each ball went to a specialist for the bladder to be inserted and was then returned to the same man for the final seam to be sewn. An important point given that the stitchers were paid on piece work!
The actual ball used in England’s 4-2 win over Germany FR in the 1966 final disappeared for many years. It should have gone to Geoff Hurst, the only man ever to score a hat-trick in a FIFA World Cup™ final, but it ended up being taken by the West German player Helmut Haller, whose son apparently kicked it about in his back garden for many years. It is now in the National Football Museum in Preston in England and the only way to find out who made the actual ball would be to unpick a seam and take a look at the name inside – a tempting thought!
1962 Chile
The balls used in Chile 1962 did not correspond at all with European standards. During wet weather, there were complaints that the balls were “drinking” water and were losing their colour in the sun. Indeed, before kick-off in the very first match between Chile and Switzerland, the referee, Ken Aston of England, asked to see the five balls that were to be used for the game. He was so horrified by their parlous, peeling state that he sent for a new ball, which only arrived ten minutes into the second half. Therefore, a number of European balls were quickly used as substitutes for the local brands for many of the remaining matches.
In the final, champions Brazil met surprise finalists Czechoslovakia in Santiago. The Czechs scored first. They were supposed to be strong defensively but in this match it was their goalkeeper Schroif who was at fault for all the Brazilian goals. First he allowed Amarildo to put the ball between himself and the goalpost from a seemingly impossible angle, then he was out of position for the second – a header by Zito, and finally, he fumbled and dropped a hopeful cross from Djalma Santos and Vava happily pumped the ball into the net for the 3-1 win.
1958 Sweden
Just Fontaine of France set a tournament record of 13 goals in these finals, which still stands but nevertheless, it was Brazil and host nation Sweden who met in the final in Stockholm.
Sweden surprisingly scored first but Garrincha swerved miraculously past two defenders and cut the ball back for Vava to score. Twenty minutes later, Vava scored again. Pelé, only 17, scored the third, trapping the ball on his thigh, hooking it over his head, swivelling and volleying past Svensson. For his second, he rose high above the defence to power in a majestic header. Brazil won 5-2 and were on their way towards becoming the world’s best football team with the man who would eventually be named as the world’s best-ever footballer.
The 18-panel ball was designed with zig-zag interlocking seams so that there was less stress on the stitching.
1954 Switzerland
Hungary were two goals up within eight minutes in the final in Berne, but remarkably Germany FR had equalised within another eight. Pouring rain drenched the players and the crowd during the game but German goalkeeper Turek was in fine form, making save after save on the slippery pitch.
Five minutes from the end, Schaefer crossed the ball into a crowded goalmouth and it eventually reached Rahn, who controlled it, advanced, seemed to pause and then drove it past Hungarian goalkeeper Grosics with his left foot.
Perhaps if Puskas, their great left-footed striker, had been fully fit Hungary might have won. The Magnificent Magyars lost only one match between 1950 and 1956, and that was the most important match of all. The 18-panel ball similar to the one illustrated left made its first appearance here and was used, in various forms, until 1966.
1950 Brazil
The first post-war finals in Brazil in 1950 still saw the use of the traditional 12-panel ball, but with curved edges to create less stress on the seams. Again, the balls used in the finals would have been made by a local manufacturer.
This particular ball is from the legendary match in Belo Horizonte when the heavyweights of England played the United States. In those days, football or “soccer” was very much a minority sport in the USA and when the unfancied Americans beat the English 1-0, the entire football world was astounded.
Such was the magnitude of the occasion that the ball was kept as a souvenir and it can now been see in the Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, New York State, USA. For the record, in the final itself, the hosts Brazil were devastated to be beaten 2-1 by rivals Uruguay.
1938 France
Cup-holders Italy this time faced the majestic Hungarians in the final in Paris.
The Italians were dynamic, employing modern tactics that left the Hungarians looking static although they did manage to score two goals. Some fine midfield and wing play had put Italy 3-2 up when, ten minutes from the end, following some skilful interpassing, Biavati back-heeled a pass to centre-forward Piola, who smashed it into the goal to make it 4-2.
France was at war a year later and there would be no more FIFA World Cups™ for 12 years. As in the two previous finals, the 12-panel ball would have come from local suppliers and would have been of brown leather.
1934 Italy
The second FIFA World Cup™ found hosts Italy up against Czechoslovakia in the final. Eight minutes from the end, the Czechs were 1-0 up when Italy’s Orsi, receiving the ball from Guaita, ran through the Czech defence, feinted with his left foot but shot with his right. The ball swerved wildly for some reason and curled past the outstretched goalkeeper and into the net. Italy scored again in extra time to take the trophy.
The following day, Orsi tried 20 times to repeat his ball-bending trick for the benefit of photographers and failed, even with an empty net!
The ball would have been similar to the one illustrated here and it is possible that it may have become slightly distorted by the end of the match, which may have caused the swerve rather than being it entirely due to Orsi’s skill!
1930 Uruguay
The 1930 ball would have been a 12-piece construction similar to the illustration on the left, but in fact two balls were used in the final itself! This saw hosts Uruguay pitted against Argentina. There was a heated argument about which ball was to be used – the Uruguayan ball or the Argentinian ball. The ball from the hosts, Uruguay, was allegedly somewhat larger than that of Argentina, although, given that the required circumference of the ball has always been between 68 and 70cm, the difference should hardly have been noticeable. In the end, the only way to resolve the disagreement was for the teams to agree to use the Argentinian ball in the first half and the Uruguayan ball in the second half. Suffice to say that Argentina led 2-1 at half time and Uruguay won the game 4-2!
Football facts
|
1950
|
The centre circle of a soccer pitch is used only at kick-offs/re-starts, and in which other game feature?
|
HISTORY ADIDAS BALLS
Here you can see the first soccer balls which were used in the first World Cup until the most recent championships in which the sport brand ADIDAS is the official supplier. All these balls are original and they are not on sale.
Official World Cup Balls:
BALL FROM XIX CENTURY (1800-1850)
During the 19th Century many sports with ball became popular (Soccer/ football, rugby, basket...etc). At the beginning the same ball was used for all these sports. It did not matter the ball's feature for every sport. This model was the most used for all sports from 1800-1850 to 1900. His appearance is almost identical to one of basketball. This model is available in our Store .
BALL OF THE BEGINNING OF XX CENTURY (1900)
This model was the first one known on the soccer history. Its appearance was like a basket ball. The ball was consisted of 8 long panels which joined in two poles of the ball thanks to an octagon panel, as you can see. Of course this model was not use in any World Cup but it is interesting to know how the first soccer balls were like. Available in store .
1930 T- SHAPE
The T-Shape model was used on the first World Cup in Uruguay 1930. It was characterized by the T form of its panels. There were in total 12 T panels. This ball had a sewing with lace to be inflated as you can observe on the picture. On the 1930 championship were used two ball models, the T-Shape and the 12 panels ball (the following model). Available at store .
1930 TWELVE PANELS
This mythical ball consisted of 12 panels made of genuine leather. This model and the T-Shape ball were used during the first World Cup in 1930, Uruguay. It had a sewing with laces out the ball in order to inflate it. This ball has gone down in history as the icon ball in most of clubs' shields like Barcelona's shield. It represents all ancient leather balls from 1930 to 1960. Available at store .
1934 FEDERALE 102
Model used on the 2º World Cup, Italy 1934. It consisted of 13 cut panels. Nowadays it is so difficult to find a model of this time. The ball also had a sewing with lace to be inflated. Available at store .
1938 ALLEN
This ball was known as ALLEN, the company which provided soccer balls during the World Cup in France 1938. These kind of balls usually had 12 panels but this model consisted of 13 leather panels, because on the part of the ball where had the lace to be inflated, was consisted of 3 panels. The rest of the ball consisted of groups of 2 panels. Available at store .
1950 SUPER DUPLO T
Ball used on the 50´s and of course on the World Cup in Brasil 1950. It consisted of 12 panels. This model was the first one which did not have any sewing with lace, that is to say, it was inflated as the current balls, thanks to a valve. Available at store .
1954 SWISS
The official ball on the Switzerland World Cup 1954. It was consisted of 18 leather cut panels. The reason of using cut panels was because the goal was to get the most espherical ball as possible. This ball also was the first one in a different colour, yellow. On its surface was printed with the following lettering: SWISS WORLD CHAMPION MATCH BALL. Available at store .
1958 TOP START
Ball used on The World Cup in Sweden 1958. The design was very similar to 1954 model, but in this case the panels was not cut as you can see. It was consisted of 18 leather panels. For this tournament were used two ball models, one brown, one white. The white model was used on the last matches, but not on the final. Available at store .
1962 CRACK
The legendary Crack ball was the authentic ball used during the 1962 World Cup in Chile. This mode revolutionized the soccer balls designs due to its octogonal panels. This ball was composed of octogonal long panels. Curiosly this is the Adidas stile at the present days, using long panels to get more ball's surface in order to kick it in a better way. This model had a bladder as the current balls. Available at store .
1963 SANTIAGO
Many people think the Santiago ball was the official ball for the 1962 World Cup in Chile, but it was not. Adidas, the brand which designed the Santiago, launched this model in 1963 as a tribute to the World Cup played last year. In the 90's Adidas relaunched a reedition of this ball, the Santiago.
1966 CHALLENGE
This model was well-known as "Challenge". It was used on The World Cup in England 1966. Model very similar like 1958 one, the most important difference was the colour, orange. Although during the championship were also used in yellow and white. This model was the last one before the ADIDAS hegemony. From that moment on the following World Cup models were designed by ADIDAS. Available at store .
1970 TELSTAR
Telstar, provided by Adidas, was the official match ball of 1970 FIFA World Cup and 1974 FIFA World Cup held in Mexico and West Germany. It was painted with black and white panels so it was more visible on black-and-white television, and hence its name which is short for television star. Telstar was also a series of TV satellites, providing intercontinental live coverage also of football games.
1974 TELSTAR Y CHILE DURLAST
Adidas repeated the same design, the only difference was the colour of the lettering, in this case in black. The Telstar is considered a classic design . The Telstar became in the icon of all soccer balls that is why we can see this design in most of cartoon movies, comics or pictures for children. On the 1974 World Cup in Germany, Adidas introduced two models, the Telstar and the Chile Durlast. Both models were the official match balls for that tournament. The Chile durlast ball was composed by 32 panels as well, but the ball was completly white.
1978 TANGO RIVER PLATE
Tango Durlast by Adidas was the official match ball of 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.It introduced a new design which would be used for the next twenty years: Twenty identical panels with ‘triads’ created the impression of 7 circles. It was the most expensive ball in history, at the time, with a £50 price tag. Like its predecessors, the adidas tango durlast was made of genuine leather and boasted the shiny waterproofing durlast coating.
1982 TANGO ESPAÑA
Tango España by Adidas was the official match ball of 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain. The Tango España had improved water resistant qualities through its rubberized seams. These were not very resistant and resulted in the ball having to be changed several times during some games. This ball was the last genuine leather ball to be used in the world cup.
.1986 AZTECA
Azteca Mexico by Adidas was the official match ball of 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. It was also the first fully synthetic FIFA World Cup ball.The elaborately decorated design was inspired by the hosting nation’s native Aztec architecture and murals.
1990 ETRUSCO UNICO
The Etrusco Unico was a football made by Adidas in the early 1990s. It was the official match ball of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy and the Euro 1992 in Sweden. The name and intricate design took their inspiration from Italy’s ancient history and the fine art of the Etruscans. Three Etruscan lion heads decorate each of the 20 Tango triads.
1994 QUESTRA
Questra by Adidas was the official match ball of 1994 FIFA World Cup in United State. The name was derived from an ancient word meaning "the quest for the stars."In the development process of the Questra, Adidas tried to create a lighter and more responsive ball. By manufacturing the new ball from five different materials and enveloping it in polystyrene foam, Adidas made the Questra more waterproof and allowed for greater acceleration when kicked.
1998 TRICOLORE
Tricolore by Adidas was the official match ball of 1998 FIFA World Cup in France. It was the first multi-coloured ball to be used in the finals. It was also the last world cup ball to bear the classic tango design introduced in 1978. The blue design was to represent the colours of the french national team who were the hosts of the world cup in 1998. Tricolores were also the first adidas world cup match-balls manufactured outside of Europe (made in Morocco) since the 1970 telstar.
2002 FEVERNOVA
The adidas Fevernova was the first World Cup Match Ball since 1978 to part from the traditional Tango design introduced in 1978. The colorful and revolutionary look and color usage was entirely based on Asian culture. The Fevernova featured a refined syntactic foam layer to give the ball superior performance characteristics and a three-layer, knitted chassis, allowing for a more precise and predictable flight path every time.
2006 TEAMGEIST
The ball was designed by the Adidas Innovation Team and the Molten Corporation and is made by Adidas, which has provided the balls used in all World Cup matches since the 1970 World Cup when the Telstar was introduced. The Teamgeist ball differs from previous balls in having just 14 curved panels (making the ball topologically equivalent to a truncated octahedron), rather than the 32 that have been standard since 1970. In another first, the panels are bonded together rather than stitched. It is claimed to be rounder and to perform more uniformly regardless of where it is hit, and being almost waterproof it does not change performance as much when wet.
2010 JABULANI
The official ball for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was the Jabulani. This model like its predecessor, Teamgeist, also is composed of large panels to get the most smooth surface as possible. But technically speaking, its surface has a roughness in order to be controlled better by players.
|
i don't know
|
Soccer has been an Olympic event since?
|
Football - Summer Olympic Sport
Football
Singapore 2010 adopts new sport formats
12 Aug 2010
Football has its roots in ancient China, while the modern version of the game began on the streets of medieval England before evolving into the most popular sport in the world.
Medieval origins
Modern football has its origins in the streets of medieval England. Neighbouring towns would play each other in games where a heaving mass of players would struggle to drag a pig’s bladder by any means possible to markers at either end of town.
A royal ban
Football became so violent in England it was banned by the king for more than 300 years. English public schools are credited with subsequently establishing the modern football codes, thus turning the mob riot into a sport in the 16th century.
Olympic history
Football first appeared on the programme of the Games of the II Olympiad, Paris 1900. It has been on the programme of each edition of the Games ever since, with the exception of Los Angeles 1932.
Europe dominated the competition until after 1992 in Barcelona, where Spain became the last European team to win a gold medal. Since the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, African and South American teams have won all the gold medals.
Also in 1996, women’s football was introduced into the Olympic programme. Three times, the USA has been on the highest step of the podium - in 1996, in 2004 in Athens and in 2008 in Beijing. But this team was beaten by the Norwegians in the final of the 2000 Games in Sydney.
|
1900
|
Waterloo, the location of Napoleon's 1815 defeat, is in modern-day?
|
Football - Summer Olympic Sport
Football
Singapore 2010 adopts new sport formats
12 Aug 2010
Football has its roots in ancient China, while the modern version of the game began on the streets of medieval England before evolving into the most popular sport in the world.
Medieval origins
Modern football has its origins in the streets of medieval England. Neighbouring towns would play each other in games where a heaving mass of players would struggle to drag a pig’s bladder by any means possible to markers at either end of town.
A royal ban
Football became so violent in England it was banned by the king for more than 300 years. English public schools are credited with subsequently establishing the modern football codes, thus turning the mob riot into a sport in the 16th century.
Olympic history
Football first appeared on the programme of the Games of the II Olympiad, Paris 1900. It has been on the programme of each edition of the Games ever since, with the exception of Los Angeles 1932.
Europe dominated the competition until after 1992 in Barcelona, where Spain became the last European team to win a gold medal. Since the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, African and South American teams have won all the gold medals.
Also in 1996, women’s football was introduced into the Olympic programme. Three times, the USA has been on the highest step of the podium - in 1996, in 2004 in Athens and in 2008 in Beijing. But this team was beaten by the Norwegians in the final of the 2000 Games in Sydney.
|
i don't know
|
Name the core specialism of notable Anglo-Danish industrialist Sir Ove Nyquist Arup (1895-1988) and the global (Arup Group) corporation he created?
|
Index-a
What does the workplace flexi-hours acronym TOIL stand for?
Waterloo, the location of Napoleon's 1815 defeat, is in modern-day: France; Belgium; Spain; or Russia?
G-BOAG, G-BOAC, and F-BVFC and the tragic F-BTSC designated what iconic 20thC invention?
Name the core specialism of notable Anglo-Danish industrialist Sir Ove Nyquist Arup (1895-1988) and the global (Arup Group) corporation he created: Pharmacy; Structural engineering; Shipbuilding; or Food canning?
The famous guitar maker founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1902 is: Gibson; Fender; Rickenbacker; or Gretsch?
Calabria, flanked by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, is the southern peninsular of which country?
In the 1920s Japanese and Austrian physicians Kyusaku Ogino and Hermann Knaus devised the contraceptive method called popularly: Coil; Rhythm; Pill; or Condom?
What boom caused gross exploitation of native people of Brazil and adjacent nations by European industrialists c.1879-1912: Rubber; Cotton; Gold; or Silk?
What popular Spanish word has various meanings including go, hurry up, come on, let's go, up, upstairs, and above?
If a fifth of the charges in a $60 bill are discounted by 25%, what is the total cost?
What punning word is an animal's mother, a barrier, and a biblical expletive?
The artists Monet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne are mainly noted for what style of art?
Comprising 100 centavos, what is the currency of Brazil?
What word, derived from Latin meaning to 'pay against the evil of something' refers to expressing disapproval?
Ogilvy & Mather, WWP and James Walter Thompson famously operate in: Law; Advertising; Auditing; or Architectural design?
What mathematical term originated from Arabic 'awar', meaning 'damage to goods', evolving through French terminology for an apportionment of shipping liabilities between owners of vessel and cargo?
What herb is traditionally associated, besides garlic, with the pickling of a gherkin (US pickle)?
Avian refers to: Birds; Bees; Apes; or Vikings?
Derived from Latin for 'place', what anglicized French word commonly means 'instead' in formal communications?
Which inspirational genius created the landmark film 'Modern Times' and its theme song, 'Smile', released in 1936?
Brazil's first ever football match as a national team was in 1914 at Laranjeiras stadium, Rio de Janeiro state, against: Argentina; USA; Prussia; or Exeter City?
What is/are 'pince-nez': Cream and wine sauce; Ferry tug-boats; Armless spectacles; or Four-legged trousers for dogs?
The Arabic term 'Al-jebr' (reunion of broken parts) is famously associated with: Disaster relief; TV news; Twin skyscrapers; or Algebra?
The UHF wireless technology developed by Eriksson in 1994 for data transfer between devices in close proximity is: Silverlip; Bluetooth; Rednose; or Goldeye?
What is the '1c Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value?
A circular partner-swapping ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader, is the: William Bligh; Paul Jones; Horatio Nelson; or James Hook?
The Stone Age was roughly how many years ago: 4-5,000; 50-100,000; 500,000-1million; or 1-2m?
Originally a French portmanteau word combining a shoe and boot, what means 'wilfully destroy'?
What is the recurring number when two-thirds is expressed as a decimal?
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what?
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose?
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014?
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to: Marry each other; Marry animals; Have face transplants; or Live indefinitely on Mars?
The volcano Olympic Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on: Mars; Jupiter; Earth; or the Moon?
What abbreviated term refers to songs/music used in film, TV, adverts, games etc: Ac; Bac; Trac; or Sync?
What authoritarian (usually military-political) leadership term takes its name from Latin 'to join'?
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery?
Which famous sports-sponsoring organization has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry?
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP: Homemade cakes and jams/chutneys; Car-boot and rummage sales; Children's pocket money; or Drug dealing and prostitution?
What word is punningly used to describe serious campers?
PAGE 6
|
Structural engineering
|
Calabria, flanked by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, is the southern peninsular of which country?
|
Index-a
ANSWER PAGE
Trivia Anyone?
What does the workplace flexi-hours acronym TOIL stand for? Time Off In Lieu (meaning 'time off in return for overtime worked')
Waterloo, the location of Napoleon's 1815 defeat, is in modern-day: France; Belgium; Spain; or Russia? Belgium
G-BOAG, G-BOAC, and F-BVFC and the tragic F-BTSC designated what iconic 20thC invention? Concorde (The G planes were British; the F were French; F-BTSC crashed in 2000, prior to which Concordes had reportedly the safest record of any other plane in history)
Name the core specialism of notable Anglo-Danish industrialist Sir Ove Nyquist Arup (1895-1988) and the global (Arup Group) corporation he created: Pharmacy; Structural engineering; Shipbuilding; or Food canning? Structural engineering
The famous guitar maker founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1902 is: Gibson; Fender; Rickenbacker; or Gretsch? Gibson
Calabria, flanked by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, is the southern peninsular of which country? Italy
In the 1920s Japanese and Austrian physicians Kyusaku Ogino and Hermann Knaus devised the contraceptive method called popularly: Coil; Rhythm; Pill; or Condom? Rhythm
What boom caused gross exploitation of native people of Brazil and adjacent nations by European industrialists c.1879-1912: Rubber; Cotton; Gold; or Silk? Rubber
What popular Spanish word has various meanings including go, hurry up, come on, let's go, up, upstairs, and above? Arriba
If a fifth of the charges in a $60 bill are discounted by 25%, what is the total cost? $57
What punning word is an animal's mother, a barrier, and a biblical expletive? Dam/Damn (these types of words are called homophones , among other interesting language terms)
The artists Monet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne are mainly noted for what style of art? Impressionism
Comprising 100 centavos, what is the currency of Brazil? Real
What word, derived from Latin meaning to 'pay against the evil of something' refers to expressing disapproval? Deprecate
Ogilvy & Mather, WWP and James Walter Thompson famously operate in: Law; Advertising; Auditing; or Architectural design? Advertising
What mathematical term originated from Arabic 'awar', meaning 'damage to goods', evolving through French terminology for an apportionment of shipping liabilities between owners of vessel and cargo? Average
What herb is traditionally associated, besides garlic, with the pickling of a gherkin (US pickle)? Dill
Avian refers to: Birds; Bees; Apes; or Vikings? Birds (avis is Latin for bird)
Derived from Latin for 'place', what anglicized French word commonly means 'instead' in formal communications? Lieu
Which inspirational genius created the landmark film 'Modern Times' and its theme song, 'Smile', released in 1936? Charlie Chaplin (see the story of Smile )
Brazil's first ever football match as a national team was in 1914 at Laranjeiras stadium, Rio de Janeiro state, against: Argentina; USA; Prussia; or Exeter City? Exeter City (the English club, the score was according to most reports 2-0 to the amateurs of Brazil [vs Exeter's professionals], although some say it was 3-3)
What is/are 'pince-nez': Cream and wine sauce; Ferry tug-boats; Armless spectacles; or Four-legged trousers for dogs? Armless spectacles (Anglicized French meaning 'pinch nose')
The Arabic term 'Al-jebr' (reunion of broken parts) is famously associated with: Disaster relief; TV news; Twin skyscrapers; or Algebra? Algebra (it's the derivation of the word)
The UHF wireless technology developed by Eriksson in 1994 for data transfer between devices in close proximity is: Silverlip; Bluetooth; Rednose; or Goldeye? Bluetooth
What is the '1c Magenta', which (at $20m) became the most expensive man-made object ever in terms of weight to value? Postage stamp (British Guiana, 1856 - only one survives)
A circular partner-swapping ballroom dance, named after a 1700s maritime leader, is the: William Bligh; Paul Jones; Horatio Nelson; or James Hook? Paul Jones (after Scottish-American admiral John Paul Jones)
The Stone Age was roughly how many years ago: 4-5,000; 50-100,000; 500,000-1million; or 1-2m? 4-5,000
Originally a French portmanteau word combining a shoe and boot, what means 'wilfully destroy'? Sabotage (from sabot, from savate and botte - and the sense of kicking something to destruction)
What is the recurring number when two-thirds is expressed as a decimal? 6 (0.666666 recurring)
A lodestone (or loadstone, from old English meaning 'leading-stone' or 'way-stone') is a naturally occurring what? Magnet (or Compass is an acceptable answer - lodestone is naturally magnetized magnetite [a form of the iron oxide mineral] and was used as an early sort of directional compass)
Which controversial Swiss sports head, accused of racism, sexism and corruption 1990s-2000s, was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, which advocated women should not replace stockings and suspenders with pantyhose? Sepp Blatter (longtime president of FIFA, soccer's world governing body)
Bambino is the family trust of which controversial business mogul, subject to criminal proceedings in Germany 2014? Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 racing boss)
Boundary-pushing Dutch media corporation Endemol sought participants in 2014 for a reality show requiring the group to: Marry each other; Marry animals; Have face transplants; or Live indefinitely on Mars? Live indefinitely on Mars (scheduled 2025, no return, so they say..)
The volcano Olympic Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest, and the highest peak in the Solar System, is on: Mars; Jupiter; Earth; or the Moon? Mars
What abbreviated term refers to songs/music used in film, TV, adverts, games etc: Ac; Bac; Trac; or Sync? Sync ('sync music' short for synchronization/synchronized [with the action/images])
What authoritarian (usually military-political) leadership term takes its name from Latin 'to join'? Junta (from juncta, and jungere, to join - a junta was historically a Spanish/Portuguese administrative council)
What pollen-receiving part of a flower also refers to negative perceptions and also Christian imagery? Stigma (stigmata refers to Christ's nail scars - the word stigma is Greek, meaning a prick/piercing, related to stick)
Which famous sports-sponsoring organization has a winged hourglass logo, the oldest registered mark of its industry? Longines (the Swiss timing machines and watchmaker, owned by Swatch)
In 2014 the European Union required member states to add what revenues to national economic reporting of GDP: Homemade cakes and jams/chutneys; Car-boot and rummage sales; Children's pocket money; or Drug dealing and prostitution? Drug dealing and prostitution (industries valued at �10bn in the UK alone - GDP is 'Gross Domestic Product', a convoluted measurement of national business revenues)
What word is punningly used to describe serious campers? Intense ('in tents')
PAGE 8
|
i don't know
|
In the 1920s Japanese and Austrian physicians Kyusaku Ogino and Hermann Knaus devised the contraceptive method called popularly?
|
Project MUSE - Catholic Birth Control?: Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse
Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse
Alexander Pavuk (bio)
Father John A. O’Brien (1893–1980), longtime Catholic chaplain at the University of Illinois and influential priest-social scientist, engaged both mainline thinkers and other Catholics on key social questions of the interwar era by employing rhetoric heavily seeded with science. Partly hoping to demonstrate Catholic openness to modernity while parrying longstanding accusations of Church obscurantism, O’Brien was one of a small, yet influential, cadre of progressive Catholics who wrote on topics straddling public ethics and public policy by using ground rules favored by non-Catholic, even non-religious, interlocutors. O’Brien thereby sought a via media between the Church and thought currents of the age. In the 1930s, his works on contraception emphasized the newly-configured “rhythm method” as a scientifically infallible way for married couples to separate sex from procreation in good conscience. The manner in which O’Brien argued in favor of rhythm—and the ends he emphasized—may have unintentionally contributed to a broader shift in the public sphere’s framing of the contraception issue. Consequently, contraception became primarily a technical question for scientists to deal with, a question that increasingly did not concern putatively obscurantist churches.
Introduction
Just as World War II’s nightmare of a scientifically-engineered Nazi utopia was evaporating in the fumes of Adolph Hitler’s bunker, across the Atlantic Ocean Catholic physician J.E. Kempf, Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, was complaining to Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (1881–1949) about progressive Catholics’ excessive concessions to scientism in American society. Kempf wrote as a believing scientist to say that the churches had ceded too much [End Page 53] cultural authority to scientists, and the latter, in turn, appointed themselves arbiters of even religious and ethical questions in public culture: “[T]he scientist has set himself up as the final judge on matters where he has not the slightest scientific knowledge. If his convictions disagree with revealed truths, he repudiates the revealed truths. Science has also encroached upon some moral problems, such as birth control….” 1 The anthropologist Cooper and especially his sometime confidante, Father John A. O’Brien of the University of Illinois, was among a small cadre of Catholic priest-social scientists who had worked diligently in the interwar period to connect science to Catholicism in the American mind. In no way did these figures consciously intend to advance the kind of scientism other liberal Christians seemed to endorse, as in the Unitarian Christian Register, which asked in 1930, “What has birth control to do with religion?” opining that it “is fundamentally a hygienic and economic matter.” 2 Instead, figures like O’Brien used the lingua franca of science to engage American intellectual culture on issues they saw as possessed of both moral import and social ramifications calling for psychological, medical, and demographic responses. However, in consistently framing their discourse to fit the scientific categories of debate favored by most American public intellectuals, progressive Catholics like O’Brien helped push the symbolic public construction of birth control away from connections to religion and into a realm of scientific concern subject to controlled human planning. Subject to technical manipulation, conception could thus become a matter for social engineering.
American birth control debates in the early 1930s had taken on special importance for Catholics not just because of the Great Depression’s challenge to the family economy but also because of the precedents set by both the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference and the American Council of Rabbis in endorsing the practice of artificial contraception within a few months of each other in 1930. 3 The Catholic Church responded with Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii, issued on December 31, 1930, definitively outlawing artificial contraception on natural law grounds. In the pope’s words, “[N]o reason, however grave, may be put forward by which [End Page 54] anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good.” 4 But the broader momentum was already discernible, and the pan-Protestant Federal Council of Churches brought its official position on marital birth control in line with Lambeth in 1931. 5 The scientific development that Catholics like O’Brien relied on to navigate all this—while maintaining fidelity to the Church’s teaching—presented itself in a 1929 volume that accurately mapped female ovulation patterns. This map facilitated a calculated, non-interventionist birth control, the “rhythm method,” as a third alternative to total abstinence and artificial contraception for separating pregnancy from intercourse.
While anthropologist Cooper and economist Msgr. John A. Ryan’s roles in these debates have been addressed to varying extents in recent books like Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception (2004), John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom (2003), and Sharon Leon’s An Image of God (2013), one of the most active and successful in reaching out to both non-Catholics and Catholics on the rhythm method was Father John O’Brien. However, considerably less has been written about his efforts in this arena. It was O’Brien, after all, who most openly popularized phrases that tied together the words “Catholic” and “birth control” in a positive way.
In addition to publishing explanatory articles urging the rhythm method in forums like the Catholic periodical Our Sunday Visitor and an influential long booklet titled Legitimate Birth Control (1934), O’Brien authored an expanded version of the latter in the form of the book, Natural Birth Control (1938), this time replete with elaborate tables and instructions on how to implement the procedure. This volume was especially notable in that it continued his vociferous advocacy for rhythm even after other Catholics quieted their calls for it following decisions by both the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and important bishops like Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago near the end of 1934 telling Catholic advocates to tone down propaganda for rhythm so as not to create a birth control mentality among Catholics. 6 Indeed, for the rest of the interwar era, advertisements for rhythm largely vanished from American Catholic publications and [End Page 55] priests were instructed to mention it only in the confessional and as an extreme option. But O’Brien did not abate. Natural Birth Control saw O’Brien defend rhythm as legitimate Catholic birth control, laying out litanies of medical and psychological quotations to support his position. 7 O’Brien’s ebullient rhetoric was such that it could even be directly quoted—albeit out of context—by pro-contraception luminaries like Margaret Sanger to bolster claims that the Catholic Church had finally come to agree with the desirability and pragmatic usefulness of separating sex from pregnancy while now merely quibbling about methods. 8
Beyond his contributions to birth control discourse, O’Brien is notable for being the first Catholic priest in America to earn a social science doctorate at a non-Catholic university; he obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1920 with a dissertation on silent reading and served as the school’s Newman chaplain from the end of World War I to 1939. 9 O’Brien departed after a series of dissonances boiled over with his ecclesial superior, Bishop Joseph Schlarmann of Peoria, Illinois, and with the powerful Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore. Until 1927, O’Brien had also served on the progressive and social science-oriented National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), an organization that has been characterized as tied to the turn-of-the-century Americanist and Modernist movements. As seen below, his dismissal from the NCWC coincided with a controversy in which Curley and others accused him of extreme liberalism.
O’Brien’s participation in broader conversations about science and sexuality at this point is important in and of itself but also because it offers a window into how progressive Catholics tried to mediate between a complex and sometimes internally-divided subcultural Catholicism and broader [End Page 56] American public culture in the interwar era. These attempted mediations could lead to various unintended consequences. In O’Brien’s case, his manner of argumentation helped serve the interests of those wanting to expand the public authority of scientific experts over topics hitherto conceived, in part, as moral or religious questions. 10
O’Brien’s Overlapping Worlds
John Anthony O’Brien was born in January 1893 in Peoria, Illinois and graduated from St. Patrick Catholic School in Washington, Illinois. After spending one year at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, he returned to his home state to enroll at St. Viator’s College in the town of Bourbonnais. O’Brien earned a B.A. in 1913 and an M.A. in 1914 from St. Viator’s, it being customary at the time to receive a master’s degree for remaining in studies for a year after graduation. In 1916, the local bishop, Edmund Dunne, ordained O’Brien a priest of the Diocese of Peoria. The same Bishop Dunne would three years later ordain another Peorian and St. Viator alumnus to the priesthood, Fulton J. Sheen.
O’Brien spent the 1916–1917 academic year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., studying what Winton Solberg characterized as graduate-level “education, psychology, and sociology.” 11 It was, however, at the non-Catholic University of Illinois where O’Brien made his most significant contributions during our time-frame. While Newman chaplain at Illinois he had controversially argued that religion courses offered in denominational residential colleges would give Catholic students enrolled at state universities an equivalent education to that obtained at Catholic institutions of higher learning. Many American Catholic officials adhered to the idea that religion could not be isolated from the other subjects and the only way to receive a holistic Catholic education was to attend a Church-run college. 12 In viewing Catholic religion as teachable in isolation from the rest of the curriculum, O’Brien enjoyed the support of his friend and fellow-cleric John Montgomery Cooper. In the later 1920s, Cooper had devised a full [End Page 57] and distinct religion curriculum for use by Catholics. 13 Bishop Dunne, too, approved of O’Brien’s educational philosophy and methods and, thus, appointed him superintendent of the Peoria diocese’s schools in 1924. 14
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Father John A. O’Brien (Courtesy of the Archives of the University of Notre Dame).
O’Brien’s administrative and educational philosophies, and his model of public engagement, bore the marks of three lines of overlapping influence from prior decades: the American Progressive Movement—particularly its emerging field of professionalized education—and two controversial discourses in early-century Catholicism: the Americanist and Modernist movements.
The early social sciences undergirding the Progressive Era’s social reform agenda emerged alongside the later nineteenth century liberal Protestant [End Page 58] turn to the Social Gospel. The embryonic social sciences offered both the religious and the secular an option for actualizing the promises of modernity. A variation on the postmillenial Protestant notion of social evolution was, for all intents and purposes, at the center of even secular reform visions. For example, John Dewey’s ideals were essentially de-Christianized versions of the millennial vision of progress. 15 Both religious and secular cohorts shared a singular faith in science’s ability to actualize progressive goals; the new sciences thus offered a highly attractive and practical union of interests. 16
German historicism’s introduction into the American intellectual scene further led early social scientists to conclude that positivist-conceived objective science would facilitate humanity’s increasing mastery of nature. One can see this in the foundational works of Auguste Comte, Lester Ward, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and others. 17 Relatedly, the American Pragmatist tradition urged the widest possible application of the scientific method, too, lending greater vigor to the scientific reform impulse. By the early twentieth century, books like Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) persuaded many reformers that the social sciences were just as “scientific” as the natural sciences. 18
This optimistically-conceived potential of social science to improve American life guided the trajectory of intellectual culture well into the twentieth century. Those hoping to influence social debate—Catholic and non-Catholic—believed they could best achieve their goals by embracing the language and methods of the social sciences. Given the social-scientific emphasis on empirical, inductivist models of analysis and intervention, it is unsurprising that at least some Catholic social scientists would have negotiated or resisted the deductive-centered philosophy the Catholic Church advocated with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). This decree directed Catholic thinkers to neo-Thomist thought as the means of engaging scientific modernity. 19 It was the lot of Catholic social scientists to inwardly attempt a reconciliation of these competing interests. [End Page 59]
As the topical breadth of O’Brien’s brief studies at Catholic University suggests, the education field saw wide overlap with psychology in the era in which O’Brien was trained; practitioners in both disciplines crusaded for their recognition as true sciences. 20 Graduate students of education frequently had to take psychology courses as part of their normal study as statistically-grounded learning models rose to prominence within progressivism’s field of virtues. O’Brien’s above-cited Illinois dissertation and related articles on silent reading also evidence the conjoining trends.
Though trained at Illinois, O’Brien’s year of study at Catholic University and his work with other Catholic social scientists connected him to the Catholic version of these trends. Scholars have shown how social science models were appropriated and negotiated in the halls of Catholic universities and their social science departments; at the Catholic University of America, in particular, the negotiation took place alongside the Americanist and Modernist movements in the early century. 21 Those two episodes informed American Catholic efforts to come to grips with modernity in the United States; their influence was especially seen in liberal Catholic circles where several of the most important Catholic social scientists dwelt.
Despite the papal encyclicals Testem Benevolentiae (1899) and Pascendi Domenici Gregiis (1907) stunting the currents enlivening those two movements, their residual influences lived on in subaltern Catholic intellectual discourses. Such currents, including cultural developmentalism and assimilationism; [End Page 60] compatibility with modern scientific trends, including prevalent philosophies of science; and desire for “a rapprochement with leaders of the intellectual world … [and with] secular culture” were by no means cut off at the time of O’Brien’s formation. 22 While trained theologians espousing full-fledged theological immanentism and openly scorning neo-Scholasticism were silenced or abandoned their advocacy, it was precisely figures in the social sciences (and literary studies) who managed to keep alive certain elements of both movements. 23 Indeed, historian William Portier suggests why modernism’s spirit lived on in Catholics seeking to connect with contemporary culture: “Those who came to be called ‘Modernists’ insist[ed] that intellectual life after Kant required … address[ing] questions about the subject’s constructive role in the process of human knowing—even knowing God. They found the neo-Scholasticism of the day inadequate to that challenge.” 24 This subtle distaste for neo-Scholasticism rubbed off on O’Brien and other liberal Catholics who influenced him, though he never openly repudiated it.
O’Brien’s membership in the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Education Commission from just after World War I to 1927 amplified his trust in science-centered activism. Growing out of the National Catholic War Council, the postwar NCWC became an officially-sanctioned arm of the U.S. Catholic bishops which largely validated Catholics who sought a role for the Church in influencing American social policy and gaining acceptance from non-Catholics. Created in part to balance the postwar influence of the liberal Protestant Federal Council of Churches, the NCWC’s visionaries enjoyed direct links with the Americanist and Modernist thinkers, as historians Christopher Kauffman and Douglas Slawson have shown. 25 [End Page 61]
The NCWC vision of reaching the era’s intellectuals centered on the dialect and idiom of science. A NCWC editorial on the eve of our timeframe titled “Science and Religion” related how the press had recently been discussing the “conflict between religion and science.” The editorialist responded, “From the Catholic standpoint, the best solution of [sic] the conflict will be attained… not by writing books explaining away the conflict but by active entrance on the part of Catholics into the scientific field and by original contributions made to science.” He continued, “If Catholic truth is to receive a sympathetic hearing from intellectual leaders today, one important approach is by way of the natural sciences.” 26
Conservatives within the Church like Boston’s powerful Cardinal William O’Connell were not impressed. He characterized the NCWC—and O’Brien—as “Americanism reincarnate.” 27 Even given the context of the NCWC’s liberalism, O’Brien managed to turn himself into a quasi-radical figure. In 1927, Ku Klux Klan agitation fomented by an ex-nun in the town of Champaign (the location of the University of Illinois) saw O’Brien agree to a Methodist minister’s request to endorse an ecumenical prayer the latter had composed in order to implore tolerance. The prayer was addressed only to God the Father, in part to permit its use by local Jewish rabbis. The NCWC news service published a piece erroneously attributing co-authorship of the prayer to O’Brien, an inaccurate claim repeated in the popular press. Baltimore’s powerful and conservative Archbishop Michael Curley fumed over both O’Brien’s involvement and the NCWC’s distribution of the story, the latter of which gave the secular press the chance to “warmly praise” O’Brien’s ecumenism. 28 Certain Catholic officials concluded that O’Brien was guilty of religious indifferentism and a host of them complained to the NCWC’s overseer of committees, Father John Burke. Having publicly questioned O’Brien’s theological orthodoxy, Archbishop Curley even went to Rome to indict O’Brien. Denouncing him to Vatican representatives, Curley [End Page 62] said O’Brien and the NCWC had created an atmosphere “redolent of unbelief and sheer materialism” and that O’Brien’s attitudes were “liberalising [sic] and un-Catholic.” 29 Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val, secretary of the Holy Office in Rome and adviser to several popes, instructed Curley to let the issue quietly drop, but O’Brien was dismissed from the NCWC that same year. Undeterred, O’Brien continued writing and speaking in this same progressive Catholic vein to as many as would listen.
O’Brien the Author
O’Brien had inaugurated his authorial career in the conjoined realm linking socially active liberal Catholicism with social science. Though an initial scholarly publication presented the fruits of his dissertation material, his writing efforts were not concentrated on academic scholarship. 30 Rather, he harnessed his pen for outreach to Catholics and non-Catholics on various social topics, usually in the language of the sciences. One of his more prominent published collections during the interwar period was Catholics and Scholarship (1938), a set of essays whose titles suggest O’Brien’s view that scientific study was the best means to Catholic respectability. 31 The book included O’Brien’s own “Catholics and Cultural Leadership”; Karl Herzfeld’s “Filling the Gap in Science”; James Reyniers’ “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists”; David McCabe’s “The Path to Eminence in Economics”; and Jerome Kerwin’s “Enhancing Catholic Prestige.” 32
In total, O’Brien published over forty books and hundreds of pamphlets (though it should be remembered the publishing standards of the time allowed some verbatim repetition of one’s own material from book to book). Among the most prominent of his volumes directed at non-Catholics was The Faith of Millions (1938), which presented Catholicism in a manner approachable to non-Catholics and which sold over 200,000 copies by 1945, having been translated into ten languages and seeing twenty-seven printings. [End Page 63] His long pamphlet, Religion in a Changing World, extended O’Brien’s claims about the sacrality of science: “[S]cience … will aid us in securing a better vision of God…. In this sense there is something priestly in the labors of the scientist in his laboring…. For [he] too [seeks] to clarify the application of ethical and eternal truth to the changing social and economic conditions of modern life.” 33 O’Brien dedicated his 1946 volume Truths Men Live By to the famous French priest-evolutionist Canon Henri de Dorlodot.
In 1932, O’Brien published a very popular book called Evolution and Religion as a contribution to public evolution discourse. Catholic scholar John Morrison claimed it achieved the largest non-Catholic readership of any Catholic work in the interwar period. For that effort O’Brien received much-desired plaudits from non-Catholic scientific experts, including renowned public palaentologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn complimented the book and O’Brien “for his liberalism.” 34 Top-flight evolutionary biologist Edwin Grant Conklin of Princeton University also delivered a glowing assessment of the book in the internationally-circulated Scientific Book Club. Morrison described the book itself as a “synthesis of the Mivart, Seton, Zahm tradition with the very latest findings of scientists like Conklin and Osborn.” 35
Correspondence between O’Brien and John Montgomery Cooper when that book was in gestation suggests consensus efforts to craft discourse that would befriend the non-Catholic elite and reorient Catholics’ intellectual rhetoric in the direction of science rather than deductive or authoritative religious categories. One O’Brien letter referred to Cooper’s prior counsel to excise certain material and tone down harshly critical rhetoric aimed at Catholic theologians who had criticized Darwin; the reason was not to stir up those in the Catholic Church who might oppose their own plans to shift Catholic discourse. As O’Brien explained, “The preparation of Chapters … on Copernicanism and the Theological Furore [sic] first raised against Dawinian [End Page 64] Evolution … as you point out … may antagonize [the theologians] and accomplish nothing in bringing about the attitude we desire.” 36
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (Courtesy of the American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.).
By this time, O’Brien had become known inside and outside the Church for liberal commentary on modern American culture, especially in relation to birth control, population, sex education, evolution, and science in general. Some of his strongest opponents argued that he was tying himself to webs of reform that were taking society in a secularizing direction—replacing moral codes with social engineering. Interwar birth control debates operated within this larger social reform skein and its organizational, politically-related outgrowths. As Angela Franks put it, the progressive impulse exploited to promote contraception encouraged the goal of “social control at a time of rapid change, and [the belief] that the government should intervene in matters of social and economic welfare in a rational way, with scientific tools … a true panacea for poverty, illness, marital problems and even war.” 37 [End Page 65]
Space does not permit a discussion of the complexities of the Catholic Church’s response to the contraception question. Still, it can be said that the Holy Office’s decrees of 1851 and 1853 probably offered the most definitive statement until the twentieth century on prohibiting mechanical contraception as contrary to natural law, although priests were not directed to initiate interrogations in the confessional without good reason. 38 Both in Europe and in the United States, the Church’s tone stiffened around the turn of the twentieth century in response to an increase in the breadth and influence of the organized movement favoring artificial contraception. Father John A. Ryan—the progressive cleric who was to head the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference—played no small role in this stronger response in the United States. His 1916 piece in the Ecclesiastical Review argued that priests should henceforth “overcome their inhibitions to publicly address the problem of contraception.” 39 The following year, the Catholic Church issued a new codification of canon law. Although conceding that in a neo-Scholastic sense there were secondary benefits to marriage, the state of matrimony was defined almost wholly in terms of procreation. 40 The U.S. Catholic bishops then issued a joint pastoral address in 1919 that included discussion of contraception, purportedly using Ryan’s arguments as a baseline. 41 Finally, after the Anglican Church guardedly endorsed marital contraception at its Lambeth Conference in the spring of 1930, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii (“On Christian Marriage”) on the last day of 1930, therein restating the objection to artificial contraception on a natural law basis.
Rhythm: Moral Science for All?
Rhythm, the method that O’Brien and others presented as the ideal, non-artificial scientific birth control for Catholics and other Americans had [End Page 66] arrived on U.S. shores from Japan and Austria. 42 O’Brien was emboldened to write about it after two books by American Catholic physicians explained and endorsed it. The first was Chicago physician-professor Leo Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women (1932). 43 The other was The Sterile Period in Family Life (1933), coauthored by Father Valere Coucke and Pennsylvania physician James A. Walsh. 44 Both books received the formal seal of approbation of the dioceses in which they were published. 45
These books explained the mutually reinforcing conclusions arrived at independently by the Japanese researcher Kyusaku Ogino and the Austrian [End Page 67] Hermann Knaus on the natural workings of the ovulatory cycle in menstruating females in the industrialized world. Although there was a one-day difference in the two scientists’ original estimates of the monthly sterile period, Ogino and Knaus independently concluded that ovulation occurred between twelve and sixteen days prior to the next menstruation. Allowing for the shelf life of sperm and ova, women with a perfectly “regular” cycle—said to be every twenty-nine days—had to abstain from intercourse in a monthly rhythm of eight days if they wanted to avoid conception. 46 By mapping out what was seen as a natural process, the argument went, one was not interfering in any way with the system of reproduction implanted in creation even if one used it to plan sex without the possibility of conceiving.
For Catholics who supported such an approach, the rhythm method was nothing other than new fruit stemming from the tree of God-given human intellect and its amazing ability to investigate and understand the workings of nature. But was the method, in reality, predicating a novel position for Catholics? Was it moral and scientific to purposely exclude what was—if the method worked—the possibility of procreation from the act of intercourse simply because one wanted to preclude it? After all, the aforementioned Catholic deductive argument said that conception was the exclusive primary end of intercourse.
The liberal-progressive Catholics who most enthusiastically endorsed the rhythm method of birth control in the public sphere did so almost exclusively based on empirical-inductive evidence wedded to arguments for the social and economic good, rather than deductive philosophical grounds. 47 Because rhythm’s efficacy could be (and was) challenged by some scientists, many wondered what exactly was supposedly distinctive and superior about this Catholic birth control compared to other methods of contraception. There is [End Page 68] ample proof the rhythm method was spoken of publicly in the interwar period by physicians, politicians, and others as one among various types of “birth control” and even—by those who wished to specifically disparage liberal Catholics—one type of “contraception” among many. 48 The pursuit of a scientific map of the ovulation process was, unsurprisingly, conducted within the same matrix of research and reform as other efforts at birth regulation. 49
After reading O’Brien’s long 1934 booklet Lawful Birth Control—and its expanded book version, Natural Birth Control (1938)—one sees John Montgomery Cooper’s quip about Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women might have applied even more so here: “I think he makes an excellent case for the birth controllers without intending to do so.” 50 O’Brien extensively referenced medical, physiological, sociological and psychological authorities to buttress his case that “[p]arents have not only the right but may have at times even the duty to space their offspring in the interests of health and conjugal happiness… Modern science discloses the method by which parents may space their offspring in a natural, rational, ethical manner. It is the method … unfolded by the two great scientists, Drs. Ogino and Knauss.” 51 In one span of five pages, O’Brien employed the word “science” or “scientific” eight times; four times on one page alone. 52 The putatively scientific yet hyperbolic tone was perhaps even more triumphalist here than it had been in his earlier book on evolution. One understands why Margaret Sanger and others complained that O’Brien’s works could be sent through the mails legally whereas information on other types of contraception could not. 53
O’Brien predicated his arguments on social and biological science with a few contentions about natural law inserted at the start. However, the latter [End Page 69] were not framed as absolute but rather as useful because beneficial to human happiness. 54 As Tentler has noted, the German Catholic ethicist Dietrich von Hildebrand particularly influenced O’Brien’s divergence from the all-encompassing emphasis on marital sexuality’s procreative nature that had frequently characterized Catholic works driven by neo-Scholasticism. Von Hildebrand’s 1928 book In Defense of Purity appeared in English in 1931, helping reorient the traditional Catholic natural law construction of marital sexuality by elevating its “secondary ends.” 55 Rather than isolating a primary function of procreation, von Hildebrand argued that marital love facilitated a unique interpersonal union which gave sexuality in marriage its greater meaning. In making this case, he had opened the door to an increased emphasis on the psychology of marriage in discussing its sexual elements. Given O’Brien’s approach, it is unsurprising he would gravitate toward psychological framings of the goal of marital union. 56
Lawful Birth Control and Natural Birth Control were not just explications of a moral birth control method. They were meant, as O’Brien wrote, to “proclaim [that method] from the house-tops” and advocate that method as “the findings of medical science….” 57 Here he saw himself as contributing to American culture writ large. At one point he asked, “Is it not evident to every fair-minded citizen, regardless of religious faith” that by expanding the American Medical Association’s prescription that physicians learn about it, “we are rendering a valuable contribution to the health and happiness of every home in America?” 58
O’Brien went further than most in testifying to the absolute scientific infallibility of Ogino and Knaus’s measurements of the female sterile period. In so doing, he employed grandiose rhetoric: “Great numbers of the outstanding leaders in gynecology have declared [Ogino and Knaus’s results] to be not a theory but a biological law, thoroughly tested and verified.” 59 He [End Page 70] extended that point by lauding the method as healthier and more effective than almost any other form of contraception. 60
O’Brien made sure to report on existing enthusiasm for the method within the Catholic Church, especially among priests. 61 This was probably done to assuage potential concerns among Catholic readers that the rhythm news was too good to be true and that the Church could not really have approved of it. In point of fact, O’Brien’s progressive diocesan hierarch, Bishop John Francis Noll of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had not only given official “ecclesiastical approbation” to publish the 1934 edition but had also penned its introduction, saying “I believe this book by Father O’Brien is the best ever written on the subject of Birth Control.” 62 Bishop Noll later declined to officially endorse the 1938 expanded version, though O’Brien and the Newman Foundation publishers still included the notation “published with ecclesiastical approbation.” 63
Noll’s shift was tied in with the broader cooling of enthusiasm for rhythm among key figures in the American Church after 1934. They felt the over-emphasis on rhythm as a sort of panacea for Catholics was leading to the development of a birth control mentality. O’Brien, however, continued to assert that the discovery of the safe period meant God was working through modern science as revealed in nature. 64 O’Brien quoted the Jesuit Joseph Reiner in his volumes to support that notion. 65 But the Jesuit order, too, was divided in its opinion of the rhythm method. America magazine had strongly criticized Latz and the rhythm method in general throughout the 1930s. 66 Francis LeBuffe, S.J., conservative science editor of America magazine, complained to Reiner that O’Brien had damaged the integrity of Catholic teaching in the public square by giving fodder to artificial contraception advocates who made use of O’Brien’s excessive material on rhythm to support their own cause. 67 [End Page 71]
O’Brien, however, contended that Catholics themselves badly needed rhythm during the extraordinary economic crises they faced as a result of the lingering Great Depression. In fact, he claimed his inspiration to write Lawful Birth Control came from the “joyous refrain which [sprang] spontaneously from the hearts of all upon learning how modern science confirm[ed] the Church’s teaching and show[ed] the way out of the [economic] difficulty,” after couples had read his articles lauding the rhythm theory in the popular devotional newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor. O’Brien attested to receiving “[a]n avalanche of letters from every state of the Union [sic], averaging hundreds a day…” after the series appeared. 68
Other aspects of O’Brien’s presentation on rhythm created problems for his more circumspect coreligionists. One, in particular, related to an idea common to theological modernists: the belief—as historian Christopher Kauffman wrote—“in the utility of scientific methodology to elucidate religious truths.” 69 O’Brien indicated in his birth control writings that science now made it possible to achieve something in the religious realm that had not been possible before. Specifically, since “the laws of nature [are] a reflection of the mind of the divine Legislator,” using them to one’s own advantage opened up even greater opportunity for one to cooperate freely with the Creator than had been the case before modern science had mapped out these menstrual laws. Because parents would know when, or when not, they should expect to conceive a child, they could “deliberately accept,” or else decline, the chance to “cooperate” with God “in His work of Creation” rather than relying on “blind chance.” 70 In O’Brien’s schema, modern inductive science served as catalyst for individuals’ religious advancement. This claim applied to both the techniques of the rhythm method and to the broader goal of controlling exactly when one would, or would not, have children.
Even as O’Brien extolled the religious possibilities that modern science had created, he revealed what can be called a common inferiority complex vis a vis science found especially in liberal Catholic writings of the day. Following a decade of unremitting anti-Catholicism in America, overcompensation for alleged past sins against science was one way figures like O’Brien parried accusations of the Church’s longstanding anti-scientific actions, the Galileo trial cliché being the most frequently invoked. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distorted historical redactions of the Galileo episode continued serving as major springboards for attacks and accusations of obscurantism by [End Page 72] those hostile to Catholicism; John William Draper’s anti-Catholic broadside, History of the Warfare Between Religion and Science (1874) had provided a blueprint for such salvos. 71
Hoping to persuade readers that he and the Church had always been celebrators of science, O’Brien completely reversed the terms of the warfare myth: “In her [the Church’s] vast temple of truth every new secret teased from any of the varied segments of nature finds a prompt and hearty welcome. For the Church knows that every newly discovered truth … will give additional reinforcements to [her known truths].” 72 He also made use of the “twin books” model of divine truth common to eighteenth and nineteenth century Protestant natural theology. Here, the book of written Biblical revelation and the book of nature acted a coterminous parts of divine revelation.
Critics inside and outside the Catholic Church complained that distributing books and pamphlets on technical aspects of natural birth control meant Catholics were providing contraceptive knowledge to anyone who sought it without expert authorization and supervision, which was ironically the same charge Catholics had made in the 1920s against Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control Review. The accusation of Catholic distribution created particular difficulties when highlighting that young people often obtained such knowledge in that way. Michael Williams of Commonweal magazine printed an article in the summer of 1932 in which a female Catholic civic leader argued against loosening the Comstock mailing restrictions: “[T]he dissemination of birth control information … is to let loose a flood of temptation upon a younger generation…. Statistics backed by the Birth Control League itself show that contraceptive articles sold in this country annually amount to one hundred million…. [T]hat the youth of the nation is being perverted in large and steadily increasing numbers is certain.” 73
O’Brien turned to medical authority in his books to deflect precisely these expressions of social-moral concern. Quoting from a 1934 American Medical Association report on the availability of contraceptives in western Florida, O’Brien wrote that they were already widely obtainable: “[P]reventives were sold in 376 places besides drug stores, including gas stations garages, restaurants, soda fountains, barber shops, pool rooms, restaurants, cigar stands, newsstands, shoe shining parlors, and grocery stores [sic]….” 74 [End Page 73] By contrast, he advocated offering a moral method of birth control as an alternative to already widely-utilized artificial contraception.
Just as O’Brien parried accusations similar to those that contraception advocates had faced for putting birth control in the wrong hands, so, too, did he advocate rhythm by employing a scare tactic common to the contraception lobby: people inevitably would be forced to choose between birth control and abortion. O’Brien argued that without workable birth regulation methods, people would turn to the abhorrent alternative of abortion. It was novel indeed to have a Catholic use the same warning as the Birth Control League to sell readers on the necessity of a particular form of birth control. 75 In O’Brien’s words, rhythm would “preven[t] … the enormous number of criminal abortions now converting our land into a whitened sepulcher … filled with the bones of unborn children. 76 He added that abortion was connected to “a high maternal death rate,” since women resorted to it after having unwisely put their trust in other contraceptive techniques that were not only immoral but also, he claimed, less effective. 77
Moving away from social arguments, several later chapters in O’Brien’s birth control volumes included antiphonal litanies of, on the one hand, scientifically-framed allegations about what would happen to married women if rhythm were not used and, on the other hand, promises of what would happen if they employed artificial contraceptive measures. O’Brien added an extensive series of quotations from expert scientists substantiating his claims about the ineffectiveness and recklessness of those alternatives in physiological and psychiatric terms.
O’Brien proffered some extraordinary claims by physiologists asserting that female genitalia not only benefited from the intake of spermatic fluid delivered during male orgasm, but also that “fruitless stimulation of the genital organs leads to more or less serious chronic pelvis [sic] disorders and very frequently to sterility.” 78 Toward this end, O’Brien cited “the distinguished scientist” Dr. H. L. Long arguing as though he were advocating a health food store’s products: “[t]he semen is the most powerful stimulant to all female sex organs and to the whole body of the woman. The organs themselves will absorb quantities of semen and it is most healthful and beneficial,” [End Page 74] and the women who had the good sense to seek out these fluids “improve in physical well being after they are married by availing themselves of this healthful nourishment.” 79 As if the point about females’ purported need for semen had not been graphically clear enough, O’Brien quoted an address from the 1929 Congress of Gynecologists: “It is perfectly well-known and universally admitted that the female organism absorbs spermatic products introduced during the sexual act and that these products act on women in a manner favorable to her development.” 80 Conversely, O’Brien averred, female developmental disorders would result from mechanical contraception, including frightful afflictions like “inflammations in the womb” that “nearly all scientific publications dealing with the subject” indicated could “lead to cancer.” 81
The putative “development” that semen conferred on women manifested itself not just in the biophysical sense. O’Brien argued that substantial psychological and psychiatric needs had been found to depend on seminal intake; he presented any course that denied women of seminal fluids as clearly dangerous. In fact, such deprivation could evidently lead to madness: “lack [of absorbed semen] leads to both physical and psychic disorders.” 82 O’Brien called upon Long again to characterize male ejaculate as the best nerve tonic available for the mentally anxious woman: “There are multitudes of nervous women, hysterical even, who are restored to health through the stimulative effects of satisfactory coitus and the absorption of semen.” 83 For more support on the psychological front, O’Brien turned to Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones of London, “a recognized authority on neural diseases,” who put matters very succinctly: “Birth control often leads to lunacy in women.” 84
Apparently, excessive abstinence could also have the same devastating consequences, or so claimed O’Brien’s experts. This information must have troubled Catholics who had argued in previous years for abstinence. 85 By including a strong physiological argument against depriving women of necessary seminal intake, O’Brien, perhaps unthinkingly, called into question the Church’s perennial wisdom in encouraging celibate chastity. Nuns, of course, experienced lifelong deprivation of these supposedly essential spermatic benefits. Was female monasticism also a practice that modern science would reveal as no longer tenable? [End Page 75]
Conclusion
Father John O’Brien’s advocacy for birth regulation by rhythm can generally be classified in two columns. One column repackaged the arguments of the birth control lobby that, since the early 1920s, emphasized a scientific defense of contraception as both a biological and a social good. The other column consisted of another kind of argument from expertise: medical and psychological testimony about women’s need for the many benefits of intercourse with completion lest physical and mental disease develop.
The relatively short, early sections of O’Brien’s birth control publications touching on the Catholic understanding of natural law in effect tried to couch his subsequent inductive arguments in ill-fitting deductive garb. This manner of argumentation was consistent with the progressive and liberal Catholic perspective O’Brien inherited from earlier twentieth-century influences. Ironically, even if not his overall goal, O’Brien’s discourse contributed to rhetorical currents in the broader culture that further conceptually separated intercourse from procreation even for married couples. This was not generally the institutional Catholic Church’s goal. At one point, O’Brien even offered a demographic-utilitarian argument that it was acceptable for a fertile Catholic married couple to produce no offspring at all, provided that “the propagation of the race is not being endangered….” 86
It is no wonder that by the 1940s, even Daniel A. Lord, an American Jesuit who had believed in the rhythm method, wrote a story in which the Catholic priest-protagonist complained of his encounters with parishioners about children and birth prevention, saying: “I’m getting awfully sick of telling people just how far they can go without actually going to hell.” 87 This was perhaps an unintended consequence of O’Brien’s moderate success in influencing Catholics and others through popular science discourse, a realm where he and some fellow forward-thinking Catholics were ever keen to be seen and heard. [End Page 76]
Alexander Pavuk is assistant professor of history at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. He is preparing a monograph examining progressive Catholic evolution and contraception discourse in American public culture.
Footnotes
1. J.E. Kempf, M.D., to Msgr. John M. Cooper (June 21, 1945), folder “Miscellaneous-K,” box 16, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (henceforth ACUA). Kempf also included euthanasia, castration, abortion, and psychotherapeutic theories in his list of topics with moral implications being treated exclusively as technical issues.
2. Quoted in Kathleen A. Tobin, The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control, 1907–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), 166.
3. For more on these shifts as well as Tobin’s argument that the economics of the Great Depression actually did not play as much of a role as one might assume, see Tobin, American Religious Debate, 148–157, esp. 154.
4. Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, quoted in Anne Fremantle, ed. The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956), 236; also available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii.html .
5. Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Annual Report, 1931, 81 quoted in Tobin, American Religious Debate, 164–165. See also “Concerning the Report on Birth Control,” Federal Council Bulletin (May 1931): 2.
6. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 116.
7. Beyond medicine and psychology, which will be addressed below, see also O’Brien’s demographic (65) and economic (69–70) arguments for rhythm as found in Natural Birth Control. Also, although outside the time-frame of this article, O’Brien continued for many decades advocating for Catholics’ use of birth regulation. O’Brien edited a post-Vatican II volume, Family Planning in an Exploding Population (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968), in which he employed a broadly neo-Malthusian argument in favor of birth control. See O’Brien’s chapters: “The World’s Soaring Population” (3–14) and “Responsible Parenthood,” (45–53), the latter being where he advocated “family planning” (45–53). Also in that book, O’Brien positively recalled his efforts on behalf of birth control in the 1930s (xvii–xvii). It is also worth noting, as Tentler points out, that O’Brien was one of the American thinkers who urged Pope Paul VI to change the Catholic teaching prohibiting artificial contraception before that pontiff’s issuance of the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968 (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 122).
8. See Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 114.
9. O’Brien’s dissertation research was published as Silent Reading With Special Reference to Methods for Developing Speed: A Study in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1921).
10. For a related example of this process in the case of 1920s evolution discourse, see Alexander Pavuk, “Evolution and Progressive Catholics in the Age of the Scopes Trail,” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 101–137.
11. Winton U. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” The Catholic Historical Review 76 (October 1990): 769. The social science disciplines were fluid in the early twentieth century; all were at various times part of Catholic University’s larger department of Social Sciences. See C. Joseph Neusse, “The Introduction of the Social Sciences in the Catholic University of America, 1895–1909,” Social Thought 12 (Spring 1986): 30–41.
12. For more details on this situation and criticisms of O’Brien, see Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois.”
13. See Cooper’s multi-volume set—the first volume printed in 1924 (with the set revised and re-issued in 1935), John M. Cooper, Religion Outlines for Colleges (Washington, DC: Catholic Education Press, 1924–1930).
14. Bishop Dunne was quoted as lauding O’Brien’s “progressive mode in the right direction” (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 773). Dunne’s successor, Joseph Schlarmann, shared none of his predecessor’s enthusiasm for Catholic progressivism; the latter dismissed O’Brien from the diocese in 1939. O’Brien spent the 1939–1940 year in residence at Oxford University and then moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1940. It was at the latter where he spent the remainder of his long career. Schlarmann so strongly disapproved of O’Brien’s educational and public relations tactics that he forbade O’Brien from ever serving as a priest, or even staying overnight, in his diocesan boundaries (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 796).
15. Dewey could be characterized as the apotheosis of this trajectory. Initially operating within liberal Protestantism, he turned to the nascent field of psychology to accomplish his social goals. Historian Bruce Kuklick pointed out that Dewey came to see the New Psychology as the method of philosophy; in this way, Dewey felt philosophy could examine metaphysics using the scientific method. See Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 235.
16. For more on this, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 54.
17. Ross, Origins, 55, 93, 96.
18. Ibid., 157–158.
19. See Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html. For more on this plan as an intellectual program, see James Hennessey, S.J., “Leo XIII: Intellectualizing the Combat With Modernity,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 393–400.
20. See Eldbridge C. Grover, “The Status of Education as an Academic Subject in American Colleges,” Educational Research Bulletin 7 (January 11, 1928): 12–15. The emerging field of psychology can be understood as secularizing the older discipline of moral philosophy. See Jon H. Roberts, “Psychology in America,” in A History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, ed. Gary Ferngren (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000), 502–507.
21. Early twentieth-century Catholics connected to social work sought especially to apply their social science training to effect social change. See, for example, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). At Catholic University, professors like historian Thomas J. Shahan, who had studied under renowned modernist Adolf von Harnack, and was made rector in 1909; and Henry Poels, critic of scholasticism who relied generously on the work of modernists Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, played important roles in establishing the intellectual orientation of the university. William Kerby, long-time sociology professor who reflected the spirit of Americanism and Progressivism was a formidable influence, hoping to recast ecclesiology in sociological principles. See R. Scott Appleby, Church and Age Unite!: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 208–210, 219–220. For more on Kerby, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 66–77.
22. This quote, on the overarching mentalite of the liberal Catholicism nurtured by these trends, comes from Robert Cross’s classic work, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 13–14. See Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13teste.htm;and Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm . Appleby maintained that among American Catholics, modernism “[p]ull[ed] together threads of European Catholic modernism, American Protestant liberalism, and American Catholic progressivism….” See Appleby, Church and Age Unite!, 2.
23. On the latter, see Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), and Una M. Cadegan, All Good Books are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
24. William L. Portier, Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), xx.
25. See Christopher J. Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in American Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), ch. 10. In Kauffman’s words, “the Americanist vision … [was close] to those second-generation Americanist bishops and priests … who were active in the formation and development of the NCWC [National Catholic Welfare Conference]” (Kauffman, 242). Douglas Slawson has also argued that “[T]he Welfare Council inherited dreams. Isaac Hecker had envisioned a spirit-filled laity taking the lead to win the nation for Catholicism. His disciple, [John] Burke, saw a nationally unified Catholic church acting as leaven of American progress.” See Douglas Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade of the National Catholic Welfare Council (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 44.
26. NCWC Editorial, March 1, 1929, Catholic Research Roundtable Articles (1929–1930), box 21, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See also Philip Gleason, Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 201–202.
27. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 276.
28. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 789. For more on the Romanizing Curley’s distaste for the NCWC’s liberalism, see Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789–1989 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 328–329.
29. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 273–274.
30. In addition to his above-cited published dissertation, see O’Brien’s “The Development of Speed in Silent Reading,” 54–76 in Guy Montrose Whipple, ed., The Twentieth Year-book of the National Society for the Study of Education Part I, Second Report of the Society’s Committee on New Materials of Instruction (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1921[?]).
31. John A. O’Brien, ed., Catholics and Scholarship (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938).
32. See O’Brien, Catholics and Scholarship, including these contributions: O’Brien, “Catholics and Cultural Leadership,” 27–37; Karl Herzfeld, “Filling the Gap in Science,” 86–96; James Reyniers, “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists,” 107–129; David McCabe, “The Path to Eminence in Economics,” 146–152; and Jerome Kerwin, “Enhancing Catholic Prestige,” 154–164.
33. John A. O’Brien, Religion in a Changing World: Christianity and Modern Thought (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938), 20.
34. Osborn’s commendatory letter to O’Brien and Conklin’s review are mentioned by John L. Morrison in “A History of American Catholic Opinion on the Theory of Evolution, 1859–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1951), 344. Morrison went on to note that Evolution and Religion “was extensively noticed by leading non-Catholics.… Michael Pupin, a distinguished physicist, bestowed lavish praise on it…. J. Howard Beard, a Protestant and Chairman of the Illinois Board of Health, reported to Fr. O’Brien that his book was making a good impression upon rural Protestant clergymen.” See Morrison, 344–345. According to Morrison, some Catholics were critical, “feeling that Fr. O’Brien had catered overmuch to popular tastes, but on the whole they were … complimentary towards his abilities” (Morrison, 345). Morrison characterized even Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a “supporter” who acted to “stav[e] off criticism” of O’Brien” (Morrison, 346).
35. Morrison, “A History,” 344, 265.
36. My emphasis. John A. O’Brien to John M. Cooper, March 21, 1931, folder “O’Brien, Rev. John,” box 13, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See other letters in this general vein between Cooper and O’Brien beginning with 1930 in folder “Correspondence with Fr. John A. O’Brien,” ibid.
37. In her critical history of Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement, historian Franks argued that birth control plans proffered by elite radicals like Sanger and Dr. Hannah Stone fit in seamlessly with the Progressive Era’s “utopianism, scientism, and proclivity for elitist social engineering.” Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, 2005), 25.
38. See John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 397–399. When cold vulcanization of rubber was perfected in 1843 allowing for the production of rubber condoms the Church expanded its concern for artificial contraception. A bishop had asked Rome’s Sacred Penitentiary if the priest should interrogate a penitent in confession if he suspected use of contraception or if he should allow good-faith ignorance to persist (401).
39. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003), 158.
40. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917 Code of Canon Law), canon 1081, §2, http://www.intertratext.com/x/LAT0813.htm (in Latin). Marriage fell short of its own definition if no such exchange occurred.
41. Noonan, Contraception, 423–424.
42. The method was based on a new scientific measurement of fertility periods in women’s monthly cycles, contrasted with an older theory also purporting to tell when during the month women were not physically able to conceive. The older model, referencing a “safe period” when couples could have sex without the threat of pregnancy, originated with nineteenth-century American physician Frederick Hollick. It was popular for a time in the second half of the century but soon became associated with French biologist Felix Pouchet’s erroneous claims about the timing of human ovulation. Pouchet’s published figures derived from the study of female dogs (James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 [New York: Basic Books, 1978], 12–13). As a consequence, up until the 1930s, the common understanding of ovulation was badly out of line with the workings of the female body, and any idea of a safe period was rendered quite suspect. This only changed with the new research undertaken during the interwar period. A rhythm method of birth prevention that could claim any success obviously needed to rely on legitimate studies.
43. See Paula Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm: The Determination of the Woman’s Time of Ovulation and its Social Impact in the United States, 1920–1940” (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 2000). Viterbo argues that by 1937, Latz had advised more than 25,000 women, most by mail and at no charge (253, fn 381). Latz described himself as a devout Catholic (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 115). One contemporary author in The Pictorial Review went out of her way to label Latz “a deeply religious Catholic” (see Maxine Davis, “The Rhythm,” The Pictorial Review 39 [May 1938]: 18). The same author also said of Latz’s enthusiasm for the rhythm method: “He teaches it with the ardor of an apostle” (ibid.). Another active Catholic physician-researcher of note in this era was John R. Rock, the future co-inventor of the Enovoid birth control pill (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252, 255–257).
44. Leo Latz, The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women: A Discussion of the Physiological, Practical, and Ethical Aspects of the Discoveries of Drs. K. Ogino (Japan) and H. Knaus (Austria) Regarding the Periods When Conception Is Impossible and When Possible (Chicago: Latz Foundation, 1932); Valere J. Coucke and James J. Walsh, The Sterile Period in Family Life (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1933). Latz learned about the method when he was in Cologne, Germany, having heard a presentation on it at the Cologne Medical Society. Soon afterward, he returned to the United States and began advising his patients to use it (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252). His official presentation to the American medical community came in Leo John Latz and C. Reiner, “Natural Conception Control,” JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 105 [1935] (cited in Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 253, fn 381).
45. Latz’s book carried the endorsement of the Chicago archdiocese’s Cardinal Mundelein; Couke and Walsh enjoyed what was an even more prestigious sanction—that of Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York. Technically, both books derived from the work of a Dutch Catholic physician, Jan M. Smulders. Smulders’ book popularizing the idea of a sterile period had appeared in Germany earlier in 1932. See J. N. Smulders, Periodische Enthaltung in der Ehe Methode: Ogino Knaus (1932). Knaus’s book bore the seal of the venerable Diocese of Regensburg, Germany.
46. As both authors noted, most women do not have perfectly regular cycles. Women with irregular menstrual cycles (such as a variation of twenty-six to thirty days) would have to be abstinent for twelve days per month. Stress and other factors could increase the irregularity (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 105).
47. In a forum aimed at other priests, Cooper had gone so far in the late 1920s as to suggest Catholics had never yet made the restrictive argument properly on natural law grounds. He specifically asked, for example, why Catholic teaching skipped over the usual assignment of venial sin for violations of the natural order in the particular case of contraception and only in that case; the Church classified contraception always as a mortal sin. How, he wondered, was that justified? He pointed out that eating “for pleasure alone” (rather than for nourishment) was simply a venial sin. Why not sex as the expression of a couple’s love, or for pleasure alone, etc.? See John M. Cooper, “Birth Control and the ‘Perverted Faculty’ Argument,” The Ecclesiastical Review 79 (November 1928): 527. Cooper targeted the deductive “perverted faculty” argument by saying that Catholic authorities have offered “facile assumptions” in place of “objective evidence” as to “what precisely is the natural function of the faculty (sex) under consideration?” (529).
48. See, for example, Frank A. Smothers, “New Light on Birth Control,” The Common-weal 17 (March 8, 1933): 511–513; A. M. Turano, “Contraception by Rhythm,” American Mercury 35 (June 1935): 164–168. A pamphlet advertising a cardboard wheel device used to calculate the rhythms of ovulation and sterility is found in John Ryan’s papers, advertising that it “Assumes Perfect Birth Control” (1937), folder 17, box 17, John A. Ryan Papers, ACUA.
49. Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 294–295.
50. John Montgomery Cooper letter to Edgar Schmiedeler, quoted in Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 113.
51. John A. O’Brien, Natural Birth Control without Contraceptives, According to Nature’s Law in Harmony with Catholic Morality (Champaign, IL: The Newman Company, 1938), 96.
52. O’Brien, Natural, 71–75.
53. The Methodist Anthony Comstock had succeeded in getting a federal law passed in 1873 that prohibited using the U.S. mail to circulate contraception-related materials. Under this law, “contraceptives” and related information were specifically prohibited under the categories “articles of immoral use” or “obscene literature.” See http://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html . In 1937, the American Medical Association endorsed medically supervised contraception as an aspect of preventive medicine while a series of court decisions effectively dismantled the Comstock laws.
54. See O’Brien’s manner of garbing natural law in the trappings of ends-based utility in Natural, 34–38.
55. Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 107.
56. See, for example, O’Brien, Natural, 53. Noonan has emphasized the importance of von Hildebrand’s novel argument in this period and for future Catholic moral theology. See Noonan, Contraception, 494–495.
57. O’Brien, Lawful, 71; O’Brien, Natural, 71.
58. O’Brien, Natural, 97.
59. O’Brien, Natural., 147, 42. O’Brien acknowledged that while he was “not a medical scientist,” he had the assistance in compiling the book of the Belgian physician Raoul Guchteneere, the Loyola of Chicago medical school professor of gynecology Henry Schmitz, and the Austrian researcher Herman Knaus (O’Brien, Natural, 146; O’Brien, Lawful, i). O’Brien also listed numerous specialist scientists throughout the books supporting the rhythm method.
60. O’Brien, Natural, 20–21.
61. See, for example, O’Brien’s citation of The Clergy Review [London] from May 1933 (ibid., 44). Raoul Guchteneere was said to have written positive articles on the method in The Homiletic Monthly (ibid., xvii–xix).
62. Noll quoted in ibid., xv.
63. For the shift in Noll’s attitude, see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 116.
64. O’Brien, Natural, 44.
|
Rhythm
|
What boom caused gross exploitation of native people of Brazil and adjacent nations by European industrialists c.1879-1912?
|
Project MUSE - Catholic Birth Control?: Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse
Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse
Alexander Pavuk (bio)
Father John A. O’Brien (1893–1980), longtime Catholic chaplain at the University of Illinois and influential priest-social scientist, engaged both mainline thinkers and other Catholics on key social questions of the interwar era by employing rhetoric heavily seeded with science. Partly hoping to demonstrate Catholic openness to modernity while parrying longstanding accusations of Church obscurantism, O’Brien was one of a small, yet influential, cadre of progressive Catholics who wrote on topics straddling public ethics and public policy by using ground rules favored by non-Catholic, even non-religious, interlocutors. O’Brien thereby sought a via media between the Church and thought currents of the age. In the 1930s, his works on contraception emphasized the newly-configured “rhythm method” as a scientifically infallible way for married couples to separate sex from procreation in good conscience. The manner in which O’Brien argued in favor of rhythm—and the ends he emphasized—may have unintentionally contributed to a broader shift in the public sphere’s framing of the contraception issue. Consequently, contraception became primarily a technical question for scientists to deal with, a question that increasingly did not concern putatively obscurantist churches.
Introduction
Just as World War II’s nightmare of a scientifically-engineered Nazi utopia was evaporating in the fumes of Adolph Hitler’s bunker, across the Atlantic Ocean Catholic physician J.E. Kempf, Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, was complaining to Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (1881–1949) about progressive Catholics’ excessive concessions to scientism in American society. Kempf wrote as a believing scientist to say that the churches had ceded too much [End Page 53] cultural authority to scientists, and the latter, in turn, appointed themselves arbiters of even religious and ethical questions in public culture: “[T]he scientist has set himself up as the final judge on matters where he has not the slightest scientific knowledge. If his convictions disagree with revealed truths, he repudiates the revealed truths. Science has also encroached upon some moral problems, such as birth control….” 1 The anthropologist Cooper and especially his sometime confidante, Father John A. O’Brien of the University of Illinois, was among a small cadre of Catholic priest-social scientists who had worked diligently in the interwar period to connect science to Catholicism in the American mind. In no way did these figures consciously intend to advance the kind of scientism other liberal Christians seemed to endorse, as in the Unitarian Christian Register, which asked in 1930, “What has birth control to do with religion?” opining that it “is fundamentally a hygienic and economic matter.” 2 Instead, figures like O’Brien used the lingua franca of science to engage American intellectual culture on issues they saw as possessed of both moral import and social ramifications calling for psychological, medical, and demographic responses. However, in consistently framing their discourse to fit the scientific categories of debate favored by most American public intellectuals, progressive Catholics like O’Brien helped push the symbolic public construction of birth control away from connections to religion and into a realm of scientific concern subject to controlled human planning. Subject to technical manipulation, conception could thus become a matter for social engineering.
American birth control debates in the early 1930s had taken on special importance for Catholics not just because of the Great Depression’s challenge to the family economy but also because of the precedents set by both the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference and the American Council of Rabbis in endorsing the practice of artificial contraception within a few months of each other in 1930. 3 The Catholic Church responded with Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii, issued on December 31, 1930, definitively outlawing artificial contraception on natural law grounds. In the pope’s words, “[N]o reason, however grave, may be put forward by which [End Page 54] anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good.” 4 But the broader momentum was already discernible, and the pan-Protestant Federal Council of Churches brought its official position on marital birth control in line with Lambeth in 1931. 5 The scientific development that Catholics like O’Brien relied on to navigate all this—while maintaining fidelity to the Church’s teaching—presented itself in a 1929 volume that accurately mapped female ovulation patterns. This map facilitated a calculated, non-interventionist birth control, the “rhythm method,” as a third alternative to total abstinence and artificial contraception for separating pregnancy from intercourse.
While anthropologist Cooper and economist Msgr. John A. Ryan’s roles in these debates have been addressed to varying extents in recent books like Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception (2004), John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom (2003), and Sharon Leon’s An Image of God (2013), one of the most active and successful in reaching out to both non-Catholics and Catholics on the rhythm method was Father John O’Brien. However, considerably less has been written about his efforts in this arena. It was O’Brien, after all, who most openly popularized phrases that tied together the words “Catholic” and “birth control” in a positive way.
In addition to publishing explanatory articles urging the rhythm method in forums like the Catholic periodical Our Sunday Visitor and an influential long booklet titled Legitimate Birth Control (1934), O’Brien authored an expanded version of the latter in the form of the book, Natural Birth Control (1938), this time replete with elaborate tables and instructions on how to implement the procedure. This volume was especially notable in that it continued his vociferous advocacy for rhythm even after other Catholics quieted their calls for it following decisions by both the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and important bishops like Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago near the end of 1934 telling Catholic advocates to tone down propaganda for rhythm so as not to create a birth control mentality among Catholics. 6 Indeed, for the rest of the interwar era, advertisements for rhythm largely vanished from American Catholic publications and [End Page 55] priests were instructed to mention it only in the confessional and as an extreme option. But O’Brien did not abate. Natural Birth Control saw O’Brien defend rhythm as legitimate Catholic birth control, laying out litanies of medical and psychological quotations to support his position. 7 O’Brien’s ebullient rhetoric was such that it could even be directly quoted—albeit out of context—by pro-contraception luminaries like Margaret Sanger to bolster claims that the Catholic Church had finally come to agree with the desirability and pragmatic usefulness of separating sex from pregnancy while now merely quibbling about methods. 8
Beyond his contributions to birth control discourse, O’Brien is notable for being the first Catholic priest in America to earn a social science doctorate at a non-Catholic university; he obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1920 with a dissertation on silent reading and served as the school’s Newman chaplain from the end of World War I to 1939. 9 O’Brien departed after a series of dissonances boiled over with his ecclesial superior, Bishop Joseph Schlarmann of Peoria, Illinois, and with the powerful Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore. Until 1927, O’Brien had also served on the progressive and social science-oriented National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), an organization that has been characterized as tied to the turn-of-the-century Americanist and Modernist movements. As seen below, his dismissal from the NCWC coincided with a controversy in which Curley and others accused him of extreme liberalism.
O’Brien’s participation in broader conversations about science and sexuality at this point is important in and of itself but also because it offers a window into how progressive Catholics tried to mediate between a complex and sometimes internally-divided subcultural Catholicism and broader [End Page 56] American public culture in the interwar era. These attempted mediations could lead to various unintended consequences. In O’Brien’s case, his manner of argumentation helped serve the interests of those wanting to expand the public authority of scientific experts over topics hitherto conceived, in part, as moral or religious questions. 10
O’Brien’s Overlapping Worlds
John Anthony O’Brien was born in January 1893 in Peoria, Illinois and graduated from St. Patrick Catholic School in Washington, Illinois. After spending one year at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, he returned to his home state to enroll at St. Viator’s College in the town of Bourbonnais. O’Brien earned a B.A. in 1913 and an M.A. in 1914 from St. Viator’s, it being customary at the time to receive a master’s degree for remaining in studies for a year after graduation. In 1916, the local bishop, Edmund Dunne, ordained O’Brien a priest of the Diocese of Peoria. The same Bishop Dunne would three years later ordain another Peorian and St. Viator alumnus to the priesthood, Fulton J. Sheen.
O’Brien spent the 1916–1917 academic year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., studying what Winton Solberg characterized as graduate-level “education, psychology, and sociology.” 11 It was, however, at the non-Catholic University of Illinois where O’Brien made his most significant contributions during our time-frame. While Newman chaplain at Illinois he had controversially argued that religion courses offered in denominational residential colleges would give Catholic students enrolled at state universities an equivalent education to that obtained at Catholic institutions of higher learning. Many American Catholic officials adhered to the idea that religion could not be isolated from the other subjects and the only way to receive a holistic Catholic education was to attend a Church-run college. 12 In viewing Catholic religion as teachable in isolation from the rest of the curriculum, O’Brien enjoyed the support of his friend and fellow-cleric John Montgomery Cooper. In the later 1920s, Cooper had devised a full [End Page 57] and distinct religion curriculum for use by Catholics. 13 Bishop Dunne, too, approved of O’Brien’s educational philosophy and methods and, thus, appointed him superintendent of the Peoria diocese’s schools in 1924. 14
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Father John A. O’Brien (Courtesy of the Archives of the University of Notre Dame).
O’Brien’s administrative and educational philosophies, and his model of public engagement, bore the marks of three lines of overlapping influence from prior decades: the American Progressive Movement—particularly its emerging field of professionalized education—and two controversial discourses in early-century Catholicism: the Americanist and Modernist movements.
The early social sciences undergirding the Progressive Era’s social reform agenda emerged alongside the later nineteenth century liberal Protestant [End Page 58] turn to the Social Gospel. The embryonic social sciences offered both the religious and the secular an option for actualizing the promises of modernity. A variation on the postmillenial Protestant notion of social evolution was, for all intents and purposes, at the center of even secular reform visions. For example, John Dewey’s ideals were essentially de-Christianized versions of the millennial vision of progress. 15 Both religious and secular cohorts shared a singular faith in science’s ability to actualize progressive goals; the new sciences thus offered a highly attractive and practical union of interests. 16
German historicism’s introduction into the American intellectual scene further led early social scientists to conclude that positivist-conceived objective science would facilitate humanity’s increasing mastery of nature. One can see this in the foundational works of Auguste Comte, Lester Ward, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and others. 17 Relatedly, the American Pragmatist tradition urged the widest possible application of the scientific method, too, lending greater vigor to the scientific reform impulse. By the early twentieth century, books like Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) persuaded many reformers that the social sciences were just as “scientific” as the natural sciences. 18
This optimistically-conceived potential of social science to improve American life guided the trajectory of intellectual culture well into the twentieth century. Those hoping to influence social debate—Catholic and non-Catholic—believed they could best achieve their goals by embracing the language and methods of the social sciences. Given the social-scientific emphasis on empirical, inductivist models of analysis and intervention, it is unsurprising that at least some Catholic social scientists would have negotiated or resisted the deductive-centered philosophy the Catholic Church advocated with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). This decree directed Catholic thinkers to neo-Thomist thought as the means of engaging scientific modernity. 19 It was the lot of Catholic social scientists to inwardly attempt a reconciliation of these competing interests. [End Page 59]
As the topical breadth of O’Brien’s brief studies at Catholic University suggests, the education field saw wide overlap with psychology in the era in which O’Brien was trained; practitioners in both disciplines crusaded for their recognition as true sciences. 20 Graduate students of education frequently had to take psychology courses as part of their normal study as statistically-grounded learning models rose to prominence within progressivism’s field of virtues. O’Brien’s above-cited Illinois dissertation and related articles on silent reading also evidence the conjoining trends.
Though trained at Illinois, O’Brien’s year of study at Catholic University and his work with other Catholic social scientists connected him to the Catholic version of these trends. Scholars have shown how social science models were appropriated and negotiated in the halls of Catholic universities and their social science departments; at the Catholic University of America, in particular, the negotiation took place alongside the Americanist and Modernist movements in the early century. 21 Those two episodes informed American Catholic efforts to come to grips with modernity in the United States; their influence was especially seen in liberal Catholic circles where several of the most important Catholic social scientists dwelt.
Despite the papal encyclicals Testem Benevolentiae (1899) and Pascendi Domenici Gregiis (1907) stunting the currents enlivening those two movements, their residual influences lived on in subaltern Catholic intellectual discourses. Such currents, including cultural developmentalism and assimilationism; [End Page 60] compatibility with modern scientific trends, including prevalent philosophies of science; and desire for “a rapprochement with leaders of the intellectual world … [and with] secular culture” were by no means cut off at the time of O’Brien’s formation. 22 While trained theologians espousing full-fledged theological immanentism and openly scorning neo-Scholasticism were silenced or abandoned their advocacy, it was precisely figures in the social sciences (and literary studies) who managed to keep alive certain elements of both movements. 23 Indeed, historian William Portier suggests why modernism’s spirit lived on in Catholics seeking to connect with contemporary culture: “Those who came to be called ‘Modernists’ insist[ed] that intellectual life after Kant required … address[ing] questions about the subject’s constructive role in the process of human knowing—even knowing God. They found the neo-Scholasticism of the day inadequate to that challenge.” 24 This subtle distaste for neo-Scholasticism rubbed off on O’Brien and other liberal Catholics who influenced him, though he never openly repudiated it.
O’Brien’s membership in the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Education Commission from just after World War I to 1927 amplified his trust in science-centered activism. Growing out of the National Catholic War Council, the postwar NCWC became an officially-sanctioned arm of the U.S. Catholic bishops which largely validated Catholics who sought a role for the Church in influencing American social policy and gaining acceptance from non-Catholics. Created in part to balance the postwar influence of the liberal Protestant Federal Council of Churches, the NCWC’s visionaries enjoyed direct links with the Americanist and Modernist thinkers, as historians Christopher Kauffman and Douglas Slawson have shown. 25 [End Page 61]
The NCWC vision of reaching the era’s intellectuals centered on the dialect and idiom of science. A NCWC editorial on the eve of our timeframe titled “Science and Religion” related how the press had recently been discussing the “conflict between religion and science.” The editorialist responded, “From the Catholic standpoint, the best solution of [sic] the conflict will be attained… not by writing books explaining away the conflict but by active entrance on the part of Catholics into the scientific field and by original contributions made to science.” He continued, “If Catholic truth is to receive a sympathetic hearing from intellectual leaders today, one important approach is by way of the natural sciences.” 26
Conservatives within the Church like Boston’s powerful Cardinal William O’Connell were not impressed. He characterized the NCWC—and O’Brien—as “Americanism reincarnate.” 27 Even given the context of the NCWC’s liberalism, O’Brien managed to turn himself into a quasi-radical figure. In 1927, Ku Klux Klan agitation fomented by an ex-nun in the town of Champaign (the location of the University of Illinois) saw O’Brien agree to a Methodist minister’s request to endorse an ecumenical prayer the latter had composed in order to implore tolerance. The prayer was addressed only to God the Father, in part to permit its use by local Jewish rabbis. The NCWC news service published a piece erroneously attributing co-authorship of the prayer to O’Brien, an inaccurate claim repeated in the popular press. Baltimore’s powerful and conservative Archbishop Michael Curley fumed over both O’Brien’s involvement and the NCWC’s distribution of the story, the latter of which gave the secular press the chance to “warmly praise” O’Brien’s ecumenism. 28 Certain Catholic officials concluded that O’Brien was guilty of religious indifferentism and a host of them complained to the NCWC’s overseer of committees, Father John Burke. Having publicly questioned O’Brien’s theological orthodoxy, Archbishop Curley even went to Rome to indict O’Brien. Denouncing him to Vatican representatives, Curley [End Page 62] said O’Brien and the NCWC had created an atmosphere “redolent of unbelief and sheer materialism” and that O’Brien’s attitudes were “liberalising [sic] and un-Catholic.” 29 Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val, secretary of the Holy Office in Rome and adviser to several popes, instructed Curley to let the issue quietly drop, but O’Brien was dismissed from the NCWC that same year. Undeterred, O’Brien continued writing and speaking in this same progressive Catholic vein to as many as would listen.
O’Brien the Author
O’Brien had inaugurated his authorial career in the conjoined realm linking socially active liberal Catholicism with social science. Though an initial scholarly publication presented the fruits of his dissertation material, his writing efforts were not concentrated on academic scholarship. 30 Rather, he harnessed his pen for outreach to Catholics and non-Catholics on various social topics, usually in the language of the sciences. One of his more prominent published collections during the interwar period was Catholics and Scholarship (1938), a set of essays whose titles suggest O’Brien’s view that scientific study was the best means to Catholic respectability. 31 The book included O’Brien’s own “Catholics and Cultural Leadership”; Karl Herzfeld’s “Filling the Gap in Science”; James Reyniers’ “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists”; David McCabe’s “The Path to Eminence in Economics”; and Jerome Kerwin’s “Enhancing Catholic Prestige.” 32
In total, O’Brien published over forty books and hundreds of pamphlets (though it should be remembered the publishing standards of the time allowed some verbatim repetition of one’s own material from book to book). Among the most prominent of his volumes directed at non-Catholics was The Faith of Millions (1938), which presented Catholicism in a manner approachable to non-Catholics and which sold over 200,000 copies by 1945, having been translated into ten languages and seeing twenty-seven printings. [End Page 63] His long pamphlet, Religion in a Changing World, extended O’Brien’s claims about the sacrality of science: “[S]cience … will aid us in securing a better vision of God…. In this sense there is something priestly in the labors of the scientist in his laboring…. For [he] too [seeks] to clarify the application of ethical and eternal truth to the changing social and economic conditions of modern life.” 33 O’Brien dedicated his 1946 volume Truths Men Live By to the famous French priest-evolutionist Canon Henri de Dorlodot.
In 1932, O’Brien published a very popular book called Evolution and Religion as a contribution to public evolution discourse. Catholic scholar John Morrison claimed it achieved the largest non-Catholic readership of any Catholic work in the interwar period. For that effort O’Brien received much-desired plaudits from non-Catholic scientific experts, including renowned public palaentologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn complimented the book and O’Brien “for his liberalism.” 34 Top-flight evolutionary biologist Edwin Grant Conklin of Princeton University also delivered a glowing assessment of the book in the internationally-circulated Scientific Book Club. Morrison described the book itself as a “synthesis of the Mivart, Seton, Zahm tradition with the very latest findings of scientists like Conklin and Osborn.” 35
Correspondence between O’Brien and John Montgomery Cooper when that book was in gestation suggests consensus efforts to craft discourse that would befriend the non-Catholic elite and reorient Catholics’ intellectual rhetoric in the direction of science rather than deductive or authoritative religious categories. One O’Brien letter referred to Cooper’s prior counsel to excise certain material and tone down harshly critical rhetoric aimed at Catholic theologians who had criticized Darwin; the reason was not to stir up those in the Catholic Church who might oppose their own plans to shift Catholic discourse. As O’Brien explained, “The preparation of Chapters … on Copernicanism and the Theological Furore [sic] first raised against Dawinian [End Page 64] Evolution … as you point out … may antagonize [the theologians] and accomplish nothing in bringing about the attitude we desire.” 36
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (Courtesy of the American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.).
By this time, O’Brien had become known inside and outside the Church for liberal commentary on modern American culture, especially in relation to birth control, population, sex education, evolution, and science in general. Some of his strongest opponents argued that he was tying himself to webs of reform that were taking society in a secularizing direction—replacing moral codes with social engineering. Interwar birth control debates operated within this larger social reform skein and its organizational, politically-related outgrowths. As Angela Franks put it, the progressive impulse exploited to promote contraception encouraged the goal of “social control at a time of rapid change, and [the belief] that the government should intervene in matters of social and economic welfare in a rational way, with scientific tools … a true panacea for poverty, illness, marital problems and even war.” 37 [End Page 65]
Space does not permit a discussion of the complexities of the Catholic Church’s response to the contraception question. Still, it can be said that the Holy Office’s decrees of 1851 and 1853 probably offered the most definitive statement until the twentieth century on prohibiting mechanical contraception as contrary to natural law, although priests were not directed to initiate interrogations in the confessional without good reason. 38 Both in Europe and in the United States, the Church’s tone stiffened around the turn of the twentieth century in response to an increase in the breadth and influence of the organized movement favoring artificial contraception. Father John A. Ryan—the progressive cleric who was to head the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference—played no small role in this stronger response in the United States. His 1916 piece in the Ecclesiastical Review argued that priests should henceforth “overcome their inhibitions to publicly address the problem of contraception.” 39 The following year, the Catholic Church issued a new codification of canon law. Although conceding that in a neo-Scholastic sense there were secondary benefits to marriage, the state of matrimony was defined almost wholly in terms of procreation. 40 The U.S. Catholic bishops then issued a joint pastoral address in 1919 that included discussion of contraception, purportedly using Ryan’s arguments as a baseline. 41 Finally, after the Anglican Church guardedly endorsed marital contraception at its Lambeth Conference in the spring of 1930, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii (“On Christian Marriage”) on the last day of 1930, therein restating the objection to artificial contraception on a natural law basis.
Rhythm: Moral Science for All?
Rhythm, the method that O’Brien and others presented as the ideal, non-artificial scientific birth control for Catholics and other Americans had [End Page 66] arrived on U.S. shores from Japan and Austria. 42 O’Brien was emboldened to write about it after two books by American Catholic physicians explained and endorsed it. The first was Chicago physician-professor Leo Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women (1932). 43 The other was The Sterile Period in Family Life (1933), coauthored by Father Valere Coucke and Pennsylvania physician James A. Walsh. 44 Both books received the formal seal of approbation of the dioceses in which they were published. 45
These books explained the mutually reinforcing conclusions arrived at independently by the Japanese researcher Kyusaku Ogino and the Austrian [End Page 67] Hermann Knaus on the natural workings of the ovulatory cycle in menstruating females in the industrialized world. Although there was a one-day difference in the two scientists’ original estimates of the monthly sterile period, Ogino and Knaus independently concluded that ovulation occurred between twelve and sixteen days prior to the next menstruation. Allowing for the shelf life of sperm and ova, women with a perfectly “regular” cycle—said to be every twenty-nine days—had to abstain from intercourse in a monthly rhythm of eight days if they wanted to avoid conception. 46 By mapping out what was seen as a natural process, the argument went, one was not interfering in any way with the system of reproduction implanted in creation even if one used it to plan sex without the possibility of conceiving.
For Catholics who supported such an approach, the rhythm method was nothing other than new fruit stemming from the tree of God-given human intellect and its amazing ability to investigate and understand the workings of nature. But was the method, in reality, predicating a novel position for Catholics? Was it moral and scientific to purposely exclude what was—if the method worked—the possibility of procreation from the act of intercourse simply because one wanted to preclude it? After all, the aforementioned Catholic deductive argument said that conception was the exclusive primary end of intercourse.
The liberal-progressive Catholics who most enthusiastically endorsed the rhythm method of birth control in the public sphere did so almost exclusively based on empirical-inductive evidence wedded to arguments for the social and economic good, rather than deductive philosophical grounds. 47 Because rhythm’s efficacy could be (and was) challenged by some scientists, many wondered what exactly was supposedly distinctive and superior about this Catholic birth control compared to other methods of contraception. There is [End Page 68] ample proof the rhythm method was spoken of publicly in the interwar period by physicians, politicians, and others as one among various types of “birth control” and even—by those who wished to specifically disparage liberal Catholics—one type of “contraception” among many. 48 The pursuit of a scientific map of the ovulation process was, unsurprisingly, conducted within the same matrix of research and reform as other efforts at birth regulation. 49
After reading O’Brien’s long 1934 booklet Lawful Birth Control—and its expanded book version, Natural Birth Control (1938)—one sees John Montgomery Cooper’s quip about Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women might have applied even more so here: “I think he makes an excellent case for the birth controllers without intending to do so.” 50 O’Brien extensively referenced medical, physiological, sociological and psychological authorities to buttress his case that “[p]arents have not only the right but may have at times even the duty to space their offspring in the interests of health and conjugal happiness… Modern science discloses the method by which parents may space their offspring in a natural, rational, ethical manner. It is the method … unfolded by the two great scientists, Drs. Ogino and Knauss.” 51 In one span of five pages, O’Brien employed the word “science” or “scientific” eight times; four times on one page alone. 52 The putatively scientific yet hyperbolic tone was perhaps even more triumphalist here than it had been in his earlier book on evolution. One understands why Margaret Sanger and others complained that O’Brien’s works could be sent through the mails legally whereas information on other types of contraception could not. 53
O’Brien predicated his arguments on social and biological science with a few contentions about natural law inserted at the start. However, the latter [End Page 69] were not framed as absolute but rather as useful because beneficial to human happiness. 54 As Tentler has noted, the German Catholic ethicist Dietrich von Hildebrand particularly influenced O’Brien’s divergence from the all-encompassing emphasis on marital sexuality’s procreative nature that had frequently characterized Catholic works driven by neo-Scholasticism. Von Hildebrand’s 1928 book In Defense of Purity appeared in English in 1931, helping reorient the traditional Catholic natural law construction of marital sexuality by elevating its “secondary ends.” 55 Rather than isolating a primary function of procreation, von Hildebrand argued that marital love facilitated a unique interpersonal union which gave sexuality in marriage its greater meaning. In making this case, he had opened the door to an increased emphasis on the psychology of marriage in discussing its sexual elements. Given O’Brien’s approach, it is unsurprising he would gravitate toward psychological framings of the goal of marital union. 56
Lawful Birth Control and Natural Birth Control were not just explications of a moral birth control method. They were meant, as O’Brien wrote, to “proclaim [that method] from the house-tops” and advocate that method as “the findings of medical science….” 57 Here he saw himself as contributing to American culture writ large. At one point he asked, “Is it not evident to every fair-minded citizen, regardless of religious faith” that by expanding the American Medical Association’s prescription that physicians learn about it, “we are rendering a valuable contribution to the health and happiness of every home in America?” 58
O’Brien went further than most in testifying to the absolute scientific infallibility of Ogino and Knaus’s measurements of the female sterile period. In so doing, he employed grandiose rhetoric: “Great numbers of the outstanding leaders in gynecology have declared [Ogino and Knaus’s results] to be not a theory but a biological law, thoroughly tested and verified.” 59 He [End Page 70] extended that point by lauding the method as healthier and more effective than almost any other form of contraception. 60
O’Brien made sure to report on existing enthusiasm for the method within the Catholic Church, especially among priests. 61 This was probably done to assuage potential concerns among Catholic readers that the rhythm news was too good to be true and that the Church could not really have approved of it. In point of fact, O’Brien’s progressive diocesan hierarch, Bishop John Francis Noll of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had not only given official “ecclesiastical approbation” to publish the 1934 edition but had also penned its introduction, saying “I believe this book by Father O’Brien is the best ever written on the subject of Birth Control.” 62 Bishop Noll later declined to officially endorse the 1938 expanded version, though O’Brien and the Newman Foundation publishers still included the notation “published with ecclesiastical approbation.” 63
Noll’s shift was tied in with the broader cooling of enthusiasm for rhythm among key figures in the American Church after 1934. They felt the over-emphasis on rhythm as a sort of panacea for Catholics was leading to the development of a birth control mentality. O’Brien, however, continued to assert that the discovery of the safe period meant God was working through modern science as revealed in nature. 64 O’Brien quoted the Jesuit Joseph Reiner in his volumes to support that notion. 65 But the Jesuit order, too, was divided in its opinion of the rhythm method. America magazine had strongly criticized Latz and the rhythm method in general throughout the 1930s. 66 Francis LeBuffe, S.J., conservative science editor of America magazine, complained to Reiner that O’Brien had damaged the integrity of Catholic teaching in the public square by giving fodder to artificial contraception advocates who made use of O’Brien’s excessive material on rhythm to support their own cause. 67 [End Page 71]
O’Brien, however, contended that Catholics themselves badly needed rhythm during the extraordinary economic crises they faced as a result of the lingering Great Depression. In fact, he claimed his inspiration to write Lawful Birth Control came from the “joyous refrain which [sprang] spontaneously from the hearts of all upon learning how modern science confirm[ed] the Church’s teaching and show[ed] the way out of the [economic] difficulty,” after couples had read his articles lauding the rhythm theory in the popular devotional newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor. O’Brien attested to receiving “[a]n avalanche of letters from every state of the Union [sic], averaging hundreds a day…” after the series appeared. 68
Other aspects of O’Brien’s presentation on rhythm created problems for his more circumspect coreligionists. One, in particular, related to an idea common to theological modernists: the belief—as historian Christopher Kauffman wrote—“in the utility of scientific methodology to elucidate religious truths.” 69 O’Brien indicated in his birth control writings that science now made it possible to achieve something in the religious realm that had not been possible before. Specifically, since “the laws of nature [are] a reflection of the mind of the divine Legislator,” using them to one’s own advantage opened up even greater opportunity for one to cooperate freely with the Creator than had been the case before modern science had mapped out these menstrual laws. Because parents would know when, or when not, they should expect to conceive a child, they could “deliberately accept,” or else decline, the chance to “cooperate” with God “in His work of Creation” rather than relying on “blind chance.” 70 In O’Brien’s schema, modern inductive science served as catalyst for individuals’ religious advancement. This claim applied to both the techniques of the rhythm method and to the broader goal of controlling exactly when one would, or would not, have children.
Even as O’Brien extolled the religious possibilities that modern science had created, he revealed what can be called a common inferiority complex vis a vis science found especially in liberal Catholic writings of the day. Following a decade of unremitting anti-Catholicism in America, overcompensation for alleged past sins against science was one way figures like O’Brien parried accusations of the Church’s longstanding anti-scientific actions, the Galileo trial cliché being the most frequently invoked. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distorted historical redactions of the Galileo episode continued serving as major springboards for attacks and accusations of obscurantism by [End Page 72] those hostile to Catholicism; John William Draper’s anti-Catholic broadside, History of the Warfare Between Religion and Science (1874) had provided a blueprint for such salvos. 71
Hoping to persuade readers that he and the Church had always been celebrators of science, O’Brien completely reversed the terms of the warfare myth: “In her [the Church’s] vast temple of truth every new secret teased from any of the varied segments of nature finds a prompt and hearty welcome. For the Church knows that every newly discovered truth … will give additional reinforcements to [her known truths].” 72 He also made use of the “twin books” model of divine truth common to eighteenth and nineteenth century Protestant natural theology. Here, the book of written Biblical revelation and the book of nature acted a coterminous parts of divine revelation.
Critics inside and outside the Catholic Church complained that distributing books and pamphlets on technical aspects of natural birth control meant Catholics were providing contraceptive knowledge to anyone who sought it without expert authorization and supervision, which was ironically the same charge Catholics had made in the 1920s against Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control Review. The accusation of Catholic distribution created particular difficulties when highlighting that young people often obtained such knowledge in that way. Michael Williams of Commonweal magazine printed an article in the summer of 1932 in which a female Catholic civic leader argued against loosening the Comstock mailing restrictions: “[T]he dissemination of birth control information … is to let loose a flood of temptation upon a younger generation…. Statistics backed by the Birth Control League itself show that contraceptive articles sold in this country annually amount to one hundred million…. [T]hat the youth of the nation is being perverted in large and steadily increasing numbers is certain.” 73
O’Brien turned to medical authority in his books to deflect precisely these expressions of social-moral concern. Quoting from a 1934 American Medical Association report on the availability of contraceptives in western Florida, O’Brien wrote that they were already widely obtainable: “[P]reventives were sold in 376 places besides drug stores, including gas stations garages, restaurants, soda fountains, barber shops, pool rooms, restaurants, cigar stands, newsstands, shoe shining parlors, and grocery stores [sic]….” 74 [End Page 73] By contrast, he advocated offering a moral method of birth control as an alternative to already widely-utilized artificial contraception.
Just as O’Brien parried accusations similar to those that contraception advocates had faced for putting birth control in the wrong hands, so, too, did he advocate rhythm by employing a scare tactic common to the contraception lobby: people inevitably would be forced to choose between birth control and abortion. O’Brien argued that without workable birth regulation methods, people would turn to the abhorrent alternative of abortion. It was novel indeed to have a Catholic use the same warning as the Birth Control League to sell readers on the necessity of a particular form of birth control. 75 In O’Brien’s words, rhythm would “preven[t] … the enormous number of criminal abortions now converting our land into a whitened sepulcher … filled with the bones of unborn children. 76 He added that abortion was connected to “a high maternal death rate,” since women resorted to it after having unwisely put their trust in other contraceptive techniques that were not only immoral but also, he claimed, less effective. 77
Moving away from social arguments, several later chapters in O’Brien’s birth control volumes included antiphonal litanies of, on the one hand, scientifically-framed allegations about what would happen to married women if rhythm were not used and, on the other hand, promises of what would happen if they employed artificial contraceptive measures. O’Brien added an extensive series of quotations from expert scientists substantiating his claims about the ineffectiveness and recklessness of those alternatives in physiological and psychiatric terms.
O’Brien proffered some extraordinary claims by physiologists asserting that female genitalia not only benefited from the intake of spermatic fluid delivered during male orgasm, but also that “fruitless stimulation of the genital organs leads to more or less serious chronic pelvis [sic] disorders and very frequently to sterility.” 78 Toward this end, O’Brien cited “the distinguished scientist” Dr. H. L. Long arguing as though he were advocating a health food store’s products: “[t]he semen is the most powerful stimulant to all female sex organs and to the whole body of the woman. The organs themselves will absorb quantities of semen and it is most healthful and beneficial,” [End Page 74] and the women who had the good sense to seek out these fluids “improve in physical well being after they are married by availing themselves of this healthful nourishment.” 79 As if the point about females’ purported need for semen had not been graphically clear enough, O’Brien quoted an address from the 1929 Congress of Gynecologists: “It is perfectly well-known and universally admitted that the female organism absorbs spermatic products introduced during the sexual act and that these products act on women in a manner favorable to her development.” 80 Conversely, O’Brien averred, female developmental disorders would result from mechanical contraception, including frightful afflictions like “inflammations in the womb” that “nearly all scientific publications dealing with the subject” indicated could “lead to cancer.” 81
The putative “development” that semen conferred on women manifested itself not just in the biophysical sense. O’Brien argued that substantial psychological and psychiatric needs had been found to depend on seminal intake; he presented any course that denied women of seminal fluids as clearly dangerous. In fact, such deprivation could evidently lead to madness: “lack [of absorbed semen] leads to both physical and psychic disorders.” 82 O’Brien called upon Long again to characterize male ejaculate as the best nerve tonic available for the mentally anxious woman: “There are multitudes of nervous women, hysterical even, who are restored to health through the stimulative effects of satisfactory coitus and the absorption of semen.” 83 For more support on the psychological front, O’Brien turned to Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones of London, “a recognized authority on neural diseases,” who put matters very succinctly: “Birth control often leads to lunacy in women.” 84
Apparently, excessive abstinence could also have the same devastating consequences, or so claimed O’Brien’s experts. This information must have troubled Catholics who had argued in previous years for abstinence. 85 By including a strong physiological argument against depriving women of necessary seminal intake, O’Brien, perhaps unthinkingly, called into question the Church’s perennial wisdom in encouraging celibate chastity. Nuns, of course, experienced lifelong deprivation of these supposedly essential spermatic benefits. Was female monasticism also a practice that modern science would reveal as no longer tenable? [End Page 75]
Conclusion
Father John O’Brien’s advocacy for birth regulation by rhythm can generally be classified in two columns. One column repackaged the arguments of the birth control lobby that, since the early 1920s, emphasized a scientific defense of contraception as both a biological and a social good. The other column consisted of another kind of argument from expertise: medical and psychological testimony about women’s need for the many benefits of intercourse with completion lest physical and mental disease develop.
The relatively short, early sections of O’Brien’s birth control publications touching on the Catholic understanding of natural law in effect tried to couch his subsequent inductive arguments in ill-fitting deductive garb. This manner of argumentation was consistent with the progressive and liberal Catholic perspective O’Brien inherited from earlier twentieth-century influences. Ironically, even if not his overall goal, O’Brien’s discourse contributed to rhetorical currents in the broader culture that further conceptually separated intercourse from procreation even for married couples. This was not generally the institutional Catholic Church’s goal. At one point, O’Brien even offered a demographic-utilitarian argument that it was acceptable for a fertile Catholic married couple to produce no offspring at all, provided that “the propagation of the race is not being endangered….” 86
It is no wonder that by the 1940s, even Daniel A. Lord, an American Jesuit who had believed in the rhythm method, wrote a story in which the Catholic priest-protagonist complained of his encounters with parishioners about children and birth prevention, saying: “I’m getting awfully sick of telling people just how far they can go without actually going to hell.” 87 This was perhaps an unintended consequence of O’Brien’s moderate success in influencing Catholics and others through popular science discourse, a realm where he and some fellow forward-thinking Catholics were ever keen to be seen and heard. [End Page 76]
Alexander Pavuk is assistant professor of history at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. He is preparing a monograph examining progressive Catholic evolution and contraception discourse in American public culture.
Footnotes
1. J.E. Kempf, M.D., to Msgr. John M. Cooper (June 21, 1945), folder “Miscellaneous-K,” box 16, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (henceforth ACUA). Kempf also included euthanasia, castration, abortion, and psychotherapeutic theories in his list of topics with moral implications being treated exclusively as technical issues.
2. Quoted in Kathleen A. Tobin, The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control, 1907–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), 166.
3. For more on these shifts as well as Tobin’s argument that the economics of the Great Depression actually did not play as much of a role as one might assume, see Tobin, American Religious Debate, 148–157, esp. 154.
4. Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, quoted in Anne Fremantle, ed. The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956), 236; also available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii.html .
5. Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Annual Report, 1931, 81 quoted in Tobin, American Religious Debate, 164–165. See also “Concerning the Report on Birth Control,” Federal Council Bulletin (May 1931): 2.
6. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 116.
7. Beyond medicine and psychology, which will be addressed below, see also O’Brien’s demographic (65) and economic (69–70) arguments for rhythm as found in Natural Birth Control. Also, although outside the time-frame of this article, O’Brien continued for many decades advocating for Catholics’ use of birth regulation. O’Brien edited a post-Vatican II volume, Family Planning in an Exploding Population (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968), in which he employed a broadly neo-Malthusian argument in favor of birth control. See O’Brien’s chapters: “The World’s Soaring Population” (3–14) and “Responsible Parenthood,” (45–53), the latter being where he advocated “family planning” (45–53). Also in that book, O’Brien positively recalled his efforts on behalf of birth control in the 1930s (xvii–xvii). It is also worth noting, as Tentler points out, that O’Brien was one of the American thinkers who urged Pope Paul VI to change the Catholic teaching prohibiting artificial contraception before that pontiff’s issuance of the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968 (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 122).
8. See Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 114.
9. O’Brien’s dissertation research was published as Silent Reading With Special Reference to Methods for Developing Speed: A Study in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1921).
10. For a related example of this process in the case of 1920s evolution discourse, see Alexander Pavuk, “Evolution and Progressive Catholics in the Age of the Scopes Trail,” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 101–137.
11. Winton U. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” The Catholic Historical Review 76 (October 1990): 769. The social science disciplines were fluid in the early twentieth century; all were at various times part of Catholic University’s larger department of Social Sciences. See C. Joseph Neusse, “The Introduction of the Social Sciences in the Catholic University of America, 1895–1909,” Social Thought 12 (Spring 1986): 30–41.
12. For more details on this situation and criticisms of O’Brien, see Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois.”
13. See Cooper’s multi-volume set—the first volume printed in 1924 (with the set revised and re-issued in 1935), John M. Cooper, Religion Outlines for Colleges (Washington, DC: Catholic Education Press, 1924–1930).
14. Bishop Dunne was quoted as lauding O’Brien’s “progressive mode in the right direction” (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 773). Dunne’s successor, Joseph Schlarmann, shared none of his predecessor’s enthusiasm for Catholic progressivism; the latter dismissed O’Brien from the diocese in 1939. O’Brien spent the 1939–1940 year in residence at Oxford University and then moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1940. It was at the latter where he spent the remainder of his long career. Schlarmann so strongly disapproved of O’Brien’s educational and public relations tactics that he forbade O’Brien from ever serving as a priest, or even staying overnight, in his diocesan boundaries (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 796).
15. Dewey could be characterized as the apotheosis of this trajectory. Initially operating within liberal Protestantism, he turned to the nascent field of psychology to accomplish his social goals. Historian Bruce Kuklick pointed out that Dewey came to see the New Psychology as the method of philosophy; in this way, Dewey felt philosophy could examine metaphysics using the scientific method. See Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 235.
16. For more on this, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 54.
17. Ross, Origins, 55, 93, 96.
18. Ibid., 157–158.
19. See Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html. For more on this plan as an intellectual program, see James Hennessey, S.J., “Leo XIII: Intellectualizing the Combat With Modernity,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 393–400.
20. See Eldbridge C. Grover, “The Status of Education as an Academic Subject in American Colleges,” Educational Research Bulletin 7 (January 11, 1928): 12–15. The emerging field of psychology can be understood as secularizing the older discipline of moral philosophy. See Jon H. Roberts, “Psychology in America,” in A History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, ed. Gary Ferngren (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000), 502–507.
21. Early twentieth-century Catholics connected to social work sought especially to apply their social science training to effect social change. See, for example, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). At Catholic University, professors like historian Thomas J. Shahan, who had studied under renowned modernist Adolf von Harnack, and was made rector in 1909; and Henry Poels, critic of scholasticism who relied generously on the work of modernists Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, played important roles in establishing the intellectual orientation of the university. William Kerby, long-time sociology professor who reflected the spirit of Americanism and Progressivism was a formidable influence, hoping to recast ecclesiology in sociological principles. See R. Scott Appleby, Church and Age Unite!: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 208–210, 219–220. For more on Kerby, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 66–77.
22. This quote, on the overarching mentalite of the liberal Catholicism nurtured by these trends, comes from Robert Cross’s classic work, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 13–14. See Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13teste.htm;and Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm . Appleby maintained that among American Catholics, modernism “[p]ull[ed] together threads of European Catholic modernism, American Protestant liberalism, and American Catholic progressivism….” See Appleby, Church and Age Unite!, 2.
23. On the latter, see Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), and Una M. Cadegan, All Good Books are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
24. William L. Portier, Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), xx.
25. See Christopher J. Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in American Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), ch. 10. In Kauffman’s words, “the Americanist vision … [was close] to those second-generation Americanist bishops and priests … who were active in the formation and development of the NCWC [National Catholic Welfare Conference]” (Kauffman, 242). Douglas Slawson has also argued that “[T]he Welfare Council inherited dreams. Isaac Hecker had envisioned a spirit-filled laity taking the lead to win the nation for Catholicism. His disciple, [John] Burke, saw a nationally unified Catholic church acting as leaven of American progress.” See Douglas Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade of the National Catholic Welfare Council (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 44.
26. NCWC Editorial, March 1, 1929, Catholic Research Roundtable Articles (1929–1930), box 21, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See also Philip Gleason, Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 201–202.
27. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 276.
28. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 789. For more on the Romanizing Curley’s distaste for the NCWC’s liberalism, see Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789–1989 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 328–329.
29. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 273–274.
30. In addition to his above-cited published dissertation, see O’Brien’s “The Development of Speed in Silent Reading,” 54–76 in Guy Montrose Whipple, ed., The Twentieth Year-book of the National Society for the Study of Education Part I, Second Report of the Society’s Committee on New Materials of Instruction (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1921[?]).
31. John A. O’Brien, ed., Catholics and Scholarship (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938).
32. See O’Brien, Catholics and Scholarship, including these contributions: O’Brien, “Catholics and Cultural Leadership,” 27–37; Karl Herzfeld, “Filling the Gap in Science,” 86–96; James Reyniers, “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists,” 107–129; David McCabe, “The Path to Eminence in Economics,” 146–152; and Jerome Kerwin, “Enhancing Catholic Prestige,” 154–164.
33. John A. O’Brien, Religion in a Changing World: Christianity and Modern Thought (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938), 20.
34. Osborn’s commendatory letter to O’Brien and Conklin’s review are mentioned by John L. Morrison in “A History of American Catholic Opinion on the Theory of Evolution, 1859–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1951), 344. Morrison went on to note that Evolution and Religion “was extensively noticed by leading non-Catholics.… Michael Pupin, a distinguished physicist, bestowed lavish praise on it…. J. Howard Beard, a Protestant and Chairman of the Illinois Board of Health, reported to Fr. O’Brien that his book was making a good impression upon rural Protestant clergymen.” See Morrison, 344–345. According to Morrison, some Catholics were critical, “feeling that Fr. O’Brien had catered overmuch to popular tastes, but on the whole they were … complimentary towards his abilities” (Morrison, 345). Morrison characterized even Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a “supporter” who acted to “stav[e] off criticism” of O’Brien” (Morrison, 346).
35. Morrison, “A History,” 344, 265.
36. My emphasis. John A. O’Brien to John M. Cooper, March 21, 1931, folder “O’Brien, Rev. John,” box 13, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See other letters in this general vein between Cooper and O’Brien beginning with 1930 in folder “Correspondence with Fr. John A. O’Brien,” ibid.
37. In her critical history of Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement, historian Franks argued that birth control plans proffered by elite radicals like Sanger and Dr. Hannah Stone fit in seamlessly with the Progressive Era’s “utopianism, scientism, and proclivity for elitist social engineering.” Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, 2005), 25.
38. See John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 397–399. When cold vulcanization of rubber was perfected in 1843 allowing for the production of rubber condoms the Church expanded its concern for artificial contraception. A bishop had asked Rome’s Sacred Penitentiary if the priest should interrogate a penitent in confession if he suspected use of contraception or if he should allow good-faith ignorance to persist (401).
39. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003), 158.
40. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917 Code of Canon Law), canon 1081, §2, http://www.intertratext.com/x/LAT0813.htm (in Latin). Marriage fell short of its own definition if no such exchange occurred.
41. Noonan, Contraception, 423–424.
42. The method was based on a new scientific measurement of fertility periods in women’s monthly cycles, contrasted with an older theory also purporting to tell when during the month women were not physically able to conceive. The older model, referencing a “safe period” when couples could have sex without the threat of pregnancy, originated with nineteenth-century American physician Frederick Hollick. It was popular for a time in the second half of the century but soon became associated with French biologist Felix Pouchet’s erroneous claims about the timing of human ovulation. Pouchet’s published figures derived from the study of female dogs (James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 [New York: Basic Books, 1978], 12–13). As a consequence, up until the 1930s, the common understanding of ovulation was badly out of line with the workings of the female body, and any idea of a safe period was rendered quite suspect. This only changed with the new research undertaken during the interwar period. A rhythm method of birth prevention that could claim any success obviously needed to rely on legitimate studies.
43. See Paula Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm: The Determination of the Woman’s Time of Ovulation and its Social Impact in the United States, 1920–1940” (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 2000). Viterbo argues that by 1937, Latz had advised more than 25,000 women, most by mail and at no charge (253, fn 381). Latz described himself as a devout Catholic (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 115). One contemporary author in The Pictorial Review went out of her way to label Latz “a deeply religious Catholic” (see Maxine Davis, “The Rhythm,” The Pictorial Review 39 [May 1938]: 18). The same author also said of Latz’s enthusiasm for the rhythm method: “He teaches it with the ardor of an apostle” (ibid.). Another active Catholic physician-researcher of note in this era was John R. Rock, the future co-inventor of the Enovoid birth control pill (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252, 255–257).
44. Leo Latz, The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women: A Discussion of the Physiological, Practical, and Ethical Aspects of the Discoveries of Drs. K. Ogino (Japan) and H. Knaus (Austria) Regarding the Periods When Conception Is Impossible and When Possible (Chicago: Latz Foundation, 1932); Valere J. Coucke and James J. Walsh, The Sterile Period in Family Life (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1933). Latz learned about the method when he was in Cologne, Germany, having heard a presentation on it at the Cologne Medical Society. Soon afterward, he returned to the United States and began advising his patients to use it (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252). His official presentation to the American medical community came in Leo John Latz and C. Reiner, “Natural Conception Control,” JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 105 [1935] (cited in Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 253, fn 381).
45. Latz’s book carried the endorsement of the Chicago archdiocese’s Cardinal Mundelein; Couke and Walsh enjoyed what was an even more prestigious sanction—that of Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York. Technically, both books derived from the work of a Dutch Catholic physician, Jan M. Smulders. Smulders’ book popularizing the idea of a sterile period had appeared in Germany earlier in 1932. See J. N. Smulders, Periodische Enthaltung in der Ehe Methode: Ogino Knaus (1932). Knaus’s book bore the seal of the venerable Diocese of Regensburg, Germany.
46. As both authors noted, most women do not have perfectly regular cycles. Women with irregular menstrual cycles (such as a variation of twenty-six to thirty days) would have to be abstinent for twelve days per month. Stress and other factors could increase the irregularity (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 105).
47. In a forum aimed at other priests, Cooper had gone so far in the late 1920s as to suggest Catholics had never yet made the restrictive argument properly on natural law grounds. He specifically asked, for example, why Catholic teaching skipped over the usual assignment of venial sin for violations of the natural order in the particular case of contraception and only in that case; the Church classified contraception always as a mortal sin. How, he wondered, was that justified? He pointed out that eating “for pleasure alone” (rather than for nourishment) was simply a venial sin. Why not sex as the expression of a couple’s love, or for pleasure alone, etc.? See John M. Cooper, “Birth Control and the ‘Perverted Faculty’ Argument,” The Ecclesiastical Review 79 (November 1928): 527. Cooper targeted the deductive “perverted faculty” argument by saying that Catholic authorities have offered “facile assumptions” in place of “objective evidence” as to “what precisely is the natural function of the faculty (sex) under consideration?” (529).
48. See, for example, Frank A. Smothers, “New Light on Birth Control,” The Common-weal 17 (March 8, 1933): 511–513; A. M. Turano, “Contraception by Rhythm,” American Mercury 35 (June 1935): 164–168. A pamphlet advertising a cardboard wheel device used to calculate the rhythms of ovulation and sterility is found in John Ryan’s papers, advertising that it “Assumes Perfect Birth Control” (1937), folder 17, box 17, John A. Ryan Papers, ACUA.
49. Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 294–295.
50. John Montgomery Cooper letter to Edgar Schmiedeler, quoted in Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 113.
51. John A. O’Brien, Natural Birth Control without Contraceptives, According to Nature’s Law in Harmony with Catholic Morality (Champaign, IL: The Newman Company, 1938), 96.
52. O’Brien, Natural, 71–75.
53. The Methodist Anthony Comstock had succeeded in getting a federal law passed in 1873 that prohibited using the U.S. mail to circulate contraception-related materials. Under this law, “contraceptives” and related information were specifically prohibited under the categories “articles of immoral use” or “obscene literature.” See http://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html . In 1937, the American Medical Association endorsed medically supervised contraception as an aspect of preventive medicine while a series of court decisions effectively dismantled the Comstock laws.
54. See O’Brien’s manner of garbing natural law in the trappings of ends-based utility in Natural, 34–38.
55. Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 107.
56. See, for example, O’Brien, Natural, 53. Noonan has emphasized the importance of von Hildebrand’s novel argument in this period and for future Catholic moral theology. See Noonan, Contraception, 494–495.
57. O’Brien, Lawful, 71; O’Brien, Natural, 71.
58. O’Brien, Natural, 97.
59. O’Brien, Natural., 147, 42. O’Brien acknowledged that while he was “not a medical scientist,” he had the assistance in compiling the book of the Belgian physician Raoul Guchteneere, the Loyola of Chicago medical school professor of gynecology Henry Schmitz, and the Austrian researcher Herman Knaus (O’Brien, Natural, 146; O’Brien, Lawful, i). O’Brien also listed numerous specialist scientists throughout the books supporting the rhythm method.
60. O’Brien, Natural, 20–21.
61. See, for example, O’Brien’s citation of The Clergy Review [London] from May 1933 (ibid., 44). Raoul Guchteneere was said to have written positive articles on the method in The Homiletic Monthly (ibid., xvii–xix).
62. Noll quoted in ibid., xv.
63. For the shift in Noll’s attitude, see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 116.
64. O’Brien, Natural, 44.
|
i don't know
|
The artists Monet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne are mainly noted for what style of art?
|
Edouard Manet Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story
Like The Art Story on Facebook
Follow The Art Story on Google+
"I paint what I see and not what others like to see."
Synopsis
Édouard Manet was the most important and influential artist to have heeded poet Charles Baudelaire's call to artists to become painters of modern life. Manet had an upper-class upbringing, but also led a bohemian life, and was driven to scandalize the French Salon public with his disregard for academic conventions and his strikingly modern images of urban life. He has long been associated with the Impressionists; he was certainly an important influence on them and he learned much from them himself. However, in recent years critics have acknowledged that he also learned from the Realism and Naturalism of his French contemporaries, and even from seventeenth century Spanish painting. This twin interest in Old Masters and contemporary Realism gave him the crucial foundation for his revolutionary approach.
Key Ideas
Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many of the scandals he provoked.
He is credited with popularizing the technique of alla prima painting. Rather than build up colors in layers, Manet would immediately lay down the hue that most closely matched the final effect he sought. The approach came to be used widely by the Impressionists, who found it perfectly suited to the pressures of capturing effects of light and atmosphere whilst painting outdoors.
His loose handling of paint, and his schematic rendering of volumes, led to areas of "flatness" in his pictures. In the artist's day, this flatness may have suggested popular posters or the artifice of painting - as opposed to its realism. Today, critics see this quality as the first example of "flatness" in modern art.
Most Important Art
Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1863)
As the primary talking point of the Salon des Refuses in 1863, it is fairly clear to see why this canvas shocked the bourgeois patrons and the Emperor himself. Manet's composition is influenced by the Renaissance artist Giorgione and by Raimondi's engraving of the Judgment of Paris after Raphael, but these influences are fractured by his disregard for perspective and his use of unnatural light sources. But it was the presence of an unidealized female nude, casually engaged with two fashionably dressed men, that was the focus of the most public outrage. Her gaze confronts the viewer on a sexual level, but through her Manet confronts the public as well, challenging its ethical and aesthetic boundaries.
Oil on canvas - Musee d'Orsay
Like The Art Story on Facebook
Biography
Childhood
Édouard Manet was born into an upper-middle class Parisian family. His father, August, was a dedicated, high-ranking civil servant and his mother, Eugenie, was the daughter of a diplomat. Along with his two younger brothers, Manet grew up in a bourgeois environment, both socially conservative and financially comfortable. A mediocre student at best, he enrolled at thirteen in a drawing class at The Rollin School.
Manet had a passion for art from an early age, but agreed to go to the Naval Academy to appease his father. When he failed the entrance exam, he joined the Merchant Marine to gain experience as a student pilot and voyaged to Rio de Janeiro in 1849. He returned to France the following year with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from his journey, and used it to prove his talent and passion to his father, who was skeptical of Manet's ambitions.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early Training
In 1849, Manet fell in love with his piano teacher, Suzanne Leenhoff. This affair resulted in a boy, Leon (b. 1852), who was passed off to Suzanne's family and, to avoid scandal, was introduced to society as Suzanne's younger brother and Manet's godson. The following year, Manet traveled to Italy, both for the art and for social distraction.
Reluctantly, his father allowed Manet to pursue his artistic goals. In January 1850, true to his contrary nature, instead of going to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to learn what he considered outdated modes, Manet joined Thomas Couture's studio. While Couture was an academic painter, and a product of the Salon system, he encouraged his students to explore their own artistic expression, rather than directly adhere to the aesthetic demands of the days.
He trained under Couture for six years, finally leaving in 1856 and starting his own studio in the rue Lavoisier. His ability to set up his own space (although it was a joint endeavor with painter Albert de Balleroy) was entirely due to his financial security, which also enabled him to live his life and create art in his signature fashion. Becoming a flaneur of Parisian life and translating his observations onto his canvases came naturally for Manet. His financial security also enabled him to travel through Holland, Germany, and Austria, and to visit Italy on several occasions. In 1857, he met Henri Fantin-Latour while copying paintings at the Louvre; theirs would become an important lifelong friendship.
Many works were produced during this time, yet it was with The Absinthe Drinker (1858) that Manet broke from Couture's teachings and began to express his own style.
Mature Period
Friends with poet Charles Baudelaire and artist Gustave Courbet, Manet moved amongst other progressive thinkers who believed that art should represent modern life, not history or mythology. This was a tumultuous artistic shift that pitted the status quo of the Salon with avant-garde artists who suffered mightily at the hands of the conservative public and vicious critics. Manet was the focus of several of these controversies and the Salon of 1863 refused his paintings. Manet and others protested and the Emperor relented by putting all of the rejected works into the secondary Salon des Refuses, so the public could see what had been deemed unworthy.
The shocking Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) drew the most criticism for a number of reasons. The Renaissance allusions did not make sense to viewers, but what they did understand was the shameless and realistically rendered nudity of a woman - likely a prostitute - staring at them from the canvas. Critiques included comments that the painting was "vulgar," "immodest," and "unartistic," comments that deeply distressed Manet and likely caused him a serious bout with depression.
Being included in the Salon des Refuses would have been upsetting for Manet's ego and personal reputation. His rebellious instincts encouraged him to want to change the system of exclusion under which the institutions - i.e. the Salon and Ecole des Beaux Arts - operated, but he did not want them eliminated. Firm in his upper-middle class background, Manet was embedded with certain ideals of achievement and he wished to be successful at the Salon - only on his terms, not theirs. The result was the creation of an unwitting revolutionary, and, arguably, the first modern artist.
More controversies continued in the following year when he produced Olympia (1863), which featured another nude of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent. Manet claimed to see the truth in her face, while painting her entire body for the world to see. This proved to be too confrontational and unacceptable to the Parisian public when viewed at the 1865 Salon. He wrote to an unsympathetic Baudelaire, "They are raining insults upon me, I've never been led such a dance."
After the death of Manet's father in 1862, he and Suzanne wed to legitimize their relationship, although their son Leon may never have known his true parentage. Manet's mother had likely helped the two conspire to keep the secret from Manet's father as he would not have tolerated the disgrace of an illegitimate child in the family. This would have been the end of Manet's artistic career before it even began. There has also been some speculation that Leon was actually Manet's father's child, but this is extremely unlikely.
In 1864, Manet lived on the rue des Batignolles, and from 1866 he began to hold court every Thursday at the Cafe Guerbois, with the likes of Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas, Emile Zola, Felix Nadar, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and, by 1868, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. The meetings of what Zola termed "the Batignolles Group" were a mixture of personalities, attitudes, and classes; all joined together as independent-minded, avant-garde artists to forge the principles of their new artistic styles. With the assembling of such minds and talents on a regular basis, there was a great degree of mutual influence and such a mixing of ideas that they could all be said to have influenced one another. However, Manet was an early leader with his avant-garde realism, along with Monet and Renoir, who eventually emerged as leaders of what would be called Impressionism.
The Salon of 1866 refused his pieces The Fifer (1866) and The Tragic Actor (1866). In response, Manet held a public exhibition in his own studio. In support of this avant-garde move, Zola wrote an essay about Manet in L'Evenement, for which he was fired. The following year Manet was excluded from the Paris Exposition Universelle, and decided not to submit anything to the Salon and instead set up a tent near Courbet's to exhibit his work outside the Exposition, where he again was criticized soundly.
Having painted a troupe of Spanish performers in 1861, Manet had been interested in Spanish culture, and after visiting Spain in 1865 he was affected by the works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya. This was expressed both in his style and subject matter. As a staunch Republican, Manet was unhappy with Napoleon III's government. In the painting The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867), which compositionally gave a nod to Goya, he implicated the French government in the tragic death of Maximilian in Mexico. This work was considered too politically controversial and its display was forbidden, even in his own tent.
Another important meeting was in 1868, when Henri Fantin-Latour introduced Manet to the Morisot sisters. Manet's relationship with Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot was fraught at best. He respected her as a painter, and even had her model for him on multiple occasions. While there was a mutual infatuation, a true affair was impossible. So to avoid any domestic disturbances, Morisot married Manet's younger brother Eugene. This effectively ended their personal relationship, as Morisot never sat for him again, but she never stopped being Manet's biggest advocate.
Fantin-Latour's A Studio at Batignolles (1870), which depicts a gathering of Monet, Zola, Bazille, and Renoir, among others, all admiring Manet as he paints in his own studio, demonstrates Manet's significance to the modern art world. However, while some of his friends, like Monet, went to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War, Manet joined the National Guard. The political events of the next few years forced Manet to stay out of Paris, returning only briefly during the Versailles repression. He was later forced to leave his destroyed studio and set up in the rue de Saint-Petersbourg in 1872.
While the public disliked his Bon Bock (1873), in the Salon of 1873, despite it receiving an honorable mention, several of his paintings were well received later that year, with fifteen works selling to one buyer alone. Yet Manet angered the Salon once again, in 1875, with his submission Argenteuil (1874), which showed a lighter palette and the influence of Monet's Impressionism. With Argentueil, Manet sent the Salon what was essentially a manifesto of the emerging style, intended for those who had not attended the group's seminal exhibition in 1874.
In 1876 the Salon rejected several of his works, so Manet responded by hosting another exhibition at his own studio, which drew over 4,000 visitors. And while many in the press claimed the Salon's rejection was unfair, he continued to be ostracized, with a subsequent denial coming in 1877. Refusing to submit to the 1878 Salon or to hold his own exhibition, Manet showed nothing that year and instead changed studios. Coincidently, that same year ill health began to affect his daily life.
Late Period
After taking some time away from Paris to aid his declining health, at the Salon of 1880 Manet was awarded a 2nd place medal, granting him a pass from future competition and the chance to become a permanent exhibitor at all future Salons. Among further accolades, Manet was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1881. Continuing his life as the flaneur, Manet recorded the modern changes in the streets of Paris and the lives of its inhabitants. The cafe concerts were a great symbol of these changes - a place where men and women from varying levels of society were able to mingle, enjoying company, drinks, and entertainment. Set in his favorite cafe concert, he created one of his most lauded works, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-82). This work, along with Spring (1881), was well received at the 1882 Salon.
Manet continued to paint portraits of women, still-lifes, landscapes, and flowers, even from his sickbed (he was unable to visit his studio in the last months of his life). Succumbing to a nervous disorder - most likely from tertiary syphilis - Manet died at only 51 years of age. In his will, he left his estate to Suzanne and obliged her to leave everything to Leon upon her death, which for all practical purposes confirms Leon as Édouard Manet's son and heir.
Legacy
After his death, Manet's wife and friends worked to secure his memory and legacy, through extraordinary sales of his paintings, acquisitions by the French government, and by publishing several biographies. Considered by many art historians to be the father of modern art, Manet's influence on art and the art world is immeasurable. While greatness and scandal characterized his professional life, his desire for respectability ultimately dictated his private life. In spite of his relatively short career, spanning a little over two decades, his works are held in most major international museums and galleries.
Influences and Connections
|
Impressionism
|
Comprising 100 centavos, what is the currency of Brazil?
|
Edgar Degas | French artist | Britannica.com
French artist
Alternative Titles: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Rembrandt van Rijn
Edgar Degas, in full Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, De Gas later spelled Degas (born July 19, 1834, Paris, France —died September 27, 1917, Paris), French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially the female—figure, which he explored in works ranging from the sombre portraits of his early years to the studies of laundresses, cabaret singers, milliners, and prostitutes of his Impressionist period. Ballet dancers and women at their toilette would preoccupy him throughout his career. Degas was the only Impressionist to truly bridge the gap between traditional academic art and the radical movements of the early 20th century, a restless innovator who often set the pace for his younger colleagues. Acknowledged as one of the finest draftsmen of his age, Degas experimented with a wide variety of media, including oil , pastel , gouache , etching , lithography , monotype , wax modeling, and photography . In his last decades, both his subject matter and technique became simplified, resulting in a new art of vivid colour and expressive form, and in long sequences of closely linked compositions . Once marginalized as a “painter of dancers,” Degas is now counted among the most complex and innovative figures of his generation, credited with influencing Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse , and many of the leading figurative artists of the 20th century.
A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers, oil on canvas by Edgar Degas, 1865; in the …
Photograph by Katie Chao. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.128)
Beginnings
Born in Paris just south of Montmartre, Degas always remained a proud Parisian, living and working in the same area of the city throughout his career. Though detailed knowledge of his middle-class family is limited, it is known that they maintained the outward forms of polite society and that they were related to minor aristocracy in Italy and to the business community in New Orleans , Louisiana , U.S. The family was also prosperous enough to send Degas in 1845 to a leading boys’ school, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he received a conventional classical education. Music featured prominently in the Degas home, where the artist’s mother sang opera arias and his father arranged occasional recitals, one of which is represented in Degas’s painting of 1872, Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas. The artist’s mother died when he was 13 years old, leaving three sons and two daughters to be brought up by his father, a banker by profession. Knowledgeable about art but conservative in his preferences, Degas’s father helped to develop his son’s interest in painting and in 1855 encouraged him to register at the École des Beaux-Arts under the supervision of Louis Lamothe, a minor follower of J.-A.-D. Ingres . Surviving works from that period show Degas’s aptitude for drawing and his attention to the historical precedents he viewed in the Louvre . He also began his first solemn explorations of the self-portrait.
Woman Reading, monotype by Edgar Degas, c. 1885; in the Rosenwald …
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection, 1950.16.292
Britannica Stories
Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent
In 1856 Degas surprisingly abandoned his studies in Paris, using his father’s funds to embark on a three-year period of travel and study in Italy, where he immersed himself in the painting and sculpture of antiquity, the trecento, and the Renaissance . Staying first with relatives in Naples , he later worked in Rome and Florence , filling notebooks with sketches of faces, historic buildings, and the landscape, and with hundreds of rapid pencil copies from frescoes and oil paintings he admired. Among these were copies after Giotto , Michelangelo , Leonardo da Vinci , and Titian , artists who were to echo through his compositions for decades; the inclusion of less-expected works, however, such as those by Sir Anthony van Dyck and Frans Snyders , hinted at wider interests. The same sketchbooks include written notes and reflections, as well as drafts for his own figure-based paintings in a variety of eclectic styles. Together they suggest a literate and serious young artist with high ambitions, but one who still lacked direction.
Colour and line
Art & Architecture: Fact or Fiction?
From his beginnings, Degas seemed equally attracted to the severity of line and to the sensuous delights of colour, echoing a historic tension that was still much debated in his time. In Italy he consciously modeled some drawings on the linear restraint of the Florentine masters, such as Michelangelo, although he gradually acknowledged the lure of the Venetian painters, such as Titian, and their densely hued surfaces. Characteristically, the young Degas developed a near reverence for Ingres , the 19th-century champion of Classical line, while almost guiltily imitating Eugène Delacroix , who was the leading proponent of lyrical colour in the century and considered to be Ingres’s antithesis . Many of the pictures of Degas’s maturity grew out of a confrontation between these impulses, which arguably found resolution in the vigorously drawn and brilliantly coloured pastels of his later years.
Britannica Lists & Quizzes
Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies
Returning to Paris in April 1859, Degas attempted to launch himself through the established art-world channels of the day, though with little success. He painted large portraits of family members and grandiose, historically inspired canvases such as The Daughter of Jephthah (1859–60) and Semiramis Building Babylon (1861), intending to submit them to the annual state-sponsored Salon . Each work was painstakingly prepared in drawings that still rank among the most beautiful of his career, but he found the paintings themselves difficult to complete to his satisfaction. Perhaps humbled by his exposure to the Italian masters, Degas scraped down and reworked parts of his own canvases, initiating a habit of technical self-criticism that was to last a lifetime. In 1865 his more simply executed Scene of War in the Middle Ages was accepted by the Salon jury, but it remained almost unnoticed in the thronged exhibition halls. The following year his dramatic painting Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey was again met with indifference, despite its startlingly close-up view of a contemporary horse race that seems, in retrospect, like the public announcement of a transformation in his art.
Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, oil on canvas by Edgar …
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1999.79.10
Realism and Impressionism
Degas’s transition to modern subject matter, evident in Scene from the Steeplechase, was a long and gradual one, not an overnight conversion. Before he left Italy, he had made drawings of street characters and paintings of fashionable horse-riders, but always on a small scale. In Paris in the early 1860s, his pictures of French racing events broke new ground both for their decidedly contemporary subject matter and for their surprising viewpoints and bold colours, which preceded the canvases of similar scenes by his renowned contemporary Édouard Manet . Degas’s portraits, too, at this time became less remote and more actively engaged with the top-hatted, restless world in which he lived. When he met Manet about 1862, Degas developed an affectionate but pointed rivalry with the slightly older man and soon shared something of Manet’s oppositional stance toward the artistic establishment and its traditional subject matter. Degas’s notebooks from these years teem with contrary possibilities for the direction of his art, as sketches of the countryside follow glimpses of theatrical performances, and studies from objects in the Louvre are interspersed among topical caricatures . After mid-decade he abandoned historical themes, sending a portrait of a current ballet star at the Paris Opéra , Eugénie Fiocre, to the Salon of 1868; he would soon reject such official exhibitions altogether.
Connect with Britannica
Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest
By 1870 Degas was a familiar figure in independent art circles in Paris, at home with Realists such as James Tissot and Henri Fantin-Latour , acquainted with the vanguard critics Edmond Duranty and Champfleury , and involved as an occasional but forceful presence at the Café Guérbois, where avant-garde artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet would also meet. He was famously opinionated, supporting these radical artists’ shared belief that painting should engage with the sights and subjects of the modern world. As part of his own process of engaging with modernity, he self-consciously aligned himself with Realist novelists such as Émile Zola and Edmond and Jules Goncourt , drafting illustrations for their novels and briefly adopting a similar social descriptiveness.
Like most of the future Impressionists , Degas lightened his palette and adopted more abrupt, simplified compositions during this period, partly under the influence of Japanese prints, which were very popular among contemporary artists. But, unlike his colleagues, who were experimenting with painting en plein-air , Degas affected disdain toward the improvised outdoor landscape studies for which many of the Impressionists became known. Although he clung to the habit of drawing in preparation for his pictures and insisted on working in the studio rather than outdoors, in 1869 Degas did experiment in private with a series of pastel landscapes executed on the Normandy coast. While he is not generally associated with them, he would turn to other rural subjects on several occasions in later life. Degas’s advancing self-confidence at this date, boosted by the first signs of public recognition, is palpable in his letters and the range of his technical accomplishment.
Trending Topics
Eyjafjallajökull volcano
The early 1870s were critical in defining Degas’s personal and artistic trajectory, as they were for the other artists who would be known as the Impressionists. Between 1870 and 1873 he painted a pioneering group of ballet rehearsal and performance scenes, such as his Dance Class of 1871, finding eager buyers for many of them and soon becoming identified with their theme. The dance allowed Degas to test his skills in a daring new context: the world of the Paris Opéra was surrounded by sexual intrigue as well as high glamour and had previously been the province of popular illustrators. Degas built on his knowledge of past art, but he cleverly directed it at audiences of his own day in his choice of subject matter; his views of backstage activity are conspicuously casual and occasionally scurrilous. In 1874 he was one of the leading organizers of the first Impressionist exhibition (which he called “a salon of Realists”), showing his signature repertoire of dancers, horse races, and women ironing.
Prima Ballerina, pastel by Edgar Degas, c. 1876; in the …
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
Astonishingly, these developments coincided with or followed the terrible months of the Franco-German War , when Paris was besieged and Degas and several of his colleagues enlisted in the National Guard to defend the city. Escaping the worst horrors of the Commune of Paris , Degas left in 1872 for a protracted visit to his relatives in New Orleans , where he pursued his experiments in family portraiture in spectacular works such as the Cotton Office at New Orleans (1873). Over this same period he began to describe a deterioration in his eyesight, complaining of intolerance to bright light and wondering if he might soon be blind.
The pictures Degas showed at the series of eight Impressionist exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886, revealed him at his most inventive. Whereas the paintings of Claude Monet , Alfred Sisley , Paul Cézanne , Berthe Morisot , Mary Cassatt , Camille Pissarro , and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were largely concerned with the landscape or with figures of rural toil and urban glamour, Degas specialized in startling and enigmatic scenes of Parisian life. Visitors were frequently disconcerted by his images of popular entertainment or back-street squalor, depicted with a sharp eye for the topical gesture and heightened by a radical use of perspective , which embodied the extreme viewpoints of a newly mobile society. Already famed for his dry humour, Degas seemed to tease his viewers by opting for ambiguity , revealing a glamorous nightclub singer in all her awkwardness, while elevating a tired laundress to near-Classical grandeur. Degas was seen as the leader of a more traditionally skilled faction within the group, and his pictures were sought out by collectors. Critics approvingly pointed out that his work was grounded in a knowledge of the Old Masters and a firm line, qualities they found lacking in some of Degas’s peers.
A versatile technician
For much of his long working life, Degas was attracted to the pleasures and difficulties of the artist’s materials. His drawings include examples in pen, ink , pencil , chalk , pastel , charcoal , and oil on paper, often in combination with each other, while his paintings were carried out in watercolour , gouache , distemper , metallic pigments, and oils, on surfaces including card, silk , ceramic, tile , and wood panel , as well as widely varied textures of canvas . There was something contradictory about much of this activity: Degas invoked the techniques of the Old Masters while creating anarchic methods of his own. He effectively developed the black-and-white monotype as an independent medium, for example, sometimes with an added layer of pastel or gouache, as in Dancer with a Bouquet Bowing (1877). The results can be exhilarating, notably when the effects of light and texture are subtly expressive of the chosen subject, but he soon tired of the technique. The late 1870s marked the height of Degas’s graphic experimentation, after which he moved away from printmaking to concentrate on enriching his use of pastel. Between 1890 and 1892 he briefly returned to monotype, perfecting a new colour procedure in a dazzling series of landscapes, many—like Wheat Field and Green Hill—with pastel embellishments.
Ballerinas in Romantic tutus in Le Foyer de la danse, oil on canvas by …
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
By the early 1880s the variety of Degas’s exhibited art seemed endless, encompassing portraits and theatre scenes, pastels of women at their toilette and of notorious criminals, and series of drawings and prints. During this period Degas began to experiment with making pictures as charcoal drawings on tracing paper and retracing them several times before adding pastel to produce a “family” of related compositions, analogous to the series paintings of Monet. Such sequences were deeply challenging artistic exercises, allowing him to move beyond subject matter and to manipulate the finest nuance of gesture or detail, while seeming to elevate the fundamentals of picture-making—colour, form, and composition—to a newly independent level. For some years Degas had also been quietly exploring the medium of sculpture , using wax and other materials to make modest statuettes of horses and a group of figures that culminated in the tantalizingly lifelike wax sculpture, The Little Dancer Aged 14 (1878–81). Shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881, this work carried the possibilities of visual realism to new extremes by incorporating an actual, reduced-scale tutu , ballet slippers, a human-hair wig , and a silk ribbon.
Final years
In 1884 Degas reached the age of 50 and confessed to his friends that he felt some disillusionment about his career. Already known for his abrasiveness toward visitors during working hours, he became notorious for his single-minded dedication to the making of art and for his hostility to journalists and the merely curious. The next decade was one of continuous invention, as he gradually refined his artistic ambitions and shed the preoccupations of his middle years. He abandoned many of the topical themes of the 1870s—the café-concerts, shop scenes, and brothels, for example—and replaced them with a new phase of concentration on the human figure in intimate , if more indistinct, settings. After a controversial sequence of pastels in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, which showed women bathing and drying themselves indoors and in the open air, Degas produced hundreds of obsessive studies of the nude female form on paper and canvas or in wax and clay. While some of the earlier scenes had been considered voyeuristic and the models identified as prostitutes, these later figures avoid easy classification. The figure in The Morning Bath (c. 1892–95) is almost monumental in the manner of the antique sculpture he admired, while others seem overtly sensual or burdened by their massiveness.
The second great subject of Degas’s later years was the dancer, now infrequently on stage or in compromising situations, but rather more often waiting in the wings. He hired models to pose in his studio for both his ballet and bathing scenes, often freely improvising his settings or utilizing familiar props. Though they never became abstract in any sense that Degas would have understood, the works of this period moved significantly away from the urban context that had formerly inspired him. His late pictures of dancers are essentially engagements with the human form, at times in rhythmic relationships with each other’s bodies, and at times expressing a forceful individual presence. In a large oil painting of about 1900, Dancers at the Barre, for example, Degas created a vital equilibrium between the energy of the two women in a tense composition of verticals and diagonals and of green skirts and orange walls.
Waiting, pastel on paper by Edgar Degas, c. 1882.
Jointly owned by the Norton Simon Art Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Pasadena, CA
Two Dancers Resting, charcoal on paper by Edgar Degas, c. 1910; in …
Edgar Degas—The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images
In such works Degas seemed to be confronting the beginnings of a new art, where documentary description counts for little and the preoccupations with structure and expression of the early 20th century are spelled out. As in his nude studies, his pastels of dancers were sometimes lightly tinted over an energetic charcoal drawing, or were otherwise densely built up in crusty layers of brilliant, unnatural hue. The old dialogue between colour and line continued, but in an emphatically modern idiom . A fascination with varied techniques haunted Degas to the end, resurfacing in dramatic and occasionally bizarre late canvases that involved finger-painting, glazes of contrasting colour, and heavily impastoed surfaces.
The audacity of Degas’s art during this period was often at odds with the narrowness of his life. In 1890 he took over a large studio on the rue Victor Massé, later moving into an adjoining apartment that was to remain his home until 1912. He never married but was a fiercely loyal friend, counting among his intimates a number of women, including Mary Cassatt . Degas enjoyed society on his own terms, dining out within a trusted circle and regaling families such as Ludovic and Louise Halévy with his trenchant opinions and humorous aphorisms on art, literature, and politics. His letters from these years are typically brief and businesslike, but occasionally allow glimpses of a melancholy , strong-willed personality. Degas relished the company of the young, from small children to the new generation of writers and artists who increasingly sought him out. With the flamboyant artist Paul Gauguin , for example, he exchanged both ideas and works of art, learning much from the younger man’s views on colour while also prompting Gauguin to make experimental prints and boldly drawn figure compositions. Degas himself remained sombre in appearance, wearing a dark suit and top hat on formal occasions and remaining aloof from the mores of bohemianism.
Despite many myths about Degas’s later years, some encouraged by the artist himself, he did not (until the very end) retreat from the art world, but rather he promoted his work energetically and closely followed the careers of perceived rivals such as Monet and Cézanne. In 1892 he staged a much-noted exhibition of his landscape monotypes at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, partly as a riposte to Monet’s gathering fame and the recent success of Pissarro’s and Cassatt’s own prints. Becoming an avid collector, he also acquired the art of many of his contemporaries, as well as hundreds of drawings and paintings by his lifelong idols, Delacroix and Ingres. And, while he remained loyal to his Montmartre studio when his contemporaries painted abroad or in their country retreats, he also traveled regularly through France, Switzerland, and Italy (his last visit was in 1906, at age 72) to visit acquaintances and make occasional landscapes. His world began to narrow at the turn of the 20th century, however, partly because of his reactionary views and violently anti-Semitic response to the Dreyfus affair , which alienated many of his friends. His declining health also began to preoccupy him; although Degas never went completely blind, a complex of eye troubles obliged him to wear dark glasses outdoors and take frequent rests from work. (His emphasis on the strikingly simplified yet eloquent forms of his final decades was partly linked to his declining sight.)
In an unusual move for an artist of his renown, Degas gave up work in old age after being obliged to move from his last studio in 1912. Suffering from reduced sight and hearing, he surrounded himself with pictures he had made and collected, retreating into his memories. His reputation in France and beyond grew steadily, with his work reaching prices of unprecedented heights and beginning to enter major museums. With his cooperation, dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard placed pictures from all periods with leading collectors, among them the American Louisine Havemeyer, the Russian Shchukin family, and the German Count Harry Kessler. Degas was idolized by artists of several early 20th-century persuasions—including Suzanne Valadon , Walter Richard Sickert , Maurice Denis , Georges Rouault , Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse , and Edward Hopper —who visited his studio or emulated him from afar.
It was not until after Degas’s death in 1917, however, that the wealth of his output was revealed in a succession of vast public sales in the war-shocked Paris of 1918 and 1919. Thousands of his previously unexhibited works on paper and canvas were sold, and some of the later, less naturalistic examples distressed even his most loyal admirers. Certain aspects of his achievement gained prominence for the first time, principally the wide range of his printmaking. Also surprising was the extent of his collection of pictures by El Greco , Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne. In the early 1920s, when the first series of posthumous bronze casts were unveiled in Europe and the United States , Degas’s sculpture provided a further revelation to the art world.
Assessment
Degas’s greatness is summarized in his ability to explore the language of art—its technical and tactile complexity, its refinement as well as its implicit energy—to a more extreme degree than any of his contemporaries, yet without losing sight of his subject of the human animal in its most public and private moments. He combined a Romantic sensibility with a Classical command of his means, fusing sensuality with unsparing observation and an insistence on visual structure. More than any of the other Impressionists, Degas’s art has long been simplified or over-categorized: in reality, the evolution from the gloomy academicism of his youth to the full-blooded social realism of the 1870s, and then to the pyrotechnical, defiant breadth of his last two- and three-dimensional work, is one of the most awe-inspiring of the modern period. In a single lifetime, Degas abandoned the certainties of a state-controlled, historical culture for an art of individual crisis, even approaching the nihilism of the following generation.
Degas’s reputation has followed an unusual trajectory, rising steeply in his maturity but suffering from the angry retreat of his old age, and from the preference for nonfigurative modes in the new century. Though respected in subsequent decades, he was sidelined by formalist criticism and relegated too often to the role of mere social commentator. The 1960s and ’70s saw the beginnings of a major reevaluation of Degas’s significance, with specialist publications on his portraits, drawings, prints, monotypes, notebooks, and sculpture, and a growing wave of popular exhibitions. His imagery became a battleground for feminist critics, who centred on the artist’s alleged misogyny and the perceived prurience of his brothel and backstage scenes. More recently, the self-consciously elusive quality of much of Degas’s depiction has been increasingly acknowledged, as well as his underestimated shift away from topicality in later years. Such debates and discoveries continue to attract vast crowds and to stimulate curators, academics, and practicing artists, suggesting that Degas’s full stature has yet to be fully measured.
|
i don't know
|
What word, derived from Latin meaning to 'pay against the evil of something' refers to expressing disapproval?
|
5000 FREE SAT Test Prep Words - 5000 Vocabulary Words FREE
abase v. To lower in position, estimation, or the like; degrade. ← Many vocabulary words, such as degrade, are repeated in definitions for double learning.
abbess n. The lady superior of a nunnery.
abbey n. The group of buildings which collectively form the dwelling-place of a society of monks or nuns. Free SAT prep math notes below vocabulary ↓
abbot n. The superior of a community of monks.
abdicate v. To give up (royal power or the like).
abdomen n. In mammals, the visceral cavity between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor; the belly.
abdominal n. Of, pertaining to, or situated on the abdomen.
abduction n. A carrying away of a person against his will, or illegally.
abed adv. In bed; on a bed.
aberration n. Deviation from a right, customary, or prescribed course.
abet v. To aid, promote, or encourage the commission of (an offense).
abeyance n. A state of suspension or temporary inaction.
abhorrence n. The act of detesting extremely.
abhorrent adj. Very repugnant; hateful.
abidance n. An abiding.
abject adj. Sunk to a low condition.
abjure v. To recant, renounce, repudiate under oath.
able-bodied adj. Competent for physical service.
ablution n. A washing or cleansing, especially of the body.
abnegate v. To renounce (a right or privilege).
abnormal adj. Not conformed to the ordinary rule or standard.
abominable adj. Very hateful.
abominate v. To hate violently.
abomination n. A very detestable act or practice.
aboriginal adj. Primitive; unsophisticated.
aborigines n. The original of earliest known inhabitants of a country.
aboveboard adv. & adj. Without concealment, fraud, or trickery.
abrade v. To wear away the surface or some part of by friction.
abrasion n. That which is rubbed off.
abridge v. To make shorter in words, keeping the essential features, leaning out minor particles.
abridgment n. A condensed form as of a book or play.
abrogate v. To abolish, repeal.
abrupt adj. Beginning, ending, or changing suddenly or with a break.
abscess n. A Collection of pus in a cavity formed within some tissue of the body.
abscission n. The act of cutting off, as in a surgical operation.
abscond v. To depart suddenly and secretly, as for the purpose of escaping arrest.
absence n. The fact of not being present or available.
absent-minded adj. Lacking in attention to immediate surroundings or business.
absolution n. Forgiveness, or passing over of offenses.
absolve v. To free from sin or its penalties.
absorb v. To drink in or suck up, as a sponge absorbs water.
absorption n. The act or process of absorbing.
abstain v. To keep oneself back (from doing or using something).
abstemious adj. Characterized by self denial or abstinence, as in the use of drink, food.
abstinence n. Self denial.
abstruse adj. Dealing with matters difficult to be understood.
absurd adj. Inconsistent with reason or common sense.
abundant adj. Plentiful.
abusive adj. Employing harsh words or ill treatment.
abut v. To touch at the end or boundary line.
abyss n. Bottomless gulf.
academic adj. Of or pertaining to an academy, college, or university.
academician n. A member of an academy of literature, art, or science.
academy n. Any institution where the higher branches of learning are taught.
accede v. To agree.
accelerate v. To move faster.
accept v. To take when offered.
access n. A way of approach or entrance; passage.
accessible adj. Approachable.
accession n. Induction or elevation, as to dignity, office, or government.
accessory n. A person or thing that aids the principal agent.
acclaim v. To utter with a shout.
accommodate v. To furnish something as a kindness or favor.
accompaniment n. A subordinate part or parts, enriching or supporting the leading part.
accompanist n. One who or that which accompanies.
accompany v. To go with, or be associated with, as a companion.
accomplice n. An associate in wrong-doing.
accomplish v. To bring to pass.
accordion n. A portable free-reed musical instrument.
accost v. To speak to.
account n. A record or statement of receipts and expenditures, or of business transactions.
accouter v. To dress.
accredit v. To give credit or authority to.
accumulate v. To become greater in quantity or number.
accuracy n. Exactness.
accurate adj. Conforming exactly to truth or to a standard.
accursed adj. Doomed to evil, misery, or misfortune.
accusation n. A charge of crime, misdemeanor, or error.
accusatory adj. Of, pertaining to, or involving an accusation.
accuse v. To charge with wrong doing, misconduct, or error.
accustom v. To make familiar by use.
acerbity n. Sourness, with bitterness and astringency.
acetate n. A salt of acetic acid.
acetic adj. Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of vinegar.
ache v. To be in pain or distress.
Achillean adj. Invulnerable.
acid n. A sour substance.
acidify v. To change into acid.
acknowledge v. To recognize; to admit the genuineness or validity of.
acknowledgment n. Recognition.
acme n. The highest point, or summit.
acoustic adj. Pertaining to the act or sense of hearing.
acquaint v. To make familiar or conversant.
acquiesce v. To comply; submit.
acquiescence n. Passive consent.
acquire v. To get as one's own.
acquisition n. Anything gained, or made one's own, usually by effort or labor.
acquit v. To free or clear, as from accusation.
acquittal n. A discharge from accusation by judicial action.
acquittance n. Release or discharge from indebtedness, obligation, or responsibility.
acreage n. Quantity or extent of land, especially of cultivated land.
acrid adj. Harshly pungent or bitter.
acrimonious adj. Full of bitterness.
acrimony n. Sharpness or bitterness of speech or temper.
actionable adj. Affording cause for instituting an action, as trespass, slanderous words.
actuality n. Any reality.
actuary n. An officer, as of an insurance company, who calculates and states the risks and premiums.
actuate v. To move or incite to action.
acumen n. Quickness of intellectual insight, or discernment; keenness of discrimination.
acute adj. Having fine and penetrating discernment.
adamant n. Any substance of exceeding hardness or impenetrability.
addendum n. Something added, or to be added.
addle v. To make inefficient or worthless; muddle.
adduce v. To bring forward or name for consideration.
adhere v. To stick fast or together.
adherence n. Attachment.
adherent adj. Clinging or sticking fast.
adhesion n. The state of being attached or joined.
adieu inter. Good-by; farewell.
adjacency n. The state of being adjacent.
adjacent n. That which is near or bordering upon.
adjudge v. To award or bestow by formal decision.
adjunct n. Something joined to or connected with another thing, but holding a subordinate place.
adjuration n. A vehement appeal.
adjutant adj. Auxiliary.
administrator n. One who manages affairs of any kind.
admissible adj. Having the right or privilege of entry.
admittance n. Entrance, or the right or permission to enter.
admonish v. To warn of a fault.
admonition n. Gentle reproof.
ado n. unnecessary activity or ceremony.
adoration n. Profound devotion.
adroit adj. Having skill in the use of the bodily or mental powers.
adulterant n. An adulterating substance.
adulterate v. To make impure by the admixture of other or baser ingredients.
adumbrate v. To represent beforehand in outline or by emblem.
advent n. The coming or arrival, as of any important change, event, state, or personage.
adverse adj. Opposing or opposed.
adversity n. Misfortune.
advert v. To refer incidentally.
advertiser n. One who advertises, especially in newspapers.
advisory adj. Not mandatory.
advocacy n. The act of pleading a cause.
advocate n. One who pleads the cause of another, as in a legal or ecclesiastical court.
aerial adj. Of, pertaining to, or like the air.
aeronaut n. One who navigates the air, a balloonist.
aeronautics n. the art or practice of flying aircraft
aerostat n. A balloon or other apparatus floating in or sustained by the air.
aerostatics n. The branch of pneumatics that treats of the equilibrium, pressure, and mechanical properties.
affable adj. Easy to approach.
affect v. To act upon
affectation n. A studied or ostentatious pretense or attempt.
affiliate n. Some auxiliary person or thing.
affirmative adj. Answering yes; to a question at issue.
affix v. To fasten.
affluence n. A profuse or abundant supply of riches.
affront n. An open insult or indignity.
afire adv. & adj. On fire, literally or figuratively.
afoot adv. In progress.
aforesaid adj. Said in a preceding part or before.
afresh adv. Once more, after rest or interval.
afterthought n. A thought that comes later than its appropriate or expected time.
agglomerate v. To pile or heap together.
aggrandize v. To cause to appear greatly.
aggravate v. To make heavier, worse, or more burdensome.
aggravation n. The fact of being made heavier or more heinous, as a crime , offense, misfortune, etc.
aggregate n. The entire number, sum, mass, or quantity of something.
aggress v. To make the first attack.
aggression n. An unprovoked attack.
aggrieve v. To give grief or sorrow to.
aghast adj. Struck with terror and amazement.
agile adj. Able to move or act quickly, physically, or mentally.
agitate v. To move or excite (the feelings or thoughts).
agrarian adj. Pertaining to land, especially agricultural land.
aide-de-camp n. An officer who receives and transmits the orders of the general.
ailment n. Slight sickness.
akin adj. Of similar nature or qualities.
alabaster n. A white or delicately tinted fine-grained gypsum.
alacrity n. Cheerful willingness.
albeit conj. Even though.
albino n. A person with milky white skin and hair, and eyes with bright red pupil and usually pink iris.
album n. A book whose leaves are so made to form paper frames for holding photographs or the like.
alchemy n. Chemistry of the middle ages, characterized by the pursuit of changing base metals to gold.
alcohol n. A volatile, inflammable, colorless liquid of a penetrating odor and burning taste.
alcoholism n. A condition resulting from the inordinate or persistent use of alcoholic beverages.
alcove n. A covered recess connected with or at the side of a larger room.
alder n. Any shrub or small tree of the genus Alumnus, of the oak family.
alderman n. A member of a municipal legislative body, who usually exercises also certain judicial functions.
aldermanship n. The dignity, condition, office, or term of office of an alderman.
alias n. An assumed name.
alien n. One who owes allegiance to a foreign government.
alienable adj. Capable of being aliened or alienated, as lands.
alienate v. To cause to turn away.
alienation n. Estrangement.
aliment n. That which nourishes.
alkali n. Anything that will neutralize an acid, as lime, magnesia, etc.
allay v. To calm the violence or reduce the intensity of; mitigate.
allege v. To assert to be true, especially in a formal manner, as in court.
allegory n. The setting forth of a subject under the guise of another subject of aptly suggestive likeness.
alleviate v. To make less burdensome or less hard to bear.
alley n. A narrow street, garden path, walk, or the like.
alliance n. Any combination or union for some common purpose.
allot v. To assign a definite thing or part to a certain person.
allotment n. Portion.
allude v. To refer incidentally, or by suggestion.
allusion n. An indirect and incidental reference to something without definite mention of it.
alluvion n. Flood.
ally n. A person or thing connected with another, usually in some relation of helpfulness.
almanac n. A series of tables giving the days of the week together with certain astronomical information.
aloof adv. Not in sympathy with or desiring to associate with others.
altar n. Any raised place or structure on which sacrifices may be offered or incense burned.
alter v. To make change in.
alteration n. Change or modification.
altercate v. To contend angrily or zealously in words.
alternate n. One chosen to act in place of another, in case of the absence or incapacity of that other.
alternative n. Something that may or must exist, be taken or chosen, or done instead of something else.
altitude n. Vertical distance or elevation above any point or base-level, as the sea.
alto n. The lowest or deepest female voice or part.
altruism n. Benevolence to others on subordination to self-interest.
altruist n. One who advocates or practices altruism.
amalgam n. An alloy or union of mercury with another metal.
amalgamate v. To mix or blend together in a homogeneous body.
amateur adj. Practicing an art or occupation for the love of it, but not as a profession.
amatory adj. Designed to excite love.
ambidextrous adj. Having the ability of using both hands with equal skill or ease.
ambiguous adj. Having a double meaning.
ambitious adj. Eagerly desirous and aspiring.
ambrosial adj. Divinely sweet, fragrant, or delicious.
ambulance n. A vehicle fitted for conveying the sick and wounded.
ambulate v. To walk about
ambush n. The act or state of lying concealed for the purpose of surprising or attacking the enemy.
ameliorate v. To relieve, as from pain or hardship
amenable adj. Willing and ready to submit.
Americanism n. A peculiar sense in which an English word or phrase is used in the United States.
amicable adj. Done in a friendly spirit.
amity n. Friendship.
amorous adj. Having a propensity for falling in love.
amorphous adj. Without determinate shape.
amour n. A love-affair, especially one of an illicit nature.
ampere n. The practical unit of electric-current strength.
ampersand n. The character &; and.
amphibious adj. Living both on land and in water.
amphitheater n. An edifice of elliptical shape, constructed about a central open space or arena.
amplitude n. Largeness.
amputate v. To remove by cutting, as a limb or some portion of the body.
amusement n. Diversion.
anachronism n. Anything occurring or existing out of its proper time.
anagram n. The letters of a word or phrase so transposed as to make a different word or phrase.
analogous adj. Corresponding (to some other) in certain respects, as in form, proportion, relations.
analogy n. Reasoning in which from certain and known relations or resemblance others are formed.
analyst n. One who analyzes or makes use of the analytical method.
analyze v. To examine minutely or critically.
anarchy n. Absence or utter disregard of government.
anathema n. Anything forbidden, as by social usage.
anatomy n. That branch of morphology which treats of the structure of organisms.
ancestry n. One's ancestors collectively.
anecdote n. A brief account of some interesting event or incident.
anemia n. Deficiency of blood or red corpuscles.
anemic adj. Affected with anemia.
anemometer n. An instrument for measuring the force or velocity of wind.
anesthetic adj. Pertaining to or producing loss of sensation.
anew adv. Once more.
angelic adj. Saintly.
Anglophobia n. Hatred or dread of England or of what is English.
Anglo-Saxon n. The entire English race wherever found, as in Europe, the United States, or India.
angular adj. Sharp-cornered.
animadversion n. The utterance of criticism or censure.
animadvert v. To pass criticism or censure.
animalcule n. An animal of microscopic smallness.
animate v. To make alive.
animosity n. Hatred.
annals n. A record of events in their chronological order, year by year.
annex v. To add or affix at the end.
annihilate v. To destroy absolutely.
annotate v. To make explanatory or critical notes on or upon.
annual adj. Occurring every year.
annuity n. An annual allowance, payment, or income.
annunciation n. Proclamation.
anode n. The point where or path by which a voltaic current enters an electrolyte or the like.
anonymous adj. Of unknown authorship.
antagonism n. Mutual opposition or resistance of counteracting forces, principles, or persons.
Antarctic adj. Pertaining to the south pole or the regions near it.
ante v. In the game of poker, to put up a stake before the cards are dealt.
antecede v. To precede.
antecedent n. One who or that which precedes or goes before, as in time, place, rank, order, or causality.
antechamber n. A waiting room for those who seek audience.
antedate v. To assign or affix a date to earlier than the actual one.
antediluvian adj. Of or pertaining to the times, things, events before the great flood in the days of Noah.
antemeridian adj. Before noon.
antemundane adj. Pertaining to time before the world's creation.
antenatal adj. Occurring or existing before birth.
anterior adj. Prior.
anteroom n. A room situated before and opening into another, usually larger.
anthology n. A collection of extracts from the writings of various authors.
anthracite n. Hard coal.
anthropology n. The science of man in general.
anthropomorphous adj. Having or resembling human form.
antic n. A grotesque, ludicrous, or fantastic action.
Antichrist n. Any opponent or enemy of Christ, whether a person or a power.
anticlimax n. A gradual or sudden decrease in the importance or impressiveness of what is said.
anticyclone n. An atmospheric condition of high central pressure, with currents flowing outward.
antidote n. Anything that will counteract or remove the effects of poison, disease, or the like.
antilogy n. Inconsistency or contradiction in terms or ideas.
antipathize v. To show or feel a feeling of antagonism, aversion, or dislike.
antiphon n. A response or alteration of responses, generally musical.
antiphony n. An anthem or other composition sung responsively.
antipodes n. A place or region on the opposite side of the earth.
antiquary n. One who collects and examines old things, as coins, books, medals, weapons, etc.
antiquate v. To make old or out of date.
antique adj. Pertaining to ancient times.
antiseptic n. Anything that destroys or restrains the growth of putrefactive micro-organisms.
antislavery adj. Opposed to human slavery.
antispasmodic adj. Tending to prevent or relieve non-inflammatory spasmodic affections.
antistrophe n. The inversion of terms in successive classes, as in "the home of joy and the joy of home".
antitoxin n. A substance which neutralizes the poisonous products of micro-organisms.
antonym n. A word directly opposed to another in meaning.
anxious adj. Distressed in mind respecting some uncertain matter.
apathy n. Insensibility to emotion or passionate feeling.
aperture n. Hole.
apex n. The highest point, as of a mountain.
aphorism n. Proverb.
apiary n. A place where bees are kept.
apogee n. The climax.
apology n. A disclaimer of intentional error or offense.
apostasy n. A total departure from one's faith or religion.
apostate adj. False.
apostle n. Any messenger commissioned by or as by divine authority.
apothecary n. One who keeps drugs for sale and puts up prescriptions.
apotheosis n. Deification.
appall v. To fill with dismay or horror.
apparent adj. Easily understood.
appease v. To soothe by quieting anger or indignation.
appellate adj. Capable of being appealed to.
appellation n. The name or title by which a particular person, class, or thing is called.
append v. To add or attach, as something accessory, subordinate, or supplementary.
appertain v. To belong, as by right, fitness, association, classification, possession, or natural relation.
apposite adj. Appropriate.
apposition n. The act of placing side by side, together, or in contact.
appraise v. To estimate the money value of.
appreciable adj. Capable of being discerned by the senses or intellect.
apprehend v. To make a prisoner of (a person) in the name of the law.
apprehensible adj. Capable of being conceived.
approbation n. Sanction.
appropriate adj. Suitable for the purpose and circumstances.
aqueduct n. A water-conduit, particularly one for supplying a community from a distance.
aqueous adj. Of, pertaining to, or containing water.
arbiter n. One chosen or appointed, by mutual consent of parties in dispute, to decide matters.
arbitrary adj. Fixed or done capriciously.
arbitrate v. To act or give judgment as umpire.
arbor n. A tree.
arboreal adj. Of or pertaining to a tree or trees.
arborescent adj. Having the nature of a tree.
arboretum n. A botanical garden or place devoted to the cultivation of trees or shrubs.
arboriculture n. The cultivation of trees or shrubs.
arcade n. A vaulted passageway or street; a roofed passageway having shops, etc., opening from it.
archaic adj. Antiquated
archaism n. Obsolescence.
archangel n. An angel of high rank.
archbishop n. The chief of the bishops of an ecclesiastical province in the Greek, Roman, and Anglican church.
archdeacon n. A high official administrator of the affairs of a diocese.
archaeology n. The branch of anthropology concerned with the systematic investigation of the relics of man.
archetype n. A prototype.
archipelago n. Any large body of water studded with islands, or the islands collectively themselves.
ardent adj. Burning with passion.
ardor n. Intensity of passion or affection.
arid adj. Very dry.
aristocracy n. A hereditary nobility
aristocrat n. A hereditary noble or one nearly connected with nobility.
armada n. A fleet of war-vessels.
armful n. As much as can be held in the arm or arms.
armory n. An arsenal.
aroma n. An agreeable odor.
arraign v. To call into court, as a person indicted for crime, and demand whether he pleads guilty or not.
arrange v. To put in definite or proper order.
arrangement n. The act of putting in proper order, or the state of being put in order.
arrant adj. Notoriously bad.
arrear n. Something overdue and unpaid.
arrival n. A coming to stopping-place or destination.
arrogant adj. Unduly or excessively proud, as of wealth, station, learning, etc.
arrogate v. To take, demand, or claim, especially presumptuously or without reasons or grounds.
Artesian well n. A very deep bored well. water rises due to underground pressure
artful adj. Characterized by craft or cunning.
Arthurian adj. Pertaining to King Arthur, the real or legendary hero of British poetic story.
artifice n. Trickery.
ascension n. The act of rising.
ascent n. A rising, soaring, or climbing.
ascetic adj. Given to severe self-denial and practicing excessive abstinence and devotion.
ascribe v. To assign as a quality or attribute.
asexual adj. Having no distinct sexual organs.
ashen adj. Pale.
askance adv. With a side or indirect glance or meaning.
asperity n. Harshness or roughness of temper.
aspirant n. One who seeks earnestly, as for advancement, honors, place.
aspiration n. An earnest wish for that which is above one's present reach.
aspire v. To have an earnest desire, wish, or longing, as for something high and good, not yet attained.
assailant n. One who attacks.
assassin n. One who kills, or tries to kill, treacherously or secretly.
assassinate v. To kill, as by surprise or secret assault, especially the killing of some eminent person.
assassination n. Murderer, as by secret assault or treachery.
assay n. The chemical analysis or testing of an alloy ore.
assent v. To express agreement with a statement or matter of opinion.
assess v. To determine the amount of (a tax or other sum to be paid).
assessor n. An officer whose duty it is to assess taxes.
assets n. pl. Property in general, regarded as applicable to the payment of debts.
assiduous adj. Diligent.
assignee n. One who is appointed to act for another in the management of certain property and interests.
assimilate v. To adapt.
assonance n. Resemblance or correspondence in sound.
assonant adj. Having resemblance of sound.
assonate v. To accord in sound, especially vowel sound.
assuage v. To cause to be less harsh, violent, or severe, as excitement, appetite, pain, or disease.
astringent adj. Harsh in disposition or character.
astute adj. Keen in discernment.
atheism n. The denial of the existence of God.
athirst adj. Wanting water.
athwart adv. From side to side.
atomizer n. An apparatus for reducing a liquid to a fine spray, as for disinfection, inhalation, etc.
atone v. To make amends for.
atonement n. Amends, reparation, or expiation made from wrong or injury.
atrocious adj. Outrageously or wantonly wicked, criminal, vile, or cruel.
atrocity n. Great cruelty or reckless wickedness.
attache n. A subordinate member of a diplomatic embassy.
attest v. To certify as accurate, genuine, or true.
attorney-general n. The chief law-officer of a government.
auburn adj. Reddish-brown, said usually of the hair.
audacious adj. Fearless.
audible adj. Loud enough to be heard.
audition n. The act or sensation of hearing.
auditory adj. Of or pertaining to hearing or the organs or sense of hearing.
augment v. To make bigger.
augur v. To predict.
Augustinian adj. Pertaining to St. Augustine, his doctrines, or the religious orders called after him.
aura n. Pervasive psychic influence supposed to emanate from persons
aural adj. Of or pertaining to the ear.
auricle n. One of the two chambers of the heart which receives the blood from the veins.
auricular adj. Of or pertaining to the ear, its auricle, or the sense of hearing.
auriferous adj. Containing gold.
aurora n. A luminous phenomenon in the upper regions of the atmosphere.
auspice n. favoring, protecting, or propitious influence or guidance.
austere adj. Severely simple; unadorned.
autarchy n. Unrestricted power.
authentic adj. Of undisputed origin.
authenticity n. The state or quality of being genuine, or of the origin and authorship claimed.
autobiography n. The story of one's life written by himself.
autocracy n. Absolute government.
autocrat n. Any one who claims or wields unrestricted or undisputed authority or influence.
automaton n. Any living being whose actions are or appear to be involuntary or mechanical.
autonomous adj. Self-governing.
autonomy n. Self-government.
autopsy n. The examination of a dead body by dissection to ascertain the cause of death.
autumnal adj. Of or pertaining to autumn.
auxiliary n. One who or that which aids or helps, especially when regarded as subsidiary or accessory.
avalanche n. The fall or sliding of a mass of snow or ice down a mountain-slope, often bearing with it rock.
avarice n. Passion for getting and keeping riches.
aver v. To assert as a fact.
averse adj. Reluctant.
aversion n. A mental condition of fixed opposition to or dislike of some particular thing.
avert v. To turn away or aside.
aviary n. A spacious cage or enclosure in which live birds are kept.
avidity n. Greediness.
avow v. To declare openly.
awaken v. To arouse, as emotion, interest, or the like.
awry adv. & adj. Out of the proper form, direction, or position.
aye adv. An expression of assent.
azalea n. A flowering shrub.
azure n. The color of the sky.
Baconian adj. Of or pertaining to Lord Bacon or his system of philosophy.
bacterium n. A microbe.
baffle v. To foil or frustrate.
bailiff n. An officer of court having custody of prisoners under arraignment.
baize n. A single-colored napped woolen fabric used for table-covers, curtains, etc.
bale n. A large package prepared for transportation or storage.
baleful adj. Malignant.
ballad n. Any popular narrative poem, often with epic subject and usually in lyric form.
balsam n. A medical preparation, aromatic and oily, used for healing.
banal adj. Commonplace.
barcarole n. A boat-song of Venetian gondoliers.
barograph n. An instrument that registers graphically and continuously the atmospheric pressure.
barometer n. An instrument for indicating the atmospheric pressure per unit of surface.
barring prep. Apart from.
baritone adj. Having a register higher than bass and lower than tenor.
bask v. To make warm by genial heat.
bass adj. Low in tone or compass.
baste v. To cover with melted fat, gravy, while cooking.
baton n. An official staff borne either as a weapon or as an emblem of authority or privilege.
battalion n. A body of infantry composed of two or more companies, forming a part of a regiment.
batten n. A narrow strip of wood.
batter n. A thick liquid mixture of two or more materials beaten together, to be used in cookery.
bauble n. A trinket.
bawl v. To proclaim by outcry.
beatify v. To make supremely happy.
beatitude n. Any state of great happiness.
beau n. An escort or lover.
becalm v. To make quiet.
beck v. To give a signal to, by nod or gesture.
bedaub v. To smear over, as with something oily or sticky.
bedeck v. To cover with ornament.
bedlam n. Madhouse.
befriend v. To be a friend to, especially when in need.
beget v. To produce by sexual generation.
begrudge v. To envy one of the possession of.
belate v. To delay past the proper hour.
belay v. To make fast, as a rope, by winding round a cleat.
belie v. To misrepresent.
believe v. To accept as true on the testimony or authority of others.
belittle v. To disparage.
belle n. A woman who is a center of attraction because of her beauty, accomplishments, etc.
bellicose adj. Warlike.
belligerent adj. Manifesting a warlike spirit.
bemoan v. To lament
benediction n. a solemn invocation of the divine blessing.
benefactor n. A doer of kindly and charitable acts.
benefice n. A church office endowed with funds or property for the maintenance of divine service.
beneficent adj. Characterized by charity and kindness.
beneficial adj. Helpful.
beneficiary n. One who is lawfully entitled to the profits and proceeds of an estate or property.
benefit n. Helpful result.
benevolence n. Any act of kindness or well-doing.
benevolent adj. Loving others and actively desirous of their well-being.
benign adj. Good and kind of heart.
benignant adj. Benevolent in feeling, character, or aspect.
benignity n. Kindness of feeling, disposition, or manner.
benison n. Blessing.
bequeath v. To give by will.
bereave v. To make desolate with loneliness and grief.
berth n. A bunk or bed in a vessel, sleeping-car, etc.
beseech v. To implore.
beset v. To attack on all sides.
besmear v. To smear over, as with any oily or sticky substance.
bestial adj. Animal.
bestrew v. To sprinkle or cover with things strewn.
bestride v. To get or sit upon astride, as a horse.
bethink v. To remind oneself.
betide v. To happen to or befall.
betimes adv. In good season or time.
betroth v. To engage to marry.
betrothal n. Engagement to marry.
bevel n. Any inclination of two surfaces other than 90 degrees.
bewilder v. To confuse the perceptions or judgment of.
bibliomania n. The passion for collecting books.
bibliography n. A list of the words of an author, or the literature bearing on a particular subject.
bibliophile n. One who loves books.
bibulous adj. Fond of drinking.
bide v. To await.
biennial n. A plant that produces leaves and roots the first year and flowers and fruit the second.
bier n. A horizontal framework with two handles at each end for carrying a corpse to the grave.
bigamist n. One who has two spouses at the same time.
bigamy n. The crime of marrying any other person while having a legal spouse living.
bight n. A slightly receding bay between headlands, formed by a long curve of a coast-line.
bilateral adj. Two-sided.
bilingual adj. Speaking two languages.
biograph n. A bibliographical sketch or notice.
biography n. A written account of one's life, actions, and character.
biology n. The science of life or living organisms.
biped n. An animal having two feet.
birthright n. A privilege or possession into which one is born.
bitterness n. Acridity, as to the taste.
blase adj. Sated with pleasure.
blaspheme v. To indulge in profane oaths.
blatant adj. Noisily or offensively loud or clamorous.
blaze n. A vivid glowing flame.
blazon v. To make widely or generally known.
bleak adj. Desolate.
blemish n. A mark that mars beauty.
blithe adj. Joyous.
blithesome adj. Cheerful.
blockade n. The shutting up of a town, a frontier, or a line of coast by hostile forces.
boatswain n. A subordinate officer of a vessel, who has general charge of the rigging, anchors, etc.
bodice n. A women's ornamental corset-shaped laced waist.
bodily adj. Corporeal.
boisterous adj. Unchecked merriment or animal spirits.
bole n. The trunk or body of a tree.
bolero n. A Spanish dance, illustrative of the passion of love, accompanied by caste nets and singing.
boll n. A round pod or seed-capsule, as a flax or cotton.
bolster v. To support, as something wrong.
bomb n. A hollow projectile containing an explosive material.
bombard v. To assail with any missile or with abusive speech.
bombardier n. A person who has charge of mortars, bombs, and shells.
bombast n. Inflated or extravagant language, especially on unimportant subjects.
boorish adj. Rude.
bore v. To weary by tediousness or dullness.
borough n. An incorporated village or town.
bosom n. The breast or the upper front of the thorax of a human being, especially of a woman.
botanical adj. Connected with the study or cultivation of plants.
botanize v. To study plant-life.
botany n. The science that treats of plants.
bountiful adj. Showing abundance.
Bowdlerize v. To expurgate in editing (a literary composition) by omitting words or passages.
bowler n. In cricket, the player who delivers the ball.
boycott v. To place the products or merchandise of under a ban.
brae n. Hillside.
braggart n. A vain boaster.
brandish v. To wave, shake, or flourish triumphantly or defiantly, as a sword or spear.
bravado n. An aggressive display of boldness.
bravo interj. Well done.
bray n. A loud harsh sound, as the cry of an ass or the blast of a horn.
braze v. To make of or ornament with brass.
brazier n. An open pan or basin for holding live coals.
breach n. The violation of official duty, lawful right, or a legal obligation.
breaker n. One who trains horses, dogs, etc.
breech n. The buttocks.
brethren n. pl. Members of a brotherhood, gild, profession, association, or the like.
brevity n. Shortness of duration.
bric-a-brac n. Objects of curiosity or for decoration.
bridle n. The head-harness of a horse consisting of a head-stall, a bit, and the reins.
brigade n. A body of troops consisting of two or more regiments.
brigadier n. General officer who commands a brigade, ranking between a colonel and a major-general.
brigand n. One who lives by robbery and plunder.
brimstone n. Sulfur.
brine n. Water saturated with salt.
bristle n. One of the coarse, stiff hairs of swine: used in brush-making, etc.
Britannia n. The United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Briticism n. A word, idiom, or phrase characteristic of Great Britain or the British.
brittle adj. Fragile.
broach v. To mention, for the first time.
broadcast adj. Disseminated far and wide.
brogan n. A coarse, heavy shoe.
brogue n. Any dialectic pronunciation of English, especially that of the Irish people.
brokerage n. The business of making sales and purchases for a commission; a broker.
bromine n. A dark reddish-brown, non-metallic liquid element with a suffocating odor.
bronchitis n. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
bronchus n. Either of the two subdivisions of the trachea conveying air into the lungs.
brooch n. An article of jewelry fastened by a hinged pin and hook on the underside.
brotherhood n. Spiritual or social fellowship or solidarity.
browbeat v. To overwhelm, or attempt to do so, by stern, haughty, or rude address or manner.
brusque adj. Somewhat rough or rude in manner or speech.
buffoon n. A clown.
buffoonery n. Low drollery, coarse jokes, etc.
bulbous adj. Of, or pertaining to, or like a bulb.
bullock n. An ox.
bulrush n. Any one of various tall rush-like plants growing in damp ground or water.
bulwark n. Anything that gives security or defense.
bumper n. A cup or glass filled to the brim, especially one to be drunk as a toast or health.
bumptious adj. Full of offensive and aggressive self-conceit.
bungle v. To execute clumsily.
buoyancy n. Power or tendency to float on or in a liquid or gas.
buoyant adj. Having the power or tendency to float or keep afloat.
bureau n. A chest of drawers for clothing, etc.
bureaucracy n. Government by departments of men transacting particular branches of public business.
burgess n. In colonial times, a member of the lower house of the legislature of Maryland or Virginia.
burgher n. An inhabitant, citizen or freeman of a borough burgh, or corporate town.
burnish v. To make brilliant or shining.
bursar n. A treasurer.
butt v. To strike with or as with the head, or horns.
butte n. A conspicuous hill, low mountain, or natural turret, generally isolated.
buttress n. Any support or prop.
by-law n. A rule or law adopted by an association, a corporation, or the like.
cabal n. A number of persons secretly united for effecting by intrigue some private purpose.
cabalism n. Superstitious devotion to one's religion.
cabinet n. The body of men constituting the official advisors of the executive head of a nation.
cacophony n. A disagreeable, harsh, or discordant sound or combination of sounds or tones.
cadaverous adj. Resembling a corpse.
cadence n. Rhythmical or measured flow or movement, as in poetry or the time and pace of marching troops.
cadenza n. An embellishment or flourish, prepared or improvised, for a solo voice or instrument.
caitiff adj. Cowardly.
cajole v. To impose on or dupe by flattering speech.
cajolery n. Delusive speech.
calculable adj. That may be estimated by reckoning.
calculus n. A concretion formed in various parts of the body resembling a pebble in hardness.
callosity n. The state of being hard and insensible.
callow adj. Without experience of the world.
calorie n. Amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree centigrade.
calumny n. Slander.
Calvary n. The place where Christ was crucified.
Calvinism n. The system of doctrine taught by John Calvin.
Calvinize v. To teach or imbue with the doctrines of Calvinism.
came n. A leaden sash-bar or grooved strip for fastening panes in stained-glass windows.
cameo n. Any small engraved or carved work in relief.
campaign n. A complete series of connected military operations.
Canaanite n. A member of one of the three tribes that dwelt in the land of Canaan, or western Palestine.
canary adj. Of a bright but delicate yellow.
candid adj. Straightforward.
candor n. The quality of frankness or outspokenness.
canine adj. Characteristic of a dog.
canon n. Any rule or law.
cant v. To talk in a singsong, preaching tone with affected solemnity.
cantata n. A choral composition.
canto n. One of the divisions of an extended poem.
cantonment n. The part of the town or district in which the troops are quartered.
capacious adj. Roomy.
capillary n. A minute vessel having walls composed of a single layer of cells.
capitulate v. To surrender or stipulate terms.
caprice n. A whim.
caption n. A heading, as of a chapter, section, document, etc.
captious adj. Hypercritical.
captivate v. To fascinate, as by excellence. eloquence, or beauty.
carcass n. The dead body of an animal.
cardiac adj. Pertaining to the heart.
cardinal adj. Of prime or special importance.
caret n. A sign (^) placed below a line, indicating where omitted words, etc., should be inserted.
caricature n. a picture or description in which natural characteristics are exaggerated or distorted.
carnage n. Massacre.
carnivorous adj. Eating or living on flesh.
carouse v. To drink deeply and in boisterous or jovial manner.
carrion n. Dead and putrefying flesh.
cartilage n. An elastic animal tissue of firm consistence.
cartridge n. A charge for a firearm, or for blasting.
caste n. The division of society on artificial grounds.
castigate v. To punish.
casual adj. Accidental, by chance.
casualty n. A fatal or serious accident or disaster.
cataclysm n. Any overwhelming flood of water.
cataract n. Opacity of the lens of the eye resulting in complete or partial blindness.
catastrophe n. Any great and sudden misfortune or calamity.
cathode n. The negative pole or electrode of a galvanic battery.
Catholicism n. The system, doctrine, and practice of the Roman Catholic Church.
catholicity n. Universal prevalence or acceptance.
cat-o-nine-tails n. An instrument consisting of nine pieces of cord, formerly used for flogging in the army and navy.
caucus n. A private meeting of members of a political party to select candidates.
causal adj. Indicating or expressing a cause.
caustic adj. Sarcastic and severe.
cauterize v. To burn or sear as with a heated iron.
cede v. To pass title to.
censor n. An official examiner of manuscripts empowered to prohibit their publication.
censorious adj. Judging severely or harshly.
census n. An official numbering of the people of a country or district.
centenary adj. Pertaining to a hundred years or a period of a hundred years.
centiliter n. A hundredth of a liter.
centimeter n. A length of one hundredth of a meter.
centurion n. A captain of a company of one hundred infantry in the ancient Roman army.
cereal adj. Pertaining to edible grain or farinaceous seeds.
ceremonial adj. Characterized by outward form or ceremony.
ceremonious adj. Observant of ritual.
cessation n. Discontinuance, as of action or motion.
cession n. Surrender, as of possessions or rights.
chagrin n. Keen vexation, annoyance, or mortification, as at one's failures or errors.
chameleon adj. Changeable in appearance.
chancery n. A court of equity, as distinguished from a common-law court.
chaos n. Any condition of which the elements or parts are in utter disorder and confusion.
characteristic n. A distinctive feature.
characterize v. To describe by distinctive marks or peculiarities.
charlatan n. A quack.
chasm n. A yawning hollow, as in the earth's surface.
chasten v. To purify by affliction.
chastise v. To subject to punitive measures.
chastity n. Sexual or moral purity.
chateau n. A castle or manor-house.
chattel n. Any article of personal property.
check v. To hold back.
chiffon n. A very thin gauze used for trimmings, evening dress, etc.
chivalry n. The knightly system of feudal times with its code, usages and practices.
cholera n. An acute epidemic disease.
choleric adj. Easily provoked to anger.
choral adj. Pertaining to, intended for, or performed by a chorus or choir.
Christ n. A title of Jesus
christen v. To name in baptism.
Christendom n. That part of the world where Christianity is generally professed.
chromatic adj. Belonging, relating to, or abounding in color.
chronology n. The science that treats of computation of time or of investigation and arrangement of events.
chronometer n. A portable timekeeper of the highest attainable precision.
cipher v. To calculate arithmetically. (also a noun meaning zero or nothing)
circulate v. To disseminate.
circumference n. The boundary-line of a circle.
circumlocution n. Indirect or roundabout expression.
circumnavigate v. To sail quite around.
circumscribe v. To confine within bounds.
circumspect adj. Showing watchfulness, caution, or careful consideration.
citadel n. Any strong fortress.
cite v. To refer to specifically.
claimant n. One who makes a claim or demand, as of right.
clairvoyance n. Intuitive sagacity or perception.
clamorous adj. Urgent in complaint or demand.
clan n. A tribe.
clangor n. Clanking or a ringing, as of arms, chains, or bells; clamor.
clarify v. To render intelligible.
clarion n. A small shrill trumpet or bugle.
classify v. To arrange in a class or classes on the basis of observed resemblances and differences.
clearance n. A certificate from the proper authorities that a vessel has complied with the law and may sail.
clemency n. Mercy.
close-hauled adj. Having the sails set for sailing as close to the wind as possible.
clothier n. One who makes or sells cloth or clothing.
clumsy adj. Awkward of movement.
coagulate v. To change into a clot or a jelly, as by heat, by chemical action, or by a ferment.
coagulant adj. Producing coagulation.
coalescence n. The act or process of coming together so as to form one body, combination, or product.
coalition n. Combination in a body or mass.
coddle v. To treat as a baby or an invalid.
codicil n. A supplement adding to, revoking, or explaining in the body of a will.
coerce v. To force.
coercion n. Forcible constraint or restraint, moral or physical.
coercive adj. Serving or tending to force.
cogent adj. Appealing strongly to the reason or conscience.
cognate adj. Akin.
cohere v. To stick together.
cohesion n. Consistency.
cohesive adj. Having the property of consistency.
coincide v. To correspond.
coincidence n. A circumstance so agreeing with another: often implying accident.
coincident adj. Taking place at the same time.
collaborate v. To labor or cooperate with another or others, especially in literary or scientific pursuits.
collapse v. To cause to shrink, fall in, or fail.
collapsible adj. That may or can collapse.
colleague n. An associate in professional employment.
collective adj. Consisting of a number of persons or objects considered as gathered into a mass, or sum.
collector n. One who makes a collection, as of objects of art, books, or the like.
collegian n. A college student.
collide v. To meet and strike violently.
collier n. One who works in a coal-mine.
collision n. Violent contact.
colloquial adj. Pertaining or peculiar to common speech as distinguished from literary.
colloquialism n. Form of speech used only or chiefly in conversation.
colloquy n. Conversation.
collusion n. A secret agreement for a wrongful purpose.
colossus n. Any strikingly great person or object.
comely adj. Handsome.
comestible adj. Fit to be eaten.
comical adj. Funny.
commemorate v. To serve as a remembrance of.
commentary n. A series of illustrative or explanatory notes on any important work.
commingle v. To blend.
commissariat n. The department of an army charged with the provision of its food and water and daily needs.
commission v. To empower.
commitment n. The act or process of entrusting or consigning for safe-keeping.
committal n. The act, fact, or result of committing, or the state of being
commodity n. Something that is bought and sold.
commotion n. A disturbance or violent agitation.
commute v. To put something, especially something less severe, in place of.
comparable adj. Fit to be compared.
comparative adj. Relative.
comparison n. Examination of two or more objects with reference to their likeness or unlikeness.
compensate v. To remunerate.
competence n. Adequate qualification or capacity.
competent adj. Qualified.
competitive adj. characterized by rivalry.
competitor n. A rival.
complacence n. Satisfaction with one's acts or surroundings.
complacent adj. Pleased or satisfied with oneself.
complaisance n. Politeness.
complement v. To make complete.
complex adj. Complicated.
complicate v. To make complex, difficult, or hard to deal with.
complication n. An intermingling or combination of things or parts, especially in a perplexing manner.
complicity n. Participation or partnership, as in wrong-doing or with a wrong-doer.
compliment v. To address or gratify with expressions of delicate praise.
component n. A constituent element or part.
comport v. To conduct or behave (oneself).
composure n. Calmness.
comprehension n. Ability to know.
comprehensive adj. Large in scope or content.
compress v. To press together or into smaller space.
compressible adj. Capable of being pressed into smaller compass.
compression n. Constraint, as by force or authority.
comprise v. To consist of.
compulsion n. Coercion.
concurrent adj. Occurring or acting together.
concussion n. A violent shock to some organ by a fall or a sudden blow.
condensation n. The act or process of making dense or denser.
condense v. To abridge.
condescend v. To come down voluntarily to equal terms with inferiors.
condolence n. Expression of sympathy with a person in pain, sorrow, or misfortune.
conduce v. To bring about.
conducive adj. Contributing to an end.
conductible adj. Capable of being conducted or transmitted.
conduit n. A means for conducting something, particularly a tube, pipe, or passageway for a fluid.
confectionery n. The candy collectively that a confectioner makes or sells, as candy.
confederacy n. A number of states or persons in compact or league with each other, as for mutual aid.
confederate n. One who is united with others in a league, compact, or agreement.
confer v. To bestow.
conferee n. A person with whom another confers.
confessor n. A spiritual advisor.
confidant n. One to whom secrets are entrusted.
confide v. To reveal in trust or confidence.
confidence n. The state or feeling of trust in or reliance upon another.
confident adj. Assured.
confinement n. Restriction within limits or boundaries.
confiscate v. To appropriate (private property) as forfeited to the public use or treasury.
conflagration n. A great fire, as of many buildings, a forest, or the like.
confluence n. The place where streams meet.
confluent n. A stream that unites with another.
conformance n. The act or state or conforming.
conformable adj. Harmonious.
conformation n. General structure, form, or outline.
conformity n. Correspondence in form, manner, or use.
confront v. To encounter, as difficulties or obstacles.
congeal v. To coagulate.
congenial adj. Having kindred character or tastes.
congest v. To collect into a mass.
congregate v. To bring together into a crowd.
coniferous adj. Cone-bearing trees.
conjugal adj. Pertaining to marriage, marital rights, or married persons.
conjugate adj. Joined together in pairs.
conjugation n. The state or condition of being joined together.
conjunction n. The state of being joined together, or the things so joined.
connive v. To be in collusion.
connoisseur n. A critical judge of art, especially one with thorough knowledge and sound judgment of art.
connote v. To mean; signify.
connubial adj. Pertaining to marriage or matrimony.
conquer v. To overcome by force.
consanguineous adj. Descended from the same parent or ancestor.
conscience n. The faculty in man by which he distinguishes between right and wrong in character and conduct.
conscientious adj. Governed by moral standard.
conscious adj. Aware that one lives, feels, and thinks.
conscript v. To force into military service.
consecrate v. To set apart as sacred.
consecutive adj. Following in uninterrupted succession.
consensus n. A collective unanimous opinion of a number of persons.
conservatism n. Tendency to adhere to the existing order of things.
conservative adj. Adhering to the existing order of things.
conservatory n. An institution for instruction and training in music and declamation.
consign v. To entrust.
consignee n. A person to whom goods or other property has been entrusted.
consignor n. One who entrusts.
consistency n. A state of permanence.
console v. To comfort.
consolidate v. To combine into one body or system.
consonance n. The state or quality of being in accord with.
consonant adj. Being in agreement or harmony with.
consort n. A companion or associate.
conspicuous adj. Clearly visible.
conspirator n. One who agrees with others to cooperate in accomplishing some unlawful purpose.
conspire v. To plot.
constable n. An officer whose duty is to maintain the peace.
constellation n. An arbitrary assemblage or group of stars.
consternation n. Panic.
constituency n. The inhabitants or voters in a district represented in a legislative body.
constituent n. One who has the right to vote at an election.
constrict v. To bind.
consul n. An officer appointed to reside in a foreign city, chiefly to represent his country.
consulate n. The place in which a consul transacts official business.
consummate v. To bring to completion.
consumption n. Gradual destruction, as by burning, eating, etc., or by using up, wearing out, etc.
consumptive adj. Designed for gradual destruction.
contagion n. The communication of disease from person to person.
contagious adj. Transmitting disease.
contemplate v. To consider thoughtfully.
contemporaneous adj. Living, occurring, or existing at the same time.
contemporary adj. Living or existing at the same time.
contemptible adj. Worthy of scorn or disdain.
contemptuous adj. Disdainful.
contender n. One who exerts oneself in opposition or rivalry.
contiguity n. Proximity.
contiguous adj. Touching or joining at the edge or boundary.
continence n. Self-restraint with respect to desires, appetites, and passion.
contingency n. Possibility of happening.
contingent adj. Not predictable.
continuity n. Uninterrupted connection in space, time, operation, or development.
continuous adj. Connected, extended, or prolonged without separation or interruption of sequence.
contort v. To twist into a misshapen form.
contraband n. Trade forbidden by law or treaty.
contradiction n. The assertion of the opposite of that which has been said.
contradictory adj. Inconsistent with itself.
contraposition n. A placing opposite.
contravene v. To prevent or obstruct the operation of.
contribution n. The act of giving for a common purpose.
contributor n. One who gives or furnishes, in common with others, for a common purpose.
contrite adj. Broken in spirit because of a sense of sin.
contrivance n. The act planning, devising, inventing, or adapting something to or for a special purpose.
contrive v. To manage or carry through by some device or scheme.
control v. To exercise a directing, restraining, or governing influence over.
controller n. One who or that which regulates or directs.
contumacious adj. Rebellious.
contumacy n. Contemptuous disregard of the requirements of rightful authority.
contuse v. To bruise by a blow, either with or without the breaking of the skin.
contusion n. A bruise.
convalesce v. To recover after a sickness.
convalescence n. The state of progressive restoration to health and strength after the cessation of disease.
convalescent adj. Recovering health after sickness.
convene v. To summon or cause to assemble.
convenience n. Fitness, as of time or place.
converge v. To cause to incline and approach nearer together.
convergent adj. Tending to one point.
conversant adj. Thoroughly informed.
conversion n. Change from one state or position to another, or from one form to another.
convertible adj. Interchangeable.
convex adj. Curving like the segment of the globe or of the surface of a circle.
conveyance n. That by which anything is transported.
convivial adj. Devoted to feasting, or to good-fellowship in eating or drinking.
convolution n. A winding motion.
convolve v. To move with a circling or winding motion.
convoy n. A protecting force accompanying property in course of transportation.
convulse v. To cause spasms in.
convulsion n. A violent and abnormal muscular contraction of the body.
copious adj. Plenteous.
coquette n. A flirt.
cornice n. An ornamental molding running round the walls of a room close to the ceiling.
cornucopia n. The horn of plenty, symbolizing peace and prosperity.
corollary n. A proposition following so obviously from another that it requires little demonstration.
coronation n. The act or ceremony of crowning a monarch.
coronet n. Inferior crown denoting, according to its form, various degrees of noble rank less than sovereign.
corporal adj. Belonging or relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
corporate adj. Belonging to a corporation.
corporeal adj. Of a material nature; physical.
corps n. A number or body of persons in some way associated or acting together.
corpse n. A dead body.
corpulent adj. Obese.
corpuscle n. A minute particle of matter.
correlate v. To put in some relation of connection or correspondence.
correlative adj. Mutually involving or implying one another.
corrigible adj. Capable of reformation.
corroborate v. To strengthen, as proof or conviction.
corroboration n. Confirmation.
corrode v. To ruin or destroy little by little.
corrosion n. Gradual decay by crumbling or surface disintegration.
corrosive n. That which causes gradual decay by crumbling or surface disintegration.
corruptible adj. Open to bribery.
corruption n. Loss of purity or integrity.
cosmetic adj. Pertaining to the art of beautifying, especially the complexion.
cosmic adj. Pertaining to the universe.
cosmogony n. A doctrine of creation or of the origin of the universe.
cosmography n. The science that describes the universe, including astronomy, geography, and geology.
cosmology n. The general science of the universe.
cosmopolitan adj. Common to all the world.
cosmopolitanism n. A cosmopolitan character.
cosmos n. The world or universe considered as a system, perfect in order and arrangement.
counter-claim n. A cross-demand alleged by a defendant in his favor against the plaintiff.
counteract v. To act in opposition to.
counterbalance v. To oppose with an equal force.
countercharge v. To accuse in return.
counterfeit adj. Made to resemble something else.
counterpart n. Something taken with another for the completion of either.
countervail v. To offset.
counting-house n. A house or office used for transacting business, bookkeeping, correspondence, etc.
countryman n. A rustic.
course n. Line of motion or direction.
courser n. A fleet and spirited horse.
courtesy n. Politeness originating in kindness and exercised habitually.
covenant n. An agreement entered into by two or more persons or parties.
covert adj. Concealed, especially for an evil purpose.
covey n. A flock of quails or partridges.
cower v. To crouch down tremblingly, as through fear or shame.
coxswain n. One who steers a rowboat, or one who has charge of a ship's boat and its crew under an officer.
crag n. A rugged, rocky projection on a cliff or ledge.
cranium n. The skull of an animal, especially that part enclosing the brain.
crass adj. Coarse or thick in nature or structure, as opposed to thin or fine.
craving n. A vehement desire.
creak n. A sharp, harsh, squeaking sound.
creamery n. A butter-making establishment.
creamy adj. Resembling or containing cream.
credence n. Belief.
creed n. A formal summary of fundamental points of religious belief.
crematory adj. A place for cremating dead bodies.
crevasse n. A deep crack or fissure in the ice of a glacier.
crevice n. A small fissure, as between two contiguous surfaces.
criterion n. A standard by which to determine the correctness of a judgment or conclusion.
critique n. A criticism or critical review.
crockery n. Earthenware made from baked clay.
crucible n. A trying and purifying test or agency.
crusade n. Any concerted movement, vigorously prosecuted, in behalf of an idea or principle.
crustacean adj. Pertaining to a division of arthropods, containing lobsters, crabs, crawfish, etc.
crustaceous adj. Having a crust-like shell.
cryptogram n. Anything written in characters that are secret or so arranged as to have hidden meaning.
crystallize v. To bring together or give fixed shape to.
cudgel n. A short thick stick used as a club.
culinary adj. Of or pertaining to cooking or the kitchen.
cull v. To pick or sort out from the rest.
culpable adj. Guilty.
culprit n. A guilty person.
culvert n. Any artificial covered channel for the passage of water through a bank or under a road, canal.
cupidity n. Avarice.
curable adj. Capable of being remedied or corrected.
curator n. A person having charge as of a library or museum.
curio n. A piece of bric-a-brac.
cursive adj. Writing in which the letters are joined together.
cursory adj. Rapid and superficial.
curt adj. Concise, compressed, and abrupt in act or expression.
curtail v. To cut off or cut short.
curtsy n. A downward movement of the body by bending the knees.
cycloid adj. Like a circle.
cygnet n. A young swan.
cynical adj. Exhibiting moral skepticism.
cynicism n. Contempt for the opinions of others and of what others value.
cynosure n. That to which general interest or attention is directed.
daring adj. Brave.
darkling adv. Blindly.
Darwinism n. The doctrine that natural selection has been the prime cause of evolution of higher forms.
dastard n. A base coward.
datum n. A premise, starting-point, or given fact.
dauntless adj. Fearless.
day-man n. A day-laborer.
dead-heat n. A race in which two or more competitors come out even, and there is no winner.
dearth n. Scarcity, as of something customary, essential ,or desirable.
death's-head n. A human skull as a symbol of death.
debase v. To lower in character or virtue.
debatable adj. Subject to contention or dispute.
debonair adj. Having gentle or courteous bearing or manner.
debut n. A first appearance in society or on the stage.
decagon n. A figure with ten sides and ten angles.
decagram n. A weight of 10 grams.
decaliter n. A liquid and dry measure of 10 liters.
decalogue n. The ten commandments.
Decameron n. A volume consisting of ten parts or books.
decameter n. A length of ten meters.
decamp v. To leave suddenly or unexpectedly.
decapitate v. To behead.
decapod adj. Ten-footed or ten-armed.
decasyllable n. A line of ten syllables.
deceit n. Falsehood.
deceive v. To mislead by or as by falsehood.
decency n. Moral fitness.
decent adj. Characterized by propriety of conduct, speech, manners, or dress.
deciduous adj. Falling off at maturity as petals after flowering, fruit when ripe, etc.
decimal adj. Founded on the number 10.
decimate v. To destroy a measurable or large proportion of.
decipher v. To find out the true words or meaning of, as something hardly legible.
decisive ad. Conclusive.
declamation n. A speech recited or intended for recitation from memory in public.
declamatory adj. A full and formal style of utterance.
declarative adj. Containing a formal, positive, or explicit statement or affirmation.
declension n. The change of endings in nouns and adj. to express their different relations of gender.
decorate v. To embellish.
decorous adj. Suitable for the occasion or circumstances.
decoy n. Anything that allures, or is intended to allures into danger or temptation.
decrepit adj. Enfeebled, as by old age or some chronic infirmity.
dedication n. The voluntary consecration or relinquishment of something to an end or cause.
deduce v. To derive or draw as a conclusion by reasoning from given premises or principles.
deface v. To mar or disfigure the face or external surface of.
defalcate v. To cut off or take away, as a part of something.
defamation n. Malicious and groundless injury done to the reputation or good name of another.
defame v. To slander.
default n. The neglect or omission of a legal requirement.
defendant n. A person against whom a suit is brought.
defensible adj. Capable of being maintained or justified.
defensive adj. Carried on in resistance to aggression.
defer v. To delay or put off to some other time.
deference n. Respectful submission or yielding, as to another's opinion, wishes, or judgment.
defiant adj. Characterized by bold or insolent opposition.
deficiency n. Lack or insufficiency.
deficient adj. Not having an adequate or proper supply or amount.
definite adj. Having an exact signification or positive meaning.
deflect v. To cause to turn aside or downward.
deforest v. To clear of forests.
deform v. To disfigure.
defraud v. To deprive of something dishonestly.
defray v. To make payment for.
degeneracy n. A becoming worse.
degenerate v. To become worse or inferior.
degradation n. Diminution, as of strength or magnitude.
degrade v. To take away honors or position from.
dehydrate v. To deprive of water.
deify v. To regard or worship as a god.
deign v. To deem worthy of notice or account.
deist n. One who believes in God, but denies supernatural revelation.
deity n. A god, goddess, or divine person.
deject v. To dishearten.
delectable adj. Delightful to the taste or to the senses.
delectation n. Delight.
deleterious adj. Hurtful, morally or physically.
delicacy n. That which is agreeable to a fine taste.
delineate v. To represent by sketch or diagram.
deliquesce v. To dissolve gradually and become liquid by absorption of moisture from the air.
delirious adj. Raving.
delude v. To mislead the mind or judgment of.
deluge v. To overwhelm with a flood of water.
delusion n. Mistaken conviction, especially when more or less enduring.
demagnetize v. To deprive (a magnet) of magnetism.
demagogue n. An unprincipled politician.
demeanor n. Deportment.
demerit n. A mark for failure or bad conduct.
demise n. Death.
demobilize v. To disband, as troops.
demolish v. To annihilate.
demonstrable adj. Capable of positive proof.
demonstrate v. To prove indubitably.
demonstrative adj. Inclined to strong exhibition or expression of feeling or thoughts.
demonstrator n. One who proves in a convincing and conclusive manner.
demulcent n. Any application soothing to an irritable surface
demurrage n. the detention of a vessel beyond the specified time of sailing.
dendroid adj. Like a tree.
dendrology n. The natural history of trees.
denizen n. Inhabitant.
denominate v. To give a name or epithet to.
denomination n. A body of Christians united by a common faith and form of worship and discipline.
denominator n. Part of a fraction which expresses the number of equal parts into which the unit is divided.
denote v. To designate by word or mark.
denouement n. That part of a play or story in which the mystery is cleared up.
denounce v. To point out or publicly accuse as deserving of punishment, censure, or odium.
dentifrice n. Any preparation used for cleaning the teeth.
denude v. To strip the covering from.
denunciation n. The act of declaring an action or person worthy of reprobation or punishment.
deplete v. To reduce or lessen, as by use, exhaustion, or waste.
deplorable adj. Contemptible.
deplore v. To regard with grief or sorrow.
deponent adj. Laying down.
depopulate v. To remove the inhabitants from.
deport v. To take or send away forcibly, as to a penal colony.
deportment n. Demeanor.
deposition n. Testimony legally taken on interrogatories and reduced to writing, for use as evidence in court.
depositor n. One who makes a deposit, or has an amount deposited.
depository n. A place where anything is kept in safety.
deprave v. To render bad, especially morally bad.
deprecate v. To express disapproval or regret for, with hope for the opposite.
depreciate v. To lessen the worth of.
depreciation n. A lowering in value or an underrating in worth.
depress v. To press down.
depression n. A falling of the spirits.
depth n. Deepness.
derelict adj. Neglectful of obligation.
deride v. To ridicule.
derisible adj. Open to ridicule.
derision n. Ridicule.
derivation n. That process by which a word is traced from its original root or primitive form and meaning.
derivative adj. Coming or acquired from some origin.
derive v. To deduce, as from a premise.
dermatology n. The branch of medical science which relates to the skin and its diseases.
derrick n. An apparatus for hoisting and swinging great weights.
descendant n. One who is descended lineally from another, as a child, grandchild, etc.
descendent adj. Proceeding downward.
descent n. The act of moving or going downward.
descry v. To discern.
desert v. To abandon without regard to the welfare of the abandoned
desiccant n. Any remedy which, when applied externally, dries up or absorbs moisture, as that of wounds.
designate v. To select or appoint, as by authority.
desist v. To cease from action.
desistance n. Cessation.
despair n. Utter hopelessness and despondency.
desperado n. One without regard for law or life.
desperate adj. Resorted to in a last extremity, or as if prompted by utter despair.
despicable adj. Contemptible.
despite prep. In spite of.
despond v. To lose spirit, courage, or hope.
despondent adj. Disheartened.
despot n. An absolute and irresponsible monarch.
despotism n. Any severe and strict rule in which the judgment of the governed has little or no part.
destitute adj. Poverty-stricken.
desultory adj. Not connected with what precedes.
deter v. To frighten away.
deteriorate v. To grow worse.
determinate adj. Definitely limited or fixed.
determination n. The act of deciding.
deterrent adj. Hindering from action through fear.
detest v. To dislike or hate with intensity.
detract v. To take away in such manner as to lessen value or estimation.
detriment n. Something that causes damage, depreciation, or loss.
detrude v. To push down forcibly.
deviate v. To take a different course.
devilry n. Malicious mischief.
deviltry n. Wanton and malicious mischief.
devious adj. Out of the common or regular track.
devise v. To invent.
devout adj. Religious.
dexterity n. Readiness, precision, efficiency, and ease in any physical activity or in any mechanical work.
diabolic adj. Characteristic of the devil.
diacritical adj. Marking a difference.
diagnose v. To distinguish, as a disease, by its characteristic phenomena.
diagnosis n. Determination of the distinctive nature of a disease.
dialect n. Forms of speech collectively that are peculiar to the people of a particular district.
dialectician n. A logician.
dialogue n. A formal conversation in which two or more take part.
diaphanous adj. Transparent.
diatomic adj. Containing only two atoms.
diatribe n. A bitter or malicious criticism.
dictum n. A positive utterance.
didactic adj. Pertaining to teaching.
difference n. Dissimilarity in any respect.
differentia n. Any essential characteristic of a species by reason of which it differs from other species.
differential adj. Distinctive.
differentiate v. To acquire a distinct and separate character.
diffidence n. Self-distrust.
diffident adj. Affected or possessed with self-distrust.
diffusible adj. Spreading rapidly through the system and acting quickly.
diffusion n. Dispersion.
dignitary n. One who holds high rank.
digraph n. A union of two characters representing a single sound.
digress v. To turn aside from the main subject and for a time dwell on some incidental matter.
dilapidated pa. Fallen into decay or partial ruin.
dilate v. To enlarge in all directions.
dilatory adj. Tending to cause delay.
dilemma n. A situation in which a choice between opposing modes of conduct is necessary.
dilettante n. A superficial amateur.
diligence n. Careful and persevering effort to accomplish what is undertaken.
dilute v. To make more fluid or less concentrated by admixture with something.
diminution n. Reduction.
dimly adv. Obscurely.
diphthong n. The sound produced by combining two vowels in to a single syllable or running together the sounds.
diplomacy n. Tact, shrewdness, or skill in conducting any kind of negotiations or in social matters.
diplomat n. A representative of one sovereign state at the capital or court of another.
diplomatic adj. Characterized by special tact in negotiations.
diplomatist n. One remarkable for tact and shrewd management.
disagree v. To be opposite in opinion.
disallow v. To withhold permission or sanction.
disappear v. To cease to exist, either actually or for the time being.
disappoint v. To fail to fulfill the expectation, hope, wish, or desire of.
disapprove v. To regard with blame.
disarm v. To deprive of weapons.
disarrange v. To throw out of order.
disavow v. To disclaim responsibility for.
disavowal n. Denial.
disbeliever n. One who refuses to believe.
disburden v. To disencumber.
disburse v. To pay out or expend, as money from a fund.
discard v. To reject.
discernible adj. Perceivable.
disciple n. One who believes the teaching of another, or who adopts and follows some doctrine.
disciplinary adj. Having the nature of systematic training or subjection to authority.
discipline v. To train to obedience.
disclaim v. To disavow any claim to, connection with, or responsibility to.
discolor v. To stain.
discomfit v. To put to confusion.
discomfort n. The state of being positively uncomfortable.
disconnect v. To undo or dissolve the connection or association of.
disconsolate adj. Grief-stricken.
discontinuance n. Interruption or intermission.
discord n. Absence of harmoniousness.
discountenance v. To look upon with disfavor.
discover v. To get first sight or knowledge of, as something previously unknown or unperceived.
discredit v. To injure the reputation of.
discreet adj. Judicious.
discriminate v. To draw a distinction.
discursive adj. Passing from one subject to another.
discussion n. Debate.
disenfranchise v. To deprive of any right privilege or power
disengage v. To become detached.
disfavor n. Disregard.
disfigure v. To impair or injure the beauty, symmetry, or appearance of.
dishabille n. Undress or negligent attire.
dishonest adj. Untrustworthy.
disinfect v. To remove or destroy the poison of infectious or contagious diseases.
disinfectant n. A substance used to destroy the germs of infectious diseases.
disinherit v. To deprive of an inheritance.
disinterested adj. Impartial.
disjunctive adj. Helping or serving to disconnect or separate.
dislocate v. To put out of proper place or order.
dismissal n. Displacement by authority from an office or an employment.
dismount v. To throw down, push off, or otherwise remove from a horse or the like.
disobedience n. Neglect or refusal to comply with an authoritative injunction.
disobedient adj. Neglecting or refusing to obey.
disown v. To refuse to acknowledge as one's own or as connected with oneself.
disparage v. To regard or speak of slightingly.
disparity n. Inequality.
dispel v. To drive away by or as by scattering in different directions.
dispensation n. That which is bestowed on or appointed to one from a higher power.
displace v. To put out of the proper or accustomed place.
dispossess v. To deprive of actual occupancy, especially of real estate.
disputation n. Verbal controversy.
disquiet v. To deprive of peace or tranquillity.
disregard v. To take no notice of.
disreputable adj. Dishonorable or disgraceful.
disrepute n. A bad name or character.
disrobe v. To unclothe.
disrupt v. To burst or break asunder.
dissatisfy v. To displease.
dissect v. To cut apart or to pieces.
dissection n. The act or operation of cutting in pieces, specifically of a plant or an animal.
dissemble v. To hide by pretending something different.
disseminate v. To sow or scatter abroad, as seed is sown.
dissension n. Angry or violent difference of opinion.
dissent n. Disagreement.
dissentient n. One who disagrees.
dissentious adj. Contentious.
disservice n. An ill turn.
dissever v. To divide.
dissipate v. To disperse or disappear.
dissipation n. The state of being dispersed or scattered.
dissolute adj. Lewd.
dissolution n. A breaking up of a union of persons.
dissolve v. To liquefy or soften, as by heat or moisture.
dissonance n. Discord.
dissonant adj. Harsh or disagreeable in sound.
dissuade v. To change the purpose or alter the plans of by persuasion, counsel, or pleading.
dissuasion n. The act of changing the purpose of or altering the plans of through persuasion, or pleading.
disyllable n. A word of two syllables.
distemper n. A disease or malady.
distend v. To stretch out or expand in every direction.
distensible adj. Capable of being stretched out or expanded in every direction.
distention n. Expansion.
distill v. To extract or produce by vaporization and condensation.
distillation n. Separation of the more volatile parts of a substance from those less volatile.
distiller n. One occupied in the business of distilling alcoholic liquors.
distinction n. A note or designation of honor, officially recognizing superiority or success in studies.
distort v. To twist into an unnatural or irregular form.
distrain v. To subject a person to distress.
distrainor n. One who subjects a person to distress.
distraught adj. Bewildered.
distrust n. Lack of confidence in the power, wisdom, or good intent of any person.
disunion n. Separation of relations or interests.
diurnal adj. Daily.
divergent adj. Tending in different directions.
diverse adj. Capable of various forms.
diversion n. Pastime.
diversity n. Dissimilitude.
divert v. To turn from the accustomed course or a line of action already established.
divertible adj. Able to be turned from the accustomed course or a line of action already established.
divest v. To strip, specifically of clothes, ornaments, or accouterments or disinvestment.
divination n. The pretended forecast of future events or discovery of what is lost or hidden.
divinity n. The quality or character of being godlike.
divisible adj. Capable of being separated into parts.
divisor n. That by which a number or quantity is divided.
divulge v. To tell or make known, as something previously private or secret.
divulgence n. A divulging.
docile adj. Easy to manage.
docket n. The registry of judgments of a court.
doe n. The female of the deer.
dogma n. A statement of religious faith or duty formulated by a body claiming authority.
dogmatic adj. Making statements without argument or evidence.
dogmatize v. To make positive assertions without supporting them by argument or evidence.
doleful adj. Melancholy.
dolorous adj. Expressing or causing sorrow or pain.
domain n. A sphere or field of action or interest.
domesticity n. Life in or fondness for one's home and family.
domicile n. The place where one lives.
dominance n. Ascendancy.
dominate v. To influence controllingly.
domination n. Control by the exercise of power or constituted authority.
domineer v. To rule with insolence or unnecessary annoyance.
donate v. To bestow as a gift, especially for a worthy cause.
donator n. One who makes a donation or present.
donee n. A person to whom a donation is made.
donor n. One who makes a donation or present.
dormant adj. Being in a state of or resembling sleep.
doublet n. One of a pair of like things.
doubly adv. In twofold degree or extent.
dowry n. The property which a wife brings to her husband in marriage.
drachma n. A modern and an ancient Greek coin.
dragnet n. A net to be drawn along the bottom of the water.
dragoon n. In the British army, a cavalryman.
drainage n. The means of draining collectively, as a system of conduits, trenches, pipes, etc.
dramatist n. One who writes plays.
dramatize v. To relate or represent in a dramatic or theatrical manner.
drastic adj. Acting vigorously.
drought n. Dry weather, especially when so long continued as to cause vegetation to wither.
drowsy adj. Heavy with sleepiness.
drudgery n. Hard and constant work in any menial or dull occupation.
dubious adj. Doubtful.
duckling n. A young duck.
ductile adj. Capable of being drawn out, as into wire or a thread.
duet n. A composition for two voices or instruments.
dun v. To make a demand or repeated demands on for payment.
duplex adj. Having two parts.
duplicity n. Double-dealing.
duration n. The period of time during which anything lasts.
duteous adj. Showing submission to natural superiors.
dutiable adj. Subject to a duty, especially a customs duty.
dutiful adj. Obedient.
dwindle v. To diminish or become less.
dyne n. The force which, applied to a mass of one gram for 1 second, would give it a velocity of 1 cm/s.
earnest adj. Ardent in spirit and speech.
earthenware n. Anything made of clay and baked in a kiln or dried in the sun.
eatable adj. Edible.
ebullient adj. Showing enthusiasm or exhilaration of feeling.
eccentric adj. Peculiar.
eccentricity n. Idiosyncrasy.
eclipse n. The obstruction of a heavenly body by its entering into the shadow of another body.
economize v. To spend sparingly.
ecstasy n. Rapturous excitement or exaltation.
ecstatic adj. Enraptured.
edible adj. Suitable to be eaten.
edict n. That which is uttered or proclaimed by authority as a rule of action.
edify v. To build up, or strengthen, especially in morals or religion.
editorial n. An article in a periodical written by the editor and published as an official argument.
educe v. To draw out.
efface v. To obliterate.
effective adj. Fit for a destined purpose.
effectual adj. Efficient.
effeminate adj. Having womanish traits or qualities.
effervesce v. To bubble up.
effervescent adj. Giving off bubbles of gas.
effete adj. Exhausted, as having performed its functions.
efficacious adj. Effective.
efficacy n. The power to produce an intended effect as shown in the production of it.
efficiency n. The state of possessing adequate skill or knowledge for the performance of a duty.
efficient adj. Having and exercising the power to produce effects or results.
efflorescence n. The state of being flowery, or a flowery appearance.
efflorescent adj. Opening in flower.
effluvium n. A noxious or ill-smelling exhalation from decaying or putrefying matter.
effrontery n. Unblushing impudence.
effuse v. To pour forth.
effusion n. an outpouring.
egoism n. The theory that places man's chief good in the completeness of self.
egoist n. One who advocates or practices egoism.
egotism n. Self-conceit.
egotist n. One given to self-mention or who is constantly telling of his own views and experiences.
egregious adj. Extreme.
egress n. Any place of exit.
eject v. To expel.
elapse v. To quietly terminate: said of time.
elasticity n. That property of matter by which a body tends to return to a former shape after being changed.
electrolysis n. The process of decomposing a chemical compound by the passage of an electric current.
electrotype n. A metallic copy of any surface, as a coin.
elegy n. A lyric poem lamenting the dead.
element n. A component or essential part.
elicit v. To educe or extract gradually or without violence.
eligible adj. Qualified for selection.
eliminate v. To separate and cast aside.
Elizabethan adj. Relating to Elizabeth, queen of England, or to her era.
elocution n. The art of correct intonation, inflection, and gesture in public speaking or reading.
eloquent adj. Having the ability to express emotion or feeling in lofty and impassioned speech.
elucidate v. To bring out more clearly the facts concerning.
elude v. To evade the search or pursuit of by dexterity or artifice.
elusion n. Evasion.
emaciate v. To waste away in flesh.
emanate v. To flow forth or proceed, as from some source.
emancipate v. To release from bondage.
embargo n. Authoritative stoppage of foreign commerce or of any special trade.
embark v. To make a beginning in some occupation or scheme.
embarrass v. To render flustered or agitated.
embellish v. To make beautiful or elegant by adding attractive or ornamental features.
embezzle v. To misappropriate secretly.
emblazon v. To set forth publicly or in glowing terms.
emblem n. A symbol.
embody v. To express, formulate, or exemplify in a concrete, compact or visible form.
embolden v. To give courage to.
embolism n. An obstruction or plugging up of an artery or other blood-vessel.
embroil v. To involve in dissension or strife.
emerge v. To come into view or into existence.
emergence n. A coming into view.
emergent adj. Coming into view.
emeritus adj. Retired from active service but retained to an honorary position.
emigrant n. One who moves from one place to settle in another.
emigrate v. To go from one country, state, or region for the purpose of settling or residing in another.
eminence n. An elevated position with respect to rank, place, character, condition, etc.
eminent adj. High in station, merit, or esteem.
emit v. To send or give out.
emphasis n. Any special impressiveness added to an utterance or act, or stress laid upon some word.
emphasize v. To articulate or enunciate with special impressiveness upon a word, or a group of words.
emphatic adj. Spoken with any special impressiveness laid upon an act, word, or set of words.
employee n. One who works for wages or a salary.
employer n. One who uses or engages the services of other persons for pay.
emporium n. A bazaar or shop.
empower v. To delegate authority to.
emulate v. To imitate with intent to equal or surpass.
enact v. To make into law, as by legislative act.
enamor v. To inspire with ardent love.
encamp v. To pitch tents for a resting-place.
encomium n. A formal or discriminating expression of praise.
encompass v. To encircle.
encore n. The call for a repetition, as of some part of a play or performance.
encourage v. To inspire with courage, hope, or strength of mind.
encroach v. To invade partially or insidiously and appropriate the possessions of another.
encumber v. To impede with obstacles.
encyclical adj. Intended for general circulation.
encyclopedia n. A work containing information on subjects, or exhaustive of one subject.
endanger v. To expose to peril.
endear v. To cause to be loved.
endemic adj. Peculiar to some specified country or people.
endue v. To endow with some quality, gift, or grace, usually spiritual.
endurable adj. Tolerable.
endurance n. The ability to suffer pain, distress, hardship, or stress of any kind without succumbing.
energetic adj. Working vigorously.
enervate v. To render ineffective or inoperative.
enfeeble v. To debilitate.
enfranchise v. To endow with a privilege, especially with the right to vote.
engender v. To produce.
engrave v. To cut or carve in or upon some surface.
engross v. To occupy completely.
enhance v. To intensify.
enrapture v. To delight extravagantly or intensely.
enshrine v. To keep sacred.
ensnare v. To entrap.
entail v. To involve; necessitate.
entangle v. To involve in difficulties, confusion, or complications.
enthrall v. To bring or hold under any overmastering influence.
enthrone v. To invest with sovereign power.
enthuse v. To yield to or display intense and rapturous feeling.
enthusiastic adj. Full of zeal and fervor.
entirety n. A complete thing.
entomology n. The branch of zoology that treats of insects.
entrails n. pl. The internal parts of an animal.
entreaty n. An earnest request.
entree n. The act of entering.
entrench v. To fortify or protect, as with a trench or ditch and wall.
entwine v. To interweave.
enumerate v. To name one by one.
epic n. A poem celebrating in formal verse the mythical achievements of great personages, heroes, etc.
epicure n. One who cultivates a delicate taste for eating and drinking.
Epicurean adj. Indulging, ministering, or pertaining to daintiness of appetite.
epicycle n. A circle that rolls upon the external or internal circumference of another circle.
epicycloid n. A curve traced by a point on the circumference of a circle which rolls upon another circle.
epidemic n. Wide-spread occurrence of a disease in a certain region.
epidermis n. The outer skin.
epigram n. A pithy phrasing of a shrewd observation.
epilogue n. The close of a narrative or dramatic poem.
epiphany n. Any appearance or bodily manifestation of a deity.
episode n. An incident or story in a literary work, separable from yet growing out of it.
epitaph n. An inscription on a tomb or monument in honor or in memory of the dead.
epithet n. Word used adjectivally to describe some quality or attribute of is objects, as in "Father Aeneas".
epitome n. A simplified representation.
epizootic adj. Prevailing among animals.
epoch n. A interval of time, memorable for extraordinary events.
epode n. A species of lyric poems.
equalize v. To render uniform.
equanimity n. Evenness of mind or temper.
equestrian adj. Pertaining to horses or horsemanship.
equilibrium n. A state of balance.
equitable adj. Characterized by fairness.
equity n. Fairness or impartiality.
equivalent adj. Equal in value, force, meaning, or the like.
equivocal adj. Ambiguous.
equivocate v. To use words of double meaning.
eradicate v. To destroy thoroughly.
errant adj. Roving or wandering, as in search of adventure or opportunity for gallant deeds.
erratic adj. Irregular.
erudition n. Extensive knowledge of literature, history, language, etc.
eschew v. To keep clear of.
espy v. To keep close watch.
esquire n. A title of dignity, office, or courtesy.
essence n. That which makes a thing to be what it is.
esthetic adj. Pertaining to beauty, taste, or the fine arts.
estimable adj. Worthy of respect.
estrange v. To alienate.
estuary n. A wide lower part of a tidal river.
et cetera Latin. And so forth.
eugenic adj. Relating to the development and improvement of race.
eulogize v. To speak or write a laudation of a person's life or character.
eulogy n. A spoken or written laudation of a person's life or character.
euphemism n. A figure of speech by which a phrase less offensive is substituted.
euphonious adj. Characterized by agreeableness of sound.
euphony n. Agreeableness of sound.
eureka Greek. I have found it.
evade v. To avoid by artifice.
evanesce v. To vanish gradually.
evanescent adj. Fleeting.
evangelical adj. Seeking the conversion of sinners.
evangelist n. A preacher who goes from place to place holding services.
evasion n. Escape.
evert v. To turn inside out.
evict v. To dispossess pursuant to judicial decree.
evidential adj. Indicative.
evince v. To make manifest or evident.
evoke v. To call or summon forth.
evolution n. Development or growth.
evolve v. To unfold or expand.
exacerbate v. To make more sharp, severe, or virulent.
exaggerate v. To overstate.
exasperate v. To excite great anger in.
excavate v. To remove by digging or scooping out.
exceed v. To go beyond, as in measure, quality, value, action, power, skill, etc.
excel v. To be superior or distinguished.
excellence n. Possession of eminently or unusually good qualities.
excellency n. A title of honor bestowed upon various high officials.
excellent adj. Possessing distinguished merit.
excerpt n. An extract or selection from written or printed matter.
excess n. That which passes the ordinary, proper, or required limit, measure, or experience.
excitable adj. Nervously high-strung.
excitation n. Intensified emotion or action.
exclamation n. An abrupt or emphatic expression of thought or of feeling.
exclude v. To shut out purposely or forcibly.
exclusion n. Non-admission.
excrescence n. Any unnatural addition, outgrowth, or development.
excretion n. The getting rid of waste matter.
excruciate v. To inflict severe pain or agony upon.
excursion n. A journey.
execration n. An accursed thing.
executor n. A person nominated by the will of another to execute the will.
exegesis n. Biblical exposition or interpretation.
exemplar n. A model, pattern, or original to be copied or imitated.
exemplary adj. Fitted to serve as a model or example worthy of imitation.
exemplify v. To show by example.
exempt adj. Free, clear, or released, as from some liability, or restriction affecting others.
exert v. To make an effort.
exhale v. To breathe forth.
exhaust v. To empty by draining off the contents.
exhaustible adj. Causing or tending to cause exhaustion.
exhaustion n. Deprivation of strength or energy.
exhaustive adj. Thorough and complete in execution.
exhilarate v. To fill with high or cheerful spirits.
exhume v. To dig out of the earth (what has been buried).
exigency n. A critical period or condition.
exigent adj. Urgent.
existence n. Possession or continuance of being.
exit n. A way or passage out.
exodus n. A going forth or departure from a place or country, especially of many people.
exonerate v. To relieve or vindicate from accusation, imputation, or blame.
exorbitance n. Extravagance or enormity.
exorbitant adj. Going beyond usual and proper limits.
exorcise v. To cast or drive out by religious or magical means.
exotic adj. Foreign.
expand v. To increase in range or scope.
expanse n. A continuous area or stretch.
expansion n. Increase of amount, size, scope, or the like.
expatriate v. To drive from one's own country.
expect v. To look forward to as certain or probable.
expectancy n. The act or state of looking forward to as certain or probable.
expectorate v. To cough up and spit forth.
expediency n. Fitness to meet the requirements of a particular case.
expedient adj. Contributing to personal advantage.
expedite v. To hasten the movement or progress of.
expeditious adj. Speedy.
expend v. To spend.
expense n. The laying out or expending or money or other resources, as time or strength.
expiate v. To make satisfaction or amends for.
explicate v. To clear from involvement.
explicit adj. Definite.
explode v. To cause to burst in pieces by force from within.
explosion n. A sudden and violent outbreak.
explosive adj. Pertaining to a sudden and violent outbreak.
exposition n. Formal presentation.
expository adj. Pertaining to a formal presentation.
expostulate v. To discuss.
exposure n. An open situation or position in relation to the sun, elements, or points of the compass.
expressive adj. Full of meaning.
expulsion n. Forcible ejection.
extant adj. Still existing and known.
extemporaneous adj. Done or made without much or any preparation.
extempore adv. Without studied or special preparation.
extensible adj. Capable of being thrust out.
extension n. A reaching or stretching out, as in space, time or scope.
extensive adj. Extended widely in space, time, or scope.
extensor n. A muscle that causes extension.
extenuate v. To diminish the gravity or importance of.
exterior n. That which is outside.
external n. Anything relating or belonging to the outside.
extinct adj. Being no longer in existence.
extinguish v. To render extinct.
extol v. To praise in the highest terms.
extort v. To obtain by violence, threats, compulsion, or the subjection of another to some necessity.
extortion n. The practice of obtaining by violence or compulsion.
extradite v. To surrender the custody of.
extradition n. The surrender by a government of a person accused of crime to the justice of another government.
extrajudicial adj. Happening out of court.
extraneous adj. Having no essential relation to a subject.
extraordinary adj. Unusual.
extravagance n. Undue expenditure of money.
extravagant adj. Needlessly free or lavish in expenditure.
extremist n. One who supports extreme measures or holds extreme views.
extremity n. The utmost point, side, or border, or that farthest removed from a mean position.
extricate v. Disentangle.
extrude v. To drive out or away.
exuberance n. Rich supply.
exuberant adj. Marked by great plentifulness.
fabricate v. To invent fancifully or falsely.
fabulous adj. Incredible.
facet n. One of the small triangular plane surfaces of a diamond or other gem.
facetious adj. Amusing.
facial adj. Pertaining to the face.
facile adj. Not difficult to do.
facilitate v. To make more easy.
facility n. Ease.
facsimile n. An exact copy or reproduction.
faction n. A number of persons combined for a common purpose.
factious adj. Turbulent.
fallacy n. Any unsound or delusive mode of reasoning, or anything based on such reasoning.
fallible adj. Capable of erring.
fallow n. Land broken up and left to become mellow or to rest.
famish v. To suffer extremity of hunger or thirst.
fanatic n. A religious zealot.
fancier n. One having a taste for or interest in special objects.
fanciless adj. Unimaginative.
fastidious adj. Hard to please.
fathom n. A measure of length, 6 feet.
fatuous adj. Idiotic
faulty adj. Imperfect.
faun n. One of a class of deities of the woods and herds represented as half human, with goats feet.
fawn n. A young deer.
fealty n. Loyalty.
feasible adj. That may be done, performed, or effected; practicable.
federate v. To league together.
feint n. Any sham, pretense, or deceptive movement.
felicitate v. To wish joy or happiness to, especially in view of a coming event.
felicity n. A state of well-founded happiness.
felon n. A criminal or depraved person.
felonious adj. Showing criminal or evil purpose.
felony n. One of the highest class of offenses, and punishable with death or imprisonment.
feminine adj. Characteristic of woman or womankind.
fernery n. A place in which ferns are grown.
ferocious adj. Of a wild, fierce, and savage nature.
ferocity n. Savageness.
fervent adj. Ardent in feeling.
fervid adj. Intense.
fervor n. Ardor or intensity of feeling.
festal adj. Joyous.
fete n. A festival or feast.
fetus n. The young in the womb or in the egg.
feudal adj. Pertaining to the relation of lord and vassal.
feudalism n. The feudal system.
fez n. A brimless felt cap in the shape of a truncated cone, usually red with a black tassel.
fiasco n. A complete or humiliating failure.
fickle adj. Unduly changeable in feeling, judgment, or purpose.
fictitious adj. Created or formed by the imagination.
fidelity n. Loyalty.
fiducial adj. Indicative of faith or trust.
fief n. A landed estate held under feudal tenure.
filibuster n. One who attempts to obstruct legislation.
finale n. Concluding performance.
finality n. The state or quality of being final or complete.
finally adv. At last.
financier n. One skilled in or occupied with financial affairs or operations.
finery n. That which is used to decorate the person or dress.
finesse n. Subtle contrivance used to gain a point.
finite adj. Limited.
fiscal adj. Pertaining to the treasury or public finances of a government.
fishmonger n. One who sells fish.
fissure n. A crack or crack-like depression.
fitful adj. Spasmodic.
fixture n. One who or that which is expected to remain permanently in its position.
flag-officer n. The captain of a flag-ship.
flagrant adj. Openly scandalous.
flamboyant adj. Characterized by extravagance and in general by want of good taste.
flatulence n. Accumulation of gas in the stomach and bowels.
flection n. The act of bending.
fledgling n. A young bird.
flexible adj. Pliable.
flimsy adj. Thin and weak.
flippant adj. Having a light, pert, trifling disposition.
floe n. A collection of tabular masses of floating polar ice.
flora n. The aggregate of plants growing without cultivation in a district.
floral adj. Pertaining to flowers.
florid adj. Flushed with red.
florist n. A dealer in flowers.
fluctuate v. To pass backward and forward irregularly from one state or degree to another.
fluctuation n. Frequent irregular change back and forth from one state or degree to another.
flue n. A smoke-duct in a chimney.
fluent adj. Having a ready or easy flow of words or ideas.
fluential adj. Pertaining to streams.
flux n. A state of constant movement, change, or renewal.
foggy adj. Obscure.
foible n. A personal weakness or failing.
foist v. To palm off.
foliage n. Any growth of leaves.
folio n. A sheet of paper folded once, or of a size adapted to folding once.
folk-lore n. The traditions, beliefs, and customs of the common people.
fondle v. To handle tenderly and lovingly.
foolery n. Folly.
foot-note n. A note of explanation or comment at the foot of a page or column.
foppery n. Dandyism.
foppish adj. Characteristic of one who is unduly devoted to dress and the niceties of manners.
forbearance n. Patient endurance or toleration of offenses.
forby adv. Besides.
forecourt n. A court opening directly from the street.
forejudge v. To judge of before hearing evidence.
forepeak n. The extreme forward part of a ship's hold, under the lowest deck.
foreshore n. That part of a shore uncovered at low tide.
forebode v. To be an omen or warning sign of, especially of evil.
forecast v. To predict.
forecastle n. That part of the upper deck of a ship forward of the after fore-shrouds.
foreclose v. To bar by judicial proceedings the equitable right of a mortgagor to redeem property.
forefather n. An ancestor.
forego v. To deny oneself the pleasure or profit of.
foreground n. That part of a landscape or picture situated or represented as nearest the spectator.
forehead n. The upper part of the face, between the eyes and the hair.
foreign adj. Belonging to, situated in, or derived from another country.
foreigner n. A citizen of a foreign country.
foreknowledge n. Prescience.
foreman n. The head man.
foreordain v. To predetermine.
forerun v. To go before as introducing or ushering in.
foresail n. A square sail.
foresee v. To discern beforehand.
foresight n. Provision against harm or need.
foretell v. To predict.
forfeit v. To lose possession of through failure to fulfill some obligation.
forfend v. To ward off.
forgery n. Counterfeiting.
forgo v. To deny oneself.
formation n. Relative disposition of parts.
formidable adj. Difficult to accomplish.
formula n. Fixed rule or set form.
forswear v. To renounce upon oath.
forte n. A strong point.
forth adv. Into notice or view.
forthright adv. With directness.
fortify v. To provide with defensive works.
fortitude n. Patient courage.
foursome adj. Consisting of four.
fracture n. A break.
frailty n. Liability to be broken or destroyed.
fragile adj. Capable of being broken.
frankincense n. A gum or resin which on burning yields aromatic fumes.
frantic adj. Frenzied.
fray v. To fret at the edge so as to loosen or break the threads.
freemason n. A member of an ancient secret fraternity originally confined to skilled artisans.
freethinker n. One who rejects authority or inspiration in religion.
free trade n. Commerce unrestricted by tariff or customs.
frequency n. The comparative number of any kind of occurrences within a given time or space.
fresco n. The art of painting on a surface of plaster, particularly on walls and ceilings.
freshness n. The state, quality, or degree of being fresh.
fretful adj. Disposed to peevishness.
frightful adj. Apt to induce terror or alarm.
frigid adj. Lacking warmth.
frigidarium n. A room kept at a low temperature for preserving fruits, meat, etc.
frivolity n. A trifling act, thought, saying, or practice.
frivolous adj. Trivial.
frizz v. To give a crinkled, fluffy appearance to.
frizzle v. To cause to crinkle or curl, as the hair.
frolicsome adj. Prankish.
frontier n. The part of a nation's territory that abuts upon another country.
frowzy adj. Slovenly in appearance.
frugal adj. Economical.
fruition n. Fulfillment.
fugacious adj. Fleeting.
fulcrum n. The support on or against which a lever rests, or the point about which it turns.
fulminate v. To cause to explode.
fulsome adj. Offensive from excess of praise or commendation.
fumigate v. To subject to the action of smoke or fumes, especially for disinfection.
functionary n. An official.
fungible adj. That may be measured, counted, or weighed.
fungous adj. Spongy.
fungus n. A plant destitute of chlorophyll, as a mushroom.
furbish v. To restore brightness or beauty to.
furlong n. A measure, one-eighth of a mile.
furlough n. A temporary absence of a soldier or sailor by permission of the commanding officer.
furrier n. A dealer in or maker of fur goods.
further adj. More distant or advanced.
furtherance n. Advancement.
furtive adj. Stealthy or sly, like the actions of a thief.
fuse v. To unite or blend as by melting together.
fusible adj. Capable of being melted by heat.
futile adj. Of no avail or effect.
futurist n. A person of expectant temperament.
gauge n. An instrument for measuring.
gaiety n. Festivity.
gait n. Carriage of the body in going.
gallant adj. Possessing a brave or chivalrous spirit.
galore adj. Abundant.
galvanic adj. Pertaining or relating to electricity produced by chemical action.
galvanism n. Current electricity, especially that arising from chemical action.
galvanize v. To imbue with life or animation.
gamble v. To risk money or other possession on an event, chance, or contingency.
gambol n. Playful leaping or frisking.
gamester n. A gambler.
gamut n. The whole range or sequence.
garnish v. In cookery, to surround with additions for embellishment.
garrison n. The military force stationed in a fort, town, or other place for its defense.
garrote v. To execute by strangling.
garrulous adj. Given to constant trivial talking.
gaseous adj. Light and unsubstantial.
gastric adj. Of, pertaining to, or near the stomach.
gastritis n. Inflammation of the stomach.
gastronomy n. The art of preparing and serving appetizing food.
gendarme n. In continental Europe, particularly in France, a uniformed and armed police officer.
genealogy n. A list, in the order of succession, of ancestors and their descendants.
genealogist n. A tracer of pedigrees.
generality n. The principal portion.
generalize v. To draw general inferences.
generally adv. Ordinarily.
generate v. To produce or cause to be.
generic adj. Noting a genus or kind; opposed to specific.
generosity n. A disposition to give liberally or to bestow favors heartily.
genesis n. Creation.
geniality n. Warmth and kindliness of disposition.
genital adj. Of or pertaining to the animal reproductive organs.
genitive adj. Indicating source, origin, possession, or the like.
genteel adj. Well-bred or refined.
gentile adj. Belonging to a people not Jewish.
geology n. The department of natural science that treats of the constitution and structure of the earth.
germane adj. Relevant.
germinate v. To begin to develop into an embryo or higher form.
gestation n. Pregnancy.
gesticulate v. To make gestures or motions, as in speaking, or in place of speech.
gesture n. A movement or action of the hands or face, expressive of some idea or emotion.
ghastly adj. Hideous.
gibe v. To utter taunts or reproaches.
giddy adj. Affected with a whirling or swimming sensation in the head.
gigantic adj. Tremendous.
giver n. One who gives, in any sense.
glacial adj. Icy, or icily cold.
glacier n. A field or stream of ice.
gladden v. To make joyous.
glazier n. One who cuts and fits panes of glass, as for windows.
glimmer n. A faint, wavering, unsteady light.
glimpse n. A momentary look.
globose adj. Spherical.
glorious adj. Of excellence and splendor.
glutinous adj. Sticky.
gluttonous adj. Given to excess in eating.
gnash v. To grind or strike the teeth together, as from rage.
Gordian knot n. Any difficulty the only issue out of which is by bold or unusual manners.
gourmand n. A connoisseur in the delicacies of the table.
gosling n. A young goose.
gossamer adj. Flimsy.
gourd n. A melon, pumpkin, squash, or some similar fruit having a hard rind.
graceless adj. Ungracious.
gradation n. A step, degree, rank, or relative position in an order or series.
gradient adj. Moving or advancing by steps.
granary n. A storehouse for grain after it is thrashed or husked.
grandeur n. The quality of being grand or admirably great.
grandiloquent adj. Speaking in or characterized by a pompous or bombastic style.
grandiose adj. Having an imposing style or effect.
grantee n. The person to whom property is transferred by deed.
grantor n. The maker of a deed.
granular adj. Composed of small grains or particles.
granulate v. To form into grains or small particles.
granule n. A small grain or particle.
grapple v. To take hold of.
gratification n. Satisfaction.
gratify v. To please, as by satisfying a physical or mental desire or need.
gratuitous adj. Voluntarily.
gratuity n. That which is given without demand or claim. Tip.
gravity n. Seriousness.
gregarious adj. Not habitually solitary or living alone.
grenadier n. A member of a regiment composed of men of great stature.
grief n. Sorrow.
grievance n. That which oppresses, injures, or causes grief and at the same time a sense of wrong.
grievous adj. Creating affliction.
grimace n. A distortion of the features, occasioned by some feeling of pain, disgust, etc.
grindstone n. A flat circular stone, used for sharpening tools.
grisly adj. Fear-inspiring.
grotesque adj. Incongruously composed or ill-proportioned.
grotto n. A small cavern.
ground n. A pavement or floor or any supporting surface on which one may walk.
guess n. Surmise.
heifer n. A young cow.
heinous adj. Odiously sinful.
hemorrhage n. Discharge of blood from a ruptured or wounded blood-vessel.
hemorrhoids n. pl. Tumors composed of enlarged and thickened blood-vessels, at the lower end of the rectum.
henchman n. A servile assistant and subordinate.
henpeck v. To worry or harass by ill temper and petty annoyances.
heptagon n. A figure having seven sides and seven angles.
heptarchy n. A group of seven governments.
herbaceous adj. Having the character of a herb.
herbarium n. A collection of dried plants scientifically arranged for study.
herbivorous adj. Feeding on herbs or other vegetable matter, as animals.
hereditary adj. Passing naturally from parent to child.
heredity n. Transmission of physical or mental qualities, diseases, etc., from parent to offspring.
heresy n. An opinion or doctrine subversive of settled beliefs or accepted principles.
heretic n. One who holds opinions contrary to the recognized standards or tenets of any philosophy.
heritage n. Birthright.
hernia n. Protrusion of any internal organ in whole or in part from its normal position.
hesitancy n. A pausing to consider.
hesitant adj. Vacillating.
heterodox adj. At variance with any commonly accepted doctrine or opinion.
heterogeneity n. Unlikeness of constituent parts.
heterogeneous adj. Consisting of dissimilar elements or ingredients of different kinds.
heteromorphic adj. Deviating from the normal form or standard type.
hexangular adj. Having six angles.
hexapod adj. Having six feet.
hexagon n. A figure with six angles.
hiatus n. A break or vacancy where something necessary to supply the connection is wanting.
hibernal adj. Pertaining to winter.
Hibernian adj. Pertaining to Ireland, or its people.
hideous adj. Appalling.
hillock n. A small hill or mound.
hinder v. To obstruct.
hindmost adj. Farthest from the front.
hindrance n. An obstacle.
hirsute adj. Having a hairy covering.
hoard v. To gather and store away for the sake of accumulation.
hoarse adj. Having the voice harsh or rough, as from a cold or fatigue.
homage n. Reverential regard or worship.
homogeneity n. Congruity of the members or elements or parts.
homogeneous adj. Made up of similar parts or elements.
homologous adj. Identical in nature, make-up, or relation.
homonym n. A word agreeing in sound with but different in meaning from another.
homophone n. A word agreeing in sound with but different in meaning from another.
honorarium n. A token fee or payment to a professional man for services.
hoodwink v. To deceive.
horde n. A gathered multitude of human beings.
hosiery n. A stocking.
hospitable adj. Disposed to treat strangers or guests with generous kindness.
hospitality n. The practice of receiving and entertaining strangers and guests with kindness.
hostility n. Enmity.
huckster n. One who retails small wares.
humane adj. Compassionate.
humanize v. To make gentle or refined.
humbug n. Anything intended or calculated to deceive or mislead.
humiliate v. To put to shame.
hussar n. A light-horse trooper armed with saber and carbine.
hustle v. To move with haste and promptness.
hybrid adj. Cross-bred.
hydra n. The seven- or nine-headed water-serpent slain by Hercules.
hydraulic adj. Involving the moving of water, of the force exerted by water in motion.
hydrodynamics n. The branch of mechanics that treats of the dynamics of fluids.
hydroelectric adj. Pertaining to electricity developed water or steam.
hydromechanics n. The mechanics of fluids.
hydrometer n. An instrument for determining the density of solids and liquids by flotation.
hydrostatics n. The branch of science that treats of the pressure and equilibrium of fluids.
hydrous adj. Watery.
hygiene n. The branch of medical science that relates to improving health.
hypercritical adj. Faultfinding.
hypnosis n. An artificial trance-sleep.
hypnotic adj. Tending to produce sleep.
hypnotism n. An artificially induced somnambulistic state in which the mind readily acts on suggestion.
hypnotize v. To produce a somnambulistic state in which the mind readily acts on suggestions.
hypocrisy n. Extreme insincerity.
hypocrite n. One who makes false professions of his views or beliefs.
hypodermic adj. Pertaining to the area under the skin.
hypotenuse n. The side of a right-angled triangle opposite the right angle.
hypothesis n. A proposition taken for granted as a premise from which to reach a conclusion.
hysteria n. A nervous affection occurring typically in paroxysms of laughing and crying.
ichthyic adj. Fish-like.
ichthyology n. The branch of zoology that treats of fishes.
ichthyosaurs n. A fossil reptile.
icily adv. Frigidly.
iciness n. The state of being icy.
icon n. An image or likeness.
iconoclast n. An image-breaker.
idealize v. To make to conform to some mental or imaginary standard.
idiom n. A use of words peculiar to a particular language.
idiosyncrasy n. A mental quality or habit peculiar to an individual.
idolize v. To regard with inordinate love or admiration.
ignoble adj. Low in character or purpose.
ignominious adj. Shameful.
Iliad n. A Greek epic poem describing scenes from the siege of Troy.
illegal adj. Not according to law.
illegible adj. Undecipherable.
illiterate adj. Having little or no book-learning.
ill-natured adj. Surly.
illogical adj. Contrary to the rules of sound thought.
illuminant n. That which may be used to produce light.
illuminate v. To supply with light.
illumine v. To make bright or clear.
illusion n. An unreal image presented to the senses.
illusive adj. Deceptive.
illusory adj. Deceiving or tending to deceive, as by false appearance.
imaginable adj. That can be imagined or conceived in the mind.
imaginary adj. Fancied.
imbibe v. To drink or take in.
imbroglio n. A misunderstanding attended by ill feeling, perplexity, or strife.
imbrue v. To wet or moisten.
imitation n. That which is made as a likeness or copy.
imitator n. One who makes in imitation.
immaculate adj. Without spot or blemish.
immaterial adj. Of no essential consequence.
immature adj. Not full-grown.
immense adj. Very great in degree, extent, size, or quantity.
immerse v. To plunge or dip entirely under water or other fluid.
immersion n. The act of plunging or dipping entirely under water or another fluid.
immigrant n. A foreigner who enters a country to settle there.
immigrate v. To come into a country or region from a former habitat.
imminence n. Impending evil or danger.
imminent adj. Dangerous and close at hand.
immiscible adj. Separating, as oil and water.
immoral adj. Habitually engaged in licentious or lewd practices.
immortalize v. To cause to last or to be known or remembered throughout a great or indefinite length of time.
immovable adj. Steadfast.
immune adj. Exempt, as from disease.
immutable adj. Unchangeable.
impair v. To cause to become less or worse.
impalpable adj. Imperceptible to the touch.
impartial adj. Unbiased.
impassable adj. That can not be passed through or over.
impassible adj. Not moved or affected by feeling.
impassive adj. Unmoved by or not exhibiting feeling.
impatience n. Unwillingness to brook delays or wait the natural course of things.
impeccable adj. Blameless.
impecunious adj. Having no money.
impede v. To be an obstacle or to place obstacles in the way of.
impel v. To drive or urge forward.
impend v. To be imminent.
imperative adj. Obligatory.
imperfectible adj. That can not be perfected.
imperil v. To endanger.
imperious adj. Insisting on obedience.
impermissible adj. Not permissible.
impersonal adj. Not relating to a particular person or thing.
impersonate v. To appear or act in the character of.
impersuadable adj. Unyielding.
importation n. The act or practice of bringing from one country into another.
importunate adj. Urgent in character, request, or demand.
importune v. To harass with persistent demands or entreaties.
impotent adj. Destitute of or lacking in power, physical, moral, or intellectual.
impoverish v. To make indigent or poor.
impracticable adj. Not feasible.
impregnable adj. That can not be taken by assault.
impregnate v. To make pregnant.
impromptu n. Anything done or said on the impulse of the moment.
improper adj. Not appropriate, suitable, or becoming.
impropriety n. The state or quality of being unfit, unseemly, or inappropriate.
improvident adj. Lacking foresight or thrift.
improvise v. To do anything extemporaneously or offhand.
imprudent adj. Heedless.
impugn v. To assail with arguments, insinuations, or accusations.
impulsion n. Impetus.
impunity n. Freedom from punishment.
impure adj. Tainted.
inaccessible adj. Difficult of approach.
inaccurate adj. Not exactly according to the facts.
inactive adj. Inert.
inadmissible adj. Not to be approved, considered, or allowed, as testimony.
inadvertent adj. Accidental.
inanimate adj. Destitute of animal life.
inapprehensible adj. Not to be understood.
inapt adj. Awkward or slow.
inarticulate adj. Speechless.
inaudible adj. That can not be heard.
inborn adj. Implanted by nature.
inbred adj. Innate.
incandescence n. The state of being white or glowing with heat.
incandescent adj. White or glowing with heat.
incapacitate v. To deprive of power, capacity, competency, or qualification.
incapacity n. Want of power to apprehend, understand, and manage.
incarcerate v. To imprison.
incendiary n. Chemical or person who starts a fire-literally or figuratively.
incentive n. That which moves the mind or inflames the passions.
inception n. The beginning.
inchoative n. That which begins, or expresses beginning.
incidence n. Casual occurrence.
incident n. A happening in general, especially one of little importance.
incidentally adv. Without intention.
incinerate v. To reduce to ashes.
incipience n. Beginning.
incisor n. A front or cutting tooth.
incite v. To rouse to a particular action.
incitement n. That which moves to action, or serves as an incentive or stimulus.
incoercible adj. Incapable of being forced, constrained, or compelled.
incoherence n. Want of connection, or agreement, as of parts or ideas in thought, speech, etc.
incoherent adj. Not logically coordinated, as to parts, elements, or details.
incombustible adj. That can not be burned.
incomparable adj. Matchless.
incompetence n. General lack of capacity or fitness.
incompetent adj. Not having the abilities desired or necessary for any purpose.
incomplete adj. Lacking some element, part, or adjunct necessary or required.
incomprehensible adj. Not understandable.
incompressible adj. Resisting all attempts to reduce volume by pressure.
inconceivable adj. Incomprehensible.
incongruous adj. Unsuitable for the time, place, or occasion.
inconsequential adj. Valueless.
inconsiderable adj. Small in quantity or importance.
inconsistent adj. Contradictory.
indigestible adj. Not digestible, or difficult to digest.
indigestion n. Difficulty or failure in the alimentary canal in changing food into absorptive nutriment.
indignant adj. Having such anger and scorn as is aroused by meanness or wickedness.
indignity n. Unmerited contemptuous conduct or treatment.
indiscernible adj. Not perceptible.
indiscreet adj. Lacking wise judgment.
indiscriminate adj. Promiscuous.
indispensable adj. Necessary or requisite for the purpose.
indistinct adj. Vague.
indivertible adj. That can not be turned aside.
indivisible adj. Not separable into parts.
indolence n. Laziness.
indolent adj. Habitually inactive or idle.
indomitable adj. Unconquerable.
induct v. To bring in.
indulgence n. The yielding to inclination, passion, desire, or propensity in oneself or another.
indulgent adj. Yielding to the desires or humor of oneself or those under one's care.
inebriate v. To intoxicate.
inedible adj. Not good for food.
ineffable adj. Unutterable.
inefficient adj. Not accomplishing an intended purpose.
inefficiency n. That which does not accomplish an intended purpose.
ineligible adj. Not suitable to be selected or chosen.
inept adj. Not fit or suitable.
inert adj. Inanimate.
inevitable adj. Unavoidable.
inexcusable adj. Not to be justified.
inexhaustible adj. So large or furnishing so great a supply as not to be emptied, wasted, or spent.
inexorable adj. Unrelenting.
inexperience n. Lack of or deficiency in experience.
inexplicable adj. Such as can not be made plain.
inexpressible adj. Unutterable.
inextensible adj. Of unchangeable length or area.
infallible adj. Exempt from error of judgment, as in opinion or statement.
infamous adj. Publicly branded or notorious, as for vice, or crime.
infamy n. Total loss or destitution of honor or reputation.
inference n. The derivation of a judgment from any given material of knowledge on the ground of law.
infernal adj. Akin to or befitting hell or its occupants.
infest v. To be present in such numbers as to be a source of annoyance, trouble, or danger.
infidel n. One who denies the existence of God.
infidelity n. Disloyalty.
infinity n. Boundless or immeasurable extension or duration.
infirm adj. Lacking in bodily or mental strength.
infirmary n. A place for the reception or treatment of the sick.
infirmity n. A physical, mental, or moral weakness or flaw.
inflammable adj. Easily set on fire or excited.
inflammation n. A morbid process in some part of the body characterized by heat, swelling, and pain.
inflexible adj. That can not be altered or varied.
influence n. Ability to sway the will of another.
influential adj. Having the power to sway the will of another.
influx n. Infusion.
infringe v. To trespass upon.
infuse v. To instill, introduce, or inculcate, as principles or qualities.
infusion n. The act of imbuing, or pouring in.
ingenious adj. Evincing skill, originality, or cleverness, as in contrivance or arrangement.
ingenuity n. Cleverness in contriving, combining, or originating.
ingenuous adj. Candid, frank, or open in character or quality.
inglorious adj. Shameful.
ingraft v. To set or implant deeply and firmly.
ingratiate v. To win confidence or good graces for oneself.
ingratitude n. Insensibility to kindness.
ingredient n. Component.
inherence n. The state of being permanently existing in something.
inherent adj. Intrinsic.
inhibit v. To hold back or in.
inhospitable adj. Not disposed to entertain strangers gratuitously.
inhuman adj. Savage.
inhume v. To place in the earth, as a dead body.
inimical adj. Adverse.
iniquity n. Gross wrong or injustice.
initiate v. To perform the first act or rite.
inject v. To introduce, as a fluid, by injection.
injunction n. Mandate.
inland adj. Remote from the sea.
inlet n. A small body of water leading into a larger.
inmost adj. Deepest within.
innovate v. To introduce or strive to introduce new things.
innuendo n. Insinuation.
inoffensive adj. Causing nothing displeasing or disturbing.
inopportune adj. Unsuitable or inconvenient, especially as to time.
inquire v. To ask information about.
inquisition n. A court or tribunal for examination and punishment of heretics.
inquisitive adj. Given to questioning, especially out of curiosity.
inquisitor n. One who makes an investigation.
inroad n. Forcible encroachment or trespass.
insatiable adj. That desires or craves immoderately or unappeasably.
inscribe v. To enter in a book, or on a list, roll, or document, by writing.
inscrutable adj. Impenetrably mysterious or profound.
insecure adj. Not assured of safety.
insensible adj. Imperceptible.
insentient adj. Lacking the power of feeling or perceiving.
inseparable adj. That can not be separated.
insidious adj. Working ill by slow and stealthy means.
insight n. Intellectual discernment.
insignificance n. Lack of import or of importance.
insignificant adj. Without importance, force, or influence.
insinuate v. To imply.
insufficient adj. Inadequate for some need, purpose, or use.
insular adj. Pertaining to an island.
insulate v. To place in a detached state or situation.
insuperable adj. Invincible.
insuppressible adj. Incapable of being concealed.
insurgence n. Uprising.
insurgent n. One who takes part in forcible opposition to the constituted authorities of a place.
insurrection n. The state of being in active resistance to authority.
intangible adj. Not perceptible to the touch.
integrity n. Uprightness of character and soundness of moral principle.
intellect n. The faculty of perception or thought.
intellectual adj. Characterized by intelligence.
intelligence n. Capacity to know or understand.
intelligible adj. Comprehensible.
intemperance n. Immoderate action or indulgence, as of the appetites.
intension n. The act of stringing or stretching, or state of being strained.
intensive adj. Adding emphasis or force.
intention n. That upon which the mind is set.
interact v. To act reciprocally.
intercede v. To mediate between persons.
intercept v. To interrupt the course of.
intercession n. Entreaty in behalf of others.
intercessor n. A mediator.
interdict n. Authoritative act of prohibition.
interim n. Time between acts or periods.
interlocutor n. One who takes part in a conversation or oral discussion.
interlude n. An action or event considered as coming between others of greater length.
intermediate adj. Being in a middle place or degree or between extremes.
interminable adj. Having no limit or end.
intermission n. A recess.
intermit v. To cause to cease temporarily.
intermittent adj. A temporary discontinuance.
interpolation n. Verbal interference.
interpose v. To come between other things or persons.
interposition n. A coming between.
interpreter n. A person who makes intelligible the speech of a foreigner by oral translation.
interrogate v. To examine formally by questioning.
interrogative adj. Having the nature or form of a question.
interrogatory n. A question or inquiry.
interrupt v. To stop while in progress.
intersect v. To cut through or into so as to divide.
intervale n. A low tract of land between hills, especially along a river.
intervene v. To interfere for some end.
intestacy n. The condition resulting from one's dying not having made a valid will.
intestate adj. Not having made a valid will.
intestine n. That part of the digestive tube below or behind the stomach, extending to the anus.
intimacy n. Close or confidential friendship.
intimidate v. To cause to become frightened.
intolerable adj. Insufferable.
intolerance n. Inability or unwillingness to bear or endure.
intolerant adj. Bigoted.
intoxicant n. Anything that unduly exhilarates or excites.
intoxicate v. To make drunk.
intracellular adj. Occurring or situated within a cell.
intramural adj. Situated within the walls of a city.
intrepid adj. Fearless and bold.
intricacy n. Perplexity.
intricate adj. Difficult to follow or understand.
intrigue n. A plot or scheme, usually complicated and intended to accomplish something by secret ways.
intrinsic adj. Inherent.
introspect v. To look into.
introspection n. The act of observing and analyzing one's own thoughts and feelings.
introversion n. The act of turning or directing inward, physically or mentally.
introvert v. To turn within.
intrude v. To come in without leave or license.
intrusion n. The act of entering without warrant or invitation; encroachment.
intuition n. Instinctive knowledge or feeling.
inundate v. To fill with an overflowing abundance.
inundation n. Flood.
inure v. To harden or toughen by use, exercise, or exposure.
invalid adj. Having no force, weight, or cogency.
invalid n. One who is disabled by illness or injury.
invalidate v. To render of no force or effect.
invaluable adj. Exceedingly precious.
invasion n. Encroachment, as by an act of intrusion or trespass.
invective n. An utterance intended to cast censure, or reproach.
inveigh v. To utter vehement censure or invective.
inventive adj. Quick at contrivance.
inverse adj. Contrary in tendency or direction.
inversion n. Change of order so that the first shall become last and the last first.
invert v. To turn inside out, upside down, or in opposite direction.
investigator n. One who investigates.
investor n. One who invests money.
inveterate adj. Habitual.
invidious adj. Showing or feeling envy.
invigorate v. To animate.
invincible adj. Not to be conquered, subdued, or overcome.
inviolable adj. Incapable of being injured or disturbed.
invoke v. To call on for assistance or protection.
involuntary adj. Unwilling.
involve v. To draw into entanglement, literally or figuratively.
invulnerable adj. That can not be wounded or hurt.
inwardly adv. With no outward manifestation.
iota n. A small or insignificant mark or part.
irascible adj. Prone to anger.
irate adj. Moved to anger.
ire n. Wrath.
iridescence n. A many-colored appearance.
iridescent adj. Exhibiting changing rainbow-colors due to the interference of the light.
irk v. To afflict with pain, vexation, or fatigue.
irksome adj. Wearisome.
irony n. Censure or ridicule under cover of praise or compliment.
irradiance n. Luster.
irradiate v. To render clear and intelligible.
irrational adj. Not possessed of reasoning powers or understanding.
irreducible adj. That can not be lessened.
irrefragable adj. That can not be refuted or disproved.
irrefrangible adj. That can not be broken or violated.
irrelevant adj. Inapplicable.
irreligious adj. Indifferent or opposed to religion.
irreparable adj. That can not be rectified or made amends for.
irrepressible adj. That can not be restrained or kept down.
irresistible adj. That can not be successfully withstood or opposed.
irresponsible adj. Careless of or unable to meet responsibilities.
irreverence n. The quality showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreverent adj. Showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreverential adj. Showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreversible adj. Irrevocable.
irrigant adj. Serving to water lands by artificial means.
irrigate v. To water, as land, by ditches or other artificial means.
irritable adj. Showing impatience or ill temper on little provocation.
irritancy n. The quality of producing vexation.
irritant n. A mechanical, chemical, or pathological agent of inflammation, pain, or tension.
irritate v. To excite ill temper or impatience in.
irruption n. Sudden invasion.
isle n. An island.
islet n. A little island.
isobar n. A line joining points at which the barometric pressure is the same at a specified moment.
isochronous adj. Relating to or denoting equal intervals of time.
isolate v. To separate from others of its kind.
isothermal adj. Having or marking equality of temperature.
itinerant adj. Wandering.
itinerary n. A detailed account or diary of a journey.
itinerate v. To wander from place to place.
jargon n. Confused, unintelligible speech or highly technical speech.
jaundice n. A morbid condition, due to obstructed excretion of bile or characterized by yellowing of the skin.
jeopardize v. To imperil.
Jingo n. One of a party in Great Britain in favor of spirited and demonstrative foreign policy.
jocose adj. Done or made in jest.
jocular adj. Inclined to joke.
joggle n. A sudden irregular shake or a push causing such a shake.
journalize v. To keep a diary.
jovial adj. Merry.
judgment n. The faculty by the exercise of which a deliberate conclusion is reached.
judicature n. Distribution and administration of justice by trial and judgment.
judicial adj. Pertaining to the administration of justice.
judiciary n. That department of government which administers the law relating to civil and criminal justice.
judicious adj. Prudent.
juggle v. To play tricks of sleight of hand.
jugglery n. The art or practice of sleight of hand.
jugular adj. Pertaining to the throat.
juicy adj. Succulent.
junction n. The condition of being joined.
juncture n. An articulation, joint, or seam.
junta n. A council or assembly that deliberates in secret upon the affairs of government.
juridical adj. Assumed by law to exist.
jurisdiction n. Lawful power or right to exercise official authority.
jurisprudence n. The science of rights in accordance with positive law.
juror n. One who serves on a jury or is sworn in for jury duty in a court of justice.
joust v. To engage in a tilt with lances on horseback.
justification n. Vindication.
juvenile adj. Characteristic of youth.
juxtapose v. To place close together.
keepsake n. Anything kept or given to be kept for the sake of the giver.
kerchief n. A square of linen, silk, or other material, used as a covering for the head or neck.
kernel n. A grain or seed.
kiln n. An oven or furnace for baking, burning, or drying industrial products.
kiloliter n. One thousand liters.
kilometer n. A length of 1,000 meters.
kilowatt n. One thousand watts.
kimono n. A loose robe, fastening with a sash, the principal outer garment in Japan.
kind-hearted adj. Having a kind and sympathetic nature.
kingling n. A petty king.
kingship n. Royal state.
knavery n. Deceitfulness in dealing.
knead v. To mix and work into a homogeneous mass, especially with the hands.
knickknack n. A small article, more for ornament that use.
knight errant n. One of the wandering knights who in the middle ages went forth in search of adventure.
knighthood n. Chivalry.
lacerate v. To tear rudely or raggedly.
lackadaisical adj. Listless.
lactation n. The secretion of milk.
lacteal adj. Milky.
lactic adj. Pertaining to milk.
laddie n. A lad.
ladle n. A cup-shaped vessel with a long handle, intended for dipping up and pouring liquids.
laggard adj. Falling behind.
landholder n. Landowner.
landlord n. A man who owns and lets a tenement or tenements.
landmark n. A familiar object in the landscape serving as a guide to an area otherwise easily lost track of.
landscape n. A rural view, especially one of picturesque effect, as seen from a distance or an elevation.
languid adj. Relaxed.
languor n. Lassitude of body or depression.
lapse n. A slight deviation from what is right, proper, or just.
lascivious adj. Lustful.
lassie n. A little lass.
latent adj. Dormant.
latency n. The state of being dormant.
later adv. At a subsequent time.
lateral adj. Directed toward the side.
latish adj. Rather late.
lattice n. Openwork of metal or wood, formed by crossing or interlacing strips or bars.
laud v. To praise in words or song.
laudable adj. Praiseworthy.
laudatory adj. Pertaining to, expressing, or containing praise.
laundress n. Washerwoman.
laureate adj. Crowned with laurel, as a mark of distinction.
lave v. To wash or bathe.
lawgiver n. A legislator.
lax adj. Not stringent or energetic.
laxative adj. Having power to open or loosen the bowels.
lea n. A field.
leaflet n. A little leaf or a booklet.
leaven v. To make light by fermentation, as dough.
leeward n. That side or direction toward which the wind blows.
left-handed adj. Using the left hand or arm more dexterously than the right.
legacy n. A bequest.
legalize v. To give the authority of law to.
legging n. A covering for the leg.
legible adj. That may be read with ease.
legionary n. A member of an ancient Roman legion or of the modern French Legion of Honor.
legislate v. To make or enact a law or laws.
legislative adj. That makes or enacts laws.
legislator n. A lawgiver.
legitimacy n. Accordance with law.
legitimate adj. Having the sanction of law or established custom.
leisure n. Spare time.
leonine adj. Like a lion.
lethargy n. Prolonged sluggishness of body or mind.
levee n. An embankment beside a river or stream or an arm of the sea, to prevent overflow.
lever n. That which exerts, or through which one may exert great power.
leviathan n. Any large animal, as a whale.
levity n. Frivolity.
levy v. To impose and collect by force or threat of force.
lewd adj. Characterized by lust or lasciviousness.
lexicographer n. One who makes dictionaries.
lexicography n. The making of dictionaries.
lexicon n. A dictionary.
liable adj. Justly or legally responsible.
libel n. Defamation.
liberalism n. Opposition to conservatism.
liberate v. To set free or release from bondage.
licentious adj. Wanton.
licit adj. Lawful.
liege adj. Sovereign.
lien n. A legal claim or hold on property, as security for a debt or charge.
lieu n. Stead.
lifelong adj. Lasting or continuous through life.
lifetime n. The time that life continues.
ligament n. That which binds objects together.
ligature n. Anything that constricts, or serves for binding or tying.
light-hearted adj. Free from care.
ligneous adj. Having the texture of appearance of wood.
likelihood n. A probability.
linear adj. Of the nature of a line.
liner n. A vessel belonging to a steamship-line.
lingo n. Language.
lingual adj. Pertaining to the use of the tongue in utterance.
linguist n. One who is acquainted with several languages.
linguistics n. The science of languages, or of the origin, history, and significance of words.
liniment n. A liquid preparation for rubbing on the skin in cases of bruises, inflammation, etc.
liquefacient adj. Possessing a liquefying nature or power.
liquefy v. To convert into a liquid or into liquid form.
liqueur n. An alcoholic cordial sweetened and flavored with aromatic substances.
liquidate v. To deliver the amount or value of.
liquor n. Any alcoholic or intoxicating liquid.
listless adj. Inattentive.
literacy n. The state or condition of knowing how to read and write.
literal adj. Following the exact words.
literature n. The written or printed productions of the human mind collectively.
lithe adj. Supple.
lithograph n. A print made by printing from stone.
lithotype n. In engraving, an etched stone surface for printing.
litigant n. A party to a lawsuit.
litigate v. To cause to become the subject-matter of a suit at law.
litigious adj. Quarrelsome.
littoral adj. Of, pertaining to, or living on a shore.
liturgy n. A ritual.
livelihood n. Means of subsistence.
livid adj. Black-and-blue, as contused flesh.
loam n. A non-coherent mixture of sand and clay.
loath adj. Averse.
locative adj. Indicating place, or the place where or wherein an action occurs.
loch n. A lake.
locomotion n. The act or power of moving from one place to another.
lode n. A somewhat continuous unstratified metal- bearing vein.
lodgment n. The act of furnishing with temporary quarters.
logic n. The science of correct thinking.
logical adj. Capable of or characterized by clear reasoning.
logician n. An expert reasoner.
loiterer n. One who consumes time idly.
loneliness n. Solitude.
longevity n. Unusually prolonged life.
loot v. To plunder.
lordling n. A little lord.
lough n. A lake or loch.
louse n. A small insect parasitic on and sucking the blood of mammals.
lovable adj. Amiable.
luminary n. One of the heavenly bodies as a source of light.
luminescent adj. Showing increase of light.
luminescence n. Showing increase.
luminosity n. The quality of giving or radiating light.
luminous adj. Giving or radiating light.
lunacy n. Mental unsoundness.
lunar adj. Pertaining to the moon.
lunatic n. An insane person.
lune n. The moon.
lurid adj. Ghastly and sensational.
luscious adj. Rich, sweet, and delicious.
lustrous adj. Shining.
luxuriance n. Excessive or superfluous growth or quantity.
luxuriant adj. Abundant or superabundant in growth.
luxuriate v. To live sumptuously.
lying n. Untruthfulness.
lyre n. One of the most ancient of stringed instruments of the harp class.
lyric adj. Fitted for expression in song.
macadamize v. To cover or pave, as a path or roadway, with small broken stone.
machinery n. The parts of a machine or engine, taken collectively.
machinist n. One who makes or repairs machines, or uses metal-working tools.
macrocosm n. The whole of any sphere or department of nature or knowledge to which man is related.
madden v. To inflame with passion.
Madonna n. A painted or sculptured representation of the Virgin, usually with the infant Jesus.
magician n. A sorcerer.
magisterial adj. Having an air of authority.
magistracy n. The office or dignity of a magistrate.
magnanimous adj. Generous in treating or judging others.
magnate n. A person of rank or importance.
magnet n. A body possessing that peculiar form of polarity found in nature in the lodestone.
magnetize v. To make a magnet of, permanently, or temporarily.
magnificence n. The exhibition of greatness of action, character, intellect, wealth, or power.
magnificent adj. Grand or majestic in appearance, quality, or action.
magnitude n. Importance.
maharaja n. A great Hindu prince.
maidenhood n. Virginity.
maintain v. To hold or preserve in any particular state or condition.
maintenance n. That which supports or sustains.
maize n. Indian corn: usually in the United States called simply corn.
makeup n. The arrangements or combination of the parts of which anything is composed.
malady n. Any physical disease or disorder, especially a chronic or deep-seated one.
malaria n. A fever characterized by alternating chills, fever, and sweating.
malcontent n. One who is dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs.
malediction n. The calling down of a curse or curses.
malefactor n. One who injures another.
maleficent adj. Mischievous.
malevolent adj. Wishing evil to others.
malign v. To speak evil of, especially to do so falsely and severely.
malignant adj. Evil in nature or tending to do great harm or mischief.
malleable adj. Pliant.
mallet n. A wooden hammer.
maltreat v. To treat ill, unkindly, roughly, or abusively.
man-trap n. A place or structure dangerous to human life.
mandate n. A command.
mandatory adj. Expressive of positive command, as distinguished from merely directory.
mane n. The long hair growing upon and about the neck of certain animals, as the horse and the lion.
man-eater n. An animal that devours human beings.
maneuver v. To make adroit or artful moves: manage affairs by strategy.
mania n. Insanity.
maniac n. a person raving with madness.
manifesto n. A public declaration, making announcement, explanation or defense of intentions, or motives.
manlike adj. Like a man.
manliness n. The qualities characteristic of a true man, as bravery, resolution, etc.
mannerism n. Constant or excessive adherence to one manner, style, or peculiarity, as of action or conduct.
manor n. The landed estate of a lord or nobleman.
mantel n. The facing, sometimes richly ornamented, about a fireplace, including the usual shelf above it.
mantle n. A cloak.
manufacturer n. A person engaged in manufacturing as a business.
manumission n. Emancipation.
manumit v. To set free from bondage.
marine adj. Of or pertaining to the sea or matters connected with the sea.
maritime adj. Situated on or near the sea.
maroon v. To put ashore and abandon (a person) on a desolate coast or island.
martial adj. Pertaining to war or military operations.
Martian adj. Pertaining to Mars, either the Roman god of war or the planet.
martyrdom n. Submission to death or persecution for the sake of faith or principle.
marvel v. To be astonished and perplexed because of (something).
masonry n. The art or work of constructing, as buildings, walls, etc., with regularly arranged stones.
masquerade n. A social party composed of persons masked and costumed so as to be disguised.
massacre n. The unnecessary and indiscriminate killing of human beings.
massive adj. Of considerable bulk and weight.
masterpiece n. A superior production.
mastery n. The attainment of superior skill.
material n. That of which anything is composed or may be constructed.
materialize v. To take perceptible or substantial form.
maternal adj. Pertaining or peculiar to a mother or to motherhood.
matinee n. An entertainment (especially theatrical) held in the daytime.
matricide n. The killing, especially the murdering, of one's mother.
matrimony n. The union of a man and a woman in marriage.
matrix n. That which contains and gives shape or form to anything.
matter of fact n. Something that has actual and undeniable existence or reality.
maudlin adj. Foolishly and tearfully affectionate.
mausoleum n. A tomb of more than ordinary size or architectural pretensions.
mawkish adj. Sickening or insipid.
maxim n. A principle accepted as true and acted on as a rule or guide.
maze n. A labyrinth.
mealy-mouthed adj. Afraid to express facts or opinions plainly.
meander v. To wind and turn while proceeding in a course.
mechanics n. The branch of physics that treats the phenomena caused by the action of forces.
medallion n. A large medal.
meddlesome adj. Interfering.
medial adj. Of or pertaining to the middle.
mediate v. To effect by negotiating as an agent between parties.
medicine n. A substance possessing or reputed to possess curative or remedial properties.
medieval adj. Belonging or relating to or descriptive of the middle ages.
mediocre adj. Ordinary.
meditation n. The turning or revolving of a subject in the mind.
medley n. A composition of different songs or parts of songs arranged to run as a continuous whole.
meliorate v. To make better or improve, as in quality or social or physical condition.
mellifluous adj. Sweetly or smoothly flowing.
melodious adj. Characterized by a sweet succession of sounds.
melodrama n. A drama with a romantic story or plot and sensational situation and incidents.
memento n. A souvenir.
mentor n. A wise and faithful teacher, guide, and friend.
mercantile adj. Conducted or acting on business principles; commercial.
mercenary adj. Greedy
merciful adj. Disposed to pity and forgive.
merciless adj. Cruel.
meretricious adj. Alluring by false or gaudy show.
mesmerize v. To hypnotize.
messieurs n. pl. Gentlemen.
metal n. An element that forms a base by combining with oxygen, is usually hard, heavy, and lustrous.
metallurgy n. The art or science of extracting a metal from ores, as by smelting.
metamorphosis n. A passing from one form or shape into another.
metaphor n. A figure of speech in which one object is likened to another, by speaking as if the other.
metaphysical adj. Philosophical.
metaphysician n. One skilled in metaphysics.
metaphysics n. The principles of philosophy as applied to explain the methods of any particular science.
mete v. To apportion.
metempsychosis n. Transition of the soul of a human being at death into another body, whether human or beast.
meticulous adj. Over-cautious.
metonymy n. A figure of speech that consists in the naming of a thing by one of its attributes.
metric adj. Relating to measurement.
metronome n. An instrument for indicating and marking exact time in music.
metropolis n. A chief city, either the capital or the largest or most important city of a state.
metropolitan adj. Pertaining to a chief city.
mettle n. Courage.
mettlesome adj. Having courage or spirit.
microcosm n. The world or universe on a small scale.
micrometer n. An instrument for measuring very small angles or dimensions.
microphone n. An apparatus for magnifying faint sounds.
microscope n. An instrument for assisting the eye in the vision of minute objects or features of objects.
microscopic adj. Adapted to or characterized by minute observation.
microscopy n. The art of examing objects with the microscope.
midsummer n. The middle of the summer.
midwife n. A woman who makes a business of assisting at childbirth.
mien n. The external appearance or manner of a person.
migrant adj. Wandering.
migrate v. To remove or pass from one country, region, or habitat to another.
migratory adj. Wandering.
mileage n. A distance in miles.
militant adj. Of a warlike or combative disposition or tendency.
militarism n. A policy of maintaining great standing armies.
militate v. To have weight or influence (in determining a question).
militia n. Those citizens, collectively, who are enrolled and drilled in temporary military organizations.
Milky Way n. The galaxy.
millet n. A grass cultivated for forage and cereal.
mimic v. To imitate the speech or actions of.
miniature adj. Much smaller than reality or that the normal size.
minimize v. To reduce to the smallest possible amount or degree.
minion n. A servile favorite.
ministration n. Any religious ceremonial.
ministry n. A service.
minority n. The smaller in number of two portions into which a number or a group is divided.
minute adj. Exceedingly small in extent or quantity.
minutia n. A small or unimportant particular or detail.
mirage n. An optical effect looking like a sheet of water in the desert.
misadventure n. An unlucky accident.
misanthropic adj. Hating mankind.
misanthropy n. Hatred of mankind.
misapprehend v. To misunderstand.
misbehave v. To behave ill.
misbehavior n. Ill or improper behavior.
mischievous adj. Fond of tricks.
miscount v. To make a mistake in counting.
miscreant n. A villain.
misdeed n. A wrong or improper act.
misdemeanor n. Evil conduct, small crime.
miser n. A person given to saving and hoarding unduly.
mishap n. Misfortune.
mismanage v. To manage badly, improperly, or unskillfully.
misnomer n. A name wrongly or mistakenly applied.
misogamy n. Hatred of marriage.
misogyny n. Hatred of women.
misplace v. To put into a wrong place.
misrepresent v. To give a wrong impression.
misrule v. To misgovern.
missal n. The book containing the service for the celebration of mass.
missile n. Any object, especially a weapon, thrown or intended to be thrown.
missive n. A message in writing.
mistrust v. To regard with suspicion or jealousy.
misty adj. Lacking clearness
misunderstand v. To Take in a wrong sense.
misuse v. To maltreat.
mite n. A very small amount, portion, or particle.
miter n. The junction of two bodies at an equally divided angle.
mitigate v. To make milder or more endurable.
mnemonics n. A system of principles and formulas designed to assist the recollection in certain instances.
moat n. A ditch on the outside of a fortress wall.
mobocracy n. Lawless control of public affairs by the mob or populace.
moccasin n. A foot-covering made of soft leather or buckskin.
mockery n. Ridicule.
moderator n. The presiding officer of a meeting.
modernity n. The state or character of being modern.
modernize v. To make characteristic of the present or of recent times.
modification n. A change.
modify v. To make somewhat different.
modish adj. Fashionable.
modulate v. To vary in tone, inflection, pitch or other quality of sound.
mollify v. To soothe.
molt v. To cast off, as hair, feathers, etc.
momentary adj. Lasting but a short time.
momentous adj. Very significant.
monarchy n. Government by a single, sovereign ruler.
monastery n. A dwelling-place occupied in common by persons under religious vows of seclusion.
monetary adj. Financial.
mongrel n. The progeny resulting from the crossing of different breeds or varieties.
monition n. Friendly counsel given by way of warning and implying caution or reproof.
monitory n. Admonition or warning.
monocracy n. Government by a single person.
monogamy n. The habit of pairing, or having but one mate.
monogram n. A character consisting of two or more letters interwoven into one, usually initials of a name.
monograph n. A treatise discussing a single subject or branch of a subject.
monolith n. Any structure or sculpture in stone formed of a single piece.
monologue n. A story or drama told or performed by one person.
monomania n. The unreasonable pursuit of one idea.
monopoly n. The control of a thing, as a commodity, to enable a person to raise its price.
monosyllable n. A word of one syllable.
monotone n. The sameness or monotony of utterance.
monotonous adj. Unchanging and tedious.
monotony n. A lack of variety.
monsieur n. A French title of respect, equivalent to Mr. and sir.
monstrosity n. Anything unnaturally huge or distorted.
moonbeam n. A ray of moonlight.
morale n. A state of mind with reference to confidence, courage, zeal, and the like.
moralist n. A writer on ethics.
morality n. Virtue.
moralize v. To render virtuous.
moratorium n. An emergency legislation authorizing a government suspend some action temporarily.
morbid adj. Caused by or denoting a diseased or unsound condition of body or mind.
mordacious adj. Biting or giving to biting.
mordant adj. Biting.
moribund adj. On the point of dying.
morose adj. Gloomy.
morphology n. the science of organic forms.
motley adj. Composed of heterogeneous or inharmonious elements.
motto n. An expressive word or pithy sentence enunciating some guiding rule of life, or faith.
mountaineer n. One who travels among or climbs mountains for pleasure or exercise.
mountainous adj. Full of or abounding in mountains.
mouthful n. As much as can be or is usually put into the or exercise.
muddle v. To confuse or becloud, especially with or as with drink.
muffle v. To deaden the sound of, as by wraps.
mulatto n. The offspring of a white person and a black person.
muleteer n. A mule-driver.
multiform adj. Having many shapes, or appearances.
multiplicity n. the condition of being manifold or very various.
mundane adj. Worldly, as opposed to spiritual or celestial.
municipal adj. Of or pertaining to a town or city, or to its corporate or local government.
municipality n. A district enjoying municipal government.
munificence n. A giving characterized by generous motives and extraordinary liberality.
munificent adj. Extraordinarily generous.
muster n. An assemblage or review of troops for parade or inspection, or for numbering off.
mutation n. The act or process of change.
mutilate v. To disfigure.
mutiny n. Rebellion against lawful or constituted authority.
myriad n. A vast indefinite number.
mystic n. One who professes direct divine illumination, or relies upon meditation to acquire truth.
mystification n. The act of artfully perplexing.
myth n. A fictitious narrative presented as historical, but without any basis of fact.
mythology n. The whole body of legends cherished by a race concerning gods and heroes.
nameless adj. Having no fame or reputation.
naphtha n. A light, colorless, volatile, inflammable oil used as a solvent, as in manufacture of paints.
Narcissus n. The son of the Athenian river-god Cephisus, fabled to have fallen in love with his reflection.
narrate v. To tell a story.
narration n. The act of recounting the particulars of an event in the order of time or occurrence.
narrative n. An orderly continuous account of the successive particulars of an event.
narrator n. One who narrates anything.
narrow-minded adj. Characterized by illiberal views or sentiments.
nasal adj. Pertaining to the nose.
natal adj. Pertaining to one's birth.
nationality n. A connection with a particular nation.
naturally adv. According to the usual order of things.
nausea n. An affection of the stomach producing dizziness and usually an impulse to vomit
nauseate v. To cause to loathe.
nauseous adj. Loathsome.
nautical adj. Pertaining to ships, seamen, or navigation.
naval adj. Pertaining to ships.
navel n. The depression on the abdomen where the umbilical cord of the fetus was attached.
navigable adj. Capable of commercial navigation.
navigate v. To traverse by ship.
nebula n. A gaseous body of unorganized stellar substance.
necessary adj. Indispensably requisite or absolutely needed to accomplish a desired result.
necessitate v. To render indispensable.
necessity n. That which is indispensably requisite to an end desired.
necrology n. A list of persons who have died in a certain place or time.
necromancer n. One who practices the art of foretelling the future by means of communication with the dead.
necropolis n. A city of the dead.
necrosis n. the death of part of the body.
nectar n. Any especially sweet and delicious drink.
nectarine n. A variety of the peach.
needlework n. Embroidery.
needy adj. Being in need, want, or poverty.
nefarious adj. Wicked in the extreme.
negate v. To deny.
negation n. The act of denying or of asserting the falsity of a proposition.
neglectful adj. Exhibiting or indicating omission.
negligee n. A loose gown worn by women.
negligence n. Omission of that which ought to be done.
negligent adj. Apt to omit what ought to be done.
negligible adj. Transferable by assignment, endorsement, or delivery.
negotiable v. To bargain with others for an agreement, as for a treaty or transfer of property.
Nemesis n. A goddess; divinity of chastisement and vengeance.
neocracy n. Government administered by new or untried persons.
neo-Darwinsim n. Darwinism as modified and extended by more recent students.
neo-Latin n. Modernized Latin.
neopaganism n. A new or revived paganism.
Neolithic adj. Pertaining to the later stone age.
neology n. The coining or using of new words or new meanings of words.
neophyte adj. Having the character of a beginner.
nestle v. To adjust cozily in snug quarters.
nestling adj. Recently hatched.
nettle v. To excite sensations of uneasiness or displeasure in.
network n. Anything that presents a system of cross- lines.
neural adj. Pertaining to the nerves or nervous system.
neurology n. The science of the nervous system.
neuter adj. Neither masculine nor feminine.
neutral adj. Belonging to or under control of neither of two contestants.
nevertheless conj. Notwithstanding.
Newtonian adj. Of or pertaining to Sir Isaac Newton, the English philosopher.
niggardly adj. Stingy. (no longer acceptable to use)
nihilist n. An advocate of the doctrine that nothing either exists or can be known.
nil n. Nothing
nimble adj. Light and quick in motion or action.
nit n. The egg of a louse or some other insect.
nocturnal adj. Of or pertaining to the night.
noiseless adj. Silent.
noisome adj. Very offensive, particularly to the sense of smell.
noisy adj. Clamorous.
nomad adj. Having no fixed abode.
nomic adj. Usual or customary.
nominal adj. Trivial.
nominate v. To designate as a candidate for any office.
nomination n. The act or ceremony of naming a man or woman for office.
nominee n. One who receives a nomination.
non-existent n. That which does not exist.
non-resident adj. Not residing within a given jurisdiction.
nonchalance n. A state of mind indicating lack of interest.
non-combatant n. One attached to the army or navy, but having duties other than that of fighting.
nondescript adj. Indescribable.
nonentity n. A person or thing of little or no account.
nonpareil n. One who or that which is of unequaled excellence.
norm n. A model.
normalcy n. The state of being normal.
Norman adj. Of or peculiar to Normandy, in northern France.
nostrum n. Any scheme or recipe of a charlatan character.
noticeable adj. Perceptible.
notorious adj. Unfavorably known to the general public.
novellette n. A short novel.
novice n. A beginner in any business or occupation.
nowadays adv. In the present time or age.
nowhere adv. In no place or state.
noxious adj. Hurtful.
nuance n. A slight degree of difference in anything perceptible to the sense of the mind.
nucleus n. A central point or part about which matter is aggregated.
nude adj. Naked.
nugatory adj. Having no power or force.
nuisance n. That which annoys, vexes, or irritates.
numeration n. The act or art of reading or naming numbers.
numerical adj. Of or pertaining to number.
nunnery n. A convent for nuns.
nuptial adj. Of or pertaining to marriage, especially to the marriage ceremony.
nurture n. The process of fostering or promoting growth.
nutriment n. That which nourishes.
nutritive adj. Having nutritious properties.
oaken adj. Made of or from oak.
oakum n. Hemp-fiber obtained by untwisting and picking out loosely the yarns of old hemp rope.
obdurate adj. Impassive to feelings of humanity or pity.
obelisk n. A square shaft with pyramidal top, usually monumental or commemorative.
obese adj. Exceedingly fat.
obituary adj. A published notice of a death.
objective adj. Grasping and representing facts as they are.
objector n. One who objects, as to a proposition, measure, or ruling.
obligate v. To hold to the fulfillment of duty.
obligatory adj. Binding in law or conscience.
oblique adj. Slanting; said of lines.
obliterate v. To cause to disappear.
oblivion n. The state of having passed out of the memory or of being utterly forgotten.
oblong adj. Longer than broad: applied most commonly to rectangular objects considerably elongated
obnoxious adj. Detestable.
obsequies n. Funeral rites.
obsequious adj. Showing a servile readiness to fall in with the wishes or will of another.
observance n. A traditional form or customary act.
observant adj. Quick to notice.
observatory n. A building designed for systematic astronomical observations.
obsolescence n. The condition or process of gradually falling into disuse.
obsolescent adj. Passing out of use, as a word.
obsolete adj. No longer practiced or accepted.
obstetrician n. A practitioner of midwifery.
obstetrics n. The branch of medical science concerned with the treatment and care of women during pregnancy.
obstinacy n. Stubborn adherence to opinion, arising from conceit or the desire to have one's own way.
obstreperous adj. Boisterous.
obstruct v. To fill with impediments so as to prevent passage, either wholly or in part.
obstruction n. Hindrance.
obtrude v. To be pushed or to push oneself into undue prominence.
obtrusive adj. Tending to be pushed or to push oneself into undue prominence.
obvert v. To turn the front or principal side of (a thing) toward any person or object.
obviate v. To clear away or provide for, as an objection or difficulty.
occasion n. An important event or celebration.
Occident n. The countries lying west of Asia and the Turkish dominions.
occlude v. To absorb, as a gas by a metal.
occult adj. Existing but not immediately perceptible.
occupant n. A tenant in possession of property, as distinguished from the actual owner.
occurrence n. A happening.
octagon n. A figure with eight sides and eight angles.
octave n. A note at this interval above or below any other, considered in relation to that other.
octavo n. A book, or collection of paper in which the sheets are so folded as to make eight leaves.
octogenarian adj. A person of between eighty and ninety years.
ocular adj. Of or pertaining to the eye.
oculist n. One versed or skilled in treating diseases of the eye.
oddity n. An eccentricity.
ode n. The form of lyric poetry anciently intended to be sung.
odious adj. Hateful.
odium n. A feeling of extreme repugnance, or of dislike and disgust.
odoriferous adj. Having or diffusing an odor or scent, especially an agreeable one.
odorous adj. Having an odor, especially a fragrant one.
off adj. Farther or more distant.
offhand adv. Without preparation.
officiate v. To act as an officer or leader.
officious adj. Intermeddling with what is not one's concern.
offshoot n. Something that branches off from the parent stock.
ogre n. A demon or monster that was supposed to devour human beings.
ointment n. A fatty preparation with a butter-like consistency in which a medicinal substance exists.
olfactory adj. of or pertaining to the sense of smell.
olive-branch n. A branch of the olive-tree, as an emblem of peace.
ominous adj. Portentous.
omnipotence n. Unlimited and universal power.
Omnipotent adj. Possessed of unlimited and universal power.
omniscience n. Unlimited or infinite knowledge.
omniscient adj. Characterized by unlimited or infinite knowledge.
omnivorous adj. Eating or living upon food of all kinds indiscriminately.
onerous adj. Burdensome or oppressive.
onrush n. Onset.
onset n. An assault, especially of troops, upon an enemy or fortification.
onslaught n. A violent onset.
onus n. A burden or responsibility.
opalescence n. The property of combined refraction and reflection of light, resulting in smoky tints.
opaque adj. Impervious to light.
operate v. To put in action and supervise the working of.
operative adj. Active.
operator n. One who works with or controls some machine or scientific apparatus.
operetta n. A humorous play in dialogue and music, of more than one act.
opinion n. A conclusion or judgment held with confidence, but falling short of positive knowledge.
opponent n. One who supports the opposite side in a debate, discussion, struggle, or sport.
opportune adj. Especially fit as occurring, said, or done at the right moment.
opportunist n. One who takes advantage of circumstances to gain his ends.
opportunity n. Favorable or advantageous chance or opening.
opposite adj. Radically different or contrary in action or movement.
opprobrium n. The state of being scornfully reproached or accused of evil.
optic n. Pertaining to the eye or vision.
optician n. One who makes or deals in optical instruments or eye-glasses.
optics n. The science that treats of light and vision, and all that is connected with sight.
optimism n. The view that everything in nature and the history of mankind is ordered for the best.
option n. The right, power, or liberty of choosing.
optometry n. Measurement of the powers of vision.
opulence n. Affluence.
oral adj. Uttered through the mouth.
orate v. To deliver an elaborate or formal public speech.
oration n. An elaborate or formal public speech.
orator n. One who delivers an elaborate or formal speech.
oratorio n. A composition for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, generally taken from the Scriptures.
oratory n. The art of public speaking.
ordeal n. Anything that severely tests courage, strength, patience, conscience, etc.
ordinal n. That form of the numeral that shows the order of anything in a series, as first, second, third.
ordination n. A consecration to the ministry.
ordnance n. A general name for all kinds of weapons and their appliances used in war.
orgies n. Wild or wanton revelry.
origin n. The beginning of that which becomes or is made to be.
original adj. Not copied nor produced by imitation.
originate v. To cause or constitute the beginning or first stage of the existence of.
ornate adj. Ornamented to a marked degree.
orthodox adj. Holding the commonly accepted faith.
orthodoxy n. Acceptance of the common faith.
orthogonal adj. Having or determined by right angles.
orthopedic adj. Relating to the correcting or preventing of deformity
orthopedist n. One who practices the correcting or preventing of deformity
oscillate v. To swing back and forth.
osculate v. To kiss.
ossify v. to convert into bone.
ostentation n. A display dictated by vanity and intended to invite applause or flattery.
ostracism n. Exclusion from intercourse or favor, as in society or politics.
ostracize v. To exclude from public or private favor.
ought v. To be under moral obligation to be or do.
oust v. To eject.
out-and-out adv. Genuinely.
outbreak n. A sudden and violent breaking forth, as of something that has been pent up or restrained.
outburst n. A violent issue, especially of passion in an individual.
outcast n. One rejected and despised, especially socially.
outcry n. A vehement or loud cry or clamor.
outdo v. To surpass.
outlandish adj. Of barbarous, uncouth, and unfamiliar aspect or action.
outlast v. To last longer than.
outlaw n. A habitual lawbreaker.
outlive v. To continue to exist after.
out-of-the-way adj. Remotely situated.
outpost n. A detachment of troops stationed at a distance from the main body to guard against surprise.
outrage n. A gross infringement of morality or decency.
outrageous adj. Shocking in conduct.
outreach v. To reach or go beyond.
outride v. To ride faster than.
outrigger n. A part built or arranged to project beyond a natural outline for support.
outright adv. Entirely.
outskirt n. A border region.
outstretch v. To extend.
outstrip v. To go beyond.
outweigh v. To surpass in importance or excellence.
overdo v. To overtax the strength of.
overdose n. An excessive dose, usually so large a dose of a medicine that its effect is toxic.
overeat v. To eat to excess.
overhang n. A portion of a structure which projects or hangs over.
overleap v. To leap beyond.
overlord n. One who holds supremacy over another.
overpass v. To pass across or over, as a river.
overpay v. To pay or reward in excess.
overpower v. To gain supremacy or victory over by superior power.
overproduction n. Excessive production.
overreach v. To stretch out too far.
overrun v. To infest or ravage.
oversee v. To superintend.
overshadow v. To cast into the shade or render insignificant by comparison.
overstride v. To step beyond.
overthrow v. To vanquish an established ruler or government.
overtone n. A harmonic.
overture n. An instrumental prelude to an opera, oratorio, or ballet.
overweight n. Preponderance.
pacify v. To bring into a peaceful state.
packet n. A bundle, as of letters.
pact n. A covenant.
pagan n. A worshiper of false gods.
pageant n. A dramatic representation, especially a spectacular one.
palate n. The roof of the mouth.
palatial adj. Magnificent.
paleontology n. The branch of biology that treats of ancient life and fossil organisms.
palette n. A thin tablet, with a hole for the thumb, upon which artists lay their colors for painting.
palinode n. A retraction.
pall v. To make dull by satiety.
palliate v. To cause to appear less guilty.
pallid adj. Of a pale or wan appearance.
palpable n. perceptible by feeling or touch.
palsy n. Paralysis.
paly adj. Lacking color or brilliancy.
pamphlet n. A brief treatise or essay, usually on a subject of current interest.
pamphleteer v. To compose or issue pamphlets, especially controversial ones.
panacea n. A remedy or medicine proposed for or professing to cure all diseases.
Pan-American adj. Including or pertaining to the whole of America, both North and South.
pandemic adj. Affecting a whole people or all classes, as a disease.
pandemonium n. A fiendish or riotous uproar.
panegyric n. A formal and elaborate eulogy, written or spoken, of a person or of an act.
panel n. A rectangular piece set in or as in a frame.
panic n. A sudden, unreasonable, overpowering fear.
panoply n. A full set of armor.
panorama n. A series of large pictures representing a continuous scene.
pantheism n. The worship of nature for itself or its beauty.
Pantheon n. A circular temple at Rome with a fine Corinthian portico and a great domed roof.
pantomime n. Sign-language.
pantoscope n. A very wide-angled photographic lens.
papacy n. The official head of the Roman Catholic Church.
papyrus n. The writing-paper of the ancient Egyptians, and later of the Romans.
parable n. A brief narrative founded on real scenes or events usually with a moral.
paradox n. A statement or doctrine seemingly in contradiction to the received belief.
paragon n. A model of excellence.
parallel v. To cause to correspond or lie in the same direction and equidistant in all parts.
parallelism n. Essential likeness.
paralysis n. Loss of the power of contractility in the voluntary or involuntary muscles.
paralyze v. To deprive of the power to act.
paramount adj. Supreme in authority.
paramour n. One who is unlawfully and immorally a lover or a mistress.
paraphernalia n. Miscellaneous articles of equipment or adornment.
paraphrase v. Translate freely.
pare v. To cut, shave, or remove (the outside) from anything.
parentage n. The relation of parent to child, of the producer to the produced, or of cause to effect.
Pariah n. A member of a degraded class; a social outcast.
parish n. The ecclesiastical district in charge of a pastor.
Parisian adj. Of or pertaining to the city of Paris.
parity n. Equality, as of condition or rank.
parlance n. Mode of speech.
parley v. To converse in.
parliament n. A legislative body.
parlor n. A room for reception of callers or entertainment of guests.
parody v. To render ludicrous by imitating the language of.
paronymous adj. Derived from the same root or primitive word.
paroxysm n. A sudden outburst of any kind of activity.
parricide n. The murder of a parent.
parse v. To describe, as a sentence, by separating it into its elements and describing each word.
parsimonious adj. Unduly sparing in the use or expenditure of money.
partible adj. Separable.
participant n. One having a share or part.
participate v. To receive or have a part or share of.
partition n. That which separates anything into distinct parts.
partisan adj. Characterized by or exhibiting undue or unreasoning devotion to a party.
passible adj. Capable of feeling of suffering.
passive adj. Unresponsive.
pastoral adj. Having the spirit or sentiment of rural life.
paternal adj. Fatherly.
pathos n. The quality in any form of representation that rouses emotion or sympathy.
patriarch n. The chief of a tribe or race who rules by paternal right.
patrician adj. Of senatorial or noble rank.
patrimony n. An inheritance from an ancestor, especially from one's father.
patriotism n. Love and devotion to one's country.
patronize v. To exercise an arrogant condescension toward.
patronymic adj. Formed after one's father's name.
patter v. To mumble something over and over.
paucity n. Fewness.
pauper n. One without means of support.
pauperism n. Dependence on charity.
pavilion n. An open structure for temporary shelter.
payee n. A person to whom money has been or is to be paid.
peaceable adj. Tranquil.
peccable adj. Capable of sinning.
peccadillo n. A small breach of propriety or principle.
peccant adj. Guilty.
pectoral adj. Pertaining to the breast or thorax.
pecuniary adj. Consisting of money.
pedagogics n. The science and art of teaching.
pedagogue n. A schoolmaster.
pedagogy n. The science and art of teaching
pedal n. A lever for the foot usually applied only to musical instruments, cycles, and other machines.
pedant n. A scholar who makes needless and inopportune display of his learning.
peddle v. To go about with a small stock of goods to sell.
pedestal n. A base or support as for a column, statue, or vase.
pedestrian n. One who journeys on foot.
pediatrics n. The department of medical science that relates to the treatment of diseases of childhood.
pedigree n. One's line of ancestors.
peddler n. One who travels from house to house with an assortment of goods for retail.
peerage n. The nobility.
peerless adj. Of unequaled excellence or worth.
peevish adj. Petulant. (irritable)
pellucid adj. Translucent.
penalty n. The consequences that follow the transgression of natural or divine law.
penance n. Punishment to which one voluntarily submits or subjects himself as an expression of penitence.
penchant n. A bias in favor of something.
pendant n. Anything that hangs from something else, either for ornament or for use.
pendulous adj. Hanging, especially so as to swing by an attached end or part.
pendulum n. A weight hung on a rod, serving by its oscillation to regulate the rate of a clock.
penetrable adj. That may be pierced by physical, moral, or intellectual force.
penetrate v. To enter or force a way into the interior parts of.
penetration n. Discernment.
peninsular adj. Pertaining to a piece of land almost surrounded by water.
penitence n. Sorrow for sin with desire to amend and to atone.
penitential adj. Pertaining to sorrow for sin with desire to amend and to atone.
pennant n. A small flag.
pension n. A periodical allowance to an individual on account of past service done by him/her.
pentagram n. A figure having five points or lobes.
pentavalent adj. Quinqeuvalent.
pentad n. The number five.
pentagon n. A figure, especially, with five angles and five sides.
pentahedron n. A solid bounded by five plane faces.
pentameter n. In prosody, a line of verse containing five units or feet.
pentathlon n. The contest of five associated exercises in the great games and the same contestants.
penultimate adj. A syllable or member of a series that is last but one.
penurious adj. Excessively sparing in the use of money.
penury n. Indigence.
perambulate v. To walk about.
perceive v. To have knowledge of, or receive impressions concerning, through the medium of the body senses.
perceptible adj. Cognizable.
perception n. Knowledge through the senses of the existence and properties of matter or the external world.
percipience n. The act of perceiving.
percipient n. One who or that which perceives.
percolate v. To filter.
percussion n. The sharp striking of one body against another.
peremptory adj. Precluding question or appeal.
perennial adj. Continuing though the year or through many years.
perfectible adj. Capable of being made perfect.
perfidy n. Treachery.
perforate v. To make a hole or holes through.
perform v. To accomplish.
perfumery n. The preparation of perfumes.
perfunctory adj. Half-hearted.
perhaps adv. Possibly.
perigee n. The point in the orbit of the moon when it is nearest the earth.
periodicity n. The habit or characteristic of recurrence at regular intervals.
peripatetic adj. Walking about.
perjure v. To swear falsely to.
perjury n. A solemn assertion of a falsity.
permanence n. A continuance in the same state, or without any change that destroys the essential form or nature.
permanent adj. Durable.
permissible adj. That may be allowed.
permutation n. Reciprocal change, different ordering of same items.
pernicious adj. Tending to kill or hurt.
perpendicular adj. Straight up and down.
perpetrator n. The doer of a wrong or a criminal act.
perpetuate v. To preserve from extinction or oblivion.
perquisite n. Any profit from service beyond the amount fixed as salary or wages.
persecution n. Harsh or malignant oppression.
perseverance n. A persistence in purpose and effort.
persevere v. To continue striving in spite of discouragements.
persiflage n. Banter.
persist v. To continue steadfast against opposition.
persistence n. A fixed adherence to a resolve, course of conduct, or the like.
personage n. A man or woman as an individual, especially one of rank or high station.
personal adj. Not general or public.
personality n. The attributes, taken collectively, that make up the character and nature of an individual.
personnel n. The force of persons collectively employed in some service.
perspective n. The relative importance of facts or matters from any special point of view.
perspicacious adj. Astute.
perspicacity n. Acuteness or discernment.
perspicuous adj. Lucid.
perspire v. To excrete through the pores of the skin.
persuade v. To win the mind of by argument, eloquence, evidence, or reflection.
persuadable adj. capable of influencing to action by entreaty, statement, or anything that moves the feelings.
pertinacious adj. Persistent or unyielding.
pertinacity n. Unyielding adherence.
perturb v. To disturb greatly.
perturbation n. Mental excitement or confusion.
perusal n. The act of reading carefully or thoughtfully.
pervade v. To pass or spread through every part.
pervasion n. The state of spreading through every part.
pervasive adj. Thoroughly penetrating or permeating.
perverse adj. Unreasonable.
perversion n. Diversion from the true meaning or proper purpose.
perversity n. Wickedness.
pervert n. One who has forsaken a doctrine regarded as true for one esteemed false.
pervious adj. Admitting the entrance or passage of another substance.
pestilence n. A raging epidemic.
pestilent adj. Having a malign influence or effect.
pestilential adj. having the nature of or breeding pestilence.
peter v. To fail or lose power, efficiency, or value.
petrify v. To convert into a substance of stony hardness and character.
petulance n. The character or condition of being impatient, capricious or petulant.
petulant adj. Displaying impatience.
pharmacopoeia n. A book containing the formulas and methods of preparation of medicines for the use of druggists.
pharmacy n. The art or business of compounding and dispensing medicines.
phenomenal adj. Extraordinary or marvelous.
phenomenon n. Any unusual occurrence.
philander v. To play at courtship with a woman.
philanthropic adj. Benevolent.
philanthropist n. One who endeavors to help his fellow men.
philanthropy n. Active humanitarianism.
philately n. The study and collection of stamps.
philharmonic adj. Fond of music.
philogynist n. One who is fond of women.
philologist n. An expert in linguistics.
philology n. The study of language in connection with history and literature.
philosophize v. To seek ultimate causes and principles.
philosophy n. The general principles, laws, or causes that furnish the rational explanation of anything.
phlegmatic adj. Not easily roused to feeling or action.
phonetic adj. Representing articulate sounds or speech.
phonic adj. Pertaining to the nature of sound.
phonogram n. A graphic character symbolizing an articulate sound.
phonology n. The science of human vocal sounds.
phosphorescence n. The property of emitting light.
photoelectric adj. Pertaining to the combined action of light and electricity.
photometer n. Any instrument for measuring the intensity of light or comparing the intensity of two lights.
photometry n. The art of measuring the intensity of light.
physicist n. A specialist in the science that treats of the phenomena associated with matter and energy.
physics n. The science that treats of the phenomena associated with matter and energy.
physiocracy n. The doctrine that land and its products are the only true wealth.
physiognomy n. The external appearance merely.
physiography n. Description of nature.
physiology n. The science of organic functions.
physique n. The physical structure or organization of a person.
picayune adj. Of small value.
piccolo n. A small flute.
piece n. A loose or separated part, as distinguished from the whole or the mass.
piecemeal adv. Gradually.
pillage n. Open robbery, as in war.
pillory n. A wooden framework in which an offender is fastened to boards and is exposed to public scorn.
pincers n. An instrument having two lever-handles and two jaws working on a pivot.
pinchers n. An instrument having two jaws working on a pivot.
pinnacle n. A high or topmost point, as a mountain-peak.
pioneer n. One among the first to explore a country.
pious adj. Religious.
pique v. To excite a slight degree of anger in.
piteous adj. Compassionate.
pitiless adj. Hard-hearted.
pittance n. Any small portion or meager allowance.
placate v. To bring from a state of angry or hostile feeling to one of patience or friendliness.
placid adj. Serene.
plagiarism n. The stealing of passages from the writings of another and publishing them as one's own.
planisphere n. A polar projection of the heavens on a chart.
plasticity n. The property of some substances through which the form of the mass can readily be changed.
platitude n. A written or spoken statement that is flat, dull, or commonplace.
plaudit n. An expression of applause.
plausible adj. Seeming likely to be true, though open to doubt.
playful adj. Frolicsome.
playwright n. A maker of plays for the stage.
plea n. An argument to obtain some desired action.
pleasant adj. Agreeable.
pledgee n. The person to whom anything is pledged.
pledgeor n. One who gives a pledge.
plenary adj. Entire.
plenipotentiary n. A person fully empowered to transact any business.
plenitude n. Abundance.
plumb n. A weight suspended by a line to test the verticality of something.
plummet n. A piece of lead for making soundings, adjusting walls to the vertical.
pluperfect adj. Expressing past time or action prior to some other past time or action.
plural adj. Containing or consisting of more than one.
plurality n. A majority.
plutocracy n. A wealthy class in a political community who control the government by means of their money.
pneumatic adj. Pertaining to or consisting of air or gas.
poesy n. Poetry.
poetaster n. An inferior poet.
poetic adj. Pertaining to poetry.
poetics n. The rules and principles of poetry.
poignancy n. Severity or acuteness, especially of pain or grief.
poignant adj. Severely painful or acute to the spirit.
poise n. Equilibrium.
polar adj. Pertaining to the poles of a sphere, especially of the earth.
polemics n. The art of controversy or disputation.
pollen n. The fine dust-like grains or powder formed within the anther of a flowering plant.
pollute v. To contaminate.
polyarchy n. Government by several or many persons of what- ever class.
polycracy n. The rule of many.
polygamy n. the fact or condition of having more than one wife or husband at once.
polyglot adj. Speaking several tongues.
polygon n. A figure having many angles.
polyhedron n. A solid bounded by plane faces, especially by more than four.
polysyllable adj. Having several syllables, especially more than three syllables.
polytechnic adj. Pertaining to, embracing, or practicing many arts.
polytheism n. The doctrine or belief that there are more gods than one.
pommel v. To beat with something thick or bulky.
pomposity n. The quality of being marked by an assumed stateliness and impressiveness of manner.
pompous adj. Marked by an assumed stateliness and impressiveness of manner.
ponder v. To meditate or reflect upon.
ponderous adj. Unusually weighty or forcible.
pontiff n. The Pope.
populace n. The common people.
populous adj. Containing many inhabitants, especially in proportion to the territory.
portend v. To indicate as being about to happen, especially by previous signs.
portent n. Anything that indicates what is to happen.
portfolio n. A portable case for holding writing-materials, drawings, etc.
posit v. To present in an orderly manner.
position n. The manner in which a thing is placed.
positive adj. Free from doubt or hesitation.
posse n. A force of men.
possess v. To own.
possession n. The having, holding, or detention of property in one's power or command.
possessive adj. Pertaining to the having, holding, or detention of property in one's power or command.
possessor n. One who owns, enjoys, or controls anything, as property.
possible adj. Being not beyond the reach of power natural, moral, or supernatural.
postdate v. To make the date of any writing later than the real date.
posterior n. The hinder part.
postgraduate adj. Pertaining to studies that are pursued after receiving a degree.
postscript n. Something added to a letter after the writer's signature.
potency n. Power.
potentate n. One possessed of great power or sway.
potential n. Anything that may be possible.
potion n. A dose of liquid medicine.
powerless adj. Impotent.
prate v. To talk about vainly or foolishly.
prattle v. To utter in simple or childish talk.
preamble n. A statement introductory to and explanatory of what follows.
precarious adj. Perilous.
precaution n. A provision made in advance for some possible emergency or danger.
precede v. To happen first.
precedence n. Priority in place, time, or rank.
precedent n. An instance that may serve as a guide or basis for a rule.
precedential adj. Of the nature of an instance that may serve as a guide or basis for a rule.
precession n. The act of going forward.
precipice n. A high and very steep or approximately vertical cliff.
precipitant adj. Moving onward quickly and heedlessly.
precipitate v. To force forward prematurely.
precise adj. Exact.
precision n. Accuracy of limitation, definition, or adjustment.
preclude v. To prevent.
precocious adj. Having the mental faculties prematurely developed.
precursor n. A forerunner or herald.
predatory adj. Prone to pillaging.
predecessor n. An incumbent of a given office previous to another.
predicament n. A difficult, trying situation or plight.
predicate v. To state as belonging to something.
predict v. To foretell.
predominance n. Ascendancy or preponderance.
predominant adj. Superior in power, influence, effectiveness, number, or degree.
predominate v. To be chief in importance, quantity, or degree.
preeminence n. Special eminence.
preempt v. To secure the right of preference in the purchase of public land.
preemption n. The right or act of purchasing before others.
preengage v. To preoccupy.
preestablish v. To settle or arrange beforehand.
preexist v. To exist at a period or in a state earlier than something else.
preexistence n. Existence antecedent to something.
preface n. A brief explanation or address to the reader, at the beginning of a book.
prefatory adj. Pertaining to a brief explanation to the reader at the beginning of a book.
prefer v. To hold in higher estimation.
preferable adj. More desirable than others.
preference n. An object of favor or choice.
preferential adj. Possessing, giving, or constituting preference or priority.
preferment n. Preference.
prefix v. To attach at the beginning.
prehensible adj. Capable of being grasped.
prehensile adj. Adapted for grasping or holding.
prehension n. The act of laying hold of or grasping.
prejudice n. A judgment or opinion formed without due examination of the facts.
prelacy n. A system of church government.
prelate n. One of a higher order of clergy having direct authority over other clergy.
prelude n. An introductory or opening performance.
premature adj. Coming too soon.
premier adj. First in rank or position.
premise n. A judgment as a conclusion.
premonition n. Foreboding.
preoccupation n. The state of having the mind, attention, or inclination preoccupied.
preoccupy v. To fill the mind of a person to the exclusion of other subjects.
preordain v. To foreordain.
preparation n. An act or proceeding designed to bring about some event.
preparatory adj. Having to do with what is preliminary.
preponderant adj. Prevalent.
preponderate v. To exceed in influence or power.
prepossession n. A preconceived liking.
preposterous adj. Utterly ridiculous or absurd.
prerogative adj. Having superior rank or precedence.
presage v. To foretell.
prescience n. Knowledge of events before they take place.
prescient adj. Foreknowing.
prescript adj. Prescribed as a rule or model.
prescriptible adj. Derived from authoritative direction.
prescription n. An authoritative direction.
presentient adj. Perceiving or feeling beforehand.
presentiment n. Foreboding.
primer n. An elementary reading-book for children.
primeval adj. Belonging to the first ages.
primitive adj. Pertaining to the beginning or early times.
principal adj. Most important.
principality n. The territory of a reigning prince.
principle n. A general truth or proposition.
priory n. A monastic house.
pristine adj. Primitive.
privateer n. A vessel owned and officered by private persons, but carrying on maritime war.
privilege n. A right or immunity not enjoyed by all, or that may be enjoyed only under special conditions.
privity n. Knowledge shared with another or others regarding a private matter.
privy adj. Participating with another or others in the knowledge of a secret transaction.
probate adj. Relating to making proof, as of a will.
probation n. Any proceeding designed to ascertain or test character, qualification, or the like.
probe v. To search through and through.
probity n. Virtue or integrity tested and confirmed.
procedure n. A manner or method of acting.
proceed v. To renew motion or action, as after rest or interruption.
proclamation n. Any announcement made in a public manner.
procrastinate v. To put off till tomorrow or till a future time.
procrastination n. Delay.
proctor n. An agent acting for another.
prodigal n. One wasteful or extravagant, especially in the use of money or property.
prodigious adj. Immense.
prodigy n. A person or thing of very remarkable gifts or qualities.
productive adj. Yielding in abundance.
profession n. Any calling or occupation involving special mental or other special disciplines.
professor n. A public teacher of the highest grade in a university or college.
proffer v. To offer to another for acceptance.
proficiency n. An advanced state of acquirement, as in some knowledge, art, or science.
proficient adj. Possessing ample and ready knowledge or of skill in any art, science, or industry.
profile n. An outline or contour.
profiteer n. One who profits.
profligacy n. Shameless viciousness.
profligate adj. Abandoned to vice.
profuse adj. Produced or displayed in overabundance.
progeny n. Offspring.
progression n. A moving forward or proceeding in course.
prohibition n. A decree or an order forbidding something.
prohibitionist n. One who favors the prohibition by law of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
prohibitory adj. Involving or equivalent to prohibition, especially of the sale of alcoholic beverages.
projection n. A prominence.
proletarian n. A person of the lowest or poorest class.
prolific adj. Producing offspring or fruit.
prolix adj. Verbose.
prologue n. A prefatory statement or explanation to a poem, discourse, or performance.
prolong v. To extend in time or duration.
promenade v. To walk for amusement or exercise.
prominence n. The quality of being noticeable or distinguished.
prominent adj. Conspicuous in position, character, or importance.
promiscuous adj. Brought together without order, distinction, or design (for sex).
promissory adj. Expressing an engagement to pay.
promontory n. A high point of land extending outward from the coastline into the sea.
promoter n. A furtherer, forwarder, or encourager.
promulgate v. To proclaim.
propaganda n. Any institution or systematic scheme for propagating a doctrine or system.
propagate v. To spread abroad or from person to person.
propel v. To drive or urge forward.
propellant adj. Propelling.
propeller n. One who or that which propels.
prophecy n. Any prediction or foretelling.
prophesy v. To predict or foretell, especially under divine inspiration and guidance.
propitious adj. Kindly disposed.
proportionate adj. Being in proportion.
propriety n. Accordance with recognized usage, custom, or principles.
propulsion n. A driving onward or forward.
prosaic adj. Unimaginative.
proscenium n. That part of the stage between the curtain and the orchestra.
proscribe v. To reject, as a teaching or a practice, with condemnation or denunciation.
proscription n. Any act of condemnation and rejection from favor and privilege.
proselyte n. One who has been won over from one religious belief to another.
prosody n. The science of poetical forms.
prospector n. One who makes exploration, search, or examination, especially for minerals.
prospectus n. A paper or pamphlet containing information of a proposed undertaking.
prostrate adj. Lying prone, or with the head to the ground.
protagonist n. A leader in any enterprise or contest.
protection n. Preservation from harm, danger, annoyance, or any other evil.
protective adj. Sheltering.
protector n. A defender.
protege n. One specially cared for and favored by another usually older person.
Protestant n. A Christian who denies the authority of the Pope and holds the right of special judgment.
protomartyr n. The earliest victim in any cause.
protocol n. A declaration or memorandum of agreement less solemn and formal than a treaty.
protoplasm n. The substance that forms the principal portion of an animal or vegetable cell.
prototype n. A work, original in character, afterward imitated in form or spirit.
protract v. To prolong.
protrude v. To push out or thrust forth.
protrusion n. The act of protruding.
protuberance n. Something that swells out from a surrounding surface.
protuberant adj. Bulging.
protuberate v. To swell or bulge beyond the surrounding surface.
proverb n. A brief, pithy saying, condensing in witty or striking form the wisdom of experience.
provident adj. Anticipating and making ready for future wants or emergencies.
providential adj. Effected by divine guidance.
provincial adj. Uncultured in thought and manner.
proviso n. A clause in a contract, will, etc., by which its operation is rendered conditional.
provocation n. An action or mode of conduct that excites resentment.
prowess n. Strength, skill, and intrepidity in battle.
proximately adv. Immediately.
proxy n. A person who is empowered by another to represent him or her in a given matter.
prudence n. Caution.
prudential adj. Proceeding or marked by caution.
prudery n. An undue display of modesty or delicacy.
prurient adj. Inclined to lascivious thoughts and desires.
pseudapostle n. A pretended or false apostle.
pseudonym n. A fictitious name, especially when assumed by a writer.
pseudonymity n. The state or character of using a fictitious name.
psychiatry n. The branch of medicine that relates to mental disease.
psychic adj. Pertaining to the mind or soul.
psychopathic adj. Morally irresponsible.
psychotherapy n. The treatment of mental disease.
pudgy adj. Small and fat.
puerile adj. Childish.
pulmonary adj. Pertaining to the lungs.
punctilious adj. Strictly observant of the rules or forms prescribed by law or custom.
punctual adj. Observant and exact in points of time.
pungent adj. Affecting the sense of smell.
pungency n. The quality of affecting the sense of smell.
punitive adj. Pertaining to punishment.
pupilage n. The state or period of being a student.
purgatory n. An intermediate state where souls are made fit for paradise or heaven by expiatory suffering.
purl v. To cause to whirl, as in an eddy.
purloin v. To steal.
purveyor n. one who supplies
pusillanimous adj. Without spirit or bravery.
putrescent adj. Undergoing decomposition of animal or vegetable matter accompanied by fetid odors.
pyre n. A heap of combustibles arranged for burning a dead body.
pyromania n. An insane propensity to set things on fire.
pyrotechnic adj. Pertaining to fireworks or their manufacture.
pyx n. A vessel or casket, usually of precious metal, in which the host is preserved.
quackery n. Charlatanry
quadrate v. To divide into quarters.
quadruple v. To multiply by four.
qualification n. A requisite for an employment, position, right, or privilege.
qualify v. To endow or furnish with requisite ability, character, knowledge, skill, or possessions.
qualm n. A fit of nausea.
quandary n. A puzzling predicament.
quantity n. Magnitude.
quarantine n. The enforced isolation of any person or place infected with contagious disease.
quarrelsome adj. Irascible.
quarter n. One of four equal parts into which anything is or may be divided.
quarterly adj. Occurring or made at intervals of three months.
quartet n. A composition for four voices or four instruments.
quarto n. An eight-page newspaper of any size.
quay n. A wharf or artificial landing-place on the shore of a harbor or projecting into it.
querulous adj. Habitually complaining.
query v. To make inquiry.
queue n. A file of persons waiting in order of their arrival, as for admittance.
quibble n. An utterly trivial distinction or objection.
quiescence n. Quiet.
quiescent adj. Being in a state of repose or inaction.
quiet adj. Making no noise.
quietus n. A silencing, suppressing, or ending.
quintessence n. The most essential part of anything.
quintet n. Musical composition arranged for five voices or instruments.
quite adv. Fully.
Quixotic adj. Chivalrous or romantic to a ridiculous or extravagant degree.
rabid adj. Affected with rabies or hydrophobia.
racy adj. Exciting or exhilarating to the mind.
radiance n. Brilliant or sparkling luster.
radiate v. To extend in all directions, as from a source or focus.
radical n. One who holds extreme views or advocates extreme measures.
radix n. That from or on which something is developed.
raillery n. Good-humored satire.
ramify v. To divide or subdivide into branches or subdivisions.
ramose adj. Branch-like.
rampant adj. Growing, climbing, or running without check or restraint.
rampart n. A bulwark or construction to oppose assault or hostile entry.
rancor n. Malice.
rankle v. To produce irritation or festering.
rapacious adj. Disposed to seize by violence or by unlawful or greedy methods.
rapid adj. Having great speed.
rapine n. The act of seizing and carrying off property by superior force, as in war.
rapt adj. Enraptured.
raptorial adj. Seizing and devouring living prey.
ration v. To provide with a fixed allowance or portion, especially of food.
rationalism n. The formation of opinions by relying upon reason alone, independently of authority.
raucous adj. Harsh.
ravage v. To lay waste by pillage, rapine, devouring, or other destructive methods.
ravenous adj. Furiously voracious or hungry.
ravine n. A deep gorge or hollow, especially one worn by a stream or flow of water.
reaction n. Tendency towards a former, or opposite state of things, as after reform, revolution, or inflation.
reactionary adj. Pertaining to, of the nature of, causing, or favoring reaction.
readily adv. Without objection or reluctance.
readjust v. To put in order after disarrangement.
ready adj. In a state of preparedness for any given purpose or occasion.
realism n. The principle and practice of depicting persons and scenes as they are believed really to exist.
rearrange v. To arrange again or in a different order.
reassure v. To give new confidence.
rebellious adj. Insubordinate.
rebuff n. A peremptory or unexpected rejection of advances or approaches.
rebuild v. To build again or anew.
rebut v. To oppose by argument or a sufficient answer.
recant v. To withdraw formally one's belief (in something previously believed or maintained).
recapitulate v. To repeat again the principal points of.
recapture v. To capture again.
recede v. To move back or away.
receivable adj. Capable of being or fit to be received - often money.
receptive adj. Having the capacity, quality, or ability of receiving, as truths or impressions.
recessive adj. Having a tendency to go back.
recidivist n. A confirmed criminal.
reciprocal adj. Mutually interchangeable or convertible.
reciprocate v. To give and take mutually.
reciprocity n. Equal mutual rights and benefits granted and enjoyed.
recitation n. The act of reciting or repeating, especially in public and from memory.
reck v. To have a care or thought for.
reckless adj. Foolishly headless of danger.
reclaim v. To demand or to obtain the return or restoration of.
recline v. To cause to assume a leaning or recumbent attitude or position.
recluse n. One who lives in retirement or seclusion.
reclusory n. A hermitage.
recognizance n. An acknowledgment entered into before a court with condition to do some particular act.
recognize v. To recall the identity of (a person or thing).
recoil v. To start back as in dismay, loathing, or dread.
recollect v. To recall the knowledge of.
reconcilable adj. Capable of being adjusted or harmonized.
reconnoiter v. To make a preliminary examination of for military, surveying, or geological purposes.
reconsider v. To review with care, especially with a view to a reversal of previous action.
reconstruct v. To rebuild.
recourse n. Resort to or application for help in exigency or trouble.
recover v. To regain.
recreant n. A cowardly or faithless person.
recreate v. To refresh after labor.
recrudescence n. The state of becoming raw or sore again.
recrudescent adj. Becoming raw or sore again.
recruit v. To enlist men for military or naval service.
rectify v. To correct.
rectitude n. The quality of being upright in principles and conduct.
recuperate v. To recover.
recur v. To happen again or repeatedly, especially at regular intervals.
recure v. To cure again.
recurrent adj. Returning from time to time, especially at regular or stated intervals.
redemption n. The recovery of what is mortgaged or pledged, by paying the debt.
redolent adj. Smelling sweet and agreeable.
redolence n. Smelling sweet and agreeable.
redoubtable adj. Formidable.
redound n. Rebound.
redress v. To set right, as a wrong by compensation or the punishment of the wrong-doer.
reducible adj. That may be reduced.
redundance n. Excess.
redundant adj. Constituting an excess.
reestablish v. To restore.
refer v. To direct or send for information or other purpose.
referrer n. One who refers.
referable adj. Ascribable.
refinery n. A place where some crude material, as sugar or petroleum, is purified.
reflectible adj. Capable of being turned back.
reflection n. The throwing off or back of light, heat, sound, or any form of energy that travels in waves.
reflector n. A mirror, as of metal, for reflecting light, heat, or sound in a particular direction.
reflexible adj. Capable of being reflected.
reform n. Change for the better.
reformer n. One who carries out a reform.
refract v. To bend or turn from a direct course.
refractory adj. Not amenable to control.
refragable adj. Capable of being refuted.
refringency n. Power to refract.
refringent adj. Having the power to refract.
refusal n. Denial of what is asked.
refute v. To prove to be wrong.
regale v. To give unusual pleasure.
regalia n. pl. The emblems of royalty.
regality n. Royalty.
regenerate v. To reproduce.
regent n. One who is lawfully deputized to administer the government for the time being in the name of the ruler.
regicide n. The killing of a king or sovereign.
regime n. Particular conduct or administration of affairs.
regimen n. A systematized order or course of living with reference to food, clothing and personal habits.
regiment n. A body of soldiers.
regnant adj. Exercising royal authority in one's own right.
regress v. To return to a former place or condition.
regretful adj. Feeling, expressive of, or full of regret.
rehabilitate v. To restore to a former status, capacity, right rank, or privilege.
reign v. To hold and exercise sovereign power.
reimburse v. To pay back as an equivalent of what has been expended.
rein n. A step attached to the bit for controlling a horse or other draft-animal.
reinstate v. To restore to a former state, station, or authority.
reiterate v. To say or do again and again.
rejoin v. To reunite after separation.
rejuvenate v. To restore to youth.
rejuvenescence n. A renewal of youth.
relapse v. To suffer a return of a disease after partial recovery.
relegate v. To send off or consign, as to an obscure position or remote destination.
relent v. To yield.
relevant adj. Bearing upon the matter in hand.
reliance n. Dependence.
relinquish v. To give up using or having.
reliquary n. A casket, coffer, or repository in which relics are kept.
relish v. To like the taste or savor of.
reluctance n. Unwillingness.
reluctant adj. Unwilling.
remembrance n. Recollection.
reminiscence n. The calling to mind of incidents within the range of personal knowledge or experience.
reminiscent adj. Pertaining to the recollection of matters of personal interest.
remiss adj. Negligent.
remission n. Temporary diminution of a disease.
remodel v. Reconstruct.
remonstrance n. Reproof.
remonstrant adj. Having the character of a reproof.
remonstrate v. To present a verbal or written protest to those who have power to right or prevent a wrong.
remunerate v. To pay or pay for.
remuneration n. Compensation.
Renaissance n. The revival of letters, and then of art, which marks the transition from medieval to modern time.
rendezvous n. A prearranged place of meeting.
rendition n. Interpretation.
renovate v. To restore after deterioration, as a building.
renunciation n. An explicit disclaimer of a right or privilege.
reorganize v. To change to a more satisfactory form of organization.
reparable adj. Capable of repair.
reparation n. The act of making amends, as for an injury, loss, or wrong.
repartee n. A ready, witty, or apt reply.
repeal v. To render of no further effect.
repel v. To force or keep back in a manner, physically or mentally.
repellent adj. Having power to force back in a manner, physically or mentally.
repentance n. Sorrow for something done or left undone, with desire to make things right by undoing the wrong.
repertory n. A place where things are stored or gathered together.
repetition n. The act of repeating.
repine v. To indulge in fretfulness and faultfinding.
replenish v. To fill again, as something that has been emptied.
replete adj. Full to the uttermost.
replica n. A duplicate executed by the artist himself, and regarded, equally with the first, as an original.
repository n. A place in which goods are stored.
reprehend v. To find fault with.
reprehensible adj. Censurable.
reprehension n. Expression of blame.
repress v. To keep under restraint or control.
repressible adj. Able to be kept under restraint or control.
reprieve v. To grant a respite from punishment to.
reprimand v. To chide or rebuke for a fault.
reprisal n. Any infliction or act by way of retaliation on an enemy.
reprobate n. One abandoned to depravity and sin.
reproduce v. To make a copy of.
reproduction n. The process by which an animal or plant gives rise to another of its kind.
reproof n. An expression of disapproval or blame personally addressed to one censured.
repudiate v. To refuse to have anything to do with.
repugnance n. Thorough dislike.
repugnant adj. Offensive to taste and feeling.
repulse n. The act of beating or driving back, as an attacking or advancing enemy.
repulsive adj. Grossly offensive.
repute v. To hold in general opinion.
requiem n. A solemn mass sung for the repose of the souls of the dead.
requisite adj. Necessary.
requital n. Adequate return for good or ill.
requite v. To repay either good or evil to, as to a person.
rescind v. To make void, as an act, by the enacting authority or a superior authority.
reseat v. To place in position of office again.
resemblance n. Similarity in quality or form.
resent v. To be indignant at, as an injury or insult.
reservoir n. A receptacle where a quantity of some material, especially of a liquid or gas, may be kept.
residue n. A remainder or surplus after a part has been separated or otherwise treated.
resilience n. The power of springing back to a former position
resilient adj. Having the quality of springing back to a former position.
resistance n. The exertion of opposite effort or effect.
resistant adj. Offering or tending to produce resistance.
resistive adj. Having or exercising the power of resistance.
resistless adj. Powerless.
resonance n. The quality of being able to reinforce sound by sympathetic vibrations.
resonance adj. Able to reinforce sound by sympathetic vibrations.
resonate v. To have or produce resonance.
resource n. That which is restored to, relied upon, or made available for aid or support.
respite n. Interval of rest.
resplendent adj. Very bright.
restitution n. Restoration of anything to the one to whom it properly belongs.
resumption n. The act of taking back, or taking again.
resurgent adj. Surging back or again.
resurrection n. A return from death to life
resuscitate v. To restore from apparent death.
retaliate v. To repay evil with a similar evil.
retch v. To make an effort to vomit.
retention n. The keeping of a thing within one's power or possession.
reticence n. The quality of habitually keeping silent or being reserved in utterance.
reticent adj. Habitually keeping silent or being reserved in utterance.
retinue n. The body of persons who attend a person of importance in travel or public appearance.
retort n. A retaliatory speech.
retouch v. To modify the details of.
retrace v. To follow backward or toward the place of beginning, as a track or marking.
retract v. To recall or take back (something that one has said).
retrench v. To cut down or reduce in extent or quantity.
retrieve v. To recover something by searching.
retroactive adj. Operative on, affecting, or having reference to past events, transactions, responsibilities.
retrograde v. To cause to deteriorate or to move backward.
retrogression n. A going or moving backward or in a reverse direction.
retrospect n. A view or contemplation of something past.
retrospective adj. Looking back on the past.
reunite v. To unite or join again, as after separation.
revelation n. A disclosing, discovering, or making known of what was before secret, private, or unknown.
revere v. To regard with worshipful veneration.
reverent adj. Humble.
reversion n. A return to or toward some former state or condition.
revert v. To return, or turn or look back, as toward a former position or the like.
revile v. To heap approach or abuse upon.
revisal n. Revision.
revise v. To examine for the correction of errors, or for the purpose of making changes.
revocation n. Repeal.
rhapsody n. Rapt or rapturous utterance.
rhetoric n. The art of discourse.
rhetorician n. A showy writer or speaker.
ribald adj. Indulging in or manifesting coarse indecency or obscenity.
riddance n. The act or ridding or delivering from something undesirable.
ridicule n. Looks or acts expressing amused contempt.
ridiculous adj. Laughable and contemptible.
rife adj. Abundant.
rightful adj. Conformed to a just claim according to established laws or usage.
rigmarole n. Nonsense.
ripplet n. A small ripple, as of water.
risible adj. capable of exciting laughter.
rivulet n. A small stream or brook.
robust adj. Characterized by great strength or power of endurance.
rondo n. A musical composition during which the first part or subject is repeated several times.
rookery n. A place where crows congregate to breed.
rotary adj. Turning around its axis, like a wheel, or so constructed as to turn thus.
rotate v. To cause to turn on or as on its axis, as a wheel.
rote n. Repetition of words or sounds as a means of learning them, with slight attention.
rotund adj. Round from fullness or plumpness.
rudimentary adj. Being in an initial, early, or incomplete stage of development.
rue v. To regret extremely.
ruffian adj. A lawless or recklessly brutal fellow.
ruminant adj. Chewing the cud.
ruminate v. To chew over again, as food previously swallowed and regurgitated.
rupture v. To separate the parts of by violence.
rustic adj. Characteristic of dwelling in the country.
ruth n. Sorrow for another's misery.
sacrifice v. To make an offering of to deity, especially by presenting on an altar.
sacrificial adj. Offering or offered as an atonement for sin.
sacrilege n. The act of violating or profaning anything sacred.
sacrilegious adj. Impious.
sagacious adj. Able to discern and distinguish with wise perception.
salacious adj. Having strong sexual desires.
salience n. The condition of standing out distinctly.
salient adj. Standing out prominently.
saline adj. Constituting or consisting of salt.
salutary adj. Beneficial.
salutation n. Any form of greeting, hailing, or welcome, whether by word or act.
salutatory n. The opening oration at the commencement in American colleges.
salvage n. Any act of saving property.
salvo n. A salute given by firing all the guns, as at the funeral of an officer.
sanctimonious adj. Making an ostentatious display or hypocritical pretense of holiness or piety.
sanction v. To approve authoritatively.
sanctity n. Holiness.
sanguine adj. Having the color of blood.
sanguineous adj. Consisting of blood.
sapid adj. Affecting the sense of taste.
sapience n. Deep wisdom or knowledge.
sapient adj. Possessing wisdom.
saponaceous adj. Having the nature or quality of soap.
sarcasm n. Cutting and reproachful language.
sarcophagus n. A stone coffin or a chest-like tomb.
sardonic adj. Scornfully or bitterly sarcastic.
satiate v. To satisfy fully the appetite or desire of.
satire n. The employment of sarcasm, irony, or keenness of wit in ridiculing vices.
satiric adj. Resembling poetry, in which vice, incapacity ,or corruption is held up to ridicule.
satirize v. To treat with sarcasm or derisive wit.
satyr n. A very lascivious person.
savage n. A wild and uncivilized human being.
savor v. To perceive by taste or smell.
scabbard n. The sheath of a sword or similar bladed weapon.
scarcity n. Insufficiency of supply for needs or ordinary demands.
scholarly adj. Characteristic of an erudite person.
scholastic adj. Pertaining to education or schools.
scintilla n. The faintest ray.
scintillate v. To emit or send forth sparks or little flashes of light.
scope n. A range of action or view.
scoundrel n. A man without principle.
scribble n. Hasty, careless writing.
scribe n. One who writes or is skilled in writing.
script n. Writing or handwriting of the ordinary cursive form.
Scriptural adj. Pertaining to, contained in, or warranted by the Holy Scriptures.
scruple n. Doubt or uncertainty regarding a question of moral right or duty.
scrupulous adj. Cautious in action for fear of doing wrong.
scurrilous adj. Grossly indecent or vulgar.
scuttle v. To sink (a ship) by making holes in the bottom.
scythe n. A long curved blade for mowing, reaping, etc.
seance n. A meeting of spirituals for consulting spirits.
sear v. To burn on the surface.
sebaceous adj. Pertaining to or appearing like fat.
secant adj. Cutting, especially into two parts.
secede v. To withdraw from union or association, especially from a political or religious body.
secession n. Voluntary withdrawal from fellowship, especially from political or religious bodies.
seclude v. To place, keep, or withdraw from the companionship of others.
seclusion n. Solitude.
secondary adj. Less important or effective than that which is primary.
secondly adv. In the second place in order or succession.
second-rate adj. Second in quality, size, rank, importance, etc.
secrecy n. Concealment.
secretary n. One who attends to correspondence, keeps records. or does other writing for others.
secretive adj. Having a tendency to conceal.
sedate adj. Even-tempered.
sedentary adj. Involving or requiring much sitting.
sediment n. Matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid.
sedition n. Conduct directed against public order and the tranquillity of the state.
seditious adj. Promotive of conduct directed against public order and the tranquillity of the state.
seduce v. To entice to surrender chastity.
sedulous adj. Persevering in effort or endeavor.
seer n. A prophet.
seethe v. To be violently excited or agitated.
seignior n. A title of honor or respectful address, equivalent to sir.
seismograph n. An instrument for recording the phenomena of earthquakes.
seize v. To catch or take hold of suddenly and forcibly.
selective adj. Having the power of choice.
self-respect n. Rational self-esteem.
semiannual adj. Recurring at intervals of six months.
semicircle n. A half-circle.
seminar n. Any assemblage of pupils for real research in some specific study under a teacher.
seminary n. A special school, as of theology or pedagogics.
senile adj. Peculiar to or proceeding from the weakness or infirmity of old age.
sensation n. A condition of mind resulting from spiritual or inherent feeling.
sense n. The signification conveyed by some word, phrase, or action.
sensibility n. Power to perceive or feel.
sensitive adj. Easily affected by outside operations or influences.
sensorium n. The sensory apparatus.
sensual adj. Pertaining to the body or the physical senses.
sensuous adj. Having a warm appreciation of the beautiful or of the refinements of luxury.
sentence n. A related group of words containing a subject and a predicate and expressing a complete thought.
sentience n. Capacity for sensation or sense-perception.
sentient adj. Possessing the power of sense or sense-perception.
sentinel n. Any guard or watch stationed for protection.
separable adj. Capable of being disjoined or divided.
separate v. To take apart.
separatist n. A seceder.
septennial adj. Recurring every seven years.
sepulcher n. A burial-place.
sequacious adj. Ready to be led.
sequel n. That which follows in consequence of what has previously happened.
sequence n. The order in which a number or persons, things, or events follow one another in space or time.
sequent adj. Following in the order of time.
sequester v. To cause to withdraw or retire, as from society or public life.
sequestrate v. To confiscate.
sergeant n. A non-commissioned military officer ranking next above a corporal.
sergeant-at-arms n. An executive officer in legislative bodies who enforces the orders of the presiding officer.
sergeant-major n. The highest non-commissioned officer in a regiment.
service n. Any work done for the benefit of another.
serviceable adj. Durable.
sextet n. A band of six singers or players.
sextuple adj. Multiplied by six.
sheer adj. Absolute.
shiftless adj. Wanting in resource, energy, or executive ability.
shrewd adj. Characterized by skill at understanding and profiting by circumstances.
shriek n. A sharp, shrill outcry or scream, caused by agony or terror.
shrinkage n. A contraction of any material into less bulk or dimension.
shrivel v. To draw or be drawn into wrinkles.
shuffle n. A mixing or changing the order of things.
sibilance n. A hissing sound.
sibilant adj. Made with a hissing sound.
sibilate v. To give a hissing sound to, as in pronouncing the letter s.
sidelong adj. Inclining or tending to one side.
sidereal adj. Pertaining to stars or constellations.
siege n. A beleaguerment.
significant adj. Important, especially as pointing something out.
signification n. The meaning conveyed by language, actions, or signs.
similar adj. Bearing resemblance to one another or to something else.
simile n. A comparison which directs the mind to the representative object itself.
similitude n. Similarity.
simplify v. To make less complex or difficult.
simulate v. Imitate.
simultaneous adj. Occurring, done, or existing at the same time.
sinecure n. Any position having emoluments with few or no duties.
singe v. To burn slightly or superficially.
sinister adj. Evil.
sinuosity n. The quality of curving in and out.
sinuous adj. Curving in and out.
sinus n. An opening or cavity.
siren n. A sea-nymph, described by Homer as dwelling between the island of Circe and Scylla.
sirocco n. hot winds from Africa.
sisterhood n. A body of sisters united by some bond of sympathy or by a religious vow.
skeptic n. One who doubts any statements.
skepticism n. The entertainment of doubt concerning something.
skiff n. Usually, a small light boat propelled by oars.
skirmish n. Desultory fighting between advanced detachments of two armies.
sleight n. A trick or feat so deftly done that the manner of performance escapes observation.
slight adj. Of a small importance or significance.
slothful adj. Lazy.
sluggard n. A person habitually lazy or idle.
sociable adj. Inclined to seek company.
socialism n. A theory of civil polity that aims to secure the reconstruction of society.
socialist adj. One who advocates reconstruction of society by collective ownership of land and capital.
sociology n. The philosophical study of society.
Sol n. The sun.
solace n. Comfort in grief, trouble, or calamity.
solar adj. Pertaining to the sun.
solder n. A fusible alloy used for joining metallic surfaces or margins.
soldier n. A person engaged in military service.
solecism n. Any violation of established rules or customs.
solicitor n. One who represents a client in court of justice; an attorney.
solicitude n. Uneasiness of mind occasioned by desire, anxiety, or fear.
soliloquy n. A monologue.
solstice n. The time of year when the sun is at its greatest declination.
soluble adj. Capable of being dissolved, as in a fluid.
solvent adj. Having sufficient funds to pay all debts.
somber adj. Gloomy.
somniferous adj. Tending to produce sleep.
somnolence n. Oppressive drowsiness.
sonata n. An instrumental composition.
sonnet n. A poem of fourteen decasyllabic or octosyllabiclines expressing two successive phrases.
sonorous adj. Resonant.
soothsayer n. One who claims to have supernatural insight or foresight.
sophism n. A false argument understood to be such by the reasoner himself and intentionally used to deceive
sophistical adj. Fallacious.
sophisticate v. To deprive of simplicity of mind or manner.
sophistry n. Reasoning sound in appearance only, especially when designedly deceptive.
soprano n. A woman's or boy's voice of high range.
sorcery n. Witchcraft.
sordid adj. Of degraded character or nature.
souvenir n. A token of remembrance.
sparse adj. Thinly diffused.
Spartan adj. Exceptionally brave; rigorously severe.
spasmodic adj. Convulsive.
specialize v. To assume an individual or specific character, or adopt a singular or special course.
specialty n. An employment limited to one particular line of work.
specie n. A coin or coins of gold, silver, copper, or other metal.
species n. A classificatory group of animals or plants subordinate to a genus.
specimen n. One of a class of persons or things regarded as representative of the class.
specious adj. Plausible.
spectator n. One who beholds or looks on.
specter n. Apparition.
spectrum n. An image formed by rays of light or other radiant energy.
speculate v. To pursue inquiries and form conjectures.
speculator n. One who makes an investment that involves a risk of loss, but also a chance of profit.
sphericity n. The state or condition of being a sphere.
spheroid n. A body having nearly the form of a sphere.
spherometer n. An instrument for measuring curvature or radii of spherical surfaces.
spinous adj. Having spines.
spinster n. A woman who has never been married.
spontaneous adj. Arising from inherent qualities or tendencies without external efficient cause.
sprightly adj. Vivacious.
squalid adj. Having a dirty, mean, poverty-stricken appearance.
squatter n. One who settles on land without permission or right.
stagnant adj. Not flowing: said of water, as in a pool.
stagnate v. To become dull or inert.
stagnation n. The condition of not flowing or not changing.
stagy adj. Having a theatrical manner.
staid adj. Of a steady and sober character.
stallion n. An uncastrated male horse, commonly one kept for breeding.
stanchion n. A vertical bar, or a pair of bars, used to confine cattle in a stall.
stanza n. A group of rimed lines, usually forming one of a series of similar divisions in a poem.
statecraft n. The art of conducting state affairs.
static adj. Pertaining to or designating bodies at rest or forces in equilibrium.
statics n. The branch of mechanics that treats of the relations that subsist among forces in order.
stationary adj. Not moving.
statistician n. One who is skilled in collecting and tabulating numerical facts.
statuesque adj. Having the grace, pose, or quietude of a statue.
statuette n. A figurine.
stature n. The natural height of an animal body.
statute n. Any authoritatively declared rule, ordinance, decree, or law.
stealth n. A concealed manner of acting.
stellar adj. Pertaining to the stars.
steppe n. One of the extensive plains in Russia and Siberia.
sterling adj. Genuine.
stifle v. To smother.
stigma n. A mark of infamy or token of disgrace attaching to a person as the result of evil-doing.
stiletto n. A small dagger.
stimulant n. Anything that rouses to activity or to quickened action.
stimulate v. To rouse to activity or to quickened action.
stimulus n. Incentive.
stingy adj. Cheap, unwilling to spend money.
stipend n. A definite amount paid at stated periods in compensation for services or as an allowance.
Stoicism n. The principles or the practice of the Stoics-being very even tempered in success and failure.
stolid adj. Expressing no power of feeling or perceiving.
strait n. A narrow passage of water connecting two larger bodies of water.
stratagem n. Any clever trick or device for obtaining an advantage.
stratum n. A natural or artificial layer, bed, or thickness of any substance or material.
streamlet n. Rivulet.
stripling n. A mere youth.
studious adj. Having or showing devotion to the acquisition of knowledge.
stultify v. To give an appearance of foolishness to.
stupendous adj. Of prodigious size, bulk, or degree.
stupor n. Profound lethargy.
suasion n. The act of persuading.
suave adj. Smooth and pleasant in manner.
subacid adj. Somewhat sharp or biting.
subaquatic adj. Being, formed, or operating under water.
subconscious adj. Being or occurring in the mind, but without attendant consciousness or conscious perception.
subjacent adj. Situated directly underneath.
subjection n. The act of bringing into a state of submission.
subjugate v. To conquer.
subliminal adj. Being beneath the threshold of consciousness.
sublingual adj. Situated beneath the tongue.
submarine adj. Existing, done, or operating beneath the surface of the sea.
submerge v. To place or plunge under water.
submergence n. The act of submerging.
submersible adj. Capable of being put underwater.
submersion n. The act of submerging.
submission n. A yielding to the power or authority of another.
submittal n. The act of submitting.
subordinate adj. Belonging to an inferior order in a classification.
subsequent adj. Following in time.
subservience n. The quality, character, or condition of being servilely following another's behests.
subservient adj. Servilely following another's behests.
subside v. To relapse into a state of repose and tranquillity.
subsist v. To be maintained or sustained.
subsistence n. Sustenance.
subtend v. To extend opposite to.
subterfuge n. Evasion.
subterranean adj. Situated or occurring below the surface of the earth.
subtle adj. Discriminating.
subtrahend n. That which is to be subtracted.
subversion n. An overthrow, as from the foundation.
subvert v. To bring to ruin.
succeed v. To accomplish what is attempted or intended.
success n. A favorable or prosperous course or termination of anything attempted.
successful adj. Having reached a high degree of worldly prosperity.
successor n. One who or that which takes the place of a predecessor or preceding thing.
succinct adj. Concise.
succumb v. To cease to resist.
sufferance n. Toleration.
sufficiency n. An ample or adequate supply.
suffrage n. The right or privilege of voting.
suffuse v. To cover or fill the surface of.
suggestible adj. That can be suggested.
suggestive adj. Stimulating to thought or reflection.
summary n. An abstract.
sumptuous adj. Rich and costly.
superabundance n. An excessive amount.
superadd v. To add in addition to what has been added.
superannuate v. To become deteriorated or incapacitated by long service.
superb adj. Sumptuously elegant.
supercilious adj. Exhibiting haughty and careless contempt.
superficial adj. Knowing and understanding only the ordinary and the obvious.
superfluity n. That part of anything that is in excess of what is needed.
superfluous adj. Being more than is needed.
superheat v. To heat to excess.
superintend v. To have the charge and direction of, especially of some work or movement.
superintendence n. Direction and management.
superintendent n. One who has the charge and direction of, especially of some work or movement.
superlative n. That which is of the highest possible excellence or eminence.
supernatural adj. Caused miraculously or by the immediate exercise of divine power.
supernumerary adj. Superfluous.
supine adj. Lying on the back.
supplant v. To take the place of.
supple adj. Easily bent.
supplementary adj. Being an addition to.
supplicant n. One who asks humbly and earnestly.
supplicate v. To beg.
suppress v. To prevent from being disclosed or punished.
suppressible adj. Capable of being suppressed.
suppression n. A forcible putting or keeping down.
supramundane adj. Supernatural.
surcharge n. An additional amount charged.
surety n. Security for payment or performance.
surfeit v. To feed to fullness or to satiety.
surmise v. To conjecture.
surmount v. To overcome by force of will.
surreptitious adj. Clandestine.
surrogate n. One who or that which is substituted for or appointed to act in place of another.
surround v. To encircle.
susceptibility n. A specific capability of feeling or emotion.
susceptible adj. Easily under a specified power or influence.
suspense n. Uncertainty.
suspension n. A hanging from a support.
suspicious adj. Inclined to doubt or mistrust.
sustenance n. Food.
swarthy adj. Having a dark hue, especially a dark or sunburned complexion.
Sybarite n. A luxurious person.
sycophant n. A servile flatterer, especially of those in authority or influence.
syllabic adj. Consisting of that which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllabication n. Division of words into that which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllable n. That which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllabus n. Outline of a subject, course, lecture, or treatise.
sylph n. A slender, graceful young woman or girl.
symmetrical adj. Well-balanced.
symmetry n. Relative proportion and harmony.
sympathetic adj. Having a fellow-feeling for or like feelings with another or others.
sympathize v. To share the sentiments or mental states of another.
symphonic adj. Characterized by a harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
symphonious adj. Marked by a harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
symphony n. A harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
synchronism n. Simultaneousness.
syndicate n. An association of individuals united for the prosecution of some enterprise.
syneresis n. The coalescence of two vowels or syllables, as e'er for ever.
synod n. An ecclesiastical council.
synonym n. A word having the same or almost the same meaning as some other.
synopsis n. A syllabus or summary.
systematic adj. Methodical.
tableau n. An arrangement of inanimate figures representing a scene from real life.
tacit adj. Understood.
taciturn adj. Disinclined to conversation.
tack n. A small sharp-pointed nail.
tact n. Fine or ready mental discernment shown in saying or doing the proper thing.
tactician n. One who directs affairs with skill and shrewdness.
tactics n. Any maneuvering or adroit management for effecting an object.
tangency n. The state of touching.
tangent adj. Touching.
tangible adj. Perceptible by touch.
tannery n. A place where leather is tanned.
tantalize v. To tease.
tantamount adj. Having equal or equivalent value, effect, or import.
tapestry n. A fabric to which a pattern is applied with a needle, designed for ornamental hangings.
tarnish v. To lessen or destroy the luster of in any way.
taut adj. Stretched tight.
taxation n. A levy, by government, of a fixed contribution.
taxidermy n. The art or process of preserving dead animals or parts of them.
technic adj. Technical.
technicality n. Something peculiar to a particular art, trade, or the like.
technique n. Manner of performance.
technography n. The scientific description or study of human arts and industries in their historic development.
technology n. The knowledge relating to industries and manufactures.
teem v. To be full to overflowing.
telepathy n. Thought-transference.
telephony n. The art or process of communicating by telephone.
telescope v. To drive together so that one slides into the another like the sections of a spy-glass.
telltale adj. That gives warning or information.
temerity n. Recklessness.
temporal adj. Pertaining to or concerned with the affairs of the present life.
temporary adj. Lasting for a short time only.
temporize v. To pursue a policy of delay.
tempt v. To offer to (somebody) an inducement to do wrong.
tempter n. An allurer or enticer to evil.
tenacious adj. Unyielding.
tenant n. An occupant.
tendency n. Direction or inclination, as toward some objector end.
tenet n. Any opinion, principle, dogma, or doctrine that a person believes or maintains as true.
tenor n. A settled course or manner of progress.
tense adj. Strained to stiffness.
tentative adj. Done as an experiment.
tenure n. The term during which a thing is held.
tercentenary adj. Pertaining to a period of 300 years.
termagant adj. Violently abusive and quarrelsome.
terminal adj. Pertaining to or creative of a boundary, limit.
terminate v. To put an end or stop to.
termination n. The act of ending or concluding.
terminus n. The final point or goal.
terrify v. To fill with extreme fear.
territorial adj. Pertaining to the domain over which a sovereign state exercises jurisdiction.
terse adj. Pithy.
testator n. The maker of a will.
testimonial n. A formal token of regard, often presented in public.
thearchy n. Government by a supreme deity.
theism n. Belief in God.
theocracy n. A government administered by ecclesiastics.
theocrasy n. The mixed worship of polytheism.
theologian n. A professor of divinity.
theological adj. Based on or growing out of divine revelation.
theology n. The branch of theological science that treats of God.
theoretical adj. Directed toward knowledge for its own sake without respect to applications.
theorist n. One given to speculating.
theorize v. To speculate.
thereabout adv. Near that number, quantity, degree, place, or time, approximately.
therefor adv. For that or this.
thermal adj. Of or pertaining to heat.
thermoelectric adj. Denoting electricity produced by heat.
thermoelectricity n. Electricity generated by differences of temperature,
thesis n. An essay or treatise on a particular subject.
thoroughbred adj. Bred from the best or purest blood or stock.
thoroughfare n. A public street or road.
thrall n. One controlled by an appetite or a passion.
tilth n. Cultivation.
timbre n. The quality of a tone, as distinguished from intensity and pitch.
timorous adj. Lacking courage.
tincture n. A solution, usually alcoholic, of some principle used in medicine.
tinge n. A faint trace of color.
tipsy adj. Befuddled with drinks.
tirade n. Harangue.
transalpine adj. Situated on the other side of the Alps.
transact v. To do business.
transatlantic adj. Situated beyond or on the other side of the Atlantic.
transcend v. To surpass.
transcontinental adj. Extending or passing across a continent.
transcribe v. To write over again (something already written)
transcript n. A copy made directly from an original.
transfer v. To convey, remove, or cause to pass from one person or place to another.
transferable adj. Capable of being conveyed from one person or place to another.
transferee n. The person to whom a transfer is made.
transference n. The act of conveying from one person or place to another.
transferrer n. One who or that which conveys from one person or place to another.
transfigure v. To give an exalted meaning or glorified appearance to.
transfuse v. To pour or cause to pass, as a fluid, from one vessel to another.
transfusible adj. Capable of being poured from one vessel to another.
transfusion n. The act of pouring from one vessel to another.
transgress v. To break a law.
transience n. Something that is of short duration.
transient n. One who or that which is only of temporary existence.
transition n. Passage from one place, condition, or action to another.
transitory adj. Existing for a short time only.
translate v. To give the sense or equivalent of in another language or dialect.
translator n. An interpreter.
translucence n. The property or state of allowing the passage of light.
translucent adj. Allowing the passage of light.
transmissible adj. That may e sent through or across.
transmission n. The act of sending through or across.
transmit v. To send trough or across.
transmute v. To change in nature, substance, or form.
transparent adj. Easy to see through or understand.
transpire v. To come to pass.
transplant v. To remove and plant in another place.
transposition n. The act of reversing the order or changing the place of.
transverse adj. Lying or being across or in a crosswise direction.
travail n. Hard or agonizing labor.
travesty n. A grotesque imitation.
treacherous adj. Perfidious.
treachery n. Violation of allegiance, confidence, or plighted faith.
treasonable adj. Of the nature of betrayal, treachery, or breech of allegiance.
treatise n. An elaborate literary composition presenting a subject in all its parts.
treble adj. Multiplied by three.
trebly adv. Triply.
tremor n. An involuntary trembling or shivering.
tremulous adj. Characterized by quivering or unsteadiness.
trenchant adj. Cutting deeply and quickly.
trepidation n. Nervous uncertainty of feeling.
trestle n. An open braced framework for supporting the horizontal stringers of a railway-bridge.
triad n. A group of three persons of things.
tribune n. Any champion of the rights and liberties of the people: often used as the name for a newspaper.
trickery n. Artifice.
tricolor adj. Of three colors.
tricycle n. A three-wheeled vehicle.
trident n. The three-pronged fork that was the emblem of Neptune.
triennial adj. Taking place every third year.
trimness n. Neatness.
trinity n. A threefold personality existing in the one divine being or substance.
trio n. Three things grouped or associated together.
triple adj. Threefold.
triplicate adj. Composed of or pertaining to three related things or parts.
triplicity n. The state of being triple or threefold.
tripod n. A three-legged stand, usually hinged near the top, for supporting some instrument.
trisect v. To divide into three parts, especially into three equal parts.
trite adj. Made commonplace by frequent repetition.
triumvir n. One of three men united coordinately in public office or authority.
trivial adj. Of little importance or value.
troublesome adj. Burdensome.
truculent adj. Having the character or the spirit of a savage.
truism n. A statement so plainly true as hardly to require statement or proof.
truthful adj. Veracious.
tutelage n. The act of training or the state of being under instruction.
tutelar adj. Protective.
tutorship n. The office of a guardian.
twinge n. A darting momentary local pain.
typical adj. Characteristic.
typify v. To serve as a characteristic example of.
typographical adj. Pertaining to typography or printing.
typography n. The arrangement of composed type, or the appearance of printed matter.
tyrannical adj. Despotic.
tyranny n. Absolute power arbitrarily or unjustly administrated.
tyro n. One slightly skilled in or acquainted with any trade or profession.
ubiquitous adj. Being present everywhere.
ulterior adj. Not so pertinent as something else to the matter spoken of.
ultimate adj. Beyond which there is nothing else.
ultimatum n. A final statement or proposal, as concerning terms or conditions.
ultramundane adj. Pertaining to supernatural things or to another life.
ultramontane adj. Beyond the mountains, especially beyond the Alps (that is, on their Italian side).
umbrage n. A sense of injury.
unaccountable adj. Inexplicable.
unanimous adj. Sharing the same views or sentiments.
unanimity n. The state or quality of being of one mind.
unavoidable adj. Inevitable.
unbecoming adj. Unsuited to the wearer, place, or surroundings.
unbelief n. Doubt.
unbiased adj. Impartial, as judgment.
unbridled adj. Being without restraint.
uncommon adj. Rare.
unconscionable adj. Ridiculously or unjustly excessive.
unconscious adj. Not cognizant of objects, actions, etc.
unction n. The art of anointing as with oil.
unctuous adj. Oily.
undeceive v. To free from deception, as by apprising of the real state of affairs.
undercharge v. To make an inadequate charge for.
underexposed adj. Insufficiently exposed for proper or full development, as negatives in photography.
undergarment n. A garment to be worn under the ordinary outer garments.
underman v. To equip with less than the full complement of men.
undersell v. To sell at a lower price than.
undersized adj. Of less than the customary size.
underhanded adj. Clandestinely carried on.
underlie v. To be the ground or support of.
underling n. A subordinate.
undermine v. To subvert in an underhand way.
underrate v. To undervalue.
understate v. To fail to put strongly enough, as a case.
undervalue v. To underestimate.
underwrite v. To issue or be party to the issue of a policy of insurance.
undue adj. More than sufficient.
undulate v. To move like a wave or in waves.
undulous adj. Resembling waves.
upbraid v. To reproach as deserving blame.
upcast n. A throwing upward.
upheaval n. Overthrow or violent disturbance of established order or condition.
upheave v. To raise or lift with effort.
uppermost adj. First in order of precedence.
uproarious adj. Noisy.
upturn v. To throw into confusion.
urban adj. Of, or pertaining to, or like a city.
urbanity n. Refined or elegant courtesy.
urchin n. A roguish, mischievous boy.
urgency n. The pressure of necessity.
usage n. Treatment.
usurious adj. Taking unlawful or exorbitant interest on money loaned.
usurp v. To take possession of by force.
usury n. The demanding for the use of money as a loan, a rate of interest beyond what is allowed by law.
utilitarianism n. The ethical doctrine that actions are right because they are useful or of beneficial tendency.
utility n. Fitness for some desirable practical purpose.
utmost n. The greatest possible extent.
vacate v. To leave.
vaccinate v. To inoculate with vaccine virus or virus of cowpox.
vacillate v. To waver.
vacuum n. A space entirely devoid of matter.
vagabond n. A wanderer.
vagrant n. An idle wanderer.
vainglory n. Excessive, pretentious, and demonstrative vanity.
vale n. Level or low land between hills.
valediction n. A bidding farewell.
valedictorian n. Student who delivers an address at graduating exercises of an educational institution.
valedictory n. A parting address.
valid adj. Founded on truth.
valorous adj. Courageous.
vapid adj. Having lost sparkling quality and flavor.
vaporizer n. An atomizer.
variable adj. Having a tendency to change.
variance n. Change.
variant n. A thing that differs from another in form only, being the same in essence or substance.
variation n. Modification.
variegate v. To mark with different shades or colors.
vassal n. A slave or bondman.
vaudeville n. A variety show.
vegetal adj. Of or pertaining to plants.
vegetarian n. One who believes in the theory that man's food should be exclusively vegetable.
vegetate v. To live in a monotonous, passive way without exercise of the mental faculties.
vegetation n. Plant-life in the aggregate.
vegetative adj. Pertaining to the process of plant-life.
vehement adj. Very eager or urgent.
velocity n. Rapid motion.
velvety adj. Marked by lightness and softness.
venal adj. Mercenary, corrupt.
vendition n. The act of selling.
vendor n. A seller.
veneer n. Outside show or elegance.
venerable adj. Meriting or commanding high esteem.
venerate v. To cherish reverentially.
venereal adj. Pertaining to or proceeding from sexual intercourse.
venial adj. That may be pardoned or forgiven, a forgivable sin.
venison n. The flesh of deer.
venom n. The poisonous fluid that certain animals secrete.
venous adj. Of, pertaining to, or contained or carried in a vein or veins.
veracious adj. Habitually disposed to speak the truth.
veracity n. Truthfulness.
verbatim adv. Word for word.
verbiage n. Use of many words without necessity.
verbose adj. Wordy.
verdant adj. Green with vegetation.
verification n. The act of proving to be true, exact, or accurate.
verify v. To prove to be true, exact, or accurate.
verily adv. In truth.
vermin n. A noxious or troublesome animal.
vernacular n. The language of one's country.
vernal adj. Belonging to or suggestive of the spring.
versatile adj. Having an aptitude for applying oneself to new and varied tasks or to various subjects.
version n. A description or report of something as modified by one's character or opinion.
vertex n. Apex.
vertical adj. Lying or directed perpendicularly to the horizon.
vertigo n. Dizziness.
vestige n. A visible trace, mark, or impression, of something absent, lost, or gone.
vestment n. Clothing or covering.
veto n. The constitutional right in a chief executive of refusing to approve an enactment.
vicarious adj. Suffered or done in place of or for the sake of another.
viceroy n. A ruler acting with royal authority in place of the sovereign in a colony or province.
vicissitude n. A change, especially a complete change, of condition or circumstances, as of fortune.
vie v. To contend.
vigilance n. Alert and intent mental watchfulness in guarding against danger.
vigilant adj. Being on the alert to discover and ward off danger or insure safety.
vignette n. A picture having a background or that is shaded off gradually.
vincible adj. Conquerable.
vindicate v. To prove true, right, or real.
vindicatory adj. Punitive.
vinery n. A greenhouse for grapes.
viol n. A stringed instrument of the violin class.
viola n. A musical instrument somewhat larger than a violin.
violator n. One who transgresses.
violation n. Infringement.
violoncello n. A stringed instrument held between the player's knees.
virago n. A bold, impudent, turbulent woman.
virile adj. Masculine.
virtu n. Rare, curious, or beautiful quality.
virtual adj. Being in essence or effect, but not in form or appearance.
virtuoso n. A master in the technique of some particular fine art.
virulence n. Extreme poisonousness.
virulent adj. Exceedingly noxious or deleterious.
visage n. The face, countenance, or look of a person.
viscount n. In England, a title of nobility, ranking fourth in the order of British peerage.
vista n. A view or prospect.
visual adj. Perceptible by sight.
visualize v. To give pictorial vividness to a mental representation.
vitality n. The state or quality of being necessary to existence or continuance.
vitalize v. To endow with life or energy.
vitiate v. To contaminate.
vituperable adj. Deserving of censure.
vivacity n. Liveliness.
vivify v. To endue with life.
vivisection n. The dissection of a living animal.
vocable n. a word, especially one regarded in relation merely to its qualities of sound.
vocative adj. Of or pertaining to the act of calling.
vociferance n. The quality of making a clamor.
vociferate v. To utter with a loud and vehement voice.
vociferous adj. Making a loud outcry.
vogue n. The prevalent way or fashion.
volant adj. Flying or able to fly.
volatile adj. Changeable.
volition n. An act or exercise of will.
volitive adj. Exercising the will.
voluble adj. Having great fluency in speaking.
voluptuous adj. having fullness of beautiful form, as a woman, with or without sensuous or sensual quality.
voracious adj. Eating with greediness or in very large quantities.
vortex n. A mass of rotating or whirling fluid, especially when sucked spirally toward the center.
votary adj. Consecrated by a vow or promise.
votive adj. Dedicated by a vow.
vulgarity n. Lack of refinement in conduct or speech.
vulnerable adj. Capable of receiving injuries.
waif n. A homeless, neglected wanderer.
waistcoat n. A vest.
waive v. To relinquish, especially temporarily, as a right or claim.
wampum n. Beads strung on threads, formerly used among the American Indians as currency.
wane v. To diminish in size and brilliancy.
wantonness n. Recklessness.
weak-kneed adj. Without resolute purpose or energy.
weal n. Well-being.
wean v. To transfer (the young) from dependence on mother's milk to another form of nourishment.
wearisome adj. Fatiguing.
well-bred adj. Of good ancestry.
well-doer n. A performer of moral and social duties.
well-to-do adj. In prosperous circumstances.
whereabouts n. The place in or near which a person or thing is.
whereupon adv. After which.
wherever adv. In or at whatever place.
wherewith n. The necessary means or resources.
whet v. To make more keen or eager.
whimsical adj. Capricious.
whine v. To utter with complaining tone.
wholly adv. Completely.
wield v. To use, control, or manage, as a weapon, or instrument, especially with full command.
wile n. An act or a means of cunning deception.
winsome adj. Attractive.
wintry adj. Lacking warmth of manner.
wiry adj. Thin, but tough and sinewy.
witchcraft n. Sorcery.
witless adj. Foolish, indiscreet, or silly.
witling n. A person who has little understanding.
witticism n. A witty, brilliant, or original saying or sentiment.
wittingly adv. With knowledge and by design.
wizen v. To become or cause to become withered or dry.
wizen-faced adj. Having a shriveled face.
working-man n. One who earns his bread by manual labor.
workmanlike adj. Like or befitting a skilled workman.
workmanship n. The art or skill of a workman.
wrangle v. To maintain by noisy argument or dispute.
wreak v. To inflict, as a revenge or punishment.
wrest v. To pull or force away by or as by violent twisting or wringing.
wretchedness n. Extreme misery or unhappiness.
writhe v. To twist the body, face, or limbs or as in pain or distress.
writing n. The act or art of tracing or inscribing on a surface letters or ideographs.
wry adj. Deviating from that which is proper or right.
yearling n. A young animal past its first year and not yet two years old.
zealot n. One who espouses a cause or pursues an object in an immoderately partisan manner.
zeitgeist n. The intellectual and moral tendencies that characterize any age or epoch.
zenith n. The culminating-point of prosperity, influence, or greatness.
zephyr n. Any soft, gentle wind.
zodiac n. An imaginary belt encircling the heavens within which are the larger planets.
Page too large to print?
SAT Vocabulary Building by Dr. Steve Baba
You do not need to learn every word in the dictionary to improve your SAT score. Every bone in your body has a name, but the names of your bones will not be on the SAT for two reasons. It would give an unfair advantage to students interested in human anatomy, and the question would be too difficult. Just as easy questions that everyone can answer will not be on the test, questions that no one can answer will also not be on the test for the same reason; they do not measure anything since everyone would get the same score.
There are about 10,000 words that are likely to show up on the SAT - other words are too hard or too easy. While 10,000 words is a lot, you probably know half of the words already. Also, many of the words are related to each other through common roots such as subsonic and supersonic. If you know what supersonic means, you should be able to figure out what subsonic means and vice versa.
Five or ten hours of vocabulary work cannot compare to a lifetime of studious vocabulary building, but all is not lost. You can review, remember and clarify words you once knew and learn a few new words. Unless you have a photographic memory or have mastered mnemonics (thinking of memory aids), you will not be able to memorize 1000 new words from a list in a few hours. What you can do is review words that you barely remember, and some of the new words may stick.
If you are tempted to skip vocabulary building because there are too many words, just remember that you do not need to know all the words to answer vocabulary questions correctly. Consider the following sentence completion question.
Because of his _____ and effort, John Doe was a success.
a. laziness
1000 Most Important Words by Norman Schur, 245 pages, $5.99.
Click on the above titles to view Amazon.com’s description. Amazon.com pays me a pittance, as an Amazon associate.
In addition to answering more vocabulary questions correctly, answering quickly leaves more time for reading comprehension questions, which have vocabulary embedded in the passages.
These words are targeted for SAT test prep, but other tests, such as the GRE and GMAT, use the same collegiate words.
GRE words and GMAT vocabulary are just hard SAT words; SAT prep will help you on graduate school entrance tests.
The SAT vocabulary and SAT math advice also applies to GRE vocabulary and GRE math, but the difficulty is different.
On the SAT, Both Speed And Accuracy Count
Finishing the easy SAT math problems faster gives you time to solve two more hard problems per section for 60 more points.
Every SAT math problem, even the hard ones such as these in my seminar (PDF), can be easily solved in one minute without a calculator.
The reading-passage questions are NOT ordered from easy to hard. If you run out of time, because of slow reading or slow vocabulary, you both miss opportunities to answer easy questions for easy points and don't have extra time for hard questions.
Just 20% faster is like having an extra 5 minutes on 25-minute sections.
SAT prep, such as my CDs/DVD, can enable you to gain 50+ points from increased accuracy and 50+ points from increased speed per subject for a total increase of 300+.
SAT Writing: Can’t write (no good/good/well)? Not a Big Problem
The “new” SAT writing (really the same old SAT II writing) is 2/3 multiple-choice grammar and 1/3 a 25-minute essay.
The multiple-choice grammar does not even require knowing the names of parts of speech. One only needs to pick the best of several choices or identify errors (no good/good/well). Because SAT scoring is highly curved, half correct (50%) is enough to reach 500, and even 600, 650 or 700 allows many mistakes or 50/50 guesses.
Most, but not all, of the multiple-choice questions can be answered with two-dozen English grammar rules, which are covered in the Kaplan and Princeton Review books.
Multiple-choice grammar questions can be answered multiple ways:
1) know the grammar rule for the one correct answer
2) eliminate all wrong answers to find the remaining correct answer
3) know a correct similar sentence - Can’t (swim/any activity) (no good/good/well)?
4) reword to clarify - I write (no good/good/well).
5) guess after eliminating some wrong answers
A 25-minute essay is as far from a creatively written novel as a 25-minute fast-food meal is from a gourmet meal. Becoming a professional chef or novelist takes years. Becoming a fast-food cook or writing a decent 25-minute essay can be mastered faster.
The essay is often illustrated by a triple cheeseburger. Top bun = introduction. Three burgers = three examples. Cheese between burgers = transitions between examples. Bottom bun = conclusion. Cooking small pieces of meat is easy = using small examples is easy.
SAT writing is the easiest to improve. Reading with difficult vocabulary is the hardest to improve.
Recommended SAT Prep Books by Steve Baba, Ph.D.
While some books are slightly better than others, I have found that none were exceptional. Kaplan certainly knows what Princeton Review is doing and vice versa. Books from other companies generally contain similar advice and are only differentiated by jokes, writing style, and graphics.
I have found that the Princeton Review book is slightly better for low-scoring students because it simplifies every solution. I have found that the Kaplan book is slightly better for high-scoring students because it does not (over) simplify every solution.
The book The Official SAT Study Guide provides real SAT tests, which are ideal for practicing and becoming more confident with the test. But do not use this book alone. Using The Official SAT Study Guide alone is like learning how to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool. To maximize your SAT score, you need to both practice and learn from experts.
While SAT preparation books generally contains similar advice, longer books obviously contain more information. While learning 200 SAT words is useful, learning 2000 words is better. Ditto for math problems. .
Almost every SAT math problem can be solved with the below math. My DVD SAT math seminar shows how-to while covering the necessary math.
Print (click icon below) the below ( if blank click here ), free, 6-page SAT Math Notes and use as a crash course and/or a quick reference "cheat sheet."
The 4-column, small-type, terse-wording design enables students to quickly find and read formulas. On a table or a large desk, 6-pages can be viewed instantly.
This website is for the pre-2016 SAT Test. The SAT sold out to Common Core money.
The new redesigned 2016 SAT is Common Core garbage, designed by the Common Core architect himself.
All You Have To Do Is Listen
5,000 Vocabulary Words on 7 audio CDs ($) or Free download
Upgrade Your Vocabulary and Math to
Upgrade Your School, Career and Life
|
Deprecation
|
What herb is traditionally associated, besides garlic, with the pickling of a gherkin (US pickle)?
|
5000 FREE SAT Test Prep Words - 5000 Vocabulary Words FREE
abase v. To lower in position, estimation, or the like; degrade. ← Many vocabulary words, such as degrade, are repeated in definitions for double learning.
abbess n. The lady superior of a nunnery.
abbey n. The group of buildings which collectively form the dwelling-place of a society of monks or nuns. Free SAT prep math notes below vocabulary ↓
abbot n. The superior of a community of monks.
abdicate v. To give up (royal power or the like).
abdomen n. In mammals, the visceral cavity between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor; the belly.
abdominal n. Of, pertaining to, or situated on the abdomen.
abduction n. A carrying away of a person against his will, or illegally.
abed adv. In bed; on a bed.
aberration n. Deviation from a right, customary, or prescribed course.
abet v. To aid, promote, or encourage the commission of (an offense).
abeyance n. A state of suspension or temporary inaction.
abhorrence n. The act of detesting extremely.
abhorrent adj. Very repugnant; hateful.
abidance n. An abiding.
abject adj. Sunk to a low condition.
abjure v. To recant, renounce, repudiate under oath.
able-bodied adj. Competent for physical service.
ablution n. A washing or cleansing, especially of the body.
abnegate v. To renounce (a right or privilege).
abnormal adj. Not conformed to the ordinary rule or standard.
abominable adj. Very hateful.
abominate v. To hate violently.
abomination n. A very detestable act or practice.
aboriginal adj. Primitive; unsophisticated.
aborigines n. The original of earliest known inhabitants of a country.
aboveboard adv. & adj. Without concealment, fraud, or trickery.
abrade v. To wear away the surface or some part of by friction.
abrasion n. That which is rubbed off.
abridge v. To make shorter in words, keeping the essential features, leaning out minor particles.
abridgment n. A condensed form as of a book or play.
abrogate v. To abolish, repeal.
abrupt adj. Beginning, ending, or changing suddenly or with a break.
abscess n. A Collection of pus in a cavity formed within some tissue of the body.
abscission n. The act of cutting off, as in a surgical operation.
abscond v. To depart suddenly and secretly, as for the purpose of escaping arrest.
absence n. The fact of not being present or available.
absent-minded adj. Lacking in attention to immediate surroundings or business.
absolution n. Forgiveness, or passing over of offenses.
absolve v. To free from sin or its penalties.
absorb v. To drink in or suck up, as a sponge absorbs water.
absorption n. The act or process of absorbing.
abstain v. To keep oneself back (from doing or using something).
abstemious adj. Characterized by self denial or abstinence, as in the use of drink, food.
abstinence n. Self denial.
abstruse adj. Dealing with matters difficult to be understood.
absurd adj. Inconsistent with reason or common sense.
abundant adj. Plentiful.
abusive adj. Employing harsh words or ill treatment.
abut v. To touch at the end or boundary line.
abyss n. Bottomless gulf.
academic adj. Of or pertaining to an academy, college, or university.
academician n. A member of an academy of literature, art, or science.
academy n. Any institution where the higher branches of learning are taught.
accede v. To agree.
accelerate v. To move faster.
accept v. To take when offered.
access n. A way of approach or entrance; passage.
accessible adj. Approachable.
accession n. Induction or elevation, as to dignity, office, or government.
accessory n. A person or thing that aids the principal agent.
acclaim v. To utter with a shout.
accommodate v. To furnish something as a kindness or favor.
accompaniment n. A subordinate part or parts, enriching or supporting the leading part.
accompanist n. One who or that which accompanies.
accompany v. To go with, or be associated with, as a companion.
accomplice n. An associate in wrong-doing.
accomplish v. To bring to pass.
accordion n. A portable free-reed musical instrument.
accost v. To speak to.
account n. A record or statement of receipts and expenditures, or of business transactions.
accouter v. To dress.
accredit v. To give credit or authority to.
accumulate v. To become greater in quantity or number.
accuracy n. Exactness.
accurate adj. Conforming exactly to truth or to a standard.
accursed adj. Doomed to evil, misery, or misfortune.
accusation n. A charge of crime, misdemeanor, or error.
accusatory adj. Of, pertaining to, or involving an accusation.
accuse v. To charge with wrong doing, misconduct, or error.
accustom v. To make familiar by use.
acerbity n. Sourness, with bitterness and astringency.
acetate n. A salt of acetic acid.
acetic adj. Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of vinegar.
ache v. To be in pain or distress.
Achillean adj. Invulnerable.
acid n. A sour substance.
acidify v. To change into acid.
acknowledge v. To recognize; to admit the genuineness or validity of.
acknowledgment n. Recognition.
acme n. The highest point, or summit.
acoustic adj. Pertaining to the act or sense of hearing.
acquaint v. To make familiar or conversant.
acquiesce v. To comply; submit.
acquiescence n. Passive consent.
acquire v. To get as one's own.
acquisition n. Anything gained, or made one's own, usually by effort or labor.
acquit v. To free or clear, as from accusation.
acquittal n. A discharge from accusation by judicial action.
acquittance n. Release or discharge from indebtedness, obligation, or responsibility.
acreage n. Quantity or extent of land, especially of cultivated land.
acrid adj. Harshly pungent or bitter.
acrimonious adj. Full of bitterness.
acrimony n. Sharpness or bitterness of speech or temper.
actionable adj. Affording cause for instituting an action, as trespass, slanderous words.
actuality n. Any reality.
actuary n. An officer, as of an insurance company, who calculates and states the risks and premiums.
actuate v. To move or incite to action.
acumen n. Quickness of intellectual insight, or discernment; keenness of discrimination.
acute adj. Having fine and penetrating discernment.
adamant n. Any substance of exceeding hardness or impenetrability.
addendum n. Something added, or to be added.
addle v. To make inefficient or worthless; muddle.
adduce v. To bring forward or name for consideration.
adhere v. To stick fast or together.
adherence n. Attachment.
adherent adj. Clinging or sticking fast.
adhesion n. The state of being attached or joined.
adieu inter. Good-by; farewell.
adjacency n. The state of being adjacent.
adjacent n. That which is near or bordering upon.
adjudge v. To award or bestow by formal decision.
adjunct n. Something joined to or connected with another thing, but holding a subordinate place.
adjuration n. A vehement appeal.
adjutant adj. Auxiliary.
administrator n. One who manages affairs of any kind.
admissible adj. Having the right or privilege of entry.
admittance n. Entrance, or the right or permission to enter.
admonish v. To warn of a fault.
admonition n. Gentle reproof.
ado n. unnecessary activity or ceremony.
adoration n. Profound devotion.
adroit adj. Having skill in the use of the bodily or mental powers.
adulterant n. An adulterating substance.
adulterate v. To make impure by the admixture of other or baser ingredients.
adumbrate v. To represent beforehand in outline or by emblem.
advent n. The coming or arrival, as of any important change, event, state, or personage.
adverse adj. Opposing or opposed.
adversity n. Misfortune.
advert v. To refer incidentally.
advertiser n. One who advertises, especially in newspapers.
advisory adj. Not mandatory.
advocacy n. The act of pleading a cause.
advocate n. One who pleads the cause of another, as in a legal or ecclesiastical court.
aerial adj. Of, pertaining to, or like the air.
aeronaut n. One who navigates the air, a balloonist.
aeronautics n. the art or practice of flying aircraft
aerostat n. A balloon or other apparatus floating in or sustained by the air.
aerostatics n. The branch of pneumatics that treats of the equilibrium, pressure, and mechanical properties.
affable adj. Easy to approach.
affect v. To act upon
affectation n. A studied or ostentatious pretense or attempt.
affiliate n. Some auxiliary person or thing.
affirmative adj. Answering yes; to a question at issue.
affix v. To fasten.
affluence n. A profuse or abundant supply of riches.
affront n. An open insult or indignity.
afire adv. & adj. On fire, literally or figuratively.
afoot adv. In progress.
aforesaid adj. Said in a preceding part or before.
afresh adv. Once more, after rest or interval.
afterthought n. A thought that comes later than its appropriate or expected time.
agglomerate v. To pile or heap together.
aggrandize v. To cause to appear greatly.
aggravate v. To make heavier, worse, or more burdensome.
aggravation n. The fact of being made heavier or more heinous, as a crime , offense, misfortune, etc.
aggregate n. The entire number, sum, mass, or quantity of something.
aggress v. To make the first attack.
aggression n. An unprovoked attack.
aggrieve v. To give grief or sorrow to.
aghast adj. Struck with terror and amazement.
agile adj. Able to move or act quickly, physically, or mentally.
agitate v. To move or excite (the feelings or thoughts).
agrarian adj. Pertaining to land, especially agricultural land.
aide-de-camp n. An officer who receives and transmits the orders of the general.
ailment n. Slight sickness.
akin adj. Of similar nature or qualities.
alabaster n. A white or delicately tinted fine-grained gypsum.
alacrity n. Cheerful willingness.
albeit conj. Even though.
albino n. A person with milky white skin and hair, and eyes with bright red pupil and usually pink iris.
album n. A book whose leaves are so made to form paper frames for holding photographs or the like.
alchemy n. Chemistry of the middle ages, characterized by the pursuit of changing base metals to gold.
alcohol n. A volatile, inflammable, colorless liquid of a penetrating odor and burning taste.
alcoholism n. A condition resulting from the inordinate or persistent use of alcoholic beverages.
alcove n. A covered recess connected with or at the side of a larger room.
alder n. Any shrub or small tree of the genus Alumnus, of the oak family.
alderman n. A member of a municipal legislative body, who usually exercises also certain judicial functions.
aldermanship n. The dignity, condition, office, or term of office of an alderman.
alias n. An assumed name.
alien n. One who owes allegiance to a foreign government.
alienable adj. Capable of being aliened or alienated, as lands.
alienate v. To cause to turn away.
alienation n. Estrangement.
aliment n. That which nourishes.
alkali n. Anything that will neutralize an acid, as lime, magnesia, etc.
allay v. To calm the violence or reduce the intensity of; mitigate.
allege v. To assert to be true, especially in a formal manner, as in court.
allegory n. The setting forth of a subject under the guise of another subject of aptly suggestive likeness.
alleviate v. To make less burdensome or less hard to bear.
alley n. A narrow street, garden path, walk, or the like.
alliance n. Any combination or union for some common purpose.
allot v. To assign a definite thing or part to a certain person.
allotment n. Portion.
allude v. To refer incidentally, or by suggestion.
allusion n. An indirect and incidental reference to something without definite mention of it.
alluvion n. Flood.
ally n. A person or thing connected with another, usually in some relation of helpfulness.
almanac n. A series of tables giving the days of the week together with certain astronomical information.
aloof adv. Not in sympathy with or desiring to associate with others.
altar n. Any raised place or structure on which sacrifices may be offered or incense burned.
alter v. To make change in.
alteration n. Change or modification.
altercate v. To contend angrily or zealously in words.
alternate n. One chosen to act in place of another, in case of the absence or incapacity of that other.
alternative n. Something that may or must exist, be taken or chosen, or done instead of something else.
altitude n. Vertical distance or elevation above any point or base-level, as the sea.
alto n. The lowest or deepest female voice or part.
altruism n. Benevolence to others on subordination to self-interest.
altruist n. One who advocates or practices altruism.
amalgam n. An alloy or union of mercury with another metal.
amalgamate v. To mix or blend together in a homogeneous body.
amateur adj. Practicing an art or occupation for the love of it, but not as a profession.
amatory adj. Designed to excite love.
ambidextrous adj. Having the ability of using both hands with equal skill or ease.
ambiguous adj. Having a double meaning.
ambitious adj. Eagerly desirous and aspiring.
ambrosial adj. Divinely sweet, fragrant, or delicious.
ambulance n. A vehicle fitted for conveying the sick and wounded.
ambulate v. To walk about
ambush n. The act or state of lying concealed for the purpose of surprising or attacking the enemy.
ameliorate v. To relieve, as from pain or hardship
amenable adj. Willing and ready to submit.
Americanism n. A peculiar sense in which an English word or phrase is used in the United States.
amicable adj. Done in a friendly spirit.
amity n. Friendship.
amorous adj. Having a propensity for falling in love.
amorphous adj. Without determinate shape.
amour n. A love-affair, especially one of an illicit nature.
ampere n. The practical unit of electric-current strength.
ampersand n. The character &; and.
amphibious adj. Living both on land and in water.
amphitheater n. An edifice of elliptical shape, constructed about a central open space or arena.
amplitude n. Largeness.
amputate v. To remove by cutting, as a limb or some portion of the body.
amusement n. Diversion.
anachronism n. Anything occurring or existing out of its proper time.
anagram n. The letters of a word or phrase so transposed as to make a different word or phrase.
analogous adj. Corresponding (to some other) in certain respects, as in form, proportion, relations.
analogy n. Reasoning in which from certain and known relations or resemblance others are formed.
analyst n. One who analyzes or makes use of the analytical method.
analyze v. To examine minutely or critically.
anarchy n. Absence or utter disregard of government.
anathema n. Anything forbidden, as by social usage.
anatomy n. That branch of morphology which treats of the structure of organisms.
ancestry n. One's ancestors collectively.
anecdote n. A brief account of some interesting event or incident.
anemia n. Deficiency of blood or red corpuscles.
anemic adj. Affected with anemia.
anemometer n. An instrument for measuring the force or velocity of wind.
anesthetic adj. Pertaining to or producing loss of sensation.
anew adv. Once more.
angelic adj. Saintly.
Anglophobia n. Hatred or dread of England or of what is English.
Anglo-Saxon n. The entire English race wherever found, as in Europe, the United States, or India.
angular adj. Sharp-cornered.
animadversion n. The utterance of criticism or censure.
animadvert v. To pass criticism or censure.
animalcule n. An animal of microscopic smallness.
animate v. To make alive.
animosity n. Hatred.
annals n. A record of events in their chronological order, year by year.
annex v. To add or affix at the end.
annihilate v. To destroy absolutely.
annotate v. To make explanatory or critical notes on or upon.
annual adj. Occurring every year.
annuity n. An annual allowance, payment, or income.
annunciation n. Proclamation.
anode n. The point where or path by which a voltaic current enters an electrolyte or the like.
anonymous adj. Of unknown authorship.
antagonism n. Mutual opposition or resistance of counteracting forces, principles, or persons.
Antarctic adj. Pertaining to the south pole or the regions near it.
ante v. In the game of poker, to put up a stake before the cards are dealt.
antecede v. To precede.
antecedent n. One who or that which precedes or goes before, as in time, place, rank, order, or causality.
antechamber n. A waiting room for those who seek audience.
antedate v. To assign or affix a date to earlier than the actual one.
antediluvian adj. Of or pertaining to the times, things, events before the great flood in the days of Noah.
antemeridian adj. Before noon.
antemundane adj. Pertaining to time before the world's creation.
antenatal adj. Occurring or existing before birth.
anterior adj. Prior.
anteroom n. A room situated before and opening into another, usually larger.
anthology n. A collection of extracts from the writings of various authors.
anthracite n. Hard coal.
anthropology n. The science of man in general.
anthropomorphous adj. Having or resembling human form.
antic n. A grotesque, ludicrous, or fantastic action.
Antichrist n. Any opponent or enemy of Christ, whether a person or a power.
anticlimax n. A gradual or sudden decrease in the importance or impressiveness of what is said.
anticyclone n. An atmospheric condition of high central pressure, with currents flowing outward.
antidote n. Anything that will counteract or remove the effects of poison, disease, or the like.
antilogy n. Inconsistency or contradiction in terms or ideas.
antipathize v. To show or feel a feeling of antagonism, aversion, or dislike.
antiphon n. A response or alteration of responses, generally musical.
antiphony n. An anthem or other composition sung responsively.
antipodes n. A place or region on the opposite side of the earth.
antiquary n. One who collects and examines old things, as coins, books, medals, weapons, etc.
antiquate v. To make old or out of date.
antique adj. Pertaining to ancient times.
antiseptic n. Anything that destroys or restrains the growth of putrefactive micro-organisms.
antislavery adj. Opposed to human slavery.
antispasmodic adj. Tending to prevent or relieve non-inflammatory spasmodic affections.
antistrophe n. The inversion of terms in successive classes, as in "the home of joy and the joy of home".
antitoxin n. A substance which neutralizes the poisonous products of micro-organisms.
antonym n. A word directly opposed to another in meaning.
anxious adj. Distressed in mind respecting some uncertain matter.
apathy n. Insensibility to emotion or passionate feeling.
aperture n. Hole.
apex n. The highest point, as of a mountain.
aphorism n. Proverb.
apiary n. A place where bees are kept.
apogee n. The climax.
apology n. A disclaimer of intentional error or offense.
apostasy n. A total departure from one's faith or religion.
apostate adj. False.
apostle n. Any messenger commissioned by or as by divine authority.
apothecary n. One who keeps drugs for sale and puts up prescriptions.
apotheosis n. Deification.
appall v. To fill with dismay or horror.
apparent adj. Easily understood.
appease v. To soothe by quieting anger or indignation.
appellate adj. Capable of being appealed to.
appellation n. The name or title by which a particular person, class, or thing is called.
append v. To add or attach, as something accessory, subordinate, or supplementary.
appertain v. To belong, as by right, fitness, association, classification, possession, or natural relation.
apposite adj. Appropriate.
apposition n. The act of placing side by side, together, or in contact.
appraise v. To estimate the money value of.
appreciable adj. Capable of being discerned by the senses or intellect.
apprehend v. To make a prisoner of (a person) in the name of the law.
apprehensible adj. Capable of being conceived.
approbation n. Sanction.
appropriate adj. Suitable for the purpose and circumstances.
aqueduct n. A water-conduit, particularly one for supplying a community from a distance.
aqueous adj. Of, pertaining to, or containing water.
arbiter n. One chosen or appointed, by mutual consent of parties in dispute, to decide matters.
arbitrary adj. Fixed or done capriciously.
arbitrate v. To act or give judgment as umpire.
arbor n. A tree.
arboreal adj. Of or pertaining to a tree or trees.
arborescent adj. Having the nature of a tree.
arboretum n. A botanical garden or place devoted to the cultivation of trees or shrubs.
arboriculture n. The cultivation of trees or shrubs.
arcade n. A vaulted passageway or street; a roofed passageway having shops, etc., opening from it.
archaic adj. Antiquated
archaism n. Obsolescence.
archangel n. An angel of high rank.
archbishop n. The chief of the bishops of an ecclesiastical province in the Greek, Roman, and Anglican church.
archdeacon n. A high official administrator of the affairs of a diocese.
archaeology n. The branch of anthropology concerned with the systematic investigation of the relics of man.
archetype n. A prototype.
archipelago n. Any large body of water studded with islands, or the islands collectively themselves.
ardent adj. Burning with passion.
ardor n. Intensity of passion or affection.
arid adj. Very dry.
aristocracy n. A hereditary nobility
aristocrat n. A hereditary noble or one nearly connected with nobility.
armada n. A fleet of war-vessels.
armful n. As much as can be held in the arm or arms.
armory n. An arsenal.
aroma n. An agreeable odor.
arraign v. To call into court, as a person indicted for crime, and demand whether he pleads guilty or not.
arrange v. To put in definite or proper order.
arrangement n. The act of putting in proper order, or the state of being put in order.
arrant adj. Notoriously bad.
arrear n. Something overdue and unpaid.
arrival n. A coming to stopping-place or destination.
arrogant adj. Unduly or excessively proud, as of wealth, station, learning, etc.
arrogate v. To take, demand, or claim, especially presumptuously or without reasons or grounds.
Artesian well n. A very deep bored well. water rises due to underground pressure
artful adj. Characterized by craft or cunning.
Arthurian adj. Pertaining to King Arthur, the real or legendary hero of British poetic story.
artifice n. Trickery.
ascension n. The act of rising.
ascent n. A rising, soaring, or climbing.
ascetic adj. Given to severe self-denial and practicing excessive abstinence and devotion.
ascribe v. To assign as a quality or attribute.
asexual adj. Having no distinct sexual organs.
ashen adj. Pale.
askance adv. With a side or indirect glance or meaning.
asperity n. Harshness or roughness of temper.
aspirant n. One who seeks earnestly, as for advancement, honors, place.
aspiration n. An earnest wish for that which is above one's present reach.
aspire v. To have an earnest desire, wish, or longing, as for something high and good, not yet attained.
assailant n. One who attacks.
assassin n. One who kills, or tries to kill, treacherously or secretly.
assassinate v. To kill, as by surprise or secret assault, especially the killing of some eminent person.
assassination n. Murderer, as by secret assault or treachery.
assay n. The chemical analysis or testing of an alloy ore.
assent v. To express agreement with a statement or matter of opinion.
assess v. To determine the amount of (a tax or other sum to be paid).
assessor n. An officer whose duty it is to assess taxes.
assets n. pl. Property in general, regarded as applicable to the payment of debts.
assiduous adj. Diligent.
assignee n. One who is appointed to act for another in the management of certain property and interests.
assimilate v. To adapt.
assonance n. Resemblance or correspondence in sound.
assonant adj. Having resemblance of sound.
assonate v. To accord in sound, especially vowel sound.
assuage v. To cause to be less harsh, violent, or severe, as excitement, appetite, pain, or disease.
astringent adj. Harsh in disposition or character.
astute adj. Keen in discernment.
atheism n. The denial of the existence of God.
athirst adj. Wanting water.
athwart adv. From side to side.
atomizer n. An apparatus for reducing a liquid to a fine spray, as for disinfection, inhalation, etc.
atone v. To make amends for.
atonement n. Amends, reparation, or expiation made from wrong or injury.
atrocious adj. Outrageously or wantonly wicked, criminal, vile, or cruel.
atrocity n. Great cruelty or reckless wickedness.
attache n. A subordinate member of a diplomatic embassy.
attest v. To certify as accurate, genuine, or true.
attorney-general n. The chief law-officer of a government.
auburn adj. Reddish-brown, said usually of the hair.
audacious adj. Fearless.
audible adj. Loud enough to be heard.
audition n. The act or sensation of hearing.
auditory adj. Of or pertaining to hearing or the organs or sense of hearing.
augment v. To make bigger.
augur v. To predict.
Augustinian adj. Pertaining to St. Augustine, his doctrines, or the religious orders called after him.
aura n. Pervasive psychic influence supposed to emanate from persons
aural adj. Of or pertaining to the ear.
auricle n. One of the two chambers of the heart which receives the blood from the veins.
auricular adj. Of or pertaining to the ear, its auricle, or the sense of hearing.
auriferous adj. Containing gold.
aurora n. A luminous phenomenon in the upper regions of the atmosphere.
auspice n. favoring, protecting, or propitious influence or guidance.
austere adj. Severely simple; unadorned.
autarchy n. Unrestricted power.
authentic adj. Of undisputed origin.
authenticity n. The state or quality of being genuine, or of the origin and authorship claimed.
autobiography n. The story of one's life written by himself.
autocracy n. Absolute government.
autocrat n. Any one who claims or wields unrestricted or undisputed authority or influence.
automaton n. Any living being whose actions are or appear to be involuntary or mechanical.
autonomous adj. Self-governing.
autonomy n. Self-government.
autopsy n. The examination of a dead body by dissection to ascertain the cause of death.
autumnal adj. Of or pertaining to autumn.
auxiliary n. One who or that which aids or helps, especially when regarded as subsidiary or accessory.
avalanche n. The fall or sliding of a mass of snow or ice down a mountain-slope, often bearing with it rock.
avarice n. Passion for getting and keeping riches.
aver v. To assert as a fact.
averse adj. Reluctant.
aversion n. A mental condition of fixed opposition to or dislike of some particular thing.
avert v. To turn away or aside.
aviary n. A spacious cage or enclosure in which live birds are kept.
avidity n. Greediness.
avow v. To declare openly.
awaken v. To arouse, as emotion, interest, or the like.
awry adv. & adj. Out of the proper form, direction, or position.
aye adv. An expression of assent.
azalea n. A flowering shrub.
azure n. The color of the sky.
Baconian adj. Of or pertaining to Lord Bacon or his system of philosophy.
bacterium n. A microbe.
baffle v. To foil or frustrate.
bailiff n. An officer of court having custody of prisoners under arraignment.
baize n. A single-colored napped woolen fabric used for table-covers, curtains, etc.
bale n. A large package prepared for transportation or storage.
baleful adj. Malignant.
ballad n. Any popular narrative poem, often with epic subject and usually in lyric form.
balsam n. A medical preparation, aromatic and oily, used for healing.
banal adj. Commonplace.
barcarole n. A boat-song of Venetian gondoliers.
barograph n. An instrument that registers graphically and continuously the atmospheric pressure.
barometer n. An instrument for indicating the atmospheric pressure per unit of surface.
barring prep. Apart from.
baritone adj. Having a register higher than bass and lower than tenor.
bask v. To make warm by genial heat.
bass adj. Low in tone or compass.
baste v. To cover with melted fat, gravy, while cooking.
baton n. An official staff borne either as a weapon or as an emblem of authority or privilege.
battalion n. A body of infantry composed of two or more companies, forming a part of a regiment.
batten n. A narrow strip of wood.
batter n. A thick liquid mixture of two or more materials beaten together, to be used in cookery.
bauble n. A trinket.
bawl v. To proclaim by outcry.
beatify v. To make supremely happy.
beatitude n. Any state of great happiness.
beau n. An escort or lover.
becalm v. To make quiet.
beck v. To give a signal to, by nod or gesture.
bedaub v. To smear over, as with something oily or sticky.
bedeck v. To cover with ornament.
bedlam n. Madhouse.
befriend v. To be a friend to, especially when in need.
beget v. To produce by sexual generation.
begrudge v. To envy one of the possession of.
belate v. To delay past the proper hour.
belay v. To make fast, as a rope, by winding round a cleat.
belie v. To misrepresent.
believe v. To accept as true on the testimony or authority of others.
belittle v. To disparage.
belle n. A woman who is a center of attraction because of her beauty, accomplishments, etc.
bellicose adj. Warlike.
belligerent adj. Manifesting a warlike spirit.
bemoan v. To lament
benediction n. a solemn invocation of the divine blessing.
benefactor n. A doer of kindly and charitable acts.
benefice n. A church office endowed with funds or property for the maintenance of divine service.
beneficent adj. Characterized by charity and kindness.
beneficial adj. Helpful.
beneficiary n. One who is lawfully entitled to the profits and proceeds of an estate or property.
benefit n. Helpful result.
benevolence n. Any act of kindness or well-doing.
benevolent adj. Loving others and actively desirous of their well-being.
benign adj. Good and kind of heart.
benignant adj. Benevolent in feeling, character, or aspect.
benignity n. Kindness of feeling, disposition, or manner.
benison n. Blessing.
bequeath v. To give by will.
bereave v. To make desolate with loneliness and grief.
berth n. A bunk or bed in a vessel, sleeping-car, etc.
beseech v. To implore.
beset v. To attack on all sides.
besmear v. To smear over, as with any oily or sticky substance.
bestial adj. Animal.
bestrew v. To sprinkle or cover with things strewn.
bestride v. To get or sit upon astride, as a horse.
bethink v. To remind oneself.
betide v. To happen to or befall.
betimes adv. In good season or time.
betroth v. To engage to marry.
betrothal n. Engagement to marry.
bevel n. Any inclination of two surfaces other than 90 degrees.
bewilder v. To confuse the perceptions or judgment of.
bibliomania n. The passion for collecting books.
bibliography n. A list of the words of an author, or the literature bearing on a particular subject.
bibliophile n. One who loves books.
bibulous adj. Fond of drinking.
bide v. To await.
biennial n. A plant that produces leaves and roots the first year and flowers and fruit the second.
bier n. A horizontal framework with two handles at each end for carrying a corpse to the grave.
bigamist n. One who has two spouses at the same time.
bigamy n. The crime of marrying any other person while having a legal spouse living.
bight n. A slightly receding bay between headlands, formed by a long curve of a coast-line.
bilateral adj. Two-sided.
bilingual adj. Speaking two languages.
biograph n. A bibliographical sketch or notice.
biography n. A written account of one's life, actions, and character.
biology n. The science of life or living organisms.
biped n. An animal having two feet.
birthright n. A privilege or possession into which one is born.
bitterness n. Acridity, as to the taste.
blase adj. Sated with pleasure.
blaspheme v. To indulge in profane oaths.
blatant adj. Noisily or offensively loud or clamorous.
blaze n. A vivid glowing flame.
blazon v. To make widely or generally known.
bleak adj. Desolate.
blemish n. A mark that mars beauty.
blithe adj. Joyous.
blithesome adj. Cheerful.
blockade n. The shutting up of a town, a frontier, or a line of coast by hostile forces.
boatswain n. A subordinate officer of a vessel, who has general charge of the rigging, anchors, etc.
bodice n. A women's ornamental corset-shaped laced waist.
bodily adj. Corporeal.
boisterous adj. Unchecked merriment or animal spirits.
bole n. The trunk or body of a tree.
bolero n. A Spanish dance, illustrative of the passion of love, accompanied by caste nets and singing.
boll n. A round pod or seed-capsule, as a flax or cotton.
bolster v. To support, as something wrong.
bomb n. A hollow projectile containing an explosive material.
bombard v. To assail with any missile or with abusive speech.
bombardier n. A person who has charge of mortars, bombs, and shells.
bombast n. Inflated or extravagant language, especially on unimportant subjects.
boorish adj. Rude.
bore v. To weary by tediousness or dullness.
borough n. An incorporated village or town.
bosom n. The breast or the upper front of the thorax of a human being, especially of a woman.
botanical adj. Connected with the study or cultivation of plants.
botanize v. To study plant-life.
botany n. The science that treats of plants.
bountiful adj. Showing abundance.
Bowdlerize v. To expurgate in editing (a literary composition) by omitting words or passages.
bowler n. In cricket, the player who delivers the ball.
boycott v. To place the products or merchandise of under a ban.
brae n. Hillside.
braggart n. A vain boaster.
brandish v. To wave, shake, or flourish triumphantly or defiantly, as a sword or spear.
bravado n. An aggressive display of boldness.
bravo interj. Well done.
bray n. A loud harsh sound, as the cry of an ass or the blast of a horn.
braze v. To make of or ornament with brass.
brazier n. An open pan or basin for holding live coals.
breach n. The violation of official duty, lawful right, or a legal obligation.
breaker n. One who trains horses, dogs, etc.
breech n. The buttocks.
brethren n. pl. Members of a brotherhood, gild, profession, association, or the like.
brevity n. Shortness of duration.
bric-a-brac n. Objects of curiosity or for decoration.
bridle n. The head-harness of a horse consisting of a head-stall, a bit, and the reins.
brigade n. A body of troops consisting of two or more regiments.
brigadier n. General officer who commands a brigade, ranking between a colonel and a major-general.
brigand n. One who lives by robbery and plunder.
brimstone n. Sulfur.
brine n. Water saturated with salt.
bristle n. One of the coarse, stiff hairs of swine: used in brush-making, etc.
Britannia n. The United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Briticism n. A word, idiom, or phrase characteristic of Great Britain or the British.
brittle adj. Fragile.
broach v. To mention, for the first time.
broadcast adj. Disseminated far and wide.
brogan n. A coarse, heavy shoe.
brogue n. Any dialectic pronunciation of English, especially that of the Irish people.
brokerage n. The business of making sales and purchases for a commission; a broker.
bromine n. A dark reddish-brown, non-metallic liquid element with a suffocating odor.
bronchitis n. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
bronchus n. Either of the two subdivisions of the trachea conveying air into the lungs.
brooch n. An article of jewelry fastened by a hinged pin and hook on the underside.
brotherhood n. Spiritual or social fellowship or solidarity.
browbeat v. To overwhelm, or attempt to do so, by stern, haughty, or rude address or manner.
brusque adj. Somewhat rough or rude in manner or speech.
buffoon n. A clown.
buffoonery n. Low drollery, coarse jokes, etc.
bulbous adj. Of, or pertaining to, or like a bulb.
bullock n. An ox.
bulrush n. Any one of various tall rush-like plants growing in damp ground or water.
bulwark n. Anything that gives security or defense.
bumper n. A cup or glass filled to the brim, especially one to be drunk as a toast or health.
bumptious adj. Full of offensive and aggressive self-conceit.
bungle v. To execute clumsily.
buoyancy n. Power or tendency to float on or in a liquid or gas.
buoyant adj. Having the power or tendency to float or keep afloat.
bureau n. A chest of drawers for clothing, etc.
bureaucracy n. Government by departments of men transacting particular branches of public business.
burgess n. In colonial times, a member of the lower house of the legislature of Maryland or Virginia.
burgher n. An inhabitant, citizen or freeman of a borough burgh, or corporate town.
burnish v. To make brilliant or shining.
bursar n. A treasurer.
butt v. To strike with or as with the head, or horns.
butte n. A conspicuous hill, low mountain, or natural turret, generally isolated.
buttress n. Any support or prop.
by-law n. A rule or law adopted by an association, a corporation, or the like.
cabal n. A number of persons secretly united for effecting by intrigue some private purpose.
cabalism n. Superstitious devotion to one's religion.
cabinet n. The body of men constituting the official advisors of the executive head of a nation.
cacophony n. A disagreeable, harsh, or discordant sound or combination of sounds or tones.
cadaverous adj. Resembling a corpse.
cadence n. Rhythmical or measured flow or movement, as in poetry or the time and pace of marching troops.
cadenza n. An embellishment or flourish, prepared or improvised, for a solo voice or instrument.
caitiff adj. Cowardly.
cajole v. To impose on or dupe by flattering speech.
cajolery n. Delusive speech.
calculable adj. That may be estimated by reckoning.
calculus n. A concretion formed in various parts of the body resembling a pebble in hardness.
callosity n. The state of being hard and insensible.
callow adj. Without experience of the world.
calorie n. Amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree centigrade.
calumny n. Slander.
Calvary n. The place where Christ was crucified.
Calvinism n. The system of doctrine taught by John Calvin.
Calvinize v. To teach or imbue with the doctrines of Calvinism.
came n. A leaden sash-bar or grooved strip for fastening panes in stained-glass windows.
cameo n. Any small engraved or carved work in relief.
campaign n. A complete series of connected military operations.
Canaanite n. A member of one of the three tribes that dwelt in the land of Canaan, or western Palestine.
canary adj. Of a bright but delicate yellow.
candid adj. Straightforward.
candor n. The quality of frankness or outspokenness.
canine adj. Characteristic of a dog.
canon n. Any rule or law.
cant v. To talk in a singsong, preaching tone with affected solemnity.
cantata n. A choral composition.
canto n. One of the divisions of an extended poem.
cantonment n. The part of the town or district in which the troops are quartered.
capacious adj. Roomy.
capillary n. A minute vessel having walls composed of a single layer of cells.
capitulate v. To surrender or stipulate terms.
caprice n. A whim.
caption n. A heading, as of a chapter, section, document, etc.
captious adj. Hypercritical.
captivate v. To fascinate, as by excellence. eloquence, or beauty.
carcass n. The dead body of an animal.
cardiac adj. Pertaining to the heart.
cardinal adj. Of prime or special importance.
caret n. A sign (^) placed below a line, indicating where omitted words, etc., should be inserted.
caricature n. a picture or description in which natural characteristics are exaggerated or distorted.
carnage n. Massacre.
carnivorous adj. Eating or living on flesh.
carouse v. To drink deeply and in boisterous or jovial manner.
carrion n. Dead and putrefying flesh.
cartilage n. An elastic animal tissue of firm consistence.
cartridge n. A charge for a firearm, or for blasting.
caste n. The division of society on artificial grounds.
castigate v. To punish.
casual adj. Accidental, by chance.
casualty n. A fatal or serious accident or disaster.
cataclysm n. Any overwhelming flood of water.
cataract n. Opacity of the lens of the eye resulting in complete or partial blindness.
catastrophe n. Any great and sudden misfortune or calamity.
cathode n. The negative pole or electrode of a galvanic battery.
Catholicism n. The system, doctrine, and practice of the Roman Catholic Church.
catholicity n. Universal prevalence or acceptance.
cat-o-nine-tails n. An instrument consisting of nine pieces of cord, formerly used for flogging in the army and navy.
caucus n. A private meeting of members of a political party to select candidates.
causal adj. Indicating or expressing a cause.
caustic adj. Sarcastic and severe.
cauterize v. To burn or sear as with a heated iron.
cede v. To pass title to.
censor n. An official examiner of manuscripts empowered to prohibit their publication.
censorious adj. Judging severely or harshly.
census n. An official numbering of the people of a country or district.
centenary adj. Pertaining to a hundred years or a period of a hundred years.
centiliter n. A hundredth of a liter.
centimeter n. A length of one hundredth of a meter.
centurion n. A captain of a company of one hundred infantry in the ancient Roman army.
cereal adj. Pertaining to edible grain or farinaceous seeds.
ceremonial adj. Characterized by outward form or ceremony.
ceremonious adj. Observant of ritual.
cessation n. Discontinuance, as of action or motion.
cession n. Surrender, as of possessions or rights.
chagrin n. Keen vexation, annoyance, or mortification, as at one's failures or errors.
chameleon adj. Changeable in appearance.
chancery n. A court of equity, as distinguished from a common-law court.
chaos n. Any condition of which the elements or parts are in utter disorder and confusion.
characteristic n. A distinctive feature.
characterize v. To describe by distinctive marks or peculiarities.
charlatan n. A quack.
chasm n. A yawning hollow, as in the earth's surface.
chasten v. To purify by affliction.
chastise v. To subject to punitive measures.
chastity n. Sexual or moral purity.
chateau n. A castle or manor-house.
chattel n. Any article of personal property.
check v. To hold back.
chiffon n. A very thin gauze used for trimmings, evening dress, etc.
chivalry n. The knightly system of feudal times with its code, usages and practices.
cholera n. An acute epidemic disease.
choleric adj. Easily provoked to anger.
choral adj. Pertaining to, intended for, or performed by a chorus or choir.
Christ n. A title of Jesus
christen v. To name in baptism.
Christendom n. That part of the world where Christianity is generally professed.
chromatic adj. Belonging, relating to, or abounding in color.
chronology n. The science that treats of computation of time or of investigation and arrangement of events.
chronometer n. A portable timekeeper of the highest attainable precision.
cipher v. To calculate arithmetically. (also a noun meaning zero or nothing)
circulate v. To disseminate.
circumference n. The boundary-line of a circle.
circumlocution n. Indirect or roundabout expression.
circumnavigate v. To sail quite around.
circumscribe v. To confine within bounds.
circumspect adj. Showing watchfulness, caution, or careful consideration.
citadel n. Any strong fortress.
cite v. To refer to specifically.
claimant n. One who makes a claim or demand, as of right.
clairvoyance n. Intuitive sagacity or perception.
clamorous adj. Urgent in complaint or demand.
clan n. A tribe.
clangor n. Clanking or a ringing, as of arms, chains, or bells; clamor.
clarify v. To render intelligible.
clarion n. A small shrill trumpet or bugle.
classify v. To arrange in a class or classes on the basis of observed resemblances and differences.
clearance n. A certificate from the proper authorities that a vessel has complied with the law and may sail.
clemency n. Mercy.
close-hauled adj. Having the sails set for sailing as close to the wind as possible.
clothier n. One who makes or sells cloth or clothing.
clumsy adj. Awkward of movement.
coagulate v. To change into a clot or a jelly, as by heat, by chemical action, or by a ferment.
coagulant adj. Producing coagulation.
coalescence n. The act or process of coming together so as to form one body, combination, or product.
coalition n. Combination in a body or mass.
coddle v. To treat as a baby or an invalid.
codicil n. A supplement adding to, revoking, or explaining in the body of a will.
coerce v. To force.
coercion n. Forcible constraint or restraint, moral or physical.
coercive adj. Serving or tending to force.
cogent adj. Appealing strongly to the reason or conscience.
cognate adj. Akin.
cohere v. To stick together.
cohesion n. Consistency.
cohesive adj. Having the property of consistency.
coincide v. To correspond.
coincidence n. A circumstance so agreeing with another: often implying accident.
coincident adj. Taking place at the same time.
collaborate v. To labor or cooperate with another or others, especially in literary or scientific pursuits.
collapse v. To cause to shrink, fall in, or fail.
collapsible adj. That may or can collapse.
colleague n. An associate in professional employment.
collective adj. Consisting of a number of persons or objects considered as gathered into a mass, or sum.
collector n. One who makes a collection, as of objects of art, books, or the like.
collegian n. A college student.
collide v. To meet and strike violently.
collier n. One who works in a coal-mine.
collision n. Violent contact.
colloquial adj. Pertaining or peculiar to common speech as distinguished from literary.
colloquialism n. Form of speech used only or chiefly in conversation.
colloquy n. Conversation.
collusion n. A secret agreement for a wrongful purpose.
colossus n. Any strikingly great person or object.
comely adj. Handsome.
comestible adj. Fit to be eaten.
comical adj. Funny.
commemorate v. To serve as a remembrance of.
commentary n. A series of illustrative or explanatory notes on any important work.
commingle v. To blend.
commissariat n. The department of an army charged with the provision of its food and water and daily needs.
commission v. To empower.
commitment n. The act or process of entrusting or consigning for safe-keeping.
committal n. The act, fact, or result of committing, or the state of being
commodity n. Something that is bought and sold.
commotion n. A disturbance or violent agitation.
commute v. To put something, especially something less severe, in place of.
comparable adj. Fit to be compared.
comparative adj. Relative.
comparison n. Examination of two or more objects with reference to their likeness or unlikeness.
compensate v. To remunerate.
competence n. Adequate qualification or capacity.
competent adj. Qualified.
competitive adj. characterized by rivalry.
competitor n. A rival.
complacence n. Satisfaction with one's acts or surroundings.
complacent adj. Pleased or satisfied with oneself.
complaisance n. Politeness.
complement v. To make complete.
complex adj. Complicated.
complicate v. To make complex, difficult, or hard to deal with.
complication n. An intermingling or combination of things or parts, especially in a perplexing manner.
complicity n. Participation or partnership, as in wrong-doing or with a wrong-doer.
compliment v. To address or gratify with expressions of delicate praise.
component n. A constituent element or part.
comport v. To conduct or behave (oneself).
composure n. Calmness.
comprehension n. Ability to know.
comprehensive adj. Large in scope or content.
compress v. To press together or into smaller space.
compressible adj. Capable of being pressed into smaller compass.
compression n. Constraint, as by force or authority.
comprise v. To consist of.
compulsion n. Coercion.
concurrent adj. Occurring or acting together.
concussion n. A violent shock to some organ by a fall or a sudden blow.
condensation n. The act or process of making dense or denser.
condense v. To abridge.
condescend v. To come down voluntarily to equal terms with inferiors.
condolence n. Expression of sympathy with a person in pain, sorrow, or misfortune.
conduce v. To bring about.
conducive adj. Contributing to an end.
conductible adj. Capable of being conducted or transmitted.
conduit n. A means for conducting something, particularly a tube, pipe, or passageway for a fluid.
confectionery n. The candy collectively that a confectioner makes or sells, as candy.
confederacy n. A number of states or persons in compact or league with each other, as for mutual aid.
confederate n. One who is united with others in a league, compact, or agreement.
confer v. To bestow.
conferee n. A person with whom another confers.
confessor n. A spiritual advisor.
confidant n. One to whom secrets are entrusted.
confide v. To reveal in trust or confidence.
confidence n. The state or feeling of trust in or reliance upon another.
confident adj. Assured.
confinement n. Restriction within limits or boundaries.
confiscate v. To appropriate (private property) as forfeited to the public use or treasury.
conflagration n. A great fire, as of many buildings, a forest, or the like.
confluence n. The place where streams meet.
confluent n. A stream that unites with another.
conformance n. The act or state or conforming.
conformable adj. Harmonious.
conformation n. General structure, form, or outline.
conformity n. Correspondence in form, manner, or use.
confront v. To encounter, as difficulties or obstacles.
congeal v. To coagulate.
congenial adj. Having kindred character or tastes.
congest v. To collect into a mass.
congregate v. To bring together into a crowd.
coniferous adj. Cone-bearing trees.
conjugal adj. Pertaining to marriage, marital rights, or married persons.
conjugate adj. Joined together in pairs.
conjugation n. The state or condition of being joined together.
conjunction n. The state of being joined together, or the things so joined.
connive v. To be in collusion.
connoisseur n. A critical judge of art, especially one with thorough knowledge and sound judgment of art.
connote v. To mean; signify.
connubial adj. Pertaining to marriage or matrimony.
conquer v. To overcome by force.
consanguineous adj. Descended from the same parent or ancestor.
conscience n. The faculty in man by which he distinguishes between right and wrong in character and conduct.
conscientious adj. Governed by moral standard.
conscious adj. Aware that one lives, feels, and thinks.
conscript v. To force into military service.
consecrate v. To set apart as sacred.
consecutive adj. Following in uninterrupted succession.
consensus n. A collective unanimous opinion of a number of persons.
conservatism n. Tendency to adhere to the existing order of things.
conservative adj. Adhering to the existing order of things.
conservatory n. An institution for instruction and training in music and declamation.
consign v. To entrust.
consignee n. A person to whom goods or other property has been entrusted.
consignor n. One who entrusts.
consistency n. A state of permanence.
console v. To comfort.
consolidate v. To combine into one body or system.
consonance n. The state or quality of being in accord with.
consonant adj. Being in agreement or harmony with.
consort n. A companion or associate.
conspicuous adj. Clearly visible.
conspirator n. One who agrees with others to cooperate in accomplishing some unlawful purpose.
conspire v. To plot.
constable n. An officer whose duty is to maintain the peace.
constellation n. An arbitrary assemblage or group of stars.
consternation n. Panic.
constituency n. The inhabitants or voters in a district represented in a legislative body.
constituent n. One who has the right to vote at an election.
constrict v. To bind.
consul n. An officer appointed to reside in a foreign city, chiefly to represent his country.
consulate n. The place in which a consul transacts official business.
consummate v. To bring to completion.
consumption n. Gradual destruction, as by burning, eating, etc., or by using up, wearing out, etc.
consumptive adj. Designed for gradual destruction.
contagion n. The communication of disease from person to person.
contagious adj. Transmitting disease.
contemplate v. To consider thoughtfully.
contemporaneous adj. Living, occurring, or existing at the same time.
contemporary adj. Living or existing at the same time.
contemptible adj. Worthy of scorn or disdain.
contemptuous adj. Disdainful.
contender n. One who exerts oneself in opposition or rivalry.
contiguity n. Proximity.
contiguous adj. Touching or joining at the edge or boundary.
continence n. Self-restraint with respect to desires, appetites, and passion.
contingency n. Possibility of happening.
contingent adj. Not predictable.
continuity n. Uninterrupted connection in space, time, operation, or development.
continuous adj. Connected, extended, or prolonged without separation or interruption of sequence.
contort v. To twist into a misshapen form.
contraband n. Trade forbidden by law or treaty.
contradiction n. The assertion of the opposite of that which has been said.
contradictory adj. Inconsistent with itself.
contraposition n. A placing opposite.
contravene v. To prevent or obstruct the operation of.
contribution n. The act of giving for a common purpose.
contributor n. One who gives or furnishes, in common with others, for a common purpose.
contrite adj. Broken in spirit because of a sense of sin.
contrivance n. The act planning, devising, inventing, or adapting something to or for a special purpose.
contrive v. To manage or carry through by some device or scheme.
control v. To exercise a directing, restraining, or governing influence over.
controller n. One who or that which regulates or directs.
contumacious adj. Rebellious.
contumacy n. Contemptuous disregard of the requirements of rightful authority.
contuse v. To bruise by a blow, either with or without the breaking of the skin.
contusion n. A bruise.
convalesce v. To recover after a sickness.
convalescence n. The state of progressive restoration to health and strength after the cessation of disease.
convalescent adj. Recovering health after sickness.
convene v. To summon or cause to assemble.
convenience n. Fitness, as of time or place.
converge v. To cause to incline and approach nearer together.
convergent adj. Tending to one point.
conversant adj. Thoroughly informed.
conversion n. Change from one state or position to another, or from one form to another.
convertible adj. Interchangeable.
convex adj. Curving like the segment of the globe or of the surface of a circle.
conveyance n. That by which anything is transported.
convivial adj. Devoted to feasting, or to good-fellowship in eating or drinking.
convolution n. A winding motion.
convolve v. To move with a circling or winding motion.
convoy n. A protecting force accompanying property in course of transportation.
convulse v. To cause spasms in.
convulsion n. A violent and abnormal muscular contraction of the body.
copious adj. Plenteous.
coquette n. A flirt.
cornice n. An ornamental molding running round the walls of a room close to the ceiling.
cornucopia n. The horn of plenty, symbolizing peace and prosperity.
corollary n. A proposition following so obviously from another that it requires little demonstration.
coronation n. The act or ceremony of crowning a monarch.
coronet n. Inferior crown denoting, according to its form, various degrees of noble rank less than sovereign.
corporal adj. Belonging or relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
corporate adj. Belonging to a corporation.
corporeal adj. Of a material nature; physical.
corps n. A number or body of persons in some way associated or acting together.
corpse n. A dead body.
corpulent adj. Obese.
corpuscle n. A minute particle of matter.
correlate v. To put in some relation of connection or correspondence.
correlative adj. Mutually involving or implying one another.
corrigible adj. Capable of reformation.
corroborate v. To strengthen, as proof or conviction.
corroboration n. Confirmation.
corrode v. To ruin or destroy little by little.
corrosion n. Gradual decay by crumbling or surface disintegration.
corrosive n. That which causes gradual decay by crumbling or surface disintegration.
corruptible adj. Open to bribery.
corruption n. Loss of purity or integrity.
cosmetic adj. Pertaining to the art of beautifying, especially the complexion.
cosmic adj. Pertaining to the universe.
cosmogony n. A doctrine of creation or of the origin of the universe.
cosmography n. The science that describes the universe, including astronomy, geography, and geology.
cosmology n. The general science of the universe.
cosmopolitan adj. Common to all the world.
cosmopolitanism n. A cosmopolitan character.
cosmos n. The world or universe considered as a system, perfect in order and arrangement.
counter-claim n. A cross-demand alleged by a defendant in his favor against the plaintiff.
counteract v. To act in opposition to.
counterbalance v. To oppose with an equal force.
countercharge v. To accuse in return.
counterfeit adj. Made to resemble something else.
counterpart n. Something taken with another for the completion of either.
countervail v. To offset.
counting-house n. A house or office used for transacting business, bookkeeping, correspondence, etc.
countryman n. A rustic.
course n. Line of motion or direction.
courser n. A fleet and spirited horse.
courtesy n. Politeness originating in kindness and exercised habitually.
covenant n. An agreement entered into by two or more persons or parties.
covert adj. Concealed, especially for an evil purpose.
covey n. A flock of quails or partridges.
cower v. To crouch down tremblingly, as through fear or shame.
coxswain n. One who steers a rowboat, or one who has charge of a ship's boat and its crew under an officer.
crag n. A rugged, rocky projection on a cliff or ledge.
cranium n. The skull of an animal, especially that part enclosing the brain.
crass adj. Coarse or thick in nature or structure, as opposed to thin or fine.
craving n. A vehement desire.
creak n. A sharp, harsh, squeaking sound.
creamery n. A butter-making establishment.
creamy adj. Resembling or containing cream.
credence n. Belief.
creed n. A formal summary of fundamental points of religious belief.
crematory adj. A place for cremating dead bodies.
crevasse n. A deep crack or fissure in the ice of a glacier.
crevice n. A small fissure, as between two contiguous surfaces.
criterion n. A standard by which to determine the correctness of a judgment or conclusion.
critique n. A criticism or critical review.
crockery n. Earthenware made from baked clay.
crucible n. A trying and purifying test or agency.
crusade n. Any concerted movement, vigorously prosecuted, in behalf of an idea or principle.
crustacean adj. Pertaining to a division of arthropods, containing lobsters, crabs, crawfish, etc.
crustaceous adj. Having a crust-like shell.
cryptogram n. Anything written in characters that are secret or so arranged as to have hidden meaning.
crystallize v. To bring together or give fixed shape to.
cudgel n. A short thick stick used as a club.
culinary adj. Of or pertaining to cooking or the kitchen.
cull v. To pick or sort out from the rest.
culpable adj. Guilty.
culprit n. A guilty person.
culvert n. Any artificial covered channel for the passage of water through a bank or under a road, canal.
cupidity n. Avarice.
curable adj. Capable of being remedied or corrected.
curator n. A person having charge as of a library or museum.
curio n. A piece of bric-a-brac.
cursive adj. Writing in which the letters are joined together.
cursory adj. Rapid and superficial.
curt adj. Concise, compressed, and abrupt in act or expression.
curtail v. To cut off or cut short.
curtsy n. A downward movement of the body by bending the knees.
cycloid adj. Like a circle.
cygnet n. A young swan.
cynical adj. Exhibiting moral skepticism.
cynicism n. Contempt for the opinions of others and of what others value.
cynosure n. That to which general interest or attention is directed.
daring adj. Brave.
darkling adv. Blindly.
Darwinism n. The doctrine that natural selection has been the prime cause of evolution of higher forms.
dastard n. A base coward.
datum n. A premise, starting-point, or given fact.
dauntless adj. Fearless.
day-man n. A day-laborer.
dead-heat n. A race in which two or more competitors come out even, and there is no winner.
dearth n. Scarcity, as of something customary, essential ,or desirable.
death's-head n. A human skull as a symbol of death.
debase v. To lower in character or virtue.
debatable adj. Subject to contention or dispute.
debonair adj. Having gentle or courteous bearing or manner.
debut n. A first appearance in society or on the stage.
decagon n. A figure with ten sides and ten angles.
decagram n. A weight of 10 grams.
decaliter n. A liquid and dry measure of 10 liters.
decalogue n. The ten commandments.
Decameron n. A volume consisting of ten parts or books.
decameter n. A length of ten meters.
decamp v. To leave suddenly or unexpectedly.
decapitate v. To behead.
decapod adj. Ten-footed or ten-armed.
decasyllable n. A line of ten syllables.
deceit n. Falsehood.
deceive v. To mislead by or as by falsehood.
decency n. Moral fitness.
decent adj. Characterized by propriety of conduct, speech, manners, or dress.
deciduous adj. Falling off at maturity as petals after flowering, fruit when ripe, etc.
decimal adj. Founded on the number 10.
decimate v. To destroy a measurable or large proportion of.
decipher v. To find out the true words or meaning of, as something hardly legible.
decisive ad. Conclusive.
declamation n. A speech recited or intended for recitation from memory in public.
declamatory adj. A full and formal style of utterance.
declarative adj. Containing a formal, positive, or explicit statement or affirmation.
declension n. The change of endings in nouns and adj. to express their different relations of gender.
decorate v. To embellish.
decorous adj. Suitable for the occasion or circumstances.
decoy n. Anything that allures, or is intended to allures into danger or temptation.
decrepit adj. Enfeebled, as by old age or some chronic infirmity.
dedication n. The voluntary consecration or relinquishment of something to an end or cause.
deduce v. To derive or draw as a conclusion by reasoning from given premises or principles.
deface v. To mar or disfigure the face or external surface of.
defalcate v. To cut off or take away, as a part of something.
defamation n. Malicious and groundless injury done to the reputation or good name of another.
defame v. To slander.
default n. The neglect or omission of a legal requirement.
defendant n. A person against whom a suit is brought.
defensible adj. Capable of being maintained or justified.
defensive adj. Carried on in resistance to aggression.
defer v. To delay or put off to some other time.
deference n. Respectful submission or yielding, as to another's opinion, wishes, or judgment.
defiant adj. Characterized by bold or insolent opposition.
deficiency n. Lack or insufficiency.
deficient adj. Not having an adequate or proper supply or amount.
definite adj. Having an exact signification or positive meaning.
deflect v. To cause to turn aside or downward.
deforest v. To clear of forests.
deform v. To disfigure.
defraud v. To deprive of something dishonestly.
defray v. To make payment for.
degeneracy n. A becoming worse.
degenerate v. To become worse or inferior.
degradation n. Diminution, as of strength or magnitude.
degrade v. To take away honors or position from.
dehydrate v. To deprive of water.
deify v. To regard or worship as a god.
deign v. To deem worthy of notice or account.
deist n. One who believes in God, but denies supernatural revelation.
deity n. A god, goddess, or divine person.
deject v. To dishearten.
delectable adj. Delightful to the taste or to the senses.
delectation n. Delight.
deleterious adj. Hurtful, morally or physically.
delicacy n. That which is agreeable to a fine taste.
delineate v. To represent by sketch or diagram.
deliquesce v. To dissolve gradually and become liquid by absorption of moisture from the air.
delirious adj. Raving.
delude v. To mislead the mind or judgment of.
deluge v. To overwhelm with a flood of water.
delusion n. Mistaken conviction, especially when more or less enduring.
demagnetize v. To deprive (a magnet) of magnetism.
demagogue n. An unprincipled politician.
demeanor n. Deportment.
demerit n. A mark for failure or bad conduct.
demise n. Death.
demobilize v. To disband, as troops.
demolish v. To annihilate.
demonstrable adj. Capable of positive proof.
demonstrate v. To prove indubitably.
demonstrative adj. Inclined to strong exhibition or expression of feeling or thoughts.
demonstrator n. One who proves in a convincing and conclusive manner.
demulcent n. Any application soothing to an irritable surface
demurrage n. the detention of a vessel beyond the specified time of sailing.
dendroid adj. Like a tree.
dendrology n. The natural history of trees.
denizen n. Inhabitant.
denominate v. To give a name or epithet to.
denomination n. A body of Christians united by a common faith and form of worship and discipline.
denominator n. Part of a fraction which expresses the number of equal parts into which the unit is divided.
denote v. To designate by word or mark.
denouement n. That part of a play or story in which the mystery is cleared up.
denounce v. To point out or publicly accuse as deserving of punishment, censure, or odium.
dentifrice n. Any preparation used for cleaning the teeth.
denude v. To strip the covering from.
denunciation n. The act of declaring an action or person worthy of reprobation or punishment.
deplete v. To reduce or lessen, as by use, exhaustion, or waste.
deplorable adj. Contemptible.
deplore v. To regard with grief or sorrow.
deponent adj. Laying down.
depopulate v. To remove the inhabitants from.
deport v. To take or send away forcibly, as to a penal colony.
deportment n. Demeanor.
deposition n. Testimony legally taken on interrogatories and reduced to writing, for use as evidence in court.
depositor n. One who makes a deposit, or has an amount deposited.
depository n. A place where anything is kept in safety.
deprave v. To render bad, especially morally bad.
deprecate v. To express disapproval or regret for, with hope for the opposite.
depreciate v. To lessen the worth of.
depreciation n. A lowering in value or an underrating in worth.
depress v. To press down.
depression n. A falling of the spirits.
depth n. Deepness.
derelict adj. Neglectful of obligation.
deride v. To ridicule.
derisible adj. Open to ridicule.
derision n. Ridicule.
derivation n. That process by which a word is traced from its original root or primitive form and meaning.
derivative adj. Coming or acquired from some origin.
derive v. To deduce, as from a premise.
dermatology n. The branch of medical science which relates to the skin and its diseases.
derrick n. An apparatus for hoisting and swinging great weights.
descendant n. One who is descended lineally from another, as a child, grandchild, etc.
descendent adj. Proceeding downward.
descent n. The act of moving or going downward.
descry v. To discern.
desert v. To abandon without regard to the welfare of the abandoned
desiccant n. Any remedy which, when applied externally, dries up or absorbs moisture, as that of wounds.
designate v. To select or appoint, as by authority.
desist v. To cease from action.
desistance n. Cessation.
despair n. Utter hopelessness and despondency.
desperado n. One without regard for law or life.
desperate adj. Resorted to in a last extremity, or as if prompted by utter despair.
despicable adj. Contemptible.
despite prep. In spite of.
despond v. To lose spirit, courage, or hope.
despondent adj. Disheartened.
despot n. An absolute and irresponsible monarch.
despotism n. Any severe and strict rule in which the judgment of the governed has little or no part.
destitute adj. Poverty-stricken.
desultory adj. Not connected with what precedes.
deter v. To frighten away.
deteriorate v. To grow worse.
determinate adj. Definitely limited or fixed.
determination n. The act of deciding.
deterrent adj. Hindering from action through fear.
detest v. To dislike or hate with intensity.
detract v. To take away in such manner as to lessen value or estimation.
detriment n. Something that causes damage, depreciation, or loss.
detrude v. To push down forcibly.
deviate v. To take a different course.
devilry n. Malicious mischief.
deviltry n. Wanton and malicious mischief.
devious adj. Out of the common or regular track.
devise v. To invent.
devout adj. Religious.
dexterity n. Readiness, precision, efficiency, and ease in any physical activity or in any mechanical work.
diabolic adj. Characteristic of the devil.
diacritical adj. Marking a difference.
diagnose v. To distinguish, as a disease, by its characteristic phenomena.
diagnosis n. Determination of the distinctive nature of a disease.
dialect n. Forms of speech collectively that are peculiar to the people of a particular district.
dialectician n. A logician.
dialogue n. A formal conversation in which two or more take part.
diaphanous adj. Transparent.
diatomic adj. Containing only two atoms.
diatribe n. A bitter or malicious criticism.
dictum n. A positive utterance.
didactic adj. Pertaining to teaching.
difference n. Dissimilarity in any respect.
differentia n. Any essential characteristic of a species by reason of which it differs from other species.
differential adj. Distinctive.
differentiate v. To acquire a distinct and separate character.
diffidence n. Self-distrust.
diffident adj. Affected or possessed with self-distrust.
diffusible adj. Spreading rapidly through the system and acting quickly.
diffusion n. Dispersion.
dignitary n. One who holds high rank.
digraph n. A union of two characters representing a single sound.
digress v. To turn aside from the main subject and for a time dwell on some incidental matter.
dilapidated pa. Fallen into decay or partial ruin.
dilate v. To enlarge in all directions.
dilatory adj. Tending to cause delay.
dilemma n. A situation in which a choice between opposing modes of conduct is necessary.
dilettante n. A superficial amateur.
diligence n. Careful and persevering effort to accomplish what is undertaken.
dilute v. To make more fluid or less concentrated by admixture with something.
diminution n. Reduction.
dimly adv. Obscurely.
diphthong n. The sound produced by combining two vowels in to a single syllable or running together the sounds.
diplomacy n. Tact, shrewdness, or skill in conducting any kind of negotiations or in social matters.
diplomat n. A representative of one sovereign state at the capital or court of another.
diplomatic adj. Characterized by special tact in negotiations.
diplomatist n. One remarkable for tact and shrewd management.
disagree v. To be opposite in opinion.
disallow v. To withhold permission or sanction.
disappear v. To cease to exist, either actually or for the time being.
disappoint v. To fail to fulfill the expectation, hope, wish, or desire of.
disapprove v. To regard with blame.
disarm v. To deprive of weapons.
disarrange v. To throw out of order.
disavow v. To disclaim responsibility for.
disavowal n. Denial.
disbeliever n. One who refuses to believe.
disburden v. To disencumber.
disburse v. To pay out or expend, as money from a fund.
discard v. To reject.
discernible adj. Perceivable.
disciple n. One who believes the teaching of another, or who adopts and follows some doctrine.
disciplinary adj. Having the nature of systematic training or subjection to authority.
discipline v. To train to obedience.
disclaim v. To disavow any claim to, connection with, or responsibility to.
discolor v. To stain.
discomfit v. To put to confusion.
discomfort n. The state of being positively uncomfortable.
disconnect v. To undo or dissolve the connection or association of.
disconsolate adj. Grief-stricken.
discontinuance n. Interruption or intermission.
discord n. Absence of harmoniousness.
discountenance v. To look upon with disfavor.
discover v. To get first sight or knowledge of, as something previously unknown or unperceived.
discredit v. To injure the reputation of.
discreet adj. Judicious.
discriminate v. To draw a distinction.
discursive adj. Passing from one subject to another.
discussion n. Debate.
disenfranchise v. To deprive of any right privilege or power
disengage v. To become detached.
disfavor n. Disregard.
disfigure v. To impair or injure the beauty, symmetry, or appearance of.
dishabille n. Undress or negligent attire.
dishonest adj. Untrustworthy.
disinfect v. To remove or destroy the poison of infectious or contagious diseases.
disinfectant n. A substance used to destroy the germs of infectious diseases.
disinherit v. To deprive of an inheritance.
disinterested adj. Impartial.
disjunctive adj. Helping or serving to disconnect or separate.
dislocate v. To put out of proper place or order.
dismissal n. Displacement by authority from an office or an employment.
dismount v. To throw down, push off, or otherwise remove from a horse or the like.
disobedience n. Neglect or refusal to comply with an authoritative injunction.
disobedient adj. Neglecting or refusing to obey.
disown v. To refuse to acknowledge as one's own or as connected with oneself.
disparage v. To regard or speak of slightingly.
disparity n. Inequality.
dispel v. To drive away by or as by scattering in different directions.
dispensation n. That which is bestowed on or appointed to one from a higher power.
displace v. To put out of the proper or accustomed place.
dispossess v. To deprive of actual occupancy, especially of real estate.
disputation n. Verbal controversy.
disquiet v. To deprive of peace or tranquillity.
disregard v. To take no notice of.
disreputable adj. Dishonorable or disgraceful.
disrepute n. A bad name or character.
disrobe v. To unclothe.
disrupt v. To burst or break asunder.
dissatisfy v. To displease.
dissect v. To cut apart or to pieces.
dissection n. The act or operation of cutting in pieces, specifically of a plant or an animal.
dissemble v. To hide by pretending something different.
disseminate v. To sow or scatter abroad, as seed is sown.
dissension n. Angry or violent difference of opinion.
dissent n. Disagreement.
dissentient n. One who disagrees.
dissentious adj. Contentious.
disservice n. An ill turn.
dissever v. To divide.
dissipate v. To disperse or disappear.
dissipation n. The state of being dispersed or scattered.
dissolute adj. Lewd.
dissolution n. A breaking up of a union of persons.
dissolve v. To liquefy or soften, as by heat or moisture.
dissonance n. Discord.
dissonant adj. Harsh or disagreeable in sound.
dissuade v. To change the purpose or alter the plans of by persuasion, counsel, or pleading.
dissuasion n. The act of changing the purpose of or altering the plans of through persuasion, or pleading.
disyllable n. A word of two syllables.
distemper n. A disease or malady.
distend v. To stretch out or expand in every direction.
distensible adj. Capable of being stretched out or expanded in every direction.
distention n. Expansion.
distill v. To extract or produce by vaporization and condensation.
distillation n. Separation of the more volatile parts of a substance from those less volatile.
distiller n. One occupied in the business of distilling alcoholic liquors.
distinction n. A note or designation of honor, officially recognizing superiority or success in studies.
distort v. To twist into an unnatural or irregular form.
distrain v. To subject a person to distress.
distrainor n. One who subjects a person to distress.
distraught adj. Bewildered.
distrust n. Lack of confidence in the power, wisdom, or good intent of any person.
disunion n. Separation of relations or interests.
diurnal adj. Daily.
divergent adj. Tending in different directions.
diverse adj. Capable of various forms.
diversion n. Pastime.
diversity n. Dissimilitude.
divert v. To turn from the accustomed course or a line of action already established.
divertible adj. Able to be turned from the accustomed course or a line of action already established.
divest v. To strip, specifically of clothes, ornaments, or accouterments or disinvestment.
divination n. The pretended forecast of future events or discovery of what is lost or hidden.
divinity n. The quality or character of being godlike.
divisible adj. Capable of being separated into parts.
divisor n. That by which a number or quantity is divided.
divulge v. To tell or make known, as something previously private or secret.
divulgence n. A divulging.
docile adj. Easy to manage.
docket n. The registry of judgments of a court.
doe n. The female of the deer.
dogma n. A statement of religious faith or duty formulated by a body claiming authority.
dogmatic adj. Making statements without argument or evidence.
dogmatize v. To make positive assertions without supporting them by argument or evidence.
doleful adj. Melancholy.
dolorous adj. Expressing or causing sorrow or pain.
domain n. A sphere or field of action or interest.
domesticity n. Life in or fondness for one's home and family.
domicile n. The place where one lives.
dominance n. Ascendancy.
dominate v. To influence controllingly.
domination n. Control by the exercise of power or constituted authority.
domineer v. To rule with insolence or unnecessary annoyance.
donate v. To bestow as a gift, especially for a worthy cause.
donator n. One who makes a donation or present.
donee n. A person to whom a donation is made.
donor n. One who makes a donation or present.
dormant adj. Being in a state of or resembling sleep.
doublet n. One of a pair of like things.
doubly adv. In twofold degree or extent.
dowry n. The property which a wife brings to her husband in marriage.
drachma n. A modern and an ancient Greek coin.
dragnet n. A net to be drawn along the bottom of the water.
dragoon n. In the British army, a cavalryman.
drainage n. The means of draining collectively, as a system of conduits, trenches, pipes, etc.
dramatist n. One who writes plays.
dramatize v. To relate or represent in a dramatic or theatrical manner.
drastic adj. Acting vigorously.
drought n. Dry weather, especially when so long continued as to cause vegetation to wither.
drowsy adj. Heavy with sleepiness.
drudgery n. Hard and constant work in any menial or dull occupation.
dubious adj. Doubtful.
duckling n. A young duck.
ductile adj. Capable of being drawn out, as into wire or a thread.
duet n. A composition for two voices or instruments.
dun v. To make a demand or repeated demands on for payment.
duplex adj. Having two parts.
duplicity n. Double-dealing.
duration n. The period of time during which anything lasts.
duteous adj. Showing submission to natural superiors.
dutiable adj. Subject to a duty, especially a customs duty.
dutiful adj. Obedient.
dwindle v. To diminish or become less.
dyne n. The force which, applied to a mass of one gram for 1 second, would give it a velocity of 1 cm/s.
earnest adj. Ardent in spirit and speech.
earthenware n. Anything made of clay and baked in a kiln or dried in the sun.
eatable adj. Edible.
ebullient adj. Showing enthusiasm or exhilaration of feeling.
eccentric adj. Peculiar.
eccentricity n. Idiosyncrasy.
eclipse n. The obstruction of a heavenly body by its entering into the shadow of another body.
economize v. To spend sparingly.
ecstasy n. Rapturous excitement or exaltation.
ecstatic adj. Enraptured.
edible adj. Suitable to be eaten.
edict n. That which is uttered or proclaimed by authority as a rule of action.
edify v. To build up, or strengthen, especially in morals or religion.
editorial n. An article in a periodical written by the editor and published as an official argument.
educe v. To draw out.
efface v. To obliterate.
effective adj. Fit for a destined purpose.
effectual adj. Efficient.
effeminate adj. Having womanish traits or qualities.
effervesce v. To bubble up.
effervescent adj. Giving off bubbles of gas.
effete adj. Exhausted, as having performed its functions.
efficacious adj. Effective.
efficacy n. The power to produce an intended effect as shown in the production of it.
efficiency n. The state of possessing adequate skill or knowledge for the performance of a duty.
efficient adj. Having and exercising the power to produce effects or results.
efflorescence n. The state of being flowery, or a flowery appearance.
efflorescent adj. Opening in flower.
effluvium n. A noxious or ill-smelling exhalation from decaying or putrefying matter.
effrontery n. Unblushing impudence.
effuse v. To pour forth.
effusion n. an outpouring.
egoism n. The theory that places man's chief good in the completeness of self.
egoist n. One who advocates or practices egoism.
egotism n. Self-conceit.
egotist n. One given to self-mention or who is constantly telling of his own views and experiences.
egregious adj. Extreme.
egress n. Any place of exit.
eject v. To expel.
elapse v. To quietly terminate: said of time.
elasticity n. That property of matter by which a body tends to return to a former shape after being changed.
electrolysis n. The process of decomposing a chemical compound by the passage of an electric current.
electrotype n. A metallic copy of any surface, as a coin.
elegy n. A lyric poem lamenting the dead.
element n. A component or essential part.
elicit v. To educe or extract gradually or without violence.
eligible adj. Qualified for selection.
eliminate v. To separate and cast aside.
Elizabethan adj. Relating to Elizabeth, queen of England, or to her era.
elocution n. The art of correct intonation, inflection, and gesture in public speaking or reading.
eloquent adj. Having the ability to express emotion or feeling in lofty and impassioned speech.
elucidate v. To bring out more clearly the facts concerning.
elude v. To evade the search or pursuit of by dexterity or artifice.
elusion n. Evasion.
emaciate v. To waste away in flesh.
emanate v. To flow forth or proceed, as from some source.
emancipate v. To release from bondage.
embargo n. Authoritative stoppage of foreign commerce or of any special trade.
embark v. To make a beginning in some occupation or scheme.
embarrass v. To render flustered or agitated.
embellish v. To make beautiful or elegant by adding attractive or ornamental features.
embezzle v. To misappropriate secretly.
emblazon v. To set forth publicly or in glowing terms.
emblem n. A symbol.
embody v. To express, formulate, or exemplify in a concrete, compact or visible form.
embolden v. To give courage to.
embolism n. An obstruction or plugging up of an artery or other blood-vessel.
embroil v. To involve in dissension or strife.
emerge v. To come into view or into existence.
emergence n. A coming into view.
emergent adj. Coming into view.
emeritus adj. Retired from active service but retained to an honorary position.
emigrant n. One who moves from one place to settle in another.
emigrate v. To go from one country, state, or region for the purpose of settling or residing in another.
eminence n. An elevated position with respect to rank, place, character, condition, etc.
eminent adj. High in station, merit, or esteem.
emit v. To send or give out.
emphasis n. Any special impressiveness added to an utterance or act, or stress laid upon some word.
emphasize v. To articulate or enunciate with special impressiveness upon a word, or a group of words.
emphatic adj. Spoken with any special impressiveness laid upon an act, word, or set of words.
employee n. One who works for wages or a salary.
employer n. One who uses or engages the services of other persons for pay.
emporium n. A bazaar or shop.
empower v. To delegate authority to.
emulate v. To imitate with intent to equal or surpass.
enact v. To make into law, as by legislative act.
enamor v. To inspire with ardent love.
encamp v. To pitch tents for a resting-place.
encomium n. A formal or discriminating expression of praise.
encompass v. To encircle.
encore n. The call for a repetition, as of some part of a play or performance.
encourage v. To inspire with courage, hope, or strength of mind.
encroach v. To invade partially or insidiously and appropriate the possessions of another.
encumber v. To impede with obstacles.
encyclical adj. Intended for general circulation.
encyclopedia n. A work containing information on subjects, or exhaustive of one subject.
endanger v. To expose to peril.
endear v. To cause to be loved.
endemic adj. Peculiar to some specified country or people.
endue v. To endow with some quality, gift, or grace, usually spiritual.
endurable adj. Tolerable.
endurance n. The ability to suffer pain, distress, hardship, or stress of any kind without succumbing.
energetic adj. Working vigorously.
enervate v. To render ineffective or inoperative.
enfeeble v. To debilitate.
enfranchise v. To endow with a privilege, especially with the right to vote.
engender v. To produce.
engrave v. To cut or carve in or upon some surface.
engross v. To occupy completely.
enhance v. To intensify.
enrapture v. To delight extravagantly or intensely.
enshrine v. To keep sacred.
ensnare v. To entrap.
entail v. To involve; necessitate.
entangle v. To involve in difficulties, confusion, or complications.
enthrall v. To bring or hold under any overmastering influence.
enthrone v. To invest with sovereign power.
enthuse v. To yield to or display intense and rapturous feeling.
enthusiastic adj. Full of zeal and fervor.
entirety n. A complete thing.
entomology n. The branch of zoology that treats of insects.
entrails n. pl. The internal parts of an animal.
entreaty n. An earnest request.
entree n. The act of entering.
entrench v. To fortify or protect, as with a trench or ditch and wall.
entwine v. To interweave.
enumerate v. To name one by one.
epic n. A poem celebrating in formal verse the mythical achievements of great personages, heroes, etc.
epicure n. One who cultivates a delicate taste for eating and drinking.
Epicurean adj. Indulging, ministering, or pertaining to daintiness of appetite.
epicycle n. A circle that rolls upon the external or internal circumference of another circle.
epicycloid n. A curve traced by a point on the circumference of a circle which rolls upon another circle.
epidemic n. Wide-spread occurrence of a disease in a certain region.
epidermis n. The outer skin.
epigram n. A pithy phrasing of a shrewd observation.
epilogue n. The close of a narrative or dramatic poem.
epiphany n. Any appearance or bodily manifestation of a deity.
episode n. An incident or story in a literary work, separable from yet growing out of it.
epitaph n. An inscription on a tomb or monument in honor or in memory of the dead.
epithet n. Word used adjectivally to describe some quality or attribute of is objects, as in "Father Aeneas".
epitome n. A simplified representation.
epizootic adj. Prevailing among animals.
epoch n. A interval of time, memorable for extraordinary events.
epode n. A species of lyric poems.
equalize v. To render uniform.
equanimity n. Evenness of mind or temper.
equestrian adj. Pertaining to horses or horsemanship.
equilibrium n. A state of balance.
equitable adj. Characterized by fairness.
equity n. Fairness or impartiality.
equivalent adj. Equal in value, force, meaning, or the like.
equivocal adj. Ambiguous.
equivocate v. To use words of double meaning.
eradicate v. To destroy thoroughly.
errant adj. Roving or wandering, as in search of adventure or opportunity for gallant deeds.
erratic adj. Irregular.
erudition n. Extensive knowledge of literature, history, language, etc.
eschew v. To keep clear of.
espy v. To keep close watch.
esquire n. A title of dignity, office, or courtesy.
essence n. That which makes a thing to be what it is.
esthetic adj. Pertaining to beauty, taste, or the fine arts.
estimable adj. Worthy of respect.
estrange v. To alienate.
estuary n. A wide lower part of a tidal river.
et cetera Latin. And so forth.
eugenic adj. Relating to the development and improvement of race.
eulogize v. To speak or write a laudation of a person's life or character.
eulogy n. A spoken or written laudation of a person's life or character.
euphemism n. A figure of speech by which a phrase less offensive is substituted.
euphonious adj. Characterized by agreeableness of sound.
euphony n. Agreeableness of sound.
eureka Greek. I have found it.
evade v. To avoid by artifice.
evanesce v. To vanish gradually.
evanescent adj. Fleeting.
evangelical adj. Seeking the conversion of sinners.
evangelist n. A preacher who goes from place to place holding services.
evasion n. Escape.
evert v. To turn inside out.
evict v. To dispossess pursuant to judicial decree.
evidential adj. Indicative.
evince v. To make manifest or evident.
evoke v. To call or summon forth.
evolution n. Development or growth.
evolve v. To unfold or expand.
exacerbate v. To make more sharp, severe, or virulent.
exaggerate v. To overstate.
exasperate v. To excite great anger in.
excavate v. To remove by digging or scooping out.
exceed v. To go beyond, as in measure, quality, value, action, power, skill, etc.
excel v. To be superior or distinguished.
excellence n. Possession of eminently or unusually good qualities.
excellency n. A title of honor bestowed upon various high officials.
excellent adj. Possessing distinguished merit.
excerpt n. An extract or selection from written or printed matter.
excess n. That which passes the ordinary, proper, or required limit, measure, or experience.
excitable adj. Nervously high-strung.
excitation n. Intensified emotion or action.
exclamation n. An abrupt or emphatic expression of thought or of feeling.
exclude v. To shut out purposely or forcibly.
exclusion n. Non-admission.
excrescence n. Any unnatural addition, outgrowth, or development.
excretion n. The getting rid of waste matter.
excruciate v. To inflict severe pain or agony upon.
excursion n. A journey.
execration n. An accursed thing.
executor n. A person nominated by the will of another to execute the will.
exegesis n. Biblical exposition or interpretation.
exemplar n. A model, pattern, or original to be copied or imitated.
exemplary adj. Fitted to serve as a model or example worthy of imitation.
exemplify v. To show by example.
exempt adj. Free, clear, or released, as from some liability, or restriction affecting others.
exert v. To make an effort.
exhale v. To breathe forth.
exhaust v. To empty by draining off the contents.
exhaustible adj. Causing or tending to cause exhaustion.
exhaustion n. Deprivation of strength or energy.
exhaustive adj. Thorough and complete in execution.
exhilarate v. To fill with high or cheerful spirits.
exhume v. To dig out of the earth (what has been buried).
exigency n. A critical period or condition.
exigent adj. Urgent.
existence n. Possession or continuance of being.
exit n. A way or passage out.
exodus n. A going forth or departure from a place or country, especially of many people.
exonerate v. To relieve or vindicate from accusation, imputation, or blame.
exorbitance n. Extravagance or enormity.
exorbitant adj. Going beyond usual and proper limits.
exorcise v. To cast or drive out by religious or magical means.
exotic adj. Foreign.
expand v. To increase in range or scope.
expanse n. A continuous area or stretch.
expansion n. Increase of amount, size, scope, or the like.
expatriate v. To drive from one's own country.
expect v. To look forward to as certain or probable.
expectancy n. The act or state of looking forward to as certain or probable.
expectorate v. To cough up and spit forth.
expediency n. Fitness to meet the requirements of a particular case.
expedient adj. Contributing to personal advantage.
expedite v. To hasten the movement or progress of.
expeditious adj. Speedy.
expend v. To spend.
expense n. The laying out or expending or money or other resources, as time or strength.
expiate v. To make satisfaction or amends for.
explicate v. To clear from involvement.
explicit adj. Definite.
explode v. To cause to burst in pieces by force from within.
explosion n. A sudden and violent outbreak.
explosive adj. Pertaining to a sudden and violent outbreak.
exposition n. Formal presentation.
expository adj. Pertaining to a formal presentation.
expostulate v. To discuss.
exposure n. An open situation or position in relation to the sun, elements, or points of the compass.
expressive adj. Full of meaning.
expulsion n. Forcible ejection.
extant adj. Still existing and known.
extemporaneous adj. Done or made without much or any preparation.
extempore adv. Without studied or special preparation.
extensible adj. Capable of being thrust out.
extension n. A reaching or stretching out, as in space, time or scope.
extensive adj. Extended widely in space, time, or scope.
extensor n. A muscle that causes extension.
extenuate v. To diminish the gravity or importance of.
exterior n. That which is outside.
external n. Anything relating or belonging to the outside.
extinct adj. Being no longer in existence.
extinguish v. To render extinct.
extol v. To praise in the highest terms.
extort v. To obtain by violence, threats, compulsion, or the subjection of another to some necessity.
extortion n. The practice of obtaining by violence or compulsion.
extradite v. To surrender the custody of.
extradition n. The surrender by a government of a person accused of crime to the justice of another government.
extrajudicial adj. Happening out of court.
extraneous adj. Having no essential relation to a subject.
extraordinary adj. Unusual.
extravagance n. Undue expenditure of money.
extravagant adj. Needlessly free or lavish in expenditure.
extremist n. One who supports extreme measures or holds extreme views.
extremity n. The utmost point, side, or border, or that farthest removed from a mean position.
extricate v. Disentangle.
extrude v. To drive out or away.
exuberance n. Rich supply.
exuberant adj. Marked by great plentifulness.
fabricate v. To invent fancifully or falsely.
fabulous adj. Incredible.
facet n. One of the small triangular plane surfaces of a diamond or other gem.
facetious adj. Amusing.
facial adj. Pertaining to the face.
facile adj. Not difficult to do.
facilitate v. To make more easy.
facility n. Ease.
facsimile n. An exact copy or reproduction.
faction n. A number of persons combined for a common purpose.
factious adj. Turbulent.
fallacy n. Any unsound or delusive mode of reasoning, or anything based on such reasoning.
fallible adj. Capable of erring.
fallow n. Land broken up and left to become mellow or to rest.
famish v. To suffer extremity of hunger or thirst.
fanatic n. A religious zealot.
fancier n. One having a taste for or interest in special objects.
fanciless adj. Unimaginative.
fastidious adj. Hard to please.
fathom n. A measure of length, 6 feet.
fatuous adj. Idiotic
faulty adj. Imperfect.
faun n. One of a class of deities of the woods and herds represented as half human, with goats feet.
fawn n. A young deer.
fealty n. Loyalty.
feasible adj. That may be done, performed, or effected; practicable.
federate v. To league together.
feint n. Any sham, pretense, or deceptive movement.
felicitate v. To wish joy or happiness to, especially in view of a coming event.
felicity n. A state of well-founded happiness.
felon n. A criminal or depraved person.
felonious adj. Showing criminal or evil purpose.
felony n. One of the highest class of offenses, and punishable with death or imprisonment.
feminine adj. Characteristic of woman or womankind.
fernery n. A place in which ferns are grown.
ferocious adj. Of a wild, fierce, and savage nature.
ferocity n. Savageness.
fervent adj. Ardent in feeling.
fervid adj. Intense.
fervor n. Ardor or intensity of feeling.
festal adj. Joyous.
fete n. A festival or feast.
fetus n. The young in the womb or in the egg.
feudal adj. Pertaining to the relation of lord and vassal.
feudalism n. The feudal system.
fez n. A brimless felt cap in the shape of a truncated cone, usually red with a black tassel.
fiasco n. A complete or humiliating failure.
fickle adj. Unduly changeable in feeling, judgment, or purpose.
fictitious adj. Created or formed by the imagination.
fidelity n. Loyalty.
fiducial adj. Indicative of faith or trust.
fief n. A landed estate held under feudal tenure.
filibuster n. One who attempts to obstruct legislation.
finale n. Concluding performance.
finality n. The state or quality of being final or complete.
finally adv. At last.
financier n. One skilled in or occupied with financial affairs or operations.
finery n. That which is used to decorate the person or dress.
finesse n. Subtle contrivance used to gain a point.
finite adj. Limited.
fiscal adj. Pertaining to the treasury or public finances of a government.
fishmonger n. One who sells fish.
fissure n. A crack or crack-like depression.
fitful adj. Spasmodic.
fixture n. One who or that which is expected to remain permanently in its position.
flag-officer n. The captain of a flag-ship.
flagrant adj. Openly scandalous.
flamboyant adj. Characterized by extravagance and in general by want of good taste.
flatulence n. Accumulation of gas in the stomach and bowels.
flection n. The act of bending.
fledgling n. A young bird.
flexible adj. Pliable.
flimsy adj. Thin and weak.
flippant adj. Having a light, pert, trifling disposition.
floe n. A collection of tabular masses of floating polar ice.
flora n. The aggregate of plants growing without cultivation in a district.
floral adj. Pertaining to flowers.
florid adj. Flushed with red.
florist n. A dealer in flowers.
fluctuate v. To pass backward and forward irregularly from one state or degree to another.
fluctuation n. Frequent irregular change back and forth from one state or degree to another.
flue n. A smoke-duct in a chimney.
fluent adj. Having a ready or easy flow of words or ideas.
fluential adj. Pertaining to streams.
flux n. A state of constant movement, change, or renewal.
foggy adj. Obscure.
foible n. A personal weakness or failing.
foist v. To palm off.
foliage n. Any growth of leaves.
folio n. A sheet of paper folded once, or of a size adapted to folding once.
folk-lore n. The traditions, beliefs, and customs of the common people.
fondle v. To handle tenderly and lovingly.
foolery n. Folly.
foot-note n. A note of explanation or comment at the foot of a page or column.
foppery n. Dandyism.
foppish adj. Characteristic of one who is unduly devoted to dress and the niceties of manners.
forbearance n. Patient endurance or toleration of offenses.
forby adv. Besides.
forecourt n. A court opening directly from the street.
forejudge v. To judge of before hearing evidence.
forepeak n. The extreme forward part of a ship's hold, under the lowest deck.
foreshore n. That part of a shore uncovered at low tide.
forebode v. To be an omen or warning sign of, especially of evil.
forecast v. To predict.
forecastle n. That part of the upper deck of a ship forward of the after fore-shrouds.
foreclose v. To bar by judicial proceedings the equitable right of a mortgagor to redeem property.
forefather n. An ancestor.
forego v. To deny oneself the pleasure or profit of.
foreground n. That part of a landscape or picture situated or represented as nearest the spectator.
forehead n. The upper part of the face, between the eyes and the hair.
foreign adj. Belonging to, situated in, or derived from another country.
foreigner n. A citizen of a foreign country.
foreknowledge n. Prescience.
foreman n. The head man.
foreordain v. To predetermine.
forerun v. To go before as introducing or ushering in.
foresail n. A square sail.
foresee v. To discern beforehand.
foresight n. Provision against harm or need.
foretell v. To predict.
forfeit v. To lose possession of through failure to fulfill some obligation.
forfend v. To ward off.
forgery n. Counterfeiting.
forgo v. To deny oneself.
formation n. Relative disposition of parts.
formidable adj. Difficult to accomplish.
formula n. Fixed rule or set form.
forswear v. To renounce upon oath.
forte n. A strong point.
forth adv. Into notice or view.
forthright adv. With directness.
fortify v. To provide with defensive works.
fortitude n. Patient courage.
foursome adj. Consisting of four.
fracture n. A break.
frailty n. Liability to be broken or destroyed.
fragile adj. Capable of being broken.
frankincense n. A gum or resin which on burning yields aromatic fumes.
frantic adj. Frenzied.
fray v. To fret at the edge so as to loosen or break the threads.
freemason n. A member of an ancient secret fraternity originally confined to skilled artisans.
freethinker n. One who rejects authority or inspiration in religion.
free trade n. Commerce unrestricted by tariff or customs.
frequency n. The comparative number of any kind of occurrences within a given time or space.
fresco n. The art of painting on a surface of plaster, particularly on walls and ceilings.
freshness n. The state, quality, or degree of being fresh.
fretful adj. Disposed to peevishness.
frightful adj. Apt to induce terror or alarm.
frigid adj. Lacking warmth.
frigidarium n. A room kept at a low temperature for preserving fruits, meat, etc.
frivolity n. A trifling act, thought, saying, or practice.
frivolous adj. Trivial.
frizz v. To give a crinkled, fluffy appearance to.
frizzle v. To cause to crinkle or curl, as the hair.
frolicsome adj. Prankish.
frontier n. The part of a nation's territory that abuts upon another country.
frowzy adj. Slovenly in appearance.
frugal adj. Economical.
fruition n. Fulfillment.
fugacious adj. Fleeting.
fulcrum n. The support on or against which a lever rests, or the point about which it turns.
fulminate v. To cause to explode.
fulsome adj. Offensive from excess of praise or commendation.
fumigate v. To subject to the action of smoke or fumes, especially for disinfection.
functionary n. An official.
fungible adj. That may be measured, counted, or weighed.
fungous adj. Spongy.
fungus n. A plant destitute of chlorophyll, as a mushroom.
furbish v. To restore brightness or beauty to.
furlong n. A measure, one-eighth of a mile.
furlough n. A temporary absence of a soldier or sailor by permission of the commanding officer.
furrier n. A dealer in or maker of fur goods.
further adj. More distant or advanced.
furtherance n. Advancement.
furtive adj. Stealthy or sly, like the actions of a thief.
fuse v. To unite or blend as by melting together.
fusible adj. Capable of being melted by heat.
futile adj. Of no avail or effect.
futurist n. A person of expectant temperament.
gauge n. An instrument for measuring.
gaiety n. Festivity.
gait n. Carriage of the body in going.
gallant adj. Possessing a brave or chivalrous spirit.
galore adj. Abundant.
galvanic adj. Pertaining or relating to electricity produced by chemical action.
galvanism n. Current electricity, especially that arising from chemical action.
galvanize v. To imbue with life or animation.
gamble v. To risk money or other possession on an event, chance, or contingency.
gambol n. Playful leaping or frisking.
gamester n. A gambler.
gamut n. The whole range or sequence.
garnish v. In cookery, to surround with additions for embellishment.
garrison n. The military force stationed in a fort, town, or other place for its defense.
garrote v. To execute by strangling.
garrulous adj. Given to constant trivial talking.
gaseous adj. Light and unsubstantial.
gastric adj. Of, pertaining to, or near the stomach.
gastritis n. Inflammation of the stomach.
gastronomy n. The art of preparing and serving appetizing food.
gendarme n. In continental Europe, particularly in France, a uniformed and armed police officer.
genealogy n. A list, in the order of succession, of ancestors and their descendants.
genealogist n. A tracer of pedigrees.
generality n. The principal portion.
generalize v. To draw general inferences.
generally adv. Ordinarily.
generate v. To produce or cause to be.
generic adj. Noting a genus or kind; opposed to specific.
generosity n. A disposition to give liberally or to bestow favors heartily.
genesis n. Creation.
geniality n. Warmth and kindliness of disposition.
genital adj. Of or pertaining to the animal reproductive organs.
genitive adj. Indicating source, origin, possession, or the like.
genteel adj. Well-bred or refined.
gentile adj. Belonging to a people not Jewish.
geology n. The department of natural science that treats of the constitution and structure of the earth.
germane adj. Relevant.
germinate v. To begin to develop into an embryo or higher form.
gestation n. Pregnancy.
gesticulate v. To make gestures or motions, as in speaking, or in place of speech.
gesture n. A movement or action of the hands or face, expressive of some idea or emotion.
ghastly adj. Hideous.
gibe v. To utter taunts or reproaches.
giddy adj. Affected with a whirling or swimming sensation in the head.
gigantic adj. Tremendous.
giver n. One who gives, in any sense.
glacial adj. Icy, or icily cold.
glacier n. A field or stream of ice.
gladden v. To make joyous.
glazier n. One who cuts and fits panes of glass, as for windows.
glimmer n. A faint, wavering, unsteady light.
glimpse n. A momentary look.
globose adj. Spherical.
glorious adj. Of excellence and splendor.
glutinous adj. Sticky.
gluttonous adj. Given to excess in eating.
gnash v. To grind or strike the teeth together, as from rage.
Gordian knot n. Any difficulty the only issue out of which is by bold or unusual manners.
gourmand n. A connoisseur in the delicacies of the table.
gosling n. A young goose.
gossamer adj. Flimsy.
gourd n. A melon, pumpkin, squash, or some similar fruit having a hard rind.
graceless adj. Ungracious.
gradation n. A step, degree, rank, or relative position in an order or series.
gradient adj. Moving or advancing by steps.
granary n. A storehouse for grain after it is thrashed or husked.
grandeur n. The quality of being grand or admirably great.
grandiloquent adj. Speaking in or characterized by a pompous or bombastic style.
grandiose adj. Having an imposing style or effect.
grantee n. The person to whom property is transferred by deed.
grantor n. The maker of a deed.
granular adj. Composed of small grains or particles.
granulate v. To form into grains or small particles.
granule n. A small grain or particle.
grapple v. To take hold of.
gratification n. Satisfaction.
gratify v. To please, as by satisfying a physical or mental desire or need.
gratuitous adj. Voluntarily.
gratuity n. That which is given without demand or claim. Tip.
gravity n. Seriousness.
gregarious adj. Not habitually solitary or living alone.
grenadier n. A member of a regiment composed of men of great stature.
grief n. Sorrow.
grievance n. That which oppresses, injures, or causes grief and at the same time a sense of wrong.
grievous adj. Creating affliction.
grimace n. A distortion of the features, occasioned by some feeling of pain, disgust, etc.
grindstone n. A flat circular stone, used for sharpening tools.
grisly adj. Fear-inspiring.
grotesque adj. Incongruously composed or ill-proportioned.
grotto n. A small cavern.
ground n. A pavement or floor or any supporting surface on which one may walk.
guess n. Surmise.
heifer n. A young cow.
heinous adj. Odiously sinful.
hemorrhage n. Discharge of blood from a ruptured or wounded blood-vessel.
hemorrhoids n. pl. Tumors composed of enlarged and thickened blood-vessels, at the lower end of the rectum.
henchman n. A servile assistant and subordinate.
henpeck v. To worry or harass by ill temper and petty annoyances.
heptagon n. A figure having seven sides and seven angles.
heptarchy n. A group of seven governments.
herbaceous adj. Having the character of a herb.
herbarium n. A collection of dried plants scientifically arranged for study.
herbivorous adj. Feeding on herbs or other vegetable matter, as animals.
hereditary adj. Passing naturally from parent to child.
heredity n. Transmission of physical or mental qualities, diseases, etc., from parent to offspring.
heresy n. An opinion or doctrine subversive of settled beliefs or accepted principles.
heretic n. One who holds opinions contrary to the recognized standards or tenets of any philosophy.
heritage n. Birthright.
hernia n. Protrusion of any internal organ in whole or in part from its normal position.
hesitancy n. A pausing to consider.
hesitant adj. Vacillating.
heterodox adj. At variance with any commonly accepted doctrine or opinion.
heterogeneity n. Unlikeness of constituent parts.
heterogeneous adj. Consisting of dissimilar elements or ingredients of different kinds.
heteromorphic adj. Deviating from the normal form or standard type.
hexangular adj. Having six angles.
hexapod adj. Having six feet.
hexagon n. A figure with six angles.
hiatus n. A break or vacancy where something necessary to supply the connection is wanting.
hibernal adj. Pertaining to winter.
Hibernian adj. Pertaining to Ireland, or its people.
hideous adj. Appalling.
hillock n. A small hill or mound.
hinder v. To obstruct.
hindmost adj. Farthest from the front.
hindrance n. An obstacle.
hirsute adj. Having a hairy covering.
hoard v. To gather and store away for the sake of accumulation.
hoarse adj. Having the voice harsh or rough, as from a cold or fatigue.
homage n. Reverential regard or worship.
homogeneity n. Congruity of the members or elements or parts.
homogeneous adj. Made up of similar parts or elements.
homologous adj. Identical in nature, make-up, or relation.
homonym n. A word agreeing in sound with but different in meaning from another.
homophone n. A word agreeing in sound with but different in meaning from another.
honorarium n. A token fee or payment to a professional man for services.
hoodwink v. To deceive.
horde n. A gathered multitude of human beings.
hosiery n. A stocking.
hospitable adj. Disposed to treat strangers or guests with generous kindness.
hospitality n. The practice of receiving and entertaining strangers and guests with kindness.
hostility n. Enmity.
huckster n. One who retails small wares.
humane adj. Compassionate.
humanize v. To make gentle or refined.
humbug n. Anything intended or calculated to deceive or mislead.
humiliate v. To put to shame.
hussar n. A light-horse trooper armed with saber and carbine.
hustle v. To move with haste and promptness.
hybrid adj. Cross-bred.
hydra n. The seven- or nine-headed water-serpent slain by Hercules.
hydraulic adj. Involving the moving of water, of the force exerted by water in motion.
hydrodynamics n. The branch of mechanics that treats of the dynamics of fluids.
hydroelectric adj. Pertaining to electricity developed water or steam.
hydromechanics n. The mechanics of fluids.
hydrometer n. An instrument for determining the density of solids and liquids by flotation.
hydrostatics n. The branch of science that treats of the pressure and equilibrium of fluids.
hydrous adj. Watery.
hygiene n. The branch of medical science that relates to improving health.
hypercritical adj. Faultfinding.
hypnosis n. An artificial trance-sleep.
hypnotic adj. Tending to produce sleep.
hypnotism n. An artificially induced somnambulistic state in which the mind readily acts on suggestion.
hypnotize v. To produce a somnambulistic state in which the mind readily acts on suggestions.
hypocrisy n. Extreme insincerity.
hypocrite n. One who makes false professions of his views or beliefs.
hypodermic adj. Pertaining to the area under the skin.
hypotenuse n. The side of a right-angled triangle opposite the right angle.
hypothesis n. A proposition taken for granted as a premise from which to reach a conclusion.
hysteria n. A nervous affection occurring typically in paroxysms of laughing and crying.
ichthyic adj. Fish-like.
ichthyology n. The branch of zoology that treats of fishes.
ichthyosaurs n. A fossil reptile.
icily adv. Frigidly.
iciness n. The state of being icy.
icon n. An image or likeness.
iconoclast n. An image-breaker.
idealize v. To make to conform to some mental or imaginary standard.
idiom n. A use of words peculiar to a particular language.
idiosyncrasy n. A mental quality or habit peculiar to an individual.
idolize v. To regard with inordinate love or admiration.
ignoble adj. Low in character or purpose.
ignominious adj. Shameful.
Iliad n. A Greek epic poem describing scenes from the siege of Troy.
illegal adj. Not according to law.
illegible adj. Undecipherable.
illiterate adj. Having little or no book-learning.
ill-natured adj. Surly.
illogical adj. Contrary to the rules of sound thought.
illuminant n. That which may be used to produce light.
illuminate v. To supply with light.
illumine v. To make bright or clear.
illusion n. An unreal image presented to the senses.
illusive adj. Deceptive.
illusory adj. Deceiving or tending to deceive, as by false appearance.
imaginable adj. That can be imagined or conceived in the mind.
imaginary adj. Fancied.
imbibe v. To drink or take in.
imbroglio n. A misunderstanding attended by ill feeling, perplexity, or strife.
imbrue v. To wet or moisten.
imitation n. That which is made as a likeness or copy.
imitator n. One who makes in imitation.
immaculate adj. Without spot or blemish.
immaterial adj. Of no essential consequence.
immature adj. Not full-grown.
immense adj. Very great in degree, extent, size, or quantity.
immerse v. To plunge or dip entirely under water or other fluid.
immersion n. The act of plunging or dipping entirely under water or another fluid.
immigrant n. A foreigner who enters a country to settle there.
immigrate v. To come into a country or region from a former habitat.
imminence n. Impending evil or danger.
imminent adj. Dangerous and close at hand.
immiscible adj. Separating, as oil and water.
immoral adj. Habitually engaged in licentious or lewd practices.
immortalize v. To cause to last or to be known or remembered throughout a great or indefinite length of time.
immovable adj. Steadfast.
immune adj. Exempt, as from disease.
immutable adj. Unchangeable.
impair v. To cause to become less or worse.
impalpable adj. Imperceptible to the touch.
impartial adj. Unbiased.
impassable adj. That can not be passed through or over.
impassible adj. Not moved or affected by feeling.
impassive adj. Unmoved by or not exhibiting feeling.
impatience n. Unwillingness to brook delays or wait the natural course of things.
impeccable adj. Blameless.
impecunious adj. Having no money.
impede v. To be an obstacle or to place obstacles in the way of.
impel v. To drive or urge forward.
impend v. To be imminent.
imperative adj. Obligatory.
imperfectible adj. That can not be perfected.
imperil v. To endanger.
imperious adj. Insisting on obedience.
impermissible adj. Not permissible.
impersonal adj. Not relating to a particular person or thing.
impersonate v. To appear or act in the character of.
impersuadable adj. Unyielding.
importation n. The act or practice of bringing from one country into another.
importunate adj. Urgent in character, request, or demand.
importune v. To harass with persistent demands or entreaties.
impotent adj. Destitute of or lacking in power, physical, moral, or intellectual.
impoverish v. To make indigent or poor.
impracticable adj. Not feasible.
impregnable adj. That can not be taken by assault.
impregnate v. To make pregnant.
impromptu n. Anything done or said on the impulse of the moment.
improper adj. Not appropriate, suitable, or becoming.
impropriety n. The state or quality of being unfit, unseemly, or inappropriate.
improvident adj. Lacking foresight or thrift.
improvise v. To do anything extemporaneously or offhand.
imprudent adj. Heedless.
impugn v. To assail with arguments, insinuations, or accusations.
impulsion n. Impetus.
impunity n. Freedom from punishment.
impure adj. Tainted.
inaccessible adj. Difficult of approach.
inaccurate adj. Not exactly according to the facts.
inactive adj. Inert.
inadmissible adj. Not to be approved, considered, or allowed, as testimony.
inadvertent adj. Accidental.
inanimate adj. Destitute of animal life.
inapprehensible adj. Not to be understood.
inapt adj. Awkward or slow.
inarticulate adj. Speechless.
inaudible adj. That can not be heard.
inborn adj. Implanted by nature.
inbred adj. Innate.
incandescence n. The state of being white or glowing with heat.
incandescent adj. White or glowing with heat.
incapacitate v. To deprive of power, capacity, competency, or qualification.
incapacity n. Want of power to apprehend, understand, and manage.
incarcerate v. To imprison.
incendiary n. Chemical or person who starts a fire-literally or figuratively.
incentive n. That which moves the mind or inflames the passions.
inception n. The beginning.
inchoative n. That which begins, or expresses beginning.
incidence n. Casual occurrence.
incident n. A happening in general, especially one of little importance.
incidentally adv. Without intention.
incinerate v. To reduce to ashes.
incipience n. Beginning.
incisor n. A front or cutting tooth.
incite v. To rouse to a particular action.
incitement n. That which moves to action, or serves as an incentive or stimulus.
incoercible adj. Incapable of being forced, constrained, or compelled.
incoherence n. Want of connection, or agreement, as of parts or ideas in thought, speech, etc.
incoherent adj. Not logically coordinated, as to parts, elements, or details.
incombustible adj. That can not be burned.
incomparable adj. Matchless.
incompetence n. General lack of capacity or fitness.
incompetent adj. Not having the abilities desired or necessary for any purpose.
incomplete adj. Lacking some element, part, or adjunct necessary or required.
incomprehensible adj. Not understandable.
incompressible adj. Resisting all attempts to reduce volume by pressure.
inconceivable adj. Incomprehensible.
incongruous adj. Unsuitable for the time, place, or occasion.
inconsequential adj. Valueless.
inconsiderable adj. Small in quantity or importance.
inconsistent adj. Contradictory.
indigestible adj. Not digestible, or difficult to digest.
indigestion n. Difficulty or failure in the alimentary canal in changing food into absorptive nutriment.
indignant adj. Having such anger and scorn as is aroused by meanness or wickedness.
indignity n. Unmerited contemptuous conduct or treatment.
indiscernible adj. Not perceptible.
indiscreet adj. Lacking wise judgment.
indiscriminate adj. Promiscuous.
indispensable adj. Necessary or requisite for the purpose.
indistinct adj. Vague.
indivertible adj. That can not be turned aside.
indivisible adj. Not separable into parts.
indolence n. Laziness.
indolent adj. Habitually inactive or idle.
indomitable adj. Unconquerable.
induct v. To bring in.
indulgence n. The yielding to inclination, passion, desire, or propensity in oneself or another.
indulgent adj. Yielding to the desires or humor of oneself or those under one's care.
inebriate v. To intoxicate.
inedible adj. Not good for food.
ineffable adj. Unutterable.
inefficient adj. Not accomplishing an intended purpose.
inefficiency n. That which does not accomplish an intended purpose.
ineligible adj. Not suitable to be selected or chosen.
inept adj. Not fit or suitable.
inert adj. Inanimate.
inevitable adj. Unavoidable.
inexcusable adj. Not to be justified.
inexhaustible adj. So large or furnishing so great a supply as not to be emptied, wasted, or spent.
inexorable adj. Unrelenting.
inexperience n. Lack of or deficiency in experience.
inexplicable adj. Such as can not be made plain.
inexpressible adj. Unutterable.
inextensible adj. Of unchangeable length or area.
infallible adj. Exempt from error of judgment, as in opinion or statement.
infamous adj. Publicly branded or notorious, as for vice, or crime.
infamy n. Total loss or destitution of honor or reputation.
inference n. The derivation of a judgment from any given material of knowledge on the ground of law.
infernal adj. Akin to or befitting hell or its occupants.
infest v. To be present in such numbers as to be a source of annoyance, trouble, or danger.
infidel n. One who denies the existence of God.
infidelity n. Disloyalty.
infinity n. Boundless or immeasurable extension or duration.
infirm adj. Lacking in bodily or mental strength.
infirmary n. A place for the reception or treatment of the sick.
infirmity n. A physical, mental, or moral weakness or flaw.
inflammable adj. Easily set on fire or excited.
inflammation n. A morbid process in some part of the body characterized by heat, swelling, and pain.
inflexible adj. That can not be altered or varied.
influence n. Ability to sway the will of another.
influential adj. Having the power to sway the will of another.
influx n. Infusion.
infringe v. To trespass upon.
infuse v. To instill, introduce, or inculcate, as principles or qualities.
infusion n. The act of imbuing, or pouring in.
ingenious adj. Evincing skill, originality, or cleverness, as in contrivance or arrangement.
ingenuity n. Cleverness in contriving, combining, or originating.
ingenuous adj. Candid, frank, or open in character or quality.
inglorious adj. Shameful.
ingraft v. To set or implant deeply and firmly.
ingratiate v. To win confidence or good graces for oneself.
ingratitude n. Insensibility to kindness.
ingredient n. Component.
inherence n. The state of being permanently existing in something.
inherent adj. Intrinsic.
inhibit v. To hold back or in.
inhospitable adj. Not disposed to entertain strangers gratuitously.
inhuman adj. Savage.
inhume v. To place in the earth, as a dead body.
inimical adj. Adverse.
iniquity n. Gross wrong or injustice.
initiate v. To perform the first act or rite.
inject v. To introduce, as a fluid, by injection.
injunction n. Mandate.
inland adj. Remote from the sea.
inlet n. A small body of water leading into a larger.
inmost adj. Deepest within.
innovate v. To introduce or strive to introduce new things.
innuendo n. Insinuation.
inoffensive adj. Causing nothing displeasing or disturbing.
inopportune adj. Unsuitable or inconvenient, especially as to time.
inquire v. To ask information about.
inquisition n. A court or tribunal for examination and punishment of heretics.
inquisitive adj. Given to questioning, especially out of curiosity.
inquisitor n. One who makes an investigation.
inroad n. Forcible encroachment or trespass.
insatiable adj. That desires or craves immoderately or unappeasably.
inscribe v. To enter in a book, or on a list, roll, or document, by writing.
inscrutable adj. Impenetrably mysterious or profound.
insecure adj. Not assured of safety.
insensible adj. Imperceptible.
insentient adj. Lacking the power of feeling or perceiving.
inseparable adj. That can not be separated.
insidious adj. Working ill by slow and stealthy means.
insight n. Intellectual discernment.
insignificance n. Lack of import or of importance.
insignificant adj. Without importance, force, or influence.
insinuate v. To imply.
insufficient adj. Inadequate for some need, purpose, or use.
insular adj. Pertaining to an island.
insulate v. To place in a detached state or situation.
insuperable adj. Invincible.
insuppressible adj. Incapable of being concealed.
insurgence n. Uprising.
insurgent n. One who takes part in forcible opposition to the constituted authorities of a place.
insurrection n. The state of being in active resistance to authority.
intangible adj. Not perceptible to the touch.
integrity n. Uprightness of character and soundness of moral principle.
intellect n. The faculty of perception or thought.
intellectual adj. Characterized by intelligence.
intelligence n. Capacity to know or understand.
intelligible adj. Comprehensible.
intemperance n. Immoderate action or indulgence, as of the appetites.
intension n. The act of stringing or stretching, or state of being strained.
intensive adj. Adding emphasis or force.
intention n. That upon which the mind is set.
interact v. To act reciprocally.
intercede v. To mediate between persons.
intercept v. To interrupt the course of.
intercession n. Entreaty in behalf of others.
intercessor n. A mediator.
interdict n. Authoritative act of prohibition.
interim n. Time between acts or periods.
interlocutor n. One who takes part in a conversation or oral discussion.
interlude n. An action or event considered as coming between others of greater length.
intermediate adj. Being in a middle place or degree or between extremes.
interminable adj. Having no limit or end.
intermission n. A recess.
intermit v. To cause to cease temporarily.
intermittent adj. A temporary discontinuance.
interpolation n. Verbal interference.
interpose v. To come between other things or persons.
interposition n. A coming between.
interpreter n. A person who makes intelligible the speech of a foreigner by oral translation.
interrogate v. To examine formally by questioning.
interrogative adj. Having the nature or form of a question.
interrogatory n. A question or inquiry.
interrupt v. To stop while in progress.
intersect v. To cut through or into so as to divide.
intervale n. A low tract of land between hills, especially along a river.
intervene v. To interfere for some end.
intestacy n. The condition resulting from one's dying not having made a valid will.
intestate adj. Not having made a valid will.
intestine n. That part of the digestive tube below or behind the stomach, extending to the anus.
intimacy n. Close or confidential friendship.
intimidate v. To cause to become frightened.
intolerable adj. Insufferable.
intolerance n. Inability or unwillingness to bear or endure.
intolerant adj. Bigoted.
intoxicant n. Anything that unduly exhilarates or excites.
intoxicate v. To make drunk.
intracellular adj. Occurring or situated within a cell.
intramural adj. Situated within the walls of a city.
intrepid adj. Fearless and bold.
intricacy n. Perplexity.
intricate adj. Difficult to follow or understand.
intrigue n. A plot or scheme, usually complicated and intended to accomplish something by secret ways.
intrinsic adj. Inherent.
introspect v. To look into.
introspection n. The act of observing and analyzing one's own thoughts and feelings.
introversion n. The act of turning or directing inward, physically or mentally.
introvert v. To turn within.
intrude v. To come in without leave or license.
intrusion n. The act of entering without warrant or invitation; encroachment.
intuition n. Instinctive knowledge or feeling.
inundate v. To fill with an overflowing abundance.
inundation n. Flood.
inure v. To harden or toughen by use, exercise, or exposure.
invalid adj. Having no force, weight, or cogency.
invalid n. One who is disabled by illness or injury.
invalidate v. To render of no force or effect.
invaluable adj. Exceedingly precious.
invasion n. Encroachment, as by an act of intrusion or trespass.
invective n. An utterance intended to cast censure, or reproach.
inveigh v. To utter vehement censure or invective.
inventive adj. Quick at contrivance.
inverse adj. Contrary in tendency or direction.
inversion n. Change of order so that the first shall become last and the last first.
invert v. To turn inside out, upside down, or in opposite direction.
investigator n. One who investigates.
investor n. One who invests money.
inveterate adj. Habitual.
invidious adj. Showing or feeling envy.
invigorate v. To animate.
invincible adj. Not to be conquered, subdued, or overcome.
inviolable adj. Incapable of being injured or disturbed.
invoke v. To call on for assistance or protection.
involuntary adj. Unwilling.
involve v. To draw into entanglement, literally or figuratively.
invulnerable adj. That can not be wounded or hurt.
inwardly adv. With no outward manifestation.
iota n. A small or insignificant mark or part.
irascible adj. Prone to anger.
irate adj. Moved to anger.
ire n. Wrath.
iridescence n. A many-colored appearance.
iridescent adj. Exhibiting changing rainbow-colors due to the interference of the light.
irk v. To afflict with pain, vexation, or fatigue.
irksome adj. Wearisome.
irony n. Censure or ridicule under cover of praise or compliment.
irradiance n. Luster.
irradiate v. To render clear and intelligible.
irrational adj. Not possessed of reasoning powers or understanding.
irreducible adj. That can not be lessened.
irrefragable adj. That can not be refuted or disproved.
irrefrangible adj. That can not be broken or violated.
irrelevant adj. Inapplicable.
irreligious adj. Indifferent or opposed to religion.
irreparable adj. That can not be rectified or made amends for.
irrepressible adj. That can not be restrained or kept down.
irresistible adj. That can not be successfully withstood or opposed.
irresponsible adj. Careless of or unable to meet responsibilities.
irreverence n. The quality showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreverent adj. Showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreverential adj. Showing or expressing a deficiency of veneration, especially for sacred things.
irreversible adj. Irrevocable.
irrigant adj. Serving to water lands by artificial means.
irrigate v. To water, as land, by ditches or other artificial means.
irritable adj. Showing impatience or ill temper on little provocation.
irritancy n. The quality of producing vexation.
irritant n. A mechanical, chemical, or pathological agent of inflammation, pain, or tension.
irritate v. To excite ill temper or impatience in.
irruption n. Sudden invasion.
isle n. An island.
islet n. A little island.
isobar n. A line joining points at which the barometric pressure is the same at a specified moment.
isochronous adj. Relating to or denoting equal intervals of time.
isolate v. To separate from others of its kind.
isothermal adj. Having or marking equality of temperature.
itinerant adj. Wandering.
itinerary n. A detailed account or diary of a journey.
itinerate v. To wander from place to place.
jargon n. Confused, unintelligible speech or highly technical speech.
jaundice n. A morbid condition, due to obstructed excretion of bile or characterized by yellowing of the skin.
jeopardize v. To imperil.
Jingo n. One of a party in Great Britain in favor of spirited and demonstrative foreign policy.
jocose adj. Done or made in jest.
jocular adj. Inclined to joke.
joggle n. A sudden irregular shake or a push causing such a shake.
journalize v. To keep a diary.
jovial adj. Merry.
judgment n. The faculty by the exercise of which a deliberate conclusion is reached.
judicature n. Distribution and administration of justice by trial and judgment.
judicial adj. Pertaining to the administration of justice.
judiciary n. That department of government which administers the law relating to civil and criminal justice.
judicious adj. Prudent.
juggle v. To play tricks of sleight of hand.
jugglery n. The art or practice of sleight of hand.
jugular adj. Pertaining to the throat.
juicy adj. Succulent.
junction n. The condition of being joined.
juncture n. An articulation, joint, or seam.
junta n. A council or assembly that deliberates in secret upon the affairs of government.
juridical adj. Assumed by law to exist.
jurisdiction n. Lawful power or right to exercise official authority.
jurisprudence n. The science of rights in accordance with positive law.
juror n. One who serves on a jury or is sworn in for jury duty in a court of justice.
joust v. To engage in a tilt with lances on horseback.
justification n. Vindication.
juvenile adj. Characteristic of youth.
juxtapose v. To place close together.
keepsake n. Anything kept or given to be kept for the sake of the giver.
kerchief n. A square of linen, silk, or other material, used as a covering for the head or neck.
kernel n. A grain or seed.
kiln n. An oven or furnace for baking, burning, or drying industrial products.
kiloliter n. One thousand liters.
kilometer n. A length of 1,000 meters.
kilowatt n. One thousand watts.
kimono n. A loose robe, fastening with a sash, the principal outer garment in Japan.
kind-hearted adj. Having a kind and sympathetic nature.
kingling n. A petty king.
kingship n. Royal state.
knavery n. Deceitfulness in dealing.
knead v. To mix and work into a homogeneous mass, especially with the hands.
knickknack n. A small article, more for ornament that use.
knight errant n. One of the wandering knights who in the middle ages went forth in search of adventure.
knighthood n. Chivalry.
lacerate v. To tear rudely or raggedly.
lackadaisical adj. Listless.
lactation n. The secretion of milk.
lacteal adj. Milky.
lactic adj. Pertaining to milk.
laddie n. A lad.
ladle n. A cup-shaped vessel with a long handle, intended for dipping up and pouring liquids.
laggard adj. Falling behind.
landholder n. Landowner.
landlord n. A man who owns and lets a tenement or tenements.
landmark n. A familiar object in the landscape serving as a guide to an area otherwise easily lost track of.
landscape n. A rural view, especially one of picturesque effect, as seen from a distance or an elevation.
languid adj. Relaxed.
languor n. Lassitude of body or depression.
lapse n. A slight deviation from what is right, proper, or just.
lascivious adj. Lustful.
lassie n. A little lass.
latent adj. Dormant.
latency n. The state of being dormant.
later adv. At a subsequent time.
lateral adj. Directed toward the side.
latish adj. Rather late.
lattice n. Openwork of metal or wood, formed by crossing or interlacing strips or bars.
laud v. To praise in words or song.
laudable adj. Praiseworthy.
laudatory adj. Pertaining to, expressing, or containing praise.
laundress n. Washerwoman.
laureate adj. Crowned with laurel, as a mark of distinction.
lave v. To wash or bathe.
lawgiver n. A legislator.
lax adj. Not stringent or energetic.
laxative adj. Having power to open or loosen the bowels.
lea n. A field.
leaflet n. A little leaf or a booklet.
leaven v. To make light by fermentation, as dough.
leeward n. That side or direction toward which the wind blows.
left-handed adj. Using the left hand or arm more dexterously than the right.
legacy n. A bequest.
legalize v. To give the authority of law to.
legging n. A covering for the leg.
legible adj. That may be read with ease.
legionary n. A member of an ancient Roman legion or of the modern French Legion of Honor.
legislate v. To make or enact a law or laws.
legislative adj. That makes or enacts laws.
legislator n. A lawgiver.
legitimacy n. Accordance with law.
legitimate adj. Having the sanction of law or established custom.
leisure n. Spare time.
leonine adj. Like a lion.
lethargy n. Prolonged sluggishness of body or mind.
levee n. An embankment beside a river or stream or an arm of the sea, to prevent overflow.
lever n. That which exerts, or through which one may exert great power.
leviathan n. Any large animal, as a whale.
levity n. Frivolity.
levy v. To impose and collect by force or threat of force.
lewd adj. Characterized by lust or lasciviousness.
lexicographer n. One who makes dictionaries.
lexicography n. The making of dictionaries.
lexicon n. A dictionary.
liable adj. Justly or legally responsible.
libel n. Defamation.
liberalism n. Opposition to conservatism.
liberate v. To set free or release from bondage.
licentious adj. Wanton.
licit adj. Lawful.
liege adj. Sovereign.
lien n. A legal claim or hold on property, as security for a debt or charge.
lieu n. Stead.
lifelong adj. Lasting or continuous through life.
lifetime n. The time that life continues.
ligament n. That which binds objects together.
ligature n. Anything that constricts, or serves for binding or tying.
light-hearted adj. Free from care.
ligneous adj. Having the texture of appearance of wood.
likelihood n. A probability.
linear adj. Of the nature of a line.
liner n. A vessel belonging to a steamship-line.
lingo n. Language.
lingual adj. Pertaining to the use of the tongue in utterance.
linguist n. One who is acquainted with several languages.
linguistics n. The science of languages, or of the origin, history, and significance of words.
liniment n. A liquid preparation for rubbing on the skin in cases of bruises, inflammation, etc.
liquefacient adj. Possessing a liquefying nature or power.
liquefy v. To convert into a liquid or into liquid form.
liqueur n. An alcoholic cordial sweetened and flavored with aromatic substances.
liquidate v. To deliver the amount or value of.
liquor n. Any alcoholic or intoxicating liquid.
listless adj. Inattentive.
literacy n. The state or condition of knowing how to read and write.
literal adj. Following the exact words.
literature n. The written or printed productions of the human mind collectively.
lithe adj. Supple.
lithograph n. A print made by printing from stone.
lithotype n. In engraving, an etched stone surface for printing.
litigant n. A party to a lawsuit.
litigate v. To cause to become the subject-matter of a suit at law.
litigious adj. Quarrelsome.
littoral adj. Of, pertaining to, or living on a shore.
liturgy n. A ritual.
livelihood n. Means of subsistence.
livid adj. Black-and-blue, as contused flesh.
loam n. A non-coherent mixture of sand and clay.
loath adj. Averse.
locative adj. Indicating place, or the place where or wherein an action occurs.
loch n. A lake.
locomotion n. The act or power of moving from one place to another.
lode n. A somewhat continuous unstratified metal- bearing vein.
lodgment n. The act of furnishing with temporary quarters.
logic n. The science of correct thinking.
logical adj. Capable of or characterized by clear reasoning.
logician n. An expert reasoner.
loiterer n. One who consumes time idly.
loneliness n. Solitude.
longevity n. Unusually prolonged life.
loot v. To plunder.
lordling n. A little lord.
lough n. A lake or loch.
louse n. A small insect parasitic on and sucking the blood of mammals.
lovable adj. Amiable.
luminary n. One of the heavenly bodies as a source of light.
luminescent adj. Showing increase of light.
luminescence n. Showing increase.
luminosity n. The quality of giving or radiating light.
luminous adj. Giving or radiating light.
lunacy n. Mental unsoundness.
lunar adj. Pertaining to the moon.
lunatic n. An insane person.
lune n. The moon.
lurid adj. Ghastly and sensational.
luscious adj. Rich, sweet, and delicious.
lustrous adj. Shining.
luxuriance n. Excessive or superfluous growth or quantity.
luxuriant adj. Abundant or superabundant in growth.
luxuriate v. To live sumptuously.
lying n. Untruthfulness.
lyre n. One of the most ancient of stringed instruments of the harp class.
lyric adj. Fitted for expression in song.
macadamize v. To cover or pave, as a path or roadway, with small broken stone.
machinery n. The parts of a machine or engine, taken collectively.
machinist n. One who makes or repairs machines, or uses metal-working tools.
macrocosm n. The whole of any sphere or department of nature or knowledge to which man is related.
madden v. To inflame with passion.
Madonna n. A painted or sculptured representation of the Virgin, usually with the infant Jesus.
magician n. A sorcerer.
magisterial adj. Having an air of authority.
magistracy n. The office or dignity of a magistrate.
magnanimous adj. Generous in treating or judging others.
magnate n. A person of rank or importance.
magnet n. A body possessing that peculiar form of polarity found in nature in the lodestone.
magnetize v. To make a magnet of, permanently, or temporarily.
magnificence n. The exhibition of greatness of action, character, intellect, wealth, or power.
magnificent adj. Grand or majestic in appearance, quality, or action.
magnitude n. Importance.
maharaja n. A great Hindu prince.
maidenhood n. Virginity.
maintain v. To hold or preserve in any particular state or condition.
maintenance n. That which supports or sustains.
maize n. Indian corn: usually in the United States called simply corn.
makeup n. The arrangements or combination of the parts of which anything is composed.
malady n. Any physical disease or disorder, especially a chronic or deep-seated one.
malaria n. A fever characterized by alternating chills, fever, and sweating.
malcontent n. One who is dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs.
malediction n. The calling down of a curse or curses.
malefactor n. One who injures another.
maleficent adj. Mischievous.
malevolent adj. Wishing evil to others.
malign v. To speak evil of, especially to do so falsely and severely.
malignant adj. Evil in nature or tending to do great harm or mischief.
malleable adj. Pliant.
mallet n. A wooden hammer.
maltreat v. To treat ill, unkindly, roughly, or abusively.
man-trap n. A place or structure dangerous to human life.
mandate n. A command.
mandatory adj. Expressive of positive command, as distinguished from merely directory.
mane n. The long hair growing upon and about the neck of certain animals, as the horse and the lion.
man-eater n. An animal that devours human beings.
maneuver v. To make adroit or artful moves: manage affairs by strategy.
mania n. Insanity.
maniac n. a person raving with madness.
manifesto n. A public declaration, making announcement, explanation or defense of intentions, or motives.
manlike adj. Like a man.
manliness n. The qualities characteristic of a true man, as bravery, resolution, etc.
mannerism n. Constant or excessive adherence to one manner, style, or peculiarity, as of action or conduct.
manor n. The landed estate of a lord or nobleman.
mantel n. The facing, sometimes richly ornamented, about a fireplace, including the usual shelf above it.
mantle n. A cloak.
manufacturer n. A person engaged in manufacturing as a business.
manumission n. Emancipation.
manumit v. To set free from bondage.
marine adj. Of or pertaining to the sea or matters connected with the sea.
maritime adj. Situated on or near the sea.
maroon v. To put ashore and abandon (a person) on a desolate coast or island.
martial adj. Pertaining to war or military operations.
Martian adj. Pertaining to Mars, either the Roman god of war or the planet.
martyrdom n. Submission to death or persecution for the sake of faith or principle.
marvel v. To be astonished and perplexed because of (something).
masonry n. The art or work of constructing, as buildings, walls, etc., with regularly arranged stones.
masquerade n. A social party composed of persons masked and costumed so as to be disguised.
massacre n. The unnecessary and indiscriminate killing of human beings.
massive adj. Of considerable bulk and weight.
masterpiece n. A superior production.
mastery n. The attainment of superior skill.
material n. That of which anything is composed or may be constructed.
materialize v. To take perceptible or substantial form.
maternal adj. Pertaining or peculiar to a mother or to motherhood.
matinee n. An entertainment (especially theatrical) held in the daytime.
matricide n. The killing, especially the murdering, of one's mother.
matrimony n. The union of a man and a woman in marriage.
matrix n. That which contains and gives shape or form to anything.
matter of fact n. Something that has actual and undeniable existence or reality.
maudlin adj. Foolishly and tearfully affectionate.
mausoleum n. A tomb of more than ordinary size or architectural pretensions.
mawkish adj. Sickening or insipid.
maxim n. A principle accepted as true and acted on as a rule or guide.
maze n. A labyrinth.
mealy-mouthed adj. Afraid to express facts or opinions plainly.
meander v. To wind and turn while proceeding in a course.
mechanics n. The branch of physics that treats the phenomena caused by the action of forces.
medallion n. A large medal.
meddlesome adj. Interfering.
medial adj. Of or pertaining to the middle.
mediate v. To effect by negotiating as an agent between parties.
medicine n. A substance possessing or reputed to possess curative or remedial properties.
medieval adj. Belonging or relating to or descriptive of the middle ages.
mediocre adj. Ordinary.
meditation n. The turning or revolving of a subject in the mind.
medley n. A composition of different songs or parts of songs arranged to run as a continuous whole.
meliorate v. To make better or improve, as in quality or social or physical condition.
mellifluous adj. Sweetly or smoothly flowing.
melodious adj. Characterized by a sweet succession of sounds.
melodrama n. A drama with a romantic story or plot and sensational situation and incidents.
memento n. A souvenir.
mentor n. A wise and faithful teacher, guide, and friend.
mercantile adj. Conducted or acting on business principles; commercial.
mercenary adj. Greedy
merciful adj. Disposed to pity and forgive.
merciless adj. Cruel.
meretricious adj. Alluring by false or gaudy show.
mesmerize v. To hypnotize.
messieurs n. pl. Gentlemen.
metal n. An element that forms a base by combining with oxygen, is usually hard, heavy, and lustrous.
metallurgy n. The art or science of extracting a metal from ores, as by smelting.
metamorphosis n. A passing from one form or shape into another.
metaphor n. A figure of speech in which one object is likened to another, by speaking as if the other.
metaphysical adj. Philosophical.
metaphysician n. One skilled in metaphysics.
metaphysics n. The principles of philosophy as applied to explain the methods of any particular science.
mete v. To apportion.
metempsychosis n. Transition of the soul of a human being at death into another body, whether human or beast.
meticulous adj. Over-cautious.
metonymy n. A figure of speech that consists in the naming of a thing by one of its attributes.
metric adj. Relating to measurement.
metronome n. An instrument for indicating and marking exact time in music.
metropolis n. A chief city, either the capital or the largest or most important city of a state.
metropolitan adj. Pertaining to a chief city.
mettle n. Courage.
mettlesome adj. Having courage or spirit.
microcosm n. The world or universe on a small scale.
micrometer n. An instrument for measuring very small angles or dimensions.
microphone n. An apparatus for magnifying faint sounds.
microscope n. An instrument for assisting the eye in the vision of minute objects or features of objects.
microscopic adj. Adapted to or characterized by minute observation.
microscopy n. The art of examing objects with the microscope.
midsummer n. The middle of the summer.
midwife n. A woman who makes a business of assisting at childbirth.
mien n. The external appearance or manner of a person.
migrant adj. Wandering.
migrate v. To remove or pass from one country, region, or habitat to another.
migratory adj. Wandering.
mileage n. A distance in miles.
militant adj. Of a warlike or combative disposition or tendency.
militarism n. A policy of maintaining great standing armies.
militate v. To have weight or influence (in determining a question).
militia n. Those citizens, collectively, who are enrolled and drilled in temporary military organizations.
Milky Way n. The galaxy.
millet n. A grass cultivated for forage and cereal.
mimic v. To imitate the speech or actions of.
miniature adj. Much smaller than reality or that the normal size.
minimize v. To reduce to the smallest possible amount or degree.
minion n. A servile favorite.
ministration n. Any religious ceremonial.
ministry n. A service.
minority n. The smaller in number of two portions into which a number or a group is divided.
minute adj. Exceedingly small in extent or quantity.
minutia n. A small or unimportant particular or detail.
mirage n. An optical effect looking like a sheet of water in the desert.
misadventure n. An unlucky accident.
misanthropic adj. Hating mankind.
misanthropy n. Hatred of mankind.
misapprehend v. To misunderstand.
misbehave v. To behave ill.
misbehavior n. Ill or improper behavior.
mischievous adj. Fond of tricks.
miscount v. To make a mistake in counting.
miscreant n. A villain.
misdeed n. A wrong or improper act.
misdemeanor n. Evil conduct, small crime.
miser n. A person given to saving and hoarding unduly.
mishap n. Misfortune.
mismanage v. To manage badly, improperly, or unskillfully.
misnomer n. A name wrongly or mistakenly applied.
misogamy n. Hatred of marriage.
misogyny n. Hatred of women.
misplace v. To put into a wrong place.
misrepresent v. To give a wrong impression.
misrule v. To misgovern.
missal n. The book containing the service for the celebration of mass.
missile n. Any object, especially a weapon, thrown or intended to be thrown.
missive n. A message in writing.
mistrust v. To regard with suspicion or jealousy.
misty adj. Lacking clearness
misunderstand v. To Take in a wrong sense.
misuse v. To maltreat.
mite n. A very small amount, portion, or particle.
miter n. The junction of two bodies at an equally divided angle.
mitigate v. To make milder or more endurable.
mnemonics n. A system of principles and formulas designed to assist the recollection in certain instances.
moat n. A ditch on the outside of a fortress wall.
mobocracy n. Lawless control of public affairs by the mob or populace.
moccasin n. A foot-covering made of soft leather or buckskin.
mockery n. Ridicule.
moderator n. The presiding officer of a meeting.
modernity n. The state or character of being modern.
modernize v. To make characteristic of the present or of recent times.
modification n. A change.
modify v. To make somewhat different.
modish adj. Fashionable.
modulate v. To vary in tone, inflection, pitch or other quality of sound.
mollify v. To soothe.
molt v. To cast off, as hair, feathers, etc.
momentary adj. Lasting but a short time.
momentous adj. Very significant.
monarchy n. Government by a single, sovereign ruler.
monastery n. A dwelling-place occupied in common by persons under religious vows of seclusion.
monetary adj. Financial.
mongrel n. The progeny resulting from the crossing of different breeds or varieties.
monition n. Friendly counsel given by way of warning and implying caution or reproof.
monitory n. Admonition or warning.
monocracy n. Government by a single person.
monogamy n. The habit of pairing, or having but one mate.
monogram n. A character consisting of two or more letters interwoven into one, usually initials of a name.
monograph n. A treatise discussing a single subject or branch of a subject.
monolith n. Any structure or sculpture in stone formed of a single piece.
monologue n. A story or drama told or performed by one person.
monomania n. The unreasonable pursuit of one idea.
monopoly n. The control of a thing, as a commodity, to enable a person to raise its price.
monosyllable n. A word of one syllable.
monotone n. The sameness or monotony of utterance.
monotonous adj. Unchanging and tedious.
monotony n. A lack of variety.
monsieur n. A French title of respect, equivalent to Mr. and sir.
monstrosity n. Anything unnaturally huge or distorted.
moonbeam n. A ray of moonlight.
morale n. A state of mind with reference to confidence, courage, zeal, and the like.
moralist n. A writer on ethics.
morality n. Virtue.
moralize v. To render virtuous.
moratorium n. An emergency legislation authorizing a government suspend some action temporarily.
morbid adj. Caused by or denoting a diseased or unsound condition of body or mind.
mordacious adj. Biting or giving to biting.
mordant adj. Biting.
moribund adj. On the point of dying.
morose adj. Gloomy.
morphology n. the science of organic forms.
motley adj. Composed of heterogeneous or inharmonious elements.
motto n. An expressive word or pithy sentence enunciating some guiding rule of life, or faith.
mountaineer n. One who travels among or climbs mountains for pleasure or exercise.
mountainous adj. Full of or abounding in mountains.
mouthful n. As much as can be or is usually put into the or exercise.
muddle v. To confuse or becloud, especially with or as with drink.
muffle v. To deaden the sound of, as by wraps.
mulatto n. The offspring of a white person and a black person.
muleteer n. A mule-driver.
multiform adj. Having many shapes, or appearances.
multiplicity n. the condition of being manifold or very various.
mundane adj. Worldly, as opposed to spiritual or celestial.
municipal adj. Of or pertaining to a town or city, or to its corporate or local government.
municipality n. A district enjoying municipal government.
munificence n. A giving characterized by generous motives and extraordinary liberality.
munificent adj. Extraordinarily generous.
muster n. An assemblage or review of troops for parade or inspection, or for numbering off.
mutation n. The act or process of change.
mutilate v. To disfigure.
mutiny n. Rebellion against lawful or constituted authority.
myriad n. A vast indefinite number.
mystic n. One who professes direct divine illumination, or relies upon meditation to acquire truth.
mystification n. The act of artfully perplexing.
myth n. A fictitious narrative presented as historical, but without any basis of fact.
mythology n. The whole body of legends cherished by a race concerning gods and heroes.
nameless adj. Having no fame or reputation.
naphtha n. A light, colorless, volatile, inflammable oil used as a solvent, as in manufacture of paints.
Narcissus n. The son of the Athenian river-god Cephisus, fabled to have fallen in love with his reflection.
narrate v. To tell a story.
narration n. The act of recounting the particulars of an event in the order of time or occurrence.
narrative n. An orderly continuous account of the successive particulars of an event.
narrator n. One who narrates anything.
narrow-minded adj. Characterized by illiberal views or sentiments.
nasal adj. Pertaining to the nose.
natal adj. Pertaining to one's birth.
nationality n. A connection with a particular nation.
naturally adv. According to the usual order of things.
nausea n. An affection of the stomach producing dizziness and usually an impulse to vomit
nauseate v. To cause to loathe.
nauseous adj. Loathsome.
nautical adj. Pertaining to ships, seamen, or navigation.
naval adj. Pertaining to ships.
navel n. The depression on the abdomen where the umbilical cord of the fetus was attached.
navigable adj. Capable of commercial navigation.
navigate v. To traverse by ship.
nebula n. A gaseous body of unorganized stellar substance.
necessary adj. Indispensably requisite or absolutely needed to accomplish a desired result.
necessitate v. To render indispensable.
necessity n. That which is indispensably requisite to an end desired.
necrology n. A list of persons who have died in a certain place or time.
necromancer n. One who practices the art of foretelling the future by means of communication with the dead.
necropolis n. A city of the dead.
necrosis n. the death of part of the body.
nectar n. Any especially sweet and delicious drink.
nectarine n. A variety of the peach.
needlework n. Embroidery.
needy adj. Being in need, want, or poverty.
nefarious adj. Wicked in the extreme.
negate v. To deny.
negation n. The act of denying or of asserting the falsity of a proposition.
neglectful adj. Exhibiting or indicating omission.
negligee n. A loose gown worn by women.
negligence n. Omission of that which ought to be done.
negligent adj. Apt to omit what ought to be done.
negligible adj. Transferable by assignment, endorsement, or delivery.
negotiable v. To bargain with others for an agreement, as for a treaty or transfer of property.
Nemesis n. A goddess; divinity of chastisement and vengeance.
neocracy n. Government administered by new or untried persons.
neo-Darwinsim n. Darwinism as modified and extended by more recent students.
neo-Latin n. Modernized Latin.
neopaganism n. A new or revived paganism.
Neolithic adj. Pertaining to the later stone age.
neology n. The coining or using of new words or new meanings of words.
neophyte adj. Having the character of a beginner.
nestle v. To adjust cozily in snug quarters.
nestling adj. Recently hatched.
nettle v. To excite sensations of uneasiness or displeasure in.
network n. Anything that presents a system of cross- lines.
neural adj. Pertaining to the nerves or nervous system.
neurology n. The science of the nervous system.
neuter adj. Neither masculine nor feminine.
neutral adj. Belonging to or under control of neither of two contestants.
nevertheless conj. Notwithstanding.
Newtonian adj. Of or pertaining to Sir Isaac Newton, the English philosopher.
niggardly adj. Stingy. (no longer acceptable to use)
nihilist n. An advocate of the doctrine that nothing either exists or can be known.
nil n. Nothing
nimble adj. Light and quick in motion or action.
nit n. The egg of a louse or some other insect.
nocturnal adj. Of or pertaining to the night.
noiseless adj. Silent.
noisome adj. Very offensive, particularly to the sense of smell.
noisy adj. Clamorous.
nomad adj. Having no fixed abode.
nomic adj. Usual or customary.
nominal adj. Trivial.
nominate v. To designate as a candidate for any office.
nomination n. The act or ceremony of naming a man or woman for office.
nominee n. One who receives a nomination.
non-existent n. That which does not exist.
non-resident adj. Not residing within a given jurisdiction.
nonchalance n. A state of mind indicating lack of interest.
non-combatant n. One attached to the army or navy, but having duties other than that of fighting.
nondescript adj. Indescribable.
nonentity n. A person or thing of little or no account.
nonpareil n. One who or that which is of unequaled excellence.
norm n. A model.
normalcy n. The state of being normal.
Norman adj. Of or peculiar to Normandy, in northern France.
nostrum n. Any scheme or recipe of a charlatan character.
noticeable adj. Perceptible.
notorious adj. Unfavorably known to the general public.
novellette n. A short novel.
novice n. A beginner in any business or occupation.
nowadays adv. In the present time or age.
nowhere adv. In no place or state.
noxious adj. Hurtful.
nuance n. A slight degree of difference in anything perceptible to the sense of the mind.
nucleus n. A central point or part about which matter is aggregated.
nude adj. Naked.
nugatory adj. Having no power or force.
nuisance n. That which annoys, vexes, or irritates.
numeration n. The act or art of reading or naming numbers.
numerical adj. Of or pertaining to number.
nunnery n. A convent for nuns.
nuptial adj. Of or pertaining to marriage, especially to the marriage ceremony.
nurture n. The process of fostering or promoting growth.
nutriment n. That which nourishes.
nutritive adj. Having nutritious properties.
oaken adj. Made of or from oak.
oakum n. Hemp-fiber obtained by untwisting and picking out loosely the yarns of old hemp rope.
obdurate adj. Impassive to feelings of humanity or pity.
obelisk n. A square shaft with pyramidal top, usually monumental or commemorative.
obese adj. Exceedingly fat.
obituary adj. A published notice of a death.
objective adj. Grasping and representing facts as they are.
objector n. One who objects, as to a proposition, measure, or ruling.
obligate v. To hold to the fulfillment of duty.
obligatory adj. Binding in law or conscience.
oblique adj. Slanting; said of lines.
obliterate v. To cause to disappear.
oblivion n. The state of having passed out of the memory or of being utterly forgotten.
oblong adj. Longer than broad: applied most commonly to rectangular objects considerably elongated
obnoxious adj. Detestable.
obsequies n. Funeral rites.
obsequious adj. Showing a servile readiness to fall in with the wishes or will of another.
observance n. A traditional form or customary act.
observant adj. Quick to notice.
observatory n. A building designed for systematic astronomical observations.
obsolescence n. The condition or process of gradually falling into disuse.
obsolescent adj. Passing out of use, as a word.
obsolete adj. No longer practiced or accepted.
obstetrician n. A practitioner of midwifery.
obstetrics n. The branch of medical science concerned with the treatment and care of women during pregnancy.
obstinacy n. Stubborn adherence to opinion, arising from conceit or the desire to have one's own way.
obstreperous adj. Boisterous.
obstruct v. To fill with impediments so as to prevent passage, either wholly or in part.
obstruction n. Hindrance.
obtrude v. To be pushed or to push oneself into undue prominence.
obtrusive adj. Tending to be pushed or to push oneself into undue prominence.
obvert v. To turn the front or principal side of (a thing) toward any person or object.
obviate v. To clear away or provide for, as an objection or difficulty.
occasion n. An important event or celebration.
Occident n. The countries lying west of Asia and the Turkish dominions.
occlude v. To absorb, as a gas by a metal.
occult adj. Existing but not immediately perceptible.
occupant n. A tenant in possession of property, as distinguished from the actual owner.
occurrence n. A happening.
octagon n. A figure with eight sides and eight angles.
octave n. A note at this interval above or below any other, considered in relation to that other.
octavo n. A book, or collection of paper in which the sheets are so folded as to make eight leaves.
octogenarian adj. A person of between eighty and ninety years.
ocular adj. Of or pertaining to the eye.
oculist n. One versed or skilled in treating diseases of the eye.
oddity n. An eccentricity.
ode n. The form of lyric poetry anciently intended to be sung.
odious adj. Hateful.
odium n. A feeling of extreme repugnance, or of dislike and disgust.
odoriferous adj. Having or diffusing an odor or scent, especially an agreeable one.
odorous adj. Having an odor, especially a fragrant one.
off adj. Farther or more distant.
offhand adv. Without preparation.
officiate v. To act as an officer or leader.
officious adj. Intermeddling with what is not one's concern.
offshoot n. Something that branches off from the parent stock.
ogre n. A demon or monster that was supposed to devour human beings.
ointment n. A fatty preparation with a butter-like consistency in which a medicinal substance exists.
olfactory adj. of or pertaining to the sense of smell.
olive-branch n. A branch of the olive-tree, as an emblem of peace.
ominous adj. Portentous.
omnipotence n. Unlimited and universal power.
Omnipotent adj. Possessed of unlimited and universal power.
omniscience n. Unlimited or infinite knowledge.
omniscient adj. Characterized by unlimited or infinite knowledge.
omnivorous adj. Eating or living upon food of all kinds indiscriminately.
onerous adj. Burdensome or oppressive.
onrush n. Onset.
onset n. An assault, especially of troops, upon an enemy or fortification.
onslaught n. A violent onset.
onus n. A burden or responsibility.
opalescence n. The property of combined refraction and reflection of light, resulting in smoky tints.
opaque adj. Impervious to light.
operate v. To put in action and supervise the working of.
operative adj. Active.
operator n. One who works with or controls some machine or scientific apparatus.
operetta n. A humorous play in dialogue and music, of more than one act.
opinion n. A conclusion or judgment held with confidence, but falling short of positive knowledge.
opponent n. One who supports the opposite side in a debate, discussion, struggle, or sport.
opportune adj. Especially fit as occurring, said, or done at the right moment.
opportunist n. One who takes advantage of circumstances to gain his ends.
opportunity n. Favorable or advantageous chance or opening.
opposite adj. Radically different or contrary in action or movement.
opprobrium n. The state of being scornfully reproached or accused of evil.
optic n. Pertaining to the eye or vision.
optician n. One who makes or deals in optical instruments or eye-glasses.
optics n. The science that treats of light and vision, and all that is connected with sight.
optimism n. The view that everything in nature and the history of mankind is ordered for the best.
option n. The right, power, or liberty of choosing.
optometry n. Measurement of the powers of vision.
opulence n. Affluence.
oral adj. Uttered through the mouth.
orate v. To deliver an elaborate or formal public speech.
oration n. An elaborate or formal public speech.
orator n. One who delivers an elaborate or formal speech.
oratorio n. A composition for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, generally taken from the Scriptures.
oratory n. The art of public speaking.
ordeal n. Anything that severely tests courage, strength, patience, conscience, etc.
ordinal n. That form of the numeral that shows the order of anything in a series, as first, second, third.
ordination n. A consecration to the ministry.
ordnance n. A general name for all kinds of weapons and their appliances used in war.
orgies n. Wild or wanton revelry.
origin n. The beginning of that which becomes or is made to be.
original adj. Not copied nor produced by imitation.
originate v. To cause or constitute the beginning or first stage of the existence of.
ornate adj. Ornamented to a marked degree.
orthodox adj. Holding the commonly accepted faith.
orthodoxy n. Acceptance of the common faith.
orthogonal adj. Having or determined by right angles.
orthopedic adj. Relating to the correcting or preventing of deformity
orthopedist n. One who practices the correcting or preventing of deformity
oscillate v. To swing back and forth.
osculate v. To kiss.
ossify v. to convert into bone.
ostentation n. A display dictated by vanity and intended to invite applause or flattery.
ostracism n. Exclusion from intercourse or favor, as in society or politics.
ostracize v. To exclude from public or private favor.
ought v. To be under moral obligation to be or do.
oust v. To eject.
out-and-out adv. Genuinely.
outbreak n. A sudden and violent breaking forth, as of something that has been pent up or restrained.
outburst n. A violent issue, especially of passion in an individual.
outcast n. One rejected and despised, especially socially.
outcry n. A vehement or loud cry or clamor.
outdo v. To surpass.
outlandish adj. Of barbarous, uncouth, and unfamiliar aspect or action.
outlast v. To last longer than.
outlaw n. A habitual lawbreaker.
outlive v. To continue to exist after.
out-of-the-way adj. Remotely situated.
outpost n. A detachment of troops stationed at a distance from the main body to guard against surprise.
outrage n. A gross infringement of morality or decency.
outrageous adj. Shocking in conduct.
outreach v. To reach or go beyond.
outride v. To ride faster than.
outrigger n. A part built or arranged to project beyond a natural outline for support.
outright adv. Entirely.
outskirt n. A border region.
outstretch v. To extend.
outstrip v. To go beyond.
outweigh v. To surpass in importance or excellence.
overdo v. To overtax the strength of.
overdose n. An excessive dose, usually so large a dose of a medicine that its effect is toxic.
overeat v. To eat to excess.
overhang n. A portion of a structure which projects or hangs over.
overleap v. To leap beyond.
overlord n. One who holds supremacy over another.
overpass v. To pass across or over, as a river.
overpay v. To pay or reward in excess.
overpower v. To gain supremacy or victory over by superior power.
overproduction n. Excessive production.
overreach v. To stretch out too far.
overrun v. To infest or ravage.
oversee v. To superintend.
overshadow v. To cast into the shade or render insignificant by comparison.
overstride v. To step beyond.
overthrow v. To vanquish an established ruler or government.
overtone n. A harmonic.
overture n. An instrumental prelude to an opera, oratorio, or ballet.
overweight n. Preponderance.
pacify v. To bring into a peaceful state.
packet n. A bundle, as of letters.
pact n. A covenant.
pagan n. A worshiper of false gods.
pageant n. A dramatic representation, especially a spectacular one.
palate n. The roof of the mouth.
palatial adj. Magnificent.
paleontology n. The branch of biology that treats of ancient life and fossil organisms.
palette n. A thin tablet, with a hole for the thumb, upon which artists lay their colors for painting.
palinode n. A retraction.
pall v. To make dull by satiety.
palliate v. To cause to appear less guilty.
pallid adj. Of a pale or wan appearance.
palpable n. perceptible by feeling or touch.
palsy n. Paralysis.
paly adj. Lacking color or brilliancy.
pamphlet n. A brief treatise or essay, usually on a subject of current interest.
pamphleteer v. To compose or issue pamphlets, especially controversial ones.
panacea n. A remedy or medicine proposed for or professing to cure all diseases.
Pan-American adj. Including or pertaining to the whole of America, both North and South.
pandemic adj. Affecting a whole people or all classes, as a disease.
pandemonium n. A fiendish or riotous uproar.
panegyric n. A formal and elaborate eulogy, written or spoken, of a person or of an act.
panel n. A rectangular piece set in or as in a frame.
panic n. A sudden, unreasonable, overpowering fear.
panoply n. A full set of armor.
panorama n. A series of large pictures representing a continuous scene.
pantheism n. The worship of nature for itself or its beauty.
Pantheon n. A circular temple at Rome with a fine Corinthian portico and a great domed roof.
pantomime n. Sign-language.
pantoscope n. A very wide-angled photographic lens.
papacy n. The official head of the Roman Catholic Church.
papyrus n. The writing-paper of the ancient Egyptians, and later of the Romans.
parable n. A brief narrative founded on real scenes or events usually with a moral.
paradox n. A statement or doctrine seemingly in contradiction to the received belief.
paragon n. A model of excellence.
parallel v. To cause to correspond or lie in the same direction and equidistant in all parts.
parallelism n. Essential likeness.
paralysis n. Loss of the power of contractility in the voluntary or involuntary muscles.
paralyze v. To deprive of the power to act.
paramount adj. Supreme in authority.
paramour n. One who is unlawfully and immorally a lover or a mistress.
paraphernalia n. Miscellaneous articles of equipment or adornment.
paraphrase v. Translate freely.
pare v. To cut, shave, or remove (the outside) from anything.
parentage n. The relation of parent to child, of the producer to the produced, or of cause to effect.
Pariah n. A member of a degraded class; a social outcast.
parish n. The ecclesiastical district in charge of a pastor.
Parisian adj. Of or pertaining to the city of Paris.
parity n. Equality, as of condition or rank.
parlance n. Mode of speech.
parley v. To converse in.
parliament n. A legislative body.
parlor n. A room for reception of callers or entertainment of guests.
parody v. To render ludicrous by imitating the language of.
paronymous adj. Derived from the same root or primitive word.
paroxysm n. A sudden outburst of any kind of activity.
parricide n. The murder of a parent.
parse v. To describe, as a sentence, by separating it into its elements and describing each word.
parsimonious adj. Unduly sparing in the use or expenditure of money.
partible adj. Separable.
participant n. One having a share or part.
participate v. To receive or have a part or share of.
partition n. That which separates anything into distinct parts.
partisan adj. Characterized by or exhibiting undue or unreasoning devotion to a party.
passible adj. Capable of feeling of suffering.
passive adj. Unresponsive.
pastoral adj. Having the spirit or sentiment of rural life.
paternal adj. Fatherly.
pathos n. The quality in any form of representation that rouses emotion or sympathy.
patriarch n. The chief of a tribe or race who rules by paternal right.
patrician adj. Of senatorial or noble rank.
patrimony n. An inheritance from an ancestor, especially from one's father.
patriotism n. Love and devotion to one's country.
patronize v. To exercise an arrogant condescension toward.
patronymic adj. Formed after one's father's name.
patter v. To mumble something over and over.
paucity n. Fewness.
pauper n. One without means of support.
pauperism n. Dependence on charity.
pavilion n. An open structure for temporary shelter.
payee n. A person to whom money has been or is to be paid.
peaceable adj. Tranquil.
peccable adj. Capable of sinning.
peccadillo n. A small breach of propriety or principle.
peccant adj. Guilty.
pectoral adj. Pertaining to the breast or thorax.
pecuniary adj. Consisting of money.
pedagogics n. The science and art of teaching.
pedagogue n. A schoolmaster.
pedagogy n. The science and art of teaching
pedal n. A lever for the foot usually applied only to musical instruments, cycles, and other machines.
pedant n. A scholar who makes needless and inopportune display of his learning.
peddle v. To go about with a small stock of goods to sell.
pedestal n. A base or support as for a column, statue, or vase.
pedestrian n. One who journeys on foot.
pediatrics n. The department of medical science that relates to the treatment of diseases of childhood.
pedigree n. One's line of ancestors.
peddler n. One who travels from house to house with an assortment of goods for retail.
peerage n. The nobility.
peerless adj. Of unequaled excellence or worth.
peevish adj. Petulant. (irritable)
pellucid adj. Translucent.
penalty n. The consequences that follow the transgression of natural or divine law.
penance n. Punishment to which one voluntarily submits or subjects himself as an expression of penitence.
penchant n. A bias in favor of something.
pendant n. Anything that hangs from something else, either for ornament or for use.
pendulous adj. Hanging, especially so as to swing by an attached end or part.
pendulum n. A weight hung on a rod, serving by its oscillation to regulate the rate of a clock.
penetrable adj. That may be pierced by physical, moral, or intellectual force.
penetrate v. To enter or force a way into the interior parts of.
penetration n. Discernment.
peninsular adj. Pertaining to a piece of land almost surrounded by water.
penitence n. Sorrow for sin with desire to amend and to atone.
penitential adj. Pertaining to sorrow for sin with desire to amend and to atone.
pennant n. A small flag.
pension n. A periodical allowance to an individual on account of past service done by him/her.
pentagram n. A figure having five points or lobes.
pentavalent adj. Quinqeuvalent.
pentad n. The number five.
pentagon n. A figure, especially, with five angles and five sides.
pentahedron n. A solid bounded by five plane faces.
pentameter n. In prosody, a line of verse containing five units or feet.
pentathlon n. The contest of five associated exercises in the great games and the same contestants.
penultimate adj. A syllable or member of a series that is last but one.
penurious adj. Excessively sparing in the use of money.
penury n. Indigence.
perambulate v. To walk about.
perceive v. To have knowledge of, or receive impressions concerning, through the medium of the body senses.
perceptible adj. Cognizable.
perception n. Knowledge through the senses of the existence and properties of matter or the external world.
percipience n. The act of perceiving.
percipient n. One who or that which perceives.
percolate v. To filter.
percussion n. The sharp striking of one body against another.
peremptory adj. Precluding question or appeal.
perennial adj. Continuing though the year or through many years.
perfectible adj. Capable of being made perfect.
perfidy n. Treachery.
perforate v. To make a hole or holes through.
perform v. To accomplish.
perfumery n. The preparation of perfumes.
perfunctory adj. Half-hearted.
perhaps adv. Possibly.
perigee n. The point in the orbit of the moon when it is nearest the earth.
periodicity n. The habit or characteristic of recurrence at regular intervals.
peripatetic adj. Walking about.
perjure v. To swear falsely to.
perjury n. A solemn assertion of a falsity.
permanence n. A continuance in the same state, or without any change that destroys the essential form or nature.
permanent adj. Durable.
permissible adj. That may be allowed.
permutation n. Reciprocal change, different ordering of same items.
pernicious adj. Tending to kill or hurt.
perpendicular adj. Straight up and down.
perpetrator n. The doer of a wrong or a criminal act.
perpetuate v. To preserve from extinction or oblivion.
perquisite n. Any profit from service beyond the amount fixed as salary or wages.
persecution n. Harsh or malignant oppression.
perseverance n. A persistence in purpose and effort.
persevere v. To continue striving in spite of discouragements.
persiflage n. Banter.
persist v. To continue steadfast against opposition.
persistence n. A fixed adherence to a resolve, course of conduct, or the like.
personage n. A man or woman as an individual, especially one of rank or high station.
personal adj. Not general or public.
personality n. The attributes, taken collectively, that make up the character and nature of an individual.
personnel n. The force of persons collectively employed in some service.
perspective n. The relative importance of facts or matters from any special point of view.
perspicacious adj. Astute.
perspicacity n. Acuteness or discernment.
perspicuous adj. Lucid.
perspire v. To excrete through the pores of the skin.
persuade v. To win the mind of by argument, eloquence, evidence, or reflection.
persuadable adj. capable of influencing to action by entreaty, statement, or anything that moves the feelings.
pertinacious adj. Persistent or unyielding.
pertinacity n. Unyielding adherence.
perturb v. To disturb greatly.
perturbation n. Mental excitement or confusion.
perusal n. The act of reading carefully or thoughtfully.
pervade v. To pass or spread through every part.
pervasion n. The state of spreading through every part.
pervasive adj. Thoroughly penetrating or permeating.
perverse adj. Unreasonable.
perversion n. Diversion from the true meaning or proper purpose.
perversity n. Wickedness.
pervert n. One who has forsaken a doctrine regarded as true for one esteemed false.
pervious adj. Admitting the entrance or passage of another substance.
pestilence n. A raging epidemic.
pestilent adj. Having a malign influence or effect.
pestilential adj. having the nature of or breeding pestilence.
peter v. To fail or lose power, efficiency, or value.
petrify v. To convert into a substance of stony hardness and character.
petulance n. The character or condition of being impatient, capricious or petulant.
petulant adj. Displaying impatience.
pharmacopoeia n. A book containing the formulas and methods of preparation of medicines for the use of druggists.
pharmacy n. The art or business of compounding and dispensing medicines.
phenomenal adj. Extraordinary or marvelous.
phenomenon n. Any unusual occurrence.
philander v. To play at courtship with a woman.
philanthropic adj. Benevolent.
philanthropist n. One who endeavors to help his fellow men.
philanthropy n. Active humanitarianism.
philately n. The study and collection of stamps.
philharmonic adj. Fond of music.
philogynist n. One who is fond of women.
philologist n. An expert in linguistics.
philology n. The study of language in connection with history and literature.
philosophize v. To seek ultimate causes and principles.
philosophy n. The general principles, laws, or causes that furnish the rational explanation of anything.
phlegmatic adj. Not easily roused to feeling or action.
phonetic adj. Representing articulate sounds or speech.
phonic adj. Pertaining to the nature of sound.
phonogram n. A graphic character symbolizing an articulate sound.
phonology n. The science of human vocal sounds.
phosphorescence n. The property of emitting light.
photoelectric adj. Pertaining to the combined action of light and electricity.
photometer n. Any instrument for measuring the intensity of light or comparing the intensity of two lights.
photometry n. The art of measuring the intensity of light.
physicist n. A specialist in the science that treats of the phenomena associated with matter and energy.
physics n. The science that treats of the phenomena associated with matter and energy.
physiocracy n. The doctrine that land and its products are the only true wealth.
physiognomy n. The external appearance merely.
physiography n. Description of nature.
physiology n. The science of organic functions.
physique n. The physical structure or organization of a person.
picayune adj. Of small value.
piccolo n. A small flute.
piece n. A loose or separated part, as distinguished from the whole or the mass.
piecemeal adv. Gradually.
pillage n. Open robbery, as in war.
pillory n. A wooden framework in which an offender is fastened to boards and is exposed to public scorn.
pincers n. An instrument having two lever-handles and two jaws working on a pivot.
pinchers n. An instrument having two jaws working on a pivot.
pinnacle n. A high or topmost point, as a mountain-peak.
pioneer n. One among the first to explore a country.
pious adj. Religious.
pique v. To excite a slight degree of anger in.
piteous adj. Compassionate.
pitiless adj. Hard-hearted.
pittance n. Any small portion or meager allowance.
placate v. To bring from a state of angry or hostile feeling to one of patience or friendliness.
placid adj. Serene.
plagiarism n. The stealing of passages from the writings of another and publishing them as one's own.
planisphere n. A polar projection of the heavens on a chart.
plasticity n. The property of some substances through which the form of the mass can readily be changed.
platitude n. A written or spoken statement that is flat, dull, or commonplace.
plaudit n. An expression of applause.
plausible adj. Seeming likely to be true, though open to doubt.
playful adj. Frolicsome.
playwright n. A maker of plays for the stage.
plea n. An argument to obtain some desired action.
pleasant adj. Agreeable.
pledgee n. The person to whom anything is pledged.
pledgeor n. One who gives a pledge.
plenary adj. Entire.
plenipotentiary n. A person fully empowered to transact any business.
plenitude n. Abundance.
plumb n. A weight suspended by a line to test the verticality of something.
plummet n. A piece of lead for making soundings, adjusting walls to the vertical.
pluperfect adj. Expressing past time or action prior to some other past time or action.
plural adj. Containing or consisting of more than one.
plurality n. A majority.
plutocracy n. A wealthy class in a political community who control the government by means of their money.
pneumatic adj. Pertaining to or consisting of air or gas.
poesy n. Poetry.
poetaster n. An inferior poet.
poetic adj. Pertaining to poetry.
poetics n. The rules and principles of poetry.
poignancy n. Severity or acuteness, especially of pain or grief.
poignant adj. Severely painful or acute to the spirit.
poise n. Equilibrium.
polar adj. Pertaining to the poles of a sphere, especially of the earth.
polemics n. The art of controversy or disputation.
pollen n. The fine dust-like grains or powder formed within the anther of a flowering plant.
pollute v. To contaminate.
polyarchy n. Government by several or many persons of what- ever class.
polycracy n. The rule of many.
polygamy n. the fact or condition of having more than one wife or husband at once.
polyglot adj. Speaking several tongues.
polygon n. A figure having many angles.
polyhedron n. A solid bounded by plane faces, especially by more than four.
polysyllable adj. Having several syllables, especially more than three syllables.
polytechnic adj. Pertaining to, embracing, or practicing many arts.
polytheism n. The doctrine or belief that there are more gods than one.
pommel v. To beat with something thick or bulky.
pomposity n. The quality of being marked by an assumed stateliness and impressiveness of manner.
pompous adj. Marked by an assumed stateliness and impressiveness of manner.
ponder v. To meditate or reflect upon.
ponderous adj. Unusually weighty or forcible.
pontiff n. The Pope.
populace n. The common people.
populous adj. Containing many inhabitants, especially in proportion to the territory.
portend v. To indicate as being about to happen, especially by previous signs.
portent n. Anything that indicates what is to happen.
portfolio n. A portable case for holding writing-materials, drawings, etc.
posit v. To present in an orderly manner.
position n. The manner in which a thing is placed.
positive adj. Free from doubt or hesitation.
posse n. A force of men.
possess v. To own.
possession n. The having, holding, or detention of property in one's power or command.
possessive adj. Pertaining to the having, holding, or detention of property in one's power or command.
possessor n. One who owns, enjoys, or controls anything, as property.
possible adj. Being not beyond the reach of power natural, moral, or supernatural.
postdate v. To make the date of any writing later than the real date.
posterior n. The hinder part.
postgraduate adj. Pertaining to studies that are pursued after receiving a degree.
postscript n. Something added to a letter after the writer's signature.
potency n. Power.
potentate n. One possessed of great power or sway.
potential n. Anything that may be possible.
potion n. A dose of liquid medicine.
powerless adj. Impotent.
prate v. To talk about vainly or foolishly.
prattle v. To utter in simple or childish talk.
preamble n. A statement introductory to and explanatory of what follows.
precarious adj. Perilous.
precaution n. A provision made in advance for some possible emergency or danger.
precede v. To happen first.
precedence n. Priority in place, time, or rank.
precedent n. An instance that may serve as a guide or basis for a rule.
precedential adj. Of the nature of an instance that may serve as a guide or basis for a rule.
precession n. The act of going forward.
precipice n. A high and very steep or approximately vertical cliff.
precipitant adj. Moving onward quickly and heedlessly.
precipitate v. To force forward prematurely.
precise adj. Exact.
precision n. Accuracy of limitation, definition, or adjustment.
preclude v. To prevent.
precocious adj. Having the mental faculties prematurely developed.
precursor n. A forerunner or herald.
predatory adj. Prone to pillaging.
predecessor n. An incumbent of a given office previous to another.
predicament n. A difficult, trying situation or plight.
predicate v. To state as belonging to something.
predict v. To foretell.
predominance n. Ascendancy or preponderance.
predominant adj. Superior in power, influence, effectiveness, number, or degree.
predominate v. To be chief in importance, quantity, or degree.
preeminence n. Special eminence.
preempt v. To secure the right of preference in the purchase of public land.
preemption n. The right or act of purchasing before others.
preengage v. To preoccupy.
preestablish v. To settle or arrange beforehand.
preexist v. To exist at a period or in a state earlier than something else.
preexistence n. Existence antecedent to something.
preface n. A brief explanation or address to the reader, at the beginning of a book.
prefatory adj. Pertaining to a brief explanation to the reader at the beginning of a book.
prefer v. To hold in higher estimation.
preferable adj. More desirable than others.
preference n. An object of favor or choice.
preferential adj. Possessing, giving, or constituting preference or priority.
preferment n. Preference.
prefix v. To attach at the beginning.
prehensible adj. Capable of being grasped.
prehensile adj. Adapted for grasping or holding.
prehension n. The act of laying hold of or grasping.
prejudice n. A judgment or opinion formed without due examination of the facts.
prelacy n. A system of church government.
prelate n. One of a higher order of clergy having direct authority over other clergy.
prelude n. An introductory or opening performance.
premature adj. Coming too soon.
premier adj. First in rank or position.
premise n. A judgment as a conclusion.
premonition n. Foreboding.
preoccupation n. The state of having the mind, attention, or inclination preoccupied.
preoccupy v. To fill the mind of a person to the exclusion of other subjects.
preordain v. To foreordain.
preparation n. An act or proceeding designed to bring about some event.
preparatory adj. Having to do with what is preliminary.
preponderant adj. Prevalent.
preponderate v. To exceed in influence or power.
prepossession n. A preconceived liking.
preposterous adj. Utterly ridiculous or absurd.
prerogative adj. Having superior rank or precedence.
presage v. To foretell.
prescience n. Knowledge of events before they take place.
prescient adj. Foreknowing.
prescript adj. Prescribed as a rule or model.
prescriptible adj. Derived from authoritative direction.
prescription n. An authoritative direction.
presentient adj. Perceiving or feeling beforehand.
presentiment n. Foreboding.
primer n. An elementary reading-book for children.
primeval adj. Belonging to the first ages.
primitive adj. Pertaining to the beginning or early times.
principal adj. Most important.
principality n. The territory of a reigning prince.
principle n. A general truth or proposition.
priory n. A monastic house.
pristine adj. Primitive.
privateer n. A vessel owned and officered by private persons, but carrying on maritime war.
privilege n. A right or immunity not enjoyed by all, or that may be enjoyed only under special conditions.
privity n. Knowledge shared with another or others regarding a private matter.
privy adj. Participating with another or others in the knowledge of a secret transaction.
probate adj. Relating to making proof, as of a will.
probation n. Any proceeding designed to ascertain or test character, qualification, or the like.
probe v. To search through and through.
probity n. Virtue or integrity tested and confirmed.
procedure n. A manner or method of acting.
proceed v. To renew motion or action, as after rest or interruption.
proclamation n. Any announcement made in a public manner.
procrastinate v. To put off till tomorrow or till a future time.
procrastination n. Delay.
proctor n. An agent acting for another.
prodigal n. One wasteful or extravagant, especially in the use of money or property.
prodigious adj. Immense.
prodigy n. A person or thing of very remarkable gifts or qualities.
productive adj. Yielding in abundance.
profession n. Any calling or occupation involving special mental or other special disciplines.
professor n. A public teacher of the highest grade in a university or college.
proffer v. To offer to another for acceptance.
proficiency n. An advanced state of acquirement, as in some knowledge, art, or science.
proficient adj. Possessing ample and ready knowledge or of skill in any art, science, or industry.
profile n. An outline or contour.
profiteer n. One who profits.
profligacy n. Shameless viciousness.
profligate adj. Abandoned to vice.
profuse adj. Produced or displayed in overabundance.
progeny n. Offspring.
progression n. A moving forward or proceeding in course.
prohibition n. A decree or an order forbidding something.
prohibitionist n. One who favors the prohibition by law of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
prohibitory adj. Involving or equivalent to prohibition, especially of the sale of alcoholic beverages.
projection n. A prominence.
proletarian n. A person of the lowest or poorest class.
prolific adj. Producing offspring or fruit.
prolix adj. Verbose.
prologue n. A prefatory statement or explanation to a poem, discourse, or performance.
prolong v. To extend in time or duration.
promenade v. To walk for amusement or exercise.
prominence n. The quality of being noticeable or distinguished.
prominent adj. Conspicuous in position, character, or importance.
promiscuous adj. Brought together without order, distinction, or design (for sex).
promissory adj. Expressing an engagement to pay.
promontory n. A high point of land extending outward from the coastline into the sea.
promoter n. A furtherer, forwarder, or encourager.
promulgate v. To proclaim.
propaganda n. Any institution or systematic scheme for propagating a doctrine or system.
propagate v. To spread abroad or from person to person.
propel v. To drive or urge forward.
propellant adj. Propelling.
propeller n. One who or that which propels.
prophecy n. Any prediction or foretelling.
prophesy v. To predict or foretell, especially under divine inspiration and guidance.
propitious adj. Kindly disposed.
proportionate adj. Being in proportion.
propriety n. Accordance with recognized usage, custom, or principles.
propulsion n. A driving onward or forward.
prosaic adj. Unimaginative.
proscenium n. That part of the stage between the curtain and the orchestra.
proscribe v. To reject, as a teaching or a practice, with condemnation or denunciation.
proscription n. Any act of condemnation and rejection from favor and privilege.
proselyte n. One who has been won over from one religious belief to another.
prosody n. The science of poetical forms.
prospector n. One who makes exploration, search, or examination, especially for minerals.
prospectus n. A paper or pamphlet containing information of a proposed undertaking.
prostrate adj. Lying prone, or with the head to the ground.
protagonist n. A leader in any enterprise or contest.
protection n. Preservation from harm, danger, annoyance, or any other evil.
protective adj. Sheltering.
protector n. A defender.
protege n. One specially cared for and favored by another usually older person.
Protestant n. A Christian who denies the authority of the Pope and holds the right of special judgment.
protomartyr n. The earliest victim in any cause.
protocol n. A declaration or memorandum of agreement less solemn and formal than a treaty.
protoplasm n. The substance that forms the principal portion of an animal or vegetable cell.
prototype n. A work, original in character, afterward imitated in form or spirit.
protract v. To prolong.
protrude v. To push out or thrust forth.
protrusion n. The act of protruding.
protuberance n. Something that swells out from a surrounding surface.
protuberant adj. Bulging.
protuberate v. To swell or bulge beyond the surrounding surface.
proverb n. A brief, pithy saying, condensing in witty or striking form the wisdom of experience.
provident adj. Anticipating and making ready for future wants or emergencies.
providential adj. Effected by divine guidance.
provincial adj. Uncultured in thought and manner.
proviso n. A clause in a contract, will, etc., by which its operation is rendered conditional.
provocation n. An action or mode of conduct that excites resentment.
prowess n. Strength, skill, and intrepidity in battle.
proximately adv. Immediately.
proxy n. A person who is empowered by another to represent him or her in a given matter.
prudence n. Caution.
prudential adj. Proceeding or marked by caution.
prudery n. An undue display of modesty or delicacy.
prurient adj. Inclined to lascivious thoughts and desires.
pseudapostle n. A pretended or false apostle.
pseudonym n. A fictitious name, especially when assumed by a writer.
pseudonymity n. The state or character of using a fictitious name.
psychiatry n. The branch of medicine that relates to mental disease.
psychic adj. Pertaining to the mind or soul.
psychopathic adj. Morally irresponsible.
psychotherapy n. The treatment of mental disease.
pudgy adj. Small and fat.
puerile adj. Childish.
pulmonary adj. Pertaining to the lungs.
punctilious adj. Strictly observant of the rules or forms prescribed by law or custom.
punctual adj. Observant and exact in points of time.
pungent adj. Affecting the sense of smell.
pungency n. The quality of affecting the sense of smell.
punitive adj. Pertaining to punishment.
pupilage n. The state or period of being a student.
purgatory n. An intermediate state where souls are made fit for paradise or heaven by expiatory suffering.
purl v. To cause to whirl, as in an eddy.
purloin v. To steal.
purveyor n. one who supplies
pusillanimous adj. Without spirit or bravery.
putrescent adj. Undergoing decomposition of animal or vegetable matter accompanied by fetid odors.
pyre n. A heap of combustibles arranged for burning a dead body.
pyromania n. An insane propensity to set things on fire.
pyrotechnic adj. Pertaining to fireworks or their manufacture.
pyx n. A vessel or casket, usually of precious metal, in which the host is preserved.
quackery n. Charlatanry
quadrate v. To divide into quarters.
quadruple v. To multiply by four.
qualification n. A requisite for an employment, position, right, or privilege.
qualify v. To endow or furnish with requisite ability, character, knowledge, skill, or possessions.
qualm n. A fit of nausea.
quandary n. A puzzling predicament.
quantity n. Magnitude.
quarantine n. The enforced isolation of any person or place infected with contagious disease.
quarrelsome adj. Irascible.
quarter n. One of four equal parts into which anything is or may be divided.
quarterly adj. Occurring or made at intervals of three months.
quartet n. A composition for four voices or four instruments.
quarto n. An eight-page newspaper of any size.
quay n. A wharf or artificial landing-place on the shore of a harbor or projecting into it.
querulous adj. Habitually complaining.
query v. To make inquiry.
queue n. A file of persons waiting in order of their arrival, as for admittance.
quibble n. An utterly trivial distinction or objection.
quiescence n. Quiet.
quiescent adj. Being in a state of repose or inaction.
quiet adj. Making no noise.
quietus n. A silencing, suppressing, or ending.
quintessence n. The most essential part of anything.
quintet n. Musical composition arranged for five voices or instruments.
quite adv. Fully.
Quixotic adj. Chivalrous or romantic to a ridiculous or extravagant degree.
rabid adj. Affected with rabies or hydrophobia.
racy adj. Exciting or exhilarating to the mind.
radiance n. Brilliant or sparkling luster.
radiate v. To extend in all directions, as from a source or focus.
radical n. One who holds extreme views or advocates extreme measures.
radix n. That from or on which something is developed.
raillery n. Good-humored satire.
ramify v. To divide or subdivide into branches or subdivisions.
ramose adj. Branch-like.
rampant adj. Growing, climbing, or running without check or restraint.
rampart n. A bulwark or construction to oppose assault or hostile entry.
rancor n. Malice.
rankle v. To produce irritation or festering.
rapacious adj. Disposed to seize by violence or by unlawful or greedy methods.
rapid adj. Having great speed.
rapine n. The act of seizing and carrying off property by superior force, as in war.
rapt adj. Enraptured.
raptorial adj. Seizing and devouring living prey.
ration v. To provide with a fixed allowance or portion, especially of food.
rationalism n. The formation of opinions by relying upon reason alone, independently of authority.
raucous adj. Harsh.
ravage v. To lay waste by pillage, rapine, devouring, or other destructive methods.
ravenous adj. Furiously voracious or hungry.
ravine n. A deep gorge or hollow, especially one worn by a stream or flow of water.
reaction n. Tendency towards a former, or opposite state of things, as after reform, revolution, or inflation.
reactionary adj. Pertaining to, of the nature of, causing, or favoring reaction.
readily adv. Without objection or reluctance.
readjust v. To put in order after disarrangement.
ready adj. In a state of preparedness for any given purpose or occasion.
realism n. The principle and practice of depicting persons and scenes as they are believed really to exist.
rearrange v. To arrange again or in a different order.
reassure v. To give new confidence.
rebellious adj. Insubordinate.
rebuff n. A peremptory or unexpected rejection of advances or approaches.
rebuild v. To build again or anew.
rebut v. To oppose by argument or a sufficient answer.
recant v. To withdraw formally one's belief (in something previously believed or maintained).
recapitulate v. To repeat again the principal points of.
recapture v. To capture again.
recede v. To move back or away.
receivable adj. Capable of being or fit to be received - often money.
receptive adj. Having the capacity, quality, or ability of receiving, as truths or impressions.
recessive adj. Having a tendency to go back.
recidivist n. A confirmed criminal.
reciprocal adj. Mutually interchangeable or convertible.
reciprocate v. To give and take mutually.
reciprocity n. Equal mutual rights and benefits granted and enjoyed.
recitation n. The act of reciting or repeating, especially in public and from memory.
reck v. To have a care or thought for.
reckless adj. Foolishly headless of danger.
reclaim v. To demand or to obtain the return or restoration of.
recline v. To cause to assume a leaning or recumbent attitude or position.
recluse n. One who lives in retirement or seclusion.
reclusory n. A hermitage.
recognizance n. An acknowledgment entered into before a court with condition to do some particular act.
recognize v. To recall the identity of (a person or thing).
recoil v. To start back as in dismay, loathing, or dread.
recollect v. To recall the knowledge of.
reconcilable adj. Capable of being adjusted or harmonized.
reconnoiter v. To make a preliminary examination of for military, surveying, or geological purposes.
reconsider v. To review with care, especially with a view to a reversal of previous action.
reconstruct v. To rebuild.
recourse n. Resort to or application for help in exigency or trouble.
recover v. To regain.
recreant n. A cowardly or faithless person.
recreate v. To refresh after labor.
recrudescence n. The state of becoming raw or sore again.
recrudescent adj. Becoming raw or sore again.
recruit v. To enlist men for military or naval service.
rectify v. To correct.
rectitude n. The quality of being upright in principles and conduct.
recuperate v. To recover.
recur v. To happen again or repeatedly, especially at regular intervals.
recure v. To cure again.
recurrent adj. Returning from time to time, especially at regular or stated intervals.
redemption n. The recovery of what is mortgaged or pledged, by paying the debt.
redolent adj. Smelling sweet and agreeable.
redolence n. Smelling sweet and agreeable.
redoubtable adj. Formidable.
redound n. Rebound.
redress v. To set right, as a wrong by compensation or the punishment of the wrong-doer.
reducible adj. That may be reduced.
redundance n. Excess.
redundant adj. Constituting an excess.
reestablish v. To restore.
refer v. To direct or send for information or other purpose.
referrer n. One who refers.
referable adj. Ascribable.
refinery n. A place where some crude material, as sugar or petroleum, is purified.
reflectible adj. Capable of being turned back.
reflection n. The throwing off or back of light, heat, sound, or any form of energy that travels in waves.
reflector n. A mirror, as of metal, for reflecting light, heat, or sound in a particular direction.
reflexible adj. Capable of being reflected.
reform n. Change for the better.
reformer n. One who carries out a reform.
refract v. To bend or turn from a direct course.
refractory adj. Not amenable to control.
refragable adj. Capable of being refuted.
refringency n. Power to refract.
refringent adj. Having the power to refract.
refusal n. Denial of what is asked.
refute v. To prove to be wrong.
regale v. To give unusual pleasure.
regalia n. pl. The emblems of royalty.
regality n. Royalty.
regenerate v. To reproduce.
regent n. One who is lawfully deputized to administer the government for the time being in the name of the ruler.
regicide n. The killing of a king or sovereign.
regime n. Particular conduct or administration of affairs.
regimen n. A systematized order or course of living with reference to food, clothing and personal habits.
regiment n. A body of soldiers.
regnant adj. Exercising royal authority in one's own right.
regress v. To return to a former place or condition.
regretful adj. Feeling, expressive of, or full of regret.
rehabilitate v. To restore to a former status, capacity, right rank, or privilege.
reign v. To hold and exercise sovereign power.
reimburse v. To pay back as an equivalent of what has been expended.
rein n. A step attached to the bit for controlling a horse or other draft-animal.
reinstate v. To restore to a former state, station, or authority.
reiterate v. To say or do again and again.
rejoin v. To reunite after separation.
rejuvenate v. To restore to youth.
rejuvenescence n. A renewal of youth.
relapse v. To suffer a return of a disease after partial recovery.
relegate v. To send off or consign, as to an obscure position or remote destination.
relent v. To yield.
relevant adj. Bearing upon the matter in hand.
reliance n. Dependence.
relinquish v. To give up using or having.
reliquary n. A casket, coffer, or repository in which relics are kept.
relish v. To like the taste or savor of.
reluctance n. Unwillingness.
reluctant adj. Unwilling.
remembrance n. Recollection.
reminiscence n. The calling to mind of incidents within the range of personal knowledge or experience.
reminiscent adj. Pertaining to the recollection of matters of personal interest.
remiss adj. Negligent.
remission n. Temporary diminution of a disease.
remodel v. Reconstruct.
remonstrance n. Reproof.
remonstrant adj. Having the character of a reproof.
remonstrate v. To present a verbal or written protest to those who have power to right or prevent a wrong.
remunerate v. To pay or pay for.
remuneration n. Compensation.
Renaissance n. The revival of letters, and then of art, which marks the transition from medieval to modern time.
rendezvous n. A prearranged place of meeting.
rendition n. Interpretation.
renovate v. To restore after deterioration, as a building.
renunciation n. An explicit disclaimer of a right or privilege.
reorganize v. To change to a more satisfactory form of organization.
reparable adj. Capable of repair.
reparation n. The act of making amends, as for an injury, loss, or wrong.
repartee n. A ready, witty, or apt reply.
repeal v. To render of no further effect.
repel v. To force or keep back in a manner, physically or mentally.
repellent adj. Having power to force back in a manner, physically or mentally.
repentance n. Sorrow for something done or left undone, with desire to make things right by undoing the wrong.
repertory n. A place where things are stored or gathered together.
repetition n. The act of repeating.
repine v. To indulge in fretfulness and faultfinding.
replenish v. To fill again, as something that has been emptied.
replete adj. Full to the uttermost.
replica n. A duplicate executed by the artist himself, and regarded, equally with the first, as an original.
repository n. A place in which goods are stored.
reprehend v. To find fault with.
reprehensible adj. Censurable.
reprehension n. Expression of blame.
repress v. To keep under restraint or control.
repressible adj. Able to be kept under restraint or control.
reprieve v. To grant a respite from punishment to.
reprimand v. To chide or rebuke for a fault.
reprisal n. Any infliction or act by way of retaliation on an enemy.
reprobate n. One abandoned to depravity and sin.
reproduce v. To make a copy of.
reproduction n. The process by which an animal or plant gives rise to another of its kind.
reproof n. An expression of disapproval or blame personally addressed to one censured.
repudiate v. To refuse to have anything to do with.
repugnance n. Thorough dislike.
repugnant adj. Offensive to taste and feeling.
repulse n. The act of beating or driving back, as an attacking or advancing enemy.
repulsive adj. Grossly offensive.
repute v. To hold in general opinion.
requiem n. A solemn mass sung for the repose of the souls of the dead.
requisite adj. Necessary.
requital n. Adequate return for good or ill.
requite v. To repay either good or evil to, as to a person.
rescind v. To make void, as an act, by the enacting authority or a superior authority.
reseat v. To place in position of office again.
resemblance n. Similarity in quality or form.
resent v. To be indignant at, as an injury or insult.
reservoir n. A receptacle where a quantity of some material, especially of a liquid or gas, may be kept.
residue n. A remainder or surplus after a part has been separated or otherwise treated.
resilience n. The power of springing back to a former position
resilient adj. Having the quality of springing back to a former position.
resistance n. The exertion of opposite effort or effect.
resistant adj. Offering or tending to produce resistance.
resistive adj. Having or exercising the power of resistance.
resistless adj. Powerless.
resonance n. The quality of being able to reinforce sound by sympathetic vibrations.
resonance adj. Able to reinforce sound by sympathetic vibrations.
resonate v. To have or produce resonance.
resource n. That which is restored to, relied upon, or made available for aid or support.
respite n. Interval of rest.
resplendent adj. Very bright.
restitution n. Restoration of anything to the one to whom it properly belongs.
resumption n. The act of taking back, or taking again.
resurgent adj. Surging back or again.
resurrection n. A return from death to life
resuscitate v. To restore from apparent death.
retaliate v. To repay evil with a similar evil.
retch v. To make an effort to vomit.
retention n. The keeping of a thing within one's power or possession.
reticence n. The quality of habitually keeping silent or being reserved in utterance.
reticent adj. Habitually keeping silent or being reserved in utterance.
retinue n. The body of persons who attend a person of importance in travel or public appearance.
retort n. A retaliatory speech.
retouch v. To modify the details of.
retrace v. To follow backward or toward the place of beginning, as a track or marking.
retract v. To recall or take back (something that one has said).
retrench v. To cut down or reduce in extent or quantity.
retrieve v. To recover something by searching.
retroactive adj. Operative on, affecting, or having reference to past events, transactions, responsibilities.
retrograde v. To cause to deteriorate or to move backward.
retrogression n. A going or moving backward or in a reverse direction.
retrospect n. A view or contemplation of something past.
retrospective adj. Looking back on the past.
reunite v. To unite or join again, as after separation.
revelation n. A disclosing, discovering, or making known of what was before secret, private, or unknown.
revere v. To regard with worshipful veneration.
reverent adj. Humble.
reversion n. A return to or toward some former state or condition.
revert v. To return, or turn or look back, as toward a former position or the like.
revile v. To heap approach or abuse upon.
revisal n. Revision.
revise v. To examine for the correction of errors, or for the purpose of making changes.
revocation n. Repeal.
rhapsody n. Rapt or rapturous utterance.
rhetoric n. The art of discourse.
rhetorician n. A showy writer or speaker.
ribald adj. Indulging in or manifesting coarse indecency or obscenity.
riddance n. The act or ridding or delivering from something undesirable.
ridicule n. Looks or acts expressing amused contempt.
ridiculous adj. Laughable and contemptible.
rife adj. Abundant.
rightful adj. Conformed to a just claim according to established laws or usage.
rigmarole n. Nonsense.
ripplet n. A small ripple, as of water.
risible adj. capable of exciting laughter.
rivulet n. A small stream or brook.
robust adj. Characterized by great strength or power of endurance.
rondo n. A musical composition during which the first part or subject is repeated several times.
rookery n. A place where crows congregate to breed.
rotary adj. Turning around its axis, like a wheel, or so constructed as to turn thus.
rotate v. To cause to turn on or as on its axis, as a wheel.
rote n. Repetition of words or sounds as a means of learning them, with slight attention.
rotund adj. Round from fullness or plumpness.
rudimentary adj. Being in an initial, early, or incomplete stage of development.
rue v. To regret extremely.
ruffian adj. A lawless or recklessly brutal fellow.
ruminant adj. Chewing the cud.
ruminate v. To chew over again, as food previously swallowed and regurgitated.
rupture v. To separate the parts of by violence.
rustic adj. Characteristic of dwelling in the country.
ruth n. Sorrow for another's misery.
sacrifice v. To make an offering of to deity, especially by presenting on an altar.
sacrificial adj. Offering or offered as an atonement for sin.
sacrilege n. The act of violating or profaning anything sacred.
sacrilegious adj. Impious.
sagacious adj. Able to discern and distinguish with wise perception.
salacious adj. Having strong sexual desires.
salience n. The condition of standing out distinctly.
salient adj. Standing out prominently.
saline adj. Constituting or consisting of salt.
salutary adj. Beneficial.
salutation n. Any form of greeting, hailing, or welcome, whether by word or act.
salutatory n. The opening oration at the commencement in American colleges.
salvage n. Any act of saving property.
salvo n. A salute given by firing all the guns, as at the funeral of an officer.
sanctimonious adj. Making an ostentatious display or hypocritical pretense of holiness or piety.
sanction v. To approve authoritatively.
sanctity n. Holiness.
sanguine adj. Having the color of blood.
sanguineous adj. Consisting of blood.
sapid adj. Affecting the sense of taste.
sapience n. Deep wisdom or knowledge.
sapient adj. Possessing wisdom.
saponaceous adj. Having the nature or quality of soap.
sarcasm n. Cutting and reproachful language.
sarcophagus n. A stone coffin or a chest-like tomb.
sardonic adj. Scornfully or bitterly sarcastic.
satiate v. To satisfy fully the appetite or desire of.
satire n. The employment of sarcasm, irony, or keenness of wit in ridiculing vices.
satiric adj. Resembling poetry, in which vice, incapacity ,or corruption is held up to ridicule.
satirize v. To treat with sarcasm or derisive wit.
satyr n. A very lascivious person.
savage n. A wild and uncivilized human being.
savor v. To perceive by taste or smell.
scabbard n. The sheath of a sword or similar bladed weapon.
scarcity n. Insufficiency of supply for needs or ordinary demands.
scholarly adj. Characteristic of an erudite person.
scholastic adj. Pertaining to education or schools.
scintilla n. The faintest ray.
scintillate v. To emit or send forth sparks or little flashes of light.
scope n. A range of action or view.
scoundrel n. A man without principle.
scribble n. Hasty, careless writing.
scribe n. One who writes or is skilled in writing.
script n. Writing or handwriting of the ordinary cursive form.
Scriptural adj. Pertaining to, contained in, or warranted by the Holy Scriptures.
scruple n. Doubt or uncertainty regarding a question of moral right or duty.
scrupulous adj. Cautious in action for fear of doing wrong.
scurrilous adj. Grossly indecent or vulgar.
scuttle v. To sink (a ship) by making holes in the bottom.
scythe n. A long curved blade for mowing, reaping, etc.
seance n. A meeting of spirituals for consulting spirits.
sear v. To burn on the surface.
sebaceous adj. Pertaining to or appearing like fat.
secant adj. Cutting, especially into two parts.
secede v. To withdraw from union or association, especially from a political or religious body.
secession n. Voluntary withdrawal from fellowship, especially from political or religious bodies.
seclude v. To place, keep, or withdraw from the companionship of others.
seclusion n. Solitude.
secondary adj. Less important or effective than that which is primary.
secondly adv. In the second place in order or succession.
second-rate adj. Second in quality, size, rank, importance, etc.
secrecy n. Concealment.
secretary n. One who attends to correspondence, keeps records. or does other writing for others.
secretive adj. Having a tendency to conceal.
sedate adj. Even-tempered.
sedentary adj. Involving or requiring much sitting.
sediment n. Matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid.
sedition n. Conduct directed against public order and the tranquillity of the state.
seditious adj. Promotive of conduct directed against public order and the tranquillity of the state.
seduce v. To entice to surrender chastity.
sedulous adj. Persevering in effort or endeavor.
seer n. A prophet.
seethe v. To be violently excited or agitated.
seignior n. A title of honor or respectful address, equivalent to sir.
seismograph n. An instrument for recording the phenomena of earthquakes.
seize v. To catch or take hold of suddenly and forcibly.
selective adj. Having the power of choice.
self-respect n. Rational self-esteem.
semiannual adj. Recurring at intervals of six months.
semicircle n. A half-circle.
seminar n. Any assemblage of pupils for real research in some specific study under a teacher.
seminary n. A special school, as of theology or pedagogics.
senile adj. Peculiar to or proceeding from the weakness or infirmity of old age.
sensation n. A condition of mind resulting from spiritual or inherent feeling.
sense n. The signification conveyed by some word, phrase, or action.
sensibility n. Power to perceive or feel.
sensitive adj. Easily affected by outside operations or influences.
sensorium n. The sensory apparatus.
sensual adj. Pertaining to the body or the physical senses.
sensuous adj. Having a warm appreciation of the beautiful or of the refinements of luxury.
sentence n. A related group of words containing a subject and a predicate and expressing a complete thought.
sentience n. Capacity for sensation or sense-perception.
sentient adj. Possessing the power of sense or sense-perception.
sentinel n. Any guard or watch stationed for protection.
separable adj. Capable of being disjoined or divided.
separate v. To take apart.
separatist n. A seceder.
septennial adj. Recurring every seven years.
sepulcher n. A burial-place.
sequacious adj. Ready to be led.
sequel n. That which follows in consequence of what has previously happened.
sequence n. The order in which a number or persons, things, or events follow one another in space or time.
sequent adj. Following in the order of time.
sequester v. To cause to withdraw or retire, as from society or public life.
sequestrate v. To confiscate.
sergeant n. A non-commissioned military officer ranking next above a corporal.
sergeant-at-arms n. An executive officer in legislative bodies who enforces the orders of the presiding officer.
sergeant-major n. The highest non-commissioned officer in a regiment.
service n. Any work done for the benefit of another.
serviceable adj. Durable.
sextet n. A band of six singers or players.
sextuple adj. Multiplied by six.
sheer adj. Absolute.
shiftless adj. Wanting in resource, energy, or executive ability.
shrewd adj. Characterized by skill at understanding and profiting by circumstances.
shriek n. A sharp, shrill outcry or scream, caused by agony or terror.
shrinkage n. A contraction of any material into less bulk or dimension.
shrivel v. To draw or be drawn into wrinkles.
shuffle n. A mixing or changing the order of things.
sibilance n. A hissing sound.
sibilant adj. Made with a hissing sound.
sibilate v. To give a hissing sound to, as in pronouncing the letter s.
sidelong adj. Inclining or tending to one side.
sidereal adj. Pertaining to stars or constellations.
siege n. A beleaguerment.
significant adj. Important, especially as pointing something out.
signification n. The meaning conveyed by language, actions, or signs.
similar adj. Bearing resemblance to one another or to something else.
simile n. A comparison which directs the mind to the representative object itself.
similitude n. Similarity.
simplify v. To make less complex or difficult.
simulate v. Imitate.
simultaneous adj. Occurring, done, or existing at the same time.
sinecure n. Any position having emoluments with few or no duties.
singe v. To burn slightly or superficially.
sinister adj. Evil.
sinuosity n. The quality of curving in and out.
sinuous adj. Curving in and out.
sinus n. An opening or cavity.
siren n. A sea-nymph, described by Homer as dwelling between the island of Circe and Scylla.
sirocco n. hot winds from Africa.
sisterhood n. A body of sisters united by some bond of sympathy or by a religious vow.
skeptic n. One who doubts any statements.
skepticism n. The entertainment of doubt concerning something.
skiff n. Usually, a small light boat propelled by oars.
skirmish n. Desultory fighting between advanced detachments of two armies.
sleight n. A trick or feat so deftly done that the manner of performance escapes observation.
slight adj. Of a small importance or significance.
slothful adj. Lazy.
sluggard n. A person habitually lazy or idle.
sociable adj. Inclined to seek company.
socialism n. A theory of civil polity that aims to secure the reconstruction of society.
socialist adj. One who advocates reconstruction of society by collective ownership of land and capital.
sociology n. The philosophical study of society.
Sol n. The sun.
solace n. Comfort in grief, trouble, or calamity.
solar adj. Pertaining to the sun.
solder n. A fusible alloy used for joining metallic surfaces or margins.
soldier n. A person engaged in military service.
solecism n. Any violation of established rules or customs.
solicitor n. One who represents a client in court of justice; an attorney.
solicitude n. Uneasiness of mind occasioned by desire, anxiety, or fear.
soliloquy n. A monologue.
solstice n. The time of year when the sun is at its greatest declination.
soluble adj. Capable of being dissolved, as in a fluid.
solvent adj. Having sufficient funds to pay all debts.
somber adj. Gloomy.
somniferous adj. Tending to produce sleep.
somnolence n. Oppressive drowsiness.
sonata n. An instrumental composition.
sonnet n. A poem of fourteen decasyllabic or octosyllabiclines expressing two successive phrases.
sonorous adj. Resonant.
soothsayer n. One who claims to have supernatural insight or foresight.
sophism n. A false argument understood to be such by the reasoner himself and intentionally used to deceive
sophistical adj. Fallacious.
sophisticate v. To deprive of simplicity of mind or manner.
sophistry n. Reasoning sound in appearance only, especially when designedly deceptive.
soprano n. A woman's or boy's voice of high range.
sorcery n. Witchcraft.
sordid adj. Of degraded character or nature.
souvenir n. A token of remembrance.
sparse adj. Thinly diffused.
Spartan adj. Exceptionally brave; rigorously severe.
spasmodic adj. Convulsive.
specialize v. To assume an individual or specific character, or adopt a singular or special course.
specialty n. An employment limited to one particular line of work.
specie n. A coin or coins of gold, silver, copper, or other metal.
species n. A classificatory group of animals or plants subordinate to a genus.
specimen n. One of a class of persons or things regarded as representative of the class.
specious adj. Plausible.
spectator n. One who beholds or looks on.
specter n. Apparition.
spectrum n. An image formed by rays of light or other radiant energy.
speculate v. To pursue inquiries and form conjectures.
speculator n. One who makes an investment that involves a risk of loss, but also a chance of profit.
sphericity n. The state or condition of being a sphere.
spheroid n. A body having nearly the form of a sphere.
spherometer n. An instrument for measuring curvature or radii of spherical surfaces.
spinous adj. Having spines.
spinster n. A woman who has never been married.
spontaneous adj. Arising from inherent qualities or tendencies without external efficient cause.
sprightly adj. Vivacious.
squalid adj. Having a dirty, mean, poverty-stricken appearance.
squatter n. One who settles on land without permission or right.
stagnant adj. Not flowing: said of water, as in a pool.
stagnate v. To become dull or inert.
stagnation n. The condition of not flowing or not changing.
stagy adj. Having a theatrical manner.
staid adj. Of a steady and sober character.
stallion n. An uncastrated male horse, commonly one kept for breeding.
stanchion n. A vertical bar, or a pair of bars, used to confine cattle in a stall.
stanza n. A group of rimed lines, usually forming one of a series of similar divisions in a poem.
statecraft n. The art of conducting state affairs.
static adj. Pertaining to or designating bodies at rest or forces in equilibrium.
statics n. The branch of mechanics that treats of the relations that subsist among forces in order.
stationary adj. Not moving.
statistician n. One who is skilled in collecting and tabulating numerical facts.
statuesque adj. Having the grace, pose, or quietude of a statue.
statuette n. A figurine.
stature n. The natural height of an animal body.
statute n. Any authoritatively declared rule, ordinance, decree, or law.
stealth n. A concealed manner of acting.
stellar adj. Pertaining to the stars.
steppe n. One of the extensive plains in Russia and Siberia.
sterling adj. Genuine.
stifle v. To smother.
stigma n. A mark of infamy or token of disgrace attaching to a person as the result of evil-doing.
stiletto n. A small dagger.
stimulant n. Anything that rouses to activity or to quickened action.
stimulate v. To rouse to activity or to quickened action.
stimulus n. Incentive.
stingy adj. Cheap, unwilling to spend money.
stipend n. A definite amount paid at stated periods in compensation for services or as an allowance.
Stoicism n. The principles or the practice of the Stoics-being very even tempered in success and failure.
stolid adj. Expressing no power of feeling or perceiving.
strait n. A narrow passage of water connecting two larger bodies of water.
stratagem n. Any clever trick or device for obtaining an advantage.
stratum n. A natural or artificial layer, bed, or thickness of any substance or material.
streamlet n. Rivulet.
stripling n. A mere youth.
studious adj. Having or showing devotion to the acquisition of knowledge.
stultify v. To give an appearance of foolishness to.
stupendous adj. Of prodigious size, bulk, or degree.
stupor n. Profound lethargy.
suasion n. The act of persuading.
suave adj. Smooth and pleasant in manner.
subacid adj. Somewhat sharp or biting.
subaquatic adj. Being, formed, or operating under water.
subconscious adj. Being or occurring in the mind, but without attendant consciousness or conscious perception.
subjacent adj. Situated directly underneath.
subjection n. The act of bringing into a state of submission.
subjugate v. To conquer.
subliminal adj. Being beneath the threshold of consciousness.
sublingual adj. Situated beneath the tongue.
submarine adj. Existing, done, or operating beneath the surface of the sea.
submerge v. To place or plunge under water.
submergence n. The act of submerging.
submersible adj. Capable of being put underwater.
submersion n. The act of submerging.
submission n. A yielding to the power or authority of another.
submittal n. The act of submitting.
subordinate adj. Belonging to an inferior order in a classification.
subsequent adj. Following in time.
subservience n. The quality, character, or condition of being servilely following another's behests.
subservient adj. Servilely following another's behests.
subside v. To relapse into a state of repose and tranquillity.
subsist v. To be maintained or sustained.
subsistence n. Sustenance.
subtend v. To extend opposite to.
subterfuge n. Evasion.
subterranean adj. Situated or occurring below the surface of the earth.
subtle adj. Discriminating.
subtrahend n. That which is to be subtracted.
subversion n. An overthrow, as from the foundation.
subvert v. To bring to ruin.
succeed v. To accomplish what is attempted or intended.
success n. A favorable or prosperous course or termination of anything attempted.
successful adj. Having reached a high degree of worldly prosperity.
successor n. One who or that which takes the place of a predecessor or preceding thing.
succinct adj. Concise.
succumb v. To cease to resist.
sufferance n. Toleration.
sufficiency n. An ample or adequate supply.
suffrage n. The right or privilege of voting.
suffuse v. To cover or fill the surface of.
suggestible adj. That can be suggested.
suggestive adj. Stimulating to thought or reflection.
summary n. An abstract.
sumptuous adj. Rich and costly.
superabundance n. An excessive amount.
superadd v. To add in addition to what has been added.
superannuate v. To become deteriorated or incapacitated by long service.
superb adj. Sumptuously elegant.
supercilious adj. Exhibiting haughty and careless contempt.
superficial adj. Knowing and understanding only the ordinary and the obvious.
superfluity n. That part of anything that is in excess of what is needed.
superfluous adj. Being more than is needed.
superheat v. To heat to excess.
superintend v. To have the charge and direction of, especially of some work or movement.
superintendence n. Direction and management.
superintendent n. One who has the charge and direction of, especially of some work or movement.
superlative n. That which is of the highest possible excellence or eminence.
supernatural adj. Caused miraculously or by the immediate exercise of divine power.
supernumerary adj. Superfluous.
supine adj. Lying on the back.
supplant v. To take the place of.
supple adj. Easily bent.
supplementary adj. Being an addition to.
supplicant n. One who asks humbly and earnestly.
supplicate v. To beg.
suppress v. To prevent from being disclosed or punished.
suppressible adj. Capable of being suppressed.
suppression n. A forcible putting or keeping down.
supramundane adj. Supernatural.
surcharge n. An additional amount charged.
surety n. Security for payment or performance.
surfeit v. To feed to fullness or to satiety.
surmise v. To conjecture.
surmount v. To overcome by force of will.
surreptitious adj. Clandestine.
surrogate n. One who or that which is substituted for or appointed to act in place of another.
surround v. To encircle.
susceptibility n. A specific capability of feeling or emotion.
susceptible adj. Easily under a specified power or influence.
suspense n. Uncertainty.
suspension n. A hanging from a support.
suspicious adj. Inclined to doubt or mistrust.
sustenance n. Food.
swarthy adj. Having a dark hue, especially a dark or sunburned complexion.
Sybarite n. A luxurious person.
sycophant n. A servile flatterer, especially of those in authority or influence.
syllabic adj. Consisting of that which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllabication n. Division of words into that which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllable n. That which is uttered in a single vocal impulse.
syllabus n. Outline of a subject, course, lecture, or treatise.
sylph n. A slender, graceful young woman or girl.
symmetrical adj. Well-balanced.
symmetry n. Relative proportion and harmony.
sympathetic adj. Having a fellow-feeling for or like feelings with another or others.
sympathize v. To share the sentiments or mental states of another.
symphonic adj. Characterized by a harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
symphonious adj. Marked by a harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
symphony n. A harmonious or agreeable mingling of sounds.
synchronism n. Simultaneousness.
syndicate n. An association of individuals united for the prosecution of some enterprise.
syneresis n. The coalescence of two vowels or syllables, as e'er for ever.
synod n. An ecclesiastical council.
synonym n. A word having the same or almost the same meaning as some other.
synopsis n. A syllabus or summary.
systematic adj. Methodical.
tableau n. An arrangement of inanimate figures representing a scene from real life.
tacit adj. Understood.
taciturn adj. Disinclined to conversation.
tack n. A small sharp-pointed nail.
tact n. Fine or ready mental discernment shown in saying or doing the proper thing.
tactician n. One who directs affairs with skill and shrewdness.
tactics n. Any maneuvering or adroit management for effecting an object.
tangency n. The state of touching.
tangent adj. Touching.
tangible adj. Perceptible by touch.
tannery n. A place where leather is tanned.
tantalize v. To tease.
tantamount adj. Having equal or equivalent value, effect, or import.
tapestry n. A fabric to which a pattern is applied with a needle, designed for ornamental hangings.
tarnish v. To lessen or destroy the luster of in any way.
taut adj. Stretched tight.
taxation n. A levy, by government, of a fixed contribution.
taxidermy n. The art or process of preserving dead animals or parts of them.
technic adj. Technical.
technicality n. Something peculiar to a particular art, trade, or the like.
technique n. Manner of performance.
technography n. The scientific description or study of human arts and industries in their historic development.
technology n. The knowledge relating to industries and manufactures.
teem v. To be full to overflowing.
telepathy n. Thought-transference.
telephony n. The art or process of communicating by telephone.
telescope v. To drive together so that one slides into the another like the sections of a spy-glass.
telltale adj. That gives warning or information.
temerity n. Recklessness.
temporal adj. Pertaining to or concerned with the affairs of the present life.
temporary adj. Lasting for a short time only.
temporize v. To pursue a policy of delay.
tempt v. To offer to (somebody) an inducement to do wrong.
tempter n. An allurer or enticer to evil.
tenacious adj. Unyielding.
tenant n. An occupant.
tendency n. Direction or inclination, as toward some objector end.
tenet n. Any opinion, principle, dogma, or doctrine that a person believes or maintains as true.
tenor n. A settled course or manner of progress.
tense adj. Strained to stiffness.
tentative adj. Done as an experiment.
tenure n. The term during which a thing is held.
tercentenary adj. Pertaining to a period of 300 years.
termagant adj. Violently abusive and quarrelsome.
terminal adj. Pertaining to or creative of a boundary, limit.
terminate v. To put an end or stop to.
termination n. The act of ending or concluding.
terminus n. The final point or goal.
terrify v. To fill with extreme fear.
territorial adj. Pertaining to the domain over which a sovereign state exercises jurisdiction.
terse adj. Pithy.
testator n. The maker of a will.
testimonial n. A formal token of regard, often presented in public.
thearchy n. Government by a supreme deity.
theism n. Belief in God.
theocracy n. A government administered by ecclesiastics.
theocrasy n. The mixed worship of polytheism.
theologian n. A professor of divinity.
theological adj. Based on or growing out of divine revelation.
theology n. The branch of theological science that treats of God.
theoretical adj. Directed toward knowledge for its own sake without respect to applications.
theorist n. One given to speculating.
theorize v. To speculate.
thereabout adv. Near that number, quantity, degree, place, or time, approximately.
therefor adv. For that or this.
thermal adj. Of or pertaining to heat.
thermoelectric adj. Denoting electricity produced by heat.
thermoelectricity n. Electricity generated by differences of temperature,
thesis n. An essay or treatise on a particular subject.
thoroughbred adj. Bred from the best or purest blood or stock.
thoroughfare n. A public street or road.
thrall n. One controlled by an appetite or a passion.
tilth n. Cultivation.
timbre n. The quality of a tone, as distinguished from intensity and pitch.
timorous adj. Lacking courage.
tincture n. A solution, usually alcoholic, of some principle used in medicine.
tinge n. A faint trace of color.
tipsy adj. Befuddled with drinks.
tirade n. Harangue.
transalpine adj. Situated on the other side of the Alps.
transact v. To do business.
transatlantic adj. Situated beyond or on the other side of the Atlantic.
transcend v. To surpass.
transcontinental adj. Extending or passing across a continent.
transcribe v. To write over again (something already written)
transcript n. A copy made directly from an original.
transfer v. To convey, remove, or cause to pass from one person or place to another.
transferable adj. Capable of being conveyed from one person or place to another.
transferee n. The person to whom a transfer is made.
transference n. The act of conveying from one person or place to another.
transferrer n. One who or that which conveys from one person or place to another.
transfigure v. To give an exalted meaning or glorified appearance to.
transfuse v. To pour or cause to pass, as a fluid, from one vessel to another.
transfusible adj. Capable of being poured from one vessel to another.
transfusion n. The act of pouring from one vessel to another.
transgress v. To break a law.
transience n. Something that is of short duration.
transient n. One who or that which is only of temporary existence.
transition n. Passage from one place, condition, or action to another.
transitory adj. Existing for a short time only.
translate v. To give the sense or equivalent of in another language or dialect.
translator n. An interpreter.
translucence n. The property or state of allowing the passage of light.
translucent adj. Allowing the passage of light.
transmissible adj. That may e sent through or across.
transmission n. The act of sending through or across.
transmit v. To send trough or across.
transmute v. To change in nature, substance, or form.
transparent adj. Easy to see through or understand.
transpire v. To come to pass.
transplant v. To remove and plant in another place.
transposition n. The act of reversing the order or changing the place of.
transverse adj. Lying or being across or in a crosswise direction.
travail n. Hard or agonizing labor.
travesty n. A grotesque imitation.
treacherous adj. Perfidious.
treachery n. Violation of allegiance, confidence, or plighted faith.
treasonable adj. Of the nature of betrayal, treachery, or breech of allegiance.
treatise n. An elaborate literary composition presenting a subject in all its parts.
treble adj. Multiplied by three.
trebly adv. Triply.
tremor n. An involuntary trembling or shivering.
tremulous adj. Characterized by quivering or unsteadiness.
trenchant adj. Cutting deeply and quickly.
trepidation n. Nervous uncertainty of feeling.
trestle n. An open braced framework for supporting the horizontal stringers of a railway-bridge.
triad n. A group of three persons of things.
tribune n. Any champion of the rights and liberties of the people: often used as the name for a newspaper.
trickery n. Artifice.
tricolor adj. Of three colors.
tricycle n. A three-wheeled vehicle.
trident n. The three-pronged fork that was the emblem of Neptune.
triennial adj. Taking place every third year.
trimness n. Neatness.
trinity n. A threefold personality existing in the one divine being or substance.
trio n. Three things grouped or associated together.
triple adj. Threefold.
triplicate adj. Composed of or pertaining to three related things or parts.
triplicity n. The state of being triple or threefold.
tripod n. A three-legged stand, usually hinged near the top, for supporting some instrument.
trisect v. To divide into three parts, especially into three equal parts.
trite adj. Made commonplace by frequent repetition.
triumvir n. One of three men united coordinately in public office or authority.
trivial adj. Of little importance or value.
troublesome adj. Burdensome.
truculent adj. Having the character or the spirit of a savage.
truism n. A statement so plainly true as hardly to require statement or proof.
truthful adj. Veracious.
tutelage n. The act of training or the state of being under instruction.
tutelar adj. Protective.
tutorship n. The office of a guardian.
twinge n. A darting momentary local pain.
typical adj. Characteristic.
typify v. To serve as a characteristic example of.
typographical adj. Pertaining to typography or printing.
typography n. The arrangement of composed type, or the appearance of printed matter.
tyrannical adj. Despotic.
tyranny n. Absolute power arbitrarily or unjustly administrated.
tyro n. One slightly skilled in or acquainted with any trade or profession.
ubiquitous adj. Being present everywhere.
ulterior adj. Not so pertinent as something else to the matter spoken of.
ultimate adj. Beyond which there is nothing else.
ultimatum n. A final statement or proposal, as concerning terms or conditions.
ultramundane adj. Pertaining to supernatural things or to another life.
ultramontane adj. Beyond the mountains, especially beyond the Alps (that is, on their Italian side).
umbrage n. A sense of injury.
unaccountable adj. Inexplicable.
unanimous adj. Sharing the same views or sentiments.
unanimity n. The state or quality of being of one mind.
unavoidable adj. Inevitable.
unbecoming adj. Unsuited to the wearer, place, or surroundings.
unbelief n. Doubt.
unbiased adj. Impartial, as judgment.
unbridled adj. Being without restraint.
uncommon adj. Rare.
unconscionable adj. Ridiculously or unjustly excessive.
unconscious adj. Not cognizant of objects, actions, etc.
unction n. The art of anointing as with oil.
unctuous adj. Oily.
undeceive v. To free from deception, as by apprising of the real state of affairs.
undercharge v. To make an inadequate charge for.
underexposed adj. Insufficiently exposed for proper or full development, as negatives in photography.
undergarment n. A garment to be worn under the ordinary outer garments.
underman v. To equip with less than the full complement of men.
undersell v. To sell at a lower price than.
undersized adj. Of less than the customary size.
underhanded adj. Clandestinely carried on.
underlie v. To be the ground or support of.
underling n. A subordinate.
undermine v. To subvert in an underhand way.
underrate v. To undervalue.
understate v. To fail to put strongly enough, as a case.
undervalue v. To underestimate.
underwrite v. To issue or be party to the issue of a policy of insurance.
undue adj. More than sufficient.
undulate v. To move like a wave or in waves.
undulous adj. Resembling waves.
upbraid v. To reproach as deserving blame.
upcast n. A throwing upward.
upheaval n. Overthrow or violent disturbance of established order or condition.
upheave v. To raise or lift with effort.
uppermost adj. First in order of precedence.
uproarious adj. Noisy.
upturn v. To throw into confusion.
urban adj. Of, or pertaining to, or like a city.
urbanity n. Refined or elegant courtesy.
urchin n. A roguish, mischievous boy.
urgency n. The pressure of necessity.
usage n. Treatment.
usurious adj. Taking unlawful or exorbitant interest on money loaned.
usurp v. To take possession of by force.
usury n. The demanding for the use of money as a loan, a rate of interest beyond what is allowed by law.
utilitarianism n. The ethical doctrine that actions are right because they are useful or of beneficial tendency.
utility n. Fitness for some desirable practical purpose.
utmost n. The greatest possible extent.
vacate v. To leave.
vaccinate v. To inoculate with vaccine virus or virus of cowpox.
vacillate v. To waver.
vacuum n. A space entirely devoid of matter.
vagabond n. A wanderer.
vagrant n. An idle wanderer.
vainglory n. Excessive, pretentious, and demonstrative vanity.
vale n. Level or low land between hills.
valediction n. A bidding farewell.
valedictorian n. Student who delivers an address at graduating exercises of an educational institution.
valedictory n. A parting address.
valid adj. Founded on truth.
valorous adj. Courageous.
vapid adj. Having lost sparkling quality and flavor.
vaporizer n. An atomizer.
variable adj. Having a tendency to change.
variance n. Change.
variant n. A thing that differs from another in form only, being the same in essence or substance.
variation n. Modification.
variegate v. To mark with different shades or colors.
vassal n. A slave or bondman.
vaudeville n. A variety show.
vegetal adj. Of or pertaining to plants.
vegetarian n. One who believes in the theory that man's food should be exclusively vegetable.
vegetate v. To live in a monotonous, passive way without exercise of the mental faculties.
vegetation n. Plant-life in the aggregate.
vegetative adj. Pertaining to the process of plant-life.
vehement adj. Very eager or urgent.
velocity n. Rapid motion.
velvety adj. Marked by lightness and softness.
venal adj. Mercenary, corrupt.
vendition n. The act of selling.
vendor n. A seller.
veneer n. Outside show or elegance.
venerable adj. Meriting or commanding high esteem.
venerate v. To cherish reverentially.
venereal adj. Pertaining to or proceeding from sexual intercourse.
venial adj. That may be pardoned or forgiven, a forgivable sin.
venison n. The flesh of deer.
venom n. The poisonous fluid that certain animals secrete.
venous adj. Of, pertaining to, or contained or carried in a vein or veins.
veracious adj. Habitually disposed to speak the truth.
veracity n. Truthfulness.
verbatim adv. Word for word.
verbiage n. Use of many words without necessity.
verbose adj. Wordy.
verdant adj. Green with vegetation.
verification n. The act of proving to be true, exact, or accurate.
verify v. To prove to be true, exact, or accurate.
verily adv. In truth.
vermin n. A noxious or troublesome animal.
vernacular n. The language of one's country.
vernal adj. Belonging to or suggestive of the spring.
versatile adj. Having an aptitude for applying oneself to new and varied tasks or to various subjects.
version n. A description or report of something as modified by one's character or opinion.
vertex n. Apex.
vertical adj. Lying or directed perpendicularly to the horizon.
vertigo n. Dizziness.
vestige n. A visible trace, mark, or impression, of something absent, lost, or gone.
vestment n. Clothing or covering.
veto n. The constitutional right in a chief executive of refusing to approve an enactment.
vicarious adj. Suffered or done in place of or for the sake of another.
viceroy n. A ruler acting with royal authority in place of the sovereign in a colony or province.
vicissitude n. A change, especially a complete change, of condition or circumstances, as of fortune.
vie v. To contend.
vigilance n. Alert and intent mental watchfulness in guarding against danger.
vigilant adj. Being on the alert to discover and ward off danger or insure safety.
vignette n. A picture having a background or that is shaded off gradually.
vincible adj. Conquerable.
vindicate v. To prove true, right, or real.
vindicatory adj. Punitive.
vinery n. A greenhouse for grapes.
viol n. A stringed instrument of the violin class.
viola n. A musical instrument somewhat larger than a violin.
violator n. One who transgresses.
violation n. Infringement.
violoncello n. A stringed instrument held between the player's knees.
virago n. A bold, impudent, turbulent woman.
virile adj. Masculine.
virtu n. Rare, curious, or beautiful quality.
virtual adj. Being in essence or effect, but not in form or appearance.
virtuoso n. A master in the technique of some particular fine art.
virulence n. Extreme poisonousness.
virulent adj. Exceedingly noxious or deleterious.
visage n. The face, countenance, or look of a person.
viscount n. In England, a title of nobility, ranking fourth in the order of British peerage.
vista n. A view or prospect.
visual adj. Perceptible by sight.
visualize v. To give pictorial vividness to a mental representation.
vitality n. The state or quality of being necessary to existence or continuance.
vitalize v. To endow with life or energy.
vitiate v. To contaminate.
vituperable adj. Deserving of censure.
vivacity n. Liveliness.
vivify v. To endue with life.
vivisection n. The dissection of a living animal.
vocable n. a word, especially one regarded in relation merely to its qualities of sound.
vocative adj. Of or pertaining to the act of calling.
vociferance n. The quality of making a clamor.
vociferate v. To utter with a loud and vehement voice.
vociferous adj. Making a loud outcry.
vogue n. The prevalent way or fashion.
volant adj. Flying or able to fly.
volatile adj. Changeable.
volition n. An act or exercise of will.
volitive adj. Exercising the will.
voluble adj. Having great fluency in speaking.
voluptuous adj. having fullness of beautiful form, as a woman, with or without sensuous or sensual quality.
voracious adj. Eating with greediness or in very large quantities.
vortex n. A mass of rotating or whirling fluid, especially when sucked spirally toward the center.
votary adj. Consecrated by a vow or promise.
votive adj. Dedicated by a vow.
vulgarity n. Lack of refinement in conduct or speech.
vulnerable adj. Capable of receiving injuries.
waif n. A homeless, neglected wanderer.
waistcoat n. A vest.
waive v. To relinquish, especially temporarily, as a right or claim.
wampum n. Beads strung on threads, formerly used among the American Indians as currency.
wane v. To diminish in size and brilliancy.
wantonness n. Recklessness.
weak-kneed adj. Without resolute purpose or energy.
weal n. Well-being.
wean v. To transfer (the young) from dependence on mother's milk to another form of nourishment.
wearisome adj. Fatiguing.
well-bred adj. Of good ancestry.
well-doer n. A performer of moral and social duties.
well-to-do adj. In prosperous circumstances.
whereabouts n. The place in or near which a person or thing is.
whereupon adv. After which.
wherever adv. In or at whatever place.
wherewith n. The necessary means or resources.
whet v. To make more keen or eager.
whimsical adj. Capricious.
whine v. To utter with complaining tone.
wholly adv. Completely.
wield v. To use, control, or manage, as a weapon, or instrument, especially with full command.
wile n. An act or a means of cunning deception.
winsome adj. Attractive.
wintry adj. Lacking warmth of manner.
wiry adj. Thin, but tough and sinewy.
witchcraft n. Sorcery.
witless adj. Foolish, indiscreet, or silly.
witling n. A person who has little understanding.
witticism n. A witty, brilliant, or original saying or sentiment.
wittingly adv. With knowledge and by design.
wizen v. To become or cause to become withered or dry.
wizen-faced adj. Having a shriveled face.
working-man n. One who earns his bread by manual labor.
workmanlike adj. Like or befitting a skilled workman.
workmanship n. The art or skill of a workman.
wrangle v. To maintain by noisy argument or dispute.
wreak v. To inflict, as a revenge or punishment.
wrest v. To pull or force away by or as by violent twisting or wringing.
wretchedness n. Extreme misery or unhappiness.
writhe v. To twist the body, face, or limbs or as in pain or distress.
writing n. The act or art of tracing or inscribing on a surface letters or ideographs.
wry adj. Deviating from that which is proper or right.
yearling n. A young animal past its first year and not yet two years old.
zealot n. One who espouses a cause or pursues an object in an immoderately partisan manner.
zeitgeist n. The intellectual and moral tendencies that characterize any age or epoch.
zenith n. The culminating-point of prosperity, influence, or greatness.
zephyr n. Any soft, gentle wind.
zodiac n. An imaginary belt encircling the heavens within which are the larger planets.
Page too large to print?
SAT Vocabulary Building by Dr. Steve Baba
You do not need to learn every word in the dictionary to improve your SAT score. Every bone in your body has a name, but the names of your bones will not be on the SAT for two reasons. It would give an unfair advantage to students interested in human anatomy, and the question would be too difficult. Just as easy questions that everyone can answer will not be on the test, questions that no one can answer will also not be on the test for the same reason; they do not measure anything since everyone would get the same score.
There are about 10,000 words that are likely to show up on the SAT - other words are too hard or too easy. While 10,000 words is a lot, you probably know half of the words already. Also, many of the words are related to each other through common roots such as subsonic and supersonic. If you know what supersonic means, you should be able to figure out what subsonic means and vice versa.
Five or ten hours of vocabulary work cannot compare to a lifetime of studious vocabulary building, but all is not lost. You can review, remember and clarify words you once knew and learn a few new words. Unless you have a photographic memory or have mastered mnemonics (thinking of memory aids), you will not be able to memorize 1000 new words from a list in a few hours. What you can do is review words that you barely remember, and some of the new words may stick.
If you are tempted to skip vocabulary building because there are too many words, just remember that you do not need to know all the words to answer vocabulary questions correctly. Consider the following sentence completion question.
Because of his _____ and effort, John Doe was a success.
a. laziness
1000 Most Important Words by Norman Schur, 245 pages, $5.99.
Click on the above titles to view Amazon.com’s description. Amazon.com pays me a pittance, as an Amazon associate.
In addition to answering more vocabulary questions correctly, answering quickly leaves more time for reading comprehension questions, which have vocabulary embedded in the passages.
These words are targeted for SAT test prep, but other tests, such as the GRE and GMAT, use the same collegiate words.
GRE words and GMAT vocabulary are just hard SAT words; SAT prep will help you on graduate school entrance tests.
The SAT vocabulary and SAT math advice also applies to GRE vocabulary and GRE math, but the difficulty is different.
On the SAT, Both Speed And Accuracy Count
Finishing the easy SAT math problems faster gives you time to solve two more hard problems per section for 60 more points.
Every SAT math problem, even the hard ones such as these in my seminar (PDF), can be easily solved in one minute without a calculator.
The reading-passage questions are NOT ordered from easy to hard. If you run out of time, because of slow reading or slow vocabulary, you both miss opportunities to answer easy questions for easy points and don't have extra time for hard questions.
Just 20% faster is like having an extra 5 minutes on 25-minute sections.
SAT prep, such as my CDs/DVD, can enable you to gain 50+ points from increased accuracy and 50+ points from increased speed per subject for a total increase of 300+.
SAT Writing: Can’t write (no good/good/well)? Not a Big Problem
The “new” SAT writing (really the same old SAT II writing) is 2/3 multiple-choice grammar and 1/3 a 25-minute essay.
The multiple-choice grammar does not even require knowing the names of parts of speech. One only needs to pick the best of several choices or identify errors (no good/good/well). Because SAT scoring is highly curved, half correct (50%) is enough to reach 500, and even 600, 650 or 700 allows many mistakes or 50/50 guesses.
Most, but not all, of the multiple-choice questions can be answered with two-dozen English grammar rules, which are covered in the Kaplan and Princeton Review books.
Multiple-choice grammar questions can be answered multiple ways:
1) know the grammar rule for the one correct answer
2) eliminate all wrong answers to find the remaining correct answer
3) know a correct similar sentence - Can’t (swim/any activity) (no good/good/well)?
4) reword to clarify - I write (no good/good/well).
5) guess after eliminating some wrong answers
A 25-minute essay is as far from a creatively written novel as a 25-minute fast-food meal is from a gourmet meal. Becoming a professional chef or novelist takes years. Becoming a fast-food cook or writing a decent 25-minute essay can be mastered faster.
The essay is often illustrated by a triple cheeseburger. Top bun = introduction. Three burgers = three examples. Cheese between burgers = transitions between examples. Bottom bun = conclusion. Cooking small pieces of meat is easy = using small examples is easy.
SAT writing is the easiest to improve. Reading with difficult vocabulary is the hardest to improve.
Recommended SAT Prep Books by Steve Baba, Ph.D.
While some books are slightly better than others, I have found that none were exceptional. Kaplan certainly knows what Princeton Review is doing and vice versa. Books from other companies generally contain similar advice and are only differentiated by jokes, writing style, and graphics.
I have found that the Princeton Review book is slightly better for low-scoring students because it simplifies every solution. I have found that the Kaplan book is slightly better for high-scoring students because it does not (over) simplify every solution.
The book The Official SAT Study Guide provides real SAT tests, which are ideal for practicing and becoming more confident with the test. But do not use this book alone. Using The Official SAT Study Guide alone is like learning how to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool. To maximize your SAT score, you need to both practice and learn from experts.
While SAT preparation books generally contains similar advice, longer books obviously contain more information. While learning 200 SAT words is useful, learning 2000 words is better. Ditto for math problems. .
Almost every SAT math problem can be solved with the below math. My DVD SAT math seminar shows how-to while covering the necessary math.
Print (click icon below) the below ( if blank click here ), free, 6-page SAT Math Notes and use as a crash course and/or a quick reference "cheat sheet."
The 4-column, small-type, terse-wording design enables students to quickly find and read formulas. On a table or a large desk, 6-pages can be viewed instantly.
This website is for the pre-2016 SAT Test. The SAT sold out to Common Core money.
The new redesigned 2016 SAT is Common Core garbage, designed by the Common Core architect himself.
All You Have To Do Is Listen
5,000 Vocabulary Words on 7 audio CDs ($) or Free download
Upgrade Your Vocabulary and Math to
Upgrade Your School, Career and Life
|
i don't know
|
Which inspirational genius created the landmark film 'Modern Times' and its theme song, 'Smile', released in 1936?
|
1000+ images about Chaplin. on Pinterest | City lights, Actors and Silent film stars
Forward
Charlie Chaplin in “The Circus” Charlie Chaplin......wrote "Smile" smile, though your heart is aching, smile even though it's breaking, when there are clouds in the sky you'll get by, just smile through your tears and sorrow, smile and maybe tomorrow, you'll see the sun come shining through, if you just smile
See More
|
Charlie Chaplin
|
The traditional generic name of the 1880s bike design which improved the penny-farthing (high-wheel) and basically endures today is the '(What?) bicycle'?
|
Charlie Chaplin : Map (The Full Wiki)
The Full Wiki
Top rankings for Charlie Chaplin
20th
Wikipedia article:
Map showing all locations mentioned on Wikipedia article:
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comedian actor and film director . Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker , composer and musician in the early to mid Classical Hollywood era of American cinema . He was famous also for his great sense of humor and slapstick comedy skills.
Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced and eventually scored his own films as one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. Chaplin himself was heavily influenced by a predecessor, the French silent movie comedian Max Linder , to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the Music Hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer almost until his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. With Mary Pickford , Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith , Chaplin co-founded United Artists in 1919.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Chaplin the 10th greatest male actor of all time . In 2008, Martin Sieff in a review of the book Chaplin: A Life , writes: "Chaplin was not just 'big', he was gigantic. In 1915, he burst onto a war-torn world bringing it the gift of comedy, laughter and relief while it was tearing itself apart through WWI . Over the next 25 years, through the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler , he stayed on the job. It is doubtful any individual has ever given more entertainment, pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most". George Bernard Shaw , having in mind the peerless quality of Chaplin's work and that he performed virtually every role in creating his films – actor, director, producer, scriptwriter, musical scores etc., called Chaplin "the only genius to come out of the movie industry".
Early life
, England
. His parents were both entertainers in the music hall tradition; his father, Charles Spencer Chaplin Sr, was a vocalist and an actor and his mother, Hannah Chaplin , a singer and an actress. They separated before Charlie was three. He learned singing from his parents. The 1891 census shows that his mother lived with Charlie and his older half-brother Sydney on Barlow Street, Walworth.
As a small child, Chaplin also lived with his mother in various addresses in and around Kennington Road
in Lambeth
, including 3 Pownall Terrace, Chester Street and 39 Methley Street. His mother and maternal grandmother were from the Smith family of Romanichals , a fact of which he was extremely proud, though he described it in his autobiography as "the skeleton in our family cupboard". Chaplin's father, Charles Chaplin Sr., was an alcoholic and had little contact with his son, though Chaplin and his half-brother briefly lived with their father and his mistress, Louise, at 287 Kennington Road where a plaque now commemorates the fact. The half-brothers lived there while their mentally ill mother resided at Cane Hill
Asylum at Coulsdon
. Chaplin's father's mistress sent the boy to Archbishop Temples Boys School. His father died of alcoholism when Charlie was twelve in 1901. As of the 1901 Census, Charles resided at 94 Ferndale Road, Lambeth
, with The Eight Lancashire Lads , led by John William Jackson (the 17 year old son of one of the founders).
A larynx condition ended the singing career of Chaplin's mother. Hannah's first crisis came in 1894 when she was performing at The Canteen, a theatre in Aldershot
. The theatre was mainly frequented by rioters and soldiers. Hannah was badly injured by the objects the audience threw at her and she was booed off the stage. Backstage, she cried and argued with her manager. Meanwhile, the five-year old Chaplin went on stage alone and sang a well-known tune at that time, "Jack Jones".
After Chaplin's mother (who went by the stage name Lilly Harley) was again admitted to the Cane Hill Asylum, her son was left in the workhouse at Lambeth in south London, moving after several weeks to the Central London District School for paupers in Hanwell
. The young Chaplin brothers forged a close relationship in order to survive. They gravitated to the Music Hall while still very young, and both of them proved to have considerable natural stage talent. Chaplin's early years of desperate poverty were a great influence on his characters. Themes in his films in later years would re-visit the scenes of his childhood deprivation in Lambeth.
Chaplin's mother died in 1928 in Hollywood, seven years after having been brought to the U.S. by her sons. Unknown to Charlie and Sydney until years later, they had a half-brother through their mother. The boy, Wheeler Dryden , was raised abroad by his father but later connected with the rest of the family and went to work for Chaplin at his Hollywood
studio.
Making a Living (1914), Chaplin's film debut
Chaplin first toured America
with the Fred Karno troupe from 1910 to 1912. Karno is his fraternal brother in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F). After five months back in England, he returned to the U.S. for a second tour, arriving with the Karno Troupe on 2 October 1912. In the Karno Company was Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who would later become known as Stan Laurel . Chaplin and Laurel shared a room in a boarding house. Stan Laurel returned to England but Chaplin remained in the United States. In late 1913, Chaplin's act with the Karno Troupe was seen by Mack Sennett , Mabel Normand , Minta Durfee , and Fatty Arbuckle . Sennett hired him for his studio, the Keystone Film Company as a replacement for Ford Sterling . Unfortunately, Chaplin had considerable initial difficulty adjusting to the demands of film acting and his performance suffered for it. After Chaplin's first film appearance, Making a Living was filmed, Sennett felt he had made a costly mistake. Most agree it was Normand who persuaded him to give Chaplin another chance.
Chaplin was given over to Normand, who directed and wrote a handful of his earliest films. Chaplin did not enjoy being directed by a woman, and the two often disagreed. Eventually, the two worked out their differences and remained friends long after Chaplin left Keystone. The Tramp debuted during the silent film era in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice (released on February 7, 1914). Chaplin, with his Little Tramp character, quickly became the most popular star in Keystone director Mack Sennett's company of players. Chaplin continued to play the Tramp through dozens of short films and, later, feature-length productions (in only a handful of other productions did he play characters other than the Tramp).
The Tramp was closely identified with the silent era, and was considered an international character; when the sound era began in the late 1920s, Chaplin refused to make a talkie featuring the character. The 1931 production City Lights featured no dialogue. Chaplin officially retired the character in the film Modern Times (released February 5, 1936), which appropriately ended with the Tramp walking down an endless highway toward the horizon. The film was only a partial talkie and is often called the last silent film. The Tramp remains silent until near the end of the film when, for the first time, his voice is finally heard, albeit only as part of a French/Italian-derived gibberish song. This allowed the Tramp to finally be given a voice but not tarnish his association with the silent era.
In The Great Dictator, Chaplin's first film after Modern Times, Chaplin plays the dual role of a Hitler-esque dictator, and a Jewish Barber. Although Chaplin emphatically stated that the barber was not The Tramp, he retains the Tramp's moustache, hat, and general appearance. Despite a few silent scenes, the barber speaks throughout the film (using Chaplin's own British accent), including the passionate plea for peace that has been widely interpreted as Chaplin speaking as himself.
Two films Chaplin made in 1915, The Tramp and The Bank, created the characteristics of his screen persona. While in the end the Tramp manages to shake off his disappointment and resume his carefree ways, “the pathos lies in The Tramp's hope for a more permanent transformation through love, and his failure to achieve this.” (Article 21, pg 112)
Mack Sennett did not warm to Chaplin right away, and Chaplin believed Sennett intended to fire him following a disagreement with Normand. However, Chaplin's pictures were soon a success, and he became one of the biggest stars at Keystone.
Pioneering film artist and global celebrity
Chaplin in character in the 1910s
Chaplin's earliest films were made for Mack Sennett 's Keystone Studios , where he developed his tramp character and very quickly learned the art and craft of film making. The public first saw the tramp when Chaplin, age 24, appeared in his second film to be released (7 February 1914), Kid Auto Races at Venice .
However, he had devised the tramp costume for a film produced a few days earlier but released later (9 February 1914), Mabel's Strange Predicament . Mack Sennett had requested that Chaplin "get into a comedy make-up". As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography :
"I had no idea what makeup to put on.
I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living].
However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat.
I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large.
I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression.
I had no idea of the character.
But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was.
I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
"Fatty" Arbuckle contributed his father-in-law's derby and his own pants (of generous proportions). Chester Conklin provided the little cutaway tailcoat, and Ford Sterling the size-14 shoes, which were so big, Chaplin had to wear each on the wrong foot to keep them on. He devised the moustache from a bit of crepe hair belonging to Mack Swain . The only thing Chaplin himself owned was the whangee cane. Chaplin's tramp character would immediately gain enormous popularity among cinema audiences.
Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914): Chaplin's second film and the debut of his "tramp" costume
Chaplin's early Keystones use the standard Mack Sennett formula of extreme physical comedy and exaggerated gestures. Chaplin's pantomime was subtler, more suitable to romantic and domestic farces than to the usual Keystone chases and mob scenes. The visual gags were pure Keystone, however; the tramp character would aggressively assault his enemies with kicks and bricks. Moviegoers loved this cheerfully earthy new comedian, even though critics warned that his antics bordered on vulgarity. Chaplin was soon entrusted with directing and editing his own films. He made 34 shorts for Sennett during his first year in pictures, as well as the landmark comedy feature Tillie's Punctured Romance .
Chaplin's principal character was " The Tramp " (known as "Charlot" in France, and the French-speaking world , Italy
and Argentina
, and "Vagabond" in Germany). "The Tramp" is a vagrant with the refined manners, clothes, and dignity of a gentleman . The character wears a tight coat, oversized trousers and shoes, and a derby ; carries a bamboo cane; and has a signature toothbrush moustache .The Tramp character was featured in the first movie trailer to be exhibited in a U.S. movie theater, a slide promotion developed by Nils Granlund , advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theater chain, and shown at the Loew's Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem in 1914.In 1915, Chaplin signed a much more favorable contract with Essanay Studios
, and further developed his cinematic skills, adding new levels of depth and pathos to the Keystone-style slapstick. Most of the Essanay films were more ambitious, running twice as long as the average Keystone comedy. Chaplin also developed his own stock company, including ingénue Edna Purviance and comic villains Leo White and Bud Jamison.
As immigrant groups arrived in waves to America silent movies were able to cross all the barriers of language, and spoke to every level of the American Tower of Babel , precisely because they were silent. Chaplin was emerging as the supreme exponent of silent movies, an emigrant himself from London. Chaplin's Tramp enacted the difficulties and humiliations of the immigrant underdog , the constant struggle at the bottom of the American heap and yet he triumphed over adversity without ever rising to the top, and thereby stayed in touch with his audience. Chaplin's films were also deliciously subversive. The bumbling officials enabled the immigrants to laugh at those they feared.
In 1916, the Mutual Film Corporation paid Chaplin US$670,000 to produce a dozen two-reel comedies. He was given near complete artistic control, and produced twelve films over an eighteen-month period that rank among the most influential comedy films in cinema. Practically every Mutual comedy is a classic: Easy Street, One AM, The Pawnshop, and The Adventurer are perhaps the best known. Edna Purviance remained the leading lady, and Chaplin added Eric Campbell , Henry Bergman, and Albert Austin to his stock company; Campbell, a Gilbert and Sullivan veteran, provided superb villainy, and second bananas Bergman and Austin would remain with Chaplin for decades. Chaplin regarded the Mutual period as the happiest of his career, although he also had concerns that the films during that time were becoming formulaic owing to the stringent production schedule his contract required. Upon the U.S. entering World War I, Chaplin became a spokesman for Liberty Bonds with his close friend Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
Most of the Chaplin films in circulation date from his Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual periods. After Chaplin assumed control of his productions in 1918 (and kept exhibitors and audiences waiting for them), entrepreneurs serviced the demand for Chaplin by bringing back his older comedies. The films were recut, retitled, and reissued again and again, first for theatres, then for the home-movie market, and in recent years, for home video. Even Essanay was guilty of this practice, fashioning "new" Chaplin comedies from old film clips and out-takes. The twelve Mutual comedies were revamped as sound movies in 1933, when producer Amadee J. Van Beuren added new orchestral scores and sound effects . A listing of the dozens of Chaplin films and alternate versions can be found in the Ted Okuda -David Maska book Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp. Efforts to produce definitive versions of Chaplin's pre-1918 short films have been underway in recent years; all twelve Mutual films were restored in 1975 by archivist David Shepard and Blackhawk Films , and new restorations with even more footage were released on DVD in 2006.
Filmmaking techniques
Chaplin never spoke more than cursorily about his filmmaking methods, claiming such a thing would be tantamount to a magician spoiling his own illusion. In fact, until he began making spoken dialogue films with The Great Dictator in 1940, Chaplin never shot from a completed script. The method he developed, once his Essanay contract gave him the freedom to write for and direct himself, was to start from a vague premise — for example "Charlie enters a health spa" or "Charlie works in a pawn shop." Chaplin then had sets constructed and worked with his stock company to improvise gags and "business" around them, almost always working the ideas out on film. As ideas were accepted and discarded, a narrative structure would emerge, frequently requiring Chaplin to reshoot an already-completed scene that might have otherwise contradicted the story. Chaplin's unique filmaking techniques became known only after his death, when his rare surviving outakes and cut sequences were carefully examined in the 1983 British documentary Unknown Chaplin .
This is one reason why Chaplin took so much longer to complete his films than did his rivals. In addition, Chaplin was an incredibly exacting director, showing his actors exactly how he wanted them to perform and shooting scores of takes until he had the shot he wanted. (Animator Chuck Jones , who lived near Charlie Chaplin's Lone Star studio as a boy, remembered his father saying he watched Chaplin shoot a scene more than a hundred times until he was satisfied with it.) This combination of story improvisation and relentless perfectionism—which resulted in days of effort and thousands of feet of film being wasted, all at enormous expense—often proved very taxing for Chaplin, who in frustration would often lash out at his actors and crew, keep them waiting idly for hours or, in extreme cases, shutting down production altogether.
Creative control
Charlie Chaplin Studios, 1922
At the conclusion of the Mutual contract in 1917, Chaplin signed a contract with First National to produce eight two-reel films. First National financed and distributed these pictures (1918-23) but otherwise gave him complete creative control over production which he could perform at a more relaxed pace that allowed him to focus on quality. Chaplin built his own Hollywood studio and using his independence, created a remarkable, timeless body of work that remains entertaining and influential. Although First National expected Chaplin to deliver short comedies like the celebrated Mutuals, Chaplin ambitiously expanded most of his personal projects into longer, feature-length films, including Shoulder Arms (1918), The Pilgrim (1923) and the feature-length classic The Kid (1921).
In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the United Artists film distribution company with Mary Pickford , Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith , all of whom were seeking to escape the growing power consolidation of film distributors and financiers in the developing Hollywood studio system. This move, along with complete control of his film production through his studio, assured Chaplin's independence as a film-maker. He served on the board of UA until the early 1950s.
All Chaplin's United Artists pictures were of feature length, beginning with the atypical drama in which Chaplin had only a brief cameo role, A Woman of Paris (1923). This was followed by the classic comedies The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).
World premiere of Modern Times (1936), New York
After the arrival of sound films, Chaplin made The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), as well as Modern Times (1936) before he committed to sound. These were essentially silent films scored with his own music and sound effects. City Lights contained arguably his most perfect balance of comedy and sentimentality. Of the final scene, critic James Agee wrote in Life magazine in 1949 that it was the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid ".
Chaplin's dialogue films made in Hollywood were The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952).
While Modern Times (1936) is a non-talkie, it does contain talk—usually coming from inanimate objects such as a radio or a TV monitor. This was done to help 1930s audiences, who were out of the habit of watching silent films, adjust to not hearing dialogue. Modern Times was the first film where Chaplin's voice is heard (in the nonsense song at the end, being both written and performed by Chaplin). However, for most viewers it is still considered a silent film—and the end of an era.
Although " talkies " became the dominant mode of movie making soon after they were introduced in 1927, Chaplin resisted making such a film all through the 1930s. He considered cinema essentially a pantomimic art. He said: "Action is more generally understood than words. Like Chinese symbolism, it will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a description of some unfamiliar object — an African warthog, for example; then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are". Time Magazine, 9 February 1931
It is a tribute to Chaplin's versatility that he also has one film credit for choreography for the 1952 film Limelight, and another as a singer for the title music of The Circus (1928). The best known of several songs he composed are " Smile ", composed for the film Modern Times (1936) and given lyrics to help promote a 1950s revival of the film, famously covered by Nat King Cole . "This Is My Song" from Chaplin's last film, "A Countess From Hong Kong," was a number one hit in several different languages in the 1960s (most notably the version by Petula Clark and discovery of an unreleased version in the 1990s recorded in 1967 by Judith Durham of The Seekers ), and Chaplin's theme from Limelight was a hit in the 1950s under the title "Eternally." Chaplin's score to Limelight won an Academy Award in 1972; a delay in the film premiering in Los Angeles made it eligible decades after it was filmed. Chaplin also wrote scores for his earlier silent films when they were re-released in the sound era, notably The Kid for its 1971 re-release.
The Great Dictator
Chaplin's first dialogue picture, The Great Dictator (1940), was an act of defiance against German dictator Adolf Hitler and Nazism , filmed and released in the United States one year before the U.S. abandoned its policy of neutrality to enter World War II. Chaplin played the role of "Adenoid Hynkel", Dictator of Tomania, clearly modeled on Hitler. The film also showcased comedian Jack Oakie as "Benzino Napaloni", dictator of Bacteria. The Napaloni character was clearly a jab at Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Fascism .
Paulette Goddard filmed with Chaplin again, depicting a woman in the ghetto. The film was seen as an act of courage in the political environment of the time, both for its ridicule of Nazism and for the portrayal of overt Jewish characters and the depiction of their persecution. Chaplin played both the role of Adenoid Hynkel and also that of a look-alike Jewish barber persecuted by the Nazis, who physically resembles Chaplin's Tramp character. At the conclusion, the two characters Chaplin portrayed swapped positions through a complex plot, and he dropped out of his comic character to address the audience directly in a speech.
He was nominated for Academy awards for Best Picture , Original Screenplay and Best Actor in The Great Dictator.
Politics
Chaplin's political sympathies always lay with the left . His politics seem moderate by some contemporary standards, but in the 1940s his views (in conjunction with his influence, fame, and status in the United States as a resident foreigner) were seen by many as communistic . His silent films made prior to the Great Depression typically did not contain overt political themes or messages, apart from the Tramp's plight in poverty and his run-ins with the law, but his 1930s films were more openly political. Modern Times depicts workers and poor people in dismal conditions. The final dramatic speech in The Great Dictator, which was critical of following patriotic nationalism without question, and his vocal public support for the opening of a second European front in 1942 to assist the Soviet Union
in World War II were controversial. In at least one of those speeches, according to a contemporary account in the Daily Worker, he intimated that Communism might sweep the world after World War II and equated it with human progress .
Apart from the controversial 1942 speeches, Chaplin declined to support the war effort as he had done for the First World War which led to public anger, although his two sons saw service in the Army in Europe. For most of World War II he was fighting serious criminal and civil charges related to his involvement with actress Joan Barry (see below). After the war, the critical view towards capitalism in his 1947 black comedy , Monsieur Verdoux led to increased hostility , with the film being the subject of protests in many U.S. cities . As a result, Chaplin's final American film, Limelight, was less political and more autobiographical in nature. His following European-made film, A King in New York (1957), satirized the political persecution and paranoia that had forced him to leave the U.S. five years earlier. After this film, Chaplin lost interest in making overt political statements, later saying that comedians and clowns should be "above politics" .
McCarthy era
Although Chaplin had his major successes in the United States and was a resident from 1914 to 1953, he always maintained a neutral nationalistic stance. During the era of McCarthyism , Chaplin was accused of " un-American activities " as a suspected communist and J. Edgar Hoover , who had instructed the FBI
to keep extensive secret files on him, tried to end his United States residency. FBI pressure on Chaplin grew after his 1942 campaign for a second European front in the war and reached a critical level in the late 1940s, when Congressional figures threatened to call him as a witness in hearings. This was never done, probably from fear of Chaplin's ability to lampoon the investigators.
In 1952, Chaplin left the US for what was intended as a brief trip home to the United Kingdom for the London premiere of Limelight. Hoover learned of the trip and negotiated with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to revoke Chaplin's re-entry permit, exiling Chaplin so he could not return for his alleged political leanings. Chaplin decided not to re-enter the United States, writing; ".....Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press , have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."
Chaplin then made his home in Vevey
. He briefly and triumphantly returned to the United States in April 1972, with his wife, to receive an Honorary Oscar , and also to discuss how his films would be re-released and marketed.
Academy Awards
Chaplin won one Oscar for the Academy Award for Original Music Score , and was given two honorary Academy Awards.
Competitive awards
In 1972, Chaplin won an Oscar for the Best Music in an Original Dramatic Score for the 1952 film Limelight which also was a great hit, which co-starred Claire Bloom . The film also features an appearance with Buster Keaton , which was the only time the two great comedians ever appeared together. Due to Chaplin's political difficulties, the film did not play a one-week theatrical engagement in Los Angeles when it was first produced. This criterion for nomination was unfulfilled until 1972.
Chaplin was also nominated for Best Comedy Director for The Circus in 1929, for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay (although the Academy no longer lists these nominations in their official records because he received a Special Award instead of being included in the final voting for the competitive ones), Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for The Great Dictator in 1940, and again for Best Original Screenplay for Monsieur Verdoux in 1948. During his active years as a filmmaker, Chaplin expressed disdain for the Academy Awards; his son Charles Jr wrote that Chaplin invoked the ire of the Academy in the 1930s by jokingly using his 1929 Oscar as a doorstop. This may help explain why City Lights and Modern Times , considered by several polls to be two of the greatest of all motion pictures, were not nominated for a single Academy Award.
Honorary awards
When the first Oscars were awarded on 16 May 1929, the voting audit procedures that now exist had not yet been put into place, and the categories were still very fluid. Chaplin had originally been nominated for both Best Actor and Best Comedy Directing for his movie The Circus, but his name was withdrawn and the Academy decided to give him a special award "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus" instead. The other film to receive a special award that year was The Jazz Singer .
Chaplin's second honorary award came forty-four years later in 1972, and was for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century". He came out of his exile to accept his award, and received the longest standing ovation in Academy Award history, lasting a full five minutes.
Final works
Chaplin's final two films were made in London: A King in New York (1957) in which he starred, wrote, directed and produced; and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), which he directed, produced, and wrote. The latter film stars Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando , and Chaplin made his final on-screen appearance in a brief cameo role as a seasick steward. He also composed the music for both films with the theme song from A Countess From Hong Kong, " This is My Song ," reaching number one in the UK as sung by Petula Clark . Chaplin also compiled a film The Chaplin Revue from three First National films A Dog's Life (1918), Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Pilgrim (1923) for which he composed the music and recorded an introductory narration. As well as directing these final films, Chaplin also wrote My Autobiography, between 1959 and 1963, which was published in 1964.
In his pictorial autobiography My Life In Pictures, published in 1974, Chaplin indicated that he had written a screenplay for his daughter, Victoria; entitled The Freak , the film would have cast her as an angel. According to Chaplin, a script was completed and pre-production rehearsals had begun on the film (the book includes a photograph of Victoria in costume), but were halted when Victoria married. "I mean to make it some day," Chaplin wrote. However, his health declined steadily in the 1970s which hampered all hopes of the film ever being produced.
From 1969 until 1976, Chaplin wrote original music compositions and scores for his silent pictures and re-released them. He composed the scores of all his First National shorts: The Idle Class in 1971 (paired with The Kid for re-release in 1972), A Day's Pleasure in 1973, Pay Day in 1972, Sunnyside in 1974, and of his feature length films firstly The Circus in 1969 and The Kid in 1971. Chaplin worked with music associate Eric James whilst composing all his scores.
Chaplin's last completed work was the score for his 1923 film A Woman of Paris , which was completed in 1976, by which time Chaplin was extremely frail, even finding communication difficult.
Relationships with women, marriages and children
Hetty Kelly
Hetty Kelly was Chaplin's "true" first love, a dancer with whom he "instantly" fell in love when she was fifteen and almost married when he was nineteen, in 1908. It is said Chaplin fell madly in love with her and asked her to marry him. When she refused, Chaplin suggested it would be best if they did not see each other again; he was reportedly crushed when she agreed. Years later, her memory would remain an obsession with Chaplin. He was devastated in 1921 when he learned that she had died of influenza during the 1918 flu pandemic .
Edna Purviance
Chaplin and his first major leading lady after Mabel Normand, Edna Purviance , were involved in a close romantic relationship during the production of his Essanay and Mutual films in 1916–1917. The romance seems to have ended by 1918, and Chaplin's marriage to Mildred Harris in late 1918 ended any possibility of reconciliation. Purviance would continue as leading lady in Chaplin's films until 1923, and would remain on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958. She and Chaplin spoke warmly of one another for the rest of their lives.
Mildred Harris
On 23 October 1918, Chaplin, age 29, married the popular child-actress, Mildred Harris , who was 16. They had one son, Norman Spencer Chaplin, born on 7 July 1919, who died three days later and is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood California. Chaplin separated from Harris by late 1919, moving back into the Los Angeles Athletic Club . The couple divorced in November 1920, with Harris getting some of their community property and a US$100,000 settlement. Chaplin admitted that he "was not in love, now that [he] was married [he] wanted to be and wanted the marriage to be a success." During the divorce, Chaplin claimed Harris had an affair with noted actress of the time Alla Nazimova , rumored to be fond of seducing young actresses.
Pola Negri
Chaplin was involved in a very public relationship and engagement to the Polish actress Pola Negri in 1922–23, after she arrived in Hollywood to star in films. The stormy on-off engagement was halted after about nine months, but in many ways it foreshadowed the modern stereotypes of Hollywood star relationships. Chaplin's public involvement with Negri was unique in his public life. By comparison he strove to keep his other romances during this period very discreet and private (usually without success). Many biographers have concluded the affair with Negri was largely for publicity purposes.
Marion Davies
In 1924, during the time he was involved with the underage Lita Grey , Chaplin was rumored to have had a fling with actress Marion Davies , companion of William Randolph Hearst . Davies and Chaplin were both present on Hearst's yacht the weekend preceding the mysterious death of Thomas Harper Ince . Charlie allegedly tried to persuade Marion to leave Hearst and remain with him, but she refused and stayed by Hearst's side until his death in 1951. Chaplin made a rare cameo appearance in Davies' 1928 film Show People , and by some accounts supposedly continued an affair with her until 1931.
Lita Grey
Chaplin first met Lita Grey during the filming of The Kid. Three years later, at age 35, he became involved with the then 16-year-old Grey during preparations for The Gold Rush in which she was to star as the female lead. They married on 26 November 1924, after she became pregnant (a development that resulted in her being removed from the cast of the film). They had two sons, the actors Charles Chaplin, Jr. (1925–1968) and Sydney Earle Chaplin (1926–2009). The marriage was a disaster, with the couple hopelessly mismatched. The couple divorced on 22 August 1927. Their extraordinarily bitter divorce had Chaplin paying Grey a then-record-breaking US$825,000 settlement, on top of almost one million dollars in legal costs. The stress of the sensational divorce, compounded by a federal tax dispute, allegedly turned his hair white. The Chaplin biographer Joyce Milton asserted in Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin that the Grey-Chaplin marriage was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's 1950s novel Lolita .
Merna Kennedy
Lita Grey's friend, Merna Kennedy was a dancer who Chaplin hired as the lead actress in The Circus (1928). It is rumored that the two had an affair during shooting. Grey used the rumored infidelity in her divorce proceedings.
Georgia Hale
Grey's replacement on The Gold Rush was Georgia Hale . In the documentary series, Unknown Chaplin , (directed and written by film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill ), Hale, in a 1980s interview states that she had idolized Chaplin since childhood and that the then-19-year-old actress and Chaplin began an affair that continued for several years, which she details in her memoir, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups. During production of Chaplin's film City Lights in 1929-30, Hale, who by then was Chaplin's closest companion, was called in to replace Virginia Cherrill as the flower girl. Seven minutes of test footage survives from this recasting, and is included on the 2003 DVD release of the film, but economics forced Chaplin to rehire Cherrill. In discussing the situation in Unknown Chaplin, Hale states that her relationship with Chaplin was as strong as ever during filming. Their romance apparently ended sometime after Chaplin's return from his world tour in 1933.
Louise Brooks
Then a chorine in the Ziegfeld Follies , Louise Brooks met Chaplin when he came to New York for the opening there of The Gold Rush. For two months in the summer of 1925, they cavorted together at the Ritz, and with film financier A.C. Blumenthal and Brooks' fellow Ziegfeld girl Peggy Fears in Blumenthal's penthouse suite at the Ambassador Hotel. Brooks was with Chaplin when he spent four hours watching a musician torture a violin in a Lower East Side
restaurant, an act he would recreate in Limelight.
May Reeves
May Reeves was originally hired to be Chaplin's secretary on his 1931-1932 extended trip to Europe, dealing mostly with reading his personal correspondence. She worked only one morning, and then was introduced to Chaplin, who was instantly infatuated with her. May became his constant companion and lover on the trip, much to the disgust of Chaplin's brother, Syd. After Reeves also became involved with Syd, Chaplin ended the relationship and she left his entourage. Reeves chronicled her short time with Chaplin in her book, "The Intimate Charlie Chaplin".
Paulette Juliet Goddard
Chaplin and actress Paulette Goddard were involved in a romantic and professional relationship between 1932 and 1940, with Goddard living with Chaplin in his Beverly Hills home for most of this time.
Chaplin "discovered" Goddard and gave her starring roles in Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Refusal to clarify their marital status is often claimed to have eliminated Goddard from final consideration for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind . After the relationship ended in 1940, Chaplin and Goddard made public statements that they had been secretly married in 1936; but these claims were likely a mutual effort to prevent any lasting damage to Goddard's career. In any case, their relationship ended amicably in 1942, with Goddard being granted a settlement. Goddard went on to a major career in films at Paramount in the 1940s, working several times with Cecil B. DeMille . Like Chaplin, she lived her later life in Switzerland, dying in 1990.
Joan Barry
In 1942 Chaplin had a brief affair with Joan Barry (1920-1996), whom he was considering for a starring role in a proposed film, but the relationship ended when she began harassing him and displaying signs of severe mental illness (not unlike his mother). Chaplin's brief involvement with Barry proved to be a nightmare for him. After having a child, she filed a paternity suit against him in 1943. Although blood tests proved Chaplin was not the father of Barry's child, Barry's attorney, Joseph Scott , convinced the court that the tests were inadmissible as evidence, and Chaplin was ordered to support the child. The injustice of the ruling later led to a change in California law to allow blood tests as evidence. Federal prosecutors also brought Mann Act charges against Chaplin related to Barry in 1944, of which he was acquitted. Chaplin's public image in America was gravely damaged by these sensational trials. Barry was institutionalized in 1953 after she was found walking the streets barefoot, carrying a pair of baby sandals and a child's ring, and murmuring: "This is magic".
Oona O'Neill
During Chaplin's legal trouble over the Barry affair, he met Oona O'Neill , daughter of Eugene O'Neill , and married her on 16 June 1943. He was fifty-four; she had just turned eighteen. The marriage produced eight children; their last child, Christopher, was born when Chaplin was 73 years old. Oona survived Chaplin by fourteen years, and died from pancreatic cancer in 1991.
Children
6 July 1962
Knighthood
Chaplin was named in the New Year's Honours List in 1975. On 4 March, he was knighted at age eighty-five as a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II . The honor was first proposed in 1931, but was not carried through due to lingering controversy over Chaplin's failure to serve in the First World War. Knighthood was proposed again in 1956, but was vetoed by the then Conservative government for fears of damage to relations with the United States at the height of the Cold War and planned invasion of Suez of that year.
Death
Chaplin's robust health began to slowly fail in the late 1960s, after the completion of his final film A Countess from Hong Kong , and more rapidly after he received his Academy Award in 1972. By 1977 he had difficulty communicating, and began using a wheelchair. He died in his sleep in Vevey
, Switzerland
. On 1 March 1978, his corpse was stolen by a small group of Swiss mechanics in an attempt to extort money from his family. The plot failed, the robbers were captured, and the corpse was recovered eleven weeks later near Lake Geneva
. His body was reburied under two metres of concrete to prevent further attempts.
Other controversies
During World War I , Chaplin was criticized in the British press for not joining the Army. He had in fact presented himself for service, but was denied for being too small and underweight. Chaplin raised substantial funds for the war effort during war bond drives not only with public speaking at rallies but also by making, at his own expense, The Bond , a comedic propaganda film used in 1918. The lingering controversy may have prevented Chaplin from receiving a knighthood in the 1930s.
For Chaplin's entire career, some level of controversy existed over claims of Jewish ancestry. Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 40s prominently portrayed him as Jewish (named Karl Tonstein) relying on articles published in the U.S. press before, and FBI investigations of Chaplin in the late 1940s also focused on Chaplin's ethnic origins. There is no documentary evidence of Jewish ancestry for Chaplin himself. For his entire public life, he fiercely refused to challenge or refute claims that he was Jewish, saying that to do so would always "play directly into the hands of anti-Semites ." Although baptised in the Church of England , Chaplin was thought to be an agnostic for most of his life.
In 1924, Chaplin was aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst when producer Thomas Ince died there in mysterious circumstances. A dramatization of one reported version of these events is depicted in Peter Bogdanovich 's 2001 film The Cat's Meow . The precise circumstances of Ince's death are still not known.
Chaplin's lifelong attraction to younger women remains another enduring source of interest to some. His biographers have attributed this to a teenage infatuation with Hetty Kelly, whom he met in Britain while performing in the music hall, and which possibly defined his feminine ideal. Chaplin clearly relished the role of discovering and closely guiding young female stars; with the exception of Mildred Harris, all of his marriages and most of his major relationships began in this manner.
Legacy
Kamal Haasan moulded his character "Chaplin Chellappa" on Chaplin in the Tamil film Punnagai Mannan
John Woo directed a parody film of Chaplin's "The Kid" called Hua ji shi dai (1981) , also known as "Laughing Times."
Chaplin's "tramp" character is possibly the most imitated on all levels of entertainment; it is said that Charlie once entered a Chaplin look-alike competition and came in 3rd.
IBM ran a series of commercials for their personal computers during the 1980s featuring a Chaplin impersonator.
Comparison with other silent comics
Since the 1960s, Chaplin's films have been compared to those of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (the other two great silent film comedians of the time), especially among the loyal fans of each comic.
The three had different styles: Chaplin had a strong affinity for sentimentality and pathos (which was popular in the 1920s), Lloyd was renowned for his everyman persona and 1920s optimism, and Keaton adhered to onscreen stoicism with a cynical tone more suited to modern audiences. On a historical level, Chaplin was behind the pioneering generation of film comedians, and both the younger Keaton and Harold Lloyd built upon his groundwork (in fact, Lloyd's early characters "Willie Work" and "Lonesome Luke" were obvious Chaplin ripoffs, something that Lloyd acknowledged and tried hard to move away from—eventually succeeding). Chaplin's period of film experimentation ended after the Mutual period (1916-1917), just before Keaton entered films.
Commercially, Chaplin made some of the highest-grossing films in the silent era ; The Gold Rush is the fifth with US$4.25 million and The Circus is the seventh with US$3.8 million. However, Chaplin's films combined made about US$10.5 million while Harold Lloyd's grossed US$15.7 million (Lloyd was far more prolific, releasing twelve feature films in the 1920s while Chaplin released just three). Buster Keaton's films were not nearly as commercially successful as Chaplin's or Lloyd's even at the height of his popularity, and only received belated critical acclaim in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Beyond a healthy professional rivalry, former vaudevillians Chaplin and Keaton thought highly of one another. Keaton stated in his autobiography that Chaplin was the greatest comedian that ever lived, and the greatest comedy director. Chaplin also greatly admired Keaton: he welcomed him to United Artists in 1925, advised him against his disastrous move to MGM in 1928, and for his last American film, Limelight, wrote a part specifically for Keaton as his first on-screen comedy partner since 1915.
Media
image:Charlie Chaplin, bond of friendship, 1918.ogg|A video clip from the silent film, The Bond (1918)image:Charlie Chaplin, the Marriage Bond.ogg|A video clip from the silent film, The Bond (1918)image:Charlie Chaplin, The Bond, 1918.ogg|A video clip from the silent film, The Bond (1918)
Filmography
Chaplin wrote, directed, and starred in dozens of feature films and short subjects . Highlights include The Immigrant (1917), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940), all of which have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry . Three of these films made the AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies and AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies lists: The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times.
See also
|
i don't know
|
What French railway term refers to the bicycle gear system for shifting the chain between sprockets?
|
Glossary of Cycling Terms - bikeline.com
Glossary of Cycling Terms
The American Bicycle Association, the world's largest sanctioning BMX organization.
abubaca
A trick where the rider goes straight up the ramp and while they are still facing forward they tap the back tire to the coping/obstacle, then drop back down the ramp riding backwards or fakie. The rider's body faces the same direction through the whole trick.
adventure race
A multi-discipline team race that varies in length and distance from a few hours to several days. Involves multiple sports such as cycling, running, orienteering, boating, rappelling, etc.
aero
(Say: air - o) - Slang for aerodynamic, streamlined. Anything that helps a cyclist cheat his main opponent, the wind. Aero devices include handlebars, bullet-shaped helmets, even windshields.
aero handlebars
Handlebars or bolt-on (often called "clip-on") bars made for road riding that put you in a streamlined position for more speed with the same effort. These usually include elbow pads, which support your weight. The bars place your hands in front of the body, where they poke a hole in the air, which decreases wind resistance. Using aero bars and finding an aerodynamically optimum riding position are the best ways to reduce your time in time trials, triathlons, even centuries. Many riders like and use aero bars not for speed but because they provide a relaxed position for cruising the flats.
aero helmet
A special helmet with a streamlined shape to reduce wind drag and offer an advantage in races against the clock. Often pretty funny looking.
aerobic
(say: air - o - bick) - Cycling or exercising at a pace that allows breathing comfortably because you're getting enough oxygen. Think of it as a "conversational" pace. If you're breathing too hard to talk, the pace is too fast.
aftermarket
A component or accessory that wasn't intended to be used as original equipment on stock bicycles.
AheadSet
Component manufacturer Dia-Compe’s brand name for a headset (the mechanism in the front of the bike that lets the fork turn for steering). This type is designed for forks with threadless steerers (the fork's top tube).
air
If you like to leap over obstacles or fly off ramps, this is what you're trying to put beneath your wheels, as in, "I got big air." Also, it's what you put in your tires and some suspension forks and shocks so you have nice, soft landings.
air shock
A suspension that uses air pressure as its spring medium.
all mountain
As in all-mountain bicycle, this means a bike or ride that encompasses all types of off-road terrain, climbs, descents, technical and jumping.
Allen wrench
A hexagonally shaped tool for turning the ubiquitous recessed bolts found on bicycles. There are L-shaped Allen wrenches, ones with screwdriver handles and ones with ball-ends so that you can turn bolts in tight spaces. Get a set for your toolbox and on-the-road/trail kit that includes at least 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8mm wrenches, and you'll be prepared to fix most things.
alloy
A blend of metals. Also slang for "aluminum."
Alpe d'Huez
A legendary Tour de France climb to the French ski station of the same name, Alpe d'Huez is renowned for its brutal steepness and 21 switchbacks, each bearing the name of a past Tour stage winner. The Alpe became the Tour’s first mountaintop finish when the then-unpaved climb was used in 1952. Fausto Coppi won the first stage to use the 8.6-mile, 7.9%-grade climb with a time of 45 minutes and 22 seconds. Now paved, debate remains as to who holds the record for the fastest ascent of the climber’s crown jewel. Marco Pantani is generally acknowledged to be the fastest at 37’35” with Lance Armstrong a close second at 37’36”.
aluminum
(Say: aloo - min - um) - A super-light, durable and affordable material that's widely used for bicycle frames and components.
anaerobic
(Say: an - air - o - bick) - Cycling or exercising at a pace that causes labored breathing because you're struggling to get enough oxygen. Obviously, you can't keep at it for long.
anatomic seat
Seats scientifically shaped to accommodate the body. There are models for women and men.
anchor bolt
The bolt on brakes and derailleurs that is tightened to hold the cable in place.
anodized
A finishing treatment for hardening and coloring aluminum.
apron
A bicycle track term that refers to the transition area just beneath the racing/riding surface of the track. Also referred to as the "cote d'azur" due to its blue color, it usually represents about 10% of the track's surface. It's not illegal to ride on the blue band but if you use it to get around another rider you'll be disqualified. Plus, it's dangerous to ride there as you're more likely to strike your pedal in the corners.
arm warmers
Sleeves for keeping your arms warm. They're easy to put on and remove and they easily fit in a jersey pocket.
Armstrong, Lance
Once America’s most revered cycling celebrity, Lance Armstrong was renowned for his prolific victories in 7 straight Tours de France and numerous U.S. races after surviving a near-fatal bout of cancer - and also for creating the cancer-fighting Livestrong Foundation. Sullied by extensive documentation and his own admission of using banned substances and bullying others into doing the same, Lance was stripped of most of his titles, and is now a polarizing figure in the cycling community.
Ashtabula crank
(Say: ash - ta - beau - la) - Also called a one-piece crank, this is a steel crankset found in some cruisers and BMX bicycles. It's simple, heavy, durable and named after a town in Ohio.
ATB
(Say: A - T - B) - For All Terrain Bike (another term for a mountain bike).
attack
Trying to get away from the group in a race by accelerating hard. Good luck.
auger
Or "auger in," this is slang for crashing, usually head- or shoulder-first.
autobus
This stage racing term (the Tour de France is the most famous stage race) is used for the group of racers riding near the back who work together to finish the stage just before the time limit expires.
automatic transmission
A bicycle drivetrain that shifts gears on its own. Ideally, it shifts into the gear needed, too.
axle
Top
baby head
In mountain biking, this is a section of trail with loose rocks about the size of a baby's head.
bacon
Slang for scabs, cuts, scars and other scrapes and abrasions from crashing. See also: road rash.
bail
To ditch (toss away) your bike before a crash, oftentimes done mid-flight during a jump.
balloon tire
A 26 x 2.125-inch tire with a tread pattern designed for road use. For example, the tires on most cruisers.
ballooner
A cruiser bicycles with fat tires. Think Pee-Wee Herman's bike.
banana seat
Fun and nicely descriptive name for the extra-long, narrow and curved seats that first became popular on the 1960's kids' bike called the Sting-Ray (viewed from the side these seats are shaped like a banana). They are so long that they attach in front to the seatpost and are supported in the rear by a strut. Today these seats are still found on high rise-style kid's bikes, called that because of their high-rise handlebars (sometimes these bikes are called "chopper bikes").
bank
A sloped embankment under 90 degrees. Found on dirt (MTB and BMX riding) and paved and wood tracks (track racing).
bar end shifters
Sometimes called "bar cons" (short for bar controls), these are shift levers that mount in the ends of the handlebars so that you can shift without removing your hands from the bars.
bar ends
1. Add-ons fit to flat handlebars to provide additional hand positions. Popular with some mountain bikers. 2. Little caps that are pressed into the ends of handlebars to seal them and for protection from puncture wounds should you crash and land on the bars.
bar plugs
Little caps that are pressed into/onto the ends of handlebars to seal them and for protection from puncture wounds should you crash and land on the bars.
bar spin
A trick where the rider releases and spins the handlebars. The standard bar spin is one full rotation of the handlebars, however riders can spin the bars twice, even three times, etc. This trick is often coupled with other tricks to add to the degree of difficulty.
bar(s)
Short for handlebar(s).
bashguard
A mountain bike accessory that protects the chainrings/crankset from damage should you run into a rock, log, etc. when you're riding over it.
bead(s)
The edges of the tire casing. When you inflate the tire, they're held by the rim to keep the tire in place.
bearings
Usually comprised of hardened-steel balls in some type of holder, these fit inside the hubs, pedals, bottom bracket, headset, sometimes derailleur pulleys, and often suspension frames to ensure parts turn with as little friction as possible.
beat
To abuse equipment as in, "That bike was beat."
beater bike
A bicycle that runs okay but looks nasty. Great for city riding because it's unlikely to be stolen.
beef-it
Slang for crash.
bell lap
In races with laps, like criteriums which typically race around city blocks, or cyclocross, which follows a fixed route, the bell lap is when the official at the starting line rings a bell. This is done either to signal a one-lap race within the race to contest a mid-race prime (the winner of that lap gets a prize), or as a signal that you're on the final lap and it's time to do your best to win.
berm
A small or large raised embankment usually in a corner that allows you to maintain speed without losing traction and sliding out.
biff
The large chainring. Also called "the big meat."
bike boom
A period in the early seventies when bicycles suddenly became super popular due to many factors, not the least of which was an international oil crisis that saw gas prices soar.
bike hooks
These inexpensive bike-storage devices are shaped like question marks with threaded ends and they're rubber coated. Screw one into a stud in the wall and hang your bike by the wheel to get it off the floor and keep it from falling over. Bike hooks make it easy and affordable to store several bicycles neatly in a tight space.
bike lust
A common affliction for all cyclists, this is slang for when you covet new bicycles, accessories or anything cycling.
bike walk
A super-easy ride used to recover the day(s) after a hard race/event.
binder bolt
(Say: byen - der bolt) - Found on stems and frames, a binder bolt is what tightens a seatpost in a frame and a handlebar in a stem. Usually, binder bolts are Allens.
bladder
The part of a hydration system that holds liquid. Bladders are made from polyurethane or similar materials, are often antimicrobial to fight germs and bacteria, and come in various sizes up to 100 fluid ounces.
blades
Also called "legs," these are the two parallel tubes that make up the lower part of the fork (the topmost tube is called the "steerer").
blocking
Helping a friend escape up the trail or road by riding in front of the group and getting in the way to slow down followers. An important team tactic.
blow up
You have to pace yourself on rides, especially hilly or long ones, or you might blow up and tire yourself out so much you have to stop, or find another way to get home. You can blow up due to riding too hard, too far and by not drinking or eating enough.
BMX
Bicycle Moto Cross. A popular type of racing, trick riding and jumping usually done on 20-inch-wheel one-speed bikes.
bonk
The miserable condition you suffer if you don't eat and drink enough on a ride. Symptoms include a pins-and-needles feeling in the arms and legs, light-headedness, disorientation and nausea. It can lead to loss of control and crashing. Prevent it by always carrying food and water and eating and drinking before you're hungry and thirsty.
boot
A tire patch. Place it between the tube and tire to cover a gash in the tire's casing that otherwise would not contain the tube. Almost anything can be used as a boot, even paper money and roadside trash.
boss or bosses
Not the guy(s) running the show, bicycle bosses (also called "braze-ons") are the posts attached to frames and forks to accept components and accessories. For example, the brake bosses on a fork are where the brakes are attached. And, water-bottle bosses are where the bottle cage is attached.
bottom bracket
There are actually two meanings of bottom bracket. It’s the term used to describe the cylindrical shell at the bottom center of the frame that the crankset (the part the pedals turn) is attached too. And it’s the term for the parts that fit in this part of the frame so there’s something to attach the crank to.
box jump
A common feature found in skateparks, stunt demos and competitions. It consists of two ramps separated by a 10-foot "deck" (flat section) in the middle (top).
BPM
Beats Per Minute, as in how many times your heart beats in a minute. It's the basic measurement used in training with a heart-rate monitor.
brain
Slang for "cyclo-computer," a small handlebar-mounted device that measures current, average, maximum and top speed. Plus, trip distance, total distance and often other things (depending on the model) such as cadence, temperature, elevation, even heart rate.
brain bucket
Helmet.
brake booster
A horseshoe-shaped add-on sometimes used on older mountain-bike rim brakes to increase braking power by eliminating flex from the brake posts (what the brakes mount to).
brake bosses
Also called "brake posts," these are the studs on the frame that bicycle brakes mount to.
brake bridge
The small diameter tube on the frame that runs between the two seatstays and on road bikes, where a rear sidepull brake is mounted.
brake fade
Usually caused by wear or improper adjustment, this is when the brakes lose power while you're braking. Bad brake fade can be scary and dangerous.
brake pad
The piece of rubber inside the brake shoe that provides the stopping power when the brake is applied.
brake posts
Also called "brake bosses," these are the posts on the frame that bicycle brakes mount to.
brake shoe
This includes the brake pad and its holder and sometimes the hardware to hold it on the brake.
brakeset
A complete brake system; levers, calipers, cables.
braze-ons
Small fittings (also called "bosses") that are usually brazed on (a type of welding) to frames for holding parts of the bicycle such as the water bottle cages, pump, rack and fenders.
breakaway
To ride away from the peloton in an effort to win a race. Because the peloton can ride much faster than an individual, breaking away is often a futile effort and leads to exhaustion, with the peloton eventually catching the rider. However, sometimes the attack pays off and the rider captures a dramatic win.
brevet
(Say: bruh-vay) - A brevet is an official randonneuring ride of at least 200 kilometers usually completed to qualify for longer and major events, such as Paris-Brest-Paris and Boston-Montreal-Boston. Just as on the longer events, in order to officially complete a brevet you must ride the entire route and stop at checkpoints along the way between certain times to get your route card signed. Failure to do this means the ride doesn't count.
bridge
Or "bridge a gap," "close the gap," this is to ride from one group of cyclists to another.
brifters
Slang for dual-function road bike levers that both brake and shift. Comprised of the "br" from brake and "ifters" from shifters.
brinelling
When a bike mechanic says a part is brinelled, it refers to components with bearings inside, like headsets or hubs. If they are brinelled, they've worn out over time and there's a pattern of dents in the bearing track.
broom wagon
The last vehicle in a race caravan, that "sweeps" the course and picks up crashed, broken-down and off-the-back riders who can't continue.
bunch
Or "the bunch," this is used to refer to the main group of riders sticking together in an event or race.
bunny-hop
A useful maneuver for clearing obstacles such as curbs and logs. You either jump and lift both wheels simultaneously or you lift the front and then the rear wheel. Careful! If you tag the rear wheel, you'll probably crash (see "faceplant").
burrito
Primary food for many mountain bikers.
bushing
A type of bearing that's essentially a sleeve (often made of nylon). They’re commonly used in telescopic suspension forks between the inner and outer legs to provide smooth fork action.
butted tubing
Bicycle frame tubes with variable wall thicknesses. Typically, the ends of the tubes, where stress is greatest, are thicker. This design saves weight while ensuring strength at the key stress points and weld (joint) zones. Butted frames usually offer a livelier ride, too.
Top
cable cutter
A special tool for cutting brake and derailleur cables. A handy tool to have because bicycle cables have a nasty habit of fraying if you try to cut them with ordinary hand tools.
cable end
Also called a "cable cap," this is a small aluminum cap that's crimped onto the ends of cables to prevent the cable from fraying.
cadence
The average rate that you pedal when riding. Count the revolutions of one pedal in a minute. A good goal is averaging 90 to 100 rpm.
cage
The part of the front derailleur the chain passes through. Also, that thing that holds your bottle, which is called a bottle cage.
calipers
That part of sidepull, centerpull and disc brakes that attaches to the frame and holds the brake shoes.
Campagnolo
A revered Italian manufacturer of road components and wheelsets. Founded by Tullio Campagnolo in 1933.
Campy
Slang for Campagnolo.
can-can
A trick where the rider removes a foot from the pedal, extends it over the top tube and to the side of their body and then returns it to the pedal before landing. There's also the "no-foot can-can." It's the same as the can-can except when the rider's one foot crosses over the top tube, the other foot comes off the pedal, and both feet are kicked out together.
cantilever brakes
(Say: cant - ee - lee - ver brakes) - A type of brake comprised of two arms that bolt to posts attached to the frame and fork with a crossover cable that connect the two. Common on mountain and touring bikes, cantilevers provide excellent braking power.
captain
What the front person on a tandem (a bicycle built for two) is called.
caravan
The motorized "circus" that accompanies most major professional stage races and even some amateur events, the caravan is composed of officials' vehicles, motorcycle police, team cars, medical vans and photographers hanging precariously off the back of even more motorcycles.
carbo loading
A popular energy-boosting practice for the days before a race or event, where the cyclist consumes as many carbohydrates as possible to store fuel for the race. Most riders' favorite part of training.
carbon fiber
One of the lightest frame and component materials, carbon fiber (also called just carbon) is unique in that it's a fabric, not a metal. This allows gossamer weights, incredible strength and impressive frame/fork compliance (vibration damping) because the fibers can be oriented in myriad ways.
cardiovascular
(Say: Card - ee-o - vask - you - lar) - Having to do with the heart and blood-supply system.
cartridge bearings
A bicycle-component bearing that is self contained and pressed in place. It's designed to be easier to replace when worn out. Sealed cartridge bearings have covers to keep dirt and grit from getting inside and contaminating the bearings and grease inside.
case
Not jumping the total distance of an obstacle and coming up short causing the rear wheel to tag the landing in an awkward, un-smooth style possibly resulting in a crash.
casing
(Say: kay - sing) - The material that makes up tire sidewalls.
cassette
The cluster of gears on the rear wheel of a bicycle. A cassette differs from a freewheel (which is also a cluster of gears on the rear wheel) in that it fits onto a splined interface on the hub. Freewheels are screwed onto threaded hubs. Also, cassettes do not include the drive mechanism while freewheels do.
cassette hub
A hub on which the freewheeling (coasting) mechanism is built into the hub as contrasted with freewheel hubs on which the mechanism screws onto the hub.
Cat I, II, III, IV and V
Or Cat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, these are designations used by the governing body of USA Cycling to rate racers' abilities and determine in which group they race. Cat I is the fastest ("Cat" is short for "Category"). Cat V is the entry level. You graduate to the next category by earning upgrade points racing in enough events, and/or placing in and winning races.
century
Any 100-mile ride. It’s been considered prestigious to be able to ride a century in a day since the 1880s. Today, many clubs hold century rides, which include a great route, rest stops at regular intervals with food and drink and a bunch of great folks to ride with. There are also "metric centuries." They cover 62.5 miles.
chain
That grimy thing toward the rear of the bike that inexplicably manages to smear your leg with a black tattoo every time you even think of going riding. More importantly, it connects the crank and rear wheel so the bike goes when you pedal.
chain guide
An accessory usually on a bicycle with one chainring and derailleur gears, that is mounted over the chainring to keep the chain from dropping off. Often found on downhill bikes.
chain keeper
A small device that's usually attached to the frame to keep the chain from falling off the small front chainring when you shift onto it. This is sometimes an issue with compact cranksets that have a bigger difference in the chainring sizes.
chain slap
The tendency of the chain to move up and down and strike ("slap") the chainstay when you're riding over bumps.
chain tensioner
A device that keeps the chain tight on singlespeed and one-speed bicycles that weren't specifically designed for a given chain length (those bikes don't require tensioners). There are many types. The most common ones are mounted at the rear axle or on the derailleur hanger. Axle-mounted tensioners typically use bolts to pull the rear wheel back and tension the chain, while derailleur-hanger tensioners use a sprung arm with a pulley.
chain tool
Also called a "rivet extractor," and a "chain breaker," this special tool drives pins in and out of the chain. It's used for installing, removing and repairing chains, and is a good tool to carry on long rides.
chain whip
This tool is a metal bar with a section of chain attached to the end. It’s used for removing cassettes and cogs.
chainline
The path the chain takes from the chainrings (in front) to the cogs (in back). Check chainline by placing a straightedge between the chainrings and seeing where it lines up on the cogs. Ideally the chainline will be in line with an imaginary line that bisects the chainrings and cogs. That will ensure a smooth, quiet-running chain and smooth shifting. If the chainline is misaligned it can cause shifting problems and even possibly throw the chain off.
chainring
Also called a "chainwheel," this is the sprocket(s) attached to the crank. Multiply the number of chainrings by the number of cogs (on the rear wheel) to determine the total number of gears on a bike. For example, some modern road bikes have 3 chainrings and 11 cogs for a total of 33 gears!
chainstay bridge
The short small-diameter frame tube that runs between and connects the chainstays.
chainstay guard
Anything applied to, or wrapped around the right chainstay to protect it from the chain, which has a tendency to strike that chainstay (and can ding the finish) when you ride over bumps.
chainstays
The twin smaller-diameter tubes on a bicycle frame that run from the bottom bracket to the rear axle. They’re called chainstays because they’re close to the chain.
chainsuck
An annoying ride-ruiner, chainsuck is when the small or middle chainring snags the chain beneath the chainstay and pulls it upwards (where the "suck" part of chainsuck comes from). This sometimes jams it between the chainring and the chainstay bringing pedaling to a grinding halt. Chainsuck is usually caused by mud, worn components and/or lack of lube.
chainwheel
Also called a "chainring," this is the sprocket(s) attached to the crank. Multiply the number of chainwheels by the number of cogs (on the rear wheel) to determine the total number of gears on a bike. For example, some modern road bikes have 3 chainwheels and 11 cogs for a total of 33 gears!
chamois
(Say: shammy) - The pad found inside most cycling shorts that cushions, wicks and breathes to ensure top comfort and protection. It also reduces friction and is seam-free to eliminate pressure points and chafing. Interestingly, the chamois was originally made of a thin leather just like the chamois you might use to dry your car. Today there are still leather ones but most are made of synthetic material, which often even includes antibacterial properties for additional protection and comfort.
chase
What you do when you get dropped by your buddies on a ride. No fun.
chrome
(Say: k - rome) - A plating treatment that leaves a super-hard mirror-like finish.
chromoly
(Say: k - rome - molly) - Short for chrome-molybdenum, a high-quality type of steel tubing.
chuck
Also called a "pump head," this is the part of the pump that's attached to the tube's valve for inflating.
chunder
Loose trail debris, rocks, roots, etc.
circuit race
Usually a multi-lap road race around a course that exceeds one mile (versus criterium races that are held on shorter courses).
classic
Traditionally, a single-day European road race on the professional calendar. Examples include Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San-Remo and Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
cleaned
Or "clean," this is slang for making it through a tricky section of trail without putting a foot down as in, "I cleaned Slickrock trail today."
cleats
The parts that are attached to the soles of cycling shoes that connect the shoes to the pedals for more efficient pedaling.
climb categories
Climb categories are used in the Tour de France to rate difficulty. Climbs are ranked on a scale of 1 to 3, with Category 1 being the most severe. Riders are awarded points toward the King of the Mountains competition based on two things: their order over the top and the climb's difficulty. The harder the climb, the more points are available. There is also a "beyond category" climb called the Hors Categorie (HC). Its extreme difficulty makes it a big factor in stage races because better climbers can pick up more points here and make up time on their rivals.
clincher tire
Tires that are held on rims by a mechanical fit between the edges of the tire and the edges of the rim. It’s the common tire found today on most mountain and road bikes.
clip-in, clip-out
(Or "click-in," "click-out") - To get in and out of clipless pedals.
clipless pedals
A popular way to attach your feet to the pedals for efficient pedaling is adding toe clips and straps, basically bolt-on cages and straps that form a harness to hold the feet. Another option is clipless pedals. Two parts make up the typical system, the pedal and the cleat. The pedal attaches to the crankarm, the cleat attaches to the shoe sole. Then, much like using ski bindings, you simply step on the pedals to click in and ride. To exit, you twist your heels sideways, which causes the pedals to release the cleats. Practice getting in and out before hitting the road or trail because it takes a little learning to get used to clipless pedals.
clunker
Or "klunker," this is a cheap bicycle that's used for errands and around-town riding, not serious cycling. Riding the clunker can be called "clunking."
cluster
Short for the cluster of cogs on the rear wheel. Better known as the "freewheel" or "cassette."
CO2 pump
The smallest bicycle pumps (they easily fit in a pocket), CO2s use pressurized cartridges to fill tires quickly. It's almost like having a compressor with you.
coaster brake
Also called a "foot brake," this brake is found on many children's bikes and one-speed cruisers. It's built into the rear hub and applied by backpedaling. No skidding, kids!
cockpit
An airplane or automobile term that is now sometimes (and confusingly) used for the parts making up the rider "compartment" on the bicycle, like the seat, seatpost, handlebars, stem and levers.
cog
Any sprocket on the rear hub.
coil-over shock
A type of shock on suspension bikes that's based on a coil spring.
col
(Say: cole) - French for a mountain pass.
comfort bike
A popular type of bicycle built mostly for recreational use and designed for optimum rider comfort with features such as soft seats, suspension seatposts, upright riding position and easy gearing.
compact crankset
A double-chainring crankset designed to provide easier gearing by using smaller chainrings than found on standard cranksets. These typically feature 39- and 53-tooth rings, while compacts usually have 34- and 50-tooth rings.
compact frame
Standard bicycle frames usually have top tubes that are parallel with the ground. Compact frames have sloping top tubes (lower at the seat tube). This can reduce frame weight, increase pedaling efficiency and speed handling. Compact and standard frames may fit riders differently.
components
The individual parts on your bike such as the derailleurs, brakes, crankset, pedals, seatpost, handlebars, etc.
composite
(Say: com - paws - it) - A frame tube or component comprised of more than one material. For example, a carbon composite includes carbon, aluminum and other elements.
compression
The part of suspension travel that loads the system such as striking a hole or when landing a jump.
computer
Also called a "cyclo-computer" or a "brain," this is a small handlebar-mounted device that measures current, average, maximum and top speed. Plus, trip distance, total distance and often other things (depending on the model) such as cadence, temperature, elevation, even heart rate.
cone
The piece that rests on the bearings in any component that includes bearings such as the headset, hub, pedals, bottom bracket and cassette. Usually this part is cone shaped, hence the name cone.
contre la montre
French for "against the clock," and used to refer to time trials where it's the cyclist against the clock, no drafting allowed.
CoolMax
A fabric designed by DuPont that's widely used in cycling clothing. CoolMax features outstanding wicking properties to move moisture away from the skin and keep you dry and comfortable.
coping
The top portion of the lip on a ramp or obstacle that is usually made of metal tubing, PVC pipe or rounded-off cement.
corncob
Also known as a "straight block," this is a cassette or freewheel on which every cog is one tooth larger than the preceding one (as you shift up the cassette to larger sprockets).
cote d'azur
A bicycle track term that refers to the transition area just beneath the racing/riding surface of the track. It's the narrow blue band at the bottom of the track. Also referred to as the "apron," it usually represents about 10% of the track's surface. It's not illegal to ride on the cote d'azure but if you use it to get around another rider you'll be disqualified. Plus, it's dangerous to ride there as you're more likely to strike your pedal in the corners.
cotterless crank
All quality bikes today have cotterless cranks. The word cotterless comes from the word cotter, which is a type of pin that used to be the common way to attach the crankarms to the axle. Cotterless cranks in comparison have a tapered or splined hole in them that fits over a similarly shaped axle. There is no cotter, so these cranks are called "cotterless."
crankarm
There are two crankarms in a crankset. Pedals attach to the crankarms and chainrings are affixed to the right arm. Crankarms are available in lengths from about 165 to 180 mm (measured center-to-center from the pedal hole to the bottom bracket axle) to accommodate different-size riders. Bicycles typically are equipped with crankarms sized to match the person who fits that frame size.
crankarm bolt
The two bolts used to attach the crankarms to the bottom bracket axle. There are standard and Allen bolts.
crankset
Also called "cranks," this is the unit comprised of the crankarms, chainrings and chainring bolts.
Crested Butte
As in Crested, Butte, Colorado, this is a mountain biking mecca. It's also famous as one of the first places the originators of the mountain bike ventured for epic off-road riding.
criterium
(Say: cry - tier - ee - um) - Also called a "crit," this is a type of multi-lap road race held on a relatively short course often around a city block. It's an exciting venue because spectators can watch the riders come around lap after lap and get up close and personal on the difficult sections of the course such as the climbs and tight corners. It's a thrilling event to race because you're so close to others, must negotiate many corners at speed and have to be smart and tactical to compete successfully. Many races come down to sprint finishes, too.
critical mass
This controversial, loosely organized monthly group ride takes place in large cities around the world, often during peak commuting hours. It's designed to promote cycling by reminding motorists that there are viable alternatives to driving. However, by impeding traffic, it may simply prejudice motorists against cyclists.
cross training
Participating in other sports for training besides cycling, such as running, hiking, swimming, etc.
cross-country bike
An off-road bike designed to be ridden and/or raced over a mountainous course. Common features include low gearing, durable components, suspension and great handling.
cross-three spoking
(Or "cross-two, cross-four") - A spoke pattern on which each spoke crosses three others, or two, or four.
crown
The part of a fork that the legs and steerer attach to.
cruiser
1. A bicycle made for casual riding. Features include a large, comfy saddle, wide handlebars and fat tires for a soft, flat-free ride. 2. A BMX bike with 24- and sometimes 26-inch wheels, often preferred by taller riders or adjusts returning to the sport. Cruisers race in their own separate class.
cruiser seat
A wide, thickly padded seat, such as the type usually found on cruisers.
curb racing
Or "curb riding," this is a tactic used when there's a crosswind. Say it's coming from the left. If you're strong enough and want to set the pace you could move over close to the right curb to prevent other riders from coming up on your right side where they would be sheltered from the wind and could save energy. You're trying to ensure that they have to work as hard as you do.
cyclo-computer
Also called a "computer" or "brain," this is a small handlebar-mounted device that measures current, average, maximum and top speed. Plus, trip distance, total distance and often other things (depending on the model) such as cadence, temperature, elevation, even heart rate.
cyclocross
A type of off-season bicycle racing (usually held October through January) around a loop course, which includes natural and man-made obstacles that force dismounting and running while carrying the bike. It was invented in Europe to keep racers fit through the winter.
cyclocross bike
A bicycle designed for the rigors of cyclocross racing with a light, responsive and rugged frame, fork and wheels, plus wide gearing, grippy tires and ample mud clearance. Cyclocross bicycles can be used for commuting, training, off-roading and training, too.
Touching a foot to the ground to hold yourself up.
damping
How suspensions are controlled to get them to react to impacts the way you want. An un-damped suspension might provide too much springiness or too rapid action turning the bicycle into a dangerous bucking bronco. Damped correctly, a suspension will absorb the bumps predictably providing control and boosting your confidence.
dance
Standing and finding a nice rhythm on a climb as in, "I danced over that hill!"
death march
A ride that turns bad making it very difficult to finish.
degreaser
Also called "solvent," this is a spray or drip liquid that penetrates and cuts built-up grime and grease. It's great for cleaning drivetrain components.
derailleur
(Say: dee - ray - lure) - Also called a "shifter" or in England, a "mech," a derailleur is a mechanism that literally derails the chain moving it to another cog or chainring. There are rear and front derailleurs. The rear shifts the chain across the cogs. The front moves the chain between the chainrings. You must be pedaling to shift and it's best to use light pedal pressure when shifting.
derailleur hanger
Also called a dropout hanger, this is the tab beneath the right rear dropout (not all bikes have these), which the rear derailleur is screwed into.
derailleur pulleys
The small toothed wheels on the rear derailleur that carry the chain. The top one is called the "jockey pulley." It's responsible for moving the chain during shifting. The bottom pulley is called the "tension pulley." It creates tension on the chain to keep it taut during shifting.
detangler
Also called a "rotor," this is a component found on the front end of many BMX bikes and some freestyle mountain bikes that prevents the rear brake cable from tangling so that you can do easy bar spins and tailwhips (spinning the bars or bike 360 degrees). It splits the brake cable into two segments, which are joined at a rotor installed above, or attached to, the bike’s head tube. As the bars rotate, the top segment spins while the bottom stays stationary and full braking power is available at every point of the rotation.
dial or dial-in
To fine-tune your bike or components as in, "He dialed my fork and it's smoother than ever."
diamond frame
The name for conventional bicycle frames because they're shaped like a diamond when viewed from the side.
directeur sportif
French for "sport director," the directeur sportif is responsible for managing almost all logistical concerns of the racing team he/she is in charge of. At the highest levels of cycling, during races, the directeur sportif drives behind the peloton watching live race coverage on a dashboard-mounted TV and informs his team on proper race strategy via radio. He may also pass out drinks and help with medical or mechanical issues.
directional tires
Tires that feature tread patterns designed specifically for front or rear use. Usually, there are arrows on the sidewalls showing how to properly mount the tire. And most are front or rear specific.
direct-pull brake
Also called a "linear-pull brake," these are the most powerful type of rim brake. They feature long parallel arms (greater leverage), inflexible brake-pad mounts and short cable paths. They are common on mountain bikes.
dirt-jumping bike
Also called a "dirt-jumper," a type of BMX or mountain bike built tough for jumping and stunt riding.
disc brake
A type of brake system that uses discs (called rotors) that are attached to the wheel hubs and calipers attached to the frame that grip the rotors when the levers are squeezed. Discs provide maximum speed control and stopping power even in wet and muddy conditions. Plus, because they do not rely on the rims for braking, wheel damage can't compromise braking the way it can with rim brakes.
disc wheel
Used for an aerodynamic edge, mostly in individual races against the clock, like time trials and triathlons, these high-tech wheels feature closed construction making them disc-like and super slippery so they slice through the wind for free speed.
dish
This is a term that describes a condition found on rear wheels equipped with cogs. Because these take room on the hub's right side, the rim must be centered over the axle instead of the hub. This requires tightening the right-side spokes more than the lefts. If you look closely, you can see that the spokes on the right side are more perpendicular to the hub than the lefts, too. This is called "dish."
DNF
What you don't want to see next to your name after an event. It stands for Did Not Finish.
DNR
Short for Did Not Race. If you register for a bicycle race or a century ride and then for some reason can't be there to ride it, the officials will usually put DNR next to your name. DNS is also used, for Did Not Start.
DNS
Short for Did Not Start. If you register for a bicycle race or a century ride and then for some reason can't be there to ride it, the officials will usually put DNS next to your name. DNR is also used, for Did Not Race.
domestique
(Say: doe - mess - teak) - A racer who sacrifices his own chance of victory to help a teammate win. Tasks of a domestique may include: carrying extra bottles and food for fellow riders, chasing breakaway groups, and even giving their bikes to the designated team leader should he have a mechanical problem.
double
1. Short for a double-chainring crankset. 2. A jump with a gap between the take-off and landing. 3. Short for double century (a 200-mile ride).
double century
A 200-mile road ride, usually completed in a day. Just like there are lots of popular organized centuries, there are also many organized doubles.
double-crown fork
A suspension fork that features two crowns, one above and one below the head tube. Usually, it's a long-travel fork and the additional crown reinforces the fork legs to improve suspension, control and handling at speed.
doubletrack
A dirt road overgrown with weeds, etc. so that there are two parallel tracks.
down tube
The frame tube that runs from the head tube to the bottom of the seat tube.
downhill bike
An off-road bike designed primarily for downhill use. Features include: long-travel suspension, rugged components and wheels and a long wheelbase for stability at speed.
downshift
To shift into an easier-pedaling gear.
down-tube shifters
Shift levers that attach to the bicycle frame down tube. Once standard on bikes, they're now rare.
draft
To ride closely behind one or more fellow riders so that you are shielded from the wind, thereby saving considerable energy. The drafting effect increases as the size of a group grows, creating the potential for a number of riders to travel much faster than an individual cyclist.
drag
Aerodynamic forces that make you have to work harder and slow you down. In cycling, drag is the result of a number of things, including the wind speed and direction, plus the bicycle, equipment and clothing that all catch the air to some degree. This is why so many companies use wind tunnels in their bicycle design and testing process.
drivetrain
It's comprised of the crankset, chain, front and rear derailleurs and pedals.
drop-off
A ledge that forces you to either dismount and walk or sail off the lip. Keep that front wheel up!
dropout
The usually crescent-shaped frame ends that the wheels fit into. Rear dropouts hold the rear wheel and front dropouts, found on the fork, hold the front wheel.
dropout hanger
Also called a derailleur hanger, this is the tab beneath the right rear dropout (not all bikes have these), which the rear derailleur is screwed into.
dropped
When you're not fit enough to ride with the group, you risk getting left behind, or "dropped." In a race, the goal is to "drop" everyone by the finish.
dropped handlebars
Racing/touring style handlebars that feature compound bends and provide several comfortable hand positions. Also called "drop" handlebars.
dropper seatpost
A spring-loaded mountain-bike seatpost that can be lowered or raised while riding so that you can dial-in the perfect seat height for a given section of trail without having to stop and get off the bike.
drops
The lowest hand position on racing/touring style ("dropped") handlebars.
dry lube
Chain lubricants that don't attract grit and grime and are best suited to dry riding conditions. They often include paraffin.
dual slalom
An exciting mountain biking event where two racers compete on side-by-side downhill slalom courses.
dualie
Slang for a bicycle with dual suspension. Also called a "full suspension."
dual-suspension bike
A bicycle (usually designed for off-road use) with front and rear suspension.
duathlon
Also called "biathlon," this race is comprised of a cycling and running leg.
dustcap
The cover on components containing bearings. It keeps dirt and grit out so it can't contaminate the bearings. Dustcaps are found on hubs, pedals and sometimes crankarms.
dynamo
Another word for "generator," a dynamo is a device that produces electricity as you pedal to power your bicycle lights. Usually they are either attached to the bicycle frame and rub on the tire or they are incorporated into the front or rear hub and built into a wheel. As the wheel turns, electricity is generated.
Slang for crash.
e-bike
Short for "electric bike," these bicycles includes battery-powered electric motors. They're popular with commuters, new cyclists and elderly riders who appreciate the engine's boost on the hills and against headwinds. Also, you're "encouraged" to pedal because the more you pedal, the longer the battery lasts.
echelon
(Say: esh - el - on) - An echelon is a riding formation used by a group of cyclists when there's an oncoming side wind. Riders stagger themselves forming a diagonal line across the road to best find shelter from the wind, save energy and maintain their pace. Riding in this formation is called "echeloning."
elastomer
(Say: ee - last - oh - mer) - A type of spring used for bicycle suspensions. It's usually cylindrical and elastic. Elastomers are lighter than coil springs and offer some built-in damping (suspension control), too.
endo
Slang for flipping over the handlebars and crashing.
energy bar
A nutritious bar eaten before, during and after riding to keep your energy up and speed recovery.
energy drink
Any liquid designed specifically for cycling. It should include the sugars and minerals needed to replace what's lost through exercise.
energy gel
A food carried and eaten on rides for energy. It's the consistency of pudding and tastes like cake frosting. It's more quickly metabolized by the body than bars because you don't have to chew it.
engine
In cycling, that's you!
epic ride
Also "epic," this is any ride that turns into a memorable adventure, or one you'd like to forget!
ergometer
(Say: erg - om - met - er) - An indoor cycling device used for training and/or testing fitness.
Ergopower
Top
50-50
Coming up short on a landing of a jump so that the rider essentially lands on their bottom bracket. This is unsightly, uncomfortable and can ruin the landing.
faceplant
Slang for a bicycle accident that results in your mug contacting the pavement. A great reason to always wear your helmet.
fakie
Riding backwards.
false flat
1. A surprisingly difficult section of road that looks flat but is actually slightly uphill. Usually, no matter how hard you pedal you go way slower than you think you should be going. 2. A stretch on a long hill that looks flat and tricks you into thinking you've reached the top when there's still more climbing to come.
fan
As in "fan the pedals," this term describes a rapid pedal cadence (your pedaling speed).
fat bike
Not to be confused with "fat-tire bikes," which is a moniker for mountain bikes, fat bikes are a new type of all-terrain bicycle that feature super-wide frames, wheels and tires (often over 4 inches wide), that make it possible to ride over snow and sand with ease.
feeble
A trick where the back peg of the bike is grinding/stalling while the front tire is on top of the obstacle.
feed zone
A designated area on a race course where managers hand food to their racers as they pass.
fenders
Also called "mudguards," these mount over the wheels to keep water and muck from spraying all over you while you're riding on rainy days or on muddy trails.
ferrules
(Say: fair - rules) - Metal or plastic caps that fit on the ends of cable housing. There are several types. Some are used to provide a perfect fit between the housing and stops the housing fit into on the frame. Others customize the end of the housing to fit in the brake and shift levers (but ferrules aren't used on certain components so always read the directions to be sure).
field
Or "the field," this is used to refer to the main group of riders sticking together in an event or race.
fireroad
A dirt road; called a "fireroad" because it's used by the fire department to reach wilderness fires.
fixed gear
A one-speed bicycle (usually used on the track or road) that has no provision for coasting. You must keep pedaling when the bicycle is moving and your feet are on the pedals.
fixie
Although there are different designs, most fixie bicycles are among the simplest two-wheelers on the road and trail. They're usually comprised of a frame, wheels, bars, stem, seat, seatpost, crankset, pedals and chain. There are no derailleurs and often no visible brakes (you slow/stop by holding back on the pedals). These elegant bikes are called "fixies," because the distinguishing characteristic is having only one fixed gear (it's attached to the rear wheel in such a way that you can't coast, the pedals always go around when the bike is rolling).
flair
A back flip combined with a 180-degree spin in which the rider lands riding forward going back in the direction from which he came, often done in a half-pipe or on a tall vert lip.
flange
(Say: flan - j) - What the spokes fit into on hubs.
flat bar
A handlebar that does not have any rise or drop. Flat bars are typically found on mountain bikes designed for cross-country riding and road-style hybrid bicycles.
flex
Often used in describing the feel of a bicycle frame. Ideally, frames will flex just enough to provide some comfort but not so much you lose pedaling efficiency.
flip whip
A trick that combines a backflip and a tailwhip.
floor pump
A bicycle inflator for home use (versus the one you carry on your bicycle). The best floor pumps have built-in gauges making it easy to check tire pressure.
fluid trainer
A device for riding indoors comprised of a stand that holds the bicycle upright, which includes a resistance unit that simulates the feel of outdoor riding. It's called a "fluid" trainer because the resistance unit uses a fan immersed in fluid (usually oil) to create the drag.
folding bike
A bicycle with a folding frame and components that make it easy to collapse the bike into a tiny package for storage and portability.
folding tire
These tires feature beads made of Kevlar, a flexible fabric, which allows folding the tire flat for easy storage and portability. It also makes the tire lighter for better acceleration and handling. Naturally, folding tires cost more.
food log
Slang for many cyclists' favorite post-ride "energy bar," the burrito.
foot brake
Another name for a "coaster brake," a type of bicycle brake that's built into the rear wheel of children's bikes and cruisers and actuated by pushing backwards on a pedal.
forcing the pace
Riding faster that your cycling companions want to.
fork
The part of the frame that holds the front wheel and that is turned to steer.
fork block
A device that can be attached to the bed or liner of a pick-up or van (many other places, too) for transporting your bike. It consists of a T-shaped block with a quick-release skewer running through it. You remove your bike's front wheel and clamp the fork into the fork block to mount your bike in the pick-up. Fork blocks can also be used for indoor bicycle storage.
fork crown
The part of a fork that the legs and steerer attach to.
frame
The frame is what the bicycle parts attach to. It does not include a fork.
frame angles
Usually shown on the frame or bicycle geometry chart (or found by measuring), frame angles help you understand a bicycle's riding characteristics. The angles used are the head-tube and seat-tube angles expressed in degrees. So, for example, a road bike might have a 74-degree head tube and a 73-degree seat tube. As a broad, general rule, as the angles steepen the ride stiffens and vice versa.
frame-fit pump
A type of pump that's held onto the bicycle without clips or straps. Spring pressure holds it in place beside a frame tube.
frameset
The foundation of every bicycle, it's comprised of a complete frame and fork.
freehub
The barrel-shaped and splined part found on the drive side of a rear-wheel cassette hub. The freehub contains the mechanism that drives the bicycle when you pedal. The cassette (cluster of gears) slides onto and is attached to the freehub so you can't see the freehub until the gears are removed.
freeride bike
An off-road bike designed for technical trail riding, downhilling and general all-around use. Features include: long-travel dual suspension, beefy components, easy gearing and great brakes.
freestyle bike
A type of BMX bicycle designed for stunt riding on the street.
freewheel
A cluster of cogs that's screwed onto the rear wheel. It includes the bearings and drive mechanism. "Freewheel" also means to "coast." Note that a "cassette" is also a cluster of gears on the rear wheel. But a cassette slips onto the splines on a cassette hub and does not include the bearings and drive mechanism (they're part of the cassette hub in a piece called the "freehub").
front triangle
Also called the "main triangle," this is the part of the frame made up of the top tube, head tube, down tube and seat tube.
fufanu
A trick where the rider goes straight up a ramp and while they are still facing forward they tap the back tire to the coping/top of the lip, then turn back toward the direction they came as they drop back into the landing. Similar to an abubaca except they do not ride the trick out backwards (fakie).
full-face helmet
A skid lid that offers more head protection than conventional bicycle helmets by including a reinforcing piece(s) that covers your lower face. It provides additional protection and is often used for downhill runs and extreme riding.
fun box
Top
gap
1. The distance between groups of riders or a breakaway and the pack in a race. 2. The space between jumps or ramps, often where riders throw tricks while airborne.
GC
For General Classification, "GC" is used in stage racing for the current overall rider standings. Since stage races are comprised of several races, there are results for each race and also results for each rider's cumulative time for all stages. The person with the lowest time overall after all the races is first on GC and the winner of the race.
gear
The chain/sprocket mechanism that makes the bicycle go when you pedal. Also, commonly used to mean "equipment," as in, "Time to buy some more biking gear."
gear ratio
This is used to compare gearing. For example, on a road bike with 18 gears, there are 2 chainrings and 9 cogs. To check the gearing, count the teeth on the cogs and chainrings and create a chart with the rings on top and the cogs on the side. Then, to calculate each gear ratio, divide the chainring by the cog and multiply by 27 (rear wheel diameter). Put the numbers in the chart so you can compare and understand. The larger the number, the harder it is to pedal the gear. By comparing the numbers, it's possible to find overlapping gears and gaps that you might want to change to improve the gear ratios.
gearing
The range of gears on a multi-speed bicycle.
gel
A pressure-eliminating anti-friction material found inside seats (sometimes found in handlebar grips and cycling shorts, too) to cushion and protect your body. Many cyclists find gel seats supremely comfortable. Gel itself feels a little bit like jelly.
General Classification
General Classification (or GC), is used in stage racing for the current overall rider standings. Since stage races are comprised of multiple races, there are results for each race and also results for each rider's cumulative time for all stages. The person with the lowest time overall after all the races is first on GC and the winner of the race.
generator
A device that usually attaches to the bicycle frame and rubs against the tire to produce electricity to illuminate your lighting system via pedal power rather than batteries.
geometry
Geometry is the key technical description of a bicycle frame that helps you understand how the frame will fit and ride. Usually it's provided on a chart with an illustration making it easy to understand which measurement is which. Common geometry measurements include: seat-, top-tube, chainstay and wheelbase lengths; head- and seat-tube angles; fork rake and trail measurements; bottom-bracket height; and often more.
Giro d'Italia
In English, the Tour of Italy, this is the country's grand tour and the second most important stage race on the professional calendar after the Tour de France.
glueless patches
A type of patch that includes a sticky adhesive so it's unnecessary to apply glue to the tube (required with other patch kits). This speeds the patching process.
glutes
The muscles in your rear end. They're all important for cycling.
gnarly
Used to describe a technically challenging trail or impressive move on your bike as in, "Gnarly save, Dude; you almost crashed!."
granny gear
A small chainring on the inside of a triple crankset. It's called a "granny" because it provides a gear easy enough for Granny to pedal up steep hills.
grease
(Say: greece) - A bicycle lubricant that's used for components, which include ball bearings, such as the hubs, bottom bracket, headset and pedals. Grease is the consistency of pudding, so it stays put and lasts a while.
grind
A BMX term for sliding along the edge of an object such as a handrail with only the axle pegs in contact.
grips
The rubber or vinyl "covers" placed on the ends of upright handlebars. Besides making it more comfortable to hold onto the bars, they cover the ends, which prevents puncture wounds should you fall and land on the bar end.
grom
Short for "grommet," and used in other sports too, a "grom" is any young, up-and-coming rider, usually under 15 years-old, who may already possess considerable skill.
group
1. Or "the group," this is used to refer to the main group of riders sticking together in an event or race. 2. Sometimes called "groupo," this is a complete set of bicycle components. A group usually includes: hubs, crankset, bottom bracket, derailleurs, shift levers, brakes, headset and sometimes the seatpost. Wheels are sold separately.
group ride
Rides with more than one person, usually a lot more. Before joining an established group ride find out what type it is so you go on one that you'll like. Some are conversational and fun, others are hard-core training rides designed to simulate tough, race conditions.
gyro
An ingenious inline brake-cable device, usually installed on the headset (steering mechanism) of freestyle BMX bikes, that makes it possible to spin the handlebars and front wheel 360 degrees without tangling the cables.
Top
half-wheel
Riding so that about half of your front wheel remains ahead of your friend's. Every time he tries to pull up next to you, you inch slightly ahead again. It's a bad habit that often turns friendly rides into fights or races.
hammer
To push the pace, ride hard.
hamstrings
The muscles on the backs of the thighs.
hand cycle
A bicycle or tricycle that's pedaled by hand, usually with a special crankset/pedal arrangement located in front of the rider.
handlebar-end shifters
Shift levers that attach to the ends of the handlebars.
hanging in
This is what you do when you're tired on a group ride, but keep trying and manage to stick to the back of the group.
hardpack
A mountain bike that has a rigid frame equipped with a front suspension.
head tube
The frame tube that the fork fits into.
headset
The bearing mechanism attached to the head tube and fork that makes it possible to steer. It's comprised of a fork race that's pressed onto the fork crown, two cups that press into the head tube, bearings and a top cone, spacers and a top nut, clamp or stem (the stem locks the adjustment on threadless headsets).
heart-rate monitor
A watch-like device that measures and displays your heart beat. A great tool for measuring and tracking fitness.
helmet hair
Or "helmet head," this is the awesome hair you get after wearing a helmet for a period of time. Usually involves many spikes of hair sticking straight up matching your helmet's vent pattern.
hitch rack
Also called a "receiver rack," this is a rack for carrying bicycles that mounts to a trailer hitch on the vehicle.
holeshot
First used in motorcycling and then BMX, "getting the holeshot," is when you get a great start in a race and are the first person through the first turn. Since BMX races start with riders lined side by side, the first racer to the turn often has to find a hole between other racers in order to do this, which is where "holeshot" comes from.
hooks
The side curved parts of dropped handlebars where you rest your hands to be in an aerodynamic body position while being able to easily reach the levers.
horizontal dropouts
A dropout is the part of the frame that holds the wheel. Horizontal dropouts are rear dropouts long enough and oriented to allow some fore/aft adjustment of the rear wheel.
housing
What the brake and derailleur cables pass through on their way to the brakes and derailleurs.
hub
The centermost part of a wheel. The part the spokes attach to and the part that includes the axle or quick release, which attach the wheel to the bicycle.
hub gears
Also called "hub gearing," or "internally geared hubs" these rear hubs (the centermost part of the wheel) have the gearing system inside. Small "planetary gears" hidden inside the hub change position as you operate the control lever to shift and this makes it easier or harder to pedal. Hub gears are heavier than derailleur shifting systems but are less affected by weather and wear and tear. They are commonly used on commuting and city bicycles.
huck
To attempt a jump with little forethought or concern about the outcome.
hybrid
A type of bicycle that's suited to road and off-road use. The concept behind hybrids is to blend the upright riding position, flat-proof tires, easy pedaling gearing, great brakes and suspension of a true off-road bikes with the lightweight wheels, skinnier tires, slightly higher gearing, and zippy geometry of a road bike. Hybrids are excellent for commuting, touring, fitness riding and exploring fireroads through the woods.
hydrate
To drink. Do it often while riding!
hydration system
A pack or container worn on the back or waist (or attached to the bike) that carries liquid and features a hose that makes sipping easy.
hydraulic brake
A brake system that utilizes liquid instead of cables for actuation.
Hyperglide
Component maker Shimano's name for their cassettes and chainrings that include gates and ramps to improve shifting. It's also used for chains designed for the system.
Top
ice pick
A trick where only the back peg is grinding or stalling while the front wheel is in the air.
Illuminite
(Say: ill - oom - in - nite) - A brand name for a highly reflective fabric used in high-tech cycling clothing.
IMBA
(Say: im - ba) - International Mountain Bicycling Association
in-mold construction
Found in helmets, this means that the hard-plastic cover (the painted part) is actually molded to the helmet's liner, not simply taped in place. It's a more durable form of helmet construction.
internally geared hub
Also called "hub gearing" or "hub gears," these rear hubs (the centermost part of the wheel) have the gearing system inside. Small "planetary gears" hidden inside the hub change position as you operate the control lever to shift and this makes it easier or harder to pedal. Hub gears are heavier than derailleur shifting systems but are less affected by weather and wear and tear. They are commonly used on commuting and city bicycles.
interval training
An intense type of workout excellent for building strength, where you go hard for a set distance, pedal easily to recover, and then repeat the hard/easy efforts a number of times.
Ironman
The first and most famous triathlon. Held in Kona, Hawaii in October each year, it's comprised of a 2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike race and 26.2-mile run. Competitors have 17 hours to finish the race.
ischial tuberosities
More commonly called the "sit bones," these are the two bony points of the pelvis that rest on the bicycle seat. For maximum comfort you want a seat that is the right width to support and pad your sit bones.
To push the pace.
jersey
A shirt made for cycling. Jerseys are often brightly colored for visibility when riding. And they're made of fabrics that wick moisture away from the skin to keep you dry and comfortable while pedaling. Usually they have rear pockets for carrying energy food, tools and clothing you might need or have removed. And, they often have long zippers, which are great for cooling off on hot days.
jockey pulley
The topmost small toothed wheel on the rear derailleur. It's responsible for moving the chain during shifting. The bottom pulley is called the "tension pulley." It creates tension on the chain to keep it taut during shifting.
JRA
Short for Just Riding Along, as in, "I was just riding along when the front wheel locked up and I flew over the bars!" Usually, a total exaggeration; like those fish-that-got-away stories.
jump
Top
Keirin
(Say: Kay - rin) - Keirin is a mass-start track race which originated in Japan as a betting event (sort of like horse racing with humans) and is now also an Olympic event. In traditional Keirin lots are drawn to determine starting positions and 6 to 9 sprinters compete after a paced start. The pacer starts at a slow 15 mph and riders are required to remain behind him. The pacer gradually increases speed and leaves the track approximately 600 to 700 meters before the end letting the racers sprint to the line. The first person across wins.
Kevlar beads
Kevlar is a tough DuPont fabric. Beads are what's on the edges of bicycle tires and clings to the rim and keeps the tire on when it's inflated. Kevlar is used for the beads of most high quality bicycle tires (instead of wire) to save weight, improve ride quality and make it easy to fold the tires for portability. Tires with Kevlar beads are called "folding" tires.
Kevlar belt
Kevlar is a tough DuPont fabric. It's sometimes used beneath a tire's tread to create a nearly impenetrable Kevlar belt that prevents flat tires.
kicker
A type of jump that will typically propel you further vertically than horizontally.
kickstand
A device attached to the bicycle that supports it for parking. It's called a "kickstand" because you put it up and down by kicking it with your foot.
kitty litter
Small pebbles and loose debris over a hardpack trail.
klunker
Or "clunker," this is a cheap bicycle that's used for errands and around-town riding, not serious cycling. Riding the klunker can be called "klunking."
knee warmers
Sleeves worn over your knees and lower legs to keep the all-important leg muscles, tendons and ligaments warm. Knee warmers are easier to take off and tuck in a jersey pocket than tights are, which is why they're favored by many riders.
knobby tires
(Say: el - ay - bee) - League of American Bicyclists
ladies' frame
A frame with a sloping top tube that makes it easier to mount and dismount.
LBS
(Say: el - bee - s) - Shorthand for Local Bike Shop.
leadout
Helping someone win the sprint at the end of a ride/race by getting in front and working hard until you're close to the finish line, when you move to the side allowing your friend to sprint past for the win.
LeMond, Greg
The first American to win the Tour de France. He won it 3 times: 1986, 1989 and 1990.
lid
Slang for helmet.
line
Or, "the line," "the good line," this is the best path through a technical section. "The line," also means "the finish line."
linear-pull brake
Also called a "direct-pull brake," these are the most powerful type of rim brake. They feature long parallel arms (greater leverage), inflexible brake-pad mounts and short cable paths. They are common on mountain bikes.
lip
The take-off point of a jump and the top edge portion of a halfpipe wall.
loaded tourer
A bicycle made to carry a lot of gear for distance riding. Usually, it includes such features as sturdy racks, a long wheelbase, great stability and strength, robust wheels, additional wheel clearance and wide-range gearing.
loamy
A trail that's not quite muddy and not quite dry, but moss-like.
loop out
When a rider flips over backwards often due to pulling back and/or pedaling too hard while doing a wheelie or a manual.
Lorica
A high quality type of synthetic leather used in some cycling shoes.
lug
Sleeves used to join frame tubes. The tubes fit inside the lugs and are brazed (sometimes bonded) in place. Lugs reinforce joints and also make it relatively easy to disassemble the joint should a tube need replacing after a crash.
Lycra
A fabric made by DuPont that's highly breathable, stretchy and comfortable. It's widely used in cycling clothing because it fits so nicely and moves so well with the body when you're riding. It's also extremely durable.
Top
mag trainer
A device for riding indoors comprised of a stand that holds the bicycle upright, which includes a resistance unit that simulates the feel of outdoor riding. It's called a "mag" trainer because the resistance unit uses a magnet to create the drag.
maglia rosa
Italian for "pink jersey," the maglia rosa is the jersey worn by the current race leader in the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy), which is the second most important professional stage race after the Tour de France. "Maglia rosa" is also used to refer to the race leader himself. TV commentators might say, “The Maglia Rosa is riding well today.” The jersey's color comes from the Italian sports tabloid and race sponsor, La Gazzetta dello Sport, which is printed on pink paper.
maillot jaune
(Say mayo - june) - French for yellow jersey, what the leader and winner of the Tour de France wears.
manual
Usually a BMX or mountain-biking skill where you lift the front wheel and ride a wheelie to more smoothly and quickly get over obstacles or certain types of terrain like rollers.
mash
Pushing hard on the pedals.
mass start
This describes when a group ride or race commences with everyone leaving the starting line at the same time. Most road and cross-country races have mass starts, and most century, charity and fun rides do too.
mechanic
Bike-repair expert.
Merckx, Eddie
(Say: Eddie Mer - ks) - One of the greatest road racers in cycling history, dubbed the "Cannibal" for how he devoured opponents often riding off the front seemingly effortlessly. "Eddie" as he is commonly called, won the Tour de France 5 times.
messenger bag
A type of pack favored by bicycle messengers (because they can get into it without removing it), that's slung over the head and shoulder bandolier style.
metric century
A 62.5-mile ride. Metric centuries are often offered along with the standard 100-mile century on organized group rides.
mini-pump
A small pump that's easily carried on the bike or in a pack for on-the-road/trail flat-tire repair.
mini-tool
A small all-in-one tool that fits in your pocket or seat bag and includes the essentials for on-the-road/trail repairs, such as Allen wrenches, screwdrivers and a chain tool.
Miss and Out
An elimination-style track race where the last rider across the line after each, or certain laps, is knocked out of the race. When the remaining riders reaches a certain number, they sprint for the finish to decide the winner. This race is also called "Devil Take the Hindmost."
mixte frame
(Say: mix - tee - frame) - A women's frame that features two small-diameter sloping top tubes. These make mounting and dismounting easier. And, because there are two tubes, lateral frame stiffness is not compromised the way it is with basic ladies' frames, which feature single down tubes.
Moab
As in Moab, Utah, a mountain biking mecca, famous the world over for wonderful trails. Also, home of the Slickrock trail.
monocoque
(Say: mon - oh - kok) - A structure on which the "skin" provides the support. Carbon-monocoque frames are hollow but plenty strong.
moto
1. A single heat in a BMX race. 2. Slang for off-road riding.
motorpace
A training technique involving riding behind a car or motorcycle to develop the ability to ride at higher speeds. Note: Don't try this behind the family car. For safety, special roller devices are used on the backs of real motorpacing vehicles.
mountain bike
A bike designed for off-road use. Common features include: knobby tires, sturdy wheels, low gearing, great brakes, upright riding position with easily reached controls and suspension.
musette
Also called a musette bag, this pouch with shoulder strap is stuffed with food and handed to racers as they pass through the feed zone.
Top
neutral support
At a ride or race, neutral support means if you have a mechanical there is assistance on the course available to all riders (versus in racing where team riders receive support from their own mechanics who will not help other riders).
neutral zone
Usually reserved for racing, a neutral zone is a section of the course where you're not allowed to race and have to remain behind the lead vehicle(s). For example there might be a neutral zone for a few miles to allow the race vehicles and competitors to get across a strip of highway before getting onto the official racecourse. Once on the course, the lead vehicles will typically signal the field to start racing and then speed up the road.
nipple
Also called a "spoke nipple," this is an oddly shaped nut that attaches to the end of the spoke, usually found at the rim. You turn nipples with a spoke wrench to true the wheel.
no-foot can-can
A trick where the rider removes one foot from the pedal, extends it over the top tube and then takes the other foot off the pedal too and kicks both feet together out to the side before returning the feet to the pedals and landing.
noodle
1. The small tube the cable runs through right beside the brake arm on some linear-pull brakes. 2. To ride really easily, to just "noodle along."
NORBA
(Say: nor - ba) - National Off Road Bicycle Association
nose case
Misjudging the landing of a jump and coming up short so that the front wheel of the bike tags the top or front of the landing. This often leads to the rider needing to bail out from the bike.
nothing
A trick where you remove both hands and feet from the bike simultaneously while in the air over an obstacle so that for a short moment no part of your body is in contact with the bicycle.
Top
off-the-back
Falling off the pace so much that a gap opens up between you and the group. A quick way to end up riding home alone because the group travels more quickly than the individual.
off-the-front
Rolling away from the group on a training ride or race. Considered rude if it's an easy day or friendly spin and apt to turn any group ride into a race. It also means being well ahead of the pack in a race. So, if you attacked and no one stayed with you, you'd be off the front.
Omnium
A track racing event in which riders compete against each other in five different disciplines including the 200-meter flying-start time trial, the 5-kilometer scratch race, the 3-kilometer individual pursuit, the 15-kilometer points race and the 1-kilometer time trial.
organ donor
Cycling slang for one who rides without a helmet.
OTB
1. Short for, "over the bars," as in crashing in such a way that you go flying over the handlebars Superman-style. 2. And, also short for, "off the back," which means being dropped by the group.
Overend, Ned
One of America's best-known and most decorated mountain-bike racers.
overgeared
When you don't have easy enough gears for the course you're trying to ride.
overlap wheels
The dangerous practice of positioning yourself on a group ride so that your front wheel overlaps someone's rear wheel. Problem is, if that person swerves, their wheel will tag yours, probably knocking you off your bike.
Top
paceline
A line of riders (all it takes is two, yet the more there are, the better it works) traveling closely together and taking turns in the lead in order to save energy, share the work and travel more quickly than possible riding alone. There are many types of pacelines, such as single and double ones, but the goal is always the same, to cover the distance more efficiently by riding closely together, sharing the work of riding in front and breaking the wind, while your riding partners rest and get ready for their "pull" at the front when the time comes. In racing, there are paceline tactics that come into play too.
pack
Or "the pack," this is used to refer to the main group of riders sticking together in an event or race.
pack fodder
Negative term used by more aggressive riders about those riding with the group who never take a pull at the front.
palmarès
A bicycle racer's list of achievements, accomplishments or wins.
panniers
(Say: pan - ee - ers) - Also called "saddlebags," these are bags that mount to front and/or rear racks for carrying gear. They're great for touring.
Paris-Brest-Paris
Or "PBP," Paris-Brest-Paris is an historic, and today the most important randonneuring event. It travels from Paris to Brest and back to Paris, a distance of 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) that must be completed in 90 hours. While food and rest stops are allowed, riders must be self-supported carrying the spares and all equipment needed such as lighting, fenders, rain gear, etc. PBP goes back to 1891 and takes place every four years in August. To qualify you must complete a series of rides called "brevets," 200, 300, 400 and 600K in length. Riders who manage to qualify and finish PBP within the time limit get their names entered in the official records of the Audax Club Parisien, and have the satisfaction of knowing they conquered one of the toughest events in all of cycling.
patch kit
A kit for repairing flat tubes. It usually comes in a small plastic box and includes patches, glue and sandpaper.
PBP
PBP stands for Paris-Brest-Paris, an historic, and today the most important randonneuring event. It travels from Paris to Brest and back to Paris, a distance of 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) that must be completed in 90 hours. While food and rest stops are allowed, riders must be self-supported carrying the spares and all equipment needed such as lighting, fenders, rain gear, etc. PBP goes back to 1891 and takes place every four years in August. To qualify you must complete a series of rides called "brevets," 200, 300, 400 and 600K in length. Riders who manage to qualify and finish PBP within the time limit get their names entered in the official records of the Audax Club Parisien, and have the satisfaction of knowing they conquered one of the toughest events in all of cycling.
pea gravel
Pea-size rocks all over the trail or road making it very hard to ride over/through.
pedicab
(Say: ped - ee - cab) - A pedal-powered taxi.
pegs
Found on some BMX bikes, pegs (or axle pegs) are heavy-duty, short tubular extensions that screw onto the axles making it possible to do tricks like grinding.
peloton
(say: pell - o - ton) - The main body or group of riders. Also called the "pack," "field" and "group."
pendulum
A trick where you do a no-foot can-can in both directions before returning your feet to the pedals.
pin
Or "pin it," this is to tackle a tough section of trail fast and clean. As in, "I pinned it down that rock garden!"
pinch flat
A flat tire caused by riding over a rock or pothole and bottoming out the tire and pinching and puncturing the tube against the rim. Also called a "snakebite" because it causes side-by-side cuts in the tube that resemble a snakebite. A common cause is riding with too little air pressure.
plain-gauge tubing
Frame tubing that has a constant wall thickness. Usually on the heavy side.
platform damping
A feature found on many mountain bike shocks and some suspension forks. Platform damping stiffens the suspension for efficient pedaling, while allowing the shock to stay active to absorb larger bumps on the trail.
pogo
Taken from the action of a pogo stick, this describes how a poorly adjusted suspension bounces up and down (usually due to insufficient damping). This leads to loss of control and should be adjusted.
portage
Someone who's not what he wants you to think he is.
pound
As in "pound the pedals," it means to ride hard.
preload
(Say: pree - load) - A suspension adjustment that's needed before your first ride to ensure that the suspension is set correctly for your weight. Because suspension designs vary, you should follow the directions in your owner's manual. Usually, preload is accomplished by setting the shock air pressure or spring tension or by replacing its elastomers with stiffer or softer ones.
Presta valve
Also called a "needle" or "French" valve, Prestas are the narrower of the two valve types (Schrader is the other valve type and it's the same as a car tire valve). Prestas also have a threaded tip that must be unscrewed before you can add or release air from the valve.
pretzled wheel
A badly bent wheel.
pull
"Taking a pull," is riding at the front of a group or paceline and breaking the wind to give the riders behind you a rest. Riders will say, "take a pull," or "that was a great pull."
pull through
Riding to the front of the pack on a group ride. You might hear a rider behind you say, "pull through," which means he wants you to keep going all the way to the front so he can follow you up there. "Pulling through" can also mean pulling off and letting someone else lead. For example, when a lead rider is tiring, it slows down the entire group. Then riders behind feel fresh and want him to pull through and get off the front so they can go to the front and pick the pace back up.
pulleys
The small toothed wheels on the rear derailleur that carry the chain. The top one is called the "jockey pulley." It's responsible for moving the chain during shifting. The bottom pulley is called the "tension pulley." It creates tension on the chain to keep it taut during shifting.
pump
An inflator used to add air to bicycle tires. Also, what you do to inflate a tire.
pump head
Also called a "chuck," this is the part of the pump that fits on the tube's valve for inflation.
pursuit
A track cycling event where riders start on opposite sides of the track and race over a set distance (4K for men, 3K for women). The racer who finishes the distance the quickest wins. It's an exciting event to watch as you can see who is ahead and a rider might even catch his opponent.
Used to refer to time trials where it's the cyclist against the clock, no drafting allowed.
races
Also called "ball races," this is where the ball bearings rest inside bicycle components that contain bearings, such as the hubs, headset, pedals and bottom bracket. There are two ball races, one on either side of the component.
rack trunk
A bag for carrying your gear that fits on top of a rear rack. Easy access.
radial spoking
This is a spoke pattern on which the spokes run directly from the hub to the rim without crossing other spokes.
rail bike
A special bicycle that's designed to be ridden on abandoned railroad tracks.
rails
The rods beneath the seat that make up its frame and support the top. Also, the parts of the seat held by the seatpost clamp.
rainbow jersey
The jersey earned and worn by the world road-race champion. It sports the rainbow stripes (green, yellow, black, red and blue).
rainbow stripes
Symbol of the world road-race champion and often used to decorate components and clothing associated with the title. The stripes are green, yellow, black, red and blue.
rake
Rake is also called "fork rake" and "fork offset." It's the distance the wheel axle is ahead of the steering axis of the bicycle. With this measurement, you can calculate front-end geometry to determine a bicycle's handling characteristics.
rally
1. To go fast. 2. A meeting or start time, as in, "Let's rally at 10 and ride!"
randonneur
A cyclist who does long-distance endurance riding with no outside support, typically not for competition but to complete the course within a certain time limit. According to Randonneurs USA "friendly camaraderie, not competition, is the hallmark of randonneuring." Randonneuring goes back to the beginnings of cycling. The most famous event is Paris-Brest-Paris, a 746-mile test that has to be completed within 90 hours. Begun in 1891, it is still held every four years in August.
ratchet
To rotate your crankset halfway to avoid striking your pedal on a rock, log, etc.
rear triangle
That part of a bicycle frame comprised of the seat tube, chainstays and seatstays. It's called a "rear triangle" because it's behind the frame's "main triangle," which is made up of the seat tube, top tube, down tube and head tube.
rebound
The part of suspension travel during which the shock returns to its starting position.
receiver rack
Also called a "hitch rack," this is a rack for carrying bicycles that mounts to a trailer hitch on the vehicle.
recovery bar
An energy food that's eaten after rides to recover more quickly.
recovery drink
An energy drink for after rides to recover more quickly.
recumbent
Bicycles designed around a reclined instead of an upright body position. On recumbents you sit in a seat that resembles a lawn chair (complete with backrest) and pedal with your legs out in front of your body. These unique bicycles come in a variety of configurations but all offer great comfort because they support more body weight and eliminate pressure on the hands, arms, neck, etc.
repair stand
Also called a "workstand," this is a support that holds your bicycle in the air to make maintenance and repair easy (and save your lower back).
retro
Someone who disdains new equipment and innovation in favor of time-tested designs.
rhythm section
A back-to-back series of jumps or rollers on a dirt track or trail.
rigid bike
A bike without suspension.
rim
The outermost part of the wheel. The tire mounts to the rim. On bicycles with caliper hand brakes (not disc brakes), the rim is part of the braking system.
rim cement
Also called "glue", this is the adhesive that's applied to rims to mount sew-up (also called "tubular") tires.
rim strip
The cloth or rubber strip inside a wheel that keeps the spoke holes/nipples from poking holes in the tube.
riser handlebars
Also called simply "risers," these handlebars are higher at the grips than in the center to provide a more upright riding position. They're popular with downhill mountain bikers because they provide additional control.
road rash
Also called a "raspberry" or "strawberry," this is the painful scrape(s) suffered from crashing and sliding down the road.
roadie
Someone who favors road riding.
rock garden
A section of trail with so many large, immovable rocks, it takes skill to ride through it without putting your foot down or walking.
rollers
1. A series of small hills on a track or trail that are typically rolled (coasted) or manualed over (extended wheelie), not jumped. 2. An indoor training device comprised of a frame holding 3 or 4 rollers on which you place your bike to pedal in place. The rollers let you pedal in place and steer as you would riding outdoors. Unlike on stationary trainers, you must balance to ride rollers (unless yours are equipped with a bicycle support).
roof rack
A rack for carrying bicycles that mounts to the roof of your car. Watch those low overhangs!
rotor
1. The "disc" part of disc brakes, rotors are the thin, flat circular metal plates that attach to the hubs. They're what the brake calipers grip to slow and stop you when you squeeze the brake levers. 2. A component found on the front end of many BMX bikes and some freestyle mountain bikes that prevents the rear brake cable from tangling so that you can do easy barspins and tailwhips (spinning the bars or bike 360 degrees). The rotor (also called a "detangler") splits the brake cable into two segments, which are joined at a rotor installed above, or attached to, the bike’s head tube. As the bars rotate, the top segment spins while the bottom stays stationary and full braking power is available at every point of the rotation.
route sheet
Sometimes called a "turn sheet," this is a type of map handed out at the beginning of organized rides that simply lists every turn on the course and the distance to it. Much easier to follow while riding than using a map.
RPM
For Revolutions Per Minute, this is how you calculate your "cadence," or pedaling speed. Simply count the number of complete pedal revolutions (one side) you do in 15 seconds and multiply by 4 to determine how fast you're spinning. A good target for fitness riders is to maintain 70 to 90 RPM.
Top
650c
(Say: six - fifty - see) - A designation for the wheel size found on many triathlon bicycles. 650c wheels are slightly smaller diameter than 700c wheels. Tires and tubes are not interchangeable.
700c
(Say: seven - hundred - see) - A designation for the wheel size found on most road bicycles.
saddle
Also called a "seat," this all-important device supports you and has a lot to do with how comfortable you are when riding.
sag wagon
Also called "SAG," this is the vehicle that follows riders on a group ride and carries supplies and food. If you crash or run out of energy, you can sometimes get a ride back to the start in the sag wagon.
Schrader valve
(Say: shray - der valve) - This is a type of valve found on bicycle tubes that's identical to those found on car tires.
schwag
(Say: sh - wag) - Also, sometimes called "swag," it's free bicycle goodies, such as posters, caps, bottles, stickers etc. you pick up at cycling events, races, shops.
scratch race
A track racing term for a race over a given distance or a race in which all riders start on equal terms (from scratch).
scream
To ride really fast.
scuffing
Using your feet on the tires to scrub speed, maintain speed, or lockup the tire to cause the bike to stall.
sealant
A usually latex-based liquid with some type of small particle mixed in, that's put inside tubes and tubeless tires to fix flats before they can happen. The sealant particles seal the hole almost immediately so you can keep right on riding.
sealed bearings
This type of bicycle bearing is protected from water, sand and dirt with some type of shield, which means the bearing runs longer and requires maintenance less often. Many high quality bicycle bottom brackets, headsets and hubs feature sealed bearings.
seat
This is a term used when installing bicycle tires (car tires too). To "seat" a tire, or "seating" tires means getting the tire beads (the edges of the tire) sitting just right on the rim. When you spin the wheel and watch the bead lines on both sides, they should sit just above the rim all around the wheel. If they dip or bulge anywhere, let the air out of the tire and try again or the tire might come off.
seat bag
Also called a "seat pack," this is a bag that attaches beneath the seat for carrying essentials.
seat tube
The frame tube that the seatpost fits into.
seatpost
The component that the saddle attaches to.
seatstays
The twin small-diameter frame tubes that straddle the rear wheel and run from the seat tube to the rear axle.
semi-slick tire
An off-road tire with such a low-profile tread pattern, it appears almost bald. Popular with cross-country racers with great bike handling skills.
sew-up glue
The adhesive applied to the rim and tire to mount a sew-up tire (also called a "tubular tire").
sew-up tire
Also called a "tubular tire," (because the tire is shaped like a tube), this is a type of tire that's glued onto the rim and features a casing that's sewn around the tube. Professional road racers favor tubulars because the tires are extremely lightweight and have a round cross-section, which improves ride quality.
Shimano
The Japanese company that's the worldwide leading manufacturer of bicycle components. Founded by Shozaburo Shimano in 1922.
shimmy
Also called "speed wobble," this is a dangerous side-to-side front-end oscillation while riding caused by a damaged or in-need-of-repair bicycle, or road/trail conditions. It starts off slowly and gets worse and can easily lead to losing control and crashing. To stop a shimmy, clamp your knees against the top tube and slow down. If it happens often have your bicycle checked for problems.
shock fork
Another name for a suspension fork.
shock pump
A special inflator for air shocks. These are needed because air shocks often require more pressure than standard bicycle pumps can supply.
sidepull brake
A lightweight brake design that's found on most road bikes. It's called a "sidepull" because the cable path runs down the side of the brake.
sidewalls
The sides of tires. Look closely. Sometimes the recommended pressure is written on the sidewall.
singlespeed
An off-road bike with one gear. Some races have singlespeed cross-country events. Singlespeeders like the simplicity of the bikes and the demands of racing without gears (if a hill's too steep, they walk).
singletrack
Eden for mountain bikers, singletrack trails are just wide enough for one bike and usually traverse glorious terrain with whoop-de-doos, scenic overlooks and challenging technical sections.
sit bones
Also called the "sitz bones" and "ischial tuberosities," these are the two bony points of the pelvis that rest on the bicycle seat. For maximum comfort you want a seat that is the right width to support and pad your sit bones.
sit in
Riding at the back of a group of cyclists to stick with them without doing any work so you can rest.
skewer
Short for quick-release skewer, the clamping device that allows you to remove and install wheels without tools. To be technically accurate, the quick release is the entire clamping device and a skewer is the rod-like part of the quick release that passes through the wheel's axle.
skid-lid
Slang for helmet.
skipping
This is a symptom of a worn drivetrain. When a cog (or chainring) gets worn enough, it can't carry the chain properly. So, if you pedal hard when the chain is on that cog, you may experience a sudden and disconcerting lurch in the pedal stroke accompanied by a strange popping sound. What's you're experiencing is the chain riding up and over the teeth on the cog and slamming back down again. Skipping can also be caused by a stiff link that binds when it reaches the derailleur or doesn't seat on the cog. Either way, it's something to have repaired ASAP.
slickrock
1. Large smooth swaths of rock, usually sandstone and great for mountain biking due to the excellent traction. 2. Slickrock is also the name of a famous trail in the riding mecca of Moab, Utah.
slicks
Tires with so little tread that they appear bald. Very fast and grippy.
Slime
A brand name for a popular type of tire sealant. It's a liquid that's squeezed into bicycle tubes to prevent flats. When you run over something that pokes a hole in the tube, escaping air forces the sealant into the hole, closing it a repairing the puncture.
smith
A trick where the front peg on the bike is grinding/stalling while the back tire is on top of the obstacle.
snakebite
Also called a "pinch flat," this is a flat tire caused by riding over a pothole or rock, which pinches the tube between the tire and rim creating side-by-side cuts in the tube that resemble a snakebite. The most common cause is riding with insufficient tire pressure.
snap
The ability to rev the pedals to accelerate quickly. Strong sprinters are said to have excellent snap.
soft pedal
To pedal easily. Often to let a ride partner catch up.
softtail
A full-suspension bicycle.
solvent
Also called "degreaser," this is a spray or drip liquid that penetrates and cuts built-up grime and grease. It's great for cleaning drivetrain components
SPD
(Say: S - P - D or spud) - Shimano's brand of clipless pedals. They're so popular that some cyclists refer to all clipless pedals as "SPDs," or "spuds."
specs
Short for specifications and used to refer to the list of bicycle components or features found in catalogs and online.
speed wobble
Also called "shimmy," this is a dangerous side-to-side front-end oscillation while riding caused by a damaged or in-need-of-repair bicycle, or road/trail conditions. It starts off slowly and gets worse and can easily lead to losing control and crashing. To stop a speed wobble, clamp your knees against the top tube and slow down. If it happens often have your bicycle checked for problems.
spider
The part of the right crankarm to which the chainrings are attached. Some spiders are integral and others can be removed.
spin
To pedal quickly, fluidly and seemingly effortlessly.
spindle
An obstacle made up of two symmetrical lips placed back-to-back or coping-to-coping.
Spinning
A brand name for a type of indoor cycling offered by some gyms and clubs. These strenuous sessions are led by instructors who ensure a quality workout.
spoke wrench
A small tool used for loosening and tightening spokes to true wheels. Not to be used carelessly!
spokes
The usually metal rods that run between the wheel hubs and rims. Spokes come in different shapes, materials, thicknesses and lengths.
sports tourer
A type of bicycle with a lively ride and load-carrying capacity. Sports tourers are ideal for "credit card touring" (traveling at a good clip with a light load and spending nights in hotels). They often include wide-range gears for easy hill climbing, too.
sprint
1. An all-out sharp burst of speed (usually covering no more than about 200 yards) at the end of a race to go for the win. 2. In track cycling, a sprint is a type of race in which two riders compete one-on-one. Unlike pursuits, the riders start next to each other in a sprint race.
sprocket
The parts that the chain rests on. There are front and rear sprockets, called respectively "chainrings" and "cogs."
spuds
Slang for Shimano's SPD brand of clipless pedals. They're so popular that some cyclists refer to all clipless pedals as "spuds," or SPDs.
squirrel
Slang for a dangerous cyclist; a rider who doesn't ride a straight line, doesn't point out obstacles and does just about everything wrong. It's a good idea to educate or steer clear of squirrels on group rides because they often cause crashes.
stage
One of the individual daily races that make up a stage race. For example, the most famous stage race, the Tour de France, is usually made up of about 21 days of racing, each one a separate stage.
stage race
Any race comprised of multiple races (stages). Usually won by the person who completes the entire event in the least amount of time. The Tour de France is the most famous stage race.
stainless steel
A type of high-grade metal widely used for quality bicycle spokes because it's strong and won't rust.
stem
The part that holds the handlebars. Sometimes called a "gooseneck," or "tiller."
STI
Shimano's name for its road-bike shifting brake levers. It stands for Shimano Total Integration.
stick it
Or "stick," this is to land a jump or drop-off: stick the landing.
stiction
(Say: stick - shun) - A term that describes friction in a suspension that prevents it from operating smoothly. Ideally, suspension should be stiction free.
stiff link
A chain link that binds and stops flexing as it should. Stiff links are usually caused by corrosion due to insufficient lubrication. Repair stiff links immediately because they compromise shifting, pedaling and can cause a nasty accident if they slip, jam or break when you're pedaling hard. To fix, pedal backwards to spot the bad link (it'll hang up as it passes over the rear derailleur pulleys), then grab the chain at the stiff link and flex it laterally to free it. If that doesn't work, replace the chain and make the old one into bicycle jewelry.
stoked
(Say: st - oh - ked) - To be excited about something; probably that great ride or new carbon frame.
stoker
The rear cyclist on a tandem.
straight block
Also known as a "corncob," this is a cassette or freewheel on which every cog is one tooth larger than the preceding one (as you shift up the cassette to larger sprockets).
straights
A track term for the longer straightaway sections on either side of the velodrome that lead into the corners. This is where riders enter and leave the track.
suicide no-hander
A trick where the rider pinches the seat/frame with their legs and pulls back their upper body and throws back their arms releasing the handlebars and allowing the front end of the bike to drop away slightly mid-flight. A rather committing trick.
Superman
Slang for crashing in such a way that you go flying over the handlebars Superman-style.
survival mode
When you're so tired, you have to settle into a slow, determined pace to make it home.
suspension
A device that insulates the rider from rough terrain by absorbing impacts. Bicycle tires provide a degree of suspension because they're full of air, which cushions bumps. Many bicycles today include mechanical suspensions that provide incredible insulation from impacts and bumps and add great control.
swag
(Say: sh - wag) - Also called "schwag," it's free bicycle goodies, such as posters, caps, bottles, stickers etc. you pick up at cycling events, races, shops.
swingarm
On a suspension bicycle, this is the part of the frame connected to the shock. It moves up and down when you hit bumps.
switch
Riding with your non-dominant foot forward or trying a trick in the opposite direction. Example: If you spin a switch three, you are spinning a 360 in the direction that does not come most naturally to you.
An off-road bicycle with 29-inch wheels.
table top
1. A jump that is flat from the lip to the landing. 2. A BMX or mountain bike jumping trick where you flatten the bike out horizontally, like a table top, while you're flying through the air.
taco'd
A term used to describe a seriously damaged wheel that appears folded over like a taco.
tailwhip
A trick where you balance on the handlebars, hold the front end stationary and then quickly whip the backend of the bicycle around (and around again, for the rare double tailwhip), before putting your feet back on the pedals.
taking a pull
Going to the front of the group and staying there for a while to give followers a rest.
tandem
A bicycle built for two.
tapered steerer
A modern fork design where the base of the fork steerer tube is larger diameter than the top. This stiffens the front end without adding weight and improves handling and sprinting. Typically, tapered steerers measure 1 1/8 inch at the top and 1 1/2 at the bottom, but other sizes are available.
Taylor, Major
Marshall Taylor (nicknamed "Major"), was the second internationally famous African American professional athlete and arguably the best American cyclist, ever. Though he was regularly bullied by racist competitors who ganged up to defeat him; restricted by race promoters who allowed only white racers; and even harassed by death threats, Taylor excelled becoming world and American champion in 1899, setting many world records and receiving a $10,000-a-year salary.
team time trial
Also called "TTT," a team time trial is a race where all the rules of the individual time trial apply, yet instead of riding alone, racers compete as teams. To optimize speed, teams ride as units, trading positions at the front of their small group so no one rider has to break the wind by himself for very long.
technical
Something challenging to ride. In mountain biking, it's a trail that's full of roots, rocks, turns, varying angles and/or other obstacles. On the road it could be a twisty descent with off-camber turns and/or rough, potholed pavement.
techno-weenie
Someone interested in technical innovation to the point that they may not even care if it works.
tempo
1. A steady, hard, but not too hard pace, set at the front of a group of riders. Sometimes a faster tempo will be set for the peloton to make up time. 2. A cycling workout effort level, tempo is below time-trial effort, but above aerobic pace. It's often the pace you can hold for an hour or so. 3. Tempo is also a type of track race where two points are awarded to the first person to cross the line each lap, and one point to the second-place rider. The rider with the most points at the end of the race wins.
tension pulley
The bottom small toothed wheel on the rear derailleur. It creates tension on the chain to keep it taut during shifting. The top pulley is called the "jockey pulley," and It's responsible for moving the chain during shifting.
thorn-proof tube
Also called a or thorn-resistant tube, this tire inner tube is built extra thick on top to prevent thorns and other sharp objects from popping it.
thrash
1) To beat on your bike or equipment by slamming it around and riding hard. 2) Sloppy or poor riding skills.
threadless headset
A type of steering mechanism (called a "headset") that's compatible with a fork that has a steerer (the topmost tube) that's unthreaded. These are common on most mountain and road bikes.
thumb shifters
Shift levers that attach to the handlebars and are operated by pushing with your thumbs.
time limit
Also called "time cut," this is a way to eliminate or penalize the slowest riders in a race or event. After every stage in a stage race, a time cut is established by taking the winner's time and adding 10 to 20%. Riders who finish in excess of this buffer zone are not allowed to start the next day. Time limits are common in road stage races, randonneuring and sometimes in other rides like centuries, usually as a way to ensure safety.
time trial
Also called a "TT," time trials are special events where riders cover a set course alone. Every cyclist's time is recorded and then compared to determine who went the fastest. Time trials are often held by cycling clubs since they're safe and easy to organize and run. They also are held in all the grand tour races and often play a major role in determining the overall race winner because the strongest riders go the fastest and gain time on those who can't go so fast when riding alone without their teammates to ride behind (see drafting).
tire levers
Tools (they usually come in a set of 3) used to pry tires off rims to make repairs or replacements.
tire liner
A protective plastic strip that's placed between the tire and tube to stop glass, thorns and debris from popping the tube.
tire sealant
A usually latex-based liquid with some type of small particle mixed in, that's put inside tubes and tubeless tires to fix flats before they can happen. The sealant particles seal the hole almost immediately so you can keep right on riding.
titanium
(Say: tie - tayne - ee - um) - An exotic and expensive metal frame material that's super light, lively riding and ultra durable.
toe clips and straps
These devices bolt to the pedals to prevent your feet from slipping off and to hold your feet in the correct position for riding (the balls of the feet should rest over the centers of the pedals).
top tube
The topmost bicycle frame tube.
Tour de France
Held since 1903, this is the most important road race in cycling. It covers approximately 3,000-miles (mostly in France) in 3 weeks (the route changes yearly) and is considered one of toughest contests in sport.
tourist
A cyclist who rides to enjoy the outdoors and see the sights versus hammering for time or competition.
track
Also called a "velodrome," this is an indoor or outdoor oval track for bicycle racing.
track bike
A bicycle made for track (also called "velodrome") racing. These bikes resemble road-racing models but have only one gear and no brakes. The gear is "fixed," which means you can't coast. You control speed by holding back on the pedals.
trackstand
Balancing in place. Highly useful at stoplights.
trail
Also called "fork trail," this is a measurement of the distance the front wheel's contact patch is behind the intersection of the steering axis with the ground. Framebuilders use trail to optimize handling. If you think of how a grocery cart's front casters work (they always swing in the direction you aim the cart because the wheels are well behind the steering axis), you can get an idea how trail effects stability and handling.
trailer bike
A device (basically, the back half of a bike) that attaches behind a regular bicycle to allow a child to ride along while the adult steers and controls the pace.
trailhead
The start of the trail. Common meeting point for ride starts.
training wheels
Devices for children's bikes that keep the bicycle upright so Junior can learn to ride safely.
transition
1. The point at which the lip/landing of a jump changes from a vertical to a horizontal surface. 2. In the sports of triathlon and duathlon, the transition comes between each racing leg, such as after the swim and before the bike leg. How quickly you "transition" (changing into your cycling clothes and mounting your bike and/or getting into your running gear) affects your time and result.
transverse cable
Also called a "crossover cable," this is the cable on cantilever brakes that runs over the top of the tire.
trials
An amazing type of extremely technical off-road riding where gravity-defying daredevils "ride" over natural and man-made obstacles such as log piles and automobiles, all the while trying not to touch the ground with their feet (called a "dab").
triathlon
A race comprised of a swimming, cycling and running leg.
trick
1) A bicycle stunt. 2) Something high-tech or custom as in, "That wheelset is trick!"
triple
1. Short for triple chainring. 2. A bicycle built for 3 people, also called a "triplet."
truck driver
A trick involving a regular 360 while simultaneously spinning the handlebars 360 degrees. A "double truck driver would be spinning the bars 720 degrees.
truing stand
An apparatus that holds a wheel and features indicators that make it easy for a mechanic to remove wheel wobbles and hops. It's also used for truing and tensioning new wheels.
trunk rack
A rack for carrying bicycles that mounts to the trunk of your vehicle.
TT
Abbreviation for "time trial," which is a special event where riders cover a set course alone. Every cyclist's time is recorded and then compared to determine who went the fastest. Time trials are often held by cycling clubs since they're safe and easy to organize and run. They also are held in all the grand tour races and often play a major role in determining the overall race winner because the strongest riders go the fastest and gain time on those who can't go so fast when riding alone without their teammates to ride behind (see drafting).
TTT
Abbreviation for "team time trial," a TTT is a race where all the rules of the regular (individual) time trial apply, yet instead of riding alone, racers compete as teams. To optimize speed, teams ride as units, trading positions at the front of their small group so no one rider has to break the wind by himself for very long.
tubeless tire
A new type of off-road tire that doesn't require an inner tube. This allows riding super-low tires pressures with no risk of puncturing (because there's no tube). And softer tires provide more traction and comfort.
tubular glue
The adhesive applied to the rim and tire to mount a tubular tire (also called a "sew-up tire").
tubular tire
Also called a "sew-up," (because the tire is actually sewn together around the tube), this is a type of tire that's glued onto the rim. Professional road racers favor tubulars because these tires are extremely lightweight and have a round cross-section, which improves ride quality.
tuck
Also "full tuck," this is getting as low as possible over the handlebars to reduce wind resistance as much as possible. Usually used on long hills to leave friends behind.
tuck no-hander
A trick where you spin the handlebars into your lap/waist while tucking your upper body forward and simultaneously throwing your hands off to the sides.
turndown
Where a rider turns the handlebars and his body down toward the ground while the rest of the bike stays facing straight up.
tweak
Union Cycliste Internationale: A European group that oversees professional cycling.
U-lock
A popular bicycle-security device that's named after its shape. In some parts of the world, it's called a "D-lock." Used correctly (you must lock the frame and wheels to an immovable object), U-locks provide excellent protection.
unicrown
A type of fork on which the blades are attached to the steerer. They differ from other forks in that there's no fork crown.
unicycle
(Say: yoo - na - cycle) - A one-wheeler. Surprisingly, they can be ridden on and off road, for short and long distance.
unobtanium
A humorous word for a bicycle frame material so light, lively, efficient and compliant it doesn't even exist yet, and might even be impossible to create. As in, "Your new carbon dream bike is really nice, but when I get my new SpeedKing with its unobtanium frame and ultralight wheels I'm going to ride like the wind."
uppers
The top parts of shoes. Where you find the straps/laces and toe.
upshift
This is a term that describes shifting, however, some riders use it to describe shifting into harder-to-pedal gears, while others use it to describe the opposite (shifting "up" the cassette onto larger cogs). We'll let you make up your own mind.
Top
valgus
Outward angulation of the foot, similar to supination. One of the things fitters look for in cycling shoes and cleat fine tuning.
valve cap
Plastic screw-on caps that fit on top of valve stems.
valve core
The mechanism inside the valve stem that lets air in and keeps it from leaking out. All Schrader valves, but only some Prestas, have replaceable cores.
valve nut
The knurled ring or nut that comes on fully-threaded valve stems.
valve stem
The part of the tube used for putting air in and letting it out.
varus
Inward angulation of the foot, similar to pronation. One of the things fitters look for in cycling shoes and cleat fine tuning.
V-brake
Shimano's brand name for "linear-pull" (also called a "direct-pull") brakes. This is the most powerful type of rim brake thanks to long arms (greater leverage), inflexible brake-pad mounts and short cable paths.
velo
Slang for bicycle from the early French term "velocipede."
velodrome
An indoor or outdoor oval track for bicycle racing.
VeloNews
An American cycling magazine focused on on- and off-road bicycle racing.
vertical dropouts
A dropout is the part of the frame that holds the wheel. Vertical dropouts are rear dropouts designed for easy wheel removal and installation because they face downward and offer usually one wheel position (for easy alignment).
visor
A protrusion attached to the front of a helmet to protect the eyes from debris and glare. Usually adjustable. Often removable.
VO2 Max
A measurement long used to determine a cyclist’s maximum potential, VO2 Max measures the maximum amount of oxygen uptake during exercise per kilogram of body weight. An average healthy, untrained male will uptake approximately 3.5 liters/minute or 45 ml/kg/min. An average healthy, untrained female will uptake approximately 2.0 liters/minute or 38 ml/kg/min. Tour de France winning cyclists have some of the highest VO2 Max scores on record with Greg LeMond scoring a reported 92.5 ml/kg/min and Lance Armstrong scoring a reported 83.8 ml/kg/min.
Vuelta a España
In English, the Tour of Spain, this is the country's grand tour, and one of the most important stage races on the professional calendar after the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia.
Top
wall
1. A climb so steep it's wall-like. 2. The point in a tough event where you quit, as in "I hit the wall and had to call for a ride home."
wallride
A gravity-defying trick involving jumping up to a vertical or almost vertical wall, maybe riding a little, and then jumping back off.
wannabe
Someone who wants to be a great cyclist but doesn't have what it takes.
wash out
When your tires hit loose dirt or gravel and slide out from under you. No fun if you're not ready for it.
washboard
A section of road or trail with closely spaced bumps that, if you ride over at speed, about jars the fillings in your teeth loose.
wax lube
A chain lube designed for dry conditions, which includes paraffin as one of its main ingredients.
weight-weenie
A cyclist who's fanatical about having the lightest bicycle.
wheelbase
The distance from the front to rear axle.
wheelie
Balancing on one wheel.
wheel-retention device
Nubs or recesses on forks that keep the wheel from falling out should the quick release or axle nuts come loose.
wheelset
A pair of wheels.
wheelsucker
That guy that tucks in behind you on a ride and never comes to the front to help break the wind. Also, that guy who beats you in the sprint.
whitewall
Usually a "balloon" tire (wide 26- or 24-inch size) that has white sidewalls. Somewhat common on beach cruiser bicycles.
wick
Or "wicking," this is a feature of all good bicycle clothing. The fabric absorbs moisture and moves it away from the skin keeping you dry and comfortable.
wind trainer
A device for riding indoors comprised of a stand that holds the bicycle upright, which includes a resistance unit that simulates the feel of outdoor riding. It's called a "wind" trainer because the resistance unit uses a fan to create the drag.
wire beads
Bicycle beads that have wire inside. Wire is used because it's reliable, holds the tire on securely and doesn't cost very much, which keeps the tire price down. Wire-bead tires are heavier than folding tires (which feature Kevlar beads) and can't be folded as small (it's possible to fold wire-bead tires, but not fully.)
WOMBATS
Women's Mountain Bike And Tea Society. This is a cycling club for new women riders founded by mountain-bike champion and cycling writer Jacquie Phelan.
wonky
Slang for when your bike's not working right.
working together
An important tactic in cycling, working together means riding with at least one other person and sharing turns in front blocking the wind so you can both rest regularly and maintain a better speed than you could riding alone.
workstand
Also called a "repair stand," this is a support that holds your bicycle in the air to make maintenance and repair easy.
wrench
Top
Y wrench
A small Y-shaped bicycle tool usually with 8, 9 and 10mm sockets or 4, 5 and 6mm Allen wrenches.
yellow jersey
What the leader and winner of the Tour de France wears. Also, The Yellow Jersey is a great novel about the Tour by Ralph Hurne.
yellow line rule
In many cycling races and events this safety rule is intended to keep riders from crossing the yellow centerline on the road. Punishment for breaking this rule may include a time penalty, being relegated to the back of the pack or even disqualification.
Top
Zabriskie, Dave
Professional cyclist from Utah, Dave Zabriskie is widely regarded as one of the top time trialists in the peloton and is the only American to have won stages at all three grand tours (the Tour, Giro and Vuelta). He also held the Maillot Jaune as leader of the Tour de France for three stages in 2005.
Zap
Debuting in 1994, and invented and produced by Mavic, Zap was the first mass-produced electronic rear derailleur shifting system. Microprocessor-controlled and powered by a small 6-volt battery, Zap was for 7- and 8-speed drivetrains. Though still seen on some vintage bicycles, it's been discontinued by Mavic.
Zimmerman, Arthur
One of the first great American bicycle racers. In 1893, Zimmerman, who was dubbed "The Flying Yankee" and "The King of Speed" rode 41mph, won over 100 races, was the World Champion and earned over $20,000 in prize money.
zip tie
An inexpensive plastic type of clamp that wraps around things and cinches in place without tools, and holds fast. Excellent for attaching race numbers, holding cables in place and all kinds of other applications.
|
Derailleur gears
|
What country produces Flying Pigeon bicycles, at 2010 the most popular mechanical vehicle in history?
|
Fixed-gear bicycle : Wikis (The Full Wiki)
The Full Wiki
More info on Fixed-gear bicycle
Wikis
Advertisements
Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles .
Related top topics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A fixed-gear bicycle
An 18 tooth cog that attaches to the rear hub of fixed-gear bike
Track cogs are typically attached and removed from the hub by screwing them with a chain whip . This tool has a lockring spanner for securing a reverse threaded lockring against the cog.
In the UK and Australia, "fixed-wheel" is the normal term for the subject of this article - meaning the opposite of freewheel , and "fixed-gear" refers to a single-speed bicycle .
A fixed-gear bicycle (or fixed-wheel bicycle) is a bicycle that has no freewheel , meaning it cannot coast — the pedals are always in motion when the bicycle is moving. The sprocket is screwed directly onto the hub. When the rear wheel turns, the pedals turn in the same direction. [1] This allows a cyclist to stop without using a brake , by resisting the rotation of the cranks, and also to ride in reverse.
Track cycling in a velodrome has always used fixed-gear track bikes , but fixed-gear bicycles are now again used on the road, [2] a trend generally seen as being led by bicycle messengers and Hipsters . [3]
Contents
Uses
A fixed/freewheel rear hub (flip-flop)
The track bicycle is a form of fixed-gear bicycle used for track cycling in a velodrome . But since a "fixed-gear bicycle" is just a bicycle without a freewheel, a fixed-gear bicycle can be any type of bicycle. [2]
Traditionally, some road racing , club cyclists used a fixed wheel bicycle for training during the winter months, generally using a relatively low gear ratio, believed to help develop a good pedaling style. [4] In the UK until the 1950s it was common for riders to use a fixed wheel for time trials. [5] [6] The fixed wheel was also commonly used, and continues to be used in the end of season hill climb races in the autumn. [7] [8] A typical clubmen's fixed wheel machine would have been a "road-path" or "road/track" cycle. In the era when most riders only had one cycle, the same bike when stripped down and fitted with racing wheels was used for road time trials and track racing, and when fitted with mudguards (fenders) and a bag it was used for club runs, touring and winter training. [9] [10] By the 1960s, multi-gear derailleurs had become the norm and riding fixed wheel on the road declined over the next few decades. [11] Recent years have seen renewed interest and increased popularity of fixed wheel cycling. [12]
In urban North America fixed gear bicycles have achieved tremendous popularity, with the rise of discernible regional aesthetic preferences for finish and design details. [13] The rise in popularity of fixed-gear bicycles in the mid-2000s, complete with adaptations such as spoke cards , is attributed to bicycle messengers. [3]
Dedicated fixed-gear road bicycles are being produced in greater numbers by established bicycle manufacturers. They are generally low in price, [14] and characterized by a very forgiving, slack road geometry, as opposed to the steep, aggressive geometry of track bicycles. [15]
Fixed-gear bicycles are also used in cycle ball , bike polo and artistic cycling .
A fixed-gear bicycle is particularly well suited for track stands , a manoeuver in which the bicycle can be held stationary, balanced upright with the rider's feet on the pedals. [16]
Gears
Although most fixed-gear bikes are also single-speed , this is not necessarily the case.
In the past Sturmey Archer made a fixed multi-speed hub gear , the model ASC, allowing the rider to change gear while riding. [17] Its successor company, SunRace Sturmey-Archer, plans to produce a modern equivalent, the S3X, in the near future [18] .
Some have a cog on each side of the rear hub, giving the rider a choice of two different gear ratios. Such a hub may have a fixed gear on each side (double-fixed) or a fixed gear on one side and a freewheel on the other (fixed-free) also known as a flip-flop hub . To change gear, it is necessary to remove, reverse and refit the rear wheel. [19] Typically, the number of teeth on the cogs will differ by one or two, for example 19 teeth on one side and 17 on the other, making the latter gear some 11 or 12% higher than the former (for the same chainring ).
There is also a possibility to install two chainrings and two cogs (or a double cog like a fixed Surly Dingle Cog or White Industries DOS ENO freewheel; cassette conversions might also work). This will let you choose between two gear ratios. For example, with 51-49 chainrings and 17-19 sprockets you may have 51/17=3 and 49/19=~2.6 ratios. The advantage of such a setup is that you actually have two gears but you neither need a chain tensioner, nor have you to change the length of the chain. This is due to the fact that the sum of teeth on the two ratios is the same: 51+17=49+19. To switch gears you have to loosen the wheel and then tighten it back.
Advantages and disadvantages
Fixed gear bicycles are ridden by cyclists for many reasons, such as their light weight, simplicity, and low maintenance. [20]
Many people who ride fixed-gear bicycles simply find it more enjoyable than or as an alternative to riding bikes with freewheels. Although the bike has only one gear, the lighter weight of a fixed-gear bike over its multi-speed freewheel equivalent can provide increased performance in some conditions. [21] In slippery conditions some riders prefer to ride fixed because the transmission gives feedback on back tire grip. [22]
Descending is more difficult as the rider must spin the cranks at a very high speed (sometimes at 170 rpm or more), or use the brake(s) to slow down. Nevertheless, the enforced fast spin when descending is said to increase "souplesse" (a French word meaning suppleness or flexibility, usually referring to the human body), which improves pedalling performance on any type of bicycle. [23]
Riding fixed is generally considered to encourage a more effective pedaling style, which translates into greater efficiency and power when used on a bicycle fitted with a freewheel. [24]
When first riding a fixed gear, a cyclist used to a freewheel has a tendency to try to coast now and again, particularly when approaching corners or obstacles. Since freewheeling, or coasting, is not possible, this can lead to anything from a 'kick' to the trailing leg, up to a loss of control of the bicycle.
Riding at speed round corners can be difficult for the novice rider, as the pedals can strike the road, resulting in a possible loss of control. Riders of freewheeling bicycles usually instinctively equalise the pedal height when making such turns.
Brakeless
Cyclist riding a fixed gear bike without brakes
Some fixed-gear riders think brakes are not strictly necessary, and brakeless fixed riding has an almost cult status in some places, based on the perception by some riders of the experience of riding in a state of intense concentration or 'flow' where brakes are thought not to be needed. [25]
Other riders dismiss riding on roads without brakes as an unnecessary affectation, based on image rather than what is practical when riding a bicycle. [26] Furthermore, riding brakeless may jeopardize the chances of a successful insurance claim in the event of an accident and, in some jurisdictions, is against the law. [27]
Advertisements
Physics and technique
It is possible to slow down or stop a fixed-gear bike by resisting the turning cranks, and a rider can also lock the rear wheel and skid to slow down or completely stop on a fixed-gear bicycle, a maneuver sometimes known as a skid stop. It is initiated by unweighting the rear wheel while in motion by shifting the rider's weight slightly forward and pulling up on the pedals using clipless pedals or toe clips and straps. The rider then stops turning the cranks, thus stopping the drivetrain and rear wheel, while applying his or her body weight in opposition to the normal rotation of the cranks. This action causes the rear wheel to skid, which acts to slow the bike. The skid can be held until the bicycle stops or until the rider desires to continue pedalling again at a slower speed. The technique requires a little practice and using it while cornering is generally considered dangerous. [28] [29] As with the technique of resisting the cranks, the maximal deceleration of this method of slowing is also significantly lower than using a front brake. A wet surface further reduces the effectiveness of this method, almost to the point of not reducing speed at all.
On any bike with only rear wheel braking, the maximal deceleration is significantly lower than on a bike equipped with a front brake. [30] As a vehicle brakes, weight is transferred towards the front wheel and away from the rear wheel, decreasing the amount of grip the rear wheel has. Shifting the rider's weight aft will increase rear wheel braking efficiency, but normally the front wheel might provide 70% or more of the braking power when braking hard ( see Weight transfer ).
Knee health
Braking by resisting the turning cranks greatly increases stress on the knees which can lead to injury. [28]
Legality
United States - The use of any bike without brakes on public roads is illegal in many places, but the wording is often something along the lines of "...must be equipped with a brake that will enable the person operating the cycle to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level and clean pavement..." [31] which some have argued allows the use of the legs and gears [32] . The retail sale of bikes without brakes is banned by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission [33] - but with an exception for the "track bicycle" (...a bicycle designed and intended for sale as a competitive machine having tubular tires, single crank-to-wheel ratio, and no free-wheeling feature between the rear wheel and the crank.... [34] ).
UK - The Pedal Cycles Construction and Use Regulations 1983 requires that pedal cycles "with a saddle height over 635 mm to have two independent braking systems, with one acting on the front wheel(s) and one on the rear". It is commonly thought that a front brake and a fixed rear wheel satisfies this requirement [35] .
Germany - The Amtsgericht (local court) Bonn declared the fixed gear system as a brake system compliant with the German StVZO . [36]
Australia - In every state, bicycles are regarded as vehicles under the Road Rules. By law, a bike is required to have at least one functioning brake. [37]
Conversion
Many companies sell bicycle frames designed specifically for use with fixed-gear hubs. A fixed-gear or track-bike hub includes special threads for a lockring that tightens in the opposite (counter-clockwise) direction compared with the cog. This ensures that the cog cannot unscrew when the rider "backpedals" while braking. [38]
A horizontal dropout on a steel frame road bicycle converted to a single-speed . The derailleur hanger (below the axle) and an eyelet (above the axle) for mounting a fender or rack, both integral parts of the original frame, are now unused.
For a variety of reasons, many cyclists choose to convert freewheel bicycles to fixed gear. Frames with horizontal dropouts will be straightforward to convert, frames with vertical dropouts less so. [39] One method is to simply replace the rear wheel with a wheel that has a track/fixed hub. Another is to use a hub designed to be used with a threaded multi-speed freewheel. Such a hub will only have the normal right-handed threads for the cog and not the reverse threads for the lockrings used on track/fixed hubs. There is the possibility that the sprocket on a hub without a lockring will unscrew while back pedalling. Even if a bottom bracket lockring is threaded onto the hub along with a track sprocket, because the bottom-bracket lockring is not reverse threaded, the possibility still exists that both the sprocket and locknut can unscrew. Therefore it is recommended to have both front and rear brakes on a fixed-gear bicycle using a converted freewheel hub in case the cog unscrews while back pedaling. It is also advisable to use a thread sealer for the cog and bottom bracket lockring. The rotafix (or "frame whipping") method may be helpful to securely install the sprocket.
Bicycles with vertical dropouts and no derailleur require some way to adjust chain tension. Most bicycles with horizontal dropouts can be tensioned by moving the wheel forward or backward in the dropouts. Bicycles with vertical dropouts can also be converted with some additional hardware. Possibilities include:
An eccentric hub or bottom bracket allows the off center axle or bottom bracket spindle to pivot and change the chain tension.
A "Ghost" or "floating" chainring. An additional chainring placed in the drive train between the driving chainring and sprocket. The top of the chain moves it forward at the same speed that the bottom of the chain moves it backwards, giving the appearance that it is floating in the chain.
A "Magic gear". With some math you can calculate a gearing ratio to fit a taut chain between the rear dropout and bottom bracket. Also, using a chain half link and slightly filing the dropouts to increase the width of the slot will increase the chances of finding a "magic gear."
Separate chain tensioning devices such as the type which are attached to the dropout gear hanger (commonly used on single speed mountain bikes) cannot be used because they will be damaged as soon as the lower part of the chain becomes tight.
Additional adjustments or modification may be needed to ensure a good chainline. The chain should run straight from the chainring to the sprocket, therefore both need to be the same distance away from the bicycle's centerline. Matched groupsets of track components are normally designed to give a chainline of 42 mm, but conversions using road or mountain bike cranksets often use more chainline. Some hubs, such as White Industries' ENO, or the British Goldtec track hub, are better suited to this task as they have a chainline greater than standard. Failure to achieve good chainline will at best lead to a noisy chain and increased wear, and at worst can throw the chain off the sprocket. This can result in rear wheel lockup and a wrecked frame if the chain falls between the rear sprocket and the spokes. Chainline can be adjusted in a number of ways, which may be used in combination with each other:
Obtaining a bottom bracket with a different spindle length, to move the chainring inboard or outboard
Choosing a bottom bracket with two lockrings, which gives fine adjustment of chainring position
Respacing and redishing the rear wheel, where permitted by the hub design
Placing thin spacers under the bottom bracket's right-hand cup (Sturmey-Archer make a suitable 1/16" spacer) to move the chainring outboard
Placing thin spacers between the chainring and its stack bolts to move it inboard (if the chainring is on the inside of the crank spider) or outboard (if the ring is on the outside of the spider)
Placing thin spacers between the hub shoulder and the cog- only recommended in the case of a freewheel-threaded hub, which has sufficiently deep threads for this
Competition
There are many forms of competition using a fixed gear bike, most of the competitions being track races. Bike messengers and other urban riders may ride fixed gear bicycles in alleycat races , including New York City's famous fixed-gear-only race Monstertrack alleycat . There are also events based on messenger racing such as Mixpression which has been held 9 times in Tokyo. But recently with the widespread popularity and advancement of fixed gear bikes, trick competitions have also become a form of event at many of the more recent alleycats. Some other competitions are games of foot down and bike polo .
In 2006, Adventures for the Cure made a documentary film on riding across the United States on fixed gears; they repeated this feat as a 4-man team at the 2008 Race Across America .
See also
|
i don't know
|
What was a bicycle first called (and still today also any human powered wheeled vehicle), a Latin portmanteau of 'speed' and 'foot'?
|
Bicycle History Timeline
Chronology of the Growth of Bicycling and the Development of Bicycle Technology
by David Mozer
Note: Many people claim credit for inventing the first bicycle. The answer to the question often depends upon the nationality of who you ask; the French claim it was a Frenchman, Scots claim a Scotsman, the English an Englishman, and Americans often claim that it was an American. Since the early 1990's the International Cycling History Conferences , with proceedings Cycle History (San Francisco), has worked to get past the jingoism. Our current understanding of the history of the bicycle suggests that many people contributed ideas and developments:
Date Development
1418
Giovanni Fontana built the first human powered land vehicle -- it had four wheels and used an endless rope connected via gears to the wheels.
1493
Sketches showing a primitive version of a bicycle, purported drawn by Leonardo da Vinci , surfaced in 1974. Further examination of the drawings indicates these are not by da Vinci's hand. The speculation that these are a sketch by a pupil after a lost drawing by da Vinci is also considered false. An age test was performed, but the library in Milan (belonging to the Vatican) conceals its negative outcome, see http://www.cyclepublishing.com/history/leonardo%20da%20vinci%20bicycle.html . Experts consider the sketches a hoax.
1791
Comte de Sicrac is credited with building the "celerifer" - purportedly a hobby horse with two wheels instead of a rocker. This is now considered a patriotic hoax created by a French historian in 1891. It was debunked by a French researcher in 1976. In fact, a Jean Sievrac (!) of Marseille obtained an import price for a four-wheeled speed coach called celerifer in 1817.
?
Heinrich Mylius' bicycle, the Heimat Museum, Themar, Germany
1817
Variously called the running machine, velocipede, Draisienne and dandy horse, it was invented by Karl Drais, in response to widespread starvation and the slaughtering of horses, the consequence of a crop failure the year before (caused by the eruption of Tambora). It had a steer-able front wheel. This is the first appearance of the two-wheeler principle that is basic to cycling and motorcycling and minimizes rolling resistance. The velocipedes were made entirely of wood and needed to be balanced by directing the front wheel a bit. People then did not dare to lift the feet off safe ground, therefore the velocipedes were propelled by pushing off with the feet. After the good harvest in 1817 riding velocipedes on sidewalks was forbidden worldwide, since the velocipeders used the sidewalks, and because they could not balance on the rutted carriageway, the fad passed. It took nearly 50 years, until a roller-skating boom created a new public with a better sense of balance. For more information see: http://www.karldrais.de/?lang=en&sid=bd15ff8c6ef29db0e7dd1d7e6e1680ae
1839
Another entry in bicycle lore: Kirkpatric Mcmillan, a Scottish blacksmith adapted a treadle-type pedals to a bicycle, is considered a hoax, see the David Herlihy's book .
1863
Bone Shaker or Velocipede: Made of stiff materials, straight angles and steel wheels make this bike literally a bone shaker to ride over the cobblestone roads of the day. The improvement is a front wheel with peddles -- direct drive, fixed gear, one speed. This machine was known as the velocipede ("fast foot"), but was popularly known as the bone shaker, They also became a fad, and indoor riding academies, similar to roller rinks, could be found in large cities.
1870
Ordinary: These are better know as the "high wheelers". It is more comfortable to ride than its predecessor, but it requires an acrobat so they popularity has always been limited. This was the first all metal machine to appeared. (Previous to this metallurgy was not advanced enough to provide metal which was strong enough to make small, light parts out of.) The pedals were still attached
directly to the front wheel with no freewheeling mechanism. Solid rubber tires and the long spokes of the large front wheel provided a much smoother ride than its predecessor. The front wheels became larger and larger as makers realized that the larger the wheel, the farther you could travel with one rotation of the pedals. You would purchase a wheel as large as your leg length would allow. These bicycles enjoyed a great popularity among young men of means (they cost an average worker six month's pay), with the hey-day being the decade of the 1880's. Because the rider sat so high above the center of gravity, if the front wheel was stopped by a stone or rut in the road, or the sudden emergence of a dog, the entire apparatus rotated forward on its front axle, and the rider, with his legs trapped under the handlebars, was dropped unceremoniously on his head. Here the term "taking a header" came into being. This machine was the first one to be called a bicycle ("two wheel").
1872
Friedrich Fischer (German) first mass-produces steel ball bearings, patented by Jules Suriray in 1869.
1876
Browett and Harrison (English) patent an early caliper brake.
1878
Scott and Phillott (English) patent the first practicable epicyclic change-speed gear fitted into the hub of a front-driving bicycle.
1878
The first American manufacturer of cycles begun with the Columbia Bicycle at the Weed Sewing Machine Company factory in Hartford, Ct. The first regular trade catalogue was twenty pages long. The first bicycles were the 60" High Wheelers and sold for $125.00 when sewing machines sold for $13.00.
1879
Henry J. Lawson (English) patents a rear wheel, chain-driven safety bicycle, the �Bicyclette� (his earlier models were lever driven).
1880
Thomas Humber (English) adapts the block chain for use with his range of bicycles.
1880's
While the men were risking their necks on the high wheels, ladies, confined to their long skirts and corsets, could take a spin around the park on an adult tricycle. These machines also afforded more dignity to gentlemen such as doctors and clergymen. Many mechanical innovations now associated with the automobile were originally invented for tricycles. Rack and pinion steering, the differential, and band brakes, to name a few!
1880
Bicycle Activism: Good roads society organized by bicyclist and lobbied for good roads -- paving the way for motor vehicles !
1884
Thomas Stevens struck out across the country, carrying socks, a spare shirt and a slicker that doubled as tent and bedroll. Leaving San Francisco at 8 o'clock on April 22, 1884, he traveled eastward, reaching Boston after 3700 wagon trail miles, to complete the first transcontinental bicycle ride on August 4, 1884. After a pause, he continued east, circumnavigating earth, and returning to San Francisco on Dec 24, 1886. See Around the World by Bicycle , 2000 reenactment of 1884 ride , and 2006 reenactment of 1885 ride .
1885
Bicycle Playing Cards are introduced and become the most recognizable brands of playing cards sold in the United States. They are currently manufactured by the United States Playing Card Company.
1888
Pneumatic tire: First applied to the bicycle by Scottish born veterinarian, working in Ireland, who was trying to give his sickly young son a more comfortable ride on his tricycle. This inventive young doctor's name was John Boyd Dunlop. Now that comfort and safety could be had in the same package, and that package was getting cheaper as manufacturing methods improved, everyone clamored to ride the bicycle.
1890
Safety Bike: As the name implies the safety bike is safer than the ordinary. The further improvement of metallurgy sparked the next innovation, or rather return to previous design. With metal that was now strong enough to make a fine chain and sprocket small and light enough for a human being to power, the next design was a return to the original configuration of two same-size wheels, only now, instead of just one wheel circumference for every pedal turn, you could, through the gear ratios, have a speed the same as the huge high-wheel. Initially, the bicycles still had the hard rubber tires, and in the absence of the long, shock-absorbing spokes, the ride they provided was much more uncomfortable than any of the high-wheel designs. Many of these bicycles of 100 years ago had front and/or rear suspensions. These designs competed with each other, your choice being the high-wheel's comfort or the safety's safety, but the next innovation tolled the death of the high-wheel design -- pneumatic tires. This is basically the same design as standard contemporary bikes. The safety bike allowed large numbers of people to take up cycling. Bikes were relatively expensive so use was somewhat restrict to the elite.
1890
Mass Production: The bicycle helped make the Gay Nineties what they were. It was a practical investment for the working man as transportation, and gave him a much greater flexibility for leisure. Women would also start riding bicycles in much larger numbers.
1894
Change In Social Order: Betty Bloomer's bloomers become very popular. Ladies, heretofore consigned to riding the heavy adult size tricycles that were only practical for taking a turn around the park, now could ride a much more versatile machine and still keep their legs covered with long skirts. The bicycle craze killed the bustle and the corset, instituted "common-sense dressing" for women and increased their mobility considerably. American Music and women bicyclists . Women and bicycles .
1894
1894
Bamboo bikes are manufactured.
The bicycle messenger business started in California when a railway strike halted mail delivery for the Bay Area. An ingenious bicycle shop owner in Fresno came up with the idea to deliver it by bicycle. He set up a relay between Fresno and San Francisco, with 6 riders covering about 30 miles each. The last rider would cover 60 miles.
1894-95
Annie Kopchovsky (nee Cohan) (a.k.a. Annie Londonderry ) was a Latvian Jewish immigrant to Boston, who traveled around the world. She started in Boston in June 1894 on her Sterling bike and finishing her ride in Chicago in Sept 1895. She was probably the first woman to take a bicycle on a world trip. Reports suggest that she traveled mainly on ships and trains -- riding her bicycles mostly to and from the main ports. She was sponsored by The Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Co.
1895
Ignatz Schwinn and Adolph Arnold formed Arnold, Schwinn & Company to produce bikes. Albert Pope purchased 75 small bicycle manufacturers to form the American Bicycle Company.
1896
"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance." Susan B Anthony
1897
An African-America army corps road 2000 miles from Montana to St. Louis - an amazing story. The Stuhr Museum made a video, "The Bicycle Corps: America's Black Army on Wheels" (2000).
1898
1899
1900
Major Taylor was the American cycling sprint champion, and he topped all European champions as well. Taylor was one of the first black athletes to become a world champion in any sport. (Major Taylor is celebrated in number of books .) See also: The Major Taylor Association , The Major Taylor Society and The Major Taylor Velodrome .
1899-1901
Bicycles first used in conflict in the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Military Bicycles: A Short History
1903
Internal hub gears invented by Sturmey Archer . By 1930 these were used on bikes manufactured around the world. There dominance lasted until the 1950s the parallelogram derailleur was introduced. See also Sturmey Archer Bicycle Hubs .
1920
Kids Bikes: The focus of planning and development of the transportation infrastructure was the private automobiles. Bicycles use declined and the bicycle was considered primarily as children's toys. Kids bikes were introduced just after the First World War by several manufacturers, such as Mead, Sears Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward, to revitalize the bike industry (Schwinn made its big splash slightly later), these designs, now called "classic", featured automobile and motorcycle elements to appeal to kids who, presumably, would rather have a motor. If ever a bike needed a motor, this was it. These bikes evolved into the most glamorous, fabulous, ostentatious, heavy designs ever. It is unbelievable today that 14-year-old kids could do the tricks that we did on these 65 pound machines! They were built into the middle 50s, by which time they had taken on design elements of jet aircraft and even rockets. By the 60s, they were becoming leaner and simpler.
1930
Tullio Campagnolo patents the quick release hub.
1930's
Schwinn introduced the fat tire, spring fork, streamline Excelsior, designed to take the abuse of teenage boys, which was the proto-type mountain bike. The Schwinn Excelsior frames became the model for the early mountain bikes almost fifty years later.
1934
Recumbents banned from racing . This had the effect of putting the recumbent bicycle design in the closet for fifty years, until it was re-discovered, primarily by MIT professor David Gordon Wilson and his students.
1938
Simplex introduced their cable shifted derailleur.
Historic European footage of unusual bikes from the late 1930s and early 1940s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdlpJqHxLxk
1940
Women bicyclists in the French Resistance. by Rebecca G. Halbreich, published in Ex Post Facto , 1994
1950s
Tullio Campagnolo introduced cable-operated, parallelogram derailleur. Campagnolo. For two decades Campagnolo equipment dominated true racing bikes. Eventually, he acquires 135 patents.
1958
Women ride in the first-ever World Championships on the road and track. Balina Ermolaeva becomes the first women's World Sprint Champion; Elsy Jacobs takes the road race.
1962
Renaissance: President's Council of Physical Fitness. Renewed interest in bicycle for recreation and fitness. This was the seed of a new major bicycle boom that accelerated through the 60's. The "English 3-speed" was the fancy consumer model of the time. Before the end of the decade it was the 10-speed derailleur "racing bike" which dominated the American market (the derailleur had been invented before the turn of the century and had been in more-or-less common use in Europe since).
1969
Audrey McElmury is the first American to wins the first World Road Cycling Championship, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, opening the door for American women to compete regularly in World Road cycling competition.
1970
Earth Day: Increased awareness of westerns civilization's level of consumption of natural resources, air pollution, and destruction of the natural environment. This generated a new spurt in the growth of bicycle sales and bicycling, especially around college campuses.
1973
Oil embargo: Fuel shortages and shifts in relative price of transportation options created an environment which encouraged bicycle commuting. Many of the new recruits to bicycling stuck to it after the end of the embargo and became enthusiasts. There was also reinvigorated interest in the engineering of bicycles, including renewed interest recumbents and fairings.
1976
Bikecentennial organized thousands of Americans to ride coast-to-coast to celebration the United States' bicentennial. The project raised the profile of bicycle touring in North America and continues to this day as the Adventure Cycling Association.
1977
The prototype of the mountain bikes were first developed in Marin Co, California, north of San Francisco. Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Gary Fisher, and Craig Mitchell were the earliest designers, builders and promoters.
1978
A new round of steep oil prices increases further encouraged bicycling. More bikes than car were being sold in the USA. Triple chain-ring cranks had become widely available, adding to the range of situation that bicycle were practical for.
1980's
Renewed interests in health and fitness, by the middle and upper class perpetuated the acceptance and growth of commuting, recreational and touring bicycling.
1980's
Bike messengers develop should backs to carry large envelopes flat. The style migrates into general use as an alternative to back packs, ruck sacks and purses.
1980's
Aerobic exercisers take the padding out of bike shorts and use them in exercise class. The style migrates into general use -- some wearers haven't exercised in decades.
1984
Tour de France Feminine run for the first time (winner: Marianne Martin.)
1984
Women's road race included in the Olympics for the first time (winner: Connie Carpenter.) Successes by American racing cyclist in the 1984 Olympics drew attention and added prestige to cycling. The ranks of racing cyclists grew substantially.
1984
Cogs began to be added to the rear gear cluster the number of speeds increase from 15 to 18, 21 and 24.
1984
Three-time national XC champion Jacquie Phelan founds the Women's Mountain Bike and Tea Society; the first formal outreach organization for women. WOMBATS is dedicated to introducing women to mountain biking in a fun, non-competitive environment.
1986
Department of the Interior and Nielson surveys show that bicycling is the third most popular participatory sport after swimming and general exercise.
1990
Shimano (Japanese) introduces integrated brake/gear levers.
1994
Sachs (SRAM) introduces PowerDisc, the first mass-produced hydraulic disc brake system.
1996
Mountain Bike compete at the Olympic Games for the first time in Atlanta, GA USA.
2000
Rohloff Speedhub 14 speed internal hub gearing system, with no overlapping ratios and a gear range as wide as a 27-speed derailleur system.
2002
|
Velocipede
|
A modern 'balance bicycle' is purpose-designed for?
|
Who Invented the Bicycle?
You are here: Home | History of Bicycles | Who Invented the Bicycle
Who Invented the Bicycle ?
I know many of you here tonight are dying to find out 'Who Invented The Bicycle'?
So ladies and gents, boys and girls, Now is the moment you've all been waiting for...
Lights, drum roll please ...
The shocking truth is that ...
NOBODY actually invented the bicycle - as we know it today.
WHAT!! I hear you gasp down there at the front row. IMPOSSIBLE!
No madam not impossible.
Because - this mighty machine is a product of over 200 years of spectacular EVOLUTION. Let me explain...
But first let me ask you this so I know where to start.
When is a bicycle, a bicycle?
Does a hand or foot propelled plank of wood with two wheels and a cushion, count?
If your answer is YES ...
Then we must consider that the prototype of the bicycle was invented by French craftsman, Comte Mede De Sivrac, back in the 1790's.
His vehicle was called a Celerifere or Velocifere.
However, ladies and gentlemen, if your answer be NO ...
(and I must say I myself am inclined to vote this way)
Then we must regard the great-granddaddy of the modern bicycle to be the German nobleman, Baron Karl Drais Von Sauerbronn.
Draisienne 1817 - Baron Karl Drais Von Sauerbronn
The good baron patented his DRAISINE (named after his good self) in 1817.
The Draisine (or Draisienne) had two wheels and a wooden frame with a rotating handlebar attached, which permitted the front wheel to be turned.
It was powered by pushing with your feet along the ground.
Of course, the Baron found it incredibly useful for covering the large distances he travelled to collect his tenants' taxes.
Ah yes... even back then they were coming up with better ways to get those taxes out of you.
But I digress...
The Baron's invention caught on across Europe and England.
Other inventors began to tinker with his design.
They added arm-rests, adjustable seats and gave them fancy names like the hobby horse and dandy horse (a reference to their expensive price tags).
In 1818, back in England, the enterprising Denis Johnson, patented his own invention - Johnson's Hobby Horse ...
It was essentially a modification (read - rip-off) of the Baron's Draisine and with great marketing became very popular for a while.
Then in 1839 a Scottish blacksmith by the name of Kirkpatrick Macmillan, came up with an ingenious way of making it possible for the Draisine to be ridden with your feet OFF the ground.
Guess how ladies and gentlemen? Go on take a stab.
That's right sir. PEDALS!
Well... technically they were known as a Foot Treadle - but who am I to quibble...
The foot treadle was connected to the back wheel.
SO NOW WE HAVE A DILEMMA...
Many claim MACMILLAN to be the true inventor of the bicycle.
But ask yourself this...
Was Macmillan The Man Who Invented The Bicycle ?
If all the chaps before him hadn't invented their primitive bikes first, would young KirkPatrick come up with the idea for a bicycle prototype or would he still just have been pumping the billows and hammering iron in his forge?
I'm not judging one way or the other - just throwing the question out there.
You decide...
All I'm going to say is ... EVOLUTION, folks, EVOLUTION!!
Pedalling right along now...
Macmillian Kirkpatrick's pedal bicycle triggered a craze for bicycle riding.
It is interesting to note, friends, that no one had a serious crack at improving this design for another 6 years until the development of the Dalzell by another Scotsman, Gavin Dazell.
The new improved Dalzell became rather popular with the Brits.
Two decades later came the next big EVOLUTION of the bicycle. This time it was a French man PIERRE MICHAUX and his son Ernest.
Michaux Velocipede 1863 - Michaux et Cie
In 1863 the Michauxs came up with the idea of attaching the pedals to a cranked arm, which would then propel the FRONT wheel.
GENIUS!!
Pierre joined together with the enterprising Olivier Brothers to form a velocipedes company called Michaux et Cie (Michaux and Company).
The Michaux velocipede was the world's first mass-produced bicycle. It caused a sensation across the continent and the craze lasted two years until the next big fad came along.
By all accounts it was an INCREDIBLY uncomfortable bike.
It had a wooden frame and wooden wheels. Those wheels were then encased in iron ... IRON!!
The front wheel was slightly higher than the back.
And the pedals were attached to the front wheel.
And, I must say the seat looks TINY.
I imagine the size of the average bottom must have been vastly smaller in the 1800's than they are today. Just looking at that seat makes me feel uncomfortable!! In England they called it...
No actually you guess. Go on. No idea?
It was called the BONESHAKER.
Don't you love it?!! Can't you just imagine some poor bloke's teeth rattling as he judders over the old cobblestone roads on his Boneshaker. PRICELESS!
Despite this the old Boneshaker was immensely popular.
Unfortunately for the poor old working men and women, Michaux's velocipede was expensive. This meant that only the folks at the high-end of town could afford it.
Aren't we lucky, ladies and gents to live in a time where, I bet just about every one of you here tonight, has their very own bicycle?
Now at this point we should also mention PIERRE LALLEMENT.
Pierre has big supporters at the ICHC who claim it is indeed HE who invented the bicycle.
Ahh... so MANY claims for such a humble machine! OK so this is Lallement's story...
Lallement Velocipede 1862 - Pierre Lallement
In 1862 Pierre took a dandy horse and modified it.
In his design he attached a transmission to the front-wheel hub.
The transmission was made up of a rotary crank device and pedals.
Lallement then travelled to Paris (and excuse the pun), pedalled his invention about...
While he received some interest from those enterprising Olivier Brothers, he had no REAL success and he moved to the USA.
Sadly, for Lallement, despite patenting his design in America in 1866, it never really took off. He couldn't secure an investor or a manufacturer.
So... poor Pierre returned to Paris JUST in time to see the Michaux Velocipede craze sweep across Europe AND ironically... AMERICA!!
(That must have been rather galling don't you think folks? Talk about bad timing!)
Lallement stuck around for a few more years then returned to America. He sold his patent to Boston entrepreneur Calvin Witty. Eventually the bicycle importer Albert Pope (left) bought the patent and made squillians of dollars from it. Lallement died in obscurity at the young age of 47 ...
Talk about TRAGIC. You can see now why I thought we should give the poor chap his dues. Who would be an INVENTOR!!
Honestly, ladies and gentlemen, it seems to be all hard graft and heartache. With somebody ELSE reaping the financial rewards... Uh huh... no way. Not for me. I'd rather run away with the circus...
Velocipede .n
Velocipede was a term coined to describe the whole bang lot, of these new types of bicycles.
If it was HUMAN-POWERED then it was a velocipede.
Two, three or four wheels? Didn't matter. VELOCIPEDE.
(I'm really starting to like the way that word sounds in my mouth now. Try it. Kinda sounds like the word velocity don't you think?)
Yes madam? Yes - you over there in the stalls? What does velocipede mean, did you ask?
Well, velocipede is the Latin way of saying fast foot.
Interesting huh!
Under the umbrella of the velocipede came a new bicycle commonly known as the Penny-Farthing or High Bicycle.
Penny Farthing or High Bicycle
The Penny Farthing was manufactured in about 1870.
Debate rages whether it was Frenchman Eugene Meyer or Englishman James Starley who invented the Penny-Farthing bicycle.
However, tonight, for the sake of impartiality, let's just say they both made a major contribution, did a sterling job and leave it at that ...
Phew. I think I handled that diplomatically...
(Although I suspect the boss going to have a few vigorous objections to handle tonight after the show.)
No good? Too impartial? OK then, here goes...
Father of the High Bicycle
(sorry James)
Frenchman Eugene Meyer, is now OFFICIALLY considered the Father of the High Bicycle by the ICHC.
In 1869 Eugene invented the classic High-Bicycle design and fashioned the wire-spoke tension wheel.
Apparently James Starley LATER added the tangent spokes and the mounting step to his famous bicycle named Ariel.
Ah well England.
You lose some.
Still...
Mr Starley continues to hold the distinguished position of being considered as the Father of the British Cycling Industry.
No small claim to fame, if I do say so myself!
Right. Back to the Penny-Farthing ...
Surely you have all seen one of these.
It has a great big wheel at the front and a tiny wheel at the back.
It was named - as you of course will have already deduced - after the British coins the Penny and ... you guessed it ... the Farthing
OK so you knew that, but did you know this ...
Ordinary Bicycle ?
To name it ORDINARY! Ordinary? Ordinary?
I ask you ladies and gentlemen, is there anything remotely ordinary about that bicycle?
Did you also know that ...
In America they called riders of the Penny-Farthing Wheelmen.
This name stuck for a 100 years until the term was replaced with Bicyclists.
The Penny-Farthing was built with a large front wheel, essentially for purposes of SPEED.
It was, however, NOT renown for its safety.
In fact they had quite a reputation for being accident-prone. Which, ladies and gentlemen, creates a nice little segway for us into the introduction of the SAFETY BICYCLE.
Rover Safety Bicycle 1885 - John Kemp Starley
John Kemp Starley was the English chap who is credited with pioneering the shape of our MODERN-DAY bicycle. Yes... another Starley.
And Yes. Related... Nephew I believe.
So Starley was the man who invented the ROVER SAFETY BICYCLE...
Rover as in the car and motorcycle - but of course they came much later.
The Rover Safety Bicycle was an instant success. It pretty much wiped out the old velocipede industry overnight.
WHY?
Well for a start it was much more stable that the old Penny-Farthing. It had two smaller, similar-sized wheels ...
(A great start already I'd say, ladies and gentlemen, wouldn't you?)
It was a rear wheel drive.
It had a diamond frame connecting the wheels.
The pedals were attached to a sprocket through gears and a chain.
AND the best thing - Drum roll please ...
TYRES. PNEUMATIC TYRES. Air-filled tyres!!
Now some people argue that Starley's addition of the CHAIN was the best thing...
but I'm voting for the tyres myself.
Pneumatic tyres are much less bone-shaking and bottom bruising!!
OH and just to set the record straight ...
Those pneumatic tyres were developed in 1887, by John Boyd Dunlop - founder of the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co. (NOT by Starley)
Note folks I said DEVELOPED not invented.
Yes indeed. Another controversy ...
The emergence of the safety bicycle was a SOCIAL REVOLUTION.
Ordinary folk could travel further
Explore their little corner of the world
Meet new and interesting people
Encounter new ideas
Expand their pool of potential spouses
And for women it was a major boost to the SUFFRAGETTE movement.
The idea of cycling for HEALTH took a hold.
INCREDIBLE! What would they come up with next!!
New industries sprung up around the cycling enthusiasts.
Inns
Entire newspaper columns just DEVOTED to cycling were written ...
The GOLDEN AGE of BICYCLING had arrived ....
In 1896, The New York Evening Post proclaimed:
As a social revolutionizer the bicycle has never had an equal.
It has put the human race on wheels, and thus changed completely many of the ordinary processes and methods of social life.
It is the great leveller. For not until all Americans got on bicycles was the great American principle that every man is just as good as another man realized. All are on equal terms, all are happier than ever before.
WOW! What a wrap for the little old bicycle, wouldn't you say, ladies and gents? Of course nobody stopped tinkering with the Safety Bike.
Nothing is THAT perfect ...
Modifications were made. New features introduced.
The hand brake
The safety bicycle phenomenon continued to grip the Western world until ...
The development of the MOTORCYCLE and AUTOMOBILE!!
Sadly after that, the beloved bicycle gradually became relegated to the category of a child's plaything.
One only rode them until they were old enough to get their driver's licence.
This is one of the greatest TRAGEDIES to befall our planet, ladies and gentlemen!!
FOSSIL FUELS. POLLUTION. WARS. ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE. ROAD TOLLS. CONGESTION. OBESITY!
If only we had stuck with the BICYCLE!!
To quote that most eloquent of authors - Elizabeth West ...
When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.
Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.
And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became.
Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others.
Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.
Pretty much sums it up wouldn't you say friends?
Of course I am rather biased ... working here and all.
HOWEVER ...
It gladdens my heart to say that cycling is starting to make a come back, ladies and gentlemen! Its WORTH is starting to be re-appreciated.
It is being VALUED for its:
economy
|
i don't know
|
In 2013 Dutch cyclist Sebastiaan Bowier set a world speed record for a bicycle (unassisted, human powered vehicle) of what mph? 49; 57; 72 or 83?
|
The Recumbent Bicycle and Human Powered Vehicle Information Center
The Top Human Powered Achievements for 2013.
Foreword: Views and opinions in this list are my own! Factual data is based on my years of keeping statistics on human powered vehicle data. Over this past year I’ve had contact with many of the individuals and teams on this list. I’ve been sent emails and data from some of the European events. I've also attended Battle Mountain, so was a first-hand witness to some of these events. All world or national records that I mention must be considered unofficial until they are recognized by the IHPVA or WHPVA. In all cases where I mention a RECORD its simply my acknowledge that it is the best ever performance in that category, whether or not the category officially exists in the IHPVA/WHPVA.
1) AeroVelo / University of Toronto team members winning the $250,000 Sikorsky prize for Human Powered helicopter flight, something that took 33 years to achieve. They achieved a flight that met the rules requiring a flight of at least one minute duration, a maximum altitude of ten feet at one point during the flight, and stayed within a 10 x 10 meter square to demonstrate control. Students and graduates of University of Toronto designed and built their helicopter, called the Atlas in only 3 months, then spent 9 months testing (and crashing it). Their technological achievements earned them major press in worldwide publications. Their prize achievement was voted the Number 8 technological achievement in the entire world in Dec 2013 (hence its #1 on this list!). Todd Reichert was the pilot on the prize winning flight, as he was on their snowbird human powered flapping wing ornithopter in 2010, another world first. He generated over one horsepower, with peak power required in the first part of the flight to climb to the ten foot altitude. Close to the ground, ground effect from the rotor downwash helped produce lift. Both devices fulfilled 500-year old designs first proposed by Leonardo daVinci of allowing humans to fly. They also relied on the successful teamwork of team members forged during four years of building four human powered streamliners for the ASME student human powered vehicle competition. Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson are the two founding members of AeroVelo. They had a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds necessary to build the Atlas. The team flew at the Toronto indoor soccer center. The four quad rotor Atlas was the largest human powered helicopter ever built, yet was very lightweight. It may be the 2nd largest helicopter ever built. They designed an ingenious control system that pulled on the blades using wires attached to the Cervelo (also a Toronto company) bicycle that the rider sat on in an upright riding position. This was to maintain flight. It was designed almost by accident after an earlier control system wasn't working right. Like other few teams trying for the prize, including Maryland (see #4) below, they had to endure several crashes, and setbacks. In the late 1970’s, human powered flights of the Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross by designed by Paul MacCready and Aerovironment in California and flown by Bryan Allen also generated the same worldwide publicity as the University of Toronto earned with their human powered orintopher in 2010 and now their human powered helicopter 2013 achievements. Such achievements are recognized far beyond the human powered racing community.
2) Human Powered Team Delft (students from TU Delft and the University of Amsterdam) setting a new world speed record of (133.78 kph, 83.13 mph) breaking Team Varna and Sam Whittingham's 13 year reign as the top speed record holder. This was the culmination of three years of work and three different vehicles that TU Delft built, each vehicle going over 80 mph powered by Sebastiaan Bowier. Delft achieved what student teams first did at the beginning of the IHPVA racing, that is get the overall top speed record. This was first accomplished by Northrop University in the late 1970's when they consistency had the top speed record with student designers and strong Olympic athletes. (Note: the three fastest student teams in history (Delft, Toronto, IUT Annecy) were at Battle Mountain this year, the second year in a row that happened, and each team set their fastest speeds ever) This in itself, might be considered a sub-achievement. Since the Dupont Prize was won in 1986, only a handful of people can lay claim to being the world's fastest human. This list is Fred Markham (1986), Chris Huber (1992), Sam Whittingham (2000), Sebastiaan Bowier (2013).
3) Maria Parker's RAAM win in the female recumbent category on a Cruzbike recumbent after losing almost a day due to her support van being damaged. This is a story of perseverance and a win after a setback. An intriguing human interest story that was closely followed by hundreds of members of the recumbent community online throughout the week of racing. RAAM is considered one of the hardest racing and athletic events in the world, with athletes racing for as many hours a day as they can for about ten days straight (in the single rider division) to cross the continent, a nearly 3000 mile journey. Maria's husband Jim Parker is one of the designers and owners of the successful Cruzbike line or recumbents. Their designs feature a moving bottom bracket front wheel drive recumbent. So like the other people at the top of this list, they had an active role in the design and building of the product they raced.
4) University of Maryland’s human powered helicopter flight world records in the first half of the year. They had the endurance record with I believe a 47 second to 57 second flight, and achieved the maximum altitude records before Toronto set its records and achieved the Sikorsky prize. Maryland was leading the battle. There battle was depicted in the article that aired just before the prize was won. They had a female rider on some flights, and a hand and foot powered machine. The Gamera helicopter is itself, an enormous technological and athletic human powered achievement, which the team had spent more than several years working on and flying. Only a small number of machines worldwide had ever achieved a working human powered helicopter, and University of Maryland's was the best in the world at the beginning of the year.
5) Graeme Obree's successful Prone bicycle, called the Beastie, built by himself racing at Battle Mountain for the first time. While it was not the fastest vehicle it will likely be (after the movie comes out, see below) be one of the most famous vehicles that’s ever raced at Battle Mountain. Nor perhaps was it the most technological well built. This is a characteristic of Obree who builds stuff with the aid of parts repurposed from household items without the aid of advanced fabrication methods. In this case a frying pan for the Beastie Prone, earlier a washing machine bearing for his world record setting upright bike Old faithful. He was supposed to show up last year, but it got delayed until this year. Graeme Obree is arguably the most famous cyclist to ever race at Battle Mountain. He is known worldwide to millions of bicyclists, a national hero in Scotland and one of the foremost proponents of thinking outside the box in bicycle design and racing. Hence he was welcomed in the human powered streamlined racing community, because it is itself a group of unconventional bicycle designers. His achievements in the realm of conventional UCI bicycle racing were extraordinary in 1993 and 1994, when he twice set the world one-hour record and world 4000-meter pursuit record on the track on his own unconventional upright bicycle using unique handlebar positions. This led to a later ban by the UCI against aerobars. He was a world champion and a film and book made about his life called the Flying Scotsman. As of Dec 2013, it has just been announced that 20,000 British pounds has been raised by Journey publications to make a movie called “The Outsider” which will document the past two years of Graeme Obree’s journey to the United States to race in the World Human powered Speed Challenge. What Graeme did achieve was the setting of the Fastest Single Rider Prone Vehicle record, a Scottish National record, and the fastest vehicle with a sort of Linear drive mechanism, and perhaps fastest vehicle with a Fixed Gear. No serious prone machines had been attempted since the early days of the IHPVA, from about 1975 and 1976 when Ralph Therrio and later Dr. Alan Abbott had the overall top speed record, and in 1983-1984 when Steve Ball’s machine was the fastest prone.
Edited by - Upright Mike on 12/20/2013 11:37:10
Trisled site claims:
Vehicle: Completely Overzealous
World multitrack single rider 1-hour distance record (2013), Ford proving ground Australia, 71.79 MPH (115 KPH), Rider Gareth Hanks
72 MPH for an hour?? Isn't that faster than the Euro 1 hour records?
I am thinking that this should have been 71.79 KPH (44MPH) and that their web person had a bit of a mixup. I'll try to get Ben to give us the real numbers.
This is their 200 meter record at Battle Mountain. Yes, I have two One Hour Trike records (pending approval of course by the IHPVA) that Gareth set this past year. Those are on List too.
6) Gareth Hank’s Two World Records for One-Hour in the Single-Rider Trike Category. These were set seven months apart using the Completely Overzealous, a Tad-Pole trike, with two wheels enclosed, narrow track velomobile, with rear wheel drive and head bubble. Gareth was the principal designer and fabricator of this bike, with some collaboration with TriSled. Both times he rode at the Ford You-Yang’s Proving Grounds near Lara, Australia. This achievement built on the success that he had in September 2012 at Battle Mountain, when he set the Trike Top speed four times, becoming the first trike to exceed 70 mph. His achievements:
Record #1: (71.376 km, 44.351 miles) March 31, 2013: Gareth beat previous best single-rider trike mark set by Daniel Fenn’s by 5.5 km. Set a new Australian One-Hour Record, beating Ben Goodall’s mark set earlier in the day. At that time, it was the 2nd best trike mark behind Vector Tandem's, made him the 20th fastest one-hour rider, and was the 46th best mark ever on the All-time lists
Record #2: (73.800 km, 45.857 miles) November 1, 2013: Gareth beat his previous mark by over 2 km, set a new Australian National One Hour record, At that time, it was the 2nd best trike mark behind Vector Tandem's, made him the 20th fastest one-hour rider, and was the 42th best mark ever on the All-time lists.
Official records were just recently recognized by the IHPVA in the Trike/Multitrack category. This category had not seen significant improvement in a long time. Prior to this, the best Trike mark was Daniel Fenn who rode (correction based on new RDW lap distance of 2.775 km for bikes in 2013, versue 2.85 km in 2012) 65.705 km, 40.828 miles
67.481km, 41.931 miles
in his self-designed Evo-V Velomobile on the RDW Track in winning CycleVision 2012. (This year Daniel rode 67.278 km, 41.805 miles, faster). Before this, Gerhardt Scheller held the long-standing Single-rider Trike mark from 1987 when he set a 100 KM record 40.86 65.76 km. As of this year, Gareth’s two marks and Daniels’ two marks are the only ones to exceed Gerhardt’s mark from 1987. Note Chuck Royalty was on 43.6 mph pace for 48 minutes in the Orion trike in 2009 at the Ford track, before a part failure that occurred during shipping of the trike occurred . (*all records still pending approval).
7) Team Cieo’s Multiple Rider (Tandem) One Hour record (83.013 km, 51.582 miles) at Dekra, a smashing the 33 year old Vector Tandem record of (74.51 km, 46.3 miles) from 1980. This first-year student-built design from ETH-Zurich or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich is now the 4th fastest student team on the planet, and they have not attended Battle Mountain yet. Ruben Koch, Dominik Dusek 32 & 29 years old were the strong amateurs that powered the bike. They became the 7th best individual or team on the all-time Hour record list at the Dekra World Record Weekend 2013, Friday July 26, 2013 They were riding a new bike in less than ideal (very hot) conditions. Later in the weekend, the supposedly “stronger” team was riding hard for another possible One Hour record when they crashed at Dekra. The Cieo Tandem may be ushering in a new type of design with their vehicle in which one rider lays below the other The captain is in a supine position elevated above stoker who is laying on his back in a headfirst position. They power independent drivetrains.
They’ve demonstrated the same dramatic improvement in their record category, as has been seen in other records categories in the past few years. (examples of other big improvements: Single-Rider Trike in 200-meters and One-Hour by Gareth Hanks in 2012 & 2103, Multiple Rider 200-meters by the Glowworm in 2012 & 2013, Women’s records in the 200-meters and One-Hour in 2009 & 2010 by Barbara Buatois). The Vector Tandem’s record rewrote the history books when it was set, as only a few years earlier, teams were just breaking the same speeds in the 200-meters, and by 1980, they were able to hold that speed for One-Hour. And prior to that, the best One-Hour distance was only about 31.8 miles by Ron Skarin in the Teledyne Titan.
8) University of Toronto’s BlueNose incredible speed on Saturday morning at Battle Mountain, with three riders doing (123 to 125 kph, 76.5 to 77.7 mph) and four over 70 mph. This was like a lightning bolt out of the blue, my initial feeling was astonishment when I saw the times reported from that Saturday morning at Battle Mountain. Only Team Delft can claim three riders (Sebastian, Wil, Jan Bos) went that fast (over 76 mph), but not all in the same machine (VeloX1,2,3), and not all in the same year. The BlueNose’s performance was not entirely unexpected, but it solidified their placing as a legitimate contender to the top-speed record. The team was organized enough to pack up, speed 6 miles up the highway and send another rider, then another down Hwy 305 with all of them setting personal bests. The BlueNose started life in 2012 as an ASME streamliner, and had multiple problems with handling crashing at the ASME races. Back then it had plastic windshield, then after significant testing at the Ford track this summer, it became a hard-shelled top made of carbon with a camera vision system. Its vision system pioneered by Oleksiy Ryndin won an Innovation award at Battle Mountain. BlueNose went through extensive sanding and prep work throughout the week. Todd Reichert had a big crash in it from a radial tire problem. Speeds were slow in the 40 to 50 mph range in the beginning of the week. The team first went 60 mph on Wed. At some point during the week, they added a vertical stabilizer fin. Trefor and Todd went 64 and 68 mph on Thursday. Then on Friday morning, Todd smashed his personal best and the team best with a 74 mph run, Cameron followed that with a 68 mph run, and Calvin did a 71 mph run, but then on Saturday morning, after a paint job overnight, these were the astonishing results, in the order that they happened.
Todd Reichert (125.02 kph, 77.68 mph) made University of Toronto the 2nd fastest student built team in history (by 0.005 sec), 2nd fastest Canadian athlete behind Sam Whittingham, ranked 7th in world after 2013 event
Cameron Robertson (113.82 kph, 70.72 mph), became the 5th fastest Canadian, and ranked 26th in the world after the 2013 event.
Calvin Moes (123.12 kph, 76.5 mph) 21 years old 2nd fastest student athlete in history (currently attending classes at the undergraduate level), 4th fastest Canadian, 1st time rider at Battle Mountain, ranked 12th in world after 2013 event
Trefor Evans (123.67 kph, 76.84 mph) 21 years old, Fastest student athlete in history (currently attending classes at the undergraduate level), 3rd fastest Canadian, ranked 11th in world after 2013 event
These achievements eared all four riders new hats. Todd, Trefor and Calvin got 75 mph hats, and Cameron a 70 mph hat.
9) The three fastest student-teams in history all setting bests at Battle Mountain. TU Delft, University of Toronto, and IUT Annecy. They each have 3 or 4 years of experience now at Battle Mountain. The 0.05 mph difference between Toronto and IUT Annecy. As mentioned above, the student history of producing fast-speed bikes was strongly renewed in the past few years at Battle Mountain, and this year was the best ever. Delft achieved what student teams first did at the beginning of the IHPVA racing, that is get the overall top speed record. This was first accomplished by Northrop University in the late 1970's when they consistency had the top speed record with student designers and strong Olympic athletes.
10) Ellen van Vugt’s two One Hour Personal Bests in the VeloXS2 (79.333 km, 49.295 miles) at the Dekra Record Weekend. Ellen finished her run in the dark and with high heat conditions. She was 13th best Hour rider ever. This was Ellen's 2nd personal best of the weekend. Earlier she rode (74.8 km, 46.478 miles). She improved upon her personal best of 74 km, 46 miles set last year. The VeloXS2 was designed by David Wielemaker (formerly of TU Delft) and built by Team Elan, incluindg Hans van Vugt and Daniel Fenn, in the Beyss Leichtfahrzeuge (workshop). Ellen stayed in her position as the 2nd fastest lady ever in one-hour, but still behind Barbara's two records of 51.0 and 52.2 miles set at the Ford test track in 2009. The VeloXS2 is a narrowed version of the VeloXS that Ellen had raced in 2012 at Battle Mountain, in which she went over 70 mph. That vehicle was also designed by David.
Edited by - Upright Mike on 12/20/2013 22:28:48
11) Aurélien Bonneteau‘s (124.91 kph, 77.62 mph) new French National Record for 200-meters in IUT Annecy’s Altair4. He moved past Barbara Buatois’s fastest legal speeds. She held the French national records for men or female since 2009. It was only marginally faster than his non-legal wind speed from last year. This made IUT 3rd fastest student team, because Todd Reichert’s from University of Toronto’s best speed was 0.05 mph faster. Aurélien is now the 8th fastest human on the planet after 2013 event.
12) Ben Goodall’s (115.63 kph, 71.85 mph) new Australian National Record for 200-meters in his self-built Nitroglycerin bicycle. This was an improvement by just 0.1 kph over Gareth Hank’s previous record in the Completely Overzealous trike in 2012. So Ben on two wheels was just a fraction quicker than Gareth on three-wheels. Ben also went over 70 mph last year at Battle Mountain. Ben is amongst the quickest builder/riders on the planet (defined by people who have designed, built and ridden their own machines). This list includes Matt Weaver 78.02 mph, University of Toronto riders with Todd's best of 77.68 mph, Damjan Zabovnik 77.15 mph, and just a little bit ahead of Larry Lem in the Glowworm Tandem.
13) University of Toronto’s Human Powered Helicopter Endurance records and Number of People who have flown records. These include the longest time aloft by a female, set by Alexis Reichert, Todd Reichert’s sister. She set two records of I believe 47 seconds, the 54 seconds. Trefor also set a maximum time aloft record. No one attempted the maximum altitude record that Todd achieved on the Sikorsky flight, which requires maximum power output. Also before one weekend in the fall-time, more people (12) had walked on the surface of the moon than had flown a human powered helicopter. In an incredible act of generosity, and to demonstrate just how obtainable human powered helicopter flight was, the team allowed more than a dozen people to fly the helicopter, nearly doubling the number of people worldwide who had flown. Amongst the new pilots were the team members, Professor Nogami, and representatives from Sikorsky.
14) Florian Kowalik’s near miss of the Age 14 year and Under Junior world record with a crash at 57 mph in the timing traps at Battle Mountain on Saturday morning. Florian did achieve a best of (88.71 kph, 55.12 mph) earlier. The crash was caused by windshield fogging when his team taped up a windshield vent. He became the second fastest Age 14 & Under Junior. He was aiming to break Charlie Ollinger's 57.70 mph Junior record set in 2005 with M5. Hopefully Florian will be back next year to try for Mackie Martin's 61.45 mph overall Junior record, set at Age 16 in the Virtual Rush. Florian was another of the 1st time riders at Battle Mountain this year. He was an inspiration to others throughout the event. Several times, the older riders stepped aside to let Florian run in better wind and temperature conditions with the hopes that he could set the Junior record.
15) Wil Baselman’s (127.43 kph, 79.18 mph) Personal best at Battle Mountain in the VeloX3 Wil is about 42 years old, nearly the same age as Jan Marcel van Diken, so both would have the over 40 years old best speeds. Last year Jan-Marcel went about 79.4 mph unofficially via high-speed film analysis, but missed having an official timing. So officially Wil is the 3rd fastest in the world, but could be the 4th fastest in the world and 3rd fastest Dutch-man. He was a first-time rider at Battle Mountain. Wil never got the chance to complete an One Hour run at Dekra this past summer, due to high heat, but is he did, he would have likely had a new Dutch record.
16) Phil Plath and Randy Gillett (117.53 kph, 73.03 mph) coming within 0.05 mph of the Tandem world record in the Glowworm. Everyone might remember their crash more though which occurred later in the week, and at a slower speed.
17) Ben Goodall’s Australian One Hour Record (68 km, 42.253 miles) in his self-built Nitro Glycerine This was a national record for less than a day on March 31, 2013, as Gareth Hanks later broke it, and then broke it again later in the year (see 6), At that time, Ben’s mark was the 58th best mark ever, 25th fastest one-hour rider This was at the Australian HPV Speed Trials at Ford You Yangs Proving Ground near Lara Australia. It’s a 2.97 mile oval at sea-level. Ben is a strong amateur, 34 years old. His streamlined recumbent has a top that slips over integral roll-cage sections
18) Daniel Fenn's 67.278 km One Hour in his Evo-V Velomobile for first place at the RDW/Bann Hour Race. Saturday, June 29, 2013. There was no CycleVision held at the RDW track this year, only this one-hour race. DISTANCES FROM LAST YEAR USED A 2.850 km track length based on the distances a car woudl travel the RDW track, new track length in 2013 for bicycles is 2.775 km so last years distance needs recomputation)
This was just short of personal best
(and the unofficial Trike Single Rider world record) he set there last year. A sub-record might be the high average speeds (almost 40 mph) of velomobiles during this year’s One-Hour race and last year’s One-Hour race on the RDW track, a 1.75 mile oval track near sea-level. Last year’s racers averaged slightly faster speeds. But these two sets of results show that with velomobiles averaging speeds of around 40 mph, they are a very fast design.
19) Bryce Marquardt (54.906 km, 34.117 miles) WORLD RECORD - Junior Age (12-14 years) ONE HOUR, finished run in dark, Became amongst the Top 100 fastest one-hour riders of all-time, and only age 14.
20) The 24-hour Pedal vs. Paddle battle between Greg K and Greg Carter on the water near Whitefish Point, Montana. Their first attempt was cut short by bad weather, rain, wind, and waves. I’m not sure if they completed the 24 hour distance. Both were attempting to better thier 24-hour distance world records on the water.
21) Todd Reichert 58.928 kph, 36.62 mph average setting a streamliner 100-lap record at the 382 meter outdoor concrete Northbrook Velodrome, one of the best contested Streamliner events in North America. 14 streamliners were racing this year. He broke Dennis Grelk’s track record by about 1 mph.
22) Chris Evans winning the BlackBear 100 mile race in a COURSE RECORD of 3:36:09 (44 kph, 27.4 mph) in a Quest streamliner, well ahead of the field. Previously Dave Johnson had won this event at least four times overall, riding the two-wheeled Great White streamliner, and held the course record of 3 hours 38 minutes. This year Dave did 3:43:25. The first nonfaired upright rider finished well back in 4:09:33, more than 33 minutes slower than Chris's winning time. The course has changed over the years. Bill Hannon (who didn't ride this year), riding a F40, and has done sub four hours before, even at age 68+. This is one of the best races in the US, where recumbents are allowed to race head-to head with uprights over a timed course. There are typically some strong road racing packs of cyclists that work together drafting, whereas a recumbent is usually on their own.
23) The incredible record smashing of UCI world records at the 250-meter indoor wooden velodrome in Aguascalientes, Mexico at the UCI World Cup Dec 6 and Dec 7, 2013. Seven record categories were broken including Men’s and Women’s 200-meters, Men’s 1 kilometer, men's team sprint (Germany), 500m time trial (Anna Meares), women's team sprint (Germany) and women's team pursuit (Great Britain). Kristina Vogel of Germany set a new 200-meter flying start world record at 10.384 sec = 69.34 kph = 43.08 mph. This new (2009 built) very fast velodrome is built of super-hard wood which may be part of its speed secret. The other is its high-altitude location of 1870 meters, 6135 feet, which is significantly lower than the outdoor 333 meter velodrome in La Paz Bolivia, but apparently quite a bit faster. What was fascinating was that not only was the records broken by one athlete, but four or five athletes broke the men’s 200-meter and kilometer records topped by 29-year old Francois Pervis of France, a rider left off the French Olympic team last year, but this year, he says he is in the best form of his life.
24) Francois Pervis Men's 1000 meter standing start: 56.303 seconds = 63.94 kph = 39.37 mph. This smashes Arnaud Tournant's 58.875 second record set in La Paz. What is even more impressive is that ten riders went under one minute for the Kilo, and this time FIVE RIDERS broke the world record. That might be like ten riders suddenly doing over 80 mph at Battle Mountain During this run, he broke the ultimate record for 1000-meters standing start time trial, previously held by Sandro Bollino's Lighting X-2 a streamlined human powered vehicle. 58.13 seconds, 38.48 mph, 61.93 kph in a straight-line Kilometer along an airport runway or public road at Interlaken, Switzerland during 1999 World Human Powered Speed Championships and Francois Pervis may have bettered the Quarter-Mile best time, unofficially held by Chris Hoy. Chris Hoy's Kilometer splits at previous events indicated that he was the fastest starter in history through the first 400 meters. If his times were extracted, he took approximately 26.2 seconds to cover the first 1/4-mile distance, which is faster than the 1/4 mile record of 26.9 seconds recognized by the IHPVA.
25) Francois Pervis Men's 200 meter flying start: 9.347 seconds = 77.03 kph = 47.86 mph. To put his in perspective, this would have broken Dr. Allan Abbotts absolute human powered speed record of 47.8 mph set in his streamlined prone at the 1976 International Speed Championships. The UCI record at that time was only about 42 mph. So in over 35 years, they’ve only improved about 5 mph, while human powered vehicle speeds have improved over 35 mph. This smashes Kévin Sireau's old world record of 9.572 seconds. By the end of the fireworks in Mexico, Kevin's time was only the 5th fastest in history. What a way to lose your world record, to have four people better it. Francois’s bike reportably used a 50 x 12 gear which equate to a required cadence of about 147 rpm to go 47.86 mph
26) Tour de France - Fastest Team Time Trial (TTT) ever (57.84 kph, 35.94 mph) by Orica-GreenEdge over 25 km in 25 minutes, 56 seconds on out and back course from Nice to Nice. Simon Gerrans maintained his yellow jersey lead as a result. Orica-GreenEdge may be most remembered for their Tour Bus becoming stuck under the Finish Line gantry on Stage one. Two other teams finished within 3 seconds. In second place was Omega Pharm Quicktep, one second back. In third place, three seconds back was Sky Pro Cycling with eventual tour winner Chris Froome. This shows how fast a team of "pro cyclists" on upright time trial machines can average in a time trial. In the 2005 Tour, Discovery Channel averaged slightly slower 57.32 kph, 35.62 mph), but over a much longer 67.5 km course which took them 70 minutes. They were aided by a tail-wind and several team members including Lance Armstrong who later admitted to performance enhancing drug use. Just two seconds behind them was Team CSC, on the new Cervelo P3C, who rode most of the way with Individual TT record setter David Zabriskie who crashed near the end.
NEW ENTRYS ---
27) Tony Martin's dominating win and speed (53.04 kph, 32.96 mph) in the longest ever (58 km) UCI World Pro Individual Time Trial Championship. He finished 46 seconds of 2012 Tour de France and Olympic TT champion Bradley Wiggins (who was not at his same form as last year), and 48 seconds of Florian Cancellera, considered one of the world's best time trialist. Tony also won the worlds in 2012. His speeds is one of the best ever speeds over that distance.
28) Sebastiaan Bowier's unfaired stock one hour distance of 51.065 km at RDW this past summer. This is probably an outdoor distance record for a stock unfaired recumbent. This was without the aid of virtually any drafting, despite other competitors on the track. Competitors circled the large 1.75 mile long RDW track. He was riding a dual 700 or 650c highracer Raptobike I believe. While not quite as far as other records set indoors on wood, it definietely shows the type of power that Sebastiaan has. The next best stock one hour finisher was Wil Baselmans with a 47.793 km distance. These distance exceeds Sean Costin's outdoor best of 46.047 km at the Ford track in 2009. Sebastiaan's mark exceeds several of the famous UCI Hour records on the track, like the classic record of Eddy Merkx, and nearly as far as Francesco Moser's famous 51.151 km hour record set in 1984 at altitude.
Edited by - Upright Mike on 12/22/2013 04:45:41
We had 4 new WRRA records this year.
Larry Lem set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 1:16.92 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 29.08 MPH (46.8 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Dual 650C FWD midracer recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the Hellyer Park Velodrome HPV Fun Day.
Followed closely by:
Phillip Plath set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 1:13.61 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 30.39 MPH (48.908 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Bacchetta Ti Aero recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the Hellyer Velodrome.
Phillip Plath set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 200 M in 12.11 sec (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 36.94 MPH (59.449 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Bacchetta Ti Aero recumbent bicycle during the 200 M event at the Hellyer Velodrome.
Sjaak Bloemberg set a new Adult Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Tail Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 66.216 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 33.78 MPH (54.364 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Razz Fazz IV recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the NVHPV Wintercompetition, Netherlands.
Edited by - warren on 12/22/2013 08:17:25
Originally posted by warren
We had 4 new WRRA records this year.
Larry Lem set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 1:16.92 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 29.08 MPH (46.8 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Dual 650C FWD midracer recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the Hellyer Park Velodrome HPV Fun Day.
Followed closely by:
Phillip Plath set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 1:13.61 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 30.39 MPH (48.908 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Bacchetta Ti Aero recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the Hellyer Velodrome.
Phillip Plath set a new Masters Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Non Faired class by riding 200 M in 12.11 sec (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 36.94 MPH (59.449 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Bacchetta Ti Aero recumbent bicycle during the 200 M event at the Hellyer Velodrome.
Sjaak Bloemberg set a new Adult Male World Recumbent Racing Association record in the Tail Faired class by riding 1 Kilo in 66.216 (hours:minutes:seconds) at an average speed of 33.78 MPH (54.364 KPH). This record was accomplished while riding a Razz Fazz IV recumbent bicycle during the 1 Kilo event at the NVHPV Wintercompetition, Netherlands.
Sebastiaan Bowier did already the 1K in 1:05 in Apeldoorn and several 1:06's just during indoor competition in the Netherlands.
This list couldn't possibly be complete without this big end of the year achievement..... it should belong in the Top Ten.
A) Maria Leijerstam, 35 becoming the first person to pedal to the South Pole on a human powered vehicle, She rode across the Antartic Continent in (I think) ten days to arrive by Christmas? She rode a recumbent Trike from the manufacturer ICE. It wsa equipped with wide tires, much wider than most. Her and her crew had to overcome many obstacles including the weather, dangerous crevasses in the ice, and extreme cold and wind. More on the journey http://www.whiteicecycle.com.
1) The AeroVelo / University of Toronto team members won the $250,000 Sikorsky prize for Human Powered helicopter flight.
2) Maria Leijerstam became the first person to pedal to the South Pole . She was riding a custom ICE recumbent trike
3) Maria Parker's RAAM win in the female recumbent category on a Cruzbike recumbent, and was fastest female overall.
4) Sebastiaan Bowier of the Delft team set a new Battle Mountain 200M world record of 83.13 mph
5) Team Cieo ’s Tandem One Hour record of 51.582 miles at the Dekra track
6) Wil Baselmans set a (127.43 kph, 79.18 mph) Personal best at Battle Mountain in the VeloX3
8) Gareth Hanks set a 45.857 mile one hour world record in the single rider trike category.
9) Graeme Obree 's prone streamliner 200M record attempts for bringing media attention to the human powered speed championships
10) Keita Saito of Tokyo Tech won the 2013 Japan International Birdman Rally which with a flight distance of over 20 kilometers.
Thanks again Mike!
I don't normally blow my own horn, but since I'm probably not on many peoples radar on this site and I fall into a strange sub-category, I'd like to remind you of my accomplishment this year.
My father, Jim Ridings and myself, Randy Ridings, designed, built, tested and rebuilt a human powered amphibian. Then I rode it 350 miles in 11 days on roads (130 miles), water (80 miles) and dirt rail-trail (140 Miles). This trip was done without aid of any support vehicle. I took all my clothing and camping gear and much of the food I ate. I did re-stock some food and a lot of water en route.
I doubt anyone has ever piloted a human-powered amphibian that far before, but I would love to be contradicted, if for no other reason than to know what to set my sights on in the future.
This may fall into the category of a better story than a record, and in that vein, I'd like to add that neither my father, a 76 yr old engineer, or myself, a 49 yr old retired Army officer had any experience with human powered craft before this project, other than me being an avid mountain biker.
|
83
|
A penny-farthing (high-wheel) bicycle is steered by which wheel(s)?
|
Bbb catalogue 2014 by Veloprofs.lv - issuu
issuu
p rod u c t g u i de 2 014 - b b b cycli ng .co m
2014
At BBB Cycling we’re dedicated to offer you the best products. Almost more than the end result, creating a new product, we immensely enjoy the journey towards it. This is not a one way street though. We encourage sharing ideas, testing products and absorbing feedback with and from people around us. That includes students at technical universities, professional cycling teams and bicycle retailers around the globe. And - last but not least - you. The cyclist that uses our products on a daily basis. 2014 will show we have truely become a specialist in many different categories. Great test results in cycling-specific media, your feedback on social media and 196 pages of Product Book are proof that we’re progressing even further and are committed to do so in the future. Some of our brightest stars are highlighted as ‘exciting gear’ across this Product Book. Highlights like our Adapt sport glasses, Scope 1300 lights or titanium RoadKing pedals are signs of what BBB has in store for you. Making you enjoy your riding even more. That’s why we feel we can truely say that BBB is All About Cycling.
team Vacansoleil-Dcm
Never a dull momeNt or lack of fightiNg spirit with this dutch team
BBB is proud to be associated with this team since 2010. The raw energy coming from such an ambitious team that’s determined to show themselves in every possible way can only function as an inspiration. A young Netherlands-based team with a bit of a streetfighter mentality. Best showcased when team member Johnny Hoogerland was bumped into barbed wire by a swerving support vehicle, Hoogerland nevertheless dragged himself to the finish of the stage to take the polka dot jersey.
In 2013 BBB Is Team Vacansoleil-Dcm’s offIcIal supplIer of: helmets // sport glasses // Bags // tools // pumps // lIght sets // fenders.
team sojasun
the freNch coNNectioN showiNg themselves at la graNde Boucle
Great riders also need great coaching staff and of course the best materials available. In their search to the best helmets and sport glasses they came to BBB. That makes us proud. In 2013 we will help the team and their riders to the next level. So that in 2014 we will still be together to turn more dreams into reality.
In 2013 BBB Is Team sojasun’s offIcIal supplIer of: helmets // sport glasses // pumps.
Superior BrentjenS mtB racIng team
Young mountain bike talents led bY experience
Led by mountainbiking legend Bart ‘Bartman’ Brentjens, first-ever winner of an Olympic gold medal in mountainbiking in 1996. Bart still races, but focusses more of his attention on forwarding the careers of young and talented XC and marathon riders on an international and even Olympic level. We are certain that with the experience of Bart this team will be able to provide us with lots of useful feedback on existing products and provide input into the development of new BBB products.
In 2013 BBB Is the Superior BrentjenS MtB racing teaM’S offIcIal supplIer of: helmets // sport glasses // fenders // lIghts // Bags.
team roSe-Vaujany graVity
small but hungrY gravitY team led bY a fourcross World champion
An eager German-Dutch mountainbike team led by 2013 Fourcross World Champion Joost Wichman. They focus on the more gravity-influenced disciplines of the sport like fourcross, downhill and the growing enduro discipline. Especially German Petrik Brückner has been doing extremely well in the enduro discipline lately. British team member Katy Curd is still one of the strongest European fourcrossers as her current series lead in the 4x Pro Tour shows.
In 2013 BBB Is roSe-Vaujany graVity’S offIcIal supplIer of: pumps // tools // cyclIng computers. jooSt WichMan Is also supplIed wIth: BBB helmets // sport glasses.
» Proud! The WinterStop glove is our first product to win a test.
» Introduction of the Winner sport glasses, the most popular model to date.
» Team TX Active-Bianchi wears the Everest helmet during the XC World Cups.
» A second pro team, Team Quick-Step Innergetic, scores three road World Championships in a row. Tom Boonen (2005) and Paolo Bettini (2006 and 2007).
» Founders Chris Koppert and Frank Moons start racing bikes aged 6.
» Czech cyclocross talent Zdenek Stybar wins the cyclocross World Championships, protected by a BBB Impact.
» Roel Paulissen wins his second mountainbike World Championship marathon wearing BBB Impact sport glasses.
» The collection consists of sport glasses, pumps, bar ends, lights, shoecovers and winter gloves.
» With a clear vision of good cycling products they decide to start BBB.
» Magnus Bäckstedt of the AlessioBianchi road team, BBB’s first sponsorship, wins Paris-Roubiax.
» BBB presents itself for the first time at the international Eurobike show.
» Final test and first public appearance of the Icarus helmet in 2012 Tour de France. » Addition of the Rose Vaujany team. A gravityoriented mountainbike team.
» Three teams at the start of Tour de France use BBB products: Cofidis, Quick-Step and Vacansoleil-DCM. » The Traveller minipump wins us our second Eurobike Award.
» International appreciation! The OvalIntegrate minipump wins a Eurobike Design award.
» Sebastiaan Bowier, product designer at BBB Cycling, sets a new World Record for human powered vehicles at 133,78 km/h.
» The flagship of the first helmet collection, the Falcon, makes its debut on Team Cofidis.
» A new BBB logo. The flashes show the rotation of a crank.
» The complete collection is presented in a twelve-page brochure.
» You can now find BBB at BBBcycling.com
» BBB’s first advertisement shows up in O2 Bikers magazine.
» Start of an ambitious co-operation with the new Vacansoleil Cycling Team.
» The first year in which the famous BBB shop-in-shop displays start popping up.
» BBB start supporting BMC Mountainbike Racing Team.
» The dealerlocator is the mostly used feature on BBBcycling.com. In 41 countries there is a dealer in your area.
» BBB’s crowdsourcing platform, called ThinkTank, is integrated on our Facebook page.
» BBB’s collection has grown to a staggering 1581 products. A product for every cyclist!
» National and international success for both racers! Chris even takes home a Dutch Championship in 1980.
» Start of Augusta Benelux, Chris and Frank import several cycling brands.
» Around the world, other people are looking for nononsense cycling products too. BBB is now available through 18 countries worldwide.
» BBB now also supports a mountainbike team, Bianchi-Agos-Liquigas. Julien Absalon wins a World Championship title wearing a pair of BBB sport glasses.
» BBB returns successfully as a supplier of helmets, sport glasses and computers with Team Quick-Step.
» Happy to announce two new teams to our roster Superior Brentjens MTB Racing team and Team Sojasun.
index
Johnny Hoogerland Team Vacansoleil-DCM, 2013
013
BIKE WEAR
0 15 031 045 0 47 048 0 50 0 52 0 55 0 56 0 57 0 59 0 62 0 66 0 68 070
sport g l asse s h e l m e ts cl oth i ng BBB t e am cl oth i ng unde rw e ar je rse y s jack e ts r ai n jack e ts sh orts ti g h ts cl oth i ng acce ssori e s sum m e r g l ove s w i nte r g l ove s sock s sh oe cove rs
073
ACCESSORIES
0 74 077 078 080 087 0 97 10 2 10 3 110 112 115 116 119 12 2 12 6 12 9 13 2 13 2 13 2 13 3
saddl e B ag s Bag s cy cl i ng com pute rs sm artph one m ounts l i g h ts pum ps co2 pum ps m i ni pum ps m i ni tool s tool s w ork stands tool case s f e nde rs B ottl e cag e s B ottl e s l ock s Bells k i ck stands carri e s prote cti on
135
BIKE PARTS
13 6 14 4 14 6 150 153 154 155 156 158 163 166 168 17 2 17 2 174 17 6 17 7 17 8 18 1 18 3 18 4 18 4 18 6 190
saddl e s h andl e Bar tape g ri ps B ar e nds se atposts cl am ps h andl e Bars ste m s pe dal s B rak e sh oe s road B rak e sh oe s m tB/cX di sc Brak e pads di sc Brak e rotors qui ck re l e ase s caBl e s case tte s ch ai ns de rai l l e ur pul l e y s ch ai nri ng s ch ai nri ng Bolts i nne rtuB e s ri m tape h e adse ts B ottom Brack e ts
192
BBB i nte rnati onal di stri B utors
All About
bike wear Joost Wichman Rose Vaujany Gravity Mountainbike Team, 2013
Jonathan Hivert Team Sojasun, 2013
all about
Maxime Mederel Team Sojasun, 2013
SPORT GLASSES
The line of BBB cycling-specific sport glasses continues to evolve. The product group is one of our achievements that we’re most proud of, and with good reason. We aim to offer the utmost in high-end performance for fair prices. This year we’re introducing the Adapt, our first full-frame design with interchangeable lenses, to further complete our line-up. Try one out and join the growing group of riders that find out how good our glasses actually are when they put on a pair for the first time.
// bbb is the 2013 official sport glasses supplier of teams:
soJasuN
superior BreNtJeNs MtB raciNg
VacaNsoleil-DcM
spor t g l as s e s : s e le c tor a pp & len s tech n o lo gy
sport g l asse s : l e ns te ch nol og y
PH Lenses – PHotocHromic
Automatically adapts to changing light conditions. They turn dark when it’s bright and become virtually clear in low light conditions. Especially the available light range is unique. BBB’s lenses can adapt from allowing 85% - 17% of the available light to flow through.
BBB seleCtor
PZ Lenses - PoLariZed
The ideal choice on bright sunny days. Polarized lenses provide a clear view while effectively eliminating glare. PZ lenses allow only direct light to pass through, resulting in a more relaxed and improved view. This prevents distractions from reflection from flat roads, tree leaves or water.
app
You can collect all your designs in a wish list for editing later, share them through your favourite media or order your favorite creation from a BBB Cycling dealer nearby. Download the BBB Selector app in the App Store or Google Play and design the glasses that suit you.
t ec hn ol og y
download now
The BBB Selector app allows you to preview your customized BBB Cycling Select and Impact sport glasses. Combining seven lens colors for all weather conditions and eight temple tip colors to choose from, you can create a style that matches with the rest of your gear or personal taste.
mLc Lenses – muLti Layer coating
A 9-layer coating give MLC lenses their renowned brightness and contrast for the sharpest view under any circumstances. All MLC equipped sport glasses come with additional yellow and clear lenses for optimal adaptability to changing light conditions.
Pc Lenses - smoke
Our standard quality base lenses. Similar in performance to BBB’s MLC lenses. The natural tinted colors are for people who prefer a more subdued style. All PC equipped sport glasses come with additional yellow and clear PC lenses for optimal adaptability to changing light conditions.
lens teChnology Category
f eatur es
Category
If you have ever put on a pair of ultra-cheap sunglasses with curved lenses you have no doubt experienced the distorted vision that accompanies such a low quality product. This visual distortion is due to the non-prescription lenses that are used in cheap sunglasses and it can be quite disturbing and fatiguing. Because of the curve, sport lenses need the be optical corrected. That’s why all BBB Sports Glasses have decentered lenses. This means they are optically balanced for no-distortion vision.
Special anti-rain coating. In rain, the water will slide of the lenses while riding
Lenses with 100% UV protection
Guarantees the best fit on any face shape
BBB sport glasses frames are made of Grilamid TR90. This is a light and flexible material, providing great durability and a level of comfort. Grilamid has some exceptional characteristics which include high heat distortion temperature, good flexural bending strength and high stress crack resistance. This makes Grilamid an ideal material for our sport glasses frames. You can bend your frame to place your lenses, without wondering is the frame crack or not.
Adjustable anti slip rubber nose piece: keeps eyewear at the right height without pressure points
Sport glasses with interchangeable lenses. Yellow and Clear lenses included
Including carrying case
sport g l asse s : se l e ct
spo r t g l as s e s : s e le c t
SELECT PH | BSG-43
Sport GlaSSeS * SELECT TEam | BSG-43
4391
Select Giftbox | bSG-43
SELECT | BSG-43 * SELECT mLC | BSG-43
Select your own style! With the replaceable lenses and temple tips you create the style you like and make a perfect match with your other gear. •Complete case comes with 6 different lenses and 7 temple tips colors. •Extra space inside the box to expand your lens and temple tip collection. •Frame colors: glossy black or glossy white. •Lens colors: clear, yellow, smoke flash mirror, blue mlc, red mlc and green mlc. •Temple tip colors: black, blue, red, green, gray, yellow and white.
4313
Since the introduction two years ago, the Select has been gaining more fans by the day. It started with the pro riders from our sponsored teams and has moved to the roads and trails of this world. The one-piece wraparound lens shape with maximum coverage provides plenty of protection from wind, sun and grit. The customizable options (which can be previewed through our BBB Selector app) allow to match team outfits, bikes or personal tastes.
• Select your own style! With the replaceable lens and temple tips you
create the style you like and make a perfect match with your other gear. 4372
• Sport glasses with interchangeable polycarbonate lenses. • Variation of lenses and temple tip colors available separately. • Full round lens shape gives optimal protection against sunlight, dust
and wind.
• Adjustable rubber nose piece for a snug fit.
*Selected models come with additional yellow and clear lens. 4375
4343
BSG-4324
BSG-4359
• The included lenses feature a hydrophobic coating. In rain, the water will slide of the lenses while riding. • Select your own style! With the replaceable lens and temple tips you create the style you like and make a perfect match with your other gear. • Sport glasses with interchangeable polycarbonate lenses. • Special air flow system for better performance in humid weather conditions. • Variation of lenses and temple tip colors available separately. • Full round lens shape gives optimal protection against sunlight, dust and wind. • Adjustable nose piece for a snug fit.
// EXCITING GEAR
spo r t g l as s e s : i m pac t
IMPACT overvIew
ADAPT | BSG-45
The updated Impact remains the slightly open and well-ventilated design it always was, improved are a few subtle design changes and an esthetic update. The mediumsized coverage provides both protection from the elements and moves lots of fresh air through the lens to prevent any moisture build-up. The fit is slightly more snug than our Select model, allowing a better fit for medium face sizes without sacrificing comfort on larger fits. The temple tips have been modified to be interchangeable with those of the Select and Adapt, allowing the same options for color customizing. * Selected models come with additional yellow and clear lens.
IMPACT PH | bSG-44
4472
*AdApt MLC | BSG-45
Our newest addition to the line is the Adapt. BBB’s first full-frame design with interchangeable lenses, further completes our line-up. It’s a slightly different esthetic, for riders looking for something that’s a little closer to their regular shades, the full-frame cradles two separate lenses that are interchangeable with the supplied yellow or clear lens tints. Through a simple twist of the nose pads the upper and lower part of the frame hinge to release the lenses for a quick swap. It has similar color-customization options as the Impact and Select, providing you with some freedom to adapt it to your outfit or bike colors.
IMPACT | bSG-44
*IMPACT SMoKe | bSG-44
4401
Adapt’s upper and lower frame are made from highly flexible Grilamid material to prevent breakage. The rubber nose piece is adjustable to fit any shape. *AdApt SMokE | BSG-45
* Selected models come with additional yellow & clear lens.
IMPACT ANd AdAPT TeMPLe TIPS
BSG-4369
sport g l asse s : i m pul se
impulse | bsg-38
impulse small | bsg-38s
• Sportive sport glasses design with interchangeable lenses. • Lens shape gives protection against sunlight, dust and wind • Adjustable nose piece for snug fit. • Spare lenses for Impulse frames are available in PH, MLC red, MLC blue, Smoke flash mirror, Yellow and Clear.
• Special small model for smaller head sizes. • Sportive sport glasses design with interchangeable lenses. • Lens shape gives protection against sunlight, dust and wind. • Adjustable nose piece for snug fit. • Spare lenses for Impulse frames are available in PH, MLC red, MLC blue, Smoke flash mirror, Yellow and Clear.
* Selected models come with additional yellow and clear lens.
AdApt Giftbox
3805 * impulse small smoke | bsg-38s
* impulse team mlc | bsg-38
3807
Precisely for this kind of cyclist we have put together the Adapt Giftbox. It consists of the new Adapt matt black top frames, combined with three lower frames to mix and match to your heart’s desire. Also included are four pairs of lenses to adapt to every light condition you would find when out on a ride: a clear lens for night riding or extremely low light conditions, two pairs of MLC lenses for sunnier conditions and a Smoke lens. The Adapt Giftbox also comes with seven colorways of the proprietary temple tips. To match your Adapt with your bike, outfit or state of mind that day.
3803
3857
If you are a fanatical cyclist, you know what we’re talking about. All your cycling equipment is carefully selected, built up and cared for. Not only does it function like a well-oiled machine, but it looks absolutely gorgeous too. Your equipment is a reflection of your own personality and the way you experience your ride. As far as Sports Glasses go, you apply the same rigorous process: only the best of the best and adaptable to every occasion.
3891
ArrIVer | BSG-36 OPTIVIEW Ph | BSG-33
BSG-33 3608
3359
• Modern frame design sport glasses. • Especially suitable for smaller faces. • Spare lenses for Arriver frames are available in: Smoke, Yellow and Clear. • With additional yellow & clear lens.
SPhErIcal GEnIuS * OPTIVIEW mlc | BSG-33
3001
The OptiView are dedicated cycling sports glasses for riders who need prescription lenses while riding, but still want the convenience of being able to swap tinted lenses to adjust for changes in light conditions.
3003
3309
Spare lenses for OptiView frames are available in: PH, Polarized, MLC red, MLC Blue, Smoke, Yellow and Clear.
3009
3307
On the inside of the frame is a special prescription-ready mount that will hold lenses with a spheric range from +6 tot -6 . In certain cases even stronger prescriptions can be fitted, an optician is able to analyze what the possibilities are. Eye tests and fitting of your prescription lenses should be carried out by a qualified optician.
retro | BSG-30 3005
* Selected models come with additional yellow & clear lens.
3007
3301
• Traditional style sport glasses with lightweight frame. • Spare lenses for Retro frames are available in: Smoke, Yellow and Clear. • With additional yellow & clear lens.
sport g l asse s
kids | BsG-31
3103 3107 3109 4613
4675
• Special children’s durable frame in smaller sizes. • Spare lenses for Kids frames are available in: Smoke, Yellow and Clear. • With additional yellow & clear lens.
street | bsg-46
• Casual styled glasses with polarized lenses. Ideal if you are looking for the sharpest and clearest possible view. • Polycarbonate frame material.
all about
Hans Becking Superior-Brentjens MTB Racing Team, 2013 Marek Konwa Superior-Brentjens MTB Racing Team, 2013
helmets
Helmets are a good example of the obsession that grabs a hold of BBB’s product designers once we decide to develop a certain group of products. We initiated our helmet category about six years ago with a focused idea to offer top-level performance at reasonable prices. This single-minded focus has driven our design process during that time. Over the years we have stacked improvement upon improvement with our helmet offerings. Constantly refining our designs and pushing the expectations of what can be expected from a BBB Cycling helmet. A ton of refinements in paddings and closure systems were implemented, creating helmets that fit even better and are easier to put on. At the top of our line are two models aimed at two very different, but very serious riders. For the die-hard racers out there we offer our Icarus helmet that further improves on ventilation and safety in an even lighter package. And for the trail riders we have the evolution of our Varallo all-mountain helmet, the Nerone. Lastly we have put extra time in the graphic designs of our most popular helmets to make them look even better. All the way down to our kids helmets. We realize that the safest helmet is one that you are happy and proud to wear. All this high-end performance still comes at sensible prices. Exactly how BBB started out in this helmet game.
// bbb is the 2013 official sport helmet supplier of teams:
soJasuN
h e l m e ts : te ch nol og y
hel m et s : te c hnology
Adjustable straps
TRIFIT
TwIsTClose Enhances moisture transport
Dial closure, can be adjusted with one hand. The fully flexible system wraps around the shape of your head. Adjustable in height.
Closure system adjustable in height. Dual compound soft and flexible half ring combined with firm retention provides a comfortable and snug fit. Dial closure, adjustable with one hand.
Dial closure for easy size adjustment with one hand.
Washable pads. (Replacement pads are available for all helmets)
PC internal reinforCement
For safety we have added an internal polycarbonate reinforcement in our top of the line helmet the Icarus. This polycarbonate reinforcement covers the front and dome of the helmet. This reinforcement is embedded in the structure of the Icarus and makes a combination of safety and great looks.
Anti-insect net inside
f eat u res In-mold technology
Reinforced carbon
Reinforced
AirFlow Cooling SyStem - ACS
When you are cycling intensive, you produce a lot of heat. Overheating your body will reduce your performance. Because of the large surface of your head, up to 40% of body heat can be lost by your head. Wearing a helmet normally is bad for ventilation. That’s why we invented the Airflow Cooling System (ACS) for our Icarus helmet. Due to the special design of not only the foam shape, but also the padding, the air pulled in and channeled to pass around your head. This guarantees optimum heat control of your head.
SPiderweb
BBB’s internal reinforcement structure inserted into the expanded polystyrene foam during the manufacturing process. It increases strength and allows the use of a minimized amount of material which allows further weight reduction and increased air-flow without compromising strength. Spiderweb reinforcements are placed in the Icarus and Falcon helmets for added safety in the case of impacts. Reflective accents
// EXCITING GEAR
Juan Antonio Flecha, Team Vacansoleil-DCM, 2013
Jimmy Englouvent, Team Sojasun, 2013
icarus
ICARus | bhE-05
BHE-05
As far as we’re concerned racing is as serious a pursuit as a dream of trying to fly. Punishing yourself until your body’s only sensation is pain. And then push your equipment and body through to the very brink of it’s performance. When you are out there, on the very edge of control, it’s a good thing to know that we have taken the design of your helmet to another level. The AirFlow cooling system was designed to further improve ventilation. The fit has been improved by embedding the padding into the inner of the helmet. The two-way adjustable Flexclose closure system keeps your helmet where it needs to be kept. And when the racing gets a little too hardcore, you can rest assured that we have done our homework to keep your head as safe and sound as possible. The Icarus is constructed with high-density EPS foam. Helmet straps are fixed in the helmet with hidden strap anchors. Icarus comes in two sizes, M (52-58cm) and L 58-62cm). Five color options are available: black/white, black/neon yellow, white/blue, white/red and matt white/silver. Like it’s namesake, Icarus is ready to fly.
h e l m e ts : road
hel m et s : road
FALCON | BHE-01 • High density gray Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam. • 23 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Sizes: S (52-55 cm), M (55-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: black and white.
FENIX | BHE-03 • 23 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Sizes: M (52-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: white/blue and white/ red.
GRIFFON | BHE-25 • 16 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Sizes: M (55-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: black and white.
HAWK | BHE-27 • 14 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Sizes: M (52-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: black, white, black/ blue and black/red.
KITE | BHE-33
• 18 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Sizes: M (52-58 cm) and L (57-63 cm). • Colors: black/silver, white/ silver, white/blue and white/red.
TRIBASE | BHE-61
• Time trial and triathlon helmet. • Adjustable air ventilation system. • Sizes: M (51-56 cm) and L (55-61 cm). • Color: white.
h e l m e ts : m tb
NeroNe | BHe-68
• All mountain offroad helmet. • Double In-mold shell construction. • 18 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Angle adjustable visor. • Sizes: M (54-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: matt black, matt black/red, matt white and matt white/green.
Joost Wichman, Rose Vaujany Gravity Mountainbike Team, 2013
Varallo | BHe-67
• All mountain offroad helmet. • 18 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Removable visor. • Sizes: M (54-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: matt black, matt black champery, matt white champery and matt black/green champery.
h e l m e ts : juni ors
hel m et s : m tb
TableTop | bHe-52 • Freeride/Dirtjump helmet. • 10 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Sizes: M (52-57 cm) and L (58-61 cm). • Colors: matt black.
TAURUS HeRo | bHe-48
As mountainbiker you will ride with a visor, of course. But for the moments you want to use this helmet without a visor, the attachment of the Taurus visor is hidden in the helmet. No attachment holes will be visible while riding.
TAURUS | BHE-26
• 13 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Size: M (51-55 cm). • Colors: black, racing red and flowers black.
• 16 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Removable visor with hidden attachment. • Sizes: M (55-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: black and white.
aMIGo | bHe-47 • 13 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Size: S (46-51 cm) and M (51-55 cm). • Colors: biker and flowers white.
JAYA | BHE-28 • 14 air vents with rear vents for optimum air flow. • Removable visor. • Sizes: M (52-58 cm) and L (58-62 cm). • Colors: matt black, matt black/magenta, matt black/green and matt white.
ElBRUS | BHE-34 • 18 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Removable visor. • Sizes: M (52-58 cm) and L (57-63 cm). • Colors: black/silver, white/silver, black/red, black/blue and black/neon yellow.
hel m et s : k i d s
boogy | bHE-37 • 12 air vents with rear vents for optimum airflow. • Size: S (48-54 cm) and M (52-56). • Colors: camouflage (M), heart (M), Police (M and S), Bug (M and S), Flower (M and S).
all about clothing
We have learned that what you wear on your bike is the most deciding factor that determines how long your rides last. If you get wet and cold - or too warm and overheated - you’re not going to last on your bike. The BBB apparel line is a system of layers in various levels of warmth, waterproofness and breathability. They can be combined to suit any kind of weather. With bike-specific solutions for fit and practical features that come from realworld experience. They allow you to plan separate levels of coverage for your torso, arms, legs, hands and feet. So you can stay out longer and ride more. We’ve added a compact collection of Team Wear for those rider’s looking to fly the BBB flag.
c l o t h ing : t e c h no l o gy
c l o t h i n g : te c hnology
airdry
The ultimate in breathability. This four way stretch polyester mesh has excellent ventilation properties.
comfortdry
A windproof, thin and ultra-lightweight fabric. BreezeSkin is also water repellent due to a special coating.
Has a special finish that results not only in moisture transportation, it quickly dissipates moisture for faster evaporation.
cl oth i ng : te am
comfortpluS
Very lightweight Polyester which controls the body temperature perfectly by absorbing and expelling body transpiration.
Designed for men
A fabric that will keep you dry and cool in even the warmest of temperatures.
240 gram lycra
ghoStSkin
A stretchable, thin and ultra-lightweight fabric, which is wind- and waterproof. The microporous membrane allows moisture vapour to evaporate. Ideal for changeable weather conditions.
premiumdry
Combines yarns developed with water repelling properties, and yarns with moisture absorbing functions. This means the PremiumDry fabric absorbs and expels moisture from the skin, and at the same time also repels outside moisture. PremiumDry’s high wicking function draws moisture away from the skin, and expands the diffusion area. Because of this One Way Wicking characteristic, your skin stays dry and comfortable. The fabric has a very soft hand feeling, and is extremely breathable.
Full length zipper
4 pockets, 1 with zipper
5 pockets, 3 with zipper
Fleece collar lining
Precurved sleeves provide a better fit on the bike
croSS-Section fiBerS
Offer a 28% extra surface area for added moisture wicking capabilities.
• Top of the range short sleeve BBB Team jersey with racefit. • PremiumDry fabric absorbs and expels moisture away from the skin. • AirDry stretch mesh inserts for extra cooling. • Pre shaped lycra sleeves for a perfect aero fit. • Hidden 3/4 YKK zipper. • Anti-slip siliconee grip at the bottom backside. • Sizes: XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
premiumheat
A fabric that consists of two superlight yarns, a water repellent outside and a soft fleece inside with high wicking function. Due to this 2-yarn technology, your body will be warm and dry during exercise.
f eat u res
Used in ergonomic panels. Provides you the best possible combination of function and fit.
diamondSoft
A high-end technical fabric, 100% polyester, laminated with a warm fleece inner liner. The combination of this material with this finish results not only in a warm moisture transporting jersey, it also spreads the moisture better for an even very fast evaporation.
Full length reversed zipper
BBB Team Jersey long sleeve | BBw-252 Mesh upper
Quickdry
A special treatment which enhances moisture transport, to keep you dry.
trilite
Breathable high-end, light weight 3-layer material, with wind- and waterproof features, keeping you dry and warm. A PolyUrethane (PU) membrane is bonded between the elastic inner and outer layer material.
trioxx
A breathable high-end 3-layer material, with wind- and waterproof features. The elastic outer material is fixed to the PolyUrethane (PU) membrane and is protected on the inside by a fleece layer. Due to this 3-layer technology, your body will be warm and dry during exercise.
Flat seams
Reflective accents
• Comfortable long sleeve jersey made of DiamondSoft fabric. • Anti-slip siliconee grip at the bottom. • Sizes: XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
trioxx hiStretch
The same features as regular Trioxx, but a higher stretch level; breathable high-end 3-layer material, with wind- and waterproof features, keeping you dry and warm during exercise. A PolyUrethane (PU) membrane is bonded between the elastic outer material and is protected on the inside by a fleece layer.
sizing The size of your jersey, short or tight depends on your physical structure. To give you an appropriate reference for size indication we made a clothing sizing chart which you can find here:
thermo faBric
Great insulation features. Perfect fabric for cold/semi-cold conditions.
thermo pluS
High-tech fabric that enhances moisture transportation. Excellent insulating features and easy to wash.
thermotec
Elastic, anti-bacterial fabric made of 17% Spandex/ 83% Nylon. Excellent insulating, breathing and moisture transporting features. Soft fleece inner lining.
sizing chart
thermocontrol
A special fabric blend, which is specifically developed and engineered to keep you warm and dry in cold conditions. The antibacterial treatment will keep the base layer fresh and clean.
BBBcycling.com/headlines/sizing-chart
BBB Team BiB shorT | BBw-255 • Top of the range 10 panel BBB Team bib-shorts. • With men’s Premium 2.0 padding with anti-bacterial protection. • Extra comfortable lycra antislip panel with siliconee design used as leggripper. • Black on black BBB logo on side panels. • Sizes: XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
cl oth i ng : unde rw e ar
c l o t h i n g : u nd e rwe ar
BASELAYER MAN | BUW-01
• BaseLayer jersey underwear, short sleeve or sleeveless • Fine mesh fabric in those area’s of you body where extra ventilation is needed. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
BASELAYER MAN | BUW-02
THERMOLAYER MAN | BUW-12
• Base layer for men, short or long sleeve. • Incorporates rib zones for enhanced body support. • Increased thermal efficiency. • Mesh zones provide improved perspiration control. • Sizes: XS/S, M/L and XL/ XXL.
THERMOLAYER MAN | BUW-11
INNERSHORTS MAN | BUW-51 • Lightweight breathable inner shorts designed for men. • Made of comfortable Polyester and spandex material. • BBB elastic to keep the shorts in the right position. • Perfect for commuting or heading out for a relaxed ride. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black and white.
BASELAYER WOMAN | BUW-05
• BaseLayer jersey underwear, short sleeve or sleeveless • Woman fit. • Fine mesh fabric in those area’s of you body where extra ventilation is needed. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
BASELAYER WOMAN | BUW-06
THERMOLAYER WOMAN | BUW -16
• Base layer for women, short or long sleeve. • Incorporates rib zones for enhanced body support. • Increased thermal efficiency. • Mesh zones provide improved perspiration control. • Sizes: XS/S, M/L and XL/ XXL.
THERMOLAYER WOMAN | BUW-15
INNERSHORTS WOMAN | BUW-55 • Lightweight breathable inner shorts designed for women. • Made of comfortable Polyester and spandex material. • BBB elastic to keep the shorts in the right position. • Perfect for commuting or heading out for a relaxed ride. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black and white.
// EXCITING GEAR
cl oth i ng : je rse y s
RoadTech | BBW-231
Comfortfit
bbW-235
Some of our best products are ones that have a competitive pricepoint, yet offer all the features of a far more expensive product. The ComfortFit jersey is a prime example of this approach. It’s constructed from ComfortPlus fabric, a highly ventilating textile with a very nice touch and fit. The pre-shaped arms add to the comfortable fit. Construction wise it comes with four rear pockets, of which one is zippered for those must-not-loose items. That zipper, and the full length chest zipper on the front, are YKK brand zippers for unmatched quality and durability. All in all enough features for a jersey to cost twice as much as it does. Reflective details are included on the sleeves and sides for extra visibility in traffic. The bottom rear hem of ComfortFit has an anti-slip silicone strip. The jersey is available from size S through to XXXL and comes in black/white, black/yellow, black/blue, black/red and white/black.
• Top of the range short sleeve jersey with racefit. • PremiumDry fabric absorbs and expels moisture away from the skin. • AirDry stretch mesh inserts for extra cooling. • Pre shaped lycra sleeves for a perfect aero fit. • Anti-slip siliconee grip at the bottom. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black/white, white/black, black/neon yellow and black/red.
niTRo | BBW-238 • Modern design tight fit short sleeve jersey made of ComfortDry fabric. • Lycra stretch binding on sleeves and bottom. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black/blue, black/red.
PoWeRGiRl | BBW-241 • Top of the range short sleeve racefit jersey. • PremiumDry fabric absorbs and expels moisture away from the skin. • AirDry stretch mesh inserts for extra cooling. • Lycra sleeves and inserts for a perfect aero fit. • Anti-slip siliconee grip at the bottom backside. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black/white, black/pink, black/lime and white/red.
foRce | BBW-248 • Modern design tight fit short sleeve jersey made of ComfortDry fabric. • Full length color matching zipper. • Lycra stretch binding on sleeves and bottom. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black/blue and black/pink.
comfoRTGiRl | BBW-245 • Comfortable short sleeve jersey. • Elastic lycra binding at rear pockets for perfect fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black/white, black/pink and white/red.
cl oth i ng : jack e ts
c l o t h i n g : j ac k e ts
ContRolShIEld | BBW-163 • Lightweight windproof, water-repellent winter jacket for men. • Strategically placed Trioxx panels makes this jacket wind- and waterproof where needed. • Soft and warm Thermoplus fabric on the back and other transpiration zones. • Siliconee grip in the hem. • Anatomic panel shape, comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Color: black, black/blue, black/red, black/neon yellow.
EASyShIEld | BBW-164W • Lightweight winter jersey for men. • Strategically placed panels on the front of Trioxx fabric makes this jersey wind and waterproof where needed. • PremiumHeat fabric on the back, sleeves and other transpiration zones. This soft fleece fabric will keep your body warm and dry during exercise. • Anatomic panel shape, comfortable fit. • Siliconee grip in the hem. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Color: black.
PRIMAVERA | BBW-162 • Lightweight windproof and water-repellent jacket for mild cold conditions. • Made of TriLite, a thin laminated Polyester with excellent stretch properties and a breathable microporous membrane. • Siliconee grip in the hem. • Front and back pockets with YKK-zippers. • Anatomic panel shape, comfortable fit. • Sizes: XS,S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
EASyShIEld | BBW-164 • Lightweight winter jersey for men, made of PremiumHeat fabric; this soft fleece fabric will keep your body warm and dry during exercise. • Anatomic panel shape, comfortable fit. • Siliconee grip in the hem. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black/blue, black/white/red and black/neon yellow.
Corsashield | BBW-149 • Lightweight windproof jacket made of BreezeSkin material, with a water repellent coating. • Mesh fabric at the back for optimum breath ability. • Lycra panel inserts at the back. • Smart opening at the backside gives access to your jersey rear pockets. • Anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Silicone grip in the hem. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL , XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black, neon yellow and white.
Nitro Jersey | BBW-160 • Comfortable long sleeve jersey, made of DiamondSoft fabric; ideal during spring and autumn rides. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black/silver, black/blue and black/red.
CorsaVest | BBW-150 • Lightweight windproof vest made of BreezeSkin material, with a water repellent coating. • Mesh fabric at the back for optimum breath ability. • Lycra panel inserts at the back. • Smart opening at the backside gives access to your jersey rear pockets. • Anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Silicone grip in the hem. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black, neon yellow and white.
Quadra Jersey | BBW-168 • Long sleeve jersey made of Diamondsoft fabric. • Fine fabrics featuring a soft feel and breath ability. • Anatomic panel shape, comfortable fit. • Silicone grip in the hem. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Colors: black/neon yellow, blue, black/red and red.
c l o t h i n g : j ac k e ts
AlpineShield | BBW-173 • Lightweight, windproof and water-repellent winter jacket for women. • Strategically placed Trioxx panels makes this jacket wind- and waterproof where needed. • Soft and warm Thermoplus fabric on the back and other transpiration zones. • Anatomic panel designed for women for a comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, black/pink and black/white.
eliteShield | BBW-174 • Lightweight winter jersey for women, made of PremiumHeat fabric. • This soft fleece fabric will keep your body warm and dry during exercise. • Anatomic panel designed for women for a comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black/white and black/pink.
cl oth i ng : rai n jack e ts
eliteShield | BBW-174W • Lightweight winter jersey for women, made of Trioxx fabric. • Strategically placed panels makes this jacket wind- and waterproof where needed. • PremiumHeat fabric on the back, sleeves and other transpiration zones. This soft fleece fabric will keep your body warm and dry during exercise. • Anatomic panel designed for women for a comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Color: black.
MiSSionShield | BBW-176 • Long sleeve jersey of Diamondsoft fabric, ideal for the early spring and fall. • Roughened inside soft to the skin. • Anatomic panel designed for women for a comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black and black/white.
RAINSHIELD MAN | BBW-143 • Lightweight wind- and waterproof jacket made of GhostSkin material. • Fine mesh fabric underneath the arms for optimum breath ability. • Silicone gripper in the hem. • Back pocket/pouch system with YKK-zipper: can be folded into a small package. • Anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Mens sizes: S, M, L, XL , XXL and XXXL. • Color: semi-transparent.
POCKETSHIELD | BBW-147 • Lightweight foldable rain jacket with tight fit. • Windproof, water resistant, and breathable. • Ventilated back and mesh at armpit for added breath-ability. • Back pocket with extra pouch: can be folded into a small package. • Weight: only 95g. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
RAINSHIELD WOMAN | BBW-145 • Lightweight wind- and waterproof womens jacket made of GhostSkin material. • Fine mesh fabric underneath the arms for optimum breath ability. • Silicone gripper in the hem. • Back pocket/pouch system with YKK-zipper: can be folded into a small package. • Anatomic panel designed for women for a comfortable fit. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Color: semi-transparent.
BASESHIELD | BBW-148 • Lightweight wind- and waterproof cycling jacket made of waterproof polyester material. • Elastic gripper in the hem and sleeve ends. • Anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Lower back panel protects against splashing water from behind. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
cl oth i ng : ti g h ts
cl o t h i n g : s horts
ItalIan paddIng
Low bulk Italian pad with soft hydrophilic top fabric and anti-bacterial treatment. The pad has four way stretch and is made out of one piece for maximum comfort.
LEGSTOP BIB TIGHTS BBW-192 | BBW-191 ULTRATECH BIB-SHORTS | BBW-215 • Top of the range 12 panel bib-shorts with men’s Premium 2.0 padding with anti-bacterial protection. • Extra comfortable lycra anti slip panel with silicone design used as leg gripper. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
GIRLTECH BIB-SHORTS | BBW-216 • Top of the range 12 panel bib-shorts with woman Premium 2.0 padding with antibacterial protection. • Extra comfortable lycra anti slip panel with silicone design used as leg gripper. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
• Top of the line winter bib-tights with additional muscle support made of Thermotec fabric with Trioxx Hi-stretch fabric inserts in strategic positions for wind protection. • White lycra binding. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • BBW-191: Same as BBW-192 without the men’s Premium 2.0 padding.
premIum 2.0 paddIng
The premium 2.0 pads are top of the range paddings. The application of new hollow fibres permits better perspiration management and a higher stretchiness. The soft fabric of the top layer absorbs and wicks moisture away from the skin, to maintain premium comfort. Available in specific male and female fits.
f eat u res
LEGSHIELD BIB TIGHTS BBW-188 | BBW-187 BIB-SHORTS | BBW-81 multI-Stretch paddIng
Four way stretchable padding gives ultimate comfort. Made out of one piece, 95 % coolmax and 5% spandex, this padding will shape completely to your body. Therefore the padding will give maximum support especially were needed. Special treatment, QuickDry, which enhances moisture transport, to keep you dry.
ultra-Stretch paddIng
High-end soft elastic padding, very comfortable. Anatomically shaped for a perfect fit. Excellent moisture transportation. Terry towel front and side panels.
• 10 panel bib-shorts. • Elastic grip with silicone print. • 245 grams Elasthan material. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
SHORTS | BBW-82 • 8 panel shorts. • Elastic grip with silicone print. • 20% Elasthan / 80% Polyester. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
GIRLTECH SHORTS | BBW-217 • With woman Premium 2.0 padding with anti-bacterial protection. • Extra comfortable lycra anti slip panel with silicone design used as leg gripper. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
SHORTS LADY | BBW-85 • 10 panel cycling shorts. • Elastic grip with silicone print. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL.
• Top of the line winter bib-tights made of Thermotec fabric shaped to provide an ergonomic fit and additional muscle support. • White lycra binding. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • BBW-187: Same as BBW-188 without the men’s Premium 2.0 padding.
QUADRA BIB TIGHTS BBW-184 | BBW-183 • Bib-tights made of Thermo fabric with anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • BBW-183: Same as BBW-184 without the UltraStretch padding.
cl oth i ng : acce ssori e s
c l o t h i n g : ti ghts
HELMETHAT | BBW-97 HIGHLEGS | BBW-201 • Leg warmers made of Thermotec fabric. • Anatomic pre-curved panel shape. • Double sided siliconee gripper on the top. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL.
LEGSHIELD TIGHTS | BBW-186 | BBW-185 • Top of the line winter tights with anatomic panel shape made of Thermotec fabric. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • BBW-185: Same as BBW-186 without the men’s Premium 2.0 padding.
• One size fits all helmet hat made of Thermo material.
LADYSTOP TIGHTS | BBW-196 | BBW-195 • Top of the line winter tights with ergonomic women specific fit made of Thermotec fabric with Trioxx Hi-stretch fabric inserts in strategic positions for wind protection. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • BBW-195: Same as BBW-196 without the Premium 2.0 padding for women.
WINTERHAT | BBW-96 COMFORTLEGS | BBW-91
• One size fits all winter hat made of Thermo material.
• Leg warmers made of Thermo fabric. • Anatomic panel shape. • Rubber grip. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL.
FULLHEAD | BBW-100 • One size fits all Balaclava for cyclists made of Thermo material (14% elasthan / 86% Polyester).
COMFORTKNEE | BBW-93
QUADRA TIGHTS | BBW-182 | BBW-181 • Tights made of Thermo fabric with anatomic panel shape for a comfortable fit. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • BBW-181: Same as BBW-182 without the Ultra-Stretch padding.
LADYSHIELD TIGHTS | BBW-194 | BBW-193
• Knee warmers made of Thermo fabric. • Anatomic panel shape. • Rubber grip. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL.
• Top of the line winter tights with ergonomic women specific fit made of Thermotec fabric. • Siliconee grip at the ankles. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • BBW-193: Same as BBW-194 without the Premium 2.0 padding for women.
CASUALHEAD | BBW-291 • One size fits all casual BBB hat (100% acryl).
HIGHARMS | BBW-202 • Arm warmers made of Thermotec fabric, ideal for cold weather conditions. • Anatomic pre-curved panel shape. • Double sided siliconee gripper on the top. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL.
QUADRA 3/4 BIB TIGHTS | BBW-190 • 3/4 Bib-tights made of Thermo fabric with anatomic panel shape. • Siliconee grip at the calf. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
GIRLTECH 3/4 | BBW-218 • Top of the range 3/4 11 panel cycling shorts. • With woman Premium 2.0 padding with anti-bacterial protection. • Extra comfortable lycra anti slip panel with silicone design used as leg gripper. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.
COMFORTHEAD | BBW-99 • Moisture absorbing bandana. • Lightweight fabric 100% polyester. • Colors: black and white.
COMFORTNECK | BBW-98 COMFORTARMS | BBW-92 • Arm warmers made of Thermo fabric . • Anatomic panel shape. • Rubber grip. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL. • Colors: black, white and blue.
• Seamless cycling scarf, made of lightweight fabric 100% polyester. • Can be worn in several different ways. • Colors: black and white.
c l o t h i n g : ac c e s s ori e s : tech n o lo gy
Coolmax
Fabric well known for its breath ability.
cl oth i ng : acce ssori e s : te ch nol og y
Far InFrared (FIr)
Technology that keeps feet and toes warm and exceptionally comfortable by improving body’s metabolism and microcirculation. Ceramic powder nano particles incorporated into the weave of the socks reflect Far InfraRed (FIR) rays emitted by the body. This improves metabolism and increases blood flow to the feet.
m aterials
multI stretCh nylon neoprene
High-end stretchable nylon laminated neoprene, which provides an excellent fit and a high level of water proofing. The nylon outer layer makes the shoe covers extremely durable.
neoskIn neoprene
Special antibacterial coated neoprene with a soft, smooth surface that water beads on and rolls immediately off.
thermo lIte
Lightweight Polyester type fabric with excellent insulating and moisture transport features. It’s hollow core fibers trap air for greater insulation. The larger surface area allows faster evaporation. By speeding moisture away from the skin to the surface of the fabric where it can evaporate more quickly.
Gel inserts
Memory foam inserts
Strategically placed silicone prints provide increased grip on handlebars as well as on the brake levers
Anti slip palm
Anatomically 70° precurved fingers for a perfect fit on the handlebar
Flat seams
Terry towel sweat wipe thumb
Finger straps provide easier glove removal
Pull-off fabrics provide easier glove removal
Full length YKK zipper
Full length YKK reversed zipper
Zipper with inner flap
Extra tough, warm, and highly stretchable neoprene, used for maximum warmth and durability.
WaterFlex
Advanced coated material of outer polyurethane (PU) rubber with inner Micro-fleece gives the highest level of water resistance, durability and flexibility.
features Open Sole System
Velcro strap for use on skates
Glued seams eliminates leakage occurring from stitching
trIoxx
trIlIte
Top mate r ials
Breathable high-end, light weight 3-layer material, with wind- and waterproof features, keeping you dry and warm. A PolyUrethane (PU) membrane is bonded between the elastic inner and outer layer material.
Breathable high-end 3-layer material, with wind- and waterproof features. The elastic outer material is fixed to the PolyUrethane (PU) membrane and is protected on the inside by a fleece layer. Due to this 3-layer technology, your body will be warm and dry during exercise.
Waterproof tape; placed over stitching for waterproofing of seams Lycra.
Ergonomic 2-panel design
Allows sweat to evaporate quickly and evenly, especially during warm weather conditions
open WeaVe mesh
Allows sweat to evaporate quickly and evenly, especially during warm weather conditions
Velcro rubber strap for secure fit
Reinforced with Kevlar
Allows natural movements of the hands, provide comfortable fit
sizing rubberteC
Improves traction for better bar grip.
VIteCh
Fabric with extra cushioning and increased durability.
amara
The thumb and forefinger area is reinforced by Amara. This strong and durable fabric resists wear and tear and is therefore used is these high stress areas.
sizing chart
ClarIno
Protective and an excellent insulator.
Just like a jersey, the size of your glove depends on your physical structure. To give you an appropriate reference for BBB gloves size indication we made a gloves sizing chart which you can find on: bbbcycling.com/headlines/gloves-sizing-chart/
g l o v es : s u m m e r
g l ove s : sum m e r
mtB Zone | BBW-33
FreeZone | BBW-38
• Full finger XC glove. • Top made of Spandex for a perfect fit and protection. • Clarino palm with memory foam patches for extra comfort. • Clarino protection on thumb and forefinger. • Pre-curved neoprene cuff with Velcro WristLock system. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Color: black.
GELLINER | BBW-35
RaCER | BBW-37
AirZone | BBW-39
• Full finger XC glove for warm weather conditions. • Top made of open structured Mesh for air ventilation. • Clarino protection on thumb and forefinger. • Pre-curved neoprene cuff with Velcro WristLock system. • Comfortable Clarino palm with foam patches and silicone anti-slip print. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Color: white.
• XC glove for sportive use. • Top made of 3D open structured Mesh for maximum air ventilation combined with Spandex and lycra fabrics. • Pre-curved neoprene cuff. • Clarino palm with memory foam patches for extra comfort and silicone anti-slip print. Extra mesh insert for ventilation. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, blue, red and green.
• High-tech professional summer glove. • Integrated technical features like Clarino palm with Gel insert and AirMesh ventilation provide your palm with increased ventilation and comfort. • Micro-mesh ventilation. • Neoprene wrist with WristLock system. • Lycra knuckle area offers excellent breath ability, comfort and freedom of movement. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, white, blue and red.
• High-tech professional summer glove. • Amara palm with memory foam for high comfort. • Lycra and mesh combined top area offers excellent breath ability, comfort and freedom of movement. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, white, blue and red.
• Comfortable and lightweight glove for warm weather conditions. • Breathable stretch Lycra top with silicone printed design. • AirMesh ventilation palm with silicone BBB anti-slip print. • Neoprene wrist with WristLock system. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, black/neon yellow,white/gray, white/blue and white/red.
g l ove s : sum m e r
g l o v es : s u m m e r
AirroAd | BBW-40
• Glove for warm weather conditions. • Top made of open structured Mesh for air ventilation. • Clarino palm with thin foam patches for comfort and e anti-slip print. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black and white.
CLASSiC | BBW-42
• Perfect fit summer glove due to combination of mesh and Spandex top. • Clarino palm with AirMesh ventilation. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, blue and red.
ForCe | BBW-43
• High-end woman’s summer glove. • Designed specifically to accommodate the size and shape of a woman’s hand. • Fashionable glove matching with the Force short sleeve jersey. • Top made of open structured Mesh for air ventilation. • Comfortable Suede palm with gel foam padding. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL. • Colors: black, blue and magenta.
LADYZONE | BBW-27
• Designed specifically to accommodate the size and shape of a woman’s hand. • Fashionable glove with dual color stretch Lycra top. • Comfortable Vitech palm. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL. • Colors: black and magenta.
KIDS | BBW-23
• Glove specially designed for children’s hands. • Breathable stretch Lycra top. • Vitech palm with extra foam cushioning. • Sizes are in proportion to children’s hands. • Sizes: S, M, L and XL. • Colors: black, blue and red.
COOLDOWN | BBW-36
• The ultimate hot weather summer glove. • Maximum breath ability and ventilation due to the open weave mesh of the top and palm. • Rubbertec reinforcement padding patches on the palm and extra reinforcement on the thumb and forefinger. • Sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black, blue and red.
g l ove s : w i nte r
g l o v es : wi nte r
UltraZone | BWG-24
• Competition glove designed to protect in all winter conditions. • Special 3-layer thermo system: inner layer with prestitched glove liner, wind and water proof HYTEX layer, outer layer of TriLite fabric and high stretch Polyester palm for a perfect fit. • 3 mm gel paddings and silicone printings for grip and comfort. • Long anatomically-shaped cuff with Velcro strap. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
aQUaSHIelD | BWG -23
• Top of the range technical glove for wet and dry winter weather. • Eurotex layer made of tough PolyUrethane stops cold air and water from entering, while microdots allow moisture to escape, keeping your hands warm and dry. • Top made of wind and waterproof Trioxx fabric. • Knuckle stretch zones for greater flexibility. • Clarino reinforced thumb, forefinger and palm. • Comfortable extra long 45 mm neoprene cuff. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
WeatHerProoF | BWG -25
• Competition glove for wet and dry winter weather. • Amara reinforced thumb, forefinger and palm patches. • Special 3-layer thermo system: 1. Inner layer with pre-stitched glove liner for a comfortable fit and maximum thermal insulation. 2. HYTEX breathable layer made of waterproof and windproof PolyUrethane (PU) membrane. Keeps cold air and water out. 3. Outer layer of Trioxx fabric on the front and an Amara palm for a perfect fit. • Extra long anatomically shaped cuff with Velcro strap for maximum comfort. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL. • Color: Black/neon yellow.
COLDSHIELD | BWG -22
• Top of the range technical glove for cold winter weather. • Made of advanced Softshell material; thin, windproof and breathable fabric with warm fleece lining. • Clarino reinforced thumb and forefinger. • Black on black artwork. • 45 mm neoprene cuff with Velcro strap. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
CONTROL ZONE | BWG -21
• Lightweight and flexible glove. Thin but extremely durable. • Windproof and breathable membrane keeps your hands comfortable and warm in cold conditions. • Padded palm for superior comfort. • Black on black artwork. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.
RACESHIELD | BWG -11
• Thermo fabric glove for mild winter conditions. • Extra-long 40 mm cuff. • Feather-light and comfortable construction. • Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL. • Colors: black and neon yellow.
sock s
so c k s
FoldFeet | BSo-03 • High-tech cycling socks with 4 different fiber structures. • Coolmax fibers for rapid drying and superior thermo regulation. • Elastic middle part for a perfect and tight fit around the feet. • Open structure knitting for breath ability. • Reinforced foldable cuff area. • Long cycling sock, 150 mm height, 110 mm when folded. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Colors: black and white.
eRGoFeet | BSo-04 • Anatomically designed cycling socks with Coolmax Active fibers for warm weather conditions. • The anatomic design results in a different shape for left and right side. • Coolmax Active fibers for rapid drying, excellent moisture management and superior thermal regulation. • Seamless toe construction. • Open structure lines on the top and sole of the sock allow excessive moisture to evaporate easily. • Flexible bending ankle area. Prevents folds where the sock is curved. • Short cycling sock, 70 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Colors: black/green, black/grey, white/neon yellow and white.
ERGOKNEE | BSO-15 • Anatomically designed cycling knee socks with Far InfraRed technology for cold weather conditions. • Far InfraRed (FIR) technology keeps feet and toes warm and exceptionally comfortable by improving body’s metabolism and microcirculation. • Sole made of extra warm fabric equipped with Far Infrared technology for extra insulation. • Seamless toe construction. • Open structure lines on top of the sock allow excessive moisture to evaporate easily. • Flexible bending ankle area. Prevents folds where the sock is curved. • Extra long kneesock, 320 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Color: black.
ERGOPLUS | BSO-14 • Anatomically designed cycling socks with Far InfraRed technology for cold weather conditions. • Sole made of extra warm fabric equipped with Far Infrared technology for extra insulation. • Far InfraRed (FIR) technology keeps feet and toes warm and exceptionally comfortable by improving body’s metabolism and microcirculation. • Seamless toe construction. • Open structure lines on top of the sock allow excessive moisture to evaporate easily. • Flexible bending ankle area. Prevents folds where the sock is curved. • Long cycling sock, 130 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Color: black.
THERMOFEET | BSO-11 • High-tech cycling socks for cold weather conditions. • Lightweight Thermolite fibers provide comfort and warmth, even when wet. • Elastic middle part for a perfect and tight fit around the feet. • Open structure lines on top of the sock allow excessive moisture to evaporate easily. • Flexible bending area above the ankle. Prevents folds where the sock is curved. • Reinforced toe and heel area for extra strength and warmth. • Long cycling sock, 120 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Colors: black, black/neon yellow, black/red and black/blue.
teCHNoFeet | BSo-02 • High-tech cycling socks with 4 different fiber structures. • Coolmax fibers for rapid drying and superior thermo regulation. • Elastic middle part for a perfect and tight fit around the feet. • Open structure knitting for breath ability. • Reinforced cuff area. • Long cycling sock, 100 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Colors: black, white/red, white/blue and white.
teCHNoFeet | BSo-01 • High-tech cycling socks with 4 different fiber structures. • Coolmax fibers for rapid drying and superior thermo regulation. • Elastic middle part for a perfect and tight fit around the feet. • Open structure knitting for breath ability. • Reinforced cuff area. • Short cycling sock, 70 mm height. • Sizes: 35-38, 39-42, 43-46 and 47-49. • Colors: white, white/red, white/blue and white.
sh oe cove rs
WATERFLEX | BWS-03
ArcticDuty | bws-16
• Designed to offer the best protection against the rain. • Advanced 2 mm WaterFlex material, outer polyurethane(PU) rubber with inner MicroFleece give the highest level of water-resistance, flexibility and durability. • Two Kevlar reinforcements between sole and zipper as well as on the nose. • Sizes: 37/38, 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
HEAVYDUTY OSS | BWS-02B • Designed to protect in all winter conditions. • Ergonomic 3D-panel design provides a perfect fit. • Outside panel: 4.2 mm waterproof Sharkskin neoprene. • Inside and front panel: 4,5 mm hydrophobic multi stretch nylon neoprene combines optimum protection with excellent fit. • Extra tough and durable rubber reinforced nose and heel part. • Sizes: 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
uLtrAwEAr | bws-12
• Designed to protect you against cold and wet conditions. • Extra tough and durable Kevlar reinforcements on shoe cover heel and nose. • Neoskin waterproof layer on top of 3 mm neoprene. • Sizes: 37/38, 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
sPEEDFLEX | bws-14
• Designed to offer the best protection against the rain. • Extra tough and durable Kevlar reinforcements on shoe cover heel and nose. • Advanced 2 mm WaterFlex material, outer polyurethane (PU) rubber with inner • MicroFleece give the highest level of water-resistance, flexibility and durability. • Sizes: 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
HArDwEAr | bws-04
• Designed to protect your feet against cold and wet conditions. • Neoskin waterproof layer on top of 3 mm neoprene offers the best protection against the cold and rain. • Two Kevlar reinforcements between sole and zipper as well as on the nose. • Sizes: 37/38, 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
• Tough shoe cover designed to give the best protection against the cold. • 3 mm multi stretch neoprene with Nylon reinforcements on both sides. • Extra 3M reflective reinforcement between the sole and zipper. • Sizes: 37/38, 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
RACEPROOF | BWS-01
• Lightweight shoe cover perfect for dry winter weather. • Anatomic design provides an exceptionally comfortable fit. • Front of the shoecover is made of Trioxx fabric and provides maximum protection against the cold wind. • Thermal fabric back is soft and comfortable to wear. • Zipper-free. • Sizes: 39/40, 41/42, 43/44, 45/46 and 47/48.
LIGHTFLEX | BWS-10
• Thin Lycra shoe cover. • Elastic fabric characteristics for a smooth, tight fit around the shoes. • One size: fits shoe sizes 41/42, 43/44 and 45/46. • Colors: white, black and blue.
STYLEFLEX | BWS-15 • Lightweight coversock to keep road spray off your shoes. • Elastic fabric characteristics for a smooth, tight fit around the shoes. • Easy to put on. • Sizes: S/M (38-42) and L/XL (43-47). • Colors: black and white.
All About
sa d d l eb ags : te c hnology
size: M
size: S
Direct-Mount systeM
STOREPACK | BSB-12 • Red interior, for better visibility inside. • Elastic strap and inside pocket (M and L size). • Lockable waterproof zipper, rattle-free. • T-buckle system mounts directly to saddle rails. • Large size bag is divided into two compartments. • Sizes: S, M and L.
twin-Buckle systeM
Click and go, the T-Buckle system mounts directly to the saddle rails. Due to the special shape of the buckle it will stay in place even when you don’t use your seatpost strap. No screws, no hex bolts.
Put the strap around your saddle rails, click the buckle, tighten the strap and ride, that’s the Twin-Buckle system. Even helps you to compress your saddlebag when its not complete full. No screws, no hex bolts.
size: L
t-Buckle systeM
The Direct-Mount is a special attachment system that clicks directly into one of BBB’s saddles: AnatomicRace (BSD-05), MemoComfort (BSD-16), MemoShape (BSD-17), SportComfort (BSD -72), SportComfort Anatomic (BSD-73) & LightComfort (BSD-81).
size: S
No screws, no hex bolts, straightforward mounting and riding.
CURVEPACK | BSB-13
Red interior helps you to find your stuff inside the saddlebag even better.
Velcro seatpost strap
size: L
Special strap for BBB rear light
• High-end curved saddlebag for the best and most natural position under the saddle. • Red interior with inside pocket for better visibility inside. • Lockable zipper, rattle-free. • T-buckle system mounts directly to saddle rails. • Sizes: S, M and L.
bag s
sa d d l eb ags
WHEELBAG | BSB-81
size: S
size: XS
• 600D Nylon material. • Provides secure storage for a single wheel. • Soft padding protects the wheel. • Extra internal pocket for storing quick-releases. • Extra long handles can double as a shoulder strap. • Internal reinforcement around the axle area.
EasyPack | BsB-21 • Twin-Buckle system. • Size L is expandable. • Sizes: XS, S, M and L.
size: L
size: M
CARRIERBAG | BSB-95 • High-volume carrier rack bag • Designed to combine with the BCA-02 MountRack and BCA-03 RearRack. • Large storage compartment with protection foam inner. • Two side compartments. • Backside compartment equipped with strap for LED attachment. • 4 velcro straps to secure the bag to the rack, cannot move forwards or sideways. • Bungee storage system. • Adjustable shoulder strap which can be removed.
RacEPack | BsB-14 • Compact design. • Mounts directly under the saddle. • Easy strap system for a tight fit. • Big enough to hold a road innertube and tire levers. • Colors: matt black and matt white.
saddlEPack | BsB-23 In our aim to minimise the number of mounts that are fitted to your bike we are introducing a completely new design, the Saddlepack. Equiped with a special attachment system that clicks directly into one of BBB’s:
TOPPack | BsB-16 • Mounts on top tube. • One big compartment. • Transparent cover for maps. • Anti-slip bottom material. • 3 Velcro straps, for secure positioning.
AnatomicRace (BSD-05), MemoComfort (BSD-16), MemoShape (BSD-17), SportComfort (BSD -72), SportComfort Anatomic (BSD-73) and LightComfort (BSD-81) saddles. No screws, no hex bolts, straightforward mounting and riding. On top of this clever mount the Saddlepack has a tapered shape allowing for a non-interfering shape with maximum storage capacity. Other details include rubber zipper pulls to prevent rattling, an outer that can easily be cleaned and an integrated strap to hang your tail light on.
EASyStoRE | BSB-98 • Three compartment back pack, for both on and off the bike. • Two side compartments for water bottle storage. • Large central compartment as well as a small compartment with organizer. • Waist and chest belt for extra stability. • Padded back with open air flow channels. • Reflective BBB logo and reflective side straps. • Rain cover included can be stored in special pocket.
RAINCoVER | BSB-96 • Rain cover for BSB-98 EasyStore and BSB-95 CarrierBag. • Fluorescent yellow for increased visibility.
Joost Wichman Rose Vaujany Gravity Mountainbike Team, 2013
Compatible with all Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Ready enabled devices.
all about
Wireless
f eat u res
BBB has made a name for itself by providing some of the most reliable computers out there and it’s what we intend to do for many more years to come. All of our models have undergone through testing in real-world kilometers before we bring them to market. Whether you choose for our highly advanced Digiboard with altitude and heart rate functions, the miniscule Microboard or the ‘less is more’ functionality of the Dashboard we feel confident in saying they will be joining you for tons of hassle-free rides. Obviously we have noticed the rise of cycling apps (some of us at BBB are pretty hooked on riding and registering too) and we’re happy to introduce our Patron iPhone case for iPhone 4 and 5 to keep your smartphone safe and ready to use on every ride.
Waterproof
Fits round and aero spokes
Handlebar or stem mounted
// bbb is the 2013 official sport cycling computer supplier of team:
rose Vaujany GraVity Mountainbike
// EXCITING GEAR
pATRoN i5 | BSM-01
c o m pu te rs : ph one m ounts & acce ssori e s rain sleeve
Patron i5
BSM-01 Patron i4 | BSM-02
Guardian | BSM-11
• Turn your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S into a high-end bicycle computer (iPhone not included. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.). • Slim case for everyday use. • Polycarbonate impact resistant shell for protection against drops. • Shock absorbing Siliconee sleeve for added stability and protection. • The set includes a summer and rain sleeve for optimal weather dependent use. • Extra shock padding in the back provides a full enclosure padding. • Lens shield for rear camera to prevent damage from road dirt. • Full iPhone operability. • Mountable in portrait or landscape. • Adjustable viewing angle for optimal viewing or filming. • Mountable on stem and handlebar with included BSM-91 PhoneFix. • Weight: 69 grams bracket included. • Color: black and white.
The rise of GPS-enabled smartphones and apps that provide us with ride data or GPS tracks of the best trails in a given area. After using bike-specific iPhone cases from a number of suppliers we weren’t truely happy with any of them, so we went to our drawing board. We wanted the case to be slim, so you can leave the phone in it’s case in everyday use. We designed a combination of a black or white polycarbonate shell with a lens shield and two silicone sleeves to provide impact resistance and shock absorption. The sleeves come in two versions: a more open one for optimal usage of the phone’s functions in good weather, the other is a more sealed design to shield your phone against the elements. This is a light solution, the case weighs a mere 69 gams including mount. The mount will fit on both stems and handlebars, and allows for the phone to be mounted in a portait or landscape position. The mount has an adjustable angle to fine tune the viewing angle or even film you buddy blazing down Alpe d’Huez. But please keep your eyes on the road. Compatible with: iPhone 5 and 5s.
BlueCoMBo | BCP-61
(iPhone not included. iPhone is a Trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.).
• Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Speed and cadence sensor in-one. • Compatible with all Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Ready enabled devices. • Crank and spoke magnet included. • Battery included. • Material for mounting included.
• Universal pouch for your smartphone. (phone not included) • Fits any smartphone up to 140mm x 70mm. • Full touch functionality. • Water resistant housing for protection during rainy days. • Shock resistant padding for added protection. • Rigid inner board for added stiffness and stability. • Separate padding to provide tight fit with smaller phones. • Mountable in portrait or landscape. • Adjustable viewing angle for optimal viewing or filming. • Mountable on stem and handlebar with included BSM-91 PhoneFix. • Weight: 89 grams bracket included.
BluePulSe | BCP-62 • Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Heart rate sensor . • Compatible with all Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Ready enabled devices. • Washable elastic fabric belt included. • Battery included.
PhoneFix | BSM-91 • Mounting bracket for Patron and Guardian phone mounts. • Fits diameters up to 38mm. • Mountable on stem and handlebar depending on user preference. • Glassfiber reinforced Nylon for added stiffness and durability. • Adjustable angle for optimal viewing or filming. • Weight: 36 grams.
rain sleeve
enerG yPaCk uSB | BSM-81 • High quality Lithium ion (2 x 22650, 3300mAh 7.4V) battery pack. • Compatible with the BLS-67/68 Scope. • The battery pack also be used for other USB charged devices, like an phone. USB output (5V 1A) only, no charging! • Battery pack equipped with a 5-steps power level warning indicator. Indicator can be switched on and off. • Battery pack can be installed in multiple positions on the bicycle by using the provided velcro strap. Rubber shaped battery ends prevent scratches on you bike. • The system is protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge. • The battery pack can be (dis)charged up to 300 times without noticeable performance loss. • Charger with power plug included • Weight: 200 grams. • Size: 105 x 55 x 32 mm.
all about
DIGIBOARD MODEL TOTAL FUNCTIONS DATA TRANSMISSION CURRENT SPEED AVARAGE SPEED MAxIMUM SPEED
DIGIBoARD
RIDING TIME TRIP DISTANCE ODOMETER BIKE 1 ODOMETER BIKE 2 TOTAL ODOMETER (1+2) CLOCK (12/24H)
The DigiBoard is our most advanced cycling computer. Two years were spent developing hardware and software from the ground up, using the most solid standard in data transfer for sports equipment, ANT+. The software and menu have been designed to function fully intuitively. When heart rate belt or cadence functions are not connected, they do not show up in the menus. Mountainbike Plus magazine was thoroughly impressed by all the hard work we put in and labeled the DigiBoard their test winner. “The set-up and control are so intuitive that you could pull it off without a manual.” and “...because of the big display you hardly have to operate the buttons, since all major functions are in your screen all the time...”. Available in four versions of which two come with heart rate belt, all models can be further completed with cadence functions by adding the separately sold DigiCadence cadence meter. BBB’s DigiSpeed, DigiHeart, DigiCadence, are all ANT+ compatible accessories.
LOW BATTERy INDICATOR AUTO START/STOP SPEED PACER BACKLIGHT TOTAL RIDING TIME BIKE 1 TOTAL RIDING TIME BIKE 2 2ND WHEEL SIZE AUTO SLEEP ALTITUDE HOME ALTITUDE STORAGE ALTITUDE GAIN/LOSS MAxIMUM ALTITUDE MINIMUM ALTITUDE PERCENT GRADE TOTAL ALTITUDE GAIN (1+2) TEMPERATURE HEART RATE MAxIMUM HEART RATE AVARAGE HEART RATE CALORIES USED UPPER / LOWER LIMIT
BCP-52WAH
ExTENDABLE WITH: CADENCE FUNCTIONS BCP-56 HEART RATE FUNCTIONS BCP-57
DIGISPEED ANT+ | BCP-55
• ANT+ digital wireless speed sensor. • Compatible with all DigiBoard computers. • Compatible with all ANT+ compatible devices. • Battery included.
DIGICADENCE ANT+ | BCP-56
• ANT+ digital wireless cadence sensor. • Compatible with all DigiBoard computers. • Compatible with all ANT+ compatible devices. • Battery included.
DIGIHEART ANT+ | BCP-57
• ANT+ digital wireless heart rate sensor. • Compatible with all DigiBoard computers. • Compatible with all ANT+ compatible devices. • Soft elastic fabric belt included. • Battery included.
DIGIBRACKET | BCP-59
ERGo MouNT | BCP-88
• •
• Computer bracket for BBB DigiBoard computers. • Can be mounted on handlebars and stems. • With this extra bracket you can use your BBB DigiBoard on a second bike.
• Wheel magnet compatible with BBB DigiBoard computers. • Fits round and aero spokes.
• Lightweight 6061 T6 aluminum CNC machined adjustable computer bracket. • Fits with all BBB computers. ( wired and wireless ) • Easy to use clamping mechanism compatible with 25.4/31.8 mm road handlebars. • Weight 40 grams. • Color: matt black.
cy cl i ng com pute rs : dash board
c yc l in g c om p u te rs : m i c r o b o ar d
MICROBOARD
DashBoarD
The MicroBoard is the ideal cycling computer for riders looking for an untroubled and minimalistic computer to record their riding data. Its sleek and minimalistic design hardly takes up any space on your handlebar or stem yet its small size doesn’t limit the clarity on the screen. The 3D-dot technology provides you with a clear vision on all of your ride information. MicroBoards have proven themselves as extremely durable over the years in BBB’s sponsored Pro teams. The wired versions run through a light and flexible cable that can be mounted discreetly. Wired and wireless versions are available with 8 or 13 functions.
MICROBOARD MODEL TOTAL FUNCTIONS DATA TRANSMISSION AUTO SCAN CURRENT SPEED AVARAGE SPEED MAXIMUM SPEED RIDING TIME TOTAL RIDING TIME TRIP DISTANCE ODOMETER CLOCK OW BATTERy INDICATOR AUTO START/STOP SPEED PACER BACKLIGHT
WIRESET BCP | BCP-86 • 2 mm wired bracket set for BCP-05/06/21/22.
70CM TRANSMITTER | BCP-73 • 70 cm transmitter set for BCP-11W, BCP-12W, BCP-13W, BCP-15W, BCP-16W, BCP-31W & BCP-32W.
BCP-32W
• • •
• • • • •
The DashBoard cycling computer has become a bit of a design icon. Originally added to our line-up back in 2006 as a simple and small computer with a large easy to read screen, it has developed into the cycling computer of choice for people that want a basic design without a gazillion functions. When it was time to update the DashBoard, we specifically chose to respect the simplicity of the DashBoard, yet still try to improve on it. The size of the entire computer has been slimmed down by combining the screen and upper part of the casing. It still retains its 32 by 32 millimeter display for ultimate readability. Also the simple single button operation has been carried over into this reincarnation. The simplification of the construction also means less seams and a better weather protection. So it’s a better DashBoard, but it’s still the same.
dashBOaRd MOdEL TOTaL FUNCTIONs daTa TRaNsMIssION aUTO sCaN CURRENT sPEEd aVaRaGE sPEEd MaXIMUM sPEEd RIdING TIME TOTaL RIdING TIME
• • • • •
TRIP dIsTaNCE OdOMETER CLOCK LOW BaTTERy INdICaTOR aUTO sTaRT/sTOP sPEEd PaCER
BraCKETsET BCP | BCP-87 • Wireless bracket set for BCP-15W/16W/31W/32W.
WhEELMaGNET | BCP-75 • Wheel magnet for all models. • Fit round and aero spokes.
BCP-16W
l i g h ts
Bart Brentjens, Superior-Brentjens MTB Racing Team, 2013
CRee led
The CREE LED’s are one of the world best light emitting diodes. CREE semiconductor delivers high quality, superior performance and uses the newest LED manufacturing technologies. These LED’s are extremely powerful, energy sufficient and last a long time.
luxeon Rebel
Luxeon Rebel LED’s are next generation high power LED’s. These LED’s are more efficient, reliable and longer lasting than traditional lighting components. Luxeon Rebel LED’s produce less heat, more light output with less energy and have the highest light density (lumens per mm2) available on this moment.
aCS
Intensive lights also produce a lot of heat. Therefore BBB high power lights are equiped with ACS (Airflow Cooling System ). Due to the special design of the aluminun casing parts of the light the airflow passing by while cycling is cooling down the light. Using an ACS controlled light, without riding will damage the light.
all about VaRifoCuS
Variable focus function. By twisting the head of the light you can change the width of the beam, emitted by the light. Due to this function the beam can be more focused on your track or illuminate also more of the surrounding area.
tightfix
Easy mounting, angle adjustable bracket. Is closed and tightened by an allen screw. Fits on both standard and oversized handlebar diameters due to it’s special design.
StRapmount
Uses a high quality, internal or external, lightweight Lithium ion polymer battery.
Regulated
Regulated lights emit over their entire burn time a constant amount of light due to an electronic regulation system. Is the battery (pack) empty, can’t the same amount of light be emitted anymore, than the light will automatically turn off. These lamps feature a battery indicator.
uSb ReChaRgeable
Quick and easy rechargeable by USB.
Uses the mentioned number of 1.5 V “AAA” replaceable or rechargeable batteries.
non-Regulated
By non-regulated lights, the luminous intensity gradually decreases. During use, these lights will dim slowly.
// bbb is the 2013 official light set supplier of teams:
lights
Easy mounting, angle adjustable silicone strap closed bracket. Fits both standard and oversized handlebar diameters.
superior Brentjens MtB racing
New technologies in LED lighting have provided riders looking to extend their possible riding time with huge advances for more visibility in the dark. Our riding lights have developed in leaps and bounds over the last few years. It was only a few years ago that we introduced the first generation of our HighPower light, but the lumens that our newest Scope 1300 model puts out would leave it - quiet literally - in the dark. These developments have spawned a whole new category of night riders that take advantage of the additional riding time these new lights provide. BBB’s right there, providing them with the cutting edge tools. At the same time we offer a full range of lights to commuting cyclists looking to increase their visibility to other traffic when the weather turns sour or the days get shorter.
Vacansoleil-DcM
l i g h ts : scope
Scope 800 | BLS-67
• 800 lumen lightweight headlight with external battery pack. • 2 Powerful XM-L T6 CREE LED. • 4 modes: Super beam, high beam, standard beam, and low beam. • Water-resistant aluminum casing with Airflow Cooling System (ACS) for optimum heat control.
• The light is protected against overheating. It automatically will
dim when the temperature goes above 85 degree Celsius and will light up again when the temperature is at normal operating temperature. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant multifunctional switch provides direct and responsive activation and is used as power indicator, indicating empty battery (red light) and light On (blue light). • HelmetMount helmet bracket (BLS-70) included. • Ultra light and compact (86 x 46 x 27 mm) High quality Lithium (2x 18650, 2500 mAh, 7.4 V) battery. • Battery pack can be installed in multiple positions on the bicycle. • Rubber shaped battery ends prevent scratches on you bike. • Battery can be (dis)charged up to 300 times without noticeable performance loss. • Charging time is typically 2 hours. • The system is protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge. • Charger with power plug included. • 110 mm extension cable included. • Weight light: 110 grams. • Weight battery: 140 grams. • Size light: 44 x 34 x 52 mm. • Size battery: 86 x 46 x 27 mm.
scope 1300
BLs-68
A massive amount of light. That will be your first impression when you switch on a Scope 1300 for the first time. A whopping 1300 lumens of light - in layman’s terms that means: a whole lot - will brighten any trail. Your second impression will be one of surprise that all this light comes from the rather small light unit (110gr, 44 x 34 x 52mm). The secret is in the side-by-side double XM-L T6 CREE LEDs. They run on a compact external battery pack, have four brightness modes and are housed in a water-resistant aluminum casing with Airflow Cooling System for optimal heat control. By using the included mounts the lighting unit can be fit to any handlebar or helmet. The battery pack is light and small enough (200gr, 105 x 55 x 32mm) to be strapped to your bike or slipped into a jersey pocket and has two neat little features. Firstly it allows you to charge USB-powered devices like smartphones or a GPS through it’s USB-out connector. The battery pack needs too much power to be charged through USB, but comes with the appropriate charger. It charges in approximately 2,5 hours. Secondly, the battery pack is equipped with a 5-steps power level warning indicator. This indicator can be switched on and off.
energypack uSB | BLS-96
energypack | BLS-97
• High quality Lithium ion (2 x 22650, 3300mAh 7.4V)
• High quality Lithium ion (2 x 18650, 2600mAh 7.4V) battery pack, compatible with the BLS-67/68 Scope. • Battery pack can be installed in multiple positions on the bicycle by using the provided velcro strap. Rubber shaped battery ends prevent scratches on you bike. • The system is protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge. • The battery pack can be (dis)charged up to 300 times without noticeable performance loss. • Weight: 140 grams. • Size: 86 x 46 x 27 mm.
battery pack, compatible with the BLS-67/68 Scope lights. • Equipped with a 5-steps power level warning indicator. Indicator can be switched on and off. • Battery pack can be installed in multiple positions on the bicycle by using the provided velcro strap. Rubber shaped battery ends prevent scratches on you bike. • The system is protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge. • The battery pack can be (dis)charged up to 300 times without noticeable performance loss. • The battery pack also be used for other USB charged devices, like a phone. USB output (5V 1A) only! • Weight: 200 grams. • Size: 105 x 55 x 32 mm.
HeLmetmount | BLS-70
• This helmet bracket in combination with a BBB
headlight will make perfect form of lighting in your line of sight for night trips. • The bracket can be attached to most conventional helmets with a Velcro strap. • This helmet bracket is compatible with BBB headlight with TightFix bracket connection; Scope 800 (BLS-67), Scope 1300 (BLS-68), Strike 300 (BLS-71) and Strike 500 (BLS-72).
l i g h ts
l ig ht s : s tri k e
SPARK | BLS-46 | HEADLIGHT Strike 500 | BLS-72 SPARKCOMBO | BLS-48 • Powerful 500 Lumen XM-L CREE LED.
• Complete set including BLS-46 white headlight and BLS-47 red rear light.
• Lightweight and compact headlight. • Exchangeable internal EnergyBar (BLS-93) battery pack. • 5 modes: Super beam, high beam, standard beam, low beam and flash beam.
• Lightweight and compact head- or rear light. • Uses 3 super-bright white or red micro-LED’s. • Battery power indicator on top. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant switch provides direct and
overcharging and total discharge.
• Economical power consumption for long lasting battery life. • 4 modes: low beam, high beam, strobe beam and flash beam. • Lithium battery (280 mAh 3.7 V) can be charged up to 400
• Rubber enclosed water-resistant switch. • Multifunctional power indicator. • Charging time 4 hours. Protected against short circuits,
responsive activation.
• Battery pack (2300mAh 3.7V) can be (dis)charged up to 400 times
times without performance loss.
without noticeable performance loss. • Weight: 127 grams. • Size: 112 x 35 x 40 mm. • Colors: black and white.
• Powerful 300 Lumen XP-G CREE LED.
Strike 300 | BLS-71
• Charging time is typically 2.5 hours. Protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge.
• Weight: 25 grams. • Size: 56 x 31 x 16 mm. • Colors: black and white.
TIGHTFIx | BLS-94 • Mounting bracket for Scope and Strike headlights.
EnERGyBAR | BLS-93 • High quality Lithium ion (2300mAh 3.7V) battery pack.
• Compatible with the BLS-71/72 Strike. • Protected against short circuits, overcharging and total discharge.
• Lithium ion polymer battery pack can be (dis) charged up to 400 times without noticeable performance loss. • Weight: 56 grams. • Size: 77 x 23 x 23 mm.
SPARK | BLS-47 | REARLIGHT
l i g h ts
l ig ht s
UNIMOUNT | BLS-95
• Mounting bracket for all BBB headlights. • Easy to mount on the front fork. • Adjustable in length.
HIGHFOCUS | BLS-62
POWERCONVERTER | BLS-92
• Lightweight and compact headlight uses a bright 0,3 watt Phillips Luxeon 3535 LED. • Sealed twist-lock head. • Economical power consumption for longer lasting battery life. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant switch in the same color as the strap. • 2 modes: standard beam and flash beam. • Weight: 74 grams. • Size: 83 x 38 x 37 mm. • Colors: white/black, black/black, white/blue and black/red.
• Headlight, Aluminum casing, with high power 2 Watt, 170 Lumen, Luxeon Rebel ES LED. • Variable focus: from a 10° - 55° beam. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant-switch provides direct and responsive activation. • 4 modes: high beam, standard beam, low beam and flash beam. • Weight: 160 grams.
• USB power adapter for BLS-46/47/48 Spark and BLS-71/72 Strike. • Enables you to charge the head- or rear light at home or at the office. • Also for other USB charged devices. • Available in EU, Australia, UK and US/JP version.
HIGHLASER | BLS-36
• Rear light, 1 superbright LED and 2 regular LED’s. • Low power consumption. • Power warning indicator. • 3 modes: continuous 0.5 Watt, continuous 2 LED’s and continuous 0.5 Watt + 2 LED’s.
ecoBeam | BLs-75
ecocomBo | BLs-76 • Complete set including EcoBeam headlight (BLS-75) and RearLaser (BLS78) rearlight. • Uses 3 + 2 “AAA” batteries (included). • Colors: black/black, black/red, white/black and white/blue.
ReaRLaseR | BLs-78 | ReaRLIGHT
• Rear light uses 3 super-bright micro-LEDs. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant switch. • Economic power consumption for longer lasting battery life. • 2 modes: standard beam and flash beam. • Can be mounted on bags or clothing, due to clip-on. • Weight: 56 grams. • Size: 65 x 38 x 26 mm.
FRonTLaseR | BLs-77 | HeaDLIGHT
• Headlight uses 3 super-bright micro-LEDs. • Rubber enclosed water-resistant switch. • Economic power consumption for longer lasting battery life. • 2 modes: standard beam and flash beam. • Can be mounted on bags or clothing, due to clip-on. • Weight: 56 grams. • Size: 65 x 38 x 26 mm.
comBILaseR | BLs-79 • Complete set including BLS-77 white headlight and BLS-78 red rear light. • Uses 2 + 2 “AAA” batteries (included).
luX chArt
240 (flashing beam)
bls-78 reArlAser: mode 2
*The BLS-46, BLS-47, BLS-62, BLS-67. BLS-68, BLS-71, BLS-72, BLS-75, BLS-77 and BLS-78 are tested with enclosed batteries. The BLS-36 is tested with GP Alkaline batteries. Batteries delivered with the BLS-36 Gold Power Heavy Duty. The lifetime is also effected by the temperature. The values may differ from the packaging, due to new testing methods and different batteries.
If you want choose the most suitable light set for your bicycle use, it’s important to have correct and comparative product data. Because there is no international standard for light sets, BBB measures various values. With these values you can always compare our products.
To fully undersTand The values menTioned in The Table, we explain the concepts used:
Candela
The unit of luminous intensity. Candela indicates the amount of light emitted in a certain direction of the beam. The in the table noted Candela value is measured at the center of the beam.
lumen
The value for the total luminous flux, is the total amount of light (in all directions) emitted by that a lamp.
lux
The amount of light (lumens) on a certain area. Therefore Lux is the most telling unity. For example, if you have a light source of 1000 lumens, spread over 1 m², this square meter is illuminated with 1000 lux. When the same 1000 lumens are spread over 10 m², the same source illuminates a square meter with only 100 lux. However, when comparing Lux values for different light sets, it’s important to know the distance from the light source. The larger the distance to the source, the lower the Lux value will be. BBB measures the Lux value at 1 and 10 meters. The Lux value at 1 meter is equal to the value for Luminous intensity (Candela).
The lighT spoT diameTer
indicates how wide the beam of the lamp is at 1 meter distance.
The burn Time
Gives an indication of how many hours the lamp will burn. For battery lamps the burn time obviously depends on the quality of the battery. All BBB battery lamps come with Gold Power Heavy Duty batteries. Only the BLS-62 comes with Duracell alkaline batteries. Burn time for BBB lights with battery pack is measured with fully charged batteries.
all about PUMPS
Pumps in all shapes and sizes have always been one of the hallmark categories of the BBB collection for over a decade. It shows in the refined designs, no- fuss operation and incredible performance. Through the years we have come up with some industryleading innovations and designs. But don’t just take our word for it. BBB’s OvalIntegrate minipump won a Eurobike Design Award in 2008 and the Traveller mini floorpump replicated that victory in 2012. On top of that our AirBlaster floorpump blew away the competition in Germany’s Tour Magazin floorpump test in August 2012. Needless to say, feedback like this is huge to us. But it’s not stopping us to introduce some new innovations.
// bbb is the 2013 official pump supplier of teams:
rose Vaujany GraVity Mountainbike
pum ps : te c hnology
Threadhead
Unique screw on valve system fits both Presta and Schrader valves. Used on the BFP-31, BFP35, BMP-46 and BMP-47
t ec h nolog y
auTohead
Recognize the valve system automatically. Fits both Presta and Schrader valves.
Threadhead air release sysTem Unique tire pressure adjustment system combined with unique screw on valve system. Fits both Presta and Schrader valves. Makes setting an even more accurate tire pressure possible. Used on the BFP-36
dualhead
A different entry for presta and schrader/Dunlop.
dualhead combined wiTh pressure gauge
A different entry for presta and schrader/Dunlop, used on the BFP-11
airconTrol and airexacT pressure gauge
The duo-tone (bar and PSI) pressure gauge on the AirExact was specifically designed for mountainbikers. A pressure gauge that is more precise at lower pressures is needed, with mountain bike tire pressures getting lower and lower. Rescaling the scale on the 2,5 inch gauge makes this possible. For road cyclists higher pressures are needed. That’s why the pressure gauge on the AirControl has a larger scale of 0-14 bar. The AirBlaster floorpump (up to 18 bar) therefore has an even larger 3 inch duo-tone pressure gauge, so that the scale is still readable.
braided hose
The extreme high pressure of the AirBlaster floorpump (up to 18 bar) needs a special hose. A ‘standard’ rubber hose would probably not survive. That’s why we equipped the AirBlaster with a braided steel high pressure hose.
f eature s
ThumbLock lever to lock on your valve
Made of:
Soft Kraton parts provide superior grip and prevent scratches on your bike
Maximum pressure output
AIRConTRoL | BFP-35
AIRExACT | BFP-36
In 2012 we introduced the AirBlaster. A floor pump built like a tank, capable of delivering tremendous tire pressures. Every detail of the AirBlaster was engineered to be strong and durable. With an easy to read 3 inch pressure gauge and screw-on ThreadHead pump head it looks the way it pumps: powerful. The AirControl and AirExact pumps both carry similar features. The AirBlaster however is still the überpump, ready to last you a life time.
The AirControl is a high-pressure pump, that will fill up any tire but is more suited for road tires and their associated pressures up to a maximum of 14 bar/200 psi. All the AirControl’s parts have been made from solid materials, from it’s aluminum barrel and base to the ergonomic wooden handle. A large pressure gauge gives you a clear view on what you’re doing and the classy matte black finish makes it stand out in your workshop or shed. A pump that will last you for years to come. The construction of the AirExact and Aircontrol are identical, beside the gauge and AirControl has the screw-on ThreadHead pump head without air release button.
The pressure gauge on the AirExact was specifically designed for mountainbikers. With mountain bike tire pressures getting lower and lower, we felt there was a need for a pump that was built as solid as an AirBlaster, but with a pressure gauge that is more precise at lower pressures. After some prototypes we decided to use the same barrel diameter as the AirControl. Larger diameters actually made the pump less precise again. The construction of the AirExact and Aircontrol are identical, besides the guage and the AirExact has the screwon ThreadHead pump head with an air release button for an even more accurate tire pressure setting.
• Extra long aluminum barrel. • Ergonomic extruded type handle. • Stable solid aluminum base. • 90 cm braided steel high pressure hose. • Overall length of 70 cm.
• Extra long aluminum barrel. • Ergonomic wooden handle. • Stable solid aluminum base. • 90 cm high pressure rubber hose. • Overall length of 70 cm.
• Extra long aluminum barrel. • Ergonomic wooden handle. • Stable solid aluminum base. • 90 cm high pressure rubber hose. • Overall length of 70 cm.
f l oorpum ps
fl o or pum p s
AUToHEAD | BFP-92
• Replacement pumphead for all BBB floorpumps (except BFP-31/35/36). • Automatically recognizes the type of valve.
DUALHEAD 2.0 | BFP-93
• Replacement pumphead for all BBB floorpumps (except BFP-31/35/36).
AIRSTEALTH | BFP-24
AIREco | BFP-11
VALVEKIT | BFP-90
• Extra long floorpump. • Sophisticated design aluminum inner double shaft, creates higher pressure. • Natural pumping position and increased pumping power. • Steel barrel with an overall length of 690 mm. • Stable composite/steel base. • Color: pearl white.
• Extra long floor pump. • Natural pumping position for increased pumping power. • Steel barrel with an overall length of 690 mm. • Stable composite/steel base. • Colors: glossy black and red (AutoHead) and silver (Dualhead 2.0).
• Aluminum floor pump. • Ergonomic handle and stable composite base. • Aluminum barrel with an overall length of 690 mm. • Colors: polished silver and polished black.
• Compact floorpump with ergonomic handle. • Steel barrel with an overall length of 620 mm. • Stable composite base. • Colors: black, white, silver and yellow.
• Compact floorpump. • Composite barrel. • Overall length of 620 mm. • Nylon fiber base. • Color: black/gray.
• Compact floor pump. • Accurate pressure gauge integrated into pumphead. • Composite barrel. • Overall length of 620 mm. • Nylon fiber base. • Color: black/gray.
• Valve kit for BBB DualHead, AutoHead and ThreadHead floorpumps. • Valve adapters for: Dunlop, sports balls, inflatable boats, etc. • Mounts on the hose of any BBB floorpump.
PRESSURE GAUGE | BMP-90
• Digital tire pressure meter. • Maximum readable pressure: 11 bar. • Auto off power-saver function.
c o2 pum p s
OVALINTEGRATE The OvalIntegrate pump is a bit of an oddity that needs a little explaining. Unlike other minipumps that either stick out of the back pocket on your jersey or get mounted awkwardly to your bike, the OvalIntegrate sits nice and flush in the curves of your frame. The entire pump was designed to have a low profile and mount directly to your frame with its supplied bracket. It’s cleverness was acknowledged with a EUROBIKE award.
CO2Blaster | BMP-33
• CO2 cartridge inflator and slim, elegant and lightweight aluminum mini pump combined. • Simple and save operation. • 16 gram cartridge and foam protective cover included. • Lock system prevents the handle from sliding down. • Length: 195 mm. • Weight: 78 grams.
OVALINTEGRATE | BMP-51S
airsPeed | BMP-32
• CO2 cartridge inflator. • Simple and save operation. • Fits both Presta and Schrader valves. • 16 gram cartridge and foam protective cover included.
airsaFe | BMP-31
• CO2 cartridge inflator. • As a safety feature the cartridge and inflator head can be mounted without opening the cartridge and prevents air leakage. • Fits both Presta and Schrader valves. • 16 gram cartridge and foam protective cover included.
airtaNKs | BMP-35
• Replacement cartridges (threaded) for BBB AirSafe, AirSpeed and CO2Blaster. • Volume capacity of 16g. • A single cartridge inflates one MTB tire up to 2.8bar / 40psi and a road tire up to 8.2bar / 125psi. • Two cartridges per pack.
• Size: 230 mm.
• Weight: 133 grams.
airtaNK Xl | BMP-38
• Replacement cartridges (threaded) for BBB AirSafe, AirSpeed and CO2Blaster. • Volume capacity of 25g. • Perfect for inflating a large MTB tire.
m i n ipum p s : hos e road
Traveller
BMP-52
HOSEROAD | BMP-46 A minipump that feels like a track pump. But one that you could take anywhere. The first idea was rather simple, but it took quite a bit design and engineering to turn the initial idea into the award winning Traveller. The final product is as simple as it could be: pop out the footbase, grab the handle and you’ll be back on the road or trail in no-time. The Traveller has a durable and light aluminum barrel and the T-type handle has a Kraton insert for added grip. We even managed to squeeze an integrated pressure gauge into the base of the pump so you know how much air is in your tires instead of guessing. The Traveller comes with bolts and mounting clamp to be mounted on your frame, or carry it in your panniers or backpack.
• Lightweight high volume mini pump with extractable hose and ThreadHead pumphead. • ThreadHead pumphead; Unique screw on valve system fits both Presta and Schrader valves. • The extractable hose makes an easy safe connection with the valve. • Mounting bracket included. • Length: 220 mm. • Weight 106 grams. • Colors: black and white.
// EXCITING GEAR TRAvEllER | BMP-52
HOSEROAD tElEScOPE | BMP-47 • Telescopic, lightweight 6061 T6 aluminum mini pump. • Compact design with high pumping volume. • ThreadHead pumphead; Unique screw on valve system fits both Presta and Schrader valves. • The extractable hose makes an easy connection with every Presta or Schrader valve system. • Mounting bracket included. • Length: 190 mm. • Weight 120 grams.
m i ni pum ps
m i n ipum p s
WINDRUSH | BMP-25
• Lightweight 25 mm barrel is light and provides high air pressure. • Metal piston shaft provides fast high-volume pumping. • Valve cover helps to keep your valves clean. • Length: 230 mm. • Weight: 121 grams.
WINDRUSH | BMP-26
• Lightweight 25 mm barrel is light and provides high air pressure. • Metal piston shaft provides fast high-volume pumping. • Valve cover helps to keep your valves clean. • Length: 280 mm. • Weight: 133 grams.
WINDGUN | BMP-27
• Lightweight 25 mm barrel is light and provides high air pressure. • Metal piston shaft provides fast high-volume pumping. • Valve cover helps to keep your valves clean. • Length: 230 mm. • Weight: 144 grams.
WINDGUN | BMP-28
• Lightweight 25 mm barrel is light and provides high air pressure. • Metal piston shaft provides fast highvolume pumping. • Valve cover helps to keep your valves clean. • Length: 280 mm. • Weight: 156 grams.
WINDWAVE | BMP-24
• Durable and lightweight composite barrel. • A 25 mm diameter is lighter, yet provides a higher air pressure. • Metal piston shaft provides fast high-volume pumping. • Valve cover helps to keep your valves clean. • Length: 230 mm. • Weight: 111 grams.
AIrShock | BMP-29
• Suspension shock pump. • Fits most shocks and forks. • Fine-tuning pressure bleeder valve for precise air delivery. • Precision 1.5-inch analog gauge protected by a rubber housing. • External swivel hose. • Lightweight aluminum barrel.
TELEroAD | BMP-45
• Compact design with high pumping volume. • Valve cover helps to keep the valve clean. • Lock-rubber prevents the handle from sliding down. • Mounting bracket included. • Length: 180 mm. • Weight: 98 grams.
coMPAcT roAD | BMP-40
• Slim, elegant and lightweight aluminum mini pump. • Lock-rubber prevents the handle from sliding down. • Mounting bracket included. • Length: 180 mm. • Weight: 74 grams.
Joost Wichman, Rose Vaujany Gravity Mountainbike Team, 2013
all about TOOLS If you really love your bike, you’re going to enjoy wrenching on it. Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance. There is something liberating about knowing that you’ve fine-tuned the performance of your bike to your personal tastes and requirements. BBB knows this. We have offered tools from the very first day we got into this business. And to this day we are ready to assist in your quest of keeping your ride operating as well as the day it was wheeled out of your LBS for the first time. We have divided the BBB tool collection into three categories: on the road to help you with road-side repairs, workshop tools that are stronger and bigger and toolboxes that offer a selection of tools in one handy carrying case. Keep wrenching, keep riding!
// bbb is the 2013 official tool supplier of teams:
rose Vaujany GraVity Mountainbike
mi n it o ols
m i ni tool s
MICROFOLD XXL | Btl-42xxl
PRIMEFOLD PRIMEFOLD S | BTL-47S
• 9 functions: - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers.
MICROFOLD
Compact and complete. The MicroFolds pack all the necessary functions in a sleek and minimalistic exterior. The rubber-coated case is ergonomic and protects scratches on your tool and bike frame. the XXl is a true macgyver of functions and has already won two major tests!
MAXIFOLD MICROFOLD S | BTL-42S
• 6 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 3, 4 and 5 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers.
MInIFOLD S | BTL -40S • 9 functions: - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers.
MICROFOLD L | BTL-42L
• 12 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5 and 6 mm. - PH1 and PH2 Philips screwdrivers. - 4 and 6 mm flat screwdrivers. - T25 and T30 torx.
MICROFOLD XL | BTL-42XL
• 10 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5 and 6 mm. - T25 torx. - PH2 screwdriver and flat screwdriver. - Chain rivet tool.
TORXFOLD | BTL-43 • Torx set with 8 sizes: T9, T10, T15, T20, T25, T27, T30 and T40.
MICROFOLD XXL | BTL-42XXL
• 20 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - T25 torx. - PH1 and PH2 Philips screwdrivers. - Flat screwdriver. - Chain rivet tool. - Tire levers. - Box wrench 8, 9 and 10 mm. - Spoke wrench 3.2, 3.3 and 3.5.
MAXIFOLD S | BTL-41S
• 10 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers. - T25 torx.
The primefolds are the tricked out version of the maxifolds. Tools and casing come with an additional coating for added durability and hardness of the tools. And it never hurt for your equipment to look good, right?
PRIMEFOLD M | BTL-47M
• 12 functions: - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers. - T25 torx. - Spoke wrenches. - 8 mm box wrench.
PRIMEFOLD L | BTL-47L
• 12 functions: - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers. - T25 torx. - Knife. - Tire lever.
The MaxiFolds are our line of no-nonsense minitools: compact, solid and functional. The Maxifold L has already won three international tests. especially the functionality of its chain tool is highly praised. The tools are designed to generate force with. the TorxFold is a version with all relevant torx sizes.
MAXIFOLD M | BTL-41M
• 13 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers. - T25 torx. - Tire lever. - Spoke wrenches. - Knife.
MAXIFOLD L | BTL-41L
• 14 functions. - Hex keys: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm. - Philips and flat screwdrivers. - T25 torx. - Tire levers. - Spoke wrenches. - Chain rivet tool.
tool s : w ork sh op
t ool s : on the road
CombiPaCk | bSb-51
TOOTHBRUSH | BTL-17
• EasyPack S Saddlebag with Twin-Buckle system with content: • BTL-42S MicroFold tool with 6 functions. • BTL-81 EasyFit tire levers 3pc/set. • BMP-24 Windwave minipump with bracket.
TooLS & TUbES S | bTL-18S
TooLS & TUbES L | bTL-18L
• Storage can to fit in your bottle cage. • Perfect to organize your innertube, tools, Co2 inflator etc. • Durable composite material. • Size: 450 ml. • Colors: black and white.
• Storage can to fit in your bottle cage. • Perfect to organize your innertube, tools, Co2 inflator etc. • Durable composite material. • Size: 600 ml. • Colors: black and white.
EaSyLifT | bTL-81 • Easy to use tire levers. • Click-together system for portability. • 3 pieces a set. • Colors: black, red/white/blue, green/white/red.
LEakfiX | bTL-80 • Compact tube repair kit. • Contains 6 self adhesive patches and a piece of sandpaper.
foRkGRiP | bTL-49 • Quick release axle system protects the front fork when the wheel is removed. • With disc brake pad adapter. Retains the brake pads when the disc is removed. • Width: 110 mm.
CHaiNGRiP | bTL-50 • Quick-release axle system, keeps the chain under tension when the wheel is removed. • Easy transportation and cleaning. • Sizes: 130 mm road bikes and 135 mm MTB with disc brake pad adapter to keep the brake pads in place when the disc is removed.
TURNER ii | bTL-15 • Compact CrMo spoke wrench. • For spoke diameters: 3,2 (0.127), 3,3 (0.130), 3,5 (0.136) and 4,0 mm (0.156).
• Extra thick bristles suited for a variety of cassette cleaning jobs. • Durable Nylon bristles stay stiff. • Washable.
LinkFix | BTL-77 • Chain link tool with dual function. • Opens and closes BBB BCH-08/09/10/11S SmartLink II chain closing links.
PROFiCOnnECT | BTL-55 • Professional chain rivet tool. • Compatible with any chain, including 11 speed. • Fully adjustable to the size of the chain. • Comfortable rubber handle. • With special peening blockage to be compatible with Campagnolo 11 speed chains. • Includes a spare pin.
FASTCUT | BTL-16 • Ultra-sharp bike cable cutter. • Industrial grade hardened steel.
PROFiLiFT | BTL-79 • Professional tire lever. • Composite side for bike wheels, metal side for heavy duty purposes. • Comfortable grip.
POWERPULL | BTL-14 • Seperates the crank. • Pulley can be used on over-sized spindles. • Without the cap the tool can be used on all standard spindles.
PARkinGHOOk | BTL-26 • Heavy-duty wall mounted storage. • Variable angle bracket fits all bicycle sizes.
BRiGHT & FRESH | BTL-21 • Modern chain-cleaning tool. • No chain disassembly required. • Smooth internal chain guide mechanism. • Made of Nylon plastic with replaceable brushes.
CHAinCHECkER | BTL-51 • Easy to use chain wear checking tool. • When the 0.75 = 75% wear is reached the chain must be replaced soon. • When the 1.0 = 100% wear is reached the chain must be replaced instantly.
nAUTiLUS ii | BTL-05 • Precision chain rivet tool that works with any chain including 11 speed. • Can be adjusted to the size of the chain. • Tough steel with comfortable rubber handle. • Includes a spare pin.
PROFiCUT | BTL-54 • Professional cable cutter. • Ultra-sharp hardened steel blades. • Crimper for cable ends. • Two-tone grip with soft Kraton inserts.
EASyTiRE | BTL-78 • Tools helps to put tires on the rim. • Perfect help for tight tire / wheel combinations. • Fully composite to prevent wheel or tire damage.
PARkinGLOT ii | BTL-19 • Hang your bike on beams and walls. • A space saving option for storing bikes.
WALLMOUnT | BTL -93 • Heavy-duty wall mounted storage for bicycles. • Hang your bike on beams and walls. • Folds out of the way when not in use, a space saving option for storing bikes. • Protective plastic cover to protect the bike frame from damage. • Strong durable steel construction. • Angle adjustable hook.
w ork stands
t o ol s : work s hop
HEX T | BTL-45 • T-handle hex wrench. • With ball head for hard to reach bolt heads. • Handle made of durable composite material. • Sizes: 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 mm (sold separately).
HEXAGON | BTL-13 • Large size hex key. • Ideal for removing the cranks hex bolt • Sizes: 6, 8 and 10 mm (sold separately)
PULLSTAR | BTL-20L • Bottom bracket tool for Octalink and ISIS models. • Screw-on blocking mechanism. • Extra long handle version, makes it easy to bring on more power. • Kraton handle provides a firm grip. • Extra long: 33 cm.
BOTTOMFIX | BTL-33L • Bottom bracket tool for Campagnolo. • Can also be used as lock-ring remover. • Kraton handle provides a firm grip. • Extra long: 33 cm
TORX T | BTL-46 • T-handle torx wrench. • Handle made of durable composite material. • Compatible with torx bolts with and without pin. • Sizes: T25 and T30 (sold separately).
TORXSTAR | BTL-28T • Torx key set with Kraton star grip. • Sizes: T25, T30 and T40.
THREESTAR | BTL-28 • Hex key set with Kraton star grip. • Sizes: 4, 5 and 6 mm.
Fullmount | Btl-64
• Professional bike repair stand. • Lightweight and stable aluminum frame with rubber foot pads. • Mounting on front fork or rear dropout. • Height adjustable. • 360-degree turntable. • Tray for tools, parts and lubricants. • Foldable.
HI-TORQUE | BTL-10L • Ergonomic pedal wrench to remove and replace pedals quickly and easily. • Extra wide strong hooks. • Extra long: 33 cm.
ULTRAGRIP | BTL-38 • Bottom bracket tool set for external BB’s • Espacially for Campagnolo UltraTorque. • Set contains: bottom bracket tool to assemble cups and extra long hex key to mount the fixing bolt. • Kraton handle provides a firm grip.
LOCKOUT | BTL-12C • Removes cassette lock-rings of Campagnolo compatible cassettes.
BOLDGRIP | BTL-32L • Chainring nut wrench for easy mounting of the chainring nuts. • Compatible with Shimano and Campagnolo chainring nuts. • Includes tool to remove the dust cap from the cranks.
BRACKETGRIP | BTL-27L • Bottom bracket tool for external BB’s. • Kraton handle provides a firm grip. • Extra long: 33 cm.
LOCKOUT | BTL-12S • Removes cassette lock-rings of Shimano compatible cassettes and center lock disc brake hub systems.
HEADFIX | BTL-56 • High quality headset wrench. • Comfortable rubber grip. • Sizes: 32/36 and 36/40 mm (sold separately).
MULTIHOOK | BTL-24 • High quality bracket tool for easy assembly of bottom bracket lock rings. • Fits most lock-ring sizes.
TURNTABLE | BTL-11 • Effectively holds the sprockets when removing the cassette lock-ring. • Also removes freewheel sprockets. • 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 speed compatible.
EASYmount | Btl-63
PROFICONE | BTL-90 • Professional cone wenches. • Strong material and longer grip. • Sizes: 19 mm, 20 mm, 23 mm, 24 mm and 28 mm (sold separately).
CONEFIX | BTL-25 • Versatile and durable cone wrenches. • Sizes: 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 mm (sold separately).
DISCSTRAIGHT | BTL-74 • Disc rotor straightening tool. • Ideal solution when a replacement disc is not available. • Ergonomic Kraton grip.
BOXFIX | BTL-57 • 14 and 15 mm wheel nut tool. • Ideal for use on the wheels of track and commuter bikes. • Comfortable rubber grip.
• Easy to use foldable bike repair stand. • Stable construction. • Rubber foot pads prevent movement. • Easy clamp mechanism with a single knob for quick mounting and dismounting. • Rubber covered bracket and frame support. • Metal straps secure the front wheel.
PRoFImount | Btl-36 • High-end bike repair stand. • Excellent stability. • Completely adjustable and foldable. • Convenient frame / seatpost clamping mechanism. • Adjustable height. • Tray can be used for tools, bolts and lubricants. • Includes a high-quality carrying bag. • Lightweight; 5.4 kgs including carrying bag.
// EXCITING GEAR
t o ol cas e s
TorqueSeT | BTL-73
TorqueFix | BTL-94
• Adjustable torque tool with 1/4” drive. • Click-mechanism to indicate when torque setting is reached. • Range: 2-14 Nm, adjustable with small increments. • Individually calibrated by computer. Possibility to re-calibrate the tool. • Hex keys 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and T25, T30 torx included. • Protection case included.
ALLroundKiT | BTL-91 • Extra strong Toolbox with the 16 most common tools for your bike maintenance. • Foam inserts keep the tools in place. • Extra space to add additional tools to meet your specific needs. • Tools included: - BTL-11 (freewheel turner), - BTL-12S (lockring remover), - 2 x BTL-13 (hex key 8 and 10 mm), - BTL-15 (spoke wrench), - BTL-17 (cassette cleaner), - BTL-28 (hex key set), - BTL-28T (torx key set), - BTL-32L (chainring nut wrench), - BTL-33L (lock-ring remover / bottom bracket tool), - BTL-51 (chain wear checker), - BTL-54 (cable cutter), - BTL-55 (chain rivet tool), - BTL-77 (chain link tool), - 2 x BTL-79 (tire lever).
BAsEKIT | BTL-92
• Fixed torque tool with 1/4” drive. • Click-mechanism to indicate when torque setting is reached. • Hex keys 4, 5 and T25 torx included. • Great for properly adjusting and installing carbon parts without damaging. • Available in 4, 5 or 6 pre-set Nm (sold separately).
TooLBox CoMPACT C | BTL-58 • Metal case toolbox specifically designed for maintenance to Campagnolo equipped bikes. • Extra space to add additional tools • Tools included: - BTL-05 (chain rivet tool), - BTL-51 (chain wear checker), - BTL-32L (chainring nut wrench), - BTL-37 (tire levers), - BTL-28 (hex key set), - BTL-28T (torx key set), - BTL-15 (spoke wrench), - BTL-11 (freewheel turner), - BTL-38 (bottom bracket set), - BTL-33 (lock-ring remover / bottom bracket tool).
TooLBox CoMPACT S | BTL-59 • Metal case toolbox specifically designed for the maintenance of Shimano equipped bikes. • Extra space to add additional tools • Tools included: - BTL-05 (chain rivet tool), - BTL-51 (chain wear checker), - BTL-32L (chainring nut wrench), - BTL-37 (tire levers), - BTL-28 (hex key set), - BTL-28T (torx key set), - BTL-15 (spoke wrench), - BTL-11 (freewheel turner), - BTL-38 (bottom bracket tool), - BTL-12S (lock-ring remover), - BTL-13 (hex key 10mm).
BaseKit
BtL-92
An extra strong Toolbox with 10 of the most common tools for regular bike maintenance, the BaseKit is an excellent starter’s kit for riders taking their first cautious steps to working on their own bikes. The cut-out protective foam inserts keep all the tools in their respective places. We’ve added a little extra space to add additional tools or small spares to meet your bikes specific needs.
tooLs incLuded: • Chain rivet tool, BTL-05 • Freewheel turner, BTL-11 • Lockring remover, BTL-12S • Spoke wrench, BTL-15 • Hex key set (4,5,6 mm), BTL-28
• Torx key set (T25, T30, T40), BTL-28T • Chainring nut wrench, BTL-32L • Minitool (9 functions), BTL-40S • Chain wear checker, BTL-51 • Tire levers, BTL-81
f e nde rs
RInGFIX
BFD-90
Fenders aren’t the most appealing accessory you’re going to stick onto your finely tuned road or mountain bike. Personally, we like to keep their presence at a minimum, only mounting them when the weather calls for it. That’s how we came up with the Ringfix bracketfree mount. If you want to use your fenders it’s fixed in a few seconds. But when the fenders come of, there aren���t any unsightly brackets that remain on your bike.
ROADCATCHER II | BFD-04 • High-tech rear fender for road bikes. • RingFix quick release system fits seatpost diameters 25.0 - 34.9mm. • Composite material. • Long, aerodynamic design.
MTBPROTECTOR | BFD-13R
Bart Brantjens, Superior Brentjens MTB Racing Team, 2013
• MTB rear fender with TPR mud flap. • RingFix quick release system fits seatpost diameters 25.0 - 34.9mm. • Two-tone composite material. • The engineered geometry provides a wide area of protection. • Suitable for 26” mountain bikes and 28”road bikes.
GRAnDPROTECT | BFD-14R • MTB rear fender with TPR mud flap. • RingFix quick release system fits seatpost diameters 25.0 - 34.9mm. • Two-tone composite material. • The engineered geometry provides a wide area of protection. • Suitable for 27.5” and 29” mountain bikes.
// bbb is the 2013 OFFICIAl fender suPPlIER of teams:
suPERIOR BREnTjEns MTB RACInG
GRanDPROTECT | BFD-14F
MTBPROTECTOR | BFD-13F
• MTB front fender with TPR mud flaps. • For suspension forks by TurnFix release system, steering tubes from 18.5-32.0mm. • Two-tone composite material. • Engineered geometry provides a wide area of protection. • Suitable for 27.5 and 29” bikes with suspension forks.
• MTB front fender with TPR mud flaps. • For suspension forks by TurnFix release system, steering tubes from 18.5-32.0mm. • Two-tone composite material. • Engineered geometry provides a wide area of protection. • Suitable for 26” bikes with suspension forks.
ROADPROTECTOR | BFD-21R • Elegant rear fender for road bikes. • Protects against water spray and road grime. • Easy quick release system; only the small, inconspicuous mounting bracket remains on the bike. • Composite material.
MUDCaTCHER II | BFD-03
• Freeride rear fender, for extreme mountain biking. • Fender can be attached firmly to the seat tube. • Maximum protection against mud, grime and debris. • Composite material.
HIGHPROTECTOR | BFD-15F • Freeride front fender especially suited for extreme mountain biking. • Fender can be attached to the inner tube of the front fork. • Maximum protection against mud, grime and debris. • Composite material.
• Elegant front fender for road bikes. • Protects against water spray and road grime. • Easy quick release system; only the small, inconspicuous mounting bracket remains on the bike. • Composite material.
BRACKET | BFD-21FB
• Down tube mounted fender. • Composite material with softer TPR flap. • Suited for extreme mountain biking. • Dual elastomer strap attachment.
HIGHPROTECTOR | BFD-15R
ROADPROTECTOR | BFD-21F
• Extra long bracket for BFD-21F RoadProtector front fender. • Protection cover and bolts included. • Standard size bracket also separately available.
RAINPROTECTORS | BFD-25 • A set with front and rear fender. • Special geometry provides a wide area of protection against dirt and water in combination with a perfect fit on almost every bike, even with wider tires. • Seattube clamp for extra stability. • Two-tone composite material. • Compatible with 26” and 28” bikes.
RAINWARRIORS | BFD-01 • One set for front and rear. • Engineered geometry provides a wide area of protection. • Composite material. • Sizes: 26”-24” and 28”-26” bikes.
bottl e cag e s
FLEXCAGE
BBC-36
BBB’s designers love pushing the development on our more basic products. Improving on something that seems so simple is always more of a challenge. The FlexCage received a design update that improved bottle retention and flexibility to adapt to a larger range of waterbottle sizes. At the same time a little weight was shaved of, we added more colors and kept the price at a nice affordable level.
• Weight: 42 grams. • Colors: glossy black/red, glossy black/yellow, glossy black/white, glossy white/black, glossy white/blue & glossy white/green.
SPEEDCAGE | BBC-31 • Aerodynamically shaped cold-forged aluminum. • One piece design with integrated bracket. • Secure bottle retention system. • Stainless steel bolts. • Weight: 40 grams. • Colors: matt black, glossy white, glossy black and carbon finish.
CARBONCAGE | BBC-30 • UD carbon fiber bottle cage. • Combines tight bottle hold with low weight. • Secure flexible bottle retention system. • Black aluminum bolts. • Weight: 22 grams. • Color: Glossy UD carbon.
FiBERCAGE | BBC-37 • UD Carbon fiber bottle cage. • Unique design holds water bottle securely while allowing fast and easy bottle retrieval. • Black aluminum bolts. • Weight: 24 grams. • Color: matt UD carbon.
COMPCAGE | BBC-19 • Glassfiber reinforced composite bottle cage. • Secure bottle retention system. • Weight: 38 grams. • Colors: black and white.
AEROCAGE | BBC-11 • 6061 T5 lightweight aluminum bottle cage. • Two pieces design with integrated bracket. • Extra composite top protection. • Easy bottle retrieval. • Stainless steel bolts. • Weight: 43 grams. • Colors: matt black, glossy white, glossy black and carbon finish.
LiGHTCAGE | BBC-16 • 3K carbon fiber bottle cage. • Visually clean and minimalistic look. • Secure bottle retention system. • Black aluminum bolts. • Weight: 20 grams. • Colors: glossy carbon and glossy white.
SIDECAGE | BBC-35 • 6463 T5 lightweight aluminum. • Especially suited for smaller-sized and full-suspension frames. • One piece design with integrated bracket. • Stainless steel bolts. • Weight: 42 grams. • Colors: glossy black and glossy white.
b ot t l ec age s
ECOTANK | BBC-01 • Standard version bottle cage. • Lightweight aluminum. • Colors: matt black and silver.
CO2HOLD | BBC-90 • 6061 T6 aluminum bracket with mounts for two CO2 cartridges. • Can be mounted under the bottle cage. • Cartridges are stored both safely and within reach. • Weight: 11 grams. • Color: matt black.
FUELTANK | BBC-03 • Durable and lightweight aluminum. • T-shape design gives a secure bottle fit. • Special dampers prevents scuff marks. • Stainless steel bolts. • Colors: chrome, matt black, blue, red, glossy black, silver, white and matt titanium.
SMALLTANK | BBC-17 • Bottle cage specially designed for small PET bottles. • Also accomodates aluminum drink cans. • T-shape design provides a secure bottle fit. • Durable and lightweight aluminum. • Stainless steel bolts. • Color: matt black.
FUELTANK XL | BBC-15. • Extra large bottle cage for PET bottles up to 1.5 Liter. • Adjustable clamping mechanism to fit a wide range of bottle shapes and sizes. • Durable and lightweight aluminum. • T-shape design provides a secure bottle fit. • Stainless steel bolts. • Color: matt black.
bottl e s
b ot t l es
ThermoTAnk | BWB-51
AluTAnk | BWB-25
• Thermo bottle with double wall construction and 3M insulation material. • Keeps your drink cool up to double as long as a normal bottle. Also helps to keep your hot drink longer warm. • SoftLock valve. Comfortable and with rotation lock closure. • Dishwasher safe and BPA free polypropylene (PP) material. • Wide opening for easy cleaning and filling. • Easy to squeeze bottle. • Volume: 500 ml / 18 oz. • Color: white/blue.
• Aluminum water bottle. • Top cap valve is made of soft Kraton, with a locking mechanism. • Volume: 680 ml / 22.9 oz. • With transparent dust cap. • Colors: matt black and brushed silver.
AutotAnk | BWB-11 • Volume: 550ml / 18.6 oz.
• Bottle with special AutoClose valve, always open and still closed on the bike. • Easy drinking, no spills on the bike. Lockable when needed. • Dishwasher safe and BPA free polypropylene (PP) material. • Wide opening for easy cleaning and filling. • Easy to squeeze bottle. • Colors: clear and black.
• Volume: 750 ml / 26.4 oz.
AutotAnk XL | BWB-15
ComPTAnk | BWB-01 • Dishwasher safe and BPA free polypropylene (PP) material. • SoftLock valve. Comfortable and with rotation lock closure. • Wide opening for easy cleaning and filling • Easy to squeeze bottle. • Volume: 550 ml / 18.6 oz. • Colors: black/blue, black/red, black/yellow, white/magenta, clear/white and clear/black.
ComPTAnk Xl | BWB-05 • Dishwasher safe and BPA free polypropylene (PP) material. • SoftLock valve. Comfortable and with rotation lock closure. • Wide opening for easy cleaning and filling • Easy to squeeze bottle. • Volume: 750 ml / 26.4 oz. • Colors: black/blue, black/red, black/yellow, white/magenta, clear/white and clear/black.
l ock s
all about locks BBB offers a wide range of high quality bike locks, ranging from chains to U-locks or cable locks. Cable locks are offered with a key or numerical code option and in either twisted or straight inner cable. To guide you through this wide range of options and security levels, BBB has developed a numbercoded security system. The number on the packaging indicates the level of security: it helps decide which security level you need and the budget you want to invest in protecting your bike.
PoWERcHAIN | BBl-14 • Thick 10 mm heavy-duty steel chains bicycle lock for maximum protection. • Nylon cover for easy carrying and protects bicycle’s paint. • Hardened steel U-lock. • Chain size: 10 mm x 10 mm x 1000 mm. • U-lock size: 100 x 110 mm.
U-VAUlT | BBl-21 • Thick hardened steel U-lock. • Extra tough lock mechanism, 2 numbered keys included. • Size: 245 mm x 170 mm.
codEARmoR | BBl-47 • Extra protected durable lock mechanism. • Thick and durable armor steel with twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • 4-combination numerical code. Owner changeable numerical code can be custom-set. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Sizes: 18 mm x 1000 mm. • Compatible with BBL-93 CableTie.
l ock s
POWERLOCK | BBL-41
QuickSafe | BBL-61
• Durable lock mechanism covered with strong steel housing. • Thick and durable coil twisted inner steel cable. • Strong metal lock mechanism, 3 keys included. • Sizes: 12 mm / 15 mm x 1800 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
• Thick and durable coil twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • Durable lock mechanism. • Comes with 2 keys. • Sizes: 8 mm x 1500 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
POWERLOCK | BBL-42
QuickSafe | BBL-62
• Durable lock mechanism covered with strong steel housing. • Thick and durable twisted inner steel cable. • Strong metal lock mechanism, 3 keys included. • Sizes: 12 mm / 15 mm x 1000 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
• Thick and durable straight twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • Durable lock mechanism. • Comes with 2 keys. • Sizes: 8 mm x 700 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
CODELOCK | BBL-45
eXTRacOiL | BBL-22 • Additional cable to combine with the BBB-21 U-Vault. • Thick durable twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • Size: 10 mm x 1800 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix.
• Extra protected durable lock mechanism. • Thick and durable coil twisted inner steel cable for maximum protection. • 4-combination numerical code. Numerical code can be custom-set. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Sizes: 12 mm / 15 mm / x 1800 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
MicROLOOP | BBL-51
CODELOCK | BBL-46
• Small, extra compact and lightweight bicycle lock. • Special loop function provides extra cable length. • Owner changeable 3-combination numerical code mechanism. • Tough and durable steel cable gives impressive security despite its small diameter. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Velcro strap can hold the cable lock together while in storage. • Size: 4.8 mm x 1500 mm. • Weight: 125 grams.
• Extra protected durable lock mechanism. • Thick and durable twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • 4-combination numerical code. Numerical code can be custom-set. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Sizes: 12 mm / 18 mm x 1000 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix and BBL-93 CableTie.
POWERSAFE | BBL-31
MiNiSaVe | BBL-52 • Small, extra compact and lightweight bicycle lock. • Owner changeable 3-combination numerical code mechanism. • Impressive despite its small diameter, due to secure code lock and tough and durable steel cable. • Long pin code lock can also be used to secure zippers. • Size: 3 mm x 1200 mm.
• Thick and durable coil twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • Strong metal lock mechanism, 3 keys included. • Sizes: 8 mm / 12 mm x 1500 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix.
MicROSafe | BBL-10
POWERSAFE | BBL-32
• Small, extra compact and lightweight bicycle lock. • Changeable 3-combination numerical code. • Tough and durable steel cable gives impressive security despite its small diameter. • Size: 3 mm x 1200 mm.
• Thick and durable straight twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • Strong metal lock mechanism, 3 keys included. • Sizes: 8 mm / 12 mm x 1000 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix.
CODESAFE | BBL-35 • Thick and durable coil twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • 4-combination numerical code. • Owner changeable numerical code can be custom-set. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Cable sizes: 6 mm / 10 mm x 1500 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix.
CODESAFE | BBL-36 caBLefiX | BBL-92 • Thick and durable straight twisted inner steel cable provides maximum protection. • 4-combination numerical code. • Owner changeable numerical code can be custom-set. • Strong metal lock mechanism. • Sizes: 6 mm / 10 mm x 1000 mm. • Compatible with BBL-92 CableFix.
• Universal mounting bracket for BBB cable locks. • Bracket is attached to the seat post frame bolt. • Compatible with cable diameters: 6, 8, 10 and 12 mm.
caBLeTie | BBL-93 • Mounting bracket for BBB High security cable locks. • Bracket can be attached to different positions on the bicycle. • Dual Quick-release strap fit tubes with a diameter of 27.2-60 mm. • Compatible with BBL-41/42/45/46/47/61/62. • Also compatible with standard cable locks: 6, 8, 10 and 12 mm.
prote cti on
b el l s & k i c k s tand s & c arrier s
LOUD & CLEAR DELUXE | BBB-15 • Loudest BBB aluminum bicycle bell. • Larger top for extra volume. • Special connection system for maximum bell vibration. • Quick-release straps fit all diameters. • Easy to install and remove.
EASYFIT DELUXE | BBB-14 • Extra loud brass top and stainless steel spring. • Can be mounted in various positions. • Quick-release straps fit all diameters. • Easy to install and remove. • Colors: black, gray and white.
EASYFIT | BBB-12
LOUD & CLEAR | BBB-11
• Lightweight aluminum bicycle bell. • Can be mounted in various positions. • Quick-release straps fits all diameters. • Easy to install and remove.
• Unique spring system makes this bell exceptionally loud. • Durable and lightweight construction. • Standard clamping mechanism. • Colors: black and white.
STAYGUARD | BBP-12M • 250 x 90 x 110 mm
• Color: Real carbon fiber layer.
• Kickstand adjustable in length and angle. • Quick-Fold Mechanism (QFM): easy to fold away and deploy. • Extremely stable configuration • Design prevents your bike from tipping over. • Compatible with 26”-28” bikes.
QUICKKICK KIDS | BKS-02K • Kids version kickstand for installation on the wheel quick release. • Can be installed also when using disc brakes. • Quick-Fold Mechanism (QFM): easy to fold away and deploy. • Adjustable length, fits 16” to 24” wheels.
• 250 x 130 x 130 mm
STAYGUARD | BBP-12XL • 200 x 160 x 160 mm
• Neoprene cover protects your chainstay from chain-slap scratches. • Extra tough yet flexible material. • Large Velcro strap keeps StayGuard securely fastened to your bike’s chainstay. • Extra strong material with anti-slip inside.
CARBONSKIN | BBP-56
MULTIKICK | BKS-04
CLEARSKIN | BBP-55 • Color: transparent.
• Thick adhesive pads for protecting your bike’s paint. Extra durable. • Set includes: stay guard protection, 4 x 30 mm pads, 4 x 20 mm pads. • Rugged water resistant and flexible pads, suitable for every condition.
• Universal kickstand, can be installed on almost all sport bikes. • Multi-adjustable. Adjustable length and angle. • Quick Fold Mechanism (QFM),easy to fold away and deploy. • Extremely stable configuration. • Extra wide composite footrest. • Compatible with 26”-29” bikes.
BIKESKIN | BBP-51 • Color: Real carbon fiber layer.
BIKESKIN | BBP-50 • Color: transparent.
• Prevent damages caused by repeated contacts among the bike’s parts and frame. • Water and heat resistant suitable for every weather conditions. • Easy installation. • Sleek and flexible pads for prottecting your bike’s paint. • Extra flexible.
LIGHTFIX | BCA -91 • Reflector mounting bracket for BCA-02 MountRack and BCA-03 RearRack.
REARRACK | BCA -03
MOUNTRACK | BCA -02 • Sturdy carrier for seatpost mounting. • Sophisticated clamp system easy to use and compatible for diameters 27.2–31.6 mm. • Removable side protection prevents wheel contact. • Prepared for BCA-91 LightFix assembly mount. • Can be used on full-suspension bikes. • Special designed to combine with BSB-95 CarrierBag. • Maximum load: 10 kgs. • Slideable rack system.
SECURERACK | BCA -90 • Elastic straps for BCA-02.
• Sturdy carrier for seatpost mounting. • Sophisticated clamp system. Easy to use and compatible for diameters 27.2–31.6 mm. • BCA-91 LightFix assembly mount. • Can be used on full-suspension bikes. • Special designed to combine with BSB-95 CarrierBag. • Maximum load: 10 kgs. • Slideable rack system.
TUBESKIN | BBP-60 • Thick adhesive pad to protect your downtube’s paint against flying dirt and debris. • Extra strong adhesive stays attached even under the most extreme conditions. • Size: 500 x 50 mm.
All About
sa d d l es : te c hnology
Designed for men
feat u res Comfortlite geometry
Designed for women
Gel inserts for extra comfort
High abrasion resistant microtec cover
Anatomically adjusted
Bsd-85 extracOmfOrt
220mm x 265mm
We were tweaking ideas to create a lightweight racing saddle without resorting to a full-carbon deck. To mimic the tight and connected feeling of stiff suspension in a sports car, we used Superlight high density foam. This shell was built on ovalized CARail carbon fiber rails that are bonded to the nose of the saddle for the best possible stiffness and lowest weight. This provides a solid chassis for optimal power transfer. We chose to keep the profile minimalist and flat. All this effort resulted in a sub 149 gram saddle that is ready to take you to places. Like the top step of the podium.
• • • •
149 grams (yes that’s ridiculously light). Carbon fiber reinforced shell. CARail lightweight rails. Weight limit rider: 100kg.
saddl e s : race
sa d d l es : rac e
ARROW | BSD-61
• High performance saddle. • Extra comfort due to the use of low
• High performance saddle. • Extra comfort due to the use of low
• High performance saddle, wide version
• High performance saddle, 130 mm. • Extra comfort due to the use of low
• High performance saddle, wide version
• High performance saddle, 130 mm. • Extra comfort due to the use of low
• High performance saddle, wide gel
• High performance saddle gel vision,
weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
140 mm. • Extra comfort due to the use of low weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
140 mm. • Extra comfort due to the use of low weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
version 140 mm. • Extra comfort due to the use of low weight high-density Superlight foam. • Integrated bumper design.
130 mm.
• Extra comfort due to the use of low
weight high-density Superlight foam.
• Sportive saddle with two-tone synthetic leather cover. • Satin rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
MULTIDENSITY | BSD-13
• Luxurious Sutex cover. • Tough synthetic leather on crash damage-prone areas. • High-quality stitching won’t come off even after long term use. • Satin rails with matt bumpers.
SMOOTHDENSITY | BSD-15
• Sportive saddle with two-tone synthetic leather cover. • Satin rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
saddl e s : com f ort
sa d d l es : c om fort
MEMOCOMFORT | BSD-16
• Anatomic design, comfortable sportive saddle. • Satin rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
• Anatomic hole design, comfortable sportive saddle. • Satin rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
LIGHTCOMFORT | BSD-81
• Comfort saddle. • Super-soft foam for extra comfort and absorbs road
• Anatomic design. • Two-tone one-piece cover, fully waterproof. • Satin rails with black bumpers for extra protection.
• Two-tone one-piece cover, fully waterproof. • Satin rails with black bumpers for extra protection.
• Super comfort saddle, the softest saddle in the range. • Durable two-tone synthetic leather cover. • Silver rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
• Super comfort saddle, the softest saddle in the range. • Durable two-tone synthetic leather cover. • Silver rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
vibrations.
• Satin rails and bumpers for extra protection.
vibration and shocks.
• Stylish two-tone gray and black synthetic leather cover. • Bumpers to protect the most vulnerable part of the saddle.
EXTRACOMFORT | BSD-85
• Super comfort saddle. • Super-soft foam for extra comfort and absorbs road vibrations.
• Webspring technology. • Satin rails and black bumpers for extra protection.
ha n d l eb ar tap e
h andl e bar tape
SPEEDRIBBON | BHT-14
RACERIBBON | BHT-05 0507 - white cork
0537 - white
1407 - white
1401 - black
• High grip tape made of strong and resilient polyurethane. • Anti-slip diamond cut pattern design to provide superior hold. • Special shock proof microfiber material absorbs shock for more riding comfort. • The surface is very easy to clean and can be ridden in every weather condition. • Each roll is long enough to ensure complete coverage on all handlebar sizes. • Stretch material and gel backing makes it easy to wrap around the handlebars. • Finish tape and handlebar plugs included. • Colors: black and white.
• Highest-grade synthetic grip with shock absorbent gel. • Also available in black & white synthetic cork. • No weak points to break during high-intensity usage. • Fits all handlebar sizes. • Finish tape and handlebar plugs included. • Colors: black cork, white cork, black, white and dark red.
SPEEDRIBBON | BHT-12
1101 - black
1107 - white
• Stretchable EVA foam material with roughened suede finish. • Preferred by professional riders. • Finishing tape and handlebar plugs included. • Colors: black and white.
• Carbon structure. • Lightweight PU material. • Colors: black and white.
SCREWON | BHT-96 • Screw on plugs for handlebar tape. • Gives a secure hold to all tapes. • Stainless steel bolts. • 2 pieces a set. • Colors: black and chrome.
ENDCAPS | BHT-90S • Color: silver
ENDCAPS | BHT-91S • Color: black. • Secure fitting plugs for handlebar tape. • 2 pieces a set.
ENDCAPS | BHT-92S • Color: carbon
0117 - white cork
• Highest-grade synthetic grip. • Also available in black and white synthetic cork. • No weak points during high-intensity usage. • Fits all handlebar sizes. • Finish tape and handlebar plugs included. • Colors: black, blue, red, yellow, white, green, black cork and white cork.
0158 - green
InterGrIp | BHG-75 • Length: 130 mm.
InterGrIp | BHG-76
• Length: 93 mm.
• Length: 93 mm and 130mm.
• Ergonomically designed Kraton grips with gel palm support. • Very comfortable due to the anatomic shape and hand support.
FIXSet | BHG-48L
FIXSet | BHG-48M
• Combination set of BHG-42 InterFix grips and BBE-21 InterSticks L. • Fully integrated grip / bar end combination. • Large bar end size 85 mm for large sized hands. • Colors: black and white.
ErgoFix
• Combination set of BHG-42 InterFix grips and BBE-21 InterSticks M. • Fully integrated grip / bar end combination. • Medium bar end size 65 mm for small sized and medium sized hands. • Colors: black and white.
BHg-71
COMFOrtFIX | BHG-62 The ErgoFix is an evolution of our existing line of FixSet and InterGrip ergonomic grips. We received feedback asking for a smaller grip which still provided support, but not as distinct as the existing grips. So we trimmed down the supportive ‘wing’ and brought some more profile into the grips. The profile on the inside of your hand, where the area between thumb and index finger sit, was tapered down, so the grips would fit smaller hands without compromising the fit for larger hands. The core of the grip is Kraton for structural integrity with gel inserts for extra comfort and grippiness. On the outside of the grip we have placed a bumper for added control. Grip-wise we included aluminum lock-on rings for easy assembly and a no-slip mounting. Endcaps are included in the design of the grips to minimise the amount of separate parts. Available in black on black and black on white. Griplength is 133 millimeters.
• Ergonomically designed Kraton grips. • Special version for twist grip touring bicycles (internal gear hub system). • Perfect fit and extra support to the palm. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Makes a perfect combination with the ErgoSticks S (BBE-15) and M (BBE-16) bar ends. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 1 x 135 mm and 1 x 92 mm.
COMFOrtFIX | BHG-61
COMFOrtFIX | BHG-60
• Ergonomically designed Kraton grips. • Special version for twist shifters. • Perfect fit and extra support to the palm. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Makes a perfect combination with the ErgoSticks S (BBE-15) and M (BBE-16) bar ends. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 92 mm.
LeAtHerFIX | BHG-16 • Ergonomically designed Kraton grips. • Real leather cover. • Perfect fit and extra support to the palm. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Makes a perfect combination with the BBE-16 ErgoSticks S bar ends. • Includes two end-caps. • Length: 135 mm.
• Ergonomically designed Kraton grips. • Perfect fit and extra support to the palm. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Makes a perfect combination with the ErgoSticks S (BBE-15) and M (BBE-16) bar ends. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 135 mm.
InterFIX | BHG-42 • Comfortable ergonomically designed Kraton grips with soft inserts and gel palm support. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Integrated grip / bar end combination, when combined with BBE-21 InterSticks bar ends. • Includes two end-caps. • Length: 132 mm. • Colors: black and white.
g ri ps
g r i ps
FOAMFIX | BHG-18 • Lock-on grips with aluminum clamps. • Superlight foam material. • Shock and vibration damping properties. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 130 mm. • Colors: black and white.
DUALFIX | BHG-31 • Lock-on grips with aluminum clamp. • Soft dual density grips. • Surface pattern gives excellent gripping traction. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 128 mm. • Colors: black and white.
DUALGRIP | BHG-06 • Soft dual-density material. • Surface pattern gives excellent gripping traction. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 125 mm. • Colors: black/gray, black/white and white/black.
TWISTGRIP | BHG-23 • Karton rubber grip for high comfort. • Slip-free surface. • Special version for twist grip touring bicycles (internal gear hub system). • Two end-caps included. • Length: 1 x 130 mm and 1 x 100 mm.
LIGHTFIX | BHG-19 • Easy assembly lock-on grips with aluminum clamp. • Superlight foam material in an ergonomic designed shape. • Shock and vibration damping properties. • Screw-on interface prevents slippage on the handlebar. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 130 mm. • Colors: black and white.
FREEGRIP | BHG-09 • Ergonomic freeride pattern gives a comfortable grip. • High-quality dual density kraton rubber and gel material provides superb shock and vibration damping. • Slip-free surface gives a secure grip traction even in wet conditions. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 125 mm.
DUALGRIP | BHG-07 • Soft dual-density material. • Surface pattern gives excellent gripping traction. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 102 mm. • Colors: black/gray, black/white and white/black.
TWISTGRIP | BHG-23G • Karton rubber grip for high comfort. • Slip-free surface. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 100 mm.
FoamWave | BHG-32 • Lightweight, ergonimical and comfortable soft foam grips with shock and vibration damping properties. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 128 mm.
eXCLUSIve | BHG-29 • Made of genuine leather. • 400 mm long comfortable foam grips provides shock and vibration damping. • Perfect for BBB MultiBar trekking handlebar. • Two end-caps included.
FoamGRIP | BHG-28 • Comfortable soft foam grips with shock and vibration damping properties. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 135 mm.
• Made of genuine leather. • Comfortable foam inside provides shock and vibration damping. • High-quality stitching won’t unravel. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 128 mm.
• High-quality foam grips for the MultiBar (BHB-30) and other trekking handlebars. • Soft foam with shock and vibration damping properties. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 400 mm.
• Kraton rubber grip for high comfort. • Slip-free surface. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 130 mm.
• Comfortable soft foam grips with shock and vibration damping properties. • Set designed to be compatible with twist shifters. • Two end-caps included. • Length: 92 mm.
eXCLUSIve | BHG-26N
ToURGRIP | BHG-22
FoamGRIP | BHG-28G
• Made of genuine leather. • Comfortable foam inside provides shock and vibration damping. • High-quality stitching won’t unravel. • Set designed for twistgrip touring bicycles (with internal gear hub system). • Two end-caps included. • Length: 1x 92 mm and 1x 128 mm.
GRIPSToP | BHG-51 • Aluminum screw-on end plugs. • Protect the grip and handlebar against the result of crashes. • Will fit handlebars with inner diameters from 16 mm.
INTeRSToP | BHG-52 • End plugs for BBB InterFix grips.
/ / b a r en d s
ERGOSTICKS S | BBE-16 • Anatomically-shaped molded bar ends. • Follows the natural contour of your hands. • Unmatched gripping comfort. • Length: 100 mm. Weight: 107 grams.
INTERSTICKS M | BBE-21M • Ergonomically designed for small & medium sized hands. • Firm natural grip for extra control. • Kraton material with soft gel inserts for added comfort. • Bar ends can be combined with almost any handlebar grip. • Fully integrated with the BBB InterGrip and InterFix grips. • Length: 65 mm. Weight: 88 grams. • Colors: black and white.
TRAILMONKEY | BBE-01 • Lightweight 6061 T6 aluminum. • One piece clamp with hex bolts for secure mounting. • Length: 100 mm. Weight: 118 grams.
CLASSIC | BBE-07 • Forged one piece 6061 T6 aluminum bar ends. • Gentle curve design follows the contours of your hand. • Superior strength and stiffness. • Length: 150 mm. Weight: 144 grams. • Colors: black and silver.
ERGOSTICKS M | BBE-15 • Anatomically-shaped molded bar ends. • Follows the natural contour of your hands. • Unmatched gripping comfort. • Length: 110 mm. Weight: 144 grams.
INTERSTICKS L | BBE-21L • Ergonomically designed bar ends for large size hands. • Firm natural grip for extra control. • Kraton material with soft gel inserts for added comfort. • Bar ends can be combined with almost any handlebar grip. • Fully integrated with the BBB InterGrip and InterFix grips. • Length: 85 mm. Weight: 110 grams. • Colors: black and white.
LIGHTSTRAIGHT | BBE-17 • One piece 3D forged 6061 T6 aluminum bar ends. • Lightweight with superior strength and stiffness. • Length: 95 mm. Weight: 104 grams. • Colors: black and white.
ERGOFIBER | BBE-14 • UD carbon fiber bar ends. • Anatomically design flows with the shape of your hands. • Aluminum reinforced clamps with aluminum bolts. • Length: 120 mm. Weight: 114 grams.
THREE-D FORGED | BBE-08 • One piece 3D forged 6061 T6 aluminum. • Lightweight with superior strength and stiffness. • Length: 105 mm. Weight: 119 grams.
THREE-D | BBE-05 • Forged one piece design for maximum durability. • 3D forged 6061 T6 aluminum. • Length: 105 mm. Weight: 129 grams.
LIGHTCURVED | BBE-18
PLUG & PLAY | BBE-50
• One piece 3D forged 6061 T6 aluminum bar ends. • Lightweight with superior strength and stiffness. • Anatomically shaped for a firm comfortable grip. • Length: 150 mm. Weight: 134 grams.
• High-quality replacement end plugs. • Durable and lightweight. • Uni-sized fits securely on all handlebar types.
se atpost
Made of:
Needle iN a haystack
BBB’s problem solvers are here to help. Throughout our collection you’ll find some products that we like to call our problem solvers. Products that address a specific problem that very few companies in the cycling industry still try to solve. Our SkyScraper seatposts are a good example of this, to this day we offer them in a staggering 30 different diameters. From skinny 25.0 millimeters to a whopping 34.9 millimeters. There’s not a diameter that we don’t offer. Or our HighFix and HighSix stems that allow to finetune your seated position on the bike. Look further in our collection and you’ll find more of these ingenious products, ready to solve that problem.
ROADPOST | BSP-11
• Low profile lightweight seatpost. • Diameters: - 27.2 and 31.6 mm. • Weight: - 235 grams (27.2 mm) and 275 grams (31.6 mm).
TOPPOST | BSP-12 • Ideal for mountain bikes. • Low profile lightweight seatpost. • Double-butted (black), plain gauge (white). • Diameters: - 27.2 mm and 31.6 mm. • Weight black: - 313 grams (27.2 mm) and 317 grams (31.6 mm).
SKYSCRAPER | BSP-20
• Diameters: - 25.0, 25.4, 25.6, 25.8, 26.0, 26.2, 26.4, 26.6, 26.8, 27.0, 27.2, 28.6, 28.8, 29.0, 29.2, 29.4, 29.6, 29.8, 30.0, 30.2, 30.4, 30.6, 30.8, 30.9, 31.0, 31.2, 31.4, 31.6, 32.0 and 34.9 mm. • Weight: 295 grams (31.6 mm).
c l a m ps
h andl e bars
PostFix | BsP-97
tHEstRANGLER | BsP-80
• Aluminum clamp to fix around the seat post. • Will be installed on top of the frame seat post clamp. • Prevents the seat post from slipping. • For carbon and aluminum seat posts. • Diameters: 27.2 mm and 31.6mm. • Weight: 5 grams (27.2 mm).
• Screw-on 6061 T6 aluminum seatpost clamp. • For aluminum seatposts. • Diameters: 28.6, 31.8 and 34.9 mm.
Ergonomic drop
Diameter:
tHELEVER | BsP-81 ERGOBAR | BHB-33
• 6061 T6 aluminum seatpost clamp. • Quick-lift quick-release lever. • For aluminum seatposts. • Diameters: 28.6, 31.8 and 34.9 mm.
• Oversized for strength, stiffness and light weight. • Drop: 125 mm. • Reach: 70 mm. • Weight: 312 grams (42 cm). • Sizes: 38, 40, 42 and 44 cm (center-to-center).
TOPBAR | BHB-04
• Rise: 0 mm. • Backsweep: 5º. • Weight: 159 grams (BHB-04) and 181 grams (BHB-04OS).
CARBoNstRANGLER | BsP-82
QR Fix | BsP-84
• Screw-on 6061 T6 aluminum seatpost clamp. • For carbon fiber and aluminum seatposts. • Equally divides the clamping forces. • Diameters: 28.6, 31.8 34.9 and 35.8 mm.
• 6061 T6 aluminum seatpost clamp for aluminum seatposts. • Full CNC open design quick-lift quick release lever. • Diameters: 28.6, 31.8 and 34.9 mm.
• Aluminum race number seatpost clamp. • Perfect solution to eliminate cable ties on frame. • Self-tapping bolts for fast and easy installation. • Rubber O-rings securely fit around the seatpost. • Rubber protection inside for extra grip and to prevent seatpost damage.
SKYBAR | BHB-06
SKYBAR OS | BHB-06OS
• Rise: 35 mm. • Backsweep: 10º. • Weight: 309 grams (BHB-06) and 347 grams (BHB-06OS).
sHiFtFix | BsP-90 • Aluminum front derailleur clamp. • For frame tube diameters: 31.8 and 34.9 mm. • Weight: 18 grams (31.8 mm).
AEROBAR | BHB-51
NUMBERFix | BsP-95
Made of:
AERoFix | BsP-96 • Aluminum race number seatpost clamp. • Special design for aero shaped seatposts. • Perfect solution to eliminate cable ties on frame. • Self-tapping bolts for fast and easy installation. • Rubber O-rings securely fit around the seatpost. • Rubber protection inside for extra grip and to prevent seatpost damage.
• Two piece set of aluminum time trial bars. • Horizontal bar shape for an aerodynamic riding position. • Clamping mechanism for 26.0/31.8 mm road handlebars. • Fully adjustable. • Soft arm support padding. • Weight: 592 grams.
AEROBASE | BHB-52 • Two piece set of aluminum time trial bars. • Convenient clamping mechanism compatible with 26.0/31.8 mm road handlebars. • Foam padded arm supports. • Adjustable extension length and two arm pad positions. • Weight: 504 grams.
MULTIBAR | BHB-30 • Multi-position ergonomic handlebar designed to offer maximum comfort. • Combine with the BHS-22 adjustable stem, BHG-27 MultiFoam or BHG-29 Exclusive grips for maximum comfort. • Width: 57 cm. • Colors: matt black and polished silver.
AEROFIX | BHB-55 • Time trial bar support for connecting the extensions. • Can be used to mount light set, computer or heart rate monitor. • Adjustable angle. Fits most customized settings.
UNIFIX | BHB-90 • Universal aluminum handlebar clamp. • Can be used to fix a bottle cage, bag, etc. to your handlebars. • Sizes: 22.2-25.4 mm and 25.4-31.8 mm.
ste m s
HIGHRISE | BHS-24 feat u res
Diameter:
• 3D forged body MTB/Hybrid stem. • Black on black decals.
ULTRAFORCE | BHS-01
• 3D forged one-piece construction stem. • Black on black decals. • Stainless steel bolts.
• Angle adjustable 3D forged hybrid stem. • Stainless steel bolts.
MOUNTAINFORCE | BHS-03
• 3D forged one-piece construction MTB stem. • Black on black decals. • Stainless steel bolts.
• Angle adjustable 3D forged hybrid stem. • Stainless steel bolts.
ROADFORCE II | BHS-07
HIGHFIx | BHS-34
• 3D forged one-piece construction stem. • Black on black decals.
• Angle adjustable 3D forged hybrid stem. • For direct mount on the steerer tube, 28.6 mm. • Stainless steel bolts.
ROADFORCE II | BHS-08
HIGHFIx OS | BHS-35
• 3D forged one-piece construction stem. • Black on black decals.
• Angle adjustable 3D forged hybrid stem. • For direct mount on the steerer tube, 28.6 mm. • Stainless steel bolts.
// EXCITING GEAR
RoAdKING TI | BPd-09TI
pe dal s : road
RoadKing | BPd-09 • Carbon reinforced body. • Adjustable release tension. • CNC-machined axle. • 2 sealed ball bearings on crank side and a needle bearing on the outside. • 8.25 mm pedal height (center axle – stainless plate). • Stainless steel contact area. • 3 degree floating cleats included. • Weight: 233 grams.
RoaddYnaMiC | BPd-05 • Durable and lightweight composite clip mechanism. • High-end cartridge-type CrMo axle. • Unique geometry allows tight cornering. • Adjustable release tension. Enables you to custom fit your pedals. • Includes a pair of red floating cleats. • Weight: 322 grams.
RoadKing Ti
MULtiCLiP 2.0 | BPC-04F • Fixed cleats. • Compatible with BBB BPD-09, BPD-09TI pedals and Look KEO.
MULtiCLiP | BPC-04a • 3 degree floating cleats • Compatible with BBB BPD-09, BPD-09TI pedals and Look KEO.
BPd-09Ti RoadCLiP | BPd-02F dUaLRidE | BPd-22
After the positive feedback we have received for our ForceMount Ti mountainbike pedal, we decided it was time to apply what we learned to construct a similarly light road pedal around a CNC-machined titanium axle. But we didn’t stop just there. Our designers started pushing the design to get the contact area as low as possible to center of the axle and managed to squeeze that down to 8.25 millimeters. Obviously without compromising durability and taking shortcuts: the RoadKing still runs on two sealed cartridge bearings at the crank side and a needle bearing on the outside. There were some other details on which we weren’t willing to compromise. The RoadKing Ti still has adjustable release tension and a stainless steel contact patch. But with the help of a carbon reinforced body in combination with that eye-catching titanium axle, we have managed to keep the weight at a very respectable 199 grams. Rider weight limit stands at 90 kilograms.
• Fixed cleats. • Compatible with BBB BPD-05 RoadDynamic and LOOK pedals.
• Aluminum two function pedal, one side SPD compatible click mechanism, one side with 4 antislip pins for street shoes. • Adjustable release tension. • High-strength CrMo spindle and sealed bearings. • SPD-compatible BBB Click and Go cleats included. • Weight: 378 grams.
RoadCLiP | BPd-02a • 4.5 degree floating cleats. • Compatible with BBB BPD-05 RoadDynamic and LOOK pedals.
dUaLCHoiCE ii | BPd-23 • Two function pedal. One side SPD compatible click mechanism, other side equipped with anti-slip aluminium cage for street shoes. • Easy clip-in/out mechanism. • Adjustable release tension. • High strength CrMo spindle. • Maintenance-free sealed bearings. • SPD-compatible BBB Click and Go cleats included. • Weight: 342 grams.
SandgRiP | BPd-91 • Pre-cut adhesive sandpaper. • Prevents slippage of the cleats on the shoes sole. • Ideal for carbon soles. • Compatible with all BBB race pedal cleats and others.
pe dal s
ped a l s : m tb
FORCEMOUNT TI | BPD-13 • SPD compatible MTB pedal. • CNC-machined titanium axle. • Open design for easy mud release • Fast clip-in / clip-out mechanism. • Stainless steel body reinforcement. • Sealed plain bearing on crank side, cartridge bearing on the outside. • Adjustable tension. • SPD-compatible BBB Click and Go cleats included. • Weight limit rider: 85 kg. • Weight: 244 grams.
CLASSICRIDE | BPD-17 • Modern version of the classic aluminum pedal. • High-strength CrMo spindle. • Maintenance-free sealed bearings. • Serrated top pattern anchors the shoe firmly. • Removable dual reflectors for increased visibility in low-light conditions.
MOUNT & GO | BPD-15 • High-strength cold-forged aluminum body and cage for extra durability with less weight. • High-strength CrMo spindle. • Serrated top pattern and bottom to anchor shoes even in wet conditions. • Dual reflectors pedal for visibility in low-light conditions. • Compatible with toe clips & BPD-30 Bike & Tight.
FORCEMOUNT | BPD-14
BIGFEET | BPD-16 • High-strength cold-forged aluminum body and C3 cage. • Extra strong with minimum weight. • High-strength CrMo spindle. • Serrated top pattern and bottom to anchor shoes even in wet conditions. • Dual reflectors pedal for visibility in low-light conditions. • Compatible with toe clips & BPD-30 Bike & Tight.
• SPD compatible MTB pedal. • Open design for easy mud release. • Stainless steel body reinforcement. • CNC-machined axle. • Sealed plain bearing on crank side, cartridge bearing on the outside. • Adjustable tension. • SPD-compatible BBB Click and Go cleats included. • Weight: 294 grams.
COMFORTLIGHT II | BPD-28 • High-strength cold-forged aluminum body. • Strong composite cage trekking pedal. • Dual built-in reflectors for added visibility. • High-quality CrMo spindle. • Anti-slip rubber top and bottom.
MOUNTAINHIGH | BPD-32 • Heavy-duty construction withstands the rough demands of freeriding. • Durable aluminum body with CrMo spindle. • Removable anti-slip pins. • Weight: 592 grams.
• Adapter that fits in one side of a SPD-compatible pedals that allows you to use ordinary street shoes. • Dual reflectors for added safety. • Easy installation and removal.
• Extra strong and durable aluminum pedal. • Anti-slip Kraton rubber. • High-strength CrMo spindle. • Dual reflectors provide increased visibility in lowlight conditions.
COMFORTRIDER | BPD-29 • High-strength aluminum body. • Strong composite cage. • Dual built-in reflectors for added visibility. • High-quality CrMo spindle. • Anti-slip Kraton rubber top and bottom.
LOWRIDE | BPD-34 • Heavy-duty freeride pedals. • Strong one-piece aluminum body. • Maintenance-free sealed / DU bushed bearings and CNC-machined CrMo axle. • Removable anti-slip pins. • Weight: 552 grams.
EASYTREK II | BPD-41 FEETREST | BPD-90
EASYRIDER II | BPD-24
CLICK & GO | BPD-01 • Compatible with all SPD shoes and pedals. • Tough and light CrMo for long-lasting durability. • Float: 4 degree. • Easy click in and out. • Hardened steel bolts included.
• One-piece composite pedal. • Kraton anti-slip pattern. • Dual built-in reflectors. • High-quality CrMo spindle.
EASYTREK | BPD-26 • High-strength one-piece composite pedal. • Dual built-in reflectors for added visibility. • High-quality CrMo spindle. • Anti-slip rubber top and bottom.
BIKE & TIGHT | BPD-30 • Industrial-strength Nylon straps. • Extra durable. • Made to withstand frequent use. • Heavy-duty high-grade buckle. • Secure locking mechanism.
brak e sh oe s : road
Carbon Compound
Special compound to be used with carbon rims. Ideal mixture of cork and rubber. Rubber for ultimate stopping power, cork prevents overheating. Low wear, long pad life.
techstop | BBs-22hp • Cartridge type brake set compatible with most Shimano / SRAM brake systems. • With high performance pads. Up to 30% more brake power in dry and wet conditions. • Triple contour design.
HigH performanCe Compound
Suitable for both dry and wet weather, provides up to 30% more braking power. HP pads are resistant to high temperatures and have very little fading. Originally developed for professional riders.
techstop | BBs-22t • Compatible with most Shimano / SRAM brake systems. • Lightweight open cartridge. • Triple contour design. • Triple color look.
techstop | BBs-22chp • Cartridge type brake set compatible with Campagnolo brake systems. • With high performance pads. Up to 30% more brake power in dry and wet conditions. • Triple contour design.
techstop | BBs-22ct • Compatible with Campagnolo brake systems. • Triple color look. • Triple contour design.
Triple ConTour design
A pad design with three separate braking stages. Stage 1 provides excellent grip with minimal wear. Stage 2 prevents mud and dust from building up on the pads. Stage 3 eliminates brake squeal. TriStop is available in HP compound, tri-color compound, and single color black compound.
RoADstop | BBs-02 • Compatible with Shimano / SRAM brake systems. • Cartridge-type. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
RoADstop | BBs-02c • Compatible with Campagnolo brake systems. • Cartridge-type. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
brak e sh oe s : road
// EXCITING GEAR
CARBSTOP | BBS-25
CARBSTOP | BBS-25C
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-11T CrossStop, BBS-22 TechStop, Shimano 105, Ultegra and Dura-Ace. • High performance brake pads for carbon fiber rims. • Special compound for high brake power and extra durability compared with ordinary pads. • Prevents overheating, more brake power under extreme conditions. • Leaves no brake coal dust on the braking surface.-
TECHSTOP | BBS-23T
TECHSTOP | BBS-23CT
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-11T CrossStop, BBS-22T TechStop, Shimano 105, Ultegra and Dura-Ace. • Triple contour design. • Triple color look.
TECHSTOP | BBS-23
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-22CT TechStop, Campagnolo Record, Chorus, Centaur and Veloce (original and spring-type cartridge). • Triple contour design. • Triple color look.
TECHSTOP | BBS-23C
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-11 CrossStop, BBS-22 TechStop, Shimano 105, Ultegra and Dura-Ace. • Triple contour design.
TechSTop
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-22C TechStop, Campagnolo Record, Chorus, Centaur, Veloce (original and springtype cartridge). • High performance brake pads for carbon fiber rims. • Special compound for high brake power and extra durability compared with ordinary pads. • Prevents overheating, more brake power under extreme conditions. • Leaves no brake coal dust on the braking surface.
• Compatible with BBB BBS-22C TechStop, Campagnolo Record, Chorus, Centaur and Veloce (original and spring-type cartridge). • Triple contour design.
BBS-26hp | BBS-26chp
Our TechStop brake pads are something that we are very proud of. Although you hardly see them, they will make a big difference in your riding, especially when you’re trying to stop. Our compound specialist has worked on fine-tuning the exact compound for these brake pads for years. And it has resulted in a product that delivers an amazing amount of control. In wet or dry conditions the TechStops provide up to 30% better braking performance. And even better yet, when the temperature of the pads rises during braking, it doesn’t influence their performance either. Fading is nonexistent. And brake wear is very low. These pads last a long time and they don’t leave coal dust on your rims. All in all, it sounds a little ‘too good to be true’. But every rider that we have given a set of these has come back with a big smile on his or her face. TechStop brake pads come in our Triple Contour Design. Compatible with: BBB BBS-11 CrossStop, BBS-22 TechStop, Shimano and SRAM (BBS-26) and Campagnolo (BBS-26C).
ROADSTOP | BBS-03A
• Compatible with: BBB BBS-02 RoadStop cartridge, BBS11 CrossStop, Shimano 105sC, Ultegra and Dura-ace.
• Compatible with: Campagnolo Record, Chorus and Athena up to 1999, Campagnolo Daytona model 2000.
ROADSTOP DELUXE | BBS-01DA • Adjustable angle for an optimal set up. • Dual-function brake pads provide superior performance at all weather conditions. • Optimum water removal due to special aquaguide system. Anti-squeal design. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
ROADSTOP | BBS-03C • Compatible with: BBB BBS-02C RoadStop, Campagnolo Record, Chorus, Centaur and Veloce (original and spring-type cartridge).
ROADSTOP DELUXE | BBS-01D • Dual-function brake pads provide superior performance at all weather conditions. • Optimum water removal due to special aqua-guide system. Anti-squeal design. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
brak e sh oe s : m tb/cx
b r a ke shoe s : m tb/c x
TriSTop | BBS-14Hp
TriSTop | BBS-14T
• Cartridge type brake set compatible with Shimano V-brakes. • With high performance pads. Up to 30% more brake power in dry and wet conditions. • Triple contour design.
• Cartridge type brake shoe set. • Triple color look. • Triple contour design. • Compatible with Shimano V-brakes.
TriSTop | BBS-16T
• Compatible with Shimano V-brakes. • Solid brake pads with triple contour design. • Triple color look.
• Compatible with Shimano V-brakes. • Solid brake pads with triple contour design.
VEESTop | BBS-05
• Cartridge-type, special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear. • Compatible with Shimano V-brakes.
• Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear. • Compatible with Shimano V-brakes.
TRISTOP | BBS-15HP • Replacement pads for BBS-14 TriStop. • High performance brake pads: 30% more brake power under any conditions. • Dry and wet weather pads. • Triple contour design.
TRISTOP | BBS-15 • Replacement pads for BBS-14 TriStop. • Triple contour design.
CANTISTOP DELUXE | BBS-18T • Cantilever type brake shoe set. • Triple color look. • Triple contour design.
CROSSSTOP | BBS-11T • Cartridge brake shoes with replaceable pads. • Specifically designed for cyclo-cross cantilever brakes. • Superior braking performance in all weather conditions. • Triple color look.
HYDroSTop | BBS-19Hp • Unique cartridge design re-enforced with aluminum and nylon fiber. • High performance brake pads: 30% more brake power under any conditions. • Dry and wet weather pads. • Compatible with Magura hydraulic brakes.
HYDroSTop | BBS-09 • Compatible with Magura hydraulic brakes. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
CANTISTOP | BBS-08 • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear. • Special contour facilitates easy water and grit removal. • Size: 65 mm.
TRISTOP | BBS-15T • Replacement pads for BBS-14T TriStop. • Triple color look. • Triple contour design.
VEESTOP | BBS-06 • Replacement pads for BBS-05 VeeStop. • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear.
CANTISTOP DELUXE | BBS-18 • Cantilever type brake shoe set. • Triple contour design.
CANTISTOP | BBS-07 • Special compound for optimum gripping power and minimal wear. • Special contour facilitates easy water and grit removal. • Size: 72 mm.
di sc brak e pads
DISCSTOP
BBS-50S
BBS-51
Compatible: Shimano Deore XT M755, Grimeca system 8, Hope Mono M4, Hope Tech M4 and The Cleg.
Sintered. Compatible: Shimano Deore XT M755, Grimeca system 8, Hope Mono M4, Hope Tech M4 and The Cleg.
DISCSTOP
BBS-52
*Shimano
All BBB DiscStop disc brake pads are sold as a set, and where necessary include springs.
Compatible: Shimano Deore M515, M495, M475, M465, M416, Nexave C501, C601, RST D-power mechanical and Tektro Aquila.
BBS-52S Sintered. Compatible: Shimano Deore M575, M525, M485, M486 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP and Giant MPH Root.
DISCSTOP
DISCSTOP
BBS-54 Compatible: Shimano XTR M975, M966, M965, XT M775, M765, SLX M665, LX M585, Deore M535, Saint M800 and Hone M601.
Our blue-backed BBB Discstop brake pads feature an organic compound braking surface. These pads have optimal performance level at lower temperatures and are therefore more suitable for cross-country oriented riding.
BBS-56
Compatible: Shimano XTR 2011, XT and SLX 2012.
DISCSTOP
BBS-55 Compatible: Shimano Saint M810.
BBS-55S
DISCSTOP
BBB offers brake pads for virtually every system on the market today. Color-codes will point you straight to the packaging of the pads that are compatible with your brakes.
DISCSTOP
Compatible: Avid Mechanical 2002 - 2004 / ball bearing 7.
Sintered cOmpOund
BBS-53 Compatible: Shimano Deore M515, M525, M495, M485, M475, M465, M415, C501, C601, M465, M475, M495 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP, Orion and Giant MPH Root.
DISCSTOP
Compatible: SRAM road RED hydraulic disc brakes.
Our metal-backed BBB Discstop brake pads feature sintered compound braking surface. These pads perform best a higher temperatures and are therefore more suitable for downhill and freeride applications.
DISCSTOP
DISCSTOP - Sintered - Compatible: Shimano Saint M810
Organic cOmpOund
BBS-54S Sintered. Compatible: Shimano XTR M975, M966, M965, XT M775, M765, SLX M665, LX M585, Deore M535, Saint M800 and Hone M601.
Compatible: Shimano Deore M555 and Nexave C901 hydraulic.
DISCSTOP
BBS-32
Compatible: Magura Clara 2001/2002, Louise FR and Louise 2002 - 2006.
Sintered. Compatible: Shimano Deore M575, M525, M485, M486 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP and Giant MPH Root.
DISCSTOP
DISCSTOP Compatible: Magura Louise 1999 - 2001 and Clara 2000.
Compatible: Shimano Deore M515, M495, M475, M465, M416, Nexave C501, C601, RST D-power mechanical and Tektro Aquila.
DISCSTOP BBS-52S
Compatible: Magura Gustav M. *giant
Sintered. Compatible: Shimano Deore M575, M525, M485, M486 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP and Giant MPH Root.
BBS-76 Compatible: Tektro IOX / LYRA.
DISCSTOP BBS-53 Compatible: Shimano Deore M515, M525, M495, M485, M475, M465, M415, C501, C601, M465, M475, M495 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP, Orion and Giant MPH Root.
*magura
Compatible: Magura Julie 2001 - 2008.
DISCSTOP BBS-36 Compatible: Magura MT2, MT4, MT6 and MT8.
Compatible: Magura Marta and Marta SL till 2008.
Compatible: Magura Louise series 2007/2008, Julie HP 2009 and Marta series 2009.
Compatible: Hope C2, O2 and Giant MPH.
DISCSTOP BBS-36S Sintered. Compatible: Magura MT2, MT4, MT6 and MT8.
* compatible with
* compatible with
Compatible: Giant MPH-1, MPH 2001 and MPH-3 2002.
DISCSTOP BBS-53 Compatible: Shimano Deore M515, M525, M495, M485, M475, M465, M415, C501, C601, M465, M475, M495 hydraulic and Tektro Draco, Auriga PRO, Auriga COMP, Orion and Giant MPH Root.
DISCSTOP BBS-77 Compatible: Tektro Volans, Auriga E-SUB, Auriga SUB, Auriga TWIN and Suntour DB8.
d i sc b r ak e rotors & qu i c k r eleases
LIgHTBLOCK | BQR-11 • Lightweight fully CNC machined levers. • Durable titanium axle. • Corrosion resistant springs. • For road bikes only, 100 mm front / 130 mm rear. • Weight: 52 grams.
POWERSTOP | BBS-84 | BBS-85 | BBS-86 • Industrial-grade stainless steel disc. • Wave design, big brake contact. • Excellent heat dissipation. • Compatible with most disc brake systems. • Sizes: 160 mm (BBS-84), 180 mm (BBS-85) and 203 mm (BBS-86).
MTBBLOCK | BQR-21 • Lightweight fully CNC machined levers. • Durable titanium axle. • Corrosion resistant springs. • For Mountain bikes only, 100 mm front / 135 mm rear. • Weight: 58 grams.
WHEELBLOCK | BQR-01
POWERMOUNT | BBS-91 • Adapter to make a standard post-mounted attachment system (160 mm discs) compatible with 180 mm discs. • 2 fixing bolts and 2 washers included. • Weight: 20 grams.
POWERMOUNT | BBS-92 • Adapter to make a standard post-mounted attachment system (160 mm discs) compatible with 203 mm discs. • 2 fixing bolts and 2 washers included. • Weight: 29 grams.
• Durable and lightweight aluminum minimizes extra weight on your bike. • Finely sculpted levers provide easy handling and maximum leverage. • Jam-free mechanism. Meticulously designed to provide the safest ride. • Properly installed, they will not open by themselves. • Levers are shaped to avoid being snagged and opened by roots, plants and other trail debris. • Corrosion-resistant springs. • Heavy-duty axle. • Weight: 114 grams.
WHEELFIXED | BQR-03
CENTERFIT | BBS-90 • Hub convert adaptor. • Centerlock fitting to 6 bolt hubs. • Can be installed on most centerlock hubs. • Can be used with all BBB PowerStop discs. • Easy mounting, no bolts needed.
DISCSHIM | BCB-68 • 20pcs metal shims for discbrake caliper alignment. • Shims are placed between the frame and calliper. • Size: 0.2 mm.
• Quick-releases are fixed with a hex key. Prevents a fast theft of your wheels. • Longer nut makes it possible to use these quick releases safely on most mountain bikes and road bikes. • Durable and lightweight aluminum. • Corrosion resistant springs. • Weight: 78 grams.
cabl e acce ssori e s
c a b l es : s e ts
BRAKEWIRE | BCB-20
STOPLINE ROAD S | BCB-06S
• Innovative construction for precise braking. • PTFE-coated. • Length: 1.5 mm x 2350 mm.
• Brake cable set, compatible with: Shimano and SRAM road brakes. • Includes: 2200 mm outer cable, 1.5 mm x 2000 mm inner cable, 1.5 mm x 1200 mm inner cable, accessories.
CABLEWRAP | BCB-90B
BRAKEWIRE | BCB-21
• Rubber cable covers to protect the frame paint. • For 5 mm brake cables. • 2 pieces per set.
CABLEWRAP | BCB-90D • Rubber cable covers to protect the frame paint. • For 4 mm derailleur cables. • 2 pieces per set.
• Designed for responsive braking. • Slick-Stainless (STS). • Length: 1.5 mm x 2350 mm.
STOPLINE ROAD C | BCB-06C • Brake cable set, compatible with: Campagnolo road brakes. • Includes: 2200 mm outer cable, 1.5 mm x 2000 mm inner cable, 1.5 mm x 1200 mm inner cable, accessories.
BRAKEWIRE | BCB-22C • Compatible with Campagnolo brake systems. • Slick-Stainless (STS). • Length: 1.5 mm x 2000 mm.
STOPLINE MTB | BCB-06M • Brake cable set, compatible with: Shimano MTB brakes. • Includes: 2400 mm outer cable, 1.5 mm x 2350 mm inner cable, 1.5 mm x 1350 mm inner cable, accessories.
HYDROCLAMP | BCB-92 • Aluminum clamp for hydraulic cables. • Fits the standard cable holes. • 2 pieces per set.
• Shift cable set, compatible with: Shimano road, SRAM road and MTB shift systems. • Includes: 1800 mm outer cable, 290 mm outer cable, 1.1 mm x 2000 mm inner cable, 1.1 mm x 1500 mm inner cable, accessories. • With special end cap to be compatible with: Shimano Dura Ace 7900, Shimano Ultegra 6700, Shimano 105 5700, SRAM Red, Force, Rival and Apex.
• Guide stickers for (hydraulic) cables. • 3M adhesive. • 3 pieces per set.
SPEEDWIRE | BCB-10 • Innovative construction for precision shifting. • PTFE-coated. • Length: 1.1 mm x 2000 mm.
ADJUSTER | BCB-93
SHIFTLINE ROAD S / MTB | BCB-05S
HYDROGUIDE | BCB-94
SPEEDWIRE | BCB-11
• Fine tune adjuster for derailleur cables. • Fit in the frame. • 2 pieces per set.
LINE ADJUSTER | BCB-95 • In-line cable adjuster. • Allows fine tuning of derailleur settings. • Including 4 mm derailleur cable ferrule. • 1 piece.
• Provides precision shifting. • Slick-Stainless (STS). • Length: 1.1 mm x 2000 mm.
SPEEDWIRE | BCB-12C SHIFTLINE ROAD C | BCB-05C • Shift cable set, compatible with Campagnolo drivetrains. • 11 speed compatible. • Includes: 1800 mm outer cable, 290 mm outer cable, 1.1 mm x 2000 mm inner cable, 1.1 mm x 1500 mm inner cable, accessories.
• Compatible with Campagnolo derailleur systems. • Slick-Stainless (STS). • 9/10/11 speed compatible. • Length: 1.1 mm x 2000 mm.
CABLESTOP | BCB-97 • Aluminum inner cable ends. • Fit both brake and derailleur cables. • 40 pcs per set.
VEEPIPE | BCB-91 • Aluminum V-brake pipes. • Rubber covers included. • 2 pieces per set.
ADJUSTER | BCB-96 • Fine tune adjuster for derailleur cables. • For non-threaded cable stops. • 2 pieces per set.
ch ai ns
• Single speed/1-7 speed internal gear hub compatible. • Quality: gray. • Weight: 359 grams.
• 7-speed Shimano / SRAM compatible. • Tough 8 micron nickel plated cogs.
SPRINGLINK | BCH-01 • Closing link compatible with BBB single speed/1-7 speed internal gear hub chains.
DRIVETRAIN | BCS-08S • 8-speed Shimano / SRAM compatible. • Extra tough 1.2 micron chrome-plated cogs.
SINGLELINE | BCH-011 • Single speed/1-7 speed internal gear hub compatible. • Quality: nickel. • Weight: 397 grams.
POWERLINE | BCH-80
SmaRtLINK | BCH-01S • Closing link compatible with BBB single speed chains.
DRIVETRAIN | BCS-09S
• 8-speed compatible. • Quality: gray. • Weight: 320 grams.
POWERLINE | BCH-81 • 8-speed compatible. • Quality: gray/nickel. • Weight: 320 grams.
• 9-speed Shimano / SRAM compatible. • Extra tough nickel-plated cogs.
POWERLINE | BCH-82
DRIVETRAIN | BCS-09C • 9-speed Campagnolo compatible. • Extra tough nickel-plated cogs. • Separate cogs and nylon spacers.
GEAR RATIOS
Low friction ceramic bearings for ultra-smooth glide and exceptional durability
ems grivory
Made of Grivory composite material provided by EMS Swiss. reinforced with a glass-fiber mixture (40%). Grivory is the proven material for metal replacement
ALUBOYS | BDP-22 • High quality aluminum derailleur pulleys with ceramic bearings. • Extra stiff for fast shifting. • High-quality sealed ceramic bearing. Super smooth and durable. • 11T. Compatible with Shimano 9 and 10-speed and Campagnolo 11-speed.
ALUBOYS | BDP-21 • High-quality aluminum derailleur pulleys. • Extra stiff for fast shifting. • High-quality sealed ball bearing. • 11T. Compatible with Shimano 9 and 10-speed and Campagnolo 11-speed.
ROLLERBOYS | BDP-12 • RollerBoys equipped with ceramic bearings. • 11T. Compatible with Shimano 9 and 10-speed / Mega Range and Campagnolo 11 speed. • Ultra-smooth glide and exceptional durability. • Lubricated with special ceramic light oil for extra smoothness. • Complete set of bushings for different shifting systems included.
ROLLERBOYS | BDP-11 • RollerBoys equipped with ceramic bearings. • 10T. Compatible with Shimano 7 and 8 speed; Campagnolo 8, 9 and 10 speed; SRAM 9.0(’97/’98), 9.0SL(’98), 7.0(’97/’98) and 5.0(’98/’99). • Ultra-smooth glide and exceptional durability. • Lubricated with special ceramic light oil for extra smoothness. • Complete set of bushings for different shifting systems included.
ROLLERBOYS | BDP-05 • 11T. Compatible with the following SRAM systems: 9.0SL (2001/2002), 9.0 (2003), X.7(< 2011), X.9(< 2011), X.0(< 2011), XX(< 2011), Apex, Rival, Force and RED. • Complete set of bushings for different shifting systems included. • Equipped with special internal lubricant system.
ROLLERBOYS | BDP-02 • 11T. Compatible with Shimano 9 and 10-speed / Mega Range, SRAM X9/X7/ X0(‘11) and Campagnolo 11-speed. • Complete set of bushings for different shifting systems included.
ROLLERBOYS | BDP-01 • 10T. Compatible with Shimano 7 and 8-speed; Campagnolo 8, 9 and 10 speed; SRAM 9.0(‘97/’98), 9.0SL(’98), 7.0(‘97/’98), 5.0(‘98/’99) and X9/X7/X0(‘11). • Complete set of bushings for different shifting systems included.
ch ai nri ng s : road
all about
• CNC machined 7075 T6 aluminium • Shifting pins on outer rings for faster pick-up • Extremely durable • Available in virutally every size and gearing
chainrings
• BCR-14S included BCR-62 to have the perfect original look • BCR-37S included BCR-61 to have the perfect original look • All Roadgear chainrings have a 130 millimeter BCD. • All Compactgear chainrings have a 110 millimeter BCD.
roadgear
bcr-11s bcr-12s
bcr-31 bcr-36s bcr-37s
triplegear bcr-14s Our chainrings are typical BBB products: versatile, long-lasting and with a great price to performance ratio. We offer them in loads of sizes and in virtually every bolt circle diameter available on the market. You’re bound to find the gearing you’re looking for, or the size you need for your specific crank. Rather than stamping them, we choose to machine them from aluminum. This is a more complex and expensive manufacturing method, but it produces more durable chainrings that last longer.
triplegear bcr-14s bcr-15s bcr-16s bcr-17s bcr-18s
roadgear
Shimano Tiagra 4550/4650, 105 5650/5750, Ultegra 6750, dura ace 7950
c h ai nri ng bolts & drop prote ctors
c ha in r i ngs : m tb
ShimStarS | BCr-61
• CNC machined 7075 T6 aluminium • Shifting pins on outer rings for faster pick-up • Extremely durable • Available in virtually every size and gearing
ShimStarS | BCr-62 • 5 piece custom bolt cap set to keep the original aesthetics your crankset. • Plastic caps are easily mounted onto the bolts. • Compatible with BCR-14S chainrings and BCR-51 bolts in combination with an Ultegra 6700 and 6703 crankset.
• 5 piece custom bolt cap set to keep the original aesthetics of your crankset. • Plastic caps are easily mounted onto the bolts. • Compatible with BCR-37S chainrings and BCR-51 bolts in combination with an Ultegra Compact 6750 crankset.
roundabout 5 bcr-01 bcr-02
roundabout 4 bcr-04 bcr-05 bcr-06 bcr-07 bcr-08
tOrXStarS | BCr-55S • Chainring bolts with torx. • Compatible with: Shimano Dura Ace 7900, Ultegra 6700, Ultegra SL 6601-G and 105 5600 10 speed chainrings. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
tOrXStarS | BCr-53C
tOrXStarS | BCr-54C
• Chainring bolt set specially designed to be compatible with Campagnolo compact cranksets. • 4 torx bolts, 1 special bolt for attachment to the crank. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
tOrXStarS | BCr-56C
• Torx chainring bolts set. • Compatible with: Campagnolo 11 speed chainrings. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
• Chainring bolts with torx. • Compatible with: Campagnolo 11 speed 2011 chainrings. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
tOrXStarS | BCr-57X • Chainring bolts with torx. • Compatible with Sram X series chainrings. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
MtbGEar bcr-45S bcr-46S
tOrXStarS | BCr-58S • Chainring bolts with torx. • Compatible with Shimano FC-M785 chainrings. • Feather light 7075 T6 aluminum.
MtbGEar
FiVEStarS | BCr-50
hEXStarS | BCr-51
• Featherlight 7075 T6 aluminum. • Do not freeze and get stuck to your crank even after years of continuous use. • Only 10 grams per set of 5 pieces.
• 7075 T6 aluminum chain ring bolts. • Only 10 grams per set of 5 pieces. • Colors: black and silver.
bcr-41X bcr-42X
64
Shimano FC-M785 2x10
ChaiNWatCh | BCr-80r • 6061 T6 aluminum chain drop protector. • Almost invisible installed on the front derailleur. • Compatible with chain rings within the range of 53-39T. • Including bolts and washers to fit various front derailleurs. • Weight: 5 grams.
ChaiNWatCh | BCr-80C • 6061 T6 aluminum chain drop protector. • Almost invisible installed on the front derailleur. • Compatible with chain rings within the range of 46-36T. • Including bolts and washers to fit various front derailleurs. • Weight: 4 grams.
triPLEStarS | BCr-52 • Ultralight 7075 T6 aluminum chain ring bolts for triple chain rings. • Only 5 grams per set of 5 pieces. • Colors: black and silver.
i n n er t ube s & ri m tap e
innertubes RIMTAPE | BTI-95
RIMTAPE | BTI-91
• High-pressure adhesive rim tape. • 10 meter roll. • Enough to cover up to 4 wheels. • Sizes: 16 mm (road bikes) and 18 mm (trekking bikes and MTB).
BikeTuBe – Road
Presta valved road tubes. SuperLite version with lightweight butyl rubber compound (BTI-72).
• High-pressure rim tapes. • Made of strong Nylon material. • Elastic characteristics for secure fit. • Equipped with a valve hole. • 2 pieces per set. • For road bikes. • 700C x 16 mm. 16 - 622 (1.6 x 94 cm).
WHeeL siZe
50/56 -622
29 x 1.9/2.3
RIMTAPE | BTI-93 • High-pressure rim tapes. • Made of strong Nylon material. • Elastic characteristics for a secure fit. • Equipped with a valve hole. • 2 pieces per set. • For mountainbikes. • 26” x 18 mm. 18 - 559 (1.8 x 84 cm).
BikeTuBe – kids / oTheRs
VALVEEXTENDER | BTI-97 • Aluminum valve extender. • Ideal for high profile carbon rims. • Length: 50 mm.
Inner tubes for wheel sizes from 12,5” to 24” with Presta, Schrader and Dunlop valves. Available with bent valve for easy access (DV 60 BV).
Preste ValVes (FV)
Available in: 33mm, 48mm, 60mm and 80mm lengths. R - Removable valve for use with extenders.
schrader ValVes (aV)
Available in: 33mm and 40mm lengths.
dunloP ValVes (dV)
Available in: 31mm and 40mm lengths. BV - Bent Valve.
MM
Bearing diameter 1 1/8-1 1/4
CERAMIC | BHP-48
• Integrated headset. • Carbon 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
INTEGRATED CARBON | BHP-43
• Integrated headset. • Carbon 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
• Integrated headset. • Carbon 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
• Integrated headset. • Aluminum 8 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
INTEGRATED | BHP-41
• Integrated headset. • Aluminum 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
f eat u res
• Integrated headset. • Carbon 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
INTEGRATED | BHP-40
Bearing diameter 1 1/8-1 1/5
SEMI-INTEGRATED | BHP-50
• Integrated tapered headset. • Aluminum 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
• Integrated tapered headset. • Aluminum 8 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
• Threadless headset cartridge type, industrial sealed bearings. • Frame cups: ø 30.2 mm. • Fork crown: ø 26.4 mm.
• Threadless headset cartridge type, industrial sealed bearings. • Frame cups: ø 34.0 mm. • Fork crown: ø 29.8 mm.
INTEGRATED | BHP-42
• Integrated headset. • Aluminum 15 mm cone spacer. • Open crown race for easy installation.
h e adse t parts
hea d sets & he ad s e t parts
TRANssPAcE | BHP-37 • Transparent ultra-lightweight composite spacers. • Set of 3 spacers: 2 x 5 mm 1x 10 mm. • Diameter: 1.1/8”. • Set weight: 7 grams. • Colors: smoke, blue, red, green and pink.
ULTRAsPAcE | BHP-35 THREADAROUND | BHP-15
• Threaded headset • Cartridge type industrial sealed bearings. • Frame cups: ø 30.2 mm. • Fork crown: ø 26.4 mm. • Lock nut: ø 22.2 mm.
FREERIDE | BHP-52
• Threadless freeride headset. • Specifically for freeride / bmx / dirtjump use. • Extra durable caged ball bearings. • Heavy duty steel top cup, cromo bottom cup. • Topcap with inner cable routing option included.
THREADAROUND | BHP-16
• Ultra-lightweight UD carbon spacers. • Unique design saves up to 38% on weight compared to ordinary carbon spacers. • Diameter 1.1/8”. • Set of 4 spacers: 5, 10, 15, 20 mm. • Set weight: 16 grams.
• Frame cups: ø 34.0 mm. • Fork crown: ø 29.8 mm. • Lock-nut: ø 25.4 mm.
LIGHTsPAcE | BHP-36 • Ultra-lightweight aluminum spacers. • Unique design saves up to 38% on weight compared to ordinary aluminum spacers. • Set of 4 spacers: 5, 10, 15, 20 mm. • Diameter: 1.1/8”. • Set weight: 20 grams. • Colors: black and glossy white.
ROUNDHEAD | BAP-02 • Stainless steel bolt with double star nut. • Size: 1.1/8” cap with 1.1/8” star nut. • Colors: glossy black and glossy white.
STAINLESSSET | BHP-92
• Replacement bearings set for integrated headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-43 and others with same size.
• Replacement bearings set for integrated headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-44 and others with same size.
• Replacement bearings set for integrated headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-41, BHP-51 and others with same size.
• Replacement bearings set for integrated headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-40/42 and others with same size.
• Expander clamping mechanism equally divides the forces. • Expander type for safe and easy assembly. • 40 mm plug for extra grip. • For forks with 1.1/8” carbon and aluminum steering tubes. • Weight: 58 grams (aluminum cap), 56 grams (carbon cap). • Colors: matt black, glossy white and glossy carbon.
EXTENDER | BHP-20 • Adapter that enables you to make your steering tube longer without affecting the ahead system. • Threaded and threadless headset compatible. • Size: 25.4-22.2 mm.
EXTENDER | BHP-21 TAPEREDSET | BHP-94
TAPEREDSET | BHP-95
TAPEREDSET | BHP-96
• Adapter that enables you to make your steering tube longer without affecting the ahead system. • Threaded and threadless headset compatible. • Size: 28.6-25.4 mm.
TUBEEXTEND | BHP-22 • Replacement bearings set for integrated tapered headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-45 and others with same size.
• Replacement bearings set for integrated tapered headsets. • Compatible with: BHP-46 and others with same size.
• Replacement bearings set for integrated tapered headsets.
• Steerer tube extention: 67 mm. • Fits steerer tubes with diameter 28.6 mm.
bottom brack e ts
b o t t om brac k e ts
Bottom thread | BBo-31
bottom brackets
• Oversized cartridge bearings for Road BSA 1.37”x24T. • Die cast alloy and CNC machined external cups. • Composite center sleeve with double o-ring seals. • BSA threading • Fits 24 mm spindle cranksets. • Fits 68 mm wide brackets.
Bottom brackets were one of the last wear components that wasn’t in our product collection yet. With the know-how gathered from years of producing headsets we have created a simple but versatile system to address the most common of current bottom bracket standards.
Bottom thread | BBo-35
bb0-11
bb0-15
Bottom Bear | BBo-11 • Press Fit chrome steel BB30 cartridge bearings road. • Inner diameter of 30 mm and outer diameter of 41,96 mm. • Wave Spring and circlips included. • Nylon adjustment washers included. • Fits 68 mm wide brackets.
Spindle dia = 30mm
bottom Press | bbo-01 • Press Fit bottom bracket PF30 standard road. • BB30 stainless steel bearings are preinstalled in bearing cups. • Cup diameter: 46 mm. • Fits 68 mm wide brackets.
bottom Press | bbo-05 • Press Fit bottom bracket PF30 standard MTB. • BB30 stainless steel bearings BB30 are preinstalled in bearing cups. • Cup diameter: 46 mm. • Fits 68/73 mm wide brackets.
bottom Press | bbo-21 • Press Fit bottom bracket for BB 92 standard road. • Chrome steel bearings. • Cup diameter: 41 mm. • Inner diameter of 24 mm fits 24mm spindle cranksets. • Fits 86.5 mm wide brackets.
bottom Press | bbo-25 • Press Fit bottom bracket for BB86 standard MTB. • Chrome steel bearings. • Cup diameter: 41 mm. • Inner diameter of 24 mm fits 24 mm spindle cranksets. • Fits 89.5 mm or 92 mm wide brackets.
Bottom Bear | BBo-15 • Press fit chrome steel BB30 cartridge bearings MTB. • Inner diameter of 30 mm and outer diameter of 41,96 mm. • Circlips and bearing covers included. • Fits 68/73 mm wide brackets.
Bottom Bear | BBo-41 • Press Fit stainless steel cartridge compatible with Campagnolo Ultra Torque crank sets. • Size: 37x25x6mm.
Bottom Bear | BBo-42 • Press Fit stainless steel cartridge compatible with Campagnolo Power Torque crank sets. • Size: 37x25x7mm.
Bottom adapt | BBo-16 • PF30 24 reducer. • Allows the installation of 24 mm spindle crank sets into BB30 and PF30 bottom bracket shells (BB30 or PF30 BB required, not included) • Aluminum covered in plastic.
a - z in d e x
A A c c e ssor ie s A c c e ssor ie s clot hing A d Ap t l enses A d Ap t spor t g lA sse s A d Ap t temple t ips A d Ap te r s disc b r A ke A d j ustA b le st ems A i rb lA st e r f loo r pu mp A i rc o n tr ol f lo o r pu mp A i re x A c t f loo r pu mp A n t+ se nso r s
di sc brAk e AdApters di sc brAk e pA ds di sc brAk e rotors 73 59 21 21 20 172 155 99 99 99 82
b bA g s sA ddle bA g s trAve l bA re n d s bA rtA p e bA se k i t t oo l cA se bbb d i st r ib u t o r s be l l s bi k e pArt s bi k e stA nds bi k e W e Ar bl ue to o t h速 4 . 0 s m A rt se nso r s bo tto m b r Acket s bo ttl e c Ages bo ttl e s br A k e c Ab les br A k e pA ds cyclo cr oss br A k e pAds disc br A k e pAds mou ntA inb ike br A k e pA ds t echs t op hp br A k e pAds r oA d br A k e sh oes cyclocr oss br A k e sh oes mo u ntA inb ike br A k e sho es r oA d br A k e pAds t e ch inf o
75 77 150 144 117 193 132 135 115 13 81 190 122 126 174 167 168 167 164 164 166 166 163 162
c c A bl e s b r Ake 174 c A bl e s s hif t er 174 c A rri e rs 132 c A sse ttes 176 c hA i n ri ng b olt s 183 c hA i n ri ngs 181 ch A i n ri ngs int r o 180 c hA i n s 177 ch A m o i s t ech inf o 56 cl A m p s 154 cl o th i ng A cce ssor ie s 59 c l o th i ng t e ch inf o A ccessori es 61 c l o th i ng int r o 45 cl o th i ng jA cket s 52 cl o th i ng jer seys 50 cl o th i ng r Ain jA cket s 55 c l o th i ng sho r t s 56 c l o th i ng socks 68 c l o th i ng t e ch inf o 46 cl o th i ng t e ch inf o A ccessori es 61 c l o th i ng t ight s 57 cl o th i ng u nder W eA r 48 c o 2 p umps 102 c o m f e rtfit j er sey 50 c o m p u ter s dA shb oA r d 85 co m p u te r s d igib oA r d 82 co m p u te r s int r o 79 co m p u te r s m icr o bo A r d 84 cyc l o c r oss b r Ake pA ds 167 cyc l o c r oss b r Ake shoes 166
d
17 2 168 17 2
e endc Aps roAd ergofi x gri ps
17 5 14 6
f fAlc on helmet feAther sAddle f en ders floorpumps f rAme protec ti on
36 13 7 119 99 13 3
g guArdi An sm Artphone mou nt 81 g lAsses 16 g loves moun tA i n bi k e sum me r 62 gloves roAd sum mer 63 gloves Wi n ter 66 gri ps 14 6 gri ps ergofi x 14 6 gri ptA pe roAd 14 5
h h AndlebA r en dc Aps roAd hAn dlebAr trek k i ng h AndlebA rs moun tA i nbi k e h AndlebArs roAd A ero h AndlebArs roAd A lumi num heA dset pArts h eAdsets h elm ets fAlc on h elm ets i cArus helmets i n tro helmets k i ds helmets m oun tA i n bi k e helmets neron e helmets roAd helm ets tec h i nfo helm ets vArA llo hoseroAd mi ni pum p
14 5 15 3 15 3 15 3 15 3 188 186 36 35 31 42 39 39 35 32 39 104
i n ner shorts i nn ertubes i phone moun t pAtron
35 20 20 20 23 23 48 185 80
j jAc k ets jAc k ets rAi n jerseys
52 55 51
k ki c k stAn ds ki ds helmets ki ds sport glAsses
13 2 42 28
l d A sh bo Ar d compu t e r d e rA i l l eu r pu lleys d i g i bo A rd compu t e r
85 178 82
li gh t i ntro li gh ts sc ope
87 88
90 87 12 9 12 9 94
m mi cr ob oA r d comp u te r 84 mi ni p u mp s 103 m i ni tool s 110 m ou ntAi nbi k e bA r e nd s 15 0 mou ntA i nbi k e br A k e cAbl e s 1 74 mou ntA i nbi k e br A k e pA d s 167 mou ntAi nbi k e br A k e s h oe s 166 mou ntAi nbi k e d i s c br A k e pAd s 169 mou ntA i nbi k e f e nd e r s 119 m ou ntAi nbi k e gl ov e s s u mme r 62 mou ntAi nbi k e gr i p s 14 6 mou ntAi nbi k e h A nd l e bA r s 15 3 mou ntAi nbi k e h e l me ts 39 mou ntAi nbi k e mi ni p u mp s 103 mou ntAi nbi k e p e d A l s 160 mou ntAi nbi k e s Ad d l e s 13 7 mou ntAi nbi k e s e Atp os ts 15 6 m ou ntAi nbi k e s te ms 15 5
n ne r one h e l me t
i i cA rus helmet i m pAc t lenses i mpA c t sport glAsses i mpA c t temple ti ps im pulse sport glAsses im pulse smA ll sport glAs s e s
l i gh ts str i k e 3 00/5 00 l i gh ts te ch i nf o l ock s l ock s i ntr o l u x ch Ar t l i gh ts
39
o op ti v i e W s p or tgl A s s e s ovA li nte gr Ate mi ni p u mp
26 103
p
r oA d ki ng ti p e d A l r otor s d i s c br A k e
158 172
s s Ad d l e bAgs s Ad d l e s comf or t s Ad d l e s f e Ath e r s Ad d l e s te ch i nf o s Ad d l e s r Ace s Ad d l e s s p or t s Ad d l e s te ch i nf o scop e l i gh t se Atp os ts se l e ct l e ns e s se l e ct s p or t gl A s s e s s e l e ct te mp l e ti p s s e l e ctor Ap p s h i f te r cAbl e s sh oe cov e r s s h or ts s mA r tp h one mou nt s ock s s p or ts gl As s e s Ad Ap t s p or ts gl As s e s i mpAct s p or ts gl As s e s i mp u l s e s p or ts gl As s e s i mp u l s e s mAl l s p or ts gl As s e s i ntr o s p or ts gl As s e s k i d s s p or ts gl As s e s o p ti v i e W s p or ts gl As s e s cAs u Al s p or ts gl As s e s s e l e ct s p or ts gl As s e s t e ch i nf o s p or ts gl As s e s W i nne r s te ms Ad ju s tAbl e ste ms mou ntA i nbi k e s te ms r o Ad s tr i k e 3 00/5 00 l i gh t s u mme r gl ov e s s u ngl As s e s
75 1 42 1 37 1 36 1 37 1 39 1 36 88 153 18 18 20 16 1 74 70 56 80 68 21 20 23 23 15 28 26 29 18 16 24 157 157 156 90 62 18
56 80 15 8 160 15 8 161 80 13 3 99 99 99 102 99 97 103
q Qu i ck r e l e As e Ax l e s
17 2
r r Ai n jA ck e ts r e pAi r s tA nd s ri mtAp e r oA d br A k e pAd s r o Ad br A k e s h oe s r oAd cA bl e s br A k e r oAd e nd cA p s r o Ad f e nd e r s r oA d gl ov e s s u mme r r o Ad gr i p tA p e r o Ad h And l e bA r s Ae r o r o Ad h And l e bA r s r o Ad h e l me ts r oA d mi ni p u mp s r o Ad p e d A l s r o Ad s Ad d l e s r o Ad s e Atp os ts r oA d s te ms
te ch s top h p br A k e pA d s te mp l e ti p s Ad A p t, i mpAc t te mp l e ti p s s e l e ct ti gh ts t i me tr i Al h And l e bA r t ool cA s e bAs e k i t tool cA s e s t ool s t ool s mi ni tool s tool s tool cA s e s t ool s W or k s h op tool s t r Av e l bAgs tr Av e l l e r mi ni p u mp
164 20 20 57 153 117 116 109 110 116 113 77 105
u u nd e r W e Ar u nd e r W e Ar i nne r s h or t s
48 48
v 55 115 184 164 163 1 74 17 5 119 63 14 4 15 3 15 3 35 103 15 8 13 7 15 6 15 4
vAlv e e x te nd e r s
184
w WAte r bottl e s W i nne r s p or t gl A s s e s W i nte r gl ov e s W or k s tAnd s W or k s h op tool s
AustrAliA
|
i don't know
|
Slang for an eccentric person, what bicycle part converts reciprocal leg-power into circular wheel motion?
|
Crank definition by Babylon’s free dictionary
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter. About
hEnglish - advanced version
crank
\crank\ (kr?nk), n. [oe. cranke; akin to e. cringe, cringle, crinkle, and to crank, a., the root meaning, probably, "to turn, twist." see cringe.]
1. (mach.) a bent portion of an axle, or shaft, or an arm keyed at right angles to the end of a shaft, by which motion is imparted to or received from it; also used to change circular into reciprocating motion, or reciprocating into circular motion. see bell crank.
2. any bend, turn, or winding, as of a passage. so many turning cranks these have, so many crooks.
3. a twist or turn in speech; a conceit consisting in a change of the form or meaning of a word. quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles.
4. a twist or turn of the mind; caprice; whim; crotchet; also, a fit of temper or passion. [prov. eng.] violent of temper; subject to sudden cranks. arlyle.
5. a person full of crotchets; one given to fantastic or impracticable projects; one whose judgment is perverted in respect to a particular matter. [colloq.]
6. a sick person; an invalid. [obs.] thou art a counterfeit crank, a cheater.
crank
axle (mach.), a driving axle formed with a crank or cranks, as in some kinds of locomotives.
crank
pin (mach.), the cylindrical piece which forms the handle, or to which the connecting rod is attached, at the end of a crank, or between the arms of a double crank.
crank
shaft, a shaft bent into a crank, or having a crank fastened to it, by which it drives or is driven.
crank
wheel, a wheel acting as a crank, or having a wrist to which a connecting rod is attached.
crank
\crank\ (kr?nk), a. [as. cranc weak; akin to icel. krangr, d. & g. krank sick, weak (cf. d. krengen to careen). cf. crank, n.] 1. sick; infirm. [prov. eng.]
2. (naut.) liable to careen or be overset, as a ship when she is too narrow, or has not sufficient ballast, or is loaded too high, to carry full sail.
3. full of spirit; brisk; lively; sprightly; overconfident; opinionated. he who was, a little before, bedrid, was now crank and lusty. if you strong electioners did not think you were among the elect, you would not be so crank about it. stowe.
crank
\crank\, v. i. [see crank, n.] to run with a winding course; to double; to crook; to wind and turn. see how this river comes me cranking in.
crank
English Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
Crank may refer to:
Mechanism
Crank (mechanism), in mechanical engineering, a bent portion of an axle or shaft, or an arm keyed at right angles to the end of a shaft, by which motion is imparted to or received from it
Crankset, the component of a bicycle drivetrain that converts the reciprocating motion of the rider's legs into rotational motion
Crankshaft, the part of a piston engine which translates reciprocating linear piston motion into rotation
See more at Wikipedia.org...
crank! A Record Company is an independent record label which was started by Jeff Matlow in September 1994. The label's first release was a 7" by Vitreous Humor.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
|
Crank
|
Who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in October 2012 due to doping?
|
Перевод АНГЛИЙСКОГО слова Crank
1. to turn up the volume of a radio, etc
2. a mentally unstable person
Больше: Перевод crank с английский на английский
crank
\crank\ (kr?nk), n. [oe. cranke; akin to e. cringe, cringle, crinkle, and to crank, a., the root meaning, probably, "to turn, twist." see cringe.]
1. (mach.) a bent portion of an axle, or shaft, or an arm keyed at right angles to the end of a shaft, by which motion is imparted to or received from it; also used to change circular into reciprocating motion, or reciprocating into circular motion. see bell crank.
2. any bend, turn, or winding, as of a passage. so many turning cranks these have, so many crooks.
3. a twist or turn in speech; a conceit consisting in a change of the form or meaning of a word. quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles.
4. a twist or turn of the mind; caprice; whim; crotchet; also, a fit of temper or passion. [prov. eng.] violent of temper; subject to sudden cranks. arlyle.
5. a person full of crotchets; one given to fantastic or impracticable projects; one whose judgment is perverted in respect to a particular matter. [colloq.]
6. a sick person; an invalid. [obs.] thou art a counterfeit crank, a cheater.
crank
axle (mach.), a driving axle formed with a crank or cranks, as in some kinds of locomotives.
crank
pin (mach.), the cylindrical piece which forms the handle, or to which the connecting rod is attached, at the end of a crank, or between the arms of a double crank.
crank
shaft, a shaft bent into a crank, or having a crank fastened to it, by which it drives or is driven.
crank
wheel, a wheel acting as a crank, or having a wrist to which a connecting rod is attached.
crank
\crank\ (kr?nk), a. [as. cranc weak; akin to icel. krangr, d. & g. krank sick, weak (cf. d. krengen to careen). cf. crank, n.] 1. sick; infirm. [prov. eng.]
2. (naut.) liable to careen or be overset, as a ship when she is too narrow, or has not sufficient ballast, or is loaded too high, to carry full sail.
3. full of spirit; brisk; lively; sprightly; overconfident; opinionated. he who was, a little before, bedrid, was now crank and lusty. if you strong electioners did not think you were among the elect, you would not be so crank about it. stowe.
crank
\crank\, v. i. [see crank, n.] to run with a winding course; to double; to crook; to wind and turn. see how this river comes me cranking in.
crank
adj : (used of boats) inclined to heel over easily under sail [syn: cranky, tender, tippy]
n
1. a bad-tempered person [syn: grouch, grump, churl, crosspatch]
2. a whimsically eccentric person [syn: crackpot, nut, nut case , nutcase, fruitcake, screwball]
3. a hand tool consisting of a rotating shaft with parallel handle [syn: starter]
v 1: travel along a zigzag path: "the river zigzags through the countryside" [syn: zigzag]
2: start by cranking; of engines [syn: crank up]
3: rotate with a crank [syn: crank up]
4. fasten with a crank
5. bend into the shape of a crank
Crank may refer to:
Mechanism
Crank (mechanism), in mechanical engineering, a bent portion of an axle or shaft, or an arm keyed at right angles to the end of a shaft, by which motion is imparted to or received from it
Crankset, the component of a bicycle drivetrain that converts the reciprocating motion of the rider's legs into rotational motion
Crankshaft, the part of a piston engine which translates reciprocating linear piston motion into rotation
See more at Wikipedia.org...
crank! A Record Company is an independent record label which was started by Jeff Matlow in September 1994. The label's first release was a 7" by Vitreous Humor.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
(synonym) grouch, grump, churl, crosspatch
(hypernym) unpleasant person, disagreeable person
(hyponym) crab, crabby person
2. a whimsically eccentric person
(synonym) crackpot, nut, nut case, nutcase, fruitcake, screwball
(hypernym) eccentric, eccentric person, flake, oddball, geek
3. amphetamine used in the form of a crystalline hydrochloride; used as a stimulant to the nervous system and as an appetite suppressant
(synonym) methamphetamine, methamphetamine hydrochloride, Methedrine, meth, deoxyephedrine, chalk, chicken feed, glass, ice, shabu, trash
(hypernym) amphetamine, pep pill, upper, speed
4. a hand tool consisting of a rotating shaft with parallel handle
(synonym) starter
(hyponym) crank handle, starting handle
Verb
1. travel along a zigzag path; "The river zigzags through the countryside"
(synonym) zigzag
(hypernym) travel, go, move, locomote
(entail) turn
2. start by cranking; "crank up the engine"
(synonym) crank up
3. rotate with a crank
(synonym) crank up
To run with a winding course; to double; to crook; to wind and turn.
(n.)
Sick; infirm.
(n.)
Liable to careen or be overset, as a ship when she is too narrow, or has not sufficient ballast, or is loaded too high, to carry full sail.
(n.)
Full of spirit; brisk; lively; sprightly; overconfident; opinionated.
(n.)
Any bend, turn, or winding, as of a passage.
(n.)
A twist or turn of the mind; caprice; whim; crotchet; also, a fit of temper or passion.
(n.)
A twist or turn in speech; a conceit consisting in a change of the form or meaning of a word.
(n.)
A sick person; an invalid.
(n.)
A person full of crotchets; one given to fantastic or impracticable projects; one whose judgment is perverted in respect to a particular matter.
(n.)
A bent portion of an axle, or shaft, or an arm keyed at right angles to the end of a shaft, by which motion is imparted to or received from it; also used to change circular into reciprocating motion, or reciprocating into circular motion. See Bell crank.
Копирайт: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter. About Источник для словаря: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
(n.) = manivela, manubrio.
Ex: Only 'calculators' then were noisy machines with cranks; to multiply, you cranked a whole lotta additions.
----
* hand crank = manivela.
* turn + the crank = darle a la manivela de arranque, dar vueltas a una manivela, dar vueltas a un manubrio.
(adj.) = excéntrico, chiflado, pirado.
Ex: The British Museum Reading Room is filled with cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars who cherish their hobby.
----
* crank (phone) call = broma telefónica, llamada telefónica obscena, llamada telefónica en broma, llamada de emergencia falsa.
(v.) = dar vueltas a una manivela, dar vueltas a un manubrio.
Ex: Only 'calculators' then were noisy machines with cranks; to multiply, you cranked a whole lotta additions.
----
* crank + a handle = dar vueltas a una manivela, dar vueltas a un manubrio.
* crank + a lever = dar vueltas a una manivela, dar vueltas a un manubrio.
* crank it up + a gear = aumentar, intensificar, acelerar, avivar, subir, mejorar, subir el listón, pasar al siguiente nivel, subir de nivel.
* crank it up + a notch = aumentar, intensificar, acelerar, avivar, subir, mejorar, subir el listón, pasar al siguiente nivel, subir de nivel.
* crank out = producir.
* crank up = aumentar, subir, intensificar, incrementar, poner más fuerte, arrancar, encender, poner en marcha.
* crank up + the volume = subir el volumen.
Больше: Перевод crank с английский на болгарский
[kr%¶k] n тех. 1. манивела; 2. кривошип; 3. коляно; коленчат/ко{2} [kr%¶k] v 1. тех. огъвам под форма на коляно; 2. тех. запал{3} [kr%¶k] а 1. нестабилен, разклатен, който лесно се обрьща ({4} [kr%¶k] n 1. чудак, ексцентричен човек, маниак; ам. мърморк
Больше: Перевод crank с английский на болгарский
[krae¤k] n тех. 1. манивела; 2. кривошип; 3. коляно; коленчат/колянов лост; коляново съединение. [krae¤k] v 1. тех. огъвам под форма на коляно; 2. тех. запалвам (двигател) с манивела (и с up); to ~ away въртя манивелата; 3. лъкатуша, движа се зигзаговидно; изрязвам зигзаговидно; crank out прен. (из)фабрикувам (книга и пр.); crank up 1) запалвам (двигател) с манивела; 2) увеличавам с мъка скоростта; 3) раздвижвам (разговор и пр.). [krae¤k] а 1. нестабилен, разклатен, който лесно се обрьща (за короб); 2. разнебитен, разклатен, разхлопан. [krae¤k] n 1. чудак, ексцентричен човек, маниак; ам. мърморко; fresh air ~ маниак на тема чист въздух; 2. причудлив/странен израз; странна идея, каприз.
|
i don't know
|
What French word commonly refers to a bunch or pack of cyclists?
|
How To Speak Like A Cyclist - I Love Bicycling
I Love Bicycling
Home / How To / How To Speak Like A Cyclist
How To Speak Like A Cyclist
March 16, 2014
by U.M. 30 Comments
How to Speak Like a Cyclist
So you want to be a cyclist? Then you should probably learn how to speak like a cyclist. Here are some terms you may come across while reading cycling blogs or speaking to your fellow cyclists outside of the normal mechanical jargon.
1. Attack
This is most commonly a racing term that means you quickly accelerate with the idea that you’re going to put a gap between you and other riders.
2. Breakaway
Similar to attack, breakaway means that you or a small group split off from the front of a larger group and move ahead, leaving a sizable gap behind you.
3. Echelon
This is a French word that refers to a line of riders who are trying to hit maximum drafting speed in a cross wind. This results in a diagonal line across the track.
4. Peloton
Another French word, a peloton is a large group of cyclists that totals more than twenty riders.
5. Drafting/Slipstreaming
This is the process of reducing your wind resistance by basically riding behind another rider. This can reduce your wind resistance so dramatically that it can reduce the amount of energy required to maintain a speed by up to 30%. Slipstreaming is so useful that it is a common feature of most road racing tactics.
6. Keep The Rubber On The Road
The equivalent to the theater world’s: Break a leg! It means, “Have a good ride! Don’t crash!”
7. Wonky
A term for anything that feels off while you’re riding. This includes mechanical failure or a riding partner’s bad mood.
8. JRA
This comes from bike shop humour and means “Just Riding Along”. As in, “I was just riding along and I crashed into a tree and the whole bike fell apart!” How many stories do you think bike repair people hear that start with JRA?
9. Bonking
This is when you run out of fuel and your blood sugar becomes incredibly low. There is no more fuel for your brain, muscles, and heart. Besides being dangerous, it makes you feel like $#!%.
10. Road Rash
This is caused by crashing. Road rash occurs when your skin slides across the asphalt leaving you with mild to severe skin abrasions.
11. Saddle Sores
This is leg-to-seat chaffing. They usually appear in the nether regions and can really hurt.
12. Biff
This is slang for a bike crash.
13. Endo
This is when a cyclist flips over their handlebars during a crash. As in, “End over end.”
14. Vitamin I
This isn’t actually a vitamin, just called one because cyclists use it so much. It’s Ibuprofen.
15. Cadence
This is the speed of spinning your pedals. Cadence is measured in revolutions per minute (RPM) and is often a focal point for improving cycling performance.
16. Watts
This is a measure of power. Watts are used to find out how much power a cyclist produces.
17. Steed
This is what a lot of cyclists call their bikes. It’s a nod to horseback riding lingo.
18. Beater Bike
Sometimes called the clunker, this is not the go-to bike but the back-up bike. Usually old and a little out of tune, the beater bike is for lackadaisical days and getting from point A to point B.
19. Chamois
This is your padded cycling shorts. They reduce chafing, blisters, and saddle sores.
20. The Brain Bucket
It’s just your helmet. Sometimes called the cycling hard hat.
21. Kit
This is a reference to cyclists who wear matchy-matchy outfits. Everything is designed to go together from the jersey to the shorts and sometimes even the socks.
22. Grand Tour
There are only three Grand Tours in the world: Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, and Vuelta a Espa᷈na. They are all three week long stage races for professionals. A lot of people either watch them or pretend to.
23. Neo-Pro
|
Peloton
|
Drop, Randonneur, Porteur, Aero and Moustache are types of bicycle what?
|
Finish Line - Bicycle Lubricants and Care Products - Cycling Glossary: The Language of Our Sport
Cycling Glossary: The Language of Our Sport
Y
2
27.5 - a mountain bike with wheels that are approximately 27.5 inches in diameter, including a 2-inch-wide tire, and are based on ISO 584 mm (aka 650B) rims.
29er - a mountain bike with wheels that are approximately 29 inches in diameter, including a 2-inch-wide tire, and are based on ISO 622 mm (aka 700C) rims.
Abandon - To quit a race
Aero - abbreviation for aerodynamically efficient
Aero Bars - Extension of the handlebars usually allowing the rider to rest his elbows and benefit from improved aerodynamics. Often found on Time Trial and Triathlon bicycles.
Aero Wheels - Bicycle wheels that normally have a deep section rim (30mm+), often made of carbon fiber, and are designed to be fast and more aerodynamically efficient that standard wheels. Newer wheels are designed with a wider rim profile that is more stable in strong cross winds.
All Mountain - Term for a type of mountain bike that normally has 5+ inches of suspension travel and is designed to work well on all parts of a mountain from climbing fire roads to steep downhill descents.
Apex - the middle or sharpest point in a curve or turn
Ardennes - hilly region in Belgium, home to a number of spring classics
Arrivee - French for the Finish Line
Attack - To quickly accelerate while riding in a pack, or in smaller numbers, with a view to create a gap between yourself and other riders
Autobus - A group of riders in a stage race (typically non-climbers and suffering domestiques) who ride together as a group on the mountain stages with the sole intention of finishing within the stage's time limit to allow them to start the next day. Also known by the Italian term gruppetto.
Back to Top
B
Bearing - a machine element that constrains relative motion between two moving parts to only the desired motion. Come in a variety of styles including: cartridge bearing, sealed bearing, needle bearing, and ball bearing.
Bell Lap - If the riders are racing the final meters of a race on a velodrome or on a circuit in a town, a bell is rung at the start of the final lap.
Belt Drive - A bicycle drivetrain that uses a durable belt instead of a metal chain to turn the rear wheel
Beyond Category (Hors Categorie) - The French term primarily used in cycle races (most notably, the Tour de France) to designate a climb that is "beyond categorization", an incredibly tough climb. Most climbs are designated from Category 1 (hardest) to Category 4 (easiest), based on both steepness and length. A climb that is harder than Category 1 is designated as hors catégorie.
Bib Shorts - Bib shorts are cycling shorts that are held up by a bib (integral suspenders/braces) instead of an elastic waistband. Pro and serious riders tend to prefer bib shorts over non-bib shorts, due to the discomfort that often occurs with an elastic waistband, such as tightness (digging into skin) and chafing. The bib part of the short is often made of spandex and polyester with large sections of netting to help keep the rider cool.
Bidon - A water bottle
Big Ring - The bigger of the two chain rings (front gears) on a bike that generates a larger gear. The Big Ring gives the rider the most speed, but is the harder gear to pedal. It is the gear used during a sprint, a flat time trial or a mountain descent.
Bike Porn - pictures of bike or bikes seen in real life that are incredibly expensive and full of rare components. The $18,000 Specialized McLaren S-Works Venge is an example of bike porn.
Blocking - Riders of one team who set a relatively slow tempo at the front of a group to control the speed, often to the advantage of one of their teammates who may be in a break.
Bonk (hit the wall) - To completely run out of energy on a long ride, often caused by poor nutrition.
Bottom bracket - The bearing assembly which allows the crank to rotate relative to the frame. May or may not include the spindle which connects the two arms, depending on the standard to which it was designed.
Braze-ons - threaded attachments welded to the bike from. Normally used to mount brakes, water bottle cages, front derailleurs, or racks.
Breakaway - A group of riders (or solo rider) who have attacked and ridden away from the peloton*. This group of opponents will often work together knowing each has some chance of winning the race.
Broom Wagon - A support vehicle following a group of cyclists in a race, tour or recreational ride that may carry equipment, food, rider luggage, or mechanics. May also pick up riders unable to continue. Also called a SAG wagon.
Bunch Sprint - The riders arrive near the finish in massive numbers to contest the victory and attempt to draft their sprinters in a good position to claim the victory. Speeds higher than 60 km/h are to be expected.
Bunny Hop - To cause one's bicycle to become airborne by lifting the front wheel and then the rear wheel into the air with such timing that both wheels are simultaneously airborne for a period. Bunny hops are performed either to navigate course features, to perform tricks or to avoid obstacles, depending on the discipline of competition.
Butting - a butted tube on a bike frame is one where the outside of the tube is a constant diameter and the wall thickness varies. This is done to make tubes lighter, while keeping them strong.
C
Cadence - The rate at which a cyclist pedals (in revolutions per minute).
Caliper Brakes - a class of cable-actuated brake in which the brake mounts to a single point above the wheel, theoretically allowing the arms to auto-centre on the rim. Arms extend around the tyre and end in brake shoes that press against the rim. While some designs incorporate dual pivot points — the arms pivot on a sub-frame — the entire assembly still mounts to a single point.
Car back - What riders yell when riding in a group when there is a car approaching from the rear. This alerts other riders to a possible danger and tells them to form a single file line to allow the car to pass.
Caravane Publicitaire - The publicity cavalcade where sponsors promote goods and hand out free samples. The Caravan precedes each stage into along the race route, giving sponsors of the Tour de France a chance to advertise.
Carbon Clincher - a type of wheel that is made from carbon fiber (normally with a deeper rim that is 30mm+), with a braketrack that is also made from carbon fiber. This helps to keep the weight down on deep section carbon wheels.
Carbon Fiber - an extremely strong and light fiber-reinforced polymer which contains carbon fibers. The binding polymer is most often epoxy, but other polymers, such as polyester, vinyl ester or nylon, are sometimes used. The composite may contain other fibers, such as aramid e.g. Kevlar, Twaron, aluminium, or glass fibers, as well as carbon fiber. The strongest and most expensive of these additives, carbon nanotubes, are contained in some primarily polymer baseball bats, car parts and even golf clubs where economically viable
Cassette - The rear cog cluster on a derailleur bicycle, that fits on a freehub. It consists only of cogs, with no ratcheting mechanism, as the ratcheting mechanism is in the freehub.
Categorized Climb - In European stage racing it is a designation of the difficulty of a mountain climb. This is a subjective judgment of the difficulty of the ascent, based upon its length, gradient and how late in the stage the climb is to be ridden. A medium difficulty climb that comes after several hard ascents will get a higher rating because the riders will already be tired. The numbering system starts with "4" for the easiest that still rate being called a climb and then with increasing severity they are 3, 2, 1. The most challenging are above categorization, or in the Tour nomenclature, "Hors catégorie", HC. In the Giro the hardest climbs are rated a Category 1.
Century - 100 mile bike ride.
Chain - a roller chain that transfers power from the pedals to the drive-wheel of a bicycle, thus propelling it. Most bicycle chains are made from plain carbon or alloy steel, but some are nickel-plated to prevent rust, or simply for aesthetics.
Chain Catcher (checker) - small device, normally made of metal that attaches to the front derailleur and extends down toward the bottom bracket. It is designed to catch the chain if it falls off the chain rings and make it easier to get the chain back on without getting off the bike.
Chain Cleaner - a device that attaches to a bicycle chain while it is still on the drivetrain. Chain Cleaners normally hold a small amount of degreaser and have rotating brushes that scrub the chain. The chain is cleaned by moving the chain through the chain cleaner, normally by backpedaling.
Chain slap - Annoying slapping of the bike's chain against the chainstays while riding over rough terrain.
Chain stay - the tubes on a bicycle from that connect at the bottom bracket and run directly back towards the hub of the wheel and connect with the seat stays.
Chain suck - The tendency of a chain to stick to chain rings and be sucked up into the bike instead of coming off the chainring. Primarily caused by worn chainrings and rust on small chain rings, under high loads, and in dirty conditions.
Chainring tattoo - the dotted-line scar you get from gouging your shin or calf on a chainring.
Chainring(s) - The front part of the drivetrain where the chain engages. May be composed of one to three gears.
Chainstay - One of the two frame tubes that run horizontally from the bottom bracket shell back to the rear dropouts.
Chase - A group of one or more riders who are ahead of the peloton trying to join the race or stage leader(s). There may be none, one, or many chases at any given point in a race.
Chasing down - Riders do this when a breakaway is up the road but their team is not represented in the lead group.
Chicane - A sequence of tight turns, often s-shaped, usually most important near the finish of a road-race or during a criterium.
Cima Coppi - prize for the first to the top of the highest mountain pass in the Giro d’Italia
Circle of Death - Term originally coined when Henri Desgrange introduced the high mountains to the Tour de France. The stage with the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque was call the Circle of Death.
Classic (one day race) - A one-day race of great prestige. Some classics date back to the 19th century. These include Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem, E3 Harelbeke, Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Amstel Gold Race, La Fleche Wallonne, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and il Lombardia.
Cleat - studs or protrusions on the sole of a shoe or an external attachment to a shoe that allows it to clip in securely to pedals.
Climber - A rider who specializes in riding uphill quickly, usually due to having a high power-to-weight ratio.
Clincher - A type of tire that uses a bead around the edge of the tire to attach to the rim of the wheel when inflated. The inner tube is separate.
Clipless Pedals - require a special cycling shoe with a cleat fitted to the sole, which locks into a mechanism in the pedal and thus holds the shoe firmly to the pedal. Most clipless pedals lock onto the cleat when stepped on firmly and unlock when the heel is twisted outward, although in some cases the locking mechanism is built into the cleat instead of the pedal. Clipless refers to the toe clip (cage) having been replaced by a locking mechanism and not to platform pedals which would normally not have toe clips. The clipless pedal was invented by Charles Hanson in 1895.
Coaster Brakes - also known as a back pedal brake or foot brake (contra or torpedo in some countries), is a type of drum brake integrated into hubs with an internal freewheel. Freewheeling functions as with other systems, but when back pedaled, the brake engages after a fraction of a revolution. The coaster brake can be found in both single-speed and internally geared hubs.
Cog - A dented gear that is part of the cassette.
Col - A mountain pass
Commissaire - A race judge, in road-racing they are usually based in a car following the event.
Components - the moving parts of a bike that are attached to the frame
Counterattack - An attack that is made when a break has been caught by chasers or the peloton.
Crack - When a cyclist runs out of strength or energy, they are said to have cracked. Compare with hit the wall.
Crank arm - One of the two arms of a crankset. Each arm connects a pedal to the bottom bracket.
Crankset (chainset) - The bicycle drivetrain assembly that converts the rider's pedaling action to rotating motion. It consists of two cranks (or arms), one or more chainwheels (or chainrings), plus the stack bolts that connect them. Sometimes the bottom bracket is included.
Criterium - A race on a closed short distance course with multiple laps. Often but not always a 4-cornered course; often includes primes (short for premiums and rhymes with 'seems') which are points or prizes for intermediate laps. Course length varies from 800 meters to 5 kilometers.
Crono - short for time trial.
Cross chained - when you are on the big ring in the front and small ring on the back or small ring on the front and big ring on the back. The extremely chainline can cause premature wear or even cause the chain to drop.
Cross Country - is the most common discipline of mountain biking. While less publicized than downhill cycling as it is more difficult to televise, it garners the highest levels of participation both recreationally and competitively. Cross-country cycling became an Olympic sport in 1996 and is the only form of mountain biking practiced at the Olympics.
Cyclocross - A form of bicycle racing that consists of many laps of a short course featuring pavement, wooded trails, grass, steep hills and obstacles requiring the rider to quickly dismount, carry the bike past some obstacles and remount.
Back to Top
D
Degreaser - Chemical product that dissolves water-insoluble substances (such as greases and oils) from hard surfaces such as floor, machines, tools.
Di2 - Digital Integrated Intelligence. The Shimano acronym for their electronic groupsets.
Directeur sportif - Team manager. During a race, the Directeur Sportif will ride in one of the cars behind the peloton and directs the action of his team through race radios
Disc wheel - Disc wheels are designed to minimize aerodynamic drag. A full disc is usually heavier than traditional spoke wheels, and can be difficult to handle when ridden with a cross wind. For this reason, international cycling organizations often ban disc wheels or limit their use to the rear wheel of a bicycle. However, international triathlon federations were (and are still) less restrictive and is what led to the wheels' initial usage growth in popularity in the 1980s.
DNF - did not finish. Abbreviation used in race results.
DNS - did not start. Abbreviation used in race results
Domestique - A rider whose job it is to support and work for other riders in their team (literally "servant" in French). Today the term has lost its bad connotation and serves as an acknowledgement of the true nature of racing tactics.
Dossard - French for race or bib number worn by cyclists
Downhill - is a time trial event held on a steep, rough terrain that often features jumps, rock gardens and other obstacles. Downhill bikes are heavy, strong, and feature front and rear suspension with over 8 inches (20 cm) of travel, to glide quickly over rocks and tree roots. A continuous course is defined on each side by a strip of tape. Riders have a single attempt to reach the finish line as fast as possible, while remaining between the two tapes designating the course. Riders musts choose their line by compromising between the shortest possible line and the line that can be travelled at the highest speed. If a rider leaves the course by crossing or breaking the tape they must return to the course at the point of exit, unless they do not gain a time advantage form crossing the tape, in which case they can continue with their run. Riders start at intervals, often seeded from slowest to fastest. Courses typically take two to five minutes to complete and winning margins are often less than a second. Riders are timed with equipment similar to that used in Downhill skiing.
Drafting - To ride closely behind another rider to make maximum use of their slipstream, reducing wind resistance and effort required to ride at the same speed.
Drop - To be dropped is to be left behind a breakaway or the peloton for whatever reason (usually because the rider cannot sustain the tempo required to stay with the group). To drop someone is to accelerate strongly with the intent of causing following riders to no longer gain the benefit of drafting.
Dropouts - the slots on the frame that accept the wheel axle
Back to Top
E
Echelon - a line of riders seeking maximum drafting in a crosswind, resulting in a diagonal line across the road.
Electronic Shifting - these are groupsets where all shifts are done with the push of a button that actuates small motors in the front and rear derailleurs instead of pulling a cable.
Endo - An Endo (short for end-over-end), is when the back wheel of the bike is lifted off the ground and the bike goes up onto its front wheel only. It can also be used to designate a crash that is similar to an unintended front flip.
EPS - Abbreviation for Electronic Power Shift. This is the term used by Campagnolo for all of their electronic groupsets
Etape - A stage of a stage race.
Etape de Tour - an event held every year that allows non professional riders the chance to ride one of the stages of the Tour de France. Usually occurs a few days before the actual stage takes place.
Back to Top
F
False flat - A low-gradient climb, usually occurring partway up a steeper climb. So-called because while it may look deceptively flat and easy (especially after the steep climb preceding it), it is still a climb.
Fast finisher (see sprinter) - A rider who has superior sprinting speed over the last few hundred meters of a race.
Feed zone - In road bicycle racing, a location along the course of a long race where team personnel hand musettes containing food and beverages to passing riders. In mountain bicycle racing, a limited section of the course in which riders may accept food from non-racing assistants. Sometimes this is combined with the technical assistance zone if one exists
Field - A group of rider, also known as a peloton.
Finish Line - 1. A marked area that designates the official end to a race, often depicted by a checkered flag. 2. The name of an American company, founded in 1988, for the purpose of making bicycle-specific lubricants and related bicycle-care products.
Fixed - Slang for a fixed-gear bicycle.
Fixie - Slang for a fixed-gear bicycle.
Flamme rouge - A red flag displayed with one kilometre remaining from the finish line of a race. Usually suspended over the road.
Follow a wheel - The ability to follow a wheel is the ability to match the pace of riders who are setting the tempo. Following is easier than pulling or setting the tempo and the term can be used in a derogatory manner, e.g. "He only ever followed".
Fork - Part of the frameset that holds the front wheel. Can be equipped with a suspension on mountain bikes.
Fork - The part of the frame set that holds the front wheel. It is usually refers to the front fork, the fork is attached to the main frame by the headset. The fork consists of the two blades that go down to hold the axle (the fork crown and the steerer). The term "rear fork" is sometimes used to refer to the part of the frame that holds the rear wheel.
Frame - the main component of a bicycle. Consist of a top tube, head tube, seat tube, down tube, chain stays, and seat stays. Frames are required to be strong, stiff and light, which they do by combining different materials and shapes.
Frameset - The bicycle frame plus the front fork.
Freewheel - consists of either a single sprocket or a set of sprockets mounted on a body which contains an internal ratcheting mechanism and mounts on a threaded hub. This allow the cyclist to increase speed when pedaling, but also allow the cyclist to stop pedaling and coast.
Front Derailleur - Responsible for changing gears on the crankset. The front derailleur only has to move the chain side to side between the front chainrings, but it has to do this with the top, taut portion of the chain. It also needs to accommodate large differences in chainring size: from as many as 53 teeth to as few as 20 teeth.
Full suspension - a bicycle with suspension in the fork and also on the rear of the frame.
Back to Top
G
G.C. - Abbr.: general classification. the timing splits used to determine who is winning in a stage race. Calculated from the first rider over the line each day time is then measured back by gaps from the winner of the day. Time gaps are then calculated back between riders and added to the overall position of riders relative to each other. Riders can attack in stage races for time rather than winning the days stage. They are said to be "riding for G.C.". In such circumstances alliances can form where some riders in a breakaway will work to help others win the days stage despite not contesting the finish as the overall gap the breakaway gains helps them "on G.C."
Gap - A distance between two or more riders large enough for drafting to no longer be effective. Also used as verb (US English), for example: "Froome has gapped Contador!". It's much easier for a stronger rider to pull ahead of others once a gap has been achieved; without a gap, the others can draft along using significantly less power to sustain the same speed as the rider in front. While gaps are usually achieved through attacks, on mountain climbs, where slower speeds means the advantage of drafting is much less significant, riders are often gapped who simply cannot maintain the tempo of the faster riders. A gap can also refer to the space in between a jump and the landing, which is common in mountain biking.
General Classification - Abbr.: G.C. the timing splits used to determine who is winning in a stage race. Calculated from the first rider over the line each day time is then measured back by gaps from the winner of the day. Time gaps are then calculated back between riders and added to the overall position of riders relative to each other. Riders can attack in stage races for time rather than winning the days stage. They are said to be "riding for G.C.". In such circumstances alliances can form where some riders in a breakaway will work to help others win the days stage despite not contesting the finish as the overall gap the breakaway gains helps them "on G.C."
Gilet - sleeveless jacket or vest worn by cyclists as the temperature drops, but it is not cold enough for a full jacket.
Grand Boucle - The big loop, a French term referring to the Tour (loop) around France.
Grand Depart - The start of the Tour de France. Often times the race begins with a Prologue, but often it is a flat stage for the sprinters.
Grand Tour - refers to one of the three major European professional cycling stage races: Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España. Collectively they are termed the Grand Tours, and all three races are similar in format being multi-week races with daily stages. They have a special status in the UCI regulations: more points for the UCI World Tour are distributed in Grand Tours than in other races, and they are the only stage races allowed to last longer than 14 days.
Granny gear - either the lowest gear ratio on a multi-speed derailleur bicycle; smallest chainring in front and the largest at the back or the smallest chainring on a crank with triple chainrings
Grease - a semisolid lubricant. It generally consists of a soap emulsified with mineral or vegetable oil. The characteristic feature of greases is that they possess a high initial viscosity, which upon the application of shear, drops to give the effect of an oil-lubricated bearing of approximately the same viscosity as the base oil used in the grease. This change in viscosity is called thixotropy. Grease is sometimes used to describe lubricating materials that are simply soft solids or high viscosity liquids, but these materials do not exhibit the shear-thinning (thixotropic) properties characteristic of the classical grease. For example, petroleum jellies such as Vaseline are not generally classified as greases.
Green Jersey - Also known as the sprinters jersey or maillot vert, is worn by the leader of the points classification at the Tour de France
Groupset - the drivetrain of the bicycle that includes the crankset, chain, cassette, front derailleur, rear derailleur, shift levers, brake levers, and brakes.
Gruppetto (autobus) - A group of riders in a stage race (typically non-climbers and suffering domestiques) who ride together as a group on the mountain stages with the sole intention of finishing within the stage's time limit to allow them to start the next day. Also known by the Italian term gruppetto.
Back to Top
H
Hammer - To ride fast. Most often hammering is used to describe what someone does when they want to drop another rider or catch a breakaway.
Handlebar - the steering mechanism for bicycles; the equivalent of a steering wheel. Besides steering, handlebars also often support a portion of the rider's weight, depending on their riding position, and provide a convenient mounting place for brake levers, shift levers, cyclocomputers, bells, etc. Handlebars are attached to a bike's stem which in turn attaches to the fork.
Hardcore - parcour
Hardtail - A bicycle that does not have a rear suspension system.
Headset - The bearing system in the head tube within which the handlebars rotate.
Helmet - a form of protective gear worn to protect the head from injuries.
Hilltop finish - When a race ends at the top of a mountain, the rider with the greater climbing skills has the advantage. It used to be that the finish line was far from the last climb, allowing the bigger, more powerful riders to use their weight and strength to close the gap to the climbers on the descents and flats. The Tour introduced hilltop finishes in 1952 and did it with a vengeance ending stages at the top of L'Alpe d'Huez, Sestrieres and Puy de Dôme. In order to reduce Anquetil's advantage in the time trials and flatter stages the 1963 Tour moved the finish lines closer to the last climbs of the day, further helping the purer climbers.
Hit the wall (see bonking) - To completely run out of energy on a long ride, also known as "bonking".
Hors delai (HD, Ted King) - French for "out of time", when a rider has finished outside the time limit in a race and is eliminated.
Hub - A hub is the center part of a bicycle wheel. It consists of an axle, bearings and a hub shell. The hub shell typically has two machined metal flanges to which spokes can be attached. Hub shells can be one-piece with press-in cartridge or free bearings or, in the case of older designs, the flanges may be affixed to a separate hub shell.
Hybrid - A bicycle that is a compromise between a road bike and a mountain bike. Often chosen by cyclists for its comfort. Many use this type of bike for commuting because it is easy to add mudguards and a rack
Hydraulic Disc Brakes - braking mechanism which uses brake fluid, typically containing ethylene glycol, to transfer pressure from the controlling mechanism to the braking mechanism. Consists of a metal disc attached to the wheel hub that rotates with the wheel. Calipers are attached to the frame or fork along with pads that squeeze together on the disc. As the pads drag against the disc, the wheel - and thus the bicycle - is slowed as kinetic energy (motion) is transformed into thermal energy (heat).
I
IBD - Independent Bicycle Dealer
Individual Time Trial - Race where riders set off at fixed intervals and complete the course against the clock.
Intermediate sprint - To keep a race or a tour active there may be points along the course where the riders will sprint for time bonuses or other prizes.
Intermediate Sprint - To keep the race active there may be points along the race course where the riders will sprint for time bonuses or other prizes (premiums, or "preems"). Sometimes called "Hot Spots".
Internal Hub Gearing - a gear ratio changing system commonly used on bicycles that is implemented with planetary or epicyclic gears. The gears and lubricants are sealed within the shell of the hub gear, in contrast with derailleur gears where the gears and mechanism are exposed to the elements. Changing the gear ratio was traditionally accomplished by a shift lever connected to the hub with a Bowden cable, and twist-grip style shifters have become common.
Ironman - a long distance triathlon that includes a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile run. The championships are held every October in Kona, Hawaii and entry is by qualification. Run by the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC).
Back to Top
J
Jump - To aggressively increase speed without warning, hopefully creating a substantial advantage over your opponents. Also (more usually) denoting an attempt to bridge a gap from the peloton or gruppetto to a breakaway. For example: "he is trying to jump across".
Back to Top
K
Kick - Accelerating quickly with a few pedal strokes in an effort to break away from other riders (e.g. "Sagan kicks again to try to rid himself of Frank")
King of the Mountains (KOM) - In 1933 the Tour de France started awarding points for the first riders over certain hard climbs, the winner of the competition being the King of the Mountains. In 1975 the Tour started awarding the distinctive polka-dot jersey or maillot a pois to the leader of the classification. The first rider to wear the dots was the Dutch racer Joop Zoetemelk. The classification has lost some of its magic in recent years because of the tactics riders use to win it. Today a rider wishing to win the KOM intentionally loses a large amount of time in the General Classification. Then when the high mountains are climbed the aspiring King can take off on long breakaways to be first over the mountains without triggering a panicked chase by the Tour GC contenders.
Kit - all of the clothing and accessories someone wears on a bike. Someone’s cycling kit.
Back to Top
L
Lantern Rouge - French for red lantern, as in what hangs off the back of a train. In the Tour de France, it refers to the rider who is the lowest on general (overall) classification.
Lanterne Rouge - French for "red lantern", as found at the end of a railway train, and the name given to the rider placed last in a race.
LBS - Local Bike shop
Lead out - Sprinting technique often used by the lead out man where the rider will accelerate to maximum speed close to the sprint point with a teammate, the sprinter, drafting behind, hoping to create space between the sprinter and the pack. When the lead out man is exhausted he will move to the side to allow his teammate to race in the sprint. Often a line of lead out men will be used to form a lead out train to drive the speed higher and higher (and to reduce the chances of other riders attacking) over the closing stages of a race. The purpose of a lead out is for the sprinter to achieve high speed at the sprint approach using as little of his own energy as possible, so he has as much energy as possible for the final sprint.
Leadout Man - The top domestique responsible for bringing a sprinter within meters of the race finish line, sheltering him from the wind until the final seconds of a race. Top sprinters will often take a trusted lead-out man to a new team as part of their contract
Lubricant - a substance introduced to reduce friction between moving surfaces. It may also have the function of transporting foreign particles. The property of reducing friction is known as lubricity. Bicycles require specific lubricant that is applied to the chain, derailleurs, and any pivot points on the bike.
Lug - metal reinforced piece into which the tubing for road bikes is brazed, allowing for lighter tubing.
Back to Top
M
Maillot Jaune - French for Yellow Jersey. The jersey worn by the leader of the general classification at the Tour de France.
MAMIL - Abbreviation of middle-aged men in lycra, a popular bicycle buying demographic for high-end bicycles.
Manual - Lifting the front wheel off the ground by the shifting of the rider's weight.
Mechanical - A problem with the function of a racer's bicycle, usually not a flat tire. Because rules have sometimes been in place that prevent rider's changing bikes unless a mechanical problem is present mechanics have manufactured mechanicals. In the 1963 Tour de France Anquetil's manager Géminiani cut one of Anquetil's gear cables so that he could give him a lighter bike to ascend the Forclaz.
Metric Century - 100km or 62 mile bike ride
Minute man - The cyclist starting in a time trial either a minute ahead or behind another rider.
Monocoque - a structural approach that supports loads through an object's external skin, similar to a pingpong ball or egg shell. This is also a term used to describe the construction of some carbon fiber bicycle frames that are manufactured in a single piece and have no internal structure.
Mudguards - fenders for bicycles that can be fitted to most bicycle frames. These catch and redirect road spray thrown up by the tires, allowing the rider to remain relatively clean.
Mur - Wall, Steep climb
Musette - Small lightweight cotton shoulder bag, used for containing food and drink given to riders in a feed zone during a cycle race. The bag is designed so that it can be easily grabbed by a moving rider. The shoulder strap is placed over the head and one shoulder, the contents are then removed and placed into jersey pockets or bottles (bidons) are placed into bottle cages. The bag is then discarded.
Back to Top
N
Nature break - With stages and racing sometimes taking six or more hours, riders will sometimes dismount to use the restroom. Many times this is organized with an understanding that the peloton will not attack those stopping to answer the call of nature.
Neo-pro - A first year professional.
Neutral Service Car - This car will give any rider a spare bike or wheel if his own team car is not nearby. This car usually follows the early part of a breakaway and services riders until their team car arrives.
Nipple - a headed cylinder with threading on the inside through part of its length that holds a bicycle rim to each spoke.
Off the back - Getting dropped from the group/peloton.
Off the back - Riders who have been dropped by the main group (the peloton).
Omloop - circuit or race
On the rivet - A rider who is riding at maximum speed. When riding at maximum power output, a road racer often perches on the front tip of the saddle (seat), where the shell of an old-style leather saddle would be attached to the saddle frame with a rivet.
Back to Top
P
Paceline - Group of riders riding at high speed by drafting one another. Riders will take turns at the front to break the wind, then rotate to the back of the line to rest in the draft. Larger group rides will often form double pacelines with two columns of riders. Sometimes referred to as "bit and bit".
Palmares - A list of races a rider has won. (French, meaning list of achievements or list of winners).
Pannier - A basket, bag, box, or similar container, carried in pairs attached to the frame, handle bars, or on racks attached above the wheels of a bicycle. Panniers are used by commuters and touring cyclists in the same way hikers and campers use backpacks, as a means to pack and carry gear, clothing and other supplies and items. The term derives from the Old French, from Classical Latin, word for bread basket.
Parcours - The profile of the race or stage route.
Pave - cobbles
Pedals - part of a bicycle that the rider pushes with their foot to propel the bicycle. It provides the connection between the cyclist's foot or shoe and the crank allowing the leg to turn the bottom bracket spindle and propel the bicycle's wheels. Pedals usually consist of a spindle that threads into the end of the crank and a body, on which the foot rests or is attached, that is free to rotate on bearings with respect to the spindle.
Peloton - (from French, literally meaning little ball or platoon and also related to the English word pellet) is the large main group in a road bicycle race. May also be called the field, bunch, or pack. Riders in a group save energy by riding close (drafting or slipstreaming) near and, particularly behind, other riders. The reduction in drag is dramatic; in the middle of a well-developed group it can be as much as 40%.
Pink Jersey - Also known as the Maglia Rosa, the Pink Jersey is worn by the best placed rider in the General Classification at the Giro d’Italia.
Points - The usual meaning is the accumulation of placings in each stage. Today the Tour gives more points to the flatter stages so the the winner of the points competition is a more likely to be sprinter. See General Classification. In the Tour the Points leader wears a green jersey, in the Giro he dons a purple jersey.
Polka Dot Jersey - The jersey worn by the leader of the mountains classification at the Tour de France
Poursuivant - From French, literally "pursuing" - refers to a cyclist or group of cyclists who are separated from and behind the leader(s) (tête de la course) but in front of the main group (peloton). This usually occurs when a small number of riders attempt to catch up to the leaders, either to join with them or to "bring them back to the pack" by encouraging the main group to chase them down.
Power Meter - a device on a bicycle that measures the power output of the rider. Most cycling power meters use strain gauges to measure torque applied, and, combined with angular velocity, calculate power. The technology was adapted to cycling in the late 1980s and was tested in professional bicycle racing i.e.: the prototype Power Pacer (Team Strawberry) and by Greg LeMond with the SRM device. This type of power meter has been commercially available since 1989. Power meters using strain gauges are mounted in the bottom bracket, rear freehub, or crankset. Certain newer devices do not use strain gauges and instead measure power through handlebar-mounted units that utilize the principles of Newton's Third Law by measuring a cyclist's opposing forces (gravity, wind resistance, inertia, rolling resistance) and combining these with velocity to determine the rider's power output.
Presta Valve - a valve commonly found in high pressure bicycle tubes. It compromises an outer valve tem and an inner valve body. A lock nut to secure the stem at the wheel and a valve cap may also be present.
Prologue - An individual time trial of usually less than 8 km (5 mi) before a stage race, used to determine which rider wears the leader's jersey on the first stage.
Pull - To take the lead on a paceline or echelon.
Pure sprinter - Also known as old school sprinter. A rider who excels primarily in sprint finishes on flat to mildly uphill terrain. Often too heavy to compete in longer or steeper uphill courses.
Back to Top
Q
Queen stage - The stage of a multi-day road race which includes the highest point reach of the whole race. Also usually, but not always, the hardest stage of the race.
Quick Link - A link for a bicycle chain produced by SRAM. This link is easy to install and remove by hand, eliminating the need for a chain tool. Quick Links make it easy to remove the chain for cleaning.
Quick Release - bolts with levers attached for easy adjustment and removal of wheels
Back to Top
R
Rack - a device attached to a bicycle to which cargo or panniers can be attached. This is popular with utility bicycles and touring bicycles.
Rainbow Jersey - The reigning world champion in a particular cycling event gets to wear a white jersey with rainbow stripes. The championships for most important events are held in the Fall. A former World Champion gets to wear a jersey with rainbow trim on his sleeves and collar. If a World Champion becomes the leader of the Tour, Giro or Vuelta he will trade his Rainbow Jersey for the Leader's Jersey.
Rake - the amount, in degrees, that a front cork curves from the line drown down the stem or steerer tube.
Rear Derailleur - Responsible for changing gears on the cassette. The rear derailleur serves double duty: moving the chain between rear sprockets and taking up chain slack caused by moving to a smaller sprocket at the rear or a smaller chainring by the front derailleur. In order to accomplish this second task, it is positioned in the path of the bottom, slack portion of chain. Sometimes the rear-derailleurs are re-purposed as chain tensioners for single-speed bicycles that cannot adjust chain tension by a different method.
Red Bull Rampage - The Red Bull Rampage is an invite-only freeride/downhill mountain bike competition held near Zion National Park in Virgin, Utah, USA, just to the north of Gooseberry Mesa. Previously it was held off the Kolob Terrace Road, on the western boundary of Zion National Park. The competition was held from 2001–2004 and then canceled due to the increasing risk competitors were taking. The Rampage however was re-introduced for the 2008 season. In 2010, the event was held October 1–3.Since then Red Bull rampage has become one of the biggest mountain biking events of the year.
Red Jersey - The Red Jersey is worn by the best placed rider in the General Classification at the Vuelta a Espana
Rigid - A bicycle without any suspension system.
Rim - commonly a metal extrusion that is butted into itself to form a hoop. Comes in a variety of materials including: aluminum, magnesium, carbon, and bamboo.
Road race - A race on pavement. Longer in distance than criteriums.
Road rash - Severe skin abrasions caused from sliding on the asphalt in a crash.
Roadie - someone who rides road bikes
Rollers - A type of trainer composed of rolling cylinders under the rear wheel linked to a single rolling cylinder under the front wheel which allow the rider to practice balance while training indoors.
Rouleur - A rider who is strong on flat and undulating roads. The rider is well suited for races such as Paris–Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara are examples of this.
Rule #5 - HTFU (http://www.velominati.com/the-rules/)
Rutkowski - noun: A spectacular bicycle accident, usually involving an immovable object such as a tree, lamppost, or cactus. Ex: When I rode off that cliff and saw the 12' cactus, I knew it would be a bad Rutkowski." verb: to crash a bicycle in a manner that would make Wyle E. Coyote cringe. Ex: "I Rutkowskied so bad this weekend I needed 417 stitches"
S
Saddle - Bike seat.
SAG Wagon (see broom wagon) - A broom wagon. SAG is an acronym for "support and gear" or "support and grub".
Same time (@) - In English language race results an asperand (or "at" sign) is used to denote the amount of time or number of points behind the winner. In the example below Luis Ocana won the race, taking 6 hours, 51 minutes, 15 seconds to complete the course. Joop Zoetemelk was behind him and crossed the finish line 15 seconds later. Pollentier was still further behind and crossed the line 3 minutes and 34 seconds after Ocana. Van Impe and Thévenet were with Pollentier but slightly behind him. The "s.t." means that they were given the same time as Pollentier. If a rider finishes close enough to a rider who is in front of him so that there is no real gap, he will be given the same time as the first rider of that group. French or Spanish results will use often use "m.t." to denote same time. If no time is given, same time is assumed.
Seat Stay - the tube on a bicycle frame that connect near the seat tube and top tube and run down towards the hub of the wheel and connect with the chain stays.
Seatpost - a tube that extends upwards from the bicycle frame to the saddle. The amount that it extends out of the frame can usually be adjusted, and there is usually a mark that indicates the minimum insertion (or maximum extension). Seatposts can be made of steel, aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, or aluminum wrapped in carbon fiber.
Service course - A command center where bicycles are maintained between races in preparation for the next race, a service course car is a car (such as those famously provided by Mavic) that carry spare bicycles or wheels in a race should the competing cyclist require it.
Shifter - A component used by the rider to control the gearing mechanisms and select the desired gear ratio. It is usually connected to the derailleur by a mechanical actuation cable. Electronic shifting systems also exist.
Shraeder Valve - brand of pneumatic tire valve used on cars, bicycle, motorcycles, etc… Consists of a valve stem into which a valve core is threaded.
Soigneur - A non-riding member of a team whose role is to provide support for the riders, possibly including transportation and organization of supplies, preparation of the team's food, post-ride massages and personal encouragement.
Souvenir Henri Desgrange - the prize given to the rider to the top of the highest mountain pass in the Tour de France.
SPD - Type of cleat produced by shimano. Uses two screws to attach and is the primary type of cleat used by mountain bikers
SPD-SL - Type of cleat produced by shimano that utilizes three bolts to attach the cleat to the show. Common for road cyclists.
Spoke - one of some number of rods radiating from the center of a wheel connecting the hub with the rim.
Sprinter - Rider with the ability to generate very high power over short periods (a few seconds to a minute) allowing for great finishing speeds, but usually unable to sustain sufficiently high power over long periods to be a good time triallist, and is usually too big to have a high enough power-to-weight ratio to be a good climber.
Stage - One part of a multi-day race, such as the Tour de France.
Stage Race - A multi day cycling race that consists of different stages. Can be as short as two days and as long as three weeks. These races often include different types of stages including flat, medium mountain, high mountain, time trial, and team time trial stages.
Stagiaire - An amateur rider, who is taken in by a professional team during the season. This lets the rider get some experience at riding a few pro races, and the team gets a chance to assess the abilities of the rider.
Stanchion - The two upper members of the bicycle fork that connect to the crown (also called fork legs).
Steerer tube - The part of the fork that is inserted into the head tube of the frame, and is used to attach the fork to the frame using a headset.
Stem - The component that attaches the handlebars to the steer tube of the bicycle. They come in two major types, quill and threadless. The angle and length plays a major part in how the bicycle fits the rider.
Sticky bottle - A technique often used by the rider who takes food and water from the team car during a race. The rider holds on for a variable amount of time to the bottle handed to him by the car occupant, who maintains his grasp on the object, effectively dragging the athlete. This concerted act gives the cyclist a moment to relax. Usually tolerated by the race commissaire if the bottle is held for 1-2 second, but may result in a sanction if an exaggeration is perceived.
Stiction - static friction or the friction that must be overcome for something to start moving
Swag - Promotional items often given away for free at cycling events. Also spelled "schwag", "shwag".
Switchback - In order to reduce the gradient of a mountain ascent the road engineer has the road go back and forth across the hill. The Stelvio climb is famous for its 48 switchbacks as is L'Alpe d'Huez for its 21. In Italian the term is Tornante.
Back to Top
T
Table Top - a jump made over a hill with a flat top where the main goal is to launch yourself over the flat section before landing on another ramp
Team time trial - Riders start in groups or teams, usually of a fixed size. The time of the nth rider of a team counts for the classification for each team member. In the 2009 edition of Tour de France, riders who are dropped from their team's group would be scored with their own time, instead of the team time.
Technical - A trail or patch of road that requires good balance and concentration since it is very uneven. Can also be said of a bend or a series of bends.
Tempo - Steady pace at the front of a group of riders. A relatively fast tempo can be used by a group or team to control the peloton, often to make up time to a break. The group will ride at the head of the bunch and set a fast enough pace to stretch the peloton out (also known as stringing out) and discourage other riders from attacking. Setting a slower tempo can be done for the purpose of blocking. A tempo is also a type of track race where two points are awarded to the first person to cross the line each lap, and one point is awarded to the second person to cross the line each lap. The winner is the person with the most points at the end of the race.
Tete de la course - From French, literally "head of the race" - the leading cyclist or group of cyclists, when separated from (in front of) the peloton.
Tifosi - The word commonly refers to fans along the roadside at professional road cycling races in Italy such as Tirreno–Adriatico, Milan – San Remo, the Giro d'Italia, and the Giro di Lombardia.
Time Bonus - Time bonus (actually time subtracted) awarded to a rider. Stage races vary and the Tour is always tinkering with its rules. Bonifications can be earned several ways: winning or placing in a stage, winning or placing in an intermediate sprint, being among the first riders over a rated climb. The rules have changed over the years. At one time in the early 1930's the Tour awarded a 4-minute time bonus for winning a stage. In 2005 the bonification was 20 seconds.
Time trial - A race against the clock where riders are started separately (ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes apart). The winner of the race is determined by the fastest person across the course. No drafting may be employed in a time trial as it is a solo race event.
Toe Clips - a thin metal or plastic attachment to the front cage of the pedal. The toe clip is shaped like the toe of a shoes and its function is to prevent a cyclist’s shoe from slipping off the pedal during forward pedaling motion.
Track Stand - a maneuver where the rider stops the bike and remains standing without putting a foot on the ground
Trade Team - A team sponsored by a commercial entity. Until the mid-1950s, cycle team sponsorship was limited to companies within the bicycle industry. That changed in 1954 when Fiorenzo Magni's bicycle manufacturer fell into financial difficulty. Magni was able to supplement the shortfall by getting the Nivea cosmetic company to sponsor his team. The move was initially resisted but it is now the standard. Bicycle companies do not have the monetary resources to finance big-time racing teams. Because the Tour organization suspected collusion between the various trade teams the Tour banished them from 1930 to 1961, and 1967 and 1968. During those years the teams were organized under a national and regional team format. Riders rode for their country, such as France or Italy, or if need be to fill out the race's roster, regions such as Ile de France.
Train (sprint train) - a method in stage races to get a sprinter to the front of a bunch sprint and launched. The sprinter's team riders will form a line, usually within 5k of the finish and take turns to build up speed - the last rider in the train will be protected (drafting) until a short distance from the finish. Perfected by HTC and Mark Cavendish.
Trainer (turbo trainer) - A piece of equipment that a bicycle stands on so that the rear wheel can spin while the bicycle is stationary, allowing stationary riding. These are usually used when the conditions outside are bad.
Triathlon - a type of race that involves three sports. Typically swimming, biking, and running. These range in distance from super sprints that most people complete in less than an hour, to Ironman distance triathlon (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run) that have a 17 hour time limit.
Tubular tires - Tubular tyres are cycle tyres that have the inner tube permanently stitched inside the casing. They are held in place using glue or glue-tape, and are affixed to rims which lack the sidewalls characteristic of a hook-bead rim. Tubulars take very high pressure (up to 10 bar or 145 psi, or higher for racing and track-specific tires) which reduces their rolling resistance. They typically result in wheelsets that are lower in overall weight than comparable clincher wheels, because of the shape of the rim, the tire construction, and the lack of rim strips. Tubulars can be ridden at lower pressures than clinchers without the risk of pinch flats, because of the shape of the rim. This makes them well-suited to cyclo-cross, especially in muddy conditions where low tire pressures are used. However, they are difficult to replace and repair and are generally more expensive than clinchers. Also called sew-ups, tubies, or tub.
Turn - A turn is a rider sharing the workload on a pace line "he took a turn" or "he is doing a lot of turns on the front". Missing turns can be expressed thus "he has missed a few turns now and has stopped working". In a breakaway the riders expect to share the work equally in "turns". A rider who doesn't take his turn is "sitting on the break".
U
UCI - The governing world body of cycling. Union Cycliste Internationale
USADA - United States Anti Doping Agency. The agency in charge of doping controls in the United States.
Back to Top
V
V Brakes - Also called linear-pull or direct-pull brakes are a side-pull version of cantilever brakes mounted on the same from bosses. However, the arms are longer, with the cable housing attached to one arm and the able to another.
Velodrome - A cycling track for races.
WADA - World Anti-Doping Agency. The agency in charge of monitoring doping in modern sports.
Wall - A steep incline along a race's course.
Weight Weenie - a bicycle enthusiast who is purely focused on making his bike as light as possible.
Wheelie - Lifting the front wheel of the bicycle in the air - through force transmitted through the pedals - whilst riding and continuing to ride on only the back wheel. The rider maintains the wheelie by applying pedal strokes and rear brake in order to balance the bicycle on only the rear wheel.
Wheelsucker - A rider who sits on the rear wheel of others in a group or on another rider, enjoying the draft but not working. Also leech, leeching.
White Jersey - The jersey worn by the leader of the young riders classification at the Tour de France
Back to Top
Y
Yard sale - A crash causing every piece of gear to be scattered all over the place, like bottles, multi-tools, energy bars, hand pump, etc. The resulting scene is reminiscent of a yard sale.
Search
|
i don't know
|
Traditionally when in colour/color, the Samsung logo is?
|
Color Codes Matching Chart HTML (CMYK, RGB Hex)
Get a Quote
Color Moods in Logo Design
The logo designer can already transmit a basic mood by the choice of color codes but their connotations can differ widely from culture to culture. For example, pink: In Europe it stands for softness and being childish, but in Korea it stands for trust. Typical uses of colors in North America and Western Europe include: Activity (Red, Orange, Yellow); Honesty (White, Blue, Green); Functionality (White, Grey, Black); Ideal (White, Blue, Gold); Cleverness (White, Blue, Silver); Performance (Blue, Gold, Red); Innovation (Violet, Orange, Silver); Objectivity (White, Grey, Blue); Speed (Silver, Red, Yellow).
Chromatic - achromatic contrasts
Achromatic monochrome (white, black and the range of codes between) combines very well with color. The resulting scheme is one of color but not of loudness, leaving an impression of unobtrusive stability. Contrasts of this type are a good basis on which to create balanced color schemes provided that pure colors are not combined with black. Yellow and black or red and black are two such combinations, appearing very intense and resulting in a signal character. It is very clear why they are often used in road signs or found in nature as with the wasp's warning sign of danger with its stripes.
Color Saturation
The intensity of a color is described as saturation or chroma. Saturation is determined by how little or how much grey a color contains. In its purest form a hue is at maximum chroma; these are color codes that are not ''grayed''. They are described as clear, pure, brilliant, bright, reach, bold, vivid and/or true. The grayer or more neutral a color is, the less its saturation. Less saturated colors are described as soft, muted, subtle, toned-down, misty, dull or dusty.
Color Value
The lightness or darkness of a color is called its value. Lightened values are tints, darkened values are shades and medium value colors are described as midtones. A variation in the light to dark arrangement or design is called a ''value pattern''. Keeping the value pattern minimized within a limited range creates an understated, subtle and restrained look that is seen as calm and quiet. Colors close in value have soft edges between them, while excitement and drama are suggested by sharp changes in value.
Cold Colors
Cold colors, those conveying a feeling of cool seriousness, are to be found between the range of tone variations from green through to blue on the color wheel. Cold colors, when combined with each other, act to create distance and impersonality but at the same time an impression of seriousness and functionality. The combination of warm and cold colors can produce powerful contrasts in logo design . The temperature represented in the greater quantity determines the overall impression.
Simultaneous contrast color schemes
Colors vary in character according to their environment. This phenomenon is called simultaneous contrast. Achromatic borders increase the luminescence of a color. Seen against a dark background, color appears lighter than seen against a pale background. A pale background will force a color to the foreground, while a darker background will cause it to recede again. A cold color, if enclosed by a warm colored border, will appear cooler than it actually is, whereas the same color, instead set within a cold border, will appear warmer. A color code taken from a position consecutive on the color wheel to that of the foreground color will, if used as a background, decrease the prominence of the foreground color. The more complementary the background color code, in terms of its position on the color wheel, the purer and more luminous the foreground color will seem.
Warm Colors
Warm colors, those provoking a sense of warmth and openness, comprise the range of tone variations from red through to yellow on the color wheel. Warm colors, when combined with each other, act to create proximity, a sense of well being and seem charged with energy.
Complementary color contrasts
These color codes are to be found opposite each other on the color wheel and result in stark contrasts and impressions of dissonance - these combinations of colors will appear very intense, garish and loud. A less intense variation on the complementary color contrast is the ''semi complementary color contrasts'' in which the color code next to the complementary color is used.
Consecutively-positioned tones
These are color tones found near each other on the color wheel. Such combinations, as with contrasts of tone and quality, form a good basis on which to create a balanced logo design . When contrasted with a further color, the result can be one of rich vibrancy founded on a harmonious structure.
Color Codes Matching Chart HTML (Convert CMYK, RGB Hex)
Note that the conversions in this color codes chart are best described as "nominal". They will produce an invertible conversion between the RGB code and a subset of CMYK; that is, one can take an RGB color code and convert to certain CMYK colors, and from these CMYK colors obtain the matching, original RGB codes. However, conversion of CMYK colors to RGB cannot be reversed; this means, given a CMYK color code which is converted to RGB, performing the former conversion may not give the original CMYK color. In addition, CMYK colors may print differently from how the RGB colors display on a monitor. There is no single "good" conversion rule between RGB and CMYK, because neither RGB nor CMYK is an absolute color space.... Read More
C M Y K RGB Hex 0 31 37 0 #ffb0a1 0 52 100 64 #5c2c00 35 0 25 0 #a6ffbf 52 63 48 0 #7a5e85 30 6 0 0 #b3f0ff 19 79 0 0 #cf36ff 67 41 0 0 #5496ff 9 67 0 0 #e854ff 0 64 100 60 #662500 43 0 34 38 #5a9e68 0 45 100 25 #bf6900 0 25 100 37 #a17800 44 0 35 20 #72cc85 10 0 74 0 #e6ff42 8 0 9 19 #becfbc 100 0 81 66 #005710 100 88 70 18 #00193f 12 0 2 0 #e0fffa 6 0 76 0 #f0ff3d 0 10 12 6 #f0d8d3 0 46 100 33 #ab5c00 58 100 0 44 #3c008f 16 0 46 0 #d6ff8a 0 23 10 2 #fac0e1 59 100 0 32 #4700ad 0 3 15 20 #ccc6ad 0 22 85 85 #261e06 69 7 0 0 #4fedff 0 17 18 10 #e6bebc 6 7 55 0 #f0ed73 50 85 100 38 #4f1800 98 100 0 55 #020073 94 0 100 0 #0fff00 3 0 100 58 #686b00 50 70 0 0 #804dff 6 100 0 26 #b100bd 59 0 33 0 #69ffab 0 25 20 10 #e6acb8 0 13 15 45 #8c7a77 100 57 0 2 #006bfa 45 0 33 0 #8cffab 0 0 31 18 #d1d190 79 0 100 75 #0d4000 6 9 23 0 #f0e8c4 100 69 0 9 #0048e8 28 0 12 0 #b8ffe0 63 0 12 0 #5effe0 45 100 100 15 #770000 43 76 0 0 #913dff 60 58 0 19 #5357cf 0 4 100 30 #b3ab00 30 0 8 0 #b3ffeb 0 31 44 0 #ffb08f 0 25 4 0 #ffbff5 75 0 7 0 #40ffed 0 3 10 10 #e6dfcf 6 5 0 0 #f0f2ff 18 0 8 0 #d1ffeb 43 0 10 0 #91ffe6 77 100 0 31 #2800b0 23 0 13 0 #c4ffde 25 79 0 12 #a82fe0 0 68 100 0 #ff5200 7 38 0 0 #ed9eff 60 34 0 10 #5c97e6 0 95 27 0 #ff0dba 80 15 0 45 #1c778c 100 45 0 37 #0058a1 0 18 28 3 #f7cbb2 0 68 100 44 #8f2e00 61 89 0 0 #631cff 20 0 100 19 #a5cf00 0 25 45 40 #997354 0 55 8 0 #ff73eb 0 91 100 23 #c41200 77 100 7 0 #3b00ed 92 0 15 5 #13f2ce 0 46 22 0 #ff8ac7 0 27 12 0 #ffbae0 43 0 27 0 #91ffba 0 53 20 0 #ff78cc 0 0 9 20 #ccccba 0 38 21 11 #e38db3 100 94 0 47 #000887 0 5 6 16 #d6cbc9 0 70 100 36 #a33100 10 0 3 16 #c1d6d0 69 34 0 11 #4696e3 0 26 45 18 #d19b73 0 100 10 59 #69005e 100 78 0 54 #001a75 3 34 0 0 #f7a8ff 65 0 56 94 #050f07 0 100 63 12 #e00053 0 37 10 0 #ffa1e6 19 9 0 0 #cfe8ff 65 0 100 42 #349400 11 100 0 0 #e300ff 0 46 73 0 #ff8a45 0 58 100 10 #e66000 82 78 100 30 #202700 0 37 68 28 #b8743b 0 62 71 49 #823126 0 34 52 0 #ffa87a 0 2 100 7 #ede800 0 97 0 59 #690369 0 11 100 27 #baa600 0 3 100 41 #969200 12 0 12 30 #9db39d 30 0 20 15 #98d9ad 40 36 0 0 #99a3ff 48 0 29 0 #85ffb5 4 5 44 0 #f5f28f 2 44 0 12 #dc7ee0 0 0 88 3 #f7f71e 85 0 50 31 #1ab058 68 34 0 0 #52a8ff 0 58 100 8 #eb6300 0 60 100 17 #d45500 0 0 16 50 #80806b 55 0 9 0 #73ffe8 0 5 31 0 #fff2b0 96 100 0 10 #0900e6 0 17 62 0 #ffd461 83 0 10 0 #2bffe6 30 0 5 0 #b3fff2 0 100 45 18 #d10073 0 35 90 0 #ffa61a 0 20 50 5 #f2c279 3 67 0 0 #f754ff 49 11 0 0 #82e3ff 100 0 5 72 #004744 0 35 50 12 #e09270 49 0 28 0 #82ffb8 60 100 15 5 #6100ce 0 4 100 12 #e0d700 25 7 0 4 #b8e4f5 0 100 13 17 #d400b8 36 0 49 0 #a3ff82 98 0 72 61 #02631c 0 1 47 30 #b3b15f 20 0 44 0 #ccff8f 42 15 0 6 #8bccf0 0 0 46 4 #f5f584 0 100 56 19 #cf005b 0 0 69 1 #fcfc4e 3 0 14 6 #e9f0ce 20 17 0 2 #c8cffa 0 11 69 0 #ffe34f 59 0 100 7 #61ed00 0 65 100 71 #4a1a00 0 18 3 0 #ffd1f7 0 7 17 43 #918779 0 18 100 27 #ba9900 38 0 32 0 #9effad 43 0 24 0 #91ffc2 100 66 0 58 #00246b 0 15 78 36 #a38b24 7 10 9 0 #ede6e8 0 39 6 0 #ff9cf0 30 40 0 0 #b399ff 20 17 0 0 #ccd4ff 50 100 100 25 #600000 70 0 100 9 #46e800 18 0 7 5 #c7f2e1 0 17 50 65 #594a2d 0 100 15 60 #660057 57 45 0 0 #6e8cff 75 95 68 5 #3d0c4e 32 0 24 10 #9ce6ae 100 0 24 38 #009e78 100 78 0 44 #001f8f 0 53 68 0 #ff7852 8 0 85 0 #ebff26 100 50 0 10 #0073e6 6 63 0 0 #f05eff 100 0 8 13 #00decc 0 27 54 0 #ffba75 0 46 23 5 #f283bb 0 59 96 0 #ff690a 10 17 10 0 #e6d4e6 0 2 67 40 #999632 0 7 39 17 #d4c581 0 53 100 72 #472200 80 53 0 0 #3378ff 34 0 19 0 #a8ffcf 0 77 100 42 #942200 1 52 0 0 #fc7aff 17 30 8 0 #d4b3eb 0 0 0 72 #474747 37 100 0 26 #7700bd 49 1 0 0 #82fcff 44 0 47 68 #2e522b 10 14 0 0 #e6dbff 100 0 54 69 #004f24 43 37 0 0 #91a1ff 7 0 0 30 #a6b3b3 100 0 44 17 #00d477 56 0 26 0 #70ffbd 0 100 62 0 #ff0061 0 100 10 35 #a60095 0 15 100 43 #917c00 24 8 0 0 #c2ebff 0 11 8 0 #ffe3eb 0 0 0 44 #8f8f8f 0 24 11 0 #ffc2e3 24 9 0 2 #bee3fa 100 62 0 54 #002d75 75 65 100 30 #2d3e00 0 0 51 0 #ffff7d 10 26 0 0 #e6bdff 47 0 32 0 #87ffad 0 1 27 6 #f0edaf 12 0 26 2 #dcfab9 34 0 100 60 #436600 54 7 0 27 #56adba 0 0 0 61 #636363 0 100 99 4 #f50002 0 46 100 11 #e37b00 60 80 100 45 #381c00 46 45 46 0 #8a8c8a 0 45 95 17 #d4740b 100 0 28 65 #005940 25 0 81 67 #3f5410 0 26 100 69 #4f3a00 27 0 95 55 #547306 0 45 10 0 #ff8ce6 15 35 0 0 #d9a6ff 0 100 7 19 #cf00c0 100 95 0 15 #000bd9 60 0 51 80 #143319 51 100 0 25 #5e00bf 80 0 10 68 #105249 24 56 0 0 #c270ff 48 100 0 40 #500099 13 3 0 17 #b8cdd4 0 100 55 0 #ff0073 79 0 56 56 #187031 0 18 0 0 #ffd1ff 7 6 0 0 #edf0ff 1 83 0 0 #fc2bff 50 100 0 0 #8000ff 3 8 0 0 #f7ebff 100 80 0 26 #0026bd 0 100 66 13 #de004b 11 0 94 0 #e3ff0f 14 11 25 0 #dbe3bf 23 2 0 63 #495c5e 22 33 0 0 #c7abff 18 0 100 31 #90b000 0 24 94 0 #ffc20f 90 57 0 0 #1a6eff 0 100 34 53 #78004f 0 39 48 0 #ff9c85 0 7 50 0 #ffed80 41 0 78 0 #96ff38 5 12 3 0 #f2e0f7 20 0 91 0 #ccff17 100 82 30 5 #002caa 100 0 5 5 #00f2e6 45 29 0 0 #8cb5ff 0 53 100 37 #a14c00 0 22 42 0 #ffc794 0 70 100 78 #381100 0 2 15 0 #fffad9 0 27 100 51 #7d5b00 5 0 0 45 #858c8c 70 100 100 35 #320000 0 19 60 0 #ffcf66 0 3 6 16 #d6d0c9 0 5 15 0 #fff2d9 0 30 14 0 #ffb3db 15 50 0 0 #d980ff 22 0 100 8 #b7eb00 43 0 14 21 #73c9ad 0 0 100 29 #b5b500 3 0 10 20 #c6ccb8 37 0 18 0 #a1ffd1 24 0 57 0 #c2ff6e 0 2 87 59 #69660e 100 64 0 38 #00399e 0 24 38 5 #f2b896 0 27 100 34 #a87b00 79 100 0 15 #2e00d9 0 4 22 32 #ada687 1 63 0 0 #fc5eff 45 0 80 35 #5ba621 2 31 0 0 #fab0ff 41 55 0 0 #9673ff 0 0 0 33 #ababab 33 29 55 0 #abb573 21 0 23 75 #324031 0 10 27 50 #80735d 0 28 0 0 #ffb8ff 12 0 29 0 #e0ffb5 0 12 35 25 #bfa87c 100 55 0 55 #003473 2 61 0 0 #fa63ff 47 0 11 0 #87ffe3 0 51 100 1 #fc7c00 0 27 76 0 #ffba3d 0 65 100 35 #a63a00 37 0 20 0 #a1ffcc 100 0 9 30 #00b3a2 100 62 0 20 #004ecc 85 0 54 52 #127a38 0 18 21 56 #705c59 9 0 6 18 #bed1c5 40 100 0 2 #9600fa 5 12 13 0 #f2e0de 100 91 0 0 #0017ff 48 0 100 53 #3e7800 63 0 18 0 #5effd1 100 19 0 75 #003440 82 0 64 70 #0e4d1c 57 28 0 9 #64a7e8 27 47 0 0 #ba87ff 6 15 0 0 #f0d9ff 60 90 0 0 #661aff 0 8 23 2 #fae6c0 96 69 0 0 #0a4fff 8 1 0 13 #ccdcde 100 68 0 54 #002675 38 0 36 0 #9effa3 49 66 28 0 #8257b8 100 0 0 5 #00f2f2 9 19 5 0 #e8cff2 50 32 0 0 #80adff 0 75 75 0 #ff4040 0 100 68 0 #ff0052 0 15 40 4 #f5d093 0 75 30 0 #ff40b3 10 0 49 28 #a5b85e 0 100 96 28 #b80007 0 15 22 0 #ffd9c7 69 0 37 0 #4fffa1 0 58 3 0 #ff6bf7 0 28 7 0 #ffb8ed 0 83 54 16 #d62463 0 55 22 0 #ff73c7 0 48 38 34 #a85868 0 84 88 0 #ff291f 45 0 31 27 #66ba80 0 91 76 0 #ff173d 0 26 10 0 #ffbde6 0 40 55 60 #663d2e 38 18 0 6 #95c5f0 0 3 100 30 #b3ad00 7 77 0 34 #9d27a8 0 27 36 72 #47342e 100 0 19 23 #00c49f 42 35 0 23 #7280c4 0 24 10 0 #ffc2e6 0 79 100 11 #e33000 29 0 36 100 #000000 0 100 60 37 #a10040 96 0 11 0 #0affe3 100 0 27 68 #00523c 0 0 100 43 #919100 63 100 0 3 #5c00f7 0 33 13 0 #ffabde 20 10 0 0 #cce6ff 100 24 0 64 #00465c 0 55 22 0 #ff73c7 0 73 100 80 #330e00 100 86 0 15 #001ed9 0 45 72 0 #ff8c47 100 88 0 15 #001ad9 12 0 50 7 #d1ed77 0 100 36 37 #a10067 73 100 0 0 #4500ff 29 0 100 0 #b5ff00 100 0 16 9 #00e8c3 45 100 0 55 #3f0073 0 95 40 49 #82074e 0 97 100 50 #800400 25 0 80 30 #86b324 7 0 31 13 #cede99 25 0 40 15 #a3d982 30 45 12 0 #b38ce0 69 0 100 0 #4fff00 0 18 100 15 #d9b200 20 35 0 0 #cca6ff 5 27 0 0 #f2baff 30 47 0 0 #b387ff 0 20 20 0 #ffcccc 0 8 9 26 #bdaeac 0 10 25 0 #ffe6bf 17 0 34 3 #cdf7a3 80 0 63 75 #0d4018 0 10 9 3 #f7dfe1 0 0 12 41 #969684 7 0 100 28 #abb800 100 49 0 70 #00274d 0 13 49 98 #050403 0 48 100 0 #ff8500 0 9 45 0 #ffe88c 3 21 0 0 #f7c9ff 0 56 100 30 #b34f00 0 74 100 47 #872300 0 0 0 26 #bdbdbd 0 100 0 0 #ff00ff 100 0 67 29 #00b53c 12 22 43 0 #e0c791 0 18 100 0 #ffd100 6 100 0 22 #bb00c7 23 2 0 77 #2d393b 59 0 50 52 #327a3d 0 1 95 0 #fffc0d 0 38 27 23 #c47a8f 18 31 0 0 #d1b0ff 60 0 50 0 #66ff80 0 55 100 2 #fa7000 9 15 34 0 #e8d9a8 0 24 7 0 #ffc2ed 0 67 100 28 #b83d00 12 0 11 10 #cae6cc 100 45 0 14 #0079db 0 11 45 0 #ffe38c 0 8 21 32 #ada089 100 0 10 25 #00bfac 0 16 37 0 #ffd6a1 100 0 33 35 #00a66f 100 0 61 61 #006327 0 25 18 0 #ffbfd1 0 4 79 0 #fff536 0 60 45 18 #d15473 27 95 0 0 #ba0dff 27 22 0 10 #a8b3e6 0 46 100 34 #a85b00 50 0 25 30 #59b386 85 0 100 55 #117300 31 30 0 7 #a4a6ed 0 16 19 0 #ffd6cf 0 0 18 1 #fcfccf 6 0 56 0 #f0ff70 3 3 35 0 #f7f7a6 0 35 28 0 #ffa6b8 0 8 22 56 #706758 0 0 79 0 #ffff36 85 100 0 0 #2600ff 14 0 10 6 #cef0d8 0 0 25 13 #dedea6 31 48 55 0 #b08573 100 43 0 65 #003359 0 19 51 0 #ffcf7d 30 60 100 40 #6b3d00 90 0 49 0 #1aff82 11 1 0 64 #525b5c 0 9 5 0 #ffe8f2 100 97 0 45 #00048c 32 0 100 40 #689900 0 80 42 20 #cc2976 0 17 6 0 #ffd4f0 21 61 0 4 #c15ff5 80 0 75 0 #33ff40 0 2 35 9 #e8e397 15 0 15 42 #7e947e 100 0 60 72 #00471d 0 15 11 0 #ffd9e3 7 20 0 0 #edccff 3 0 85 0 #f7ff26 100 100 0 28 #0000b8 34 0 81 71 #314a0e 0 36 100 63 #5e3c00 0 71 20 0 #ff4acc 10 100 0 49 #750082 100 0 18 83 #002b24 0 17 80 0 #ffd433 0 0 0 77 #3b3b3b 52 0 100 5 #74f200 100 57 0 37 #0045a1 29 90 0 0 #b51aff 3 0 55 0 #f7ff73 100 0 31 23 #00c487 0 15 100 28 #b89c00 100 85 46 11 #00227b 100 0 85 24 #00c21d 100 94 0 29 #000bb5 1 0 25 65 #585943 0 38 21 0 #ff9ec9 49 0 100 39 #4f9c00 0 3 100 64 #5c5900 0 15 8 1 #fcd7e8 14 0 9 0 #dbffe8 100 65 0 52 #002b7a 11 0 7 29 #a1b5a8 30 4 0 32 #79a6ad 0 31 61 18 #d19052 1 30 0 0 #fcb3ff 5 18 0 0 #f2d1ff 100 44 0 0 #008fff 41 20 0 0 #96ccff 100 0 46 46 #008a4a 100 72 0 18 #003bd1 0 11 65 0 #ffe359 100 44 0 76 #00223d 0 9 80 0 #ffe833 17 100 0 3 #cd00f7 0 9 5 0 #ffe8f2 56 100 0 15 #5f00d9 9 38 0 0 #e89eff 11 79 0 0 #e336ff 6 0 28 27 #afba86 85 24 0 0 #26c2ff 14 0 36 10 #c5e693 52 0 32 1 #79fcac 0 100 57 5 #f20068 100 56 0 23 #0056c4 45 0 9 0 #8cffe8 0 58 100 33 #ab4800 0 14 47 0 #ffdb87 0 30 70 55 #735022 70 60 100 20 #3d5200 0 80 45 55 #73173f 33 3 0 0 #abf7ff 100 0 43 60 #00663a 54 49 0 0 #7582ff 0 42 100 7 #ed8a00 0 21 48 10 #e6b577 40 90 100 30 #6b1200 89 43 0 0 #1c91ff 0 24 52 3 #f7bc77 100 0 65 30 #00b33e 9 0 13 30 #a2b39b 29 38 24 0 #b59ec2 9 0 53 0 #e8ff78 27 3 0 13 #a2d7de 2 13 0 0 #fadeff 65 55 100 10 #506700 26 28 0 0 #bdb8ff 45 0 100 24 #6bc200 100 0 53 21 #00c95f 0 100 81 4 #f5002f 19 35 0 0 #cfa6ff 100 58 0 21 #0055c9 55 35 0 7 #6b9aed 39 4 0 21 #7bc1c9 13 0 100 33 #95ab00 0 100 35 27 #ba0079 75 70 100 10 #394500 0 3 87 30 #b3ad17 5 36 11 0 #f2a3e3 14 4 0 0 #dbf5ff 0 40 35 20 #cc7a85 9 0 58 0 #e8ff6b 22 3 0 0 #c7f7ff 100 97 0 30 #0005b3 40 0 5 6 #90f0e4 0 15 34 1 #fcd7a7 100 72 0 32 #0031ad 24 25 25 0 #c2bfbf 30 0 45 0 #b3ff8c 0 6 30 0 #fff0b3 0 30 95 0 #ffb30d 0 35 70 0 #ffa64d 0 65 100 60 #662400 9 7 16 0 #e8edd6 100 0 48 60 #006635 0 2 15 3 #f7f2d2 5 57 0 19 #c459cf 100 0 30 95 #000d09 36 100 0 0 #a300ff 0 9 80 0 #ffe833 80 100 60 10 #2e005c 0 28 100 18 #d19700 6 6 0 5 #e4e4f2 5 0 7 10 #dae6d5 100 11 0 74 #003b42 100 0 55 5 #00f26d 8 0 100 0 #ebff00 17 0 16 0 #d4ffd6 0 34 3 0 #ffa8f7 56 0 44 33 #4bab60 22 14 3 0 #c7dbf7 71 42 0 0 #4a94ff 0 26 19 0 #ffbdcf 100 0 9 72 #004741 83 85 0 70 #0d0b4d 100 0 60 3 #00f763 3 49 0 0 #f782ff 47 0 24 0 #87ffc2 62 60 0 0 #6166ff 16 0 18 36 #89a386 0 45 50 30 #b36259 100 5 0 47 #008087 6 0 100 0 #f0ff00 98 0 57 17 #04d45b 40 30 70 25 #738639 0 100 60 55 #73002e 0 37 100 23 #c47c00 10 20 0 0 #e6ccff 58 0 80 0 #6bff33 90 11 0 0 #1ae3ff 84 0 56 0 #29ff70 100 0 71 43 #00912a 0 58 36 0 #ff6ba3 24 19 39 0 #c2cf9c 0 16 100 0 #ffd600 0 22 85 11 #e3b122 46 72 0 0 #8a47ff 100 0 78 42 #009421 14 6 0 1 #d9edfc 0 3 100 50 #807c00 0 2 48 17 #d4cf6e 0 60 60 0 #ff6666 0 0 51 0 #ffff7d 57 0 6 13 #5fded1 100 25 0 50 #006080 0 46 100 18 #d17100 0 6 95 0 #fff00d 14 53 0 0 #db78ff 0 56 90 0 #ff701a 0 100 79 20 #cc002b 0 74 100 72 #471300 0 66 38 0 #ff579e 25 0 100 80 #263300 100 0 49 46 #008a46 41 2 0 0 #96faff 27 0 25 0 #baffbf 0 79 100 52 #7a1a00 2 27 0 0 #fabaff 6 20 0 0 #f0ccff 95 0 25 0 #0dffbf 6 0 10 0 #f0ffe6 19 0 6 0 #cffff0 39 14 0 0 #9cdbff 25 0 10 0 #bfffe6 18 94 0 0 #d10fff 1 88 0 0 #fc1fff 100 95 0 0 #000dff 0 27 100 54 #755600 36 0 17 56 #48705d 0 42 45 34 #a8625d 29 0 10 14 #9cdbc5 0 32 100 9 #e89e00 0 25 15 11 #e3aac1 0 47 100 8 #eb7c00 16 0 31 82 #272e20 30 0 20 0 #b3ffcc 0 10 100 38 #9e8e00 5 0 40 0 #f2ff99 79 90 0 0 #361aff 38 0 15 0 #9effd9 0 28 100 56 #705100 56 0 27 74 #1d4230 5 29 0 0 #f2b5ff 0 55 100 49 #823b00 0 90 30 7 #ed18a6 100 38 0 64 #00395c 30 0 24 26 #84bd8f 24 0 19 4 #baf5c6 17 27 15 0 #d4bad9 80 100 70 15 #2b0041 0 0 0 100 #000000 0 11 20 0 #ffe3cc 0 2 8 10 #e6e1d3 0 10 50 0 #ffe680 15 29 31 0 #d9b5b0 0 12 100 7 #edd100 27 7 0 0 #baedff 0 16 77 0 #ffd63b 0 47 91 0 #ff8717 16 0 74 57 #5c6e1d 0 25 0 3 #f7baf7 100 0 31 7 #00eda4 17 37 0 0 #d4a1ff 0 43 19 10 #e683ba 0 40 90 0 #ff991a 20 0 16 17 #a9d4b2 0 53 100 38 #9e4a00 0 10 11 34 #a89796 0 28 100 6 #f0ad00 0 0 40 0 #ffff99 31 22 5 0 #b0c7f2 13 0 10 2 #d9fae1 27 0 23 0 #baffc4 0 32 35 25 #bf827c 60 0 80 7 #5fed2f 0 90 100 66 #570900 43 0 12 0 #91ffe0 43 0 60 0 #91ff66 0 25 95 0 #ffbf0d 52 49 0 14 #6970db 0 14 31 0 #ffdbb0 0 4 30 11 #e3da9f 100 0 38 47 #008754 0 57 100 59 #692d00 0 7 14 4 #f5e4d3 52 0 25 0 #7affbf 0 12 100 49 #827200 6 0 7 9 #dae8d8 63 100 0 15 #5000d9 0 40 44 0 #ff998f 30 20 0 3 #adc6f7 18 0 9 38 #829e90 78 100 0 33 #2600ab 20 0 30 0 #ccffb3 100 87 0 2 #0020fa 76 0 64 63 #175e22 33 3 0 95 #090c0d 100 36 0 2 #00a0fa 20 32 58 0 #ccad6b 0 4 18 0 #fff5d1 0 10 33 72 #474030 64 100 0 14 #4f00db 67 57 0 34 #3848a8 0 10 100 0 #ffe600 0 53 100 54 #753700 18 0 14 0 #d1ffdb 0 30 72 11 #e39f40 100 33 0 20 #0089cc 46 63 0 0 #8a5eff 0 0 58 6 #f0f065 0 0 32 2 #fafaaa 10 10 73 0 #e6e645 0 15 34 5 #f2cea0 50 60 100 48 #423500 0 12 28 0 #ffe0b8 29 36 0 0 #b5a3ff 33 100 0 8 #9d00eb 14 34 0 0 #dba8ff 0 43 70 0 #ff914d 55 0 50 0 #73ff80 0 3 19 6 #f0e9c2 20 0 40 6 #c0f090 61 0 45 0 #63ff8c 0 49 66 0 #ff8257 0 34 49 0 #ffa882 0 23 47 0 #ffc487 0 30 100 0 #ffb300 6 0 0 9 #dae8e8 0 59 56 0 #ff6970 0 30 55 0 #ffb373 0 79 58 0 #ff366b 5 0 24 9 #dce8b0 0 46 0 0 #ff8aff 0 47 29 0 #ff87b5 0 55 3 10 #e667df 36 50 0 0 #a380ff 59 66 0 0 #6957ff 0 3 100 18 #d1cb00 100 4 0 30 #00abb3 50 0 25 0 #80ffbf 100 0 44 0 #00ff8f 10 43 0 2 #e18efa 0 68 41 0 #ff5296 0 17 0 2 #facffa 0 66 100 7 #ed5100 0 18 32 10 #e6bc9c 77 73 0 46 #20258a 100 0 50 7 #00ed77 68 0 100 24 #3ec200 27 0 38 0 #baff9e 0 84 54 40 #991846 98 100 0 43 #030091 90 0 76 84 #04290a 66 0 57 82 #102e14 0 100 64 33 #ab003e 100 10 0 28 #00a5b8 100 82 0 30 #0020b3 71 0 33 0 #4affab 59 7 0 0 #69edff 0 64 100 0 #ff5c00 100 46 0 0 #008aff 0 22 23 15 #d9a9a7 41 11 0 0 #96e3ff 13 39 0 0 #de9cff 0 13 0 0 #ffdeff 13 49 23 0 #de82c4 2 0 0 5 #edf2f2 40 0 100 38 #5f9e00 0 61 97 0 #ff6308 64 35 0 0 #5ca6ff 85 0 65 0 #26ff59 0 0 0 11 #e3e3e3 0 18 10 1 #fccfe3 31 27 0 0 #b0baff 0 100 34 8 #eb009b 0 30 12 6 #f0a8d3 0 17 10 0 #ffd4e6 2 0 9 36 #a0a395 100 16 0 27 #009cba 70 0 23 0 #4dffc4 0 46 21 0 #ff8ac9 15 0 68 39 #849c32 0 53 100 4 #f57300 100 0 77 22 #00c72e 0 100 80 2 #fa0032 16 13 0 7 #c7ceed 32 0 100 79 #243600 29 12 0 0 #b5e0ff 0 7 66 0 #ffed57 34 100 0 0 #a800ff 0 27 13 3 #f7b5d7 100 0 66 9 #00e84f 0 0 18 8 #ebebc0 0 35 85 0 #ffa626 46 88 0 0 #8a1fff 4 0 21 18 #c9d1a5 87 0 38 0 #21ff9e 58 48 0 0 #6b85ff 28 0 14 0 #b8ffdb 100 0 85 50 #008013 10 1 0 40 #8a9799 0 60 100 79 #361500 59 0 6 0 #69fff0 0 42 100 1 #fc9200 100 72 0 18 #003bd1 11 9 0 0 #e3e8ff 0 100 65 28 #b80040 0 26 100 26 #bd8c00 85 19 0 0 #26cfff 32 0 8 0 #adffeb 0 6 14 31 #b0a597 13 0 100 46 #788a00 3 27 0 0 #f7baff 0 79 100 0 #ff3600 0 8 35 10 #e6d395 0 48 95 0 #ff850d 95 0 100 27 #09ba00 0 2 6 7 #ede8df 9 0 13 25 #aebfa6 0 81 100 74 #420d00 0 2 100 20 #ccc800 80 0 90 0 #33ff1a 14 0 79 0 #dbff36 0 100 61 43 #910039 100 0 9 40 #00998b 0 10 100 0 #ffe600 0 20 95 46 #8a6e07 13 9 2 0 #dee8fa 30 43 0 0 #b391ff 79 66 0 0 #3657ff 7 0 100 49 #798200 13 16 14 0 #ded6db 100 0 86 3 #00f723 43 38 0 0 #919eff 14 0 9 0 #dbffe8 0 75 15 15 #d936b8 0 41 9 0 #ff96e8 50 70 100 50 #402600 50 24 0 10 #73aee6 0 100 63 29 #b50043 100 92 0 10 #0012e6 0 67 50 0 #ff5480 6 0 4 11 #d5e3da 0 28 76 0 #ffb83d 25 2 0 0 #bffaff 80 0 100 56 #167000 0 20 56 0 #ffcc70 100 0 57 42 #009440 0 39 76 29 #b56e2b 34 0 9 0 #a8ffe8 0 9 58 0 #ffe86b 0 30 66 98 #050402 33 0 85 82 #1f2e07 0 10 30 0 #ffe6b3 0 36 14 0 #ffa3db 77 68 0 0 #3b52ff 28 27 0 0 #b8baff 32 42 0 55 #4e4373 0 2 69 0 #fffa4f 0 59 100 5 #f26300 78 28 0 0 #38b8ff 0 55 60 27 #ba544a 35 4 0 94 #0a0f0f 0 93 70 51 #7d0925 32 0 19 0 #adffcf 9 19 21 0 #e8cfc9 2 0 0 18 #cdd1d1 81 100 0 7 #2d00ed 65 86 49 0 #592482 0 20 100 56 #705a00 100 0 12 43 #009180 24 0 46 10 #aee67c 17 6 0 0 #d4f0ff 51 0 9 0 #7dffe8 0 15 26 0 #ffd9bd 0 18 15 0 #ffd1d9 83 0 21 0 #2bffc9 0 48 96 44 #8f4a06 0 11 21 6 #f0d5bd 100 20 0 40 #007a99 0 100 43 19 #cf0076 0 63 100 48 #853100 6 49 0 0 #f082ff 16 4 0 2 #d2f0fa 0 72 11 0 #ff47e3 55 0 47 0 #73ff87 0 17 100 65 #594a00 1 20 0 0 #fcccff 0 41 100 37 #a15f00 100 17 0 51 #00687d 0 63 91 0 #ff5e17 0 5 100 53 #787200 20 0 13 9 #bae8ca 0 47 41 0 #ff8796 40 30 0 0 #99b3ff 23 0 14 0 #c4ffdb 0 22 34 0 #ffc7a8 90 0 28 22 #14c78f 2 0 100 72 #464700 0 56 100 43 #914000 62 22 0 3 #5ec1f7 40 100 0 28 #6e00b8 0 0 20 4 #f5f5c4 0 70 60 5 #f24961 56 0 100 27 #52ba00 0 42 77 0 #ff943b 0 0 91 79 #363605 0 4 20 6 #f0e6c0 0 29 91 0 #ffb517 40 21 0 0 #99c9ff 0 9 50 24 #c2b061 55 19 0 0 #73cfff 1 0 68 0 #fcff52 32 0 59 0 #adff69 42 30 7 0 #94b3ed 0 52 100 35 #a65000 0 4 100 43 #918c00 0 0 0 15 #d9d9d9 100 0 91 42 #00940d 100 0 46 15 #00d975 84 100 45 5 #270085 0 18 12 7 #edc2d1 0 43 100 33 #ab6100 26 40 0 0 #bd99ff 100 66 0 2 #0055fa 40 45 0 0 #998cff 100 0 67 47 #00872d 0 100 80 27 #ba0025 100 0 0 22 #00c7c7 52 0 19 0 #7affcf 88 0 57 36 #14a346 11 0 66 2 #defa55 0 66 88 0 #ff571f 0 100 15 30 #b30098 100 0 45 32 #00ad5f 82 0 28 52 #167a58 64 100 12 0 #5c00e0 0 38 2 5 #f296ed 100 96 0 8 #0009eb 0 37 71 0 #ffa14a 95 9 0 83 #02272b 0 69 34 5 #f24ba0 0 94 100 0 #ff0f00 33 4 0 72 #304547 0 5 11 23 #c4bbaf 80 0 60 67 #115422 0 4 12 17 #d4cbba 43 0 100 56 #407000 5 100 0 40 #910099 88 100 85 10 #1c0022 20 0 20 65 #475947 0 0 10 30 #b3b3a1 0 35 69 0 #ffa64f 0 58 28 25 #bf508a 0 33 67 0 #ffab54 100 0 54 20 #00cc5e 10 50 100 35 #955300 0 80 15 20 #cc29ad 0 40 30 16 #d68196 52 100 0 26 #5b00bd 6 0 9 18 #c5d1be 60 0 55 0 #66ff73 89 100 0 0 #1c00ff 80 75 100 20 #293300 20 0 85 0 #ccff26 0 23 36 0 #ffc4a3 0 28 100 30 #b38100 76 78 0 47 #201e87 7 0 8 7 #ddedda 100 68 0 12 #0048e0 95 0 47 0 #0dff87 62 0 21 31 #43b08b 31 0 20 0 #b0ffcc 100 45 0 18 #0073d1 0 56 100 64 #5c2800 11 0 5 3 #dcf7eb 12 0 79 6 #d3f032 0 34 0 0 #ffa8ff 26 10 0 0 #bde6ff 3 0 31 75 #3e402c 91 100 0 49 #0c0082 0 36 76 9 #e89538 0 100 30 61 #630046 0 8 73 0 #ffeb45 50 26 0 0 #80bdff 0 76 60 0 #ff3d66 3 0 0 32 #a8adad 0 69 100 4 #f54c00 10 0 33 0 #e6ffab 40 8 0 41 #5a8a96 0 95 100 0 #ff0d00 57 0 100 0 #6eff00 2 0 12 11 #dee3c8 0 90 100 51 #7d0c00 6 10 7 0 #f0e6ed 54 56 0 0 #7570ff 35 9 0 0 #a6e8ff 0 100 38 3 #f70099 100 46 0 70 #00294d 0 16 8 0 #ffd6eb 13 0 72 0 #deff47 58 17 0 46 #3a728a 15 0 0 9 #c5e8e8 72 100 77 46 #270020 10 57 0 0 #e66eff 28 0 30 51 #5a7d57 70 0 38 8 #46eb91 0 1 92 11 #e3e112 9 0 43 38 #909e5a 100 57 0 38 #00449e 0 62 100 32 #ad4200 0 28 54 0 #ffb875 0 100 4 41 #960090 0 93 100 60 #660700 65 64 0 30 #3e40b3 0 95 100 29 #b50900 0 76 38 0 #ff3d9e 0 59 100 18 #d15600 0 44 100 7 #ed8500 0 16 9 0 #ffd6e8 0 62 51 48 #853241 10 0 100 11 #cce300 0 78 33 0 #ff38ab 69 100 0 2 #4d00fa 11 100 0 43 #810091 82 100 0 12 #2800e0 0 19 41 0 #ffcf96 0 0 29 0 #ffffb5 0 45 40 0 #ff8c99 72 100 35 5 #44009d 0 84 9 0 #ff29e8 70 100 50 20 #3d0066 67 0 12 2 #52fadc 24 0 16 0 #c2ffd6 43 95 0 0 #910dff 100 67 0 23 #0041c4 27 100 0 2 #b600fa 0 60 100 44 #8f3900 23 0 100 17 #a3d400 0 30 0 5 #f2aaf2 0 29 72 0 #ffb547
|
Blue
|
The French medieval term 'jongleur' refers to the trade of?
|
2016 Kitchen Trends - New Kitchen Appliances
1 Of 7
Clip-On Color
Cristel's new stackable cookware line, Mutine, has detachable handles in nine colors that will free up space under the counter — and coordinate with dishware or towels.
$50 for a set of three handles, metrokitchen.com
metrokitchen.com
2 Of 7
All-Purpose Bakeware
Freezer-, fridge-, oven-, microwave-, and dishwasher-safe — yes, it does exist! Creo's new Smartglass combines tempered glass (sturdy) with a ceramic exterior (pretty) in a range of nostalgic colors. Choose from nesting bowls, baking dishes, or pie and loaf pans.
$70 for a set of four, bedbathandbeyond.com
bedbathandbeyond.com
3 Of 7
Simplicity Is the New Luxury
Appliances can be state-of-the-art without completely overwhelming your space. In this updated kitchen, a dreamy lineup of built-in Bosch Benchmark® appliances makes the busy heart of this home both hardworking and good-looking.
4 Of 7
Design Your Own Tiles
Imagine creating a custom backsplash in under 60 seconds. With Fireclay Tile's online Color-It! tool, select a pattern and palette from more than 100 options and watch as your digital tile fills with vibrant color. Once you order, your design will be delivered within six weeks.
1. Diamond Lattice in Huckleberry and White Wash.
2. & 4. Summit Sakura in Huckleberry, Indigo, Lapis, and White Wash.
3. Cypress Sakura in Indigo and Lemon Cream.
From $35 per 8" sq. tile, fireclaytile.com.
fireclaytile.com
5 Of 7
The Last Juicer Standing
If you've been waiting to jump headfirst into the juicing craze, here's your reason. The Vita Juicer touts the features of both a "slow" juicer (the one that's good for leafy greens) and a "fast" juicer (the one that macerates whole fruit in seconds). Plus, the other benefits — a spout that locks in an upright position to eliminate drips, a quiet motor, and dishwasher-safe parts. Now you have no excuse not to raid the farmers' market. These are available in seven colors.
6 Of 7
Transformative Taps
Hiding below these unassuming spouts are innovative systems that will transform plain water into sparkling water, or even into a perfectly brewed café au lait. We'll drink to that!
1. Twist the left handle from regular tap to chilled and filtered, or to lightly or fully sparkling. Grohe Blue Chilled and Sparkling, $4,299, grohe.com/us. Eau Minerale Glass in Amber, $13, canvashomestore.com.
2. Set a timer or simply use the app to order a latte or espresso from bed. TopBrewer, from $7,000, topbrewerusa.com. Ancona 3-oz. cup and saucer by Ted Baker London, $25 for a set of 2, portmeirion.com.
grohe.com/us, canvashomestore.com | brewerusa.com, portmeirion.com
7 Of 7
Golden Accents
Rose gold, brass, and copper finishes are officially here on gadgets, hardware, and appliances. Warm finishes bring a homey luxury and pair well with many cabinet colors.
1. With the benefits of stainless steel, copper, and an aluminum core, this line cooks as good as it looks. Lagostina's Martellata Hammered Copper Collection, $600 for a 10-piece set, bedbathandbeyond.com.
2. For backsplashes and cabinet doors, Wilsonart's Decorative Metals are as versatile as laminate but with the luster and durability of metal. $46 per sq. ft., wilsonart.com.
3. This classic gets a modern makeover. Brew Stovetop Coffee Maker in Copper, $175, tomdixon.net.
4. Trimmed in rose gold stainless steel with hidden liner storage inside. Rectangular Step Can, $80, simplehuman.com.
bedbathandbeyond.com | wilsonart.com | tomdixon.com | simplehuman.com
|
i don't know
|
A loggia is a room or gallery characterized by the absence of?
|
Buildings - 5 | Britannica.com
Buildings
This general category includes a selection of more specific topics.
Displaying 301 - 400 of 534 results
lantern of the dead small stone structure with windows in the upper part, in which lamps were placed to mark the position of a cemetery at night. Their use, which seems limited to western and central France, is probably owing to a traditional survival of primitive Celtic...
Latrobe, Benjamin British-born architect and civil engineer who established architecture as a profession in the United States. Latrobe was the most original proponent of the Greek Revival style in American building. Latrobe attended the Moravian college at Niesky, Saxony,...
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas French architect who developed an eclectic and visionary architecture linked with nascent pre-Revolutionary social ideals. Ledoux studied under J.-F. Blondel and L.-F. Trouard. His imaginative woodwork at a café brought him to the notice of society,...
LEED standards a certification program devised in 1994 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC; founded 1993) to encourage sustainable practices design and development by means of tools and criteria for performance measurement. It is “a voluntary, consensus-based,...
Legorreta, Ricardo Mexican architect who combined elements of Western modernism with traditional pre-Columbian design (thick masonry walls) and contemporary Latin components in more than 100 buildings that were known for their vibrant colours and geometric shapes. After...
Lescaze, William Swiss-born American architect best known for conceiving, in conjunction with George Howe, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, or PSFS (1931–32), which effectively introduced the International style of architecture into the United States....
life-safety system Any interior building element designed to protect and evacuate the building population in emergencies, including fires and earthquakes, and less critical events, such as power failures. Fire-detection systems include electronic heat and smoke detectors...
lift-slab construction Technique whereby concrete floor slabs are poured on the ground, one on top of the other, and then lifted into place on top of columns by hydraulic jacks. Used for very tall multistory buildings, this method offers substantial savings in formwork.
light-frame construction System of construction using many small and closely spaced members that can be assembled by nailing. It is the standard for U.S. suburban housing. The balloon-frame house with wood cladding, invented in Chicago in the 1840s, aided the rapid settlement...
lighting use of an artificial source of light for illumination. It is a key element of architecture and interior design. Residential lighting uses mainly either incandescent lamps or fluorescent lamps and often depends heavily on movable fixtures plugged into...
limes Latin “path” in ancient Rome, originally a path that marked the boundary between plots of land. Later it came to refer to roads along which troops advanced into unfriendly territory. The word, therefore, came to mean a Roman military road, fortified...
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts travertine-clad cultural complex on the western side of Manhattan (1962–68), built by a board of architects headed by Wallace K. Harrison. The buildings, situated around a plaza with a fountain, are the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City...
lock mechanical device for securing a door or receptacle so that it cannot be opened except by a key or by a series of manipulations that can be carried out only by a person knowing the secret or code. Early history. The lock originated in the Near East;...
lodge originally an insubstantial house or dwelling, erected as a seasonal habitation or for some temporary occupational purpose, such as woodcutting. In this sense the word is currently used to describe accommodations for sportsmen during hunting season and...
loft in architecture, upper space within a building, or a large undivided space in a building used principally for storage in business or industry. In churches the rood loft is a display gallery above the rood screen, and a choir or organ loft is a gallery...
log cabin small house built of logs notched at the ends and laid one upon another with the spaces filled with plaster, moss, mortar, mud, or dried manure. Log cabins are found especially in wooded areas, where the construction material is easily at hand. In North...
loggia room, hall, gallery, or porch open to the air on one or more sides; it evolved in the Mediterranean region, where an open sitting room with protection from the sun was desirable. Ancient Egyptian houses often had a loggia on their roofs or an interior...
Longhena, Baldassare major Venetian architect of the 17th century. Longhena was a pupil of Vincenzo Scamozzi and completed Scamozzi’s Procuratie Nuove (1584–1640) in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Among his churches are the cathedral at Chioggia (1624–47), Santa Maria degli...
longhouse traditional dwelling of many Northeast Indians of North America. A traditional longhouse was built by using a rectangular frame of saplings, each 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7.5 cm) in diameter. The larger end of each sapling was placed in a posthole in the...
louver arrangement of parallel, horizontal blades, slats, laths, slips of glass, wood, or other material designed to regulate airflow or light penetration. Louvers are often used in windows or doors in order to allow air or light in while keeping sunshine or...
low-income housing housing for individuals or families with low incomes. Although housing has been recognized as a human right under a number of international conventions, access to housing for low-income people is often problematic. Various state, private, and nonprofit-sector...
lunette arching aperture in a wall or concave ceiling. It may be crescent-shaped or semicircular. The word is the French diminutive of lune, “moon.” Lunettes may function as windows, they may form a cove for ornament or statuary, or they may be simply a section...
lych-gate (from Middle English lyche, “body”; yate, “gate”) roofed-in gateway to a churchyard in which a bier might stand while the introductory part of the burial service was read. The most common form of lych-gate was a simple shed composed of a roof with two...
Lysicrates, Monument of only extant example of the ancient Greek architectural structure known as the choragic monument. For architects in the 18th century, the Monument of Lysicrates, located in Athens, was a common inspiration for decorative detail.
Maekawa Kunio Japanese architect noted for his designs of community centres and his work in concrete. After graduation from Tokyo University in 1928, Maekawa studied with the architect Le Corbusier in Paris for two years. Returning to Japan, he tried in such works...
Maillart, Robert Swiss bridge engineer whose radical use of reinforced concrete revolutionized masonry arch bridge design. After studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, where he received a degree in structural engineering in 1894, Maillart worked...
manor house during the European Middle Ages, the dwelling of the lord of the manor or his residential bailiff and administrative centre of the feudal estate. The medieval manor was generally fortified in proportion to the degree of peaceful settlement of the country...
mansard roof type of roof having two slopes on every side, the lower slope being considerably steeper than the upper. In cross section the straight-sided mansard can appear like a gambrel roof, but it differs from the gambrel by displaying the same profile on all...
Mansion House official residence of the lord mayor of the City of London. It stands in the City’s central financial district, across from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. Notable sections of the house include the dining room known as the Egyptian Hall,...
mantel hood or other similar projection, usually ornamented, that surrounds the opening of a fireplace and directs smoke up to the chimney flue. See chimneypiece.
Marina City mid-century modern multibuilding development located at 300–350 North State Street and 315–339 North Dearborn Street along the Chicago River in downtown Chicago. Completed in 1968, it was designed by Bertrand Goldberg as an urban experiment to draw middle-class...
mashriq al-adhkār Arabic “place where the uttering of the name of God arises at dawn” temple or house of worship in the Bahāʾī faith. The mashriq is characterized by a nine-sided construction, in keeping with the Bahāʾī belief in the mystical properties of the number...
mastaba Arabic “bench” rectangular superstructure of ancient Egyptian tombs, built of mud brick or, later, stone, with sloping walls and a flat roof. A deep shaft descended to the underground burial chamber. The term mastaba was first used archaeologically in...
matha in Hinduism, any monastic establishment of world renouncers or sannyasi s. The first matha s were founded by the great teacher Shankara in the 8th century ce. Shankara was said to have established four matha s at strategic points in India as bulwarks...
mausoleum large, sepulchral monument, typically made of stone, that is used to inter and enshrine the remains of a famous or powerful person. The term mausoleum can also denote other types of aboveground structures used for human burials. The word is derived from...
Maybeck, Bernard American architect whose work in California (from 1889) exhibits the versatility attainable within the formal styles of early 20th-century architecture. Educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1880–86), Maybeck worked briefly in New York City and...
McKim, Charles Follen American architect who was of primary importance in the American Neoclassical revival. McKim was educated at Harvard University and at the École des Beaux-Arts (“School of Fine Arts”) in Paris. He was trained as a draftsman by the architect Henry Hobson...
mechanical system Any building service using machines. They include plumbing, elevators, escalators, and heating and air-conditioning systems. The introduction of mechanization in buildings in the early 20th century brought about major adjustments; the new equipment demanded...
megaron in ancient Greece and the Middle East, architectural form consisting of an open porch, a vestibule, and a large hall with a central hearth and a throne. The megaron was found in all Mycenaean palaces and was also built as part of houses. It seemingly...
membrane structure Structure with a thin, flexible surface (membrane) that carries loads primarily through tensile stresses. There are two main types: tent structures and pneumatic structures. The Denver International Airport (1995) features a terminal building roofed...
Mendelsohn, Erich German architect known initially for his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, a notable example of German Expressionism in architecture, and later for his use of modern materials and construction methods to make what he saw as organically unified buildings. While...
Merchandise Mart landmark building in downtown Chicago, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world and the largest wholesale design centre. Encompassing some 4,200,000 square feet (390,000 square metres) of floor space, the Merchandise Mart spans two city blocks...
Michelangelo Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one...
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig German-born American architect whose rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, epitomized the International Style of architecture. Early training and influence Ludwig Mies (he added his mother’s surname, van der Rohe, when he had established...
military bridge temporary bridge that must usually be constructed in haste by military engineers, from available materials, frequently under fire. The earliest types historically were pontoon bridges — i.e., floating bridges that rest on stationary boats. Pontoon bridges...
Millennium Dome massive construction project and tourist attraction in Greenwich, London, England. It was initiated to house an exhibition for the approach of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium ce (the official start of which was January 1, 2001). The central structure...
module in architecture, an arbitrary unit adopted to regulate the dimensions, proportions, or construction of the parts of a building. A number of modules, based on the diameter of a column, were used in determining the proportions of the order in Classical...
monastery local community or residence of a religious order, particularly an order of monks. See abbey; monasticism.
Monticello the home of Thomas Jefferson, located in south-central Virginia, U.S., about 2 miles (3 km) southeast of Charlottesville. Constructed between 1768 and 1809, it is one of the finest examples of the early Classical Revival style in the United States. Monticello...
mortuary temple in ancient Egypt, place of worship of a deceased king and the depository for food and objects offered to the dead monarch. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2575– c. 2130 bce; and 1938– c. 1630 bce) the mortuary temple usually adjoined the pyramid and...
motel originally a hotel designed for persons travelling by automobile, with convenient parking space provided. Motels serve commercial and business travellers and persons attending conventions and meetings as well as vacationers and tourists. The automobile...
moucharaby in Islamic or Islamic-influenced architecture, an oriel, or projecting second-story window of latticework. The moucharaby is a familiar feature of residences in cities of North Africa and the Middle East; in France, where it was introduced from colonial...
Murano Tōgo Japanese architect particularly noted for the construction of large department stores with solid external walls. Murano was trained in traditional Japanese styles, but he was gradually drawn to the European modern style. By the 1930s he was earning a...
narthex long, narrow, enclosed porch, usually colonnaded or arcaded, crossing the entire width of a church at its entrance. The narthex is usually separated from the nave by columns or a pierced wall, and in Byzantine churches the space is divided into two parts;...
national monument in the United States, any of numerous areas reserved by act of Congress or presidential proclamation for the protection of objects or places of historical, prehistoric, or scientific interest. They include natural physical features, remains of Indian...
naumachia Latin, derived from Greek “naval battle” in ancient Rome, a mimic sea battle and the specially constructed basin in which such a battle sometimes took place. These entertainments also took place in flooded amphitheatres. The opposing sides were prisoners...
nave central and principal part of a Christian church, extending from the entrance (the narthex) to the transepts (transverse aisle crossing the nave in front of the sanctuary in a cruciform church) or, in the absence of transepts, to the chancel (area around...
Nervi, Pier Luigi Italian engineer and architect, internationally renowned for his technical ingenuity and dramatic sense of design, especially as applied to large-span structures built of reinforced concrete. His important works include a prefabricated 309-foot-span...
newel upright post rising at the foot of a stairway, at its landings, or at its top. These posts usually serve as anchors for handrails. Often the stringboards, which cover and connect the ends of the steps, are framed into the newels. Made of the same substance...
niche in architecture, decorative recess set into a wall for the purpose of displaying a statue, vase, font, or other object. Niches were used extensively in both interior and exterior walls by the architects of ancient Rome. A fine extant example of such...
North Indian temple architecture style of architecture produced throughout northern India and as far south as Bijapur district in northern Karnataka state, characterized by its distinctive shikhara, a superstructure, tower, or spire above the garbhagriha (“womb-room”), a small sanctuary...
Nouvel, Jean French architect who designed his buildings to “create a visual landscape” that fit their context—sometimes by making them contrast with the surrounding area. For his boldly experimental designs, which defied a general characterization, he was awarded...
obelisk tapered monolithic pillar, originally erected in pairs at the entrances of ancient Egyptian temples. The Egyptian obelisk was carved from a single piece of stone, usually red granite from the quarries at Aswān. It was designed to be wider at its square...
oculus (Latin: “eye”), in architecture, any of several structural elements resembling an eye. A small window that is circular or oval in shape, such as an oeil-de-boeuf window, is an oculus. The round opening at the top of some domes, or cupolas, is also an...
oeil-de-boeuf window in architecture, a small circular or oval window, usually resembling a wheel, with glazing bars (bars framing the panes of glass) as spokes radiating outward from an empty hub, or circular centre. In French, oeil-de-boeuf means “eye of the steer,” and,...
O’Gorman, Juan Mexican architect and muralist, known for his mosaic designs that adorned the facades of buildings. Early in life, O’Gorman was exposed to drawing and composition through his father, Cecil Crawford O’Gorman, a well-known Irish painter who settled in...
oil burner heating device in which fuel oil is mixed with air under controlled conditions. In most burners oil is supplied under pressure to an atomizing nozzle to produce a fine spray, to which air is added by a motor-driven fan. As the cone-shaped spray emerges...
oratory in architecture, a small, private chapel.
order any of several styles of classical or Neoclassical architecture that are defined by the particular type of column and entablature they use as a basic unit. A column consists of a shaft together with its base and its capital. The column supports a section...
oriel in architecture, a bay window in an upper story, supported from below by projecting corbels, or brackets of stone or wood. Usually semi-hexagonal or rectangular in plan, oriels first became prevalent early in the 15th century and were a popular way of...
orientation (from Latin oriens, orientum, “the rising sun”), in architecture, the position of a building in relation to an east-west axis. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as in pre-Columbian Central America, the important features of the buildings, such as entrances...
ornament in architecture, any element added to an otherwise merely structural form, usually for purposes of decoration or embellishment. Three basic and fairly distinct categories of ornament in architecture may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament,...
Otis, Elisha American inventor of the safety elevator. A descendant of a James Otis who immigrated from England to New England in 1631, the young Otis grew up in Vermont and, at age 19, moved to Troy, New York, and later to Brattleboro, Vermont, working at various...
pagoda a towerlike, multistory, solid or hollow structure made of stone, brick, or wood, usually associated with a Buddhist temple complex and therefore usually found in East and Southeast Asia, where Buddhism was long the prevailing religion. The pagoda structure...
palace royal residence, and sometimes a seat of government or religious centre. The word is derived from the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the Roman emperors built their residences. As a building a palace should be differentiated from a castle, which was originally...
Palladian window in architecture, three-part window composed of a large, arched central section flanked by two narrower, shorter sections having square tops. This type of window, popular in 17th- and 18th-century English versions of Italian designs, was inspired by the...
panopticon architectural form for a prison, the drawings for which were published by Jeremy Bentham in 1791. It consisted of a circular, glass-roofed, tanklike structure with cells along the external wall facing toward a central rotunda; guards stationed in the...
Panthéon building in Paris that was begun about 1757 by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève to replace a much older church of that name on the same site. It was secularized during the French Revolution and dedicated to the...
Pantheon building in Rome that was begun in 27 bc by the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, probably as a building of the ordinary Classical temple type—rectangular with a gabled roof supported by a colonnade on all sides. It was completely rebuilt by the emperor...
Parliament, Houses of in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the seat of the bicameral Parliament, including the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It is located on the left bank of the River Thames in the borough of Westminster, London. A royal...
patio in Spanish and Latin American architecture, a courtyard within a building, open to the sky. It is a Spanish development of the Roman atrium and is comparable to the Italian cortile. The patio was a major feature in medieval Spanish architecture. Sevilla...
Paxton, Sir Joseph English landscape gardener and designer of hothouses, who was the architect of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. He was originally a gardener employed by the duke of Devonshire, whose friend, factotum, and adviser he became....
pedestal in Classical architecture, support or base for a column, statue, vase, or obelisk. Such a pedestal may be square, octagonal, or circular. The name is also given to the vertical members that divide the sections of a balustrade. A single pedestal may also...
pediment in architecture, triangular gable forming the end of the roof slope over a portico (the area, with a roof supported by columns, leading to the entrance of a building); or a similar form used decoratively over a doorway or window. The pediment was the...
Pei, I. M. Chinese-born American architect noted for his large but elegantly designed urban buildings and complexes. Pei went to the United States in 1935, enrolling initially at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and then transferring to the Massachusetts...
pendentive in architecture, a triangular segment of a spherical surface, filling in the upper corners of a room, in order to form, at the top, a circular support for a dome. The challenge of supporting a dome over an enclosed square or polygonal space assumed growing...
Pentagon large five-sided building in Arlington county, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, including all three military services—Army, Navy, and Air Force. Constructed during 1941–43, the Pentagon...
penthouse enclosed area on top of a building. Such a structure may house the top of an elevator shaft, air-conditioning equipment, or the stairs leading to the roof; it can also provide living or working accommodations. Usually a penthouse is set back from the...
Percier, Charles pair of French architects and interior designers who carried out many building and decorative projects during the reign of Napoleon I and helped create the influential Empire style of interior decoration. Percier and Fontaine became acquainted with each...
Perronet, Jean French civil engineer renowned for his stone arch bridges, especially the Pont de la Concorde, Paris. The son of an army officer, Perronet entered the newly formed Corps des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways Corps) and so distinguished himself...
Petronas Twin Towers pair of skyscraper office buildings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that are among the world’s tallest buildings. The Twin Towers, built to house the headquarters of Petronas, the national petroleum company of Malaysia, were designed by the Argentine-born...
piano nobile (Italian: “noble floor”), in architecture, main floor of a Renaissance building. In the typical palazzo, or palace, erected by an Italian prince of the Renaissance, the main reception rooms were in an upper story, usually the story immediately above...
pier in building construction, vertical loadbearing member such as an intermediate support for adjacent ends of two bridge spans. In foundations for large buildings, piers are usually cylindrical concrete shafts, cast in prepared holes, while in bridges they...
pilaster in Greco-Roman Classical architecture, shallow rectangular column that projects slightly beyond the wall into which it is built and conforms precisely to the order or style of the adjacent columns. The anta of ancient Greece was the direct ancestor of...
pile in building construction, a postlike foundation member used from prehistoric times. In modern civil engineering, piles of timber, steel, or concrete are driven into the ground to support a structure; bridge piers may be supported on groups of large-diameter...
pillar in architecture and building construction, any isolated, vertical structural member such as a pier, column, or post. It may be constructed of a single piece of stone or wood or built up of units, such as bricks. It may be any shape in cross section....
piscina in Roman times, an artificial reservoir used for swimming or as a fish pond. During the Middle Ages a piscina was a pool or tank in which fish were stored by monastic communities, for whose members fish was a staple item of diet. Although never a calculated...
pīṭhā Sanskrit “seats,” or “benches,” of the Goddess, usually numbered at 108 and associated with the parts of the deity’s body and with the various aspects of her divine female power, or śakti. Many of the 108 pīṭhā s have become important pilgrimage sites...
playground controlled setting for children’s play. This institutionalized environment consists of a planned, enclosed space with play equipment that encourages children’s motor development. For most of history children merely shared public spaces such as marketplaces...
plinth Lowest part, or foot, of a pedestal, podium, or architrave (molding around a door). It can also refer to the bottom support of a piece of furniture or the usually projecting stone coursing that forms a platform for a building. Tall stone plinths are...
|
external wall
|
What is the main organic ingredient of Grappa, the strong Italian alcholic drink?
|
Buildings - 5 | Britannica.com
Buildings
This general category includes a selection of more specific topics.
Displaying 301 - 400 of 534 results
lantern of the dead small stone structure with windows in the upper part, in which lamps were placed to mark the position of a cemetery at night. Their use, which seems limited to western and central France, is probably owing to a traditional survival of primitive Celtic...
Latrobe, Benjamin British-born architect and civil engineer who established architecture as a profession in the United States. Latrobe was the most original proponent of the Greek Revival style in American building. Latrobe attended the Moravian college at Niesky, Saxony,...
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas French architect who developed an eclectic and visionary architecture linked with nascent pre-Revolutionary social ideals. Ledoux studied under J.-F. Blondel and L.-F. Trouard. His imaginative woodwork at a café brought him to the notice of society,...
LEED standards a certification program devised in 1994 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC; founded 1993) to encourage sustainable practices design and development by means of tools and criteria for performance measurement. It is “a voluntary, consensus-based,...
Legorreta, Ricardo Mexican architect who combined elements of Western modernism with traditional pre-Columbian design (thick masonry walls) and contemporary Latin components in more than 100 buildings that were known for their vibrant colours and geometric shapes. After...
Lescaze, William Swiss-born American architect best known for conceiving, in conjunction with George Howe, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, or PSFS (1931–32), which effectively introduced the International style of architecture into the United States....
life-safety system Any interior building element designed to protect and evacuate the building population in emergencies, including fires and earthquakes, and less critical events, such as power failures. Fire-detection systems include electronic heat and smoke detectors...
lift-slab construction Technique whereby concrete floor slabs are poured on the ground, one on top of the other, and then lifted into place on top of columns by hydraulic jacks. Used for very tall multistory buildings, this method offers substantial savings in formwork.
light-frame construction System of construction using many small and closely spaced members that can be assembled by nailing. It is the standard for U.S. suburban housing. The balloon-frame house with wood cladding, invented in Chicago in the 1840s, aided the rapid settlement...
lighting use of an artificial source of light for illumination. It is a key element of architecture and interior design. Residential lighting uses mainly either incandescent lamps or fluorescent lamps and often depends heavily on movable fixtures plugged into...
limes Latin “path” in ancient Rome, originally a path that marked the boundary between plots of land. Later it came to refer to roads along which troops advanced into unfriendly territory. The word, therefore, came to mean a Roman military road, fortified...
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts travertine-clad cultural complex on the western side of Manhattan (1962–68), built by a board of architects headed by Wallace K. Harrison. The buildings, situated around a plaza with a fountain, are the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City...
lock mechanical device for securing a door or receptacle so that it cannot be opened except by a key or by a series of manipulations that can be carried out only by a person knowing the secret or code. Early history. The lock originated in the Near East;...
lodge originally an insubstantial house or dwelling, erected as a seasonal habitation or for some temporary occupational purpose, such as woodcutting. In this sense the word is currently used to describe accommodations for sportsmen during hunting season and...
loft in architecture, upper space within a building, or a large undivided space in a building used principally for storage in business or industry. In churches the rood loft is a display gallery above the rood screen, and a choir or organ loft is a gallery...
log cabin small house built of logs notched at the ends and laid one upon another with the spaces filled with plaster, moss, mortar, mud, or dried manure. Log cabins are found especially in wooded areas, where the construction material is easily at hand. In North...
loggia room, hall, gallery, or porch open to the air on one or more sides; it evolved in the Mediterranean region, where an open sitting room with protection from the sun was desirable. Ancient Egyptian houses often had a loggia on their roofs or an interior...
Longhena, Baldassare major Venetian architect of the 17th century. Longhena was a pupil of Vincenzo Scamozzi and completed Scamozzi’s Procuratie Nuove (1584–1640) in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Among his churches are the cathedral at Chioggia (1624–47), Santa Maria degli...
longhouse traditional dwelling of many Northeast Indians of North America. A traditional longhouse was built by using a rectangular frame of saplings, each 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7.5 cm) in diameter. The larger end of each sapling was placed in a posthole in the...
louver arrangement of parallel, horizontal blades, slats, laths, slips of glass, wood, or other material designed to regulate airflow or light penetration. Louvers are often used in windows or doors in order to allow air or light in while keeping sunshine or...
low-income housing housing for individuals or families with low incomes. Although housing has been recognized as a human right under a number of international conventions, access to housing for low-income people is often problematic. Various state, private, and nonprofit-sector...
lunette arching aperture in a wall or concave ceiling. It may be crescent-shaped or semicircular. The word is the French diminutive of lune, “moon.” Lunettes may function as windows, they may form a cove for ornament or statuary, or they may be simply a section...
lych-gate (from Middle English lyche, “body”; yate, “gate”) roofed-in gateway to a churchyard in which a bier might stand while the introductory part of the burial service was read. The most common form of lych-gate was a simple shed composed of a roof with two...
Lysicrates, Monument of only extant example of the ancient Greek architectural structure known as the choragic monument. For architects in the 18th century, the Monument of Lysicrates, located in Athens, was a common inspiration for decorative detail.
Maekawa Kunio Japanese architect noted for his designs of community centres and his work in concrete. After graduation from Tokyo University in 1928, Maekawa studied with the architect Le Corbusier in Paris for two years. Returning to Japan, he tried in such works...
Maillart, Robert Swiss bridge engineer whose radical use of reinforced concrete revolutionized masonry arch bridge design. After studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, where he received a degree in structural engineering in 1894, Maillart worked...
manor house during the European Middle Ages, the dwelling of the lord of the manor or his residential bailiff and administrative centre of the feudal estate. The medieval manor was generally fortified in proportion to the degree of peaceful settlement of the country...
mansard roof type of roof having two slopes on every side, the lower slope being considerably steeper than the upper. In cross section the straight-sided mansard can appear like a gambrel roof, but it differs from the gambrel by displaying the same profile on all...
Mansion House official residence of the lord mayor of the City of London. It stands in the City’s central financial district, across from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. Notable sections of the house include the dining room known as the Egyptian Hall,...
mantel hood or other similar projection, usually ornamented, that surrounds the opening of a fireplace and directs smoke up to the chimney flue. See chimneypiece.
Marina City mid-century modern multibuilding development located at 300–350 North State Street and 315–339 North Dearborn Street along the Chicago River in downtown Chicago. Completed in 1968, it was designed by Bertrand Goldberg as an urban experiment to draw middle-class...
mashriq al-adhkār Arabic “place where the uttering of the name of God arises at dawn” temple or house of worship in the Bahāʾī faith. The mashriq is characterized by a nine-sided construction, in keeping with the Bahāʾī belief in the mystical properties of the number...
mastaba Arabic “bench” rectangular superstructure of ancient Egyptian tombs, built of mud brick or, later, stone, with sloping walls and a flat roof. A deep shaft descended to the underground burial chamber. The term mastaba was first used archaeologically in...
matha in Hinduism, any monastic establishment of world renouncers or sannyasi s. The first matha s were founded by the great teacher Shankara in the 8th century ce. Shankara was said to have established four matha s at strategic points in India as bulwarks...
mausoleum large, sepulchral monument, typically made of stone, that is used to inter and enshrine the remains of a famous or powerful person. The term mausoleum can also denote other types of aboveground structures used for human burials. The word is derived from...
Maybeck, Bernard American architect whose work in California (from 1889) exhibits the versatility attainable within the formal styles of early 20th-century architecture. Educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1880–86), Maybeck worked briefly in New York City and...
McKim, Charles Follen American architect who was of primary importance in the American Neoclassical revival. McKim was educated at Harvard University and at the École des Beaux-Arts (“School of Fine Arts”) in Paris. He was trained as a draftsman by the architect Henry Hobson...
mechanical system Any building service using machines. They include plumbing, elevators, escalators, and heating and air-conditioning systems. The introduction of mechanization in buildings in the early 20th century brought about major adjustments; the new equipment demanded...
megaron in ancient Greece and the Middle East, architectural form consisting of an open porch, a vestibule, and a large hall with a central hearth and a throne. The megaron was found in all Mycenaean palaces and was also built as part of houses. It seemingly...
membrane structure Structure with a thin, flexible surface (membrane) that carries loads primarily through tensile stresses. There are two main types: tent structures and pneumatic structures. The Denver International Airport (1995) features a terminal building roofed...
Mendelsohn, Erich German architect known initially for his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, a notable example of German Expressionism in architecture, and later for his use of modern materials and construction methods to make what he saw as organically unified buildings. While...
Merchandise Mart landmark building in downtown Chicago, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world and the largest wholesale design centre. Encompassing some 4,200,000 square feet (390,000 square metres) of floor space, the Merchandise Mart spans two city blocks...
Michelangelo Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one...
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig German-born American architect whose rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, epitomized the International Style of architecture. Early training and influence Ludwig Mies (he added his mother’s surname, van der Rohe, when he had established...
military bridge temporary bridge that must usually be constructed in haste by military engineers, from available materials, frequently under fire. The earliest types historically were pontoon bridges — i.e., floating bridges that rest on stationary boats. Pontoon bridges...
Millennium Dome massive construction project and tourist attraction in Greenwich, London, England. It was initiated to house an exhibition for the approach of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium ce (the official start of which was January 1, 2001). The central structure...
module in architecture, an arbitrary unit adopted to regulate the dimensions, proportions, or construction of the parts of a building. A number of modules, based on the diameter of a column, were used in determining the proportions of the order in Classical...
monastery local community or residence of a religious order, particularly an order of monks. See abbey; monasticism.
Monticello the home of Thomas Jefferson, located in south-central Virginia, U.S., about 2 miles (3 km) southeast of Charlottesville. Constructed between 1768 and 1809, it is one of the finest examples of the early Classical Revival style in the United States. Monticello...
mortuary temple in ancient Egypt, place of worship of a deceased king and the depository for food and objects offered to the dead monarch. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2575– c. 2130 bce; and 1938– c. 1630 bce) the mortuary temple usually adjoined the pyramid and...
motel originally a hotel designed for persons travelling by automobile, with convenient parking space provided. Motels serve commercial and business travellers and persons attending conventions and meetings as well as vacationers and tourists. The automobile...
moucharaby in Islamic or Islamic-influenced architecture, an oriel, or projecting second-story window of latticework. The moucharaby is a familiar feature of residences in cities of North Africa and the Middle East; in France, where it was introduced from colonial...
Murano Tōgo Japanese architect particularly noted for the construction of large department stores with solid external walls. Murano was trained in traditional Japanese styles, but he was gradually drawn to the European modern style. By the 1930s he was earning a...
narthex long, narrow, enclosed porch, usually colonnaded or arcaded, crossing the entire width of a church at its entrance. The narthex is usually separated from the nave by columns or a pierced wall, and in Byzantine churches the space is divided into two parts;...
national monument in the United States, any of numerous areas reserved by act of Congress or presidential proclamation for the protection of objects or places of historical, prehistoric, or scientific interest. They include natural physical features, remains of Indian...
naumachia Latin, derived from Greek “naval battle” in ancient Rome, a mimic sea battle and the specially constructed basin in which such a battle sometimes took place. These entertainments also took place in flooded amphitheatres. The opposing sides were prisoners...
nave central and principal part of a Christian church, extending from the entrance (the narthex) to the transepts (transverse aisle crossing the nave in front of the sanctuary in a cruciform church) or, in the absence of transepts, to the chancel (area around...
Nervi, Pier Luigi Italian engineer and architect, internationally renowned for his technical ingenuity and dramatic sense of design, especially as applied to large-span structures built of reinforced concrete. His important works include a prefabricated 309-foot-span...
newel upright post rising at the foot of a stairway, at its landings, or at its top. These posts usually serve as anchors for handrails. Often the stringboards, which cover and connect the ends of the steps, are framed into the newels. Made of the same substance...
niche in architecture, decorative recess set into a wall for the purpose of displaying a statue, vase, font, or other object. Niches were used extensively in both interior and exterior walls by the architects of ancient Rome. A fine extant example of such...
North Indian temple architecture style of architecture produced throughout northern India and as far south as Bijapur district in northern Karnataka state, characterized by its distinctive shikhara, a superstructure, tower, or spire above the garbhagriha (“womb-room”), a small sanctuary...
Nouvel, Jean French architect who designed his buildings to “create a visual landscape” that fit their context—sometimes by making them contrast with the surrounding area. For his boldly experimental designs, which defied a general characterization, he was awarded...
obelisk tapered monolithic pillar, originally erected in pairs at the entrances of ancient Egyptian temples. The Egyptian obelisk was carved from a single piece of stone, usually red granite from the quarries at Aswān. It was designed to be wider at its square...
oculus (Latin: “eye”), in architecture, any of several structural elements resembling an eye. A small window that is circular or oval in shape, such as an oeil-de-boeuf window, is an oculus. The round opening at the top of some domes, or cupolas, is also an...
oeil-de-boeuf window in architecture, a small circular or oval window, usually resembling a wheel, with glazing bars (bars framing the panes of glass) as spokes radiating outward from an empty hub, or circular centre. In French, oeil-de-boeuf means “eye of the steer,” and,...
O’Gorman, Juan Mexican architect and muralist, known for his mosaic designs that adorned the facades of buildings. Early in life, O’Gorman was exposed to drawing and composition through his father, Cecil Crawford O’Gorman, a well-known Irish painter who settled in...
oil burner heating device in which fuel oil is mixed with air under controlled conditions. In most burners oil is supplied under pressure to an atomizing nozzle to produce a fine spray, to which air is added by a motor-driven fan. As the cone-shaped spray emerges...
oratory in architecture, a small, private chapel.
order any of several styles of classical or Neoclassical architecture that are defined by the particular type of column and entablature they use as a basic unit. A column consists of a shaft together with its base and its capital. The column supports a section...
oriel in architecture, a bay window in an upper story, supported from below by projecting corbels, or brackets of stone or wood. Usually semi-hexagonal or rectangular in plan, oriels first became prevalent early in the 15th century and were a popular way of...
orientation (from Latin oriens, orientum, “the rising sun”), in architecture, the position of a building in relation to an east-west axis. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as in pre-Columbian Central America, the important features of the buildings, such as entrances...
ornament in architecture, any element added to an otherwise merely structural form, usually for purposes of decoration or embellishment. Three basic and fairly distinct categories of ornament in architecture may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament,...
Otis, Elisha American inventor of the safety elevator. A descendant of a James Otis who immigrated from England to New England in 1631, the young Otis grew up in Vermont and, at age 19, moved to Troy, New York, and later to Brattleboro, Vermont, working at various...
pagoda a towerlike, multistory, solid or hollow structure made of stone, brick, or wood, usually associated with a Buddhist temple complex and therefore usually found in East and Southeast Asia, where Buddhism was long the prevailing religion. The pagoda structure...
palace royal residence, and sometimes a seat of government or religious centre. The word is derived from the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the Roman emperors built their residences. As a building a palace should be differentiated from a castle, which was originally...
Palladian window in architecture, three-part window composed of a large, arched central section flanked by two narrower, shorter sections having square tops. This type of window, popular in 17th- and 18th-century English versions of Italian designs, was inspired by the...
panopticon architectural form for a prison, the drawings for which were published by Jeremy Bentham in 1791. It consisted of a circular, glass-roofed, tanklike structure with cells along the external wall facing toward a central rotunda; guards stationed in the...
Panthéon building in Paris that was begun about 1757 by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève to replace a much older church of that name on the same site. It was secularized during the French Revolution and dedicated to the...
Pantheon building in Rome that was begun in 27 bc by the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, probably as a building of the ordinary Classical temple type—rectangular with a gabled roof supported by a colonnade on all sides. It was completely rebuilt by the emperor...
Parliament, Houses of in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the seat of the bicameral Parliament, including the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It is located on the left bank of the River Thames in the borough of Westminster, London. A royal...
patio in Spanish and Latin American architecture, a courtyard within a building, open to the sky. It is a Spanish development of the Roman atrium and is comparable to the Italian cortile. The patio was a major feature in medieval Spanish architecture. Sevilla...
Paxton, Sir Joseph English landscape gardener and designer of hothouses, who was the architect of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. He was originally a gardener employed by the duke of Devonshire, whose friend, factotum, and adviser he became....
pedestal in Classical architecture, support or base for a column, statue, vase, or obelisk. Such a pedestal may be square, octagonal, or circular. The name is also given to the vertical members that divide the sections of a balustrade. A single pedestal may also...
pediment in architecture, triangular gable forming the end of the roof slope over a portico (the area, with a roof supported by columns, leading to the entrance of a building); or a similar form used decoratively over a doorway or window. The pediment was the...
Pei, I. M. Chinese-born American architect noted for his large but elegantly designed urban buildings and complexes. Pei went to the United States in 1935, enrolling initially at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and then transferring to the Massachusetts...
pendentive in architecture, a triangular segment of a spherical surface, filling in the upper corners of a room, in order to form, at the top, a circular support for a dome. The challenge of supporting a dome over an enclosed square or polygonal space assumed growing...
Pentagon large five-sided building in Arlington county, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, including all three military services—Army, Navy, and Air Force. Constructed during 1941–43, the Pentagon...
penthouse enclosed area on top of a building. Such a structure may house the top of an elevator shaft, air-conditioning equipment, or the stairs leading to the roof; it can also provide living or working accommodations. Usually a penthouse is set back from the...
Percier, Charles pair of French architects and interior designers who carried out many building and decorative projects during the reign of Napoleon I and helped create the influential Empire style of interior decoration. Percier and Fontaine became acquainted with each...
Perronet, Jean French civil engineer renowned for his stone arch bridges, especially the Pont de la Concorde, Paris. The son of an army officer, Perronet entered the newly formed Corps des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways Corps) and so distinguished himself...
Petronas Twin Towers pair of skyscraper office buildings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that are among the world’s tallest buildings. The Twin Towers, built to house the headquarters of Petronas, the national petroleum company of Malaysia, were designed by the Argentine-born...
piano nobile (Italian: “noble floor”), in architecture, main floor of a Renaissance building. In the typical palazzo, or palace, erected by an Italian prince of the Renaissance, the main reception rooms were in an upper story, usually the story immediately above...
pier in building construction, vertical loadbearing member such as an intermediate support for adjacent ends of two bridge spans. In foundations for large buildings, piers are usually cylindrical concrete shafts, cast in prepared holes, while in bridges they...
pilaster in Greco-Roman Classical architecture, shallow rectangular column that projects slightly beyond the wall into which it is built and conforms precisely to the order or style of the adjacent columns. The anta of ancient Greece was the direct ancestor of...
pile in building construction, a postlike foundation member used from prehistoric times. In modern civil engineering, piles of timber, steel, or concrete are driven into the ground to support a structure; bridge piers may be supported on groups of large-diameter...
pillar in architecture and building construction, any isolated, vertical structural member such as a pier, column, or post. It may be constructed of a single piece of stone or wood or built up of units, such as bricks. It may be any shape in cross section....
piscina in Roman times, an artificial reservoir used for swimming or as a fish pond. During the Middle Ages a piscina was a pool or tank in which fish were stored by monastic communities, for whose members fish was a staple item of diet. Although never a calculated...
pīṭhā Sanskrit “seats,” or “benches,” of the Goddess, usually numbered at 108 and associated with the parts of the deity’s body and with the various aspects of her divine female power, or śakti. Many of the 108 pīṭhā s have become important pilgrimage sites...
playground controlled setting for children’s play. This institutionalized environment consists of a planned, enclosed space with play equipment that encourages children’s motor development. For most of history children merely shared public spaces such as marketplaces...
plinth Lowest part, or foot, of a pedestal, podium, or architrave (molding around a door). It can also refer to the bottom support of a piece of furniture or the usually projecting stone coursing that forms a platform for a building. Tall stone plinths are...
|
i don't know
|
'Pinyin', the original and common other Chinese/Japanese name for the tile game Mahjong means?
|
Mahjong - The Full Wiki
The Full Wiki
Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles .
Related top topics
Mahjong tiles
Did you know ...
Yuki Kataoka , a character from the Japanese manga Saki , seems to play better at mahjong if she eats tacos ?
For other uses, see Mahjong (disambiguation) .
Mahjong
A game of mahjong being played in Hangzhou, China
Chinese name
alternative Chinese name Traditional Chinese 麻雀 Simplified Chinese 麻雀
Transliterations
Japanese name Kanji 麻雀 Kana マージャン
Transliterations
Korean name Hangul 마작 Hanja 麻雀
Transliterations
Vietnamese name Vietnamese mạt chược
Mahjong
Dependent on variation and/or house/tournament rules
Random chance
Skills required
Tactics, observation, memory
This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana .
Mahjong ( Chinese : 麻將; pinyin : má jiàng) is a game for four players that originated in China . Mahjong involves skill, strategy, and calculation, as well as a certain degree of luck (depending on the variation played, luck can be anything from a minor to a dominant factor in winning). In Asia , mahjong is also popularly played as a gambling game. In the game, each player is dealt either thirteen or sixteen tiles in a hand, depending on the variation being played. On their turn, players draw a tile and discard one, with the goal of making four or five melds (also depending on the variation) and one pair, or "head". Winning comes "on the draw" by drawing a new or discarded tile that completes the hand. Thus, a winning hand actually contains fourteen (or seventeen) tiles.
Contents
14 External links
Name
The game was called 麻雀 má què, meaning sparrow in Chinese, which is still the name most commonly used in some southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Min Nan , as well as in Japanese . However, most Mandarin-speaking Chinese now call the game má jiàng (麻將). In Northern Wu Chinese ( Shanghainese and its relatives), it is pronounced as 麻將 [mu tsiaŋ], but in actuality, 麻將 is the diminutive form of 麻雀, written as 麻雀兒 [mu ʦiaʔ ŋ], due to an erhua event. It is through the Wu Chinese pronunciation of 麻雀兒 that the diminutive form of 麻雀 in Northern Wu dialect became known as 麻將 in both Mandarin and Wu.
History
Mahjong in China
One of the myths of the origin of mahjong suggests that Confucius , [1] the great Chinese philosopher, developed the game in about 500 BC. This assertion is likely to be apocryphal. According to this myth, the appearance of the game in the various Chinese states coincided with Confucius' travels at the time he was teaching his new doctrines. The three dragon (cardinal) tiles also agree with the three cardinal virtues bequeathed by Confucius. Hóng Zhōng ( 紅中
, red middle), Fā Cái ( 發財
, prosperity), and Bái Ban ( 白板
, white board) represent benevolence , sincerity , and filial piety , respectively.
The myth also claims that Confucius was fond of birds, which would explain the name "mahjong" (maque 麻雀 = sparrow). However, there is no evidence of mahjong's existence before the Taiping era in the 19th century, which eliminates Confucius as a likely inventor.
Many historians believe it was based on a Chinese card game called Mǎdiào (馬吊) (also known as Ma Tiae, hanging horse; or Yèzí [葉子], leaf) in the early Ming dynasty . [2] This game was played with 40 paper cards similar in appearance to the cards used in the game Ya Pei. These 40 cards are numbered 1 to 9 in four different suits, along with four extra flower cards. This is quite similar to the numbering of mahjong tiles today, although mahjong only has three suits and, in effect, uses four packs of Ya Pei cards.
There is still some debate about who created the game. One theory is that Chinese army officers serving during the Taiping Rebellion created the game to pass the time. Another theory is that a nobleman living in the Shanghai area created the game between 1870 and 1875. Others believe that two brothers from Níngpō created mahjong around 1850, from the earlier game of Mǎdiào.
This game was banned by the government of People's Republic of China when it took power in 1949. [3] The new Communist government forbade any gambling activities, which were regarded as symbols of capitalist corruption. After the Cultural Revolution , the game was revived, without gambling elements (see below), and the prohibition was revoked in 1985. [4] Today, it is a favorite pastime in China and other Chinese-speaking communities.
Mahjong in the Western world
Students in the United States learning how to play mahjong
In 1895, Stewart Culin , an American anthropologist , wrote a paper in which mahjong was mentioned. This is the first known written account of mahjong in any language other than Chinese. By 1910, there were written accounts in many languages, including French and Japanese.
The game was imported to the United States in the 1920s. The first mahjong sets sold in the U.S. were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch starting in 1920. [5] It became a success in New York , and the owner of the company, Ezra Fitch , sent emissaries to Chinese villages to buy every set of mahjong they could find. Abercrombie & Fitch sold a total of 12,000 sets. [5]
Also in 1920, Joseph Park Babcock published his book Rules of Mah-Jongg, also known as the "red book". This was the earliest version of mahjong known in America. Babcock had learned mahjong while living in China. Babcock's rules simplified the game to make it easier for Americans to take up, and his version was common through the mahjong fad of the 1920s. Later, when the 1920s fad died out, many of Babcock's simplifications were abandoned.
The game has taken on a number of trademarked names, such as "Pung Chow" and the "Game of Thousand Intelligences". Mahjong nights in America often involved dressing and decorating rooms in Chinese style. [6] Several hit songs were also recorded during the mahjong fad, most notably "Since Ma is Playing Mah Jong" by Eddie Cantor . [7]
Many variants of mahjong developed during this period. By the 1930s, many revisions of the rules developed that were substantially different from Babcock's classical version (including some that were considered fundamentals in other variants, such as the notion of a standard hand). The most common form, which eventually became "American mahjong", was most popular among Jewish women [8] . Standardization came with the formation of the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL) in 1937, along with the first American mahjong rulebook, Maajh: The American Version of the Ancient Chinese Game.
While mahjong was accepted by U.S. players of all ethnic backgrounds during the Babcock era, many consider the modern American version a remake of a Jewish game, [9] as many American mahjong players are of Jewish descent. The NMJL was founded by Jewish players and is considered a Jewish organization. In addition, players usually use the American game as a family-friendly social activity, not as gambling.
In recent years, a second organization has formed, the American Mah Jongg Association. The AMJA currently hosts tournaments all across North America, with their signature event being at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City , New Jersey .
British author Alan D. Millington revived the Chinese classical game of the 1920s with his book The Complete Book of Mah-jongg (1977). This handbook includes a formal rules set for the game. Many players in Western countries consider Millington's work authoritative.
Mahjong is not the first re-appearance of the Chinese game in the western world. It was also introduced by W. H. Wilkinson, an official of Britain 's Consular Service , in card form under the name of Khanhoo , prior to 1895. This card game does not seem to have made any impression. The later success of mahjong came in part from the elegance of its mechanism as embodied in the domino-like pieces.
Current development
Today, the popularity and the characteristics of players of mahjong vary from country to country. There are also many governing bodies, which often host exhibition games and tournaments. It remains far more popular in Asia than in the West.
Mahjong, as of 2010, is the most popular table game in Japan. [10] In Japan, there is a traditional emphasis on gambling, and the typical player is male. Many devotees there believe the game is losing popularity and have taken efforts to revive it.[citation needed] There are several manga and anime (e.g. Saki and Akagi ) devoted to dramatic and comic situations involving mahjong. [11] In addition, Japanese video arcades have introduced mahjong arcade machines that can be connected to others over the Internet. Additional incentives for video game players in Japan come in the form of beautiful and scantily clad young female opponents (mostly anime, but sometimes videotaped models) playing a form of strip mahjong by removing clothing items when they lose a hand.
Mahjong culture is still deeply ingrained in the Chinese community. Sam Hui wrote Cantopop songs using mahjong as their themes, and Hong Kong movies have often included scenes of mahjong games. Many gambling movies have been filmed in Hong Kong, and a recent sub-genre is the mahjong movie .
A 2007 study by doctors in Hong Kong concluded that extensive playing of the game can induce epileptic seizures . [12] [13]
Studies by doctors have also shown in Hong Kong that the game is beneficial for individuals suffering from dementia or cognitive memory difficulties, leading to the development of mahjong therapy. [14]
Type of game
Because of the solid form of the tiles, mahjong is sometimes classified as a domino game. However, it is much more similar to Western-style card games such as rummy .
Variants
There are many variations of mahjong. In many places, players often observe one version and are either unaware of other variations or claim that different versions are incorrect. Although many variations today differ only by scoring, there are several main varieties:
Chinese classical mahjong is the oldest variety of mahjong and was the version introduced to America in the 1920s under various names. It has a small, loyal following in the West, although few play it in Asia.
Hong Kong mahjong or Cantonese mahjong is possibly the most common form of mahjong, differing in minor scoring details from the Chinese Classical variety. It does not allow multiple players to win from a single discard.
Korean mahjong is unique in many ways and is an excellent version for beginners and three players. One suit is ommited completely (usually the Bamboo set) as well as the seasons. The scoring is simpler and the play is faster. No melded chows are allowed in and concealed hands are common. Riichi (much like its Japanese cousin) is an integral part of the game as well. Korean Rules
Sichuan mahjong is a growing variety, particularly in southern China, disallowing chi melds, and using only the suited tiles. It can be played very quickly.
Taiwanese mahjong is the variety prevalent in Taiwan and involves hands of 16 tiles (as opposed to the 13-tile hands in other versions), features bonuses for dealers and recurring dealerships, and allows multiple players to win from a single discard.
Japanese mahjong is a standardized form of mahjong in Japan and is also found prevalently in video games. In addition to scoring changes, the rules of rīchi (ready hand) and dora (bonus tiles) are unique highlights of this variant. Besides, there is a variation called sanma (三麻) based on this sort, which is modified for playing by three players, and its main differences from the standard one are that chī (Chow) is disallowed and the simple tiles (numbers two through eight) of one suit (usually characters) are removed.
Western classical mahjong is a descendant of the version of mahjong introduced by Babcock to America in the 1920s. Today, this term largely refers to the "Wright-Patterson" rules, used in the U.S. military, and other similar American-made variants that are closer to the Babcock rules.
American mahjong is a form of mahjong standardized by the National Mah Jongg League [15] and the American Mah-Jongg Association. [16] It uses joker tiles, the Charleston, plus melds of five or more tiles, and eschews the Chow and the notion of a standard hand. Purists claim that this makes American mahjong a separate game. In addition, the NMJL and AMJA variations, which differ by minor scoring differences, are commonly referred to as mahjongg or mah-jongg (with two Gs, often hyphenated).
Three-player (or three-ka) mahjong is a simplified three-person mahjong that involves hands of 13 tiles (with a total of 84 tiles on the table) and uses joker tiles as well. It includes only the stones tiles. It has jackpot or royal flush rules of winning, in which whoever accumulates a point of 10 is considered to hit the jackpot. It needs fewer people to start a game and the turnaround time of a game is short—hence, it is considered a fast game.
Singaporean/Malaysian mahjong is a variant similar to the Cantonese mahjong played in Malaysia. Unique elements of Singaporean/Malaysian mahjong are the four animal tiles (cat, mouse, cockerel, and centipede) as well as certain alternatives in the scoring rules, which allow payouts midway through the game if certain conditions (such as a kang) are met.
Fujian mahjong, with a Dàidì joker 帶弟百搭.
Vietnamese mạt chược, with 16 different kinds of jokers.
Filipino mahjong, with the Window Joker.
Pussers bones is a fast-moving variant developed by sailors in the Royal Australian Navy . It uses a creative alternative vocabulary, such as Eddie, Sammy, Wally, and Normie, instead of East, South, West, and North.
Mahjong competition rules
The top three in the World Mahjong Championship in Tokyo , October 2002. In the middle: world champion Mai Hatsune, from Japan
The first Open European Mahjong Championship, Nijmegen , the Netherlands, June 2005
The winners of the second Open European Mahjong Championship, Copenhagen , Denmark, June 2007. From left: Kohichi Oda (2), Martin Wedel Jacobsen (1), and Benjamin Boas (3)
In 1998, in the interest of dissociating illegal gambling from mahjong, the China State Sports Commission published a new set of rules, now generally referred to as Chinese Official rules or International Tournament rules (see Guobiao Majiang ). The principles of the new, wholesome mahjong are: no gambling, no drinking, and no smoking. In international tournaments, players are often grouped in teams to emphasize that mahjong from now on is considered a sport.
The new rules are highly pattern-based. The rulebook contains 81 combinations, based on patterns and scoring elements popular in both classic and modern regional Chinese variants; some table practices of Japan have also been adopted. Points for flower tiles (each flower is worth one point) may not be added until the player has scored 8 points. The winner of a game receives the score from the player who discards the winning tile, plus 8 basic points from each player; in the case of zimo (self-drawn win), he receives the value of this round plus 8 points from all players.
The new rules were first used in an international tournament in Tokyo , where, in 2002, the first World Championship in Mahjong was organized by the Mahjong Museum, the Japan Mahjong Organizing Committee, and the city council of Ningbo, China. One hundred players participated, mainly from Japan and China, but also from Europe and the United States. Mai Hatsune, from Japan, became the first world champion. The following year saw the first annual China Majiang Championship, held in Hainan; the next two annual tournaments were held in Hong Kong and Beijing. Most players were Chinese, but players from other nations attended as well.
In 2005, the first Open European Mahjong Championship [17] was held in the Netherlands, with 108 players. The competition was won by Masato Chiba from Japan. The second European championship [18] in Copenhagen (2007) was attended by 136 players and won by Danish player Martin Wedel Jacobsen. The first Online European Mahjong Championship was held on the Mahjong Time server in 2007, with 64 players, and the winner was Juliani Leo, from the U.S., and the Best European Player was Gerda van Oorschot, from the Netherlands. The Third Open European Mahjong Championship 2009 [19] at Baden/ Vienna , Austria , was won by Japanese player Koji Idota, while runner-up Bo Lang from Switzerland became European Champion. There were 152 participants.
In 2006, the World Mahjong Organization (WMO) was founded in Beijing , China, with the cooperation of, amongst others, the Japan Mahjong Organizing Committee (JMOC) and the European Mahjong Association (EMA). This organization held its first World Championship in November 2007 in the Chinese town of Chengdu , attended by 144 participants from all over the world. It was won by Li Li, a Chinese student at Tsinghua University . The next World Championship will take place in Utrecht , the Netherlands, in Summer 2010.
Some other parties have also attempted to create international competition rules. The most noticeable one is the Zung Jung (中庸) Mahjong Scoring System, created by Hong Kong mahjong scholar Alan Kwan. Unlike the Chinese Official rules, Zung Jung is designed with simplicity as one of its design goals and aims to be suitable for casual entertainment as well as tournament play. Zung Jung is adopted by the World Series of Mahjong event held annually in Macau. The World Series of Mahjong was last held in September 2008, in which 302 participants took part. The main event had a prize pool of US$1-million, which was won over three days of play by Alex Ho, from Hong Kong. He won US$500K from the prize pool and a mahjong necklace designed by Steela+Steelo. [20]
Equipment
Main article: Mahjong tiles
Basic equipment: chips, tiles, and dice
Mahjong can be played either with a set of mahjong tiles or a set of mahjong playing cards (sometimes spelled "kards" to distinguish them from the list of standard hands used in American mahjong). One brand of mahjong cards calls these Mhing. Playing cards are often used when travelling, as they take up less space and are lighter than their tile counterparts; however, they are usually of a lower quality. In this article, "tile" will be used to denote both playing cards and tiles.
Many mahjong sets will also include a set of chips or bone tiles for scoring, as well as indicators denoting the dealer and the Prevailing Wind of the round. Some sets may also include racks to hold tiles or chips (although in many sets, the tiles are generally sufficiently thick so that they can stand on their own), with one of them being different to denote the dealer's rack.
Computer implementations of mahjong are also available. These allow you to play against computer opponents, or against human opponents on the Internet .
A set of mahjong tiles will usually differ from place to place. It usually has at least 136 tiles (most commonly 144), although sets originating from America or Japan will have more. Mahjong tiles are split into these categories: suits, honor, and flowers.
Suits
The suits of the tiles are money-based. In ancient China, the copper coins had a square hole in the center; people passed a rope through the holes to tie coins into strings. These strings are usually in groups of 100 coins, called diào (弔, or variant 吊), or 1000 coins, called guàn (貫). Mahjong's connection to the ancient Chinese currency system is consistent with its alleged derivation from the game named mǎ diào (馬弔).
In the mahjong suits, the coppers represent the coins, the ropes are actually strings of 100 coins, and the character myriad represents 10,000 coins or 100 strings. When a hand receives the maximum allowed winning of a round, it is called mǎn guàn (滿貫, literally, "full string of coins".)
Stones (alternatively wheels or circles): one through nine (🀙🀚🀛🀜🀝🀞🀟🀠🀡). Named as each tile consists of a number of circles. Each circle is said to represent can (筒, tóng) coins with a square hole in the middle.
Bamboos: one through nine (🀐🀑🀒🀓🀔🀕🀖🀗🀘). Named as each tile consists of a number of bamboo sticks. Each stick is said to represent a string (索, sǔo) that holds a hundred coins. Note that 1 Bamboo is an exception: it has a bird sitting on a bamboo, to prevent alteration.
Characters (alternatively numbers): one through nine (🀇🀈🀉🀊🀋🀌🀍🀎🀏). Named as each tile represents ten thousand (萬, wàn) coins, or one hundred strings of one hundred coins.
Honors
Wind tiles: 🀀 East Wind (東, dōng east), 🀁 South Wind (南, nán south), 🀂 West Wind (西, xī west), and 🀃 North Wind (北, běi north).
Dragon tiles: 🀄 Red Dragon, 🀅 Green Dragon, and 🀆 White Dragon. The term dragon tile is a Western convention introduced by Joseph Park Babcock in his 1920 book introducing mahjong to America. Originally, these tiles are said to have something to do with the Chinese Imperial Examination . The red tile ("中"榜, zhōngbǎng) means passing the examination to clear the way to officialdom. The green tile ("發"財, fācái, literally "get rich") means wealth. The white tile (白板, báibǎn, literally "clean slate") means freedom from corruption. It usually has a blue border to distinguish from replacement tiles and prevent alterations. In the original Chinese mahjong, these pieces are called jiàn (箭), which represents archery, and the red "中" represents a hit on the target. In ancient Chinese archery, one would put a red "中" to signify that the target was hit. White "白" represents failure, and green "發" means that one will release the draw.[citation needed]
Flowers
The last category, and typically optional components to a set of mahjong tiles, these tiles often contain artwork. Many people prefer not to use these tiles, because they make it easier to win and earn bonus points. For example, if you have no flowers in your hand, you get only one bonus point; but if you hold two flower tiles that match your seat/wind direction, you're entitled to two bonus points, since flowers correspond with wind directions. For example, holding a pair of the symbol 3 flower while you are in the West Wind position earns 2 bonus points for that hand, since the 3 flower is associated with the West Wind.
The other four flower tiles represent seasons: 🀦 spring , 🀧 summer , 🀨 autumn , and 🀩 winter .
Setting up the board
The following sequence is for setting up a standard Hong Kong (or Singapore) game. Casual or beginning players may wish to proceed directly to gameplay. Shuffling the tiles is needed before piling up.
Game Wind and Prevailing Wind
To determine the Player Game Wind (門風 or 自風), each player throws three dice (two in some variants) and the player with the highest total is chosen as the dealer or the banker (莊家). The dealer's Wind is East; the player to the right of the dealer has South wind; the next player to the right has West; and the fourth player has North (imagine a reversed map). Game Wind changes after every hand, unless the dealer wins. In some variations, the longer the dealer remains dealer, the higher the value of each hand.
The Prevailing Wind (場風) is always set to East when starting. It changes after the Game Wind has rotated around the board; that is, after each player has lost as the dealer. The dealer is always East. A full game of mahjong lasts until the Prevailing Wind has cycled through all four.
A mahjong set with Winds in play will usually include a separate Prevailing Wind marker (typically a die marked with the Wind characters in a holder) and a pointer that can be oriented towards the dealer to show Player Game Wind. In sets with racks, a rack may be marked differently to denote the dealer.
These Winds are also significant, as Winds are often associated with a member of a Flower tile group, typically 1 with East, 2 with South, 3 with West, and 4 with North.
Dealing tiles
All tiles are placed face down and shuffled. Each player then stacks a row of tiles two tiles high in front of him, the length of the row depending on the number of tiles in use:
136 tiles: 17 stacks for each player
Suits of dots, bamboos, and characters + winds + dragons
144 tiles: 18 stacks for each player
148 tiles: 19 stacks for dealer and player opposite, 18 for rest
152 tiles: 19 stacks for each player
The dealer throws three dice and sums up the total. Counting counterclockwise so that the dealer is 1, a player's row is chosen. Starting at the right edge, "sum" tiles are counted and shifted to the right.
The dealer now takes a block of four tiles to the left of the divide.
The player to the dealer's right takes four tiles to the left, and players (counterclockwise) take blocks of four tiles (clockwise) until all players have 12 tiles (for 13-tile variations) and 16 (for 16-tile variations). In 13-tile variations, each player then takes one more tile, to make a 13-tile hand. In practice, in order to speed up the dealing procedure, the dealer often takes one extra tile during the dealing procedure to start his turn.
The board is now ready, and new tiles will be taken from the wall where the dealing left off, proceeding clockwise. In some special cases discussed later, tiles are taken from the other end of the wall, commonly referred to as the back end of the wall. In some variations, a group of tiles at the back end, known as the dead wall, is reserved for this purpose instead. In such variations, the dead wall may be visually separated from the main wall, but it is not required.
Unless the dealer has already won (see below), the dealer then discards a tile. The dealing process with tiles is ritualized and complex to prevent cheating. Casual players, or players with mahjong playing cards, may wish to simply shuffle well and deal out the tiles with fewer ceremonial procedures.
Charleston
In the American variations, it is required that before each hand begins, a Charleston is enacted. In the first round, three tiles are passed to the player on one's right; in the next round, the tiles are passed to the player opposite, followed by three tiles passed to the left. If all players are in agreement, a second Charleston is performed; however, any player may decide to stop passing after the first Charleston is complete. The Charleston is followed by an optional pass to the player across of one, two, or three tiles. The Charleston, a distinctive feature of American mahjong, may have been borrowed from card games such as Hearts .
Gameplay
Each player is dealt either thirteen tiles (for 13-tile variations) or sixteen tiles (for 16-tile variations). If a player is dealt a hand of tiles that is determined to be a winning hand (known as a "heavenly win", 天胡), he or she may declare victory immediately before the game even begins. However, this scenario of victory occurs very rarely.
A turn involves a player's drawing a tile from the wall (or draw pile) and then placing it in his or her hand; the player then discards a tile onto the table. This signals the end of his or her turn, prompting the player to the right to make his or her move. Some variants encourage each player to loudly announce the name of the tile being discarded as a form of courtesy. Many variations require that discarded tiles be placed in an orderly fashion in front of the player, while some require that they be placed face down.
During gameplay, the number of tiles maintained by each player should always be the same; i.e., thirteen or sixteen. A player must discard a tile after picking up one. Failure to do so rules that player effectively out of winning, since a winning combination could never be built with one extra tile or fewer, but the player is obliged to continue until someone else wins.
A distinctive feature of West tiles: when three players drop the West tile, the fourth player will usually avoid discarding another West in the following turn. This is caused by a superstition that says, when all the players discard a West ("西") together, all players will die ("歸西") or be cursed with bad luck (see tetraphobia ). During the West Prevailing Wind round, players will also avoid throwing in the One Circle during the first move, because One Circle sounds like "together" in Mandarin; thus, "to die all together" ("一同歸西"). In fact, because of this superstition, some variants require players to restart the game when all tiles of one kind of wind are discarded either in the first four turns, or during any four turns during the game.[citation needed]
Melds
When a player discards a tile, any other player may "call" or "bid" for it in order to complete a meld (a certain set of tiles) in his own hand. The disadvantage of doing this is that the player must now expose the completed meld to the other players, giving them an idea of what type of hand he or she is creating. This also creates an element of strategy as, in many variations, discarding a tile that allows another player to win the game requires the discarding player to lose points, or pay the winner more, in a game for money.
Most variants, with the notable exception of American mahjong, allow three types of melds. When a meld is declared through a discard, the player must state the type of meld to be declared and place the meld face up. (As for the Japanese variant, callings to make melds are different from the actual names of the types of melds, favoring the original chinese names over the japanese translation.) The player must then discard a tile, and play continues to the right. Because of this, turns may be skipped in the process.
Pong, or Pung (碰 pinyin pèng, Japanese: 刻子 kōtsu)—A Pong, or Pung, is a set of three identical tiles.
For example:
;
.
In American mahjong, where it is possible to meld Flower tiles, a Pong may also refer to a meld of three of the four Flower tiles in a single group. American mahjong may also have hands requiring a knitted triplet—three tiles of identical rank but of different suits.
Kong (槓/杠 pinyin gàng, Japanese: 槓子 kantsu)—A Kong is a set of four identical tiles.
For example:
;
.
Because all other melds contain three tiles, a Kong must be immediately exposed when explicitly declared. If the fourth tile is formed from a discard, it is said to be an exposed Kong (明槓/明杠, pinyin míng gàng). If all four tiles were formed in the hand, it is said to be a concealed Kong (暗槓/暗杠, pinyin àn gàng). In some forms of play, the outer two tiles of a concealed Kong are flipped to indicate its concealed status. It is also possible to form an exposed Kong if the player has an exposed Pung and draws the fourth tile. In any case, a player must draw an extra tile from the back end of the wall, or from the dead wall, if it exists, and discard as normal. Play then continues to the right. Once a Kong is formed, it cannot be split up, i.e., to use one tile as part of a Chow, and thus, it may be advantageous not to immediately declare a Kong.
Sheung (上, in some versions 吃 chi, Japanese: 順子 shuntsu)—A Sheung is a meld of three suited tiles in sequence.
For example:
;
.
Unlike other melds, an exposed Sheung may only be declared off the discard of the player on the left. The only exception is when the player needs that tile to form a Sheung to win. In this case, a Sheung can be declared at any opponent's turn. American mahjong does not have a formal Sheung (Sheungs cannot be declared), but some hands may require that similar sequences be constructed in the hand. Some American variations may also have the knitted sequence, where the three tiles are of three different suits. Sequences of higher length are usually not permissible, unless it forms more than one meld.
Eye (將 jiàng, in some versions 眼 yǎn, Japanese: 対子 toitsu or 雀頭 jantō; also Pair)—The pair, while not a meld (and thus cannot be declared or formed with a discard, except if completing the pair completes the hand), is the final component to the standard hand. It consists of any two identical tiles.
For example, this hand
uses two
as the eyes.
American mahjongg hands may have tile constructions that are not melds, such as "NEWS" (having one of each Wind). As they are not melds, they cannot be formed off discards, and in some variations, cannot be constructed in part or in whole by Joker tiles. In the Chinese official (and several other) rulesets, there are further hands, such as Seven Pairs or Thirteen Orphans.
When two or more players call for a discarded tile, a player taking the tile to win the hand has precedence over all others, followed by Pong or Kong declarations, and lastly, Chows. In American mahjong, where it may be possible for two players needing the same tile for melds, the meld of a higher number of identical tiles takes precedence. If two or more players call for a meld of the same precedence (or to win), the player closest to the right wins out. In particular, if a call to win overrides a call to form a kong, such a move is called "robbing the Kong", and may give a scoring bonus. The game may be declared an abortive draw if two or more players call a tile for the win though, again depending on the variation.
There is generally an informal convention as to the amount of time allowed to make a call for a discarded tile before the next player takes their turn. In American mahjong, this "window of opportunity" is explicitly stated in the rules; whereas in other variants, it is generally considered that when the next player's turn starts, i.e., the tile leaves the wall, the opportunity has been lost.
Flowers
Flower tiles, when dealt or drawn, must be immediately replaced by a tile from the dead wall (or if no dead wall exists, the back end of the wall). With the exception of American mahjong, they are immediately exposed, placed in view on the table on front of the player's tiles. At the start of each round, where two or more players may have Flower tiles, Flower tiles are replaced starting with the dealer and moving to the right. Flower tiles may or may not have point value; in some variations, possession of all the Flower tiles wins the round regardless of the actual contents of the hand.
In American mahjong, Flower tiles are not instantly exposed and replaced, as they may be melded with other Flower tiles in the same group (in essence, they are treated as if they were another set of honor tiles) or be used as a requirement of a winning hand. Early versions of American mahjong used Flower tiles as Joker tiles.
Jokers
A feature of several variations of mahjong, most notably American variations, is the notion of some number of 🀪 Joker tiles. They may be used as a wild card: a substitute for any tile in a hand, or, in some variations, only tiles in melds. Another variation is that the Joker tile may not be used for melding. Depending on the variation, a player may replace a Joker tile that is part of an exposed meld belonging to any player with the tile it represents.
Rules governing discarding Joker tiles also exist; some variations permit the Joker tile to take on the identity of any tile, and others only permit the Joker tile to take on the identity of the previously discarded tile (or the absence of a tile, if it is the first discard).
Joker tiles may or may not have an impact on scoring, depending on the variation. Some special hands may require the use of Joker tiles (for example, to represent a "fifth tile" of a certain suited or honor tile).
In American mahjong, it is illegal to pass Jokers during the Charleston.
Winning
A player wins the round by creating a standard mahjong hand, which consists of a certain number of melds (namely, four for 13-tile variations and five for 16-tile variations) and a pair. If a player needs only one more tile to complete his winning hand and another player discards the tile he needs, he may claim it immediately, regardless of who discarded it or what part of his hand it completes.
Examples of winning hands (split into melds and pair for clarity):
-
-
-
In Western Classical variants, this is known as creating a mahjong, and the process of winning is called going mahjong.
Variations may have special nonstandard hands that a player can make (in this sense, American mahjong is a variant where only special hands exist).
Some variations may require that winning hands be of some point value. If a player declares victory but is discovered not to be holding a winning hand, he or she suffers a penalty of having to pay all the opposing players (called a jaa woo, or zhà hú [詐胡] in Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively, or literally translated, "fake hand"). In some versions a player needs a very demanding winning hand to win such as 5 fan Hong Kong mahjong.
Winning is called hú (胡) in Chinese, and agari (アガリ) or hōra (和了) in Japanese. If the player wins by drawing a tile from a wall during his turn, a special name is given to this type of win in Chinese and Japanese: zìmō (自摸) in Chinese and tsumo (自摸, ツモ) in Japanese, while when the player wins by taking a tile cast off by another player, in Japanese it is called ron (栄, ロン).
Ready hands
When a hand is one tile short of winning (for example:
, waiting for:
, or
, as
can be eyes), the hand is said to be a ready hand (Traditional Chinese: 聽牌; Simplified Chinese: 听牌; Japanese: tenpai [聴牌]), or more figuratively, "on the pot". The player holding a ready hand is said to be waiting for certain tiles. It is common to be waiting for two or three tiles, and some variations award points for a hand that is waiting for one tile. In 13-tile mahjong, the largest number of tiles for which a player can wait is 13 (the thirteen wonders , or thirteen orphans, a nonstandard special hand). Ready hands must be declared in some variations of mahjong, while other variations prohibit the same.
Some variations of mahjong, most notably Japanese and Korean ones, allow a player to declare rīchi (立直; sometimes known as reach, as it is phonetically similar). A declaration of rīchi is a promise that any tile drawn by the player is immediately discarded unless it constitutes a win. Standard requirements for rīchi are that the hand be closed or have no melds declared (other than a concealed kong) and that players already have points for declaration of rīchi. A player who declares rīchi and wins usually receives a point bonus for their hand directly, and a player who won with rīchi also has the advantage to open the inner dora (ドラ, from "dra"gon) which leads to higher possibilities to match such a card, thus has more chance to grant additional bonus. However, a player who declares rīchi and loses is usually penalized in some fashion. Declaring a nonexistent rīchi is also penalized in some way.
In some variations, a situation in which all four players declare a rīchi is an automatic drawn game, as it reduces the game down to pure luck, i.e., who gets their needed tile first.
Draws
If only the dead wall remains (or if no dead wall exists and the wall is depleted) and no one has won, the round is drawn (流局 liú jú, 黃莊 huáng zhuāng, Japanese ryūkyoku), or " goulashed ". A new round begins, and depending on the variant, the Game Wind may change. For example, in most playing circles in Singapore, if there is at least one Kong when the round is a draw, the following player of the dealer becomes the next dealer; otherwise, the dealer remains dealer.
Japanese mahjong has a special rule called sanchahō (三家和), which is, if three players claim the same discard in order to win, the round is drawn. One reason for this is that there are cases in which bars of 1,000 points for declaring rīchi cannot be divided by three. The rule is treated the same as "abortive draws".
Abortive draws
In Japanese mahjong, rules allow abortive draws to be declared while tiles are still available. They can be declared under the following conditions:
九種么九牌倒牌 (kyūshu yaochūhai tōhai): On a player's first turn when no meld has been declared yet, if a player has nine different terminal or honor tiles, the player may declare the round to be drawn (for example,
, but could also go for the nonstandard thirteen wonders hand as well).
四風子連打 (sūfontsu renda): On the first turn without any meld declarations, if all four players discard the same Wind tile, the round is drawn.
四家立直 (sūcha rīchi): If all four players declare rīchi, the round is drawn.
四槓算了 (sūkan sanra): The round is drawn when the fourth Kong is declared, unless all four Kongs were declared by a single player. Still, the round is drawn when another player declares a fifth Kong.
Turns and rounds
If the dealer wins the game, he will remain the dealer. Otherwise, the player to the right becomes dealer, and that player's Wind becomes the Game Wind, in the sequence East-South-West-North.
After the Wind returns to East (i.e., each player has been the dealer), a round is complete and the Prevailing Wind will change, again in the sequence East-South-West-North. A full game of mahjong ends after when the North Prevailing Wind round is over. It is often regarded as an unlucky act to stop the gameplay at the West round, as the Chinese word for West (西) has a similar sound to the word for death (死).
However, the Japanese variation differs in that the game starts on the East round, where a special table Wind is assigned to all games in that round. The dealer is also always considered East seat, so when the dealership passes to the next player, it reassigns all the seat Winds to the next player, although nobody actually moves around. After every player has been East at least once, the East round is over and the South round begins. Play usually ends after the South round; however, if none of the players has more than a certain amount, usually 30,000, then play will continue to the West, and possibly even to the North round.
The Korean variation is similar to the Japanese one, though east paying double is optional. In some three player versions (three player versions not being frowned upon in Korea) two North tiles are removed, meaning it can only be used as a pair. This leaves three rounds of three games. This is often doubled to last 18 games, which can be played surprisingly fast in a three player game.
Scoring
Main article: Scoring in mahjong
Scoring in mahjong involves points, with a monetary value for points agreed upon by players. Although in many variations scoreless hands are possible, many require that hands be of some point value in order to win the round.
While the basic gameplay is more or less the same throughout mahjong, the greatest divergence between variations lies in the scoring systems. Like the gameplay, there is a generalized system of scoring, based on the method of winning and the winning hand, from which Chinese and Japanese (among notable systems) base their roots. American mahjong generally has greatly divergent scoring rules, as well as greatly divergent gameplay rules.
Because of the large differences between the various systems of scoring (especially for Chinese variants), groups of players will often agree on particular scoring rules before a game. As with gameplay, many attempts have been made to create an international standard of scoring, but most are not widely accepted.
Points (terminology of which differs from variation to variation) are obtained by matching the winning hand and the winning condition with a specific set of criteria, with different criteria scoring different values. Some of these criteria may be subsets of other criteria (for example, having a meld of one Dragon versus having a meld of all of them), and in these cases, only the most general criterion is scored. The points obtained may be translated into scores for each player using some (typically exponential ) functions. When gambling with mahjong, these scores are typically directly translated into sums of money. Some criteria may be also in terms of both points and score.
Mahjong in Unicode
The Unicode range for mahjong is U+1F000 .. U+1F02F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.
Mahjong Tiles
|
Sparrow
|
Technically 'flash point' refers to the triggering of what aspect of a volatile substance?
|
mahjong tiles – Mahjong Treasures
October 30, 2016
Many of you are familiar with the delightful Crisloid set, with its peacock wearing a crown. Just looking at the color of the tiles, and the cheery images can cheer up a dreary day. No wonder this set is a fan favorite.
One of the most talented designers and craftswomen in the Mahjong business today, Dee Gallo of Red Coin , worked with Crisloid to create a new set for them, putting her touches on some of Crisloid's beloved images, and adding new wonderful designs for the Dragon Set, released in 2015. What a great result.
I thought I would show you some of the original tiles, and the ones that Dee tweaked to fit in with her vision for the new set. The plastic used for each kind of set is very different which probably leads to some design choices as well.
The lighter tiles will always be the original Crisloid set. Here are some of the suit tiles. The new One dot has the R representing Red Coin and the C representing Crisloid. The 7 Bam on the new set looks inspired by the designs of the 7 Dots we often see. The One Bam peacock is a bit more detailed, with the coins on his wings really resembling the Red Coin/Crisloid One Dots.
The original Crisloid Flowers look sunny, with what looks like a Swedish design influence in their simplicity and bold colors.There are two groups of Flowers on the new set : actual flowers (the eight ones on the left), and those that can be used in the Singapore Capture style of play (on the right.) The rooster gets the centipede, the rich man the pot of gold, the fisherman the fish, and the cat the rat.
The Crisloid Big Joker has a wonderful bold and simple look to it. The new sets give the buyer a choice of Jokers. This one is the Ma-Ma Hu-Hu, half horse and half Tiger.
I must admit, I never thought I would have Winds as my favorite part of the set, but on this set they are. A Winds hand, seen below, is just beautiful. But when you see how Dee has directed the fans to the four compass directions, you will understand why the tiles are so beautiful.
But what would be a Crisloid set without their darling dragons? See how Dee has finessed them to fit in with the new set.
What wonderful inspirations, and great teamwork!
Given that the holidays are just around the corner.... 🙂
June 12, 2016
NEWS: This is the first real bone and bamboo set ever to be part of a mahjong solitaire game! Redstone Games has introduced this tile set to their other already existing selections. How exciting is this!! The download info is at the end of this post.
I found this set in Salem, New York at McCartee's Barn. I have a habit of walking into stores and opening every box that could possibly hold mahjong tiles; I finally got lucky! The carving and the colors are just divine. The tiles are in fabulous shape too, and look how thick the bone is. This must have been the work of a very skilled carver, because only the best craftsmen were allowed to work on sets with the thickest bone, which sold for a lot of money. This set has Arabic numbers and Western letters, so we know it was made for the export market.
The Crane One Bam is lovely, as are the other round end Bams. The Dots are delightful, certainly starting with that delicate Two Dot with plum blossom center, a theme continued through the 9 Dots. The presence of those little details on each flower petal adds to the charm, as do those orange outlines.
The Craks, Winds and Dragons are what we are used to seeing with these old Bone and Bamboo sets. But, once again, we have stunning and unusual Flowers.
These tiles are a fabulous visual interpretation of the four noble callings that existed in Chinese society for hundreds of years. Each man is caught in a moment of activity, of motion, almost like a snapshot. #1 is the fisherman, lucky with his rather large catch. He's sporting a mustache and goatee, and he's wearing a wrap-around shirt, shorts and some kind of soft shoe, like two of the other men. He's carrying his fishing pole over his shoulder. #2 shows us the wood-gatherer, walking instead of sitting and smoking as we often see him. #3 is the farmer, with his hoe over the shoulder. I love that his face is turned away from us, adding to the idea that the carver has captured a brief moment in time. And #4 is the scholar, wearing a robe, a different type of hat, and what are probably wooden shoes. Amazing, right, how many details can be fit into such tiny surfaces?
There are some familiar images on the tiles. The three men, on tiles 1,3 and 4, are all wearing robes and sporting the mustache and goatee look we saw on the other set; only the boy, on #2 does not. #1 shows us a man holding a ruyi scepter, a talisman which symbolizes power and good fortune. This idea of good fortune ties in with some of the messages of these tiles, as you will see. #2 is Liu Hai and the three legged toad, a story that we often see on mahjong tiles. Normally we see him with a rope with coins, but here he has a flower. From Primal Trek:
Liu Hai was a Minister of State during the 10th century in China. He was also a Taoist practitioner. One version of the story says that he became good friends with a three-legged toad who had the fabulous ability to whisk its owner to any destination.¹ This particular toad had a love not only for water but also for gold. If the toad happened to escape down a well, Liu Hai could make him come out by means of a line baited with gold coins.
The second version of the story is that the toad actually lived in a deep pool and exuded a poisonous vapor which harmed the people. Liu Hai is said to have hooked this ugly and venous creature with gold coins and then destroyed it.
#3 shows the Chinese character (word) we often see: Fa, the Green Dragon on many sets, meaning prosperity. In the photo with all the tiles, at the top, you can see the set's Green Dragon directly above #3. Tile #4 shows a man about to place a piece of coral in a treasure pot. For the Chinese, coral had a special significance: From Primaltrek:
Coral (shanhu 珊瑚) is included as one of the Eight Treasures and symbolizes longevity and official promotion.
As a symbol of longevity, the Chinese have traditionally believed that coral represents an "iron tree" (tieshu 铁树) that grew under the sea and blossomed only once every hundred years.
Red coral is considered particularly auspicious because the Chinese believe the color red signifies good luck, good fortune, and happiness.
Coral resembles deer antlers and deer are symbols of longevity.
Coral is also a symbol of official promotion because a coral button on the hat identified one of the nine grades of government officials.
Once again, thanks to Ray Heaton, we have a translation for these tiles:
The phrase is 四喜發財, and isn't that easy to translate. In pinyin it is Si Xi Fa Cai. Fa Cai is easy enough, "Get Rich" (and it's the Fa character seen frequently, 發, as the Green Dragon), but the first two are more challenging, not helped by how the full phrase is used today. Nowadays it appears that the most common meaning relates to food, used as the name for a dish of four meatballs! If we split the phrase up into two pairs then we find them used in mahjong...Si Xi, is used in Hong Kong Mahjong rules in the scoring hands "Four Small Blessings" and "Four Large Blessings" and of course we have, Fa Cai, in Hong Kong rules this means a meld of three Green Dragons.
Si Xi is also used to describe the folk art model "the four happinesses baby figurine"; also called Si Xi Wa Wa, see here, http://english.visitbeijing.com.cn/culture/n215174241.html . (If you click on that link you will recognize this figure.)
But looking back, using a dictionary that covers historical uses of phrases, we find Si Xi referring to those things that will cause one joy (and so its use in Hong Kong mahjong rules fits well - four blessings). These are explained too in the description of the four happinesses baby; “The four great happy moments in life are to enjoy one’s wedding night, to succeed in an imperial exam, to have a welcome rain after a long drought, and to come across an old friend in a distant land."
I expect the phrase was used as a new year expression, wishing you wealth and happiness throughout the year (pretty much as 恭喜發財 is now, which differs in only its first character..."may you have a happy and prosperous new year", Gong Xi Fa Cai).
It is always so interesting to see how the images do not necessarily correlate with the Characters on the tiles, giving us all a lot to see and think about.
Click below to download the Mahjong solitaire app:
Mahjong Solitaire Redstone (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.redstonegames.redstonemahjong
I just co-wrote a book with Susan West. It's the first book ever to identify vintage mahjong sets and allow the reader to determine the set's relative value: Mahjong is For the Birds. To see more about this, click here
March 27, 2016
I have given around 100 talks about mahjong art in the last year and a half, and I always mention the craftsmen who designed, carved and painted those tiles we all love. The other day I was asked about some of my favorite sets, and my thoughts immediately went to a wonderful one designed by Dee Gallo, a craftswoman! So here is a celebration of Dee and the beautiful sets she has designed. I am lucky enough to own one, featured today, but please visit her website to see some of the others.
Some of you know that when mahjong was ruled illegal in China, during the Cultural Revolution, all mahjong sets were ordered destroyed, as were all company records. Craftsmen were no longer allowed to practice the techniques that had been handed down for generations. Methods of carving, restoring, and painting Mahjong tiles were lost forever. Thank goodness Dee Gallo was determined to figure out how to bring tiles back to life, and I know many of us are indebted to her for her help restoring or replacing our lost tiles. But while learning how to go about restoring old tiles and carving replacement tiles, Dee was able to start thinking about creating new designs for sets. And this is her latest limited edition enrobed (!) set:
Dee Gallo's Limited Edition Money Set. Be sure to note the often unique Bam placement and Bamboo stalk design.
Dee's deep rooted knowledge of Chinese culture and history is evident in every new series she creates. Here you can see The Money Set, released in 2014. This is Dee's 8th set, dedicated to her parents. It pays homage to her grandfather and his two brothers who worked at the Bank of Shanghai. All three were sent to different parts of China to open bank branches, and they met their wives while working for the bank. Eventually they all decided to move to the United States and open their own banking business and fur import business. The banking world in China inspired Dee's latest set. (More about that later.) I know we all could not be more delighted that Dee is free to work on her creative designs on our shores.
I am going to use Dee's own words (in green) to describe what the images represent. But please visit Dee's site to really get to see the beauty of the tiles. My photos were taken with my cell phone, and don't begin to show the wonderful work she has done.
We'll start with the suits.
This is the 22nd set she made in this edition.
Dots:
"Each of the Dots in this set is a coin, with the #1 Dot sporting a signature and an edition number. The Chinese character for Lee, which is my family name, is rotated four times around the square hole, representing the four Cardinal points (E,S,W,N). Inside the square is the number representing its place in the series. Chinese cash is a symbol of prosperity, both as an amulet and an ornament. In 11th Century China, the name "round coin" was applied to copper coins (hence " Red Coin ") (Ed, the name of Dee's business) described as "square within and round without." This represents the internal integrity of the government issuing the coin, and their external attitude of cooperation (no sharp corners to annoy anyone.) I hope to promote these qualities. Because this set celebrates the Chinese cash (coin) I have used copper as a color for the first time on many of the designs. (Ed: my husband Woody, an art director and font aficionado, noted that the typeface that Dee uses is Copper Plate, a lovely tie-in.)
Dee uses banking numbers instead of the normally seen Chinese numbers.
The Wan or Crak Suit
This is a unique suit designed with the special characters (ED: look at the Chinese numbers, very different from what we are used to seeing on our tiles) used in China and Taiwan for writing checks. The usual characters are too easy to alter so these characters were developed to make checks more secure. You can see the "normal" characters hidden in most of these special characters. These unusual characters are perfect for this Money Set, don't you think?
The Bamboo suit
The #1 Bamboo is my Rooster, perched on a pile of copper coins and crowing his joy at a prosperous day beginning. The Rooster has special meaning for me, as my father and sister were born in the Year of the Rooster and my husband's surname, Gallo, means rooster in Italian. So it is in their honor that I drew the Rooster as the #1 Bam, a distinctive tile in all Mah Jong sets. In addition, most of the rural villages in China had living bamboo fences surrounding the compound of houses, and plenty of chickens and roosters...these served as a security and early warning system against pirates and thieves.
(Ed: Be sure to look at the arrangement of the other Bams on this photo: some unique approaches to the designs!)
The Dragons
Coins decorate the Dragon suit as well. The Red (Jung) (Ed: sometimes written Chung) means "center" as in Jung Guo (China: central country). The Green (Fa) is half of the phrase "Fa Tsai," meaning (I hope you) become rich. The Blue character (Bai) means "white" or blank.
Ed: Don't you love the coin in each of the Dragons?
The Winds
Money bags represent the winds, with the neck of the bag facing in the direction of the tile. Each money bag is sitting on a pile of copper coins, representing abundant wealth and prosperity.
Ed: The money bags almost have personalities, don't they? They remind me of the first short made by Pixar: Luxo Jr. (If you are not familiar with this short, you will have to go to youtube to see that delightful film: search for Luxo Jr. I was not allowed to post the link here.)
The Flowers
One set of Flowers sports a large coin and as flower representing the season. The large coins are indicative of the traditional shapes used for coins in early dynasties. The characters tell you the name of the plant, 1 Plum, 2 Orchid, 3 Mom (Ed: chrysanthemum) 4 Bamboo. th other set of Flowers depicts children playing with coins in each season (1 Spring, 2 Summer, 3 Autumn, 4 Winter), representing a wish for prosperity and luck.
Ed: In the top row I believe Dee is paying homage to 100 children, a theme often seen in Chinese art, where children are seen being children in paintings. Children are also seen on mahjong tiles and boxes
Direction Coins
(Ed: Dee made these specifically for this set. As many of you know, we often find mings with direction coins in our old boxes, or sometimes a bakelite wheel indicating directions on it. Dee designed her own, also seen on the top row of the Flower tiles.)
Jokers
(Ed: sadly I only have eight Jokers, but I will tell you about all of them, and you just will have to go to Dee's website to see them all)
Each joker shows a design which will bring you luck and prosperity!
2 Facing Bats and coin: Blessings before your eyes
3 Coins tied together: the Trinity of luck-Heaven, Earth and Mankind
Double Fish & Stone Chime: May you have a superabundance of auspicious happiness
Ruyi: Wish-granting Wand, Ruyi means "As you wish"
Ingot: Yuanbao is a large ingot of gold representing the phrase "all will be as you wish" in addition to prosperity
3 legged Toad: Belongs to Liu Hai, God of Wealth & always finds gold
Shou Medallion: the longevity symbol, when used in a circular shape mens fulfillment or completion. Mah Jong!
Lozenge and Endless Knot: may you have everlasting victory for 10 Thousand generations
I am missing ( 🙁 )
Yin-Yang: Remember there is a balance in life, you win some, you lose some! This symbol is actually called Tai-ji, meaning The Original One, from which the duality of Yin (dark)/Yang (light) developed.
5 Ears of Grain on One Stalk: may you enjoy a bumper harvest and reap a big reward!
Now, wasn't this a wonderful treat? Here's to Dee!!
Dee at work on the Money Set, hand-painting each tile.
The Dragon Set, designed by Dee Gallo and Crisloid.
You have a chance to buy one of Dee's other sets, designed by Dee and the people at Crisloid. ( Click here .)The Dragon Set takes many of Crisloid's unique designs and combines them with Dee's images.
On this Shanghai Luck set, the Dots are crabs.
Today we are very lucky to have guest contributor Dr. Arjan Gittenberger. Arjan is a Marine Biologist, based in the Netherlands, and he is a mahjong enthusiast. Given his interest in marine life, he was perusing some of the posts on this website featuring Flower tiles with sea creatures. He wrote me this fascinating email, which he kindly agreed to have turned into a post. I think you will be amazed both by the descriptions of the marine life and the skill of the carvers.
Hi Gregg,
We run a company focusing specifically on questions where species identification in the marine environment is of the uttermost importance (mostly marine invasive species related projects). Although I have never been diving or working in Chinese seas I’ve worked for quite some years in the NW Pacific in the waters surrounding Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, etc…
Evidentially I find the Mah-jong tiles showing sea-creatures very interesting and I’m actually amazed about the details that are visible on the drawings. Looking at your posts about sea creatures on tiles I noticed some details that you may find interesting (and may already know), but which you don’t mention in these posts:
* First the “Shanghai Luck set”:… I assume that it doesn’t simply show sea-creatures. It in fact illustrates the Shanghai cuisine, the youngest among the ten major cuisines in China with a history of more than 400 years, becoming especially popular when Shanghai became a major domestic and international trading port in the later part of the 19th century. The most famous dishes of the Shanghai cuisine concern the Chinese mitten crab (hairy crab) and a dish with “shrimp with colorful vegetables”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_cuisine#History
* Looking at the crabs illustrated on the tiles of the “Shanghai Luck set” and in other sets illustrated in your posts on crabs on tiles, you can in fact notice several morphological characters that are diagnostic for the Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis):
First, on many of the tiles I found illustrated on the internet the brown/reddish fur-like hairs on the claws, and the white “claw tips”, are clearly visible. There are only a few species of crabs worldwide that have such claws with hairs and white claw tips. A second morphological character that is used for identifying crabs concerns the pattern on its back. These patterns are very crab species specific. As can for example be seen on this Wikipedia picture of the Chinese mitten crab
from wikipedia
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EriocheirSinensis1.jpg ) , this crab species has “H” pattern on its back (not present in other crab species), which in fact looks like a square if you look at it from a bit more of a distance from a different angle. In the drawings of crabs on mah-jong tiles you had already noticed that this “H”-like pattern is often engraved on the back of these crabs. A final detail that is only visible on the One Dot crab illustrated on your website (“Shanghai Luck set”), is the number of “spines” in between the eyes of the crab. This number is again very species specific. There are crab species with “in between the eyes” no spines, three spines, five spines, etc…. The Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) has four spines between the eyes, which is also the exact number of spines between the eyes visible on the One Dot. The carver of this tile in fact appears to be aware of all of the above mentioned diagnostic characters, i.e. the illustrated crab has white claw tips, followed by a zone of brownish hairs on the claws, four spines between the eyes, and a H-like pattern on its back.
Concerning the habitat of the Chinese mitten crab… On your post about a tile with a fish and a crab on it ( The Fish in Chinese Art and Mahjong Part 2) , you indicate that the fish is probably “a sturgeon, a type of fish treasured by the Chinese, which is unusual in that it lives in both fresh and salt water, although on this tile you can see the artist clearly intended this to be salt water, given the presence of the crab.”….
I agree with you that the fish is probably a sturgeon. The crab does not indicate that the artist intended this to be salt water however… The red claws of the crab probably indicate that this crab again concerns the Chinese mitten crab. Just like the sturgeon, the Chinese mitten crab is unusual, as one of the only crab species worldwide that does this, in that it lives in both fresh and salt water. Most of it life Chinese mitten crabs live in fresh water many miles land inwards, but for their reproduction (when the crab is ~2-3 years old) they travel back to the sea. This often happens once per year during which up to thousands of 10-20 cm large hairy crabs may start their trip together at the same time over many miles towards back the sea to reproduce (after which most die and the young swim stream upwards into the fresh water again). To reach the sea they sometimes come out of the rivers/streams and even continue their way over land ( sometimes causing traffic jams, panic, etc. ). In conclusion it is probably not a coincidence that this crab is illustrated together with a sturgeon on the same tile, as they both have the unusual freshwater/marine lifecycle.
In your first post about sea creatures (December 24) you also illustrate a beautiful tile with “a crab on it next to rocks and grasses growing at the bottom of the sea”. The hairy claws and the H on its back in fact illustrate that this again should be considered a Chinese mitten crab. This crab is clearly shown in its fresh water habitat as the grasses on the tile probably concern a freshwater cane species, possibly “ Miscanthus sinensis ”
( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus_sinensis ).
Finally concerning the tile with a fish and to the left of it a strange creature. You indicate that this may be some kind of jelly fish. I agree. As you probably noticed the strange thing about this picture is that, if it is a jellyfish, it is drawn upside down… To my believe it is in fact the “upside down jellyfish”, Cassiopea andromeda. This is a well-known common species in China/the NW Pacific as it occurs in mashes and mangroves where also most of the crab and shrimp fisheries took/take place. This unique species lies upside down on the bottom with its tentacles sticking up, mimicking sea-grass. When mangrove fishes get scared away by a predator, they tend to flee into the sea-grass to hide… When they make the mistake of fleeing into the tentacles of this upside-down jellyfish they get stung, die and get eaten. Possibly this behaviour is what is being illustrated on the mah-jong tile.
Although I haven’t found any specific references about Cassiopea andromeda, this species belongs to the jellyfish Order Rhizostomae from which many species are prepared in various dishes (e.g. within the Shanghai cuisine). As this jellyfish lies in shallow water on the bottom in mangroves, I can imagine that it is relatively easy to collect, and crab/shrimp fishermen would take them along ☺
Best,
Arjan
A picture I took myself in Indonesia of the upside down jellyfish illustrating how the tentacles mimic sea-grass. The young/smaller individuals of this species, look more like the picture on the Mahjong tile, including the stripes/dots pattern.
Here's Gregg again: Isn't it remarkable how much can be learned about the world by looking at mahjong tiles? Not only does playing the game keep us mentally sharp and flexible, and provide opportunities to develop friendships, but it can help us gain more knowledge about different cultures, art and design, and now marine life! Thank you, Arjan for this extra bit of appreciation for our beloved Mahjong tiles.
Scenes from Ruse of the Empty City, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Although I have written about this before, I thought you would enjoy seeing the same story on a couple sets of tiles, and the actual opera.There are many scenes on Mahjong tiles that are parts of Chinese operas. For those of you who do not know, Chinese operas are very different from others. Of course there is some singing, but the singing is minimal. Operas have a lot of music, dancing, pantomime, acrobatics, and always fabulous costumes and sometimes facial painting. Both the costumes and make-up help the viewers understand the status and personality of each character.
On today's post you can see scenes from two different sets of tiles, seen above and in the lower row below, all telling the same story.
Ruse of the Empty City on the bottom row, courtesy of www.mahjongmahjong.com
Chinese operas celebrate stories known to all Chinese, often taken from the 14th Century book Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The above story , Ruse of the Empty City, from that book, is based on Zhuge Liang, the Prime Minister of Shu State who, during wartime, was left in a city far from the battlefield. The only people in the city were old and incapable of fighting or defending the city. It had been thought they were safe, but the enemy general, not knowing the city was basically empty, decided to attack it. Zhuge Liang decided the only way to survive was to act non-plussed, welcoming the enemy, hoping the enemy would feel they were walking into a trap. Zhuge got up on top of the city wall and played a musical instrument, and had some of the old men sweep the street, as if preparing for the enemy to walk into the city. The enemy, startled by what they perceived to be an invitation into a trap, quickly left, and the city was saved.
I thought you might enjoy seeing a real opera, showing this story-line. You can see how closely the tiles mimic the real opera scenes, costumes, head-pieces, city walls and all. You will see the people sweeping the fans, the headpieces, etc.These scenes start around the 1:08 mark. Just click on the triangle in the middle of video to start it. You might even want to start the video from the beginning to take in all the unusual costumes, masks, and props.
February 20, 2015
The above set was on ebay, and is used as an example of a set that had tiles added, replaced and stickered by a previous owner.
The other week I was at a bookstore for a talk and signing. There were some mahjong players in the area who came by to meet me, hear the talk, buy the book and get it signed.
Before the talk, the players gave demonstrations to visitors about how to play the game.
Several of the ladies who played are very lucky. They own sets that belonged to beloved family members. The sets were old, predating the introduction of Jokers, and those previous owners had to improvise about how to update their sets to play by NMJL rules. Some added non-matching tiles, others put nail polish on extra Flowers.
I mentioned to the players I have a few leads if they want to get tiles to match the ones in their set, or stickers to use instead of nail polish. I got the same response I got another time, about another set that had belonged to a dear relative: "I want to keep playing the game the way she played it." Their memories of their mothers and other relatives involved the sets looking the way they do, nail polish and non-matching tiles and all, and by keeping the sets that way, they were keeping on that exact tradition of Mahjong. Along the same lines, recently another reader contacted me. She had inherited her grandmother's set and she wanted to learn to play the game according to the same rules and scoring her grandmother used, yet another lovely way to keep connections with beloved relatives. Mahjong sets in and of themselves bring out a lot of emotions when owners think about the wonderful times spent around a Mahjong set with family and friends.
Emotional connections exist in fiction too. There's a lovely play called The Men of Mah Jongg, written about a group of men who used to play poker but switched to Mahjong following the death of the wife of the one of the players. It's the departed wife's love for the game that encouraged these men to connect around the table. Here's a write up in Playbill:
http:// www.playbill.com/news/article/elderly-men-play-mah-jongg-in-world-premiere-directed-by-medoff-dec.-5-14-i-155779
If you get a set and do want to update it, because of missing tiles or other problems, you can look here for resources.
To see when I am doing author appearances, click here
You can now follow me on Twitter!
@MahJonggGregg
To learn more about Mah Jongg, you might want to take a look at this book that I wrote with Ann Israel, published by Tuttle. To see more about it:
Qi Baishi, the Chinese artist who lived from 1867-1957, did this lovely scroll in 1950. It shows us five crabs (that number does keep reappearing, doesn't it?). This work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum .
Here's what the catalog has to say about his work featuring crabs:
"Crabs became an important subject in Qi Baishi's painting after he moved into a new studio in 1913 and crabs frequented his backyard. He once observed, "When a crab moves, its legs rise and fall in strict order despite their great number. This is something crab painters in the world do not know." This work represents his mature style, when naturalism and abstraction found a new balance. The subtle gradation of the ink suggests the undulation of the shell's surface. The eyes have become two short slanting lines. The claws, as circular splotches of ink with two simple converging lines, are reduced to geometric abstraction. During the last forty years of his life Qi lived in Beijing and befriended people of radically different persuasions. His passive tolerance of things of which he might not approve shows in his sarcastic inscription to this painting, which reads: "I just fold my arms and watch you gentlemen go." The Chinese term for the sideways movement of crabs, hengxing, is also a metaphor for impudent behavior. Qi often humorously compared crabs to presumptuous people. Here, he states that he will simply stand aside and let these creatures have their way."
Of course the crab is symbolic in Chinese art. And once again it has to do with the way the Chinese word is pronounced.
From Primaltrek:
The Chinese word for crab (蟹) and the Chinese word for harmony (协) are both pronounced xie. The crab symbol is sometimes used on charms which express a desire for peace such as the large tian xia tai ping (天 下太平) charm shown at Peace Coins and Charms .
The crab is also used to symbolize success in the imperial examination system . This is because the Chinese word for the crab's shell (jia 甲) has the additional meaning of "first" as in achieving the highest score in the examination to become a government official.
Certainly we have seen many symbols wishing for success on exams, as these crabs might be doing. Doing well on Scholar's exams opened up the door for success to people outside the noble classes. Great grades could allow the student an important job in government, whereas failure would prevent any kind of government job.
Wonderful crabs appear on Mahjong tiles too.
These crabs are Dots in a Shanghai Luck Mahjong set
These three tiles are the One, Two and Three Dot tiles from a Shanghai Luck Set, called that because of the presence of sea creatures. I love the way the crabs are shown, legs going in a few different directions, the eyes popping out, and the great attention paid to the claws on the One Dot. Can't you just see them skittering across the mahjong table? Maybe when one plays with one of these sets is can be the Game of Skittering Crabs in stead of The Game of Sparrows!!
Here is another crab from a different set of Flower tiles. You'll notice he too has the mark on the top of his shell, just like the ones on the One and Two Dot tiles above.
Reader Bill provided us with these wonderful Flower tiles some of you remember from before . The crab certainly is quite recognizable, on the right tile, but what is the left creature?
Perhaps it is some kind of jelly fish?
There is a Asian fascination with jelly fish, and they frequently appear in aquarium tanks, and anyone who has had the delightful experience of seeing these creatures from afar can certainly enjoy their great beauty.
To learn more about Mah Jongg, you might want to take a look at this book that I wrote with Ann Israel, published by Tuttle. To see more about it:
May 5, 2014
This magnificent fan in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was painted by Ren Xun who lived in China from 1835-1893. You can clearly see the bird, perched on a rock resembling what probably could be called a scholar's rock. We can see those wonderful holes, created by the movement of water over thousands of years, going through the rock.
On this lovely porcelain featured on Live Auctioneers, we have another bird, this time standing on one leg, as we often see on Mahjong tiles. The following interpretation was applied by Terese Bartholomew Tse about an eagle standing on one leg, it might be also true that "any bird standing on one leg shows independence of spirit."
We have a lot of birds seen on rocks in Mahjong.
This One Bam is from a miniature ladies' set, a fairly typical scene of a peacock standing on one leg on a rock.
I
It is not so different from this One Bam above, from a more recently carved set, probably from the late 1960s or early 1970s.
This One Bam is perched on a rock too, one foot raised in a bit of a balancing act.
And this recently carved One Bam from a tri-color lucite tile continues the same tradition.
We thank Mahjongmahjong for the use of some tiles seen here from their collection.
April 21, 2014
In China the orchid is traditionally associated with spring. The polar vortex has left our area, after what seemed to most of us to be a very long stay, so it is time to celebrate. And how better than to look at orchids, some created by nature and others brought to us by artists. We will look at Mahjong tiles with this pairing, and a photograph of some real beauties on display in the Bronx.
The above ink work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was painted by Ma Shouzhen during the Ming Dynasty. Here is an orchid; a few of the delicate blooms have fallen to the ground, but some remain intact. As we have seen in some other posts, the artist has chosen to position the plant next to a rock, a very common theme in Chinese art.
In China the orchid represents delicacy and elegance. Patricia Bjaaland Welch, in her book Chinese Art A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery
"They are specifically associated with women, love beauty and fertility; and secondly with virtue, moral elegance" and the refinement of a superior man who stands out in a crowd because of being a learned gentleman.
Rocks were often prized as objects of beauty, and we know they are objects of permanence. And so the rock with the orchid might be a play upon visual beauty, some of which is short lived and some permanent throughout time.
Above we have a version of paired Mahjong flowers. The hand carved bone and bamboo tile flower on the left is the orchid, with a rock just below the edge of the pot. Of course a rock appears in the other half of the diptych as well.
Above a vase, holding a hand carved Mahjong tile orchid, has a rock right next to it. Again, it seems like some of the blossoms may have fallen, thus alluding to the impermanence of some kinds of beauty.
Although not hand carved, these tiles by Imperial feature a vase of orchids and the rock beside them.
Above is a photo from a set by Selfridge's, with a paper face showing the orchid in a vase with a rock in a pot right behind. Clearly the pairing of the two was important enough to feature on all tiles of Mahjong tiles.
And we'll end with a photo of some other stars of the orchid show at the Bronx Botanical Garden, these exquisite pink orchids. There is no indication of nearby rocks, but, then again, this show is not Chinese art, but rather a celebration of the beauty of orchids. Given that the show ends today, it is another indication of the need to appreciate etherial beauty when we have a chance.
April 14, 2014
We'll begin today's post with a close up of a painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You will quickly see cranes in water, some flying and even swooping down(!), and bamboo, that every present plant that means so much to the Chinese. It is said that in China alone, more than 300 varieties of bamboo grow. Some of you know that Bamboo was probably the first material used to make mahjong tiles. Craftsmen took the images that were on paper cards and carved them into the harder bamboo surface. Bamboo was cheap (perhaps even free?) and abundant. It is no surprise it appears so often on Mahjong tiles, sometimes as itself in a pot, and sometimes worked into the scenes on the tiles and boxes.
Above we have the crane and the bamboo stalk, both part of the Bamboo suit, as we all now call it. But calling it bamboo, certainly in the early days of the game, was something of a misnomer. Through the years the suit certainly morphed into looking like bamboo stalks, and thus can properly be called that today, but in the early days it was called String of Cash , close to its original money-based suit inspiration. You may want to read Michael Stanwick's website for more information about the development of the suits.
As many of you already know, bamboo is one of the Four Gentlemen, and is one of the plants frequently appearing on Flower tiles.
The Flower in the top row, tile #3 is the Bamboo. It is one of the easiest Chinese characters to read, I think.
The above top row #3 tile is also a bamboo, looking very much like we would expect.
From Wikipedia:
"The Four Gentlemen, also called the Four Noble Ones, in Chinese art refers to four plants: the orchid , the bamboo , the chrysanthemum , and the plum blossom . [1] [2] The term compares the four plants to Confucianist junzi , or "gentlemen". They are most typically depicted in traditional ink and wash painting and they belong to the category of bird-and-flower painting in Chinese art.
The Four Gentlemen have been used in Chinese painting since the time of the Chinese Song Dynasty (960–1279) because of their refined beauty, and were later adopted elsewhere in East Asia by artists in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. As they represent the four different seasons (the orchid for spring, the bamboo for summer, the chrysanthemum for autumn, and the plum blossom for winter), the four are used to depict the unfolding of the seasons through the year."
So, the Bamboo Flower tiles we have just seen show us Bamboo growing out of a pot, and a close-up of it growing in the ground.
Above we see a much more simplified bamboo, but recognizable nevertheless. Once again on #3, the lower row of tiles, with a slightly different rendition of the Chinese character.
And here it is again, this time just represented in the Chinese character seen on the #3 tile.
The third and fifth images are from the collection of mahjongmahjong
We end the post by looking at an ink painting of bamboo
dating from the Ming dynasty, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can easily see the nodes on the stalks, and the simple leaves of the plant, very much like what we see on Mahjong tiles.
The book I wrote with Ann Israel is being published by Tuttle. To see more about it:
|
i don't know
|
Sitka wood, named after the Alaskan town, is a type of?
|
Things To Do In Sitka | Our Guide To The City's Best Spots
Things To Do In Sitka
May - September
$12
You’ll look eagles in the eye at this raptor rehab and education center on the edge of Tongass National Forest. You’ll get a close-up look at a snowy owl, American kestrels, a peregrine falcon, a Swainson’s hawk, a Western screech owl, and other birds of prey.
You’ll look eagles in the eye at this raptor rehab and education center on the edge of…
Sitka National Historical Park
Alaska’s oldest National Park isn’t a big one—only 113 acres—but it’s rich with history and there’s plenty to do: hiking trails, ranger-led interpretive walks, carving demonstrations, ethnographic displays, and more. The park’s main attractions are the roughly 20 totem poles and the beautiful coastal rainforest, which you can explore on your More...
Sitka National Historical Park
Alaska’s oldest National Park isn’t a big one—only 113 acres—but it’s rich with history and there’s plenty to do: hiking trails, ranger-led interpretive walks, carving demonstrations, ethnographic displays, and more. The park’s main attractions are the roughly 20 totem poles and the beautiful coastal rainforest, which you can explore on your own More...
Sheldon Jackson Museum
Dr. Sheldon Jackson, museum founder, had the distinction of serving in three pioneer fields during the late 1800s, founding Protestant missions and schools, establishing the public school system, and introducing domestic reindeer. In his travels he reached many sections of Alaska, as well as the coast of Siberia, gathering the majority of the artifacts now seen in the museum. Located More...
Sheldon Jackson Museum
Dr. Sheldon Jackson, museum founder, had the distinction of serving in three pioneer fields during the late 1800s, founding Protestant missions and schools, establishing the public school system, and introducing domestic reindeer. In his travels he reached many sections of Alaska, as well as the coast of Siberia, gathering the majority of the artifacts now seen in the museum. Located on More...
John O’Connell Bridge
This 1255-foot-long bridge has reserved its place in history by being America's first cable-stayed girder spanned bridge. Today, it connects Sitka, on Baranof Island, to the town's airport, which is on Japonski Island. Finished in 1972, it was named after a former mayor of Sitka.
John O’Connell Bridge
This 1255-foot-long bridge has reserved its place in history by being America's first cable-stayed girder spanned bridge. Today, it connects Sitka, on Baranof Island, to the town's airport, which is on Japonski Island. Finished in 1972, it was named after a former mayor of Sitka.
Old Sitka State Historic Site
You won’t find any old buildings here, but there are great interpretive signs and numerous hiking trails at this state park. And it’s an important place—the site of the first Russian settlement on Baranof Island. The Russians built a small fort in 1799, but Tlingits, unhappy with the Russian traders, attacked it in 1802. Nearly 100 Aleuts and 20 Russians were More...
Old Sitka State Historic Site
You won’t find any old buildings here, but there are great interpretive signs and numerous hiking trails at this state park. And it’s an important place—the site of the first Russian settlement on Baranof Island. The Russians built a small fort in 1799, but Tlingits, unhappy with the Russian traders, attacked it in 1802. Nearly 100 Aleuts and 20 Russians were killed, More...
Sitka Airport Causeway Trail
The causeway connects Japonski, Sasedni, Kirushkin, and Makhnait Islands. There are many beaches scattered along the route and beach-combing for shells is good here, but the probability of finding glass fishing floats is slim. There are underground bunkers that remain from WWII and they can be explored but use caution because they are very old. If you do plan on exploring these More...
Sitka Airport Causeway Trail
The causeway connects Japonski, Sasedni, Kirushkin, and Makhnait Islands. There are many beaches scattered along the route and beach-combing for shells is good here, but the probability of finding glass fishing floats is slim. There are underground bunkers that remain from WWII and they can be explored but use caution because they are very old. If you do plan on exploring these bunkers, More...
Sitka Historical Society & Museum
Explore a large, scale model of Sitka from 1867, the year the Russians transferred the Territory to the United States. View exhibits on traditional Tlingit lifestyles and see a collection of tightly woven cedar and spruce root baskets. Or learn about the town blackouts and a large-scale military buildup in Sitka during World War II. The museum is the only place in Sitka that includes More...
Sitka Historical Society & Museum
Explore a large, scale model of Sitka from 1867, the year the Russians transferred the Territory to the United States. View exhibits on traditional Tlingit lifestyles and see a collection of tightly woven cedar and spruce root baskets. Or learn about the town blackouts and a large-scale military buildup in Sitka during World War II. The museum is the only place in Sitka that includes More...
St. Peters-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church
After four years of worshiping in the Presbyterian Chapel, Episcopalians finally had their own church in 1899, with the construction of St. Peters-by-the-Sea. Complete with stained glass windows, modified flying buttresses, and wooden pews, this small chapel is open to the public 24/7. The church and the adjacent See House (1905) are both on the National Register of Historical Places, More...
St. Peters-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church
After four years of worshiping in the Presbyterian Chapel, Episcopalians finally had their own church in 1899, with the construction of St. Peters-by-the-Sea. Complete with stained glass windows, modified flying buttresses, and wooden pews, this small chapel is open to the public 24/7. The church and the adjacent See House (1905) are both on the National Register of Historical Places, and More...
New Archangel Dancers
Clap your hands, hoot and holler, and tap your feet—it’s all encouraged when you attend a show by the New Archangel Dancers. Performing Russian folk dances in Sitka for over 40 years, this all-female group has been dedicated to preserving and celebrating the town’s Russian heritage since 1969. You’ll experience upbeat dances (with their emcee leading a clapping More...
New Archangel Dancers
Clap your hands, hoot and holler, and tap your feet—it’s all encouraged when you attend a show by the New Archangel Dancers. Performing Russian folk dances in Sitka for over 40 years, this all-female group has been dedicated to preserving and celebrating the town’s Russian heritage since 1969. You’ll experience upbeat dances (with their emcee leading a clapping More...
Castle Hill Trail
Once the administrative headquarters for an empire stretching from Asia to California and Hawaii, Castle Hill today is little more than a grassy hill with a few interpretive signs, a modest stonewall, several old cannons, and a few flagpoles. But when you visit the top of this hill, you’re standing on rich historic grounds. Archeological excavations have unearthed over 300,000 More...
Castle Hill Trail
Once the administrative headquarters for an empire stretching from Asia to California and Hawaii, Castle Hill today is little more than a grassy hill with a few interpretive signs, a modest stonewall, several old cannons, and a few flagpoles. But when you visit the top of this hill, you’re standing on rich historic grounds. Archeological excavations have unearthed over 300,000 More...
Overlooking the Eastern Channel, this park is designed for whale watching, with 3 covered…
Sitka Sound Science Center
Come play with sea cucumbers and sea stars in saltwater touch tanks. Explore the suspended, 15-foot long skeleton of a young, male orca whale. Or have your family try to mimic the sound of a howling wolf pack. The interactive displays at this science center are a great place for interactive learning about the animals and ecosystems of coastal Southeast Alaska.
There’s a More...
Sitka Sound Science Center
Come play with sea cucumbers and sea stars in saltwater touch tanks. Explore the suspended, 15-foot long skeleton of a young, male orca whale. Or have your family try to mimic the sound of a howling wolf pack. The interactive displays at this science center are a great place for interactive learning about the animals and ecosystems of coastal Southeast Alaska.
There’s a large More...
Russian Cemetery - Observatory Street
Overgrown and unmarked, this 200-year-old Russian cemetery is still used for Russian Orthodox parishioners of St. Michael’s. You’ll find stone and wood headstones, some of which are made from the ballasts of old Russian ships. But unless you’re a history/cemetery buff, you’ll mainly find an overgrown plot. Caretakers clean up the site each Alaska Day, but the More...
Russian Cemetery - Observatory Street
Overgrown and unmarked, this 200-year-old Russian cemetery is still used for Russian Orthodox parishioners of St. Michael’s. You’ll find stone and wood headstones, some of which are made from the ballasts of old Russian ships. But unless you’re a history/cemetery buff, you’ll mainly find an overgrown plot. Caretakers clean up the site each Alaska Day, but the More...
Sitka Festivals
Alaskans love to get together. And since they’re hunkered down all winter and working all summer, festivals give them an excuse to socialize. So they’ve created parties for fish, for music, for light, for dark, for plants…you name it, there’s probably a festival for it up north. And Sitka, a historic town on the outer coast with lots of artists, has festivals More...
Sitka Festivals
Alaskans love to get together. And since they’re hunkered down all winter and working all summer, festivals give them an excuse to socialize. So they’ve created parties for fish, for music, for light, for dark, for plants…you name it, there’s probably a festival for it up north. And Sitka, a historic town on the outer coast with lots of artists, has festivals More...
Russian Bishop’s House
Built in 1843, during the “Golden Age” of Russian North America, this spacious, two-story building was home to Bishop Innocent of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was the center of Russian North America’s cultural, educational, and business ventures, complete with a formal reception hall, dining room, chapel, school, and seminary.
Although it was a church More...
Russian Bishop’s House
Built in 1843, during the “Golden Age” of Russian North America, this spacious, two-story building was home to Bishop Innocent of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was the center of Russian North America’s cultural, educational, and business ventures, complete with a formal reception hall, dining room, chapel, school, and seminary.
Although it was a church building, More...
Sitka’s Russian History
Walking the streets of Sitka, you may find it hard to believe that this quiet coastal community was once the hub of the West Coast: a center for trade, diplomacy, and the arts. When San Francisco had less than 10 residents, Sitka was home to 800 Russians, Europeans, Tlingits, and Aleuts. The oldest town on the West Coast, it was the capital of Russian America—called New More...
Sitka’s Russian History
Walking the streets of Sitka, you may find it hard to believe that this quiet coastal community was once the hub of the West Coast: a center for trade, diplomacy, and the arts. When San Francisco had less than 10 residents, Sitka was home to 800 Russians, Europeans, Tlingits, and Aleuts. The oldest town on the West Coast, it was the capital of Russian America—called New More...
Sheet’ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi Dancers
Held in a modern traditional Tlingit clan house, these dances are powerful performances that kids love. The booming echo of a drum, the smell of burning cedar, the lively chanting, and the energetic dance moves make for a memorable experience. The 30-minute performances include a story and five traditional songs. The dance troupe includes performers of all ages, dressed in colorful More...
Sheet’ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi Dancers
Held in a modern traditional Tlingit clan house, these dances are powerful performances that kids love. The booming echo of a drum, the smell of burning cedar, the lively chanting, and the energetic dance moves make for a memorable experience. The 30-minute performances include a story and five traditional songs. The dance troupe includes performers of all ages, dressed in colorful black More...
Sitka Lutheran Church
After Finnish laborers completed St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, they asked Russian authorities if they could build a Lutheran church for themselves. The Russians allowed it, but only if the building didn’t look like a church. That building was torn down in 1888, but you can still see what it looked like: the current Lutheran church (which looks like a church) has More...
Sitka Lutheran Church
After Finnish laborers completed St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, they asked Russian authorities if they could build a Lutheran church for themselves. The Russians allowed it, but only if the building didn’t look like a church. That building was torn down in 1888, but you can still see what it looked like: the current Lutheran church (which looks like a church) has a More...
Russian Block House
This stout structure is a re-creation of the guard tower that once stood here, part of the fortress enclosing the Russians during their time in Sitka, from 1804 to 1867. Fearful of the wilderness around them, and of Tlingit Natives, the Russians’ enclosed fort was open to outsiders only in the daytime. A massive fence, with three guard towers like this block tower, separated the More...
Russian Block House
This stout structure is a re-creation of the guard tower that once stood here, part of the fortress enclosing the Russians during their time in Sitka, from 1804 to 1867. Fearful of the wilderness around them, and of Tlingit Natives, the Russians’ enclosed fort was open to outsiders only in the daytime. A massive fence, with three guard towers like this block tower, separated the More...
April - September
$225 per person, per day // Single to Multi-Day Trips
This Southeast Alaska-based tour operator will leave you with a new definition of what it means to have a once-in-a-lifetime Alaska cruise: You sail on an intimate vessel—often getting to steer yourself, under the supervision of an experienced licensed captain—while exploring away from the crowds, and getting a wonderfully up-close view of the wildlife and scenery. Sailings from Juneau and Sitka.
This Southeast Alaska-based tour operator will leave you with a new definition of what it…
Fortress of the Bear: Guaranteed Bear Viewing
Watch brown bears in their natural habitat as they swim, play, sleep, or eat in a 3/4 acre enclosure near Sitka. The Fortress of the Bear takes in abandoned or orphaned cubs and then works to find new homes for them, sending them to zoos around the country. You’ll view these creatures from raised platforms while a guide shares information about bear safety, nutrition, and biology.
Watch brown bears in their natural habitat as they swim, play, sleep, or eat in a 3/4 acre…
See the glaciers of Tracy Arm or Misty Fjords, finding wildlife like sea otters and…
Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures
// 2.5 to 4.5 hrs
Dip your paddle into the clear saltwater of Southeast’s only outer-coast sea kayaking destination. Explore kelp forests and tidepools as you float over giant, fuzzy starfish and bright green sea anemones. Paddle past sea otters or sea lions and explore remote islands and coves. You can do it all with Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures. This family-run company limits its trips to More...
Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures
Dip your paddle into the clear saltwater of Southeast’s only outer-coast sea kayaking destination. Explore kelp forests and tidepools as you float over giant, fuzzy starfish and bright green sea anemones. Paddle past sea otters or sea lions and explore remote islands and coves. You can do it all with Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures. This family-run company limits its trips to small More...
The Arched Bridge: Great Salmon Viewing in Sitka
The Indian river is home to a number of fish: Summer Pink, chum, coho, chinook salmon, along with Dolly Varden, char, and steelhead trout. This arched bridge is the place to see them. Be sure to stop by on your way through Alaska's oldest designated National Park.
The Arched Bridge: Great Salmon Viewing in Sitka
The Indian river is home to a number of fish: Summer Pink, chum, coho, chinook salmon, along with Dolly Varden, char, and steelhead trout. This arched bridge is the place to see them. Be sure to stop by on your way through Alaska's oldest designated National Park.
Indian River
Season: Approximately Jul 15 to Sep 30
The Indian River is a beautiful, clear stream that’s home to spawning salmon each summer. On the lower reaches of the river, by the intertidal zone and lower floodplain, pink and chum salmon spawn from mid-July through September.
Farther up the river, you’ll find coho and chinook salmon, Dolly Varden, char, and steelhead trout.
The Indian River is a beautiful, clear stream that’s home to spawning salmon each…
Kruzof Island
Before the salmon return, it can be difficult to find bears. Instead of gathering at the salmon runs, they’re dispersed throughout beaches, tidal flats, and alpine meadows, grazing on fresh vegetation. The beaches and grass flats on the east coast of Kruzof Island offer prime grazing in May and June, and if you’re lucky, you just might see one. Even if you don’t, More...
Kruzof Island
Before the salmon return, it can be difficult to find bears. Instead of gathering at the salmon runs, they’re dispersed throughout beaches, tidal flats, and alpine meadows, grazing on fresh vegetation. The beaches and grass flats on the east coast of Kruzof Island offer prime grazing in May and June, and if you’re lucky, you just might see one. Even if you don’t, though, More...
Overlooking the Eastern Channel, this park is designed for whale watching, with 3 covered…
St. Lazaria National Wildlife Refuge
A clump of volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean, this 60-acre island is home to nesting puffins, murres, cormorants, and peregrine falcons from May to September. Thousands of birds show up, making it a loud, raucous place. They come because of the island’s location in the middle of food-rich ocean currents and its lack of predators.
You’ll have to get here by More...
St. Lazaria National Wildlife Refuge
A clump of volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean, this 60-acre island is home to nesting puffins, murres, cormorants, and peregrine falcons from May to September. Thousands of birds show up, making it a loud, raucous place. They come because of the island’s location in the middle of food-rich ocean currents and its lack of predators.
You’ll have to get here by boat; More...
Estuary Life Trail
This is a great, easy walk that can be linked to the Forest and Muskeg Trail and Mosquito Cove Trail. The boardwalk trail travels through a rich tidelands ecosystem, where you’ll find good bird watching for shore and seabirds. You may even spot bears, who show up here to feed on young grasses in early summer and return in mid-July to the end of September for the pink and silver More...
Estuary Life Trail
This is a great, easy walk that can be linked to the Forest and Muskeg Trail and Mosquito Cove Trail. The boardwalk trail travels through a rich tidelands ecosystem, where you’ll find good bird watching for shore and seabirds. You may even spot bears, who show up here to feed on young grasses in early summer and return in mid-July to the end of September for the pink and silver More...
Indian River Trail
Close to town on moderate terrain, this trail is a popular destination for locals and travelers and is used for everything from family walks to trail runs. The trail follows the turquoise blue Indian River up through the valley to a waterfall. This riverside terrain makes it a good place to look for birds and other wildlife like deer. In late summer, the river fills with salmon (though fishing is prohibited). The bears have their own trail on the other side of the river, so it’s rare to encounter one.
Close to town on moderate terrain, this trail is a popular destination for locals and…
The Big Hike
Starting from the Baranof Street trailhead, it’s about 2 miles up to 2,400 feet! That’s steep—steep enough to make for a challenging race, the Alpine Adventure Run, which coincides with an annual meeting of specialists in the sports medicine field. The trail starts easily, with a raised boardwalk that takes you through open meadows and then a forest of big hemlock More...
The Big Hike
Starting from the Baranof Street trailhead, it’s about 2 miles up to 2,400 feet! That’s steep—steep enough to make for a challenging race, the Alpine Adventure Run, which coincides with an annual meeting of specialists in the sports medicine field. The trail starts easily, with a raised boardwalk that takes you through open meadows and then a forest of big hemlock and More...
Old Sitka State Historic Site
You won’t find any old buildings here, but there are great interpretive signs and numerous hiking trails at this state park. And it’s an important place—the site of the first Russian settlement on Baranof Island. The Russians built a small fort in 1799, but Tlingits, unhappy with the Russian traders, attacked it in 1802. Nearly 100 Aleuts and 20 Russians were More...
Old Sitka State Historic Site
You won’t find any old buildings here, but there are great interpretive signs and numerous hiking trails at this state park. And it’s an important place—the site of the first Russian settlement on Baranof Island. The Russians built a small fort in 1799, but Tlingits, unhappy with the Russian traders, attacked it in 1802. Nearly 100 Aleuts and 20 Russians were killed, More...
Halibut Point State Recreation Site
If you’re looking for a nice day along the waterfront with the family, this is the spot. Watch fishing boats come and go, have a picnic at one of the covered shelters, or go tidepooling with the kids. At low tide you can access Magic Island and look for sea creatures.
A nice one-mile loop trail winds through the park—it’s a good place to stretch your legs. And More...
Halibut Point State Recreation Site
If you’re looking for a nice day along the waterfront with the family, this is the spot. Watch fishing boats come and go, have a picnic at one of the covered shelters, or go tidepooling with the kids. At low tide you can access Magic Island and look for sea creatures.
A nice one-mile loop trail winds through the park—it’s a good place to stretch your legs. And More...
Sitka Airport Causeway Trail
The causeway connects Japonski, Sasedni, Kirushkin, and Makhnait Islands. There are many beaches scattered along the route and beach-combing for shells is good here, but the probability of finding glass fishing floats is slim. There are underground bunkers that remain from WWII and they can be explored but use caution because they are very old. If you do plan on exploring these More...
Sitka Airport Causeway Trail
The causeway connects Japonski, Sasedni, Kirushkin, and Makhnait Islands. There are many beaches scattered along the route and beach-combing for shells is good here, but the probability of finding glass fishing floats is slim. There are underground bunkers that remain from WWII and they can be explored but use caution because they are very old. If you do plan on exploring these bunkers, More...
Sitka Nat’l Historic Park Trails
Starting at the National Park Service Visitor Center, this trail system takes you through rich coastal forest and along a salmon stream, then opens to views of the shoreline and coastal mountains. It also travels past totem poles and memorial sites, including that of the 1804 Battle of Sitka. The last armed conflict with the Tlingits in Sitka and the beginning of Russian rule, this More...
Sitka Nat’l Historic Park Trails
Starting at the National Park Service Visitor Center, this trail system takes you through rich coastal forest and along a salmon stream, then opens to views of the shoreline and coastal mountains. It also travels past totem poles and memorial sites, including that of the 1804 Battle of Sitka. The last armed conflict with the Tlingits in Sitka and the beginning of Russian rule, this More...
Forest & Muskeg Trail
This is one of the prettiest trails for a visitor who’s not a big hiker. It’s an interpretive trail with a self-guided brochure, and you’ll travel through prime examples of the dominant forest ecosystems in the area: forest and muskeg. Learn about these ecologies while walking a gently sloping trail of gravel and boardwalk.
One of the best ways to enjoy More...
Forest & Muskeg Trail
This is one of the prettiest trails for a visitor who’s not a big hiker. It’s an interpretive trail with a self-guided brochure, and you’ll travel through prime examples of the dominant forest ecosystems in the area: forest and muskeg. Learn about these ecologies while walking a gently sloping trail of gravel and boardwalk.
One of the best ways to enjoy this More...
Castle Hill Trail
Once the administrative headquarters for an empire stretching from Asia to California and Hawaii, Castle Hill today is little more than a grassy hill with a few interpretive signs, a modest stonewall, several old cannons, and a few flagpoles. But when you visit the top of this hill, you’re standing on rich historic grounds. Archeological excavations have unearthed over 300,000 More...
Castle Hill Trail
Once the administrative headquarters for an empire stretching from Asia to California and Hawaii, Castle Hill today is little more than a grassy hill with a few interpretive signs, a modest stonewall, several old cannons, and a few flagpoles. But when you visit the top of this hill, you’re standing on rich historic grounds. Archeological excavations have unearthed over 300,000 More...
Herring Cove to Beaver Lake
One of the newest trails in Sitka, this beautiful hike follows a creek, passes several waterfalls, and takes you through old-growth forest. It’s quite popular, and you’ll find the Herring Cove parking area crowded on the weekends. It’s also great for families, despite being a little steep at points, thanks to fun trail features and fishing platforms at a lake More...
Herring Cove to Beaver Lake
One of the newest trails in Sitka, this beautiful hike follows a creek, passes several waterfalls, and takes you through old-growth forest. It’s quite popular, and you’ll find the Herring Cove parking area crowded on the weekends. It’s also great for families, despite being a little steep at points, thanks to fun trail features and fishing platforms at a lake stocked More...
Estuary Life Trail
This is a great, easy walk that can be linked to the Forest and Muskeg Trail and Mosquito Cove Trail. The boardwalk trail travels through a rich tidelands ecosystem, where you’ll find good bird watching for shore and seabirds. You may even spot bears, who show up here to feed on young grasses in early summer and return in mid-July to the end of September for the pink and silver More...
Estuary Life Trail
This is a great, easy walk that can be linked to the Forest and Muskeg Trail and Mosquito Cove Trail. The boardwalk trail travels through a rich tidelands ecosystem, where you’ll find good bird watching for shore and seabirds. You may even spot bears, who show up here to feed on young grasses in early summer and return in mid-July to the end of September for the pink and silver More...
The Big Drive & Hike
Harbor Mountain Trailhead can take you to the summit of Harbor Mountain, but you have to drive up to 1,800 feet. This road was originally built during World War II to provide access for military installations. Be careful: the road is in decent shape, but it’s narrow. From the trailhead/parking area, the trail follows a ridge with great views in all directions. It’s had More...
The Big Drive & Hike
Harbor Mountain Trailhead can take you to the summit of Harbor Mountain, but you have to drive up to 1,800 feet. This road was originally built during World War II to provide access for military installations. Be careful: the road is in decent shape, but it’s narrow. From the trailhead/parking area, the trail follows a ridge with great views in all directions. It’s had More...
Thimbleberry Lake-Heart Lake Trail
This is a popular trail for cyclists, families, and swimmers! Yep, on sunny days this is one of the warmer spots to take a dip. That’s because the small lakes warm up in the summer (relatively…if you’re from Florida you might disagree). The trail can be accessed using public transport, and cyclists can even mount their bike on the bus. A local bike shop does a tour More...
Thimbleberry Lake-Heart Lake Trail
This is a popular trail for cyclists, families, and swimmers! Yep, on sunny days this is one of the warmer spots to take a dip. That’s because the small lakes warm up in the summer (relatively…if you’re from Florida you might disagree). The trail can be accessed using public transport, and cyclists can even mount their bike on the bus. A local bike shop does a tour More...
|
Spruce
|
What 2001 Disney movie bockbuster is considered the first to successfully achieve CGI fur?
|
Trees in Alaska | Alaska Trees | Rainforest | Alaska Tree
Alaska Trees
Alaska Trees and Descriptions (A few of them)
The trees of Alaska span a vast array of ecosystems from open, wind-swept tundra bordering the Artic Ocean, and Bering Sea through expansive boreal forests of the Interior to impressive temperate rain forests along the Pacific Coast. Tree composition changes with the prevailing climate across the state. In the Interior, principal species include white spruce, birch, and quaking aspen on uplands, black spruce and tamarack in forested wetlands, and balsam poplar within floodplains. Willows are abundant in the Interior as well, however most do not reach tree size. The coastal temperate rain forests of southcentral and southeastern Alaska are comprised mainly of western hemlock, and Sitka spruce. Mountain hemlock, Alaska yellow-cedar, western redcedar, and shore pine are most often encountered where soils are more poorly drained. Deciduous trees are uncommon in the temperate rain forests of Alaska, and are represented mainly by red alder and black cottonwood.
Western Hemlock Trees
The Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) is a large evergreen coniferous tree growing to 150-200 feet tall, with a trunk diameter of up to 8 feet. It is the largest species of hemlock, with the next largest (Mountain Hemlock T. mertensiana) reaching a maximum of 140 feet. It is native to the west coast of North America, with its northwestern limit on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, and its southeastern limit in northern Sonoma County, California. It is closely associated with temperate rain forests, and most of its range is less than 75 miles from the Pacific Ocean. There is however an inland population in the Rocky Mountains in southeast British Columbia, northern Idaho and western Montana. It mostly grows at low altitudes, from sea level to 2,000 feet, but up to 6,000 feet in the interior part of its range in Idaho.
Western Hemlock boughs are used to collect herring eggs during the spring spawn in southeast Alaska. The boughs provide a easily collectible surface for the eggs to attach to as well as provide a distinctive flavor. This practice orginates from traditional gathering methods used by Native Alaskans from southeast Alaska.
Leaves — light green to medium green on top, with two whitish parallel lines beneath, 1/4 to 7/8 inch long, blunt-tipped, soft, shiny, and flat, growing from two sides of branch parallel to the ground
Cones — brown, oval-shaped, 5/8 to 1 inch long; thin, papery scales; hanging down at end of twig
Bark — reddish-brown when young, turning gray-brown; scaly when young, becoming thick and furrowed with age
Size at maturity and lifespan — 100 to 150 feet in height and 2 to 4 feet in diameter; 200 to 500 years
Distribution — sea level to subalpine areas; throughout the coastal forest of Southeast Alaska and north to Prince William Sound
Shore Pine Trees
Depending on subspecies, Shore Pine (Pinus contorta) grows as an evergreen shrub or tree. The shrub form is krummholz and is approximately 3.3 to 9.8 ft high. The thin and narrow-crowned tree is 130 to 160 ft high and can achieve up to 6.6 ft diameter at chest height. The murrayana subspecies is the tallest. The crown is rounded and the top of the tree is flattened. In dense forests, the tree’s a slim, conical crown. The formation of twin trees is common in some populations in British Columbia. The elastic branches stand upright or overhang and are difficult to break. The branches are covered with short shoots that are easy to remove.
Leaves — yellow-green to dark green; 1 to 2 1/4 inches long; two leaves, each a half-round, bundled together, making a circle when pressed together
Cones — light brown; egg-shaped; 1 1/4 to 2 inches long; pointed backwards on branches; woody, with stiff prickles on the end of each scale
Bark — resinous and scaly, becoming furrowed with age; dark brown to blackish
Size at maturity and lifespan — often a small, scrubby tree; 20 to 40 feet in height and 8 to 12 inches in diameter; sometimes 75 feet in height and 18 to 32 inches in diameter on well-drained, sunny sites; 200 to 600 years
Distribution — especially in coastal muskegs; sea level to alpine zone; throughout Southeast Alaska, north to Yakutat
Red Alder Trees
Red Alder (Alnus rubra) is a deciduous tree native to western North America, from southeast Alaska south to central coastal California. It is the largest species of alder in North America and one of the largest in the world, reaching heights of 66 to 98 ft. The name derives from the bright rusty red color that develops in bruised or scraped bark. The bark is mottled, ashy-gray and smooth, often draped with moss. The leaves are ovate, 2.8 to 5.9 inches long, with bluntly serrated edges and a distinct point at the end; the leaf margin is revolute, the very edge being curled under, a diagnostic character which distinguishes it from all other alders. The leaves turn yellow in the autumn before falling. The male flowers are dangling reddish catkins 3.9 to 5.9 inches long in early spring, and female flowers are erect catkins which develop into small, woody, superficially cone-like oval dry fruit 0.79 to 1.18 inches long. The seeds develop between the woody bracts of the ‘cones’ they are shed in the autumn and winter.
Sitka Spruce (Alaska’s State Tree)
The Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis) is a large evergreen tree growing to 120-180 feet tall, and with a trunk diameter of 3-5 feet. It is by far the largest species of spruce, and the third tallest tree species in the world (after Coast Redwood and Coast Douglas-fir). Sitka Spruce is native to the west coast of North America, with its northwestern limit on Kodiak Island, Alaska, and its southeastern limit near Fort Bragg in northern California (Griffin & Critchfield 1972). It is closely associated with the temperate rain forests and is found within a few kilometers of the coast in the southern portion of its range.
Sitka Spruce is a long-lived tree, with individuals over 700 years old known. Because it grows rapidly under favorable conditions, large size may not indicate exceptional age. The Queets Spruce has been estimated to be only 350 to 450 years old, but adds more than a cubic meter of wood each year.
A unique specimen with golden foliage that used to grow on the Queen Charlotte Islands, known as Kiidk’yaas, is sacred to the Haida Native American people. It was illegally felled, although saplings grown from cuttings can now be found near its original site.
Sitka Spruce is of major importance in forestry for timber and paper production. It is used widely in piano, harp, violin, and guitar manufacture, as its high strength-to-weight ratio and regular, knot-free rings make it an excellent conductor of sound. The Steinway and Sons piano company is well known for using exclusively Sitka spruce soundboards in its pianos. The harp company, Lyon and Healy, is well known for it use of Sitka spruce for the soundboard of their harps as well. This wood is an important material for homebuilt aircraft for the same reasons.
Outside of its native range, it is particularly valued for its fast growth on poor soils and exposed sites where few other trees can be grown successfully; in ideal conditions young trees may grow 4 feet per year. It is naturalized in some parts of Britain where it was introduced in 1831 and New Zealand, though not so extensively as to be considered an invasive weed tree.
Newly grown tips of Sitka Spruce branches are used to flavor spruce beer and are boiled to make syrup.
The root bark of Sitka Spruce trees is used in Native Alaskan basket-weaving designs.
Leaves — dark green, 5/8 to 1 inch long, needle sharp, growing in all sides of branches from woody pegs (a trait common only to spruce)
Cones — light orange-brown, 2 to 3 1/2 inches long, usually found in the top quarter of tree, hanging down from branches, papery scales
Bark — thin and smooth, developing scaly plates with age, gray, becoming dark purplish brown with age
Size at maturity and lifespan — 150 to 225 feet in height and 5 to 8 feet in diameter, grows much larger in the southern part of its range, 500 to 700 years
Distribution — sea level to 3,000 feet elevation in Southeast Alaska, throughout Southeast Alaska, west to Kodiak Island and north to the coast of the Alaska Peninsula.
Yellow Cedar Trees
This species goes by many common names including Nootka Cypress, Yellow Cypress, and Alaska Cypress. Even though it is not a cedar, it is also often confusingly called “Nootka Cedar”, “Yellow Cedar”, “Alaska Cedar”, or even “Alaska Yellow Cedar”. Its name derives from its discovery on the lands of a First Nation of Canada, the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, who were formerly referred to as the Nootka. Nootka Cypress is native to the west coast of North America, from the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, south to northernmost California, typically occurring on wet sites in mountains, often close to the tree-line, but sometimes also at lower altitudes.
Leaves — dark green; 1/16 to 1/8 inch long
Cones — patchy green and black, nearly round; 1/2 inch in diameter; scattered among the needles; sharp central point on each cone scale
Bark — shreddy; generally ash gray
Size at maturity and lifespan — 40 to 80 feet in height and 1 to 2 feet in diameter; slow-growing trees; 15 to 20 inches in diameter at 200 to 300 years; up to 1,000 years
Distribution — muskegs, alpine meadows, and nearby forests of Southeast Alaska as far north as Prince William Sound; sea level to timberline in Southeast Alaska, though mainly at elevation of 500 to 1,200 feet; common in northern Southeast Alaska scattered in southern Southeast
share
|
i don't know
|
The 1st World War Armistice was signed in 'Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits 2419', a?
|
Armistice | Iconic Photos
Iconic Photos
Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos
Posts Tagged ‘Armistice’
with 3 comments
On November 8th 1918, the German delegation crossed the frontlines to negotiate an armistice to end the First World War. Instead of directly driving them to where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Marshal Ferdinand Foch was waiting, the French gave them a 10-hour tour of the ruined countryside. The talk took three days and the terms from the United States included the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This was agreed and Wilhem abdicated on Novemeber 10th while Germany slowly descended into riots and unrest.
Foch appeared only twice in the three days of negotiations: on the first day, to ask the German delegation what they wanted, and on the last day, to see to the signatures. The armistice was formally signed in Foch’s carriage on 11 November. Above is the only picture of the signing ceremony. The armistice initially ran for 30 days but was regularly renewed until the formal peace treaty was signed at Versailles the following year. Before the Treaty of Verseilles, the Allies kept their armies ready to begin hostilities back again within 48 hours.
In 1940, Hitler exacted revenge by forcing the French to sign an armistice in the same railway carriage. The Nazis destroyed the building housing it, the Clairiere de l’Armistice and took the carriage to Berlin. With the Allied advance into Germany, the carriage was removed to Ohrdruf, where it was destroyed.
More information about armistice, see here .
Rate this:
with 3 comments
“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice was signed, ending “The War to End All Wars”. With the military morale in its ebb and revolution brewing at home, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated two days before on 9 November. The German government had decided to negotiate an armistice with the Allies starting 7th November, when the German Army Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg exchanged a series of telegrams with the Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch.
In the forest of Compiègne, In the railcar given to Foch for military use by the manufacturer, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the armistice was signed. The photograph was taken after reaching an agreement. The diplomatic situation was terse: The German signatory, Matthias Erzberger made a short speech, protesting the harshness of the terms, and concluded by saying that “a nation of seventy millions can suffer, but it cannot die”. Foch then refused to shake Erzberger’s hand and said, “Très bien“.)
Although it was signed at 5 am, the terms of the agreement didn’t come into effect until six hours later at 11 am. The hour was chosen by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, First Sea Lord and Britain’s official delegate to oversee the Armistice. He was explicitly ordered by his Prime Minister David Lloyd George to delay the terms until 3 pm to coincide with parliment sitting so that PM could get the credit of announcing it officially to the house on the hour. Weymss thought the delay would cause unnecessary killing and decided that the eleventh hour would add to the poignancy of the date. Lloyd George was furious. Erzberger, too, was not kindly received back–he was assassinated later by a right-wing extremist group, Organisation Consul for signing the Armistice. Foch on the other hand was elected to the Académie des Sciences on the very day of the Armistice [and ten days later, to the Académie française].
In the above picture, front row from left to right: Rear-Admiral George P.W. Hope, Wemyss’s deputy; General Maxime Weygrand, Foch’s righthand man and one who read out the armistice conditions; Wemyss; Foch and Royal Navy captain JPR Marriott, attache to two admirals. On the train, clockwise from top right: Interpreter Laperche, Captain le Mierry, Commander Riedinger, and General Desticker, Foch’s ADC. The German delegation was notably absent. The photo was taken at 7:30 am as Foch was about to return to Paris with the signed documents in his briefcase.
Although Germany had insisted that it would only enter into negotiations on the understanding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s so-called ‘Fourteen Points’ would form the basis for a settlement, the armistice terms were nevertheless punitive. The Allies agreed to an armistice only on the basis that Germany effectively disarm herself; the cause preventing the latter from renewing hostilities backfired spectacularly: her ignominious “reparations” agreement sowed the seeds for the rise of a nationalist movement and subsequently the Second World War.
Rate this:
|
Railroad car
|
'Interlocution' refers to a person's involvement in?
|
WWI | Iconic Photos
Iconic Photos
Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos
Posts Tagged ‘WWI’
with 7 comments
During the First World War, drafts created the armies that were drawn from remarkably similar societies for the first time in modern warfare. Along the Western Front, on both sides there were industrial workers and farm laborers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. For Catholics, Protestants and Jews fighting for separate armies, they sometimes identified more with their religious brethren on the opposing side than with their fellow soldiers.
The soldiers, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians were equally irreverent about what they were supposedly fighting for. Over the longer period of trench warfare, a kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude developed in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line; war was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans. English pacifist Vera Brittain noted about a Scottish and a Saxon regiment that had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a lot of noise and an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. Robert Graves — in his pivotal memoir of the Great War, Goodbye to All That — recollected about letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: “Your little dog has run over to us, and we are keeping it safe here.” Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion. Louis Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’.
Nothing symbolized this easygoing attitudes more than the informal Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing soldiers in many sectors joined together to sing carols, and exchange Christmas greetings and gifts. Soccer games were played in no man’s land with makeshift balls. Of course, there were some who refused to participate in the truce; among those was a German field messenger named Adolf Hitler, who grumbled, ““Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?”
At Diksmuide, Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914, drinking schapps together. One year later, ad hoc ceasefires took place again, this time in northern France. No man’s land was suddenly transformed into ‘a country fair’ as lively bartering began for schnapps, cigarettes, coffee, uniform buttons and other trinkets. More worryingly for their superiors, the soldiers sang the Internationale.
Yet socialist hopes that soldiers would ultimately repudiate their national loyalties for the sake of international brotherhood were proven to be futile. Christmas Truce was almost the last hurrah of a bygone era; as the war went on, mutual hatred grew, expunging the common origins and predicament of the combatants. War, too, has lost its mystique; soon, only fools would celebrate it or enter it with excited patriotic fervor. After August 1914, when thousands of red-trousered Frenchmen and white-gloved officers in full dress and plumes were decimated by German machine guns, France eschewed her pride and switched to neutral-colored service uniforms — the last world power to do so. Soon, there will be no more sabres and Sam Browne belts, no more centuries-old habits of chivalry, no more leaving civilians out of war.
Rate this:
with 6 comments
The above is one in a series of pictures a Royal Canadian cameraman took during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917. The photo is regarded as one of the greatest war photos — although its origins are obscure. Some note that it was taken during “pre-battle” training behind the lines. This is not unusual. Because of the primitive photographic equipment available in the field, most photos purporting to portray actual ‘combat action’ during World War I in fact showed troops during pre-war training exercises. Some however note that the soldier going over the top was making a gesture expressing his contempt for the Germans by putting his thumb to his nose. (There is a website refuting this here ).
No matter what the battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917 was considered as a pivotal moment for Canada as a nation; four Canadian Army units fought together as one for the first time. Three thousand five hundred and ninety eight Canadian soldiers were killed during the battle, and four Victoria Crosses were awarded. Indeed, the Canadians captured a strategic area, but it was a minor victory for the losing Allies that spring, and had a negligible effect. The Globe and Mail noted that “if French or British rather than Canadian troops had driven the German enemy off Vimy Ridge, history probably would have forgotten about it.”
Yet, the victory at Vimy become inseparable from the Canadian identity. When there were rumors that the Vimy memorial had been destroyed by Germans during the WWII, the Canadians were whipped fury and hatred so much so that Adolf Hitler’s advisers thought it was necessary for the Nazi leader to be photographed in Vimy at the monument to demonstrate that it was still intact.
Rate this:
with 23 comments
The above photo showed Adolf Hitler in the huge crowd which heard the announcement of the First World War outside Field Marshals’ Hall, Munich on 2 August 1914. After the Nazis came to power, Hitler mentioned being outside the hall when the war was declared. A German photographer went back and looked through his photos and found the above picture.
At the outbreak of war, 25-year old Adolf Hitler was an aimless drifter and failed artist in Munich and had previously failed army entry tests because he was too weak to carry weapons. Yet, during the wartime, Germany needed soldiers and Hitler was able to enlist in the Bavarian army; although he was not considered for further promotion because of ‘a lack of leadership qualities’, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, an honour rarely given to a lance corporal (which showed that he did not lack courage). The Great War ended for Hitler inside a hospital where he was being treated for temporary blindness caused by chlorine gas. There he heard the news of German surrender, deeply incredulous; he came to believe, like many other nationalists, that the army, “undefeated in the field,” had been “stabbed in the back” by civilian leaders and Marxists back home.
Hitler returned to Munich after a short failed stint as a borderguard and joined a nationalist group German Workers’ Party (DAP), which was formed by extremists and anti-Semites as a counterforce to Bolshevism. He rose quickly through its ranks and in July 1921, he took over its leadership renaming it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The rest as they say is history.
Rate this:
with 3 comments
On November 8th 1918, the German delegation crossed the frontlines to negotiate an armistice to end the First World War. Instead of directly driving them to where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Marshal Ferdinand Foch was waiting, the French gave them a 10-hour tour of the ruined countryside. The talk took three days and the terms from the United States included the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This was agreed and Wilhem abdicated on Novemeber 10th while Germany slowly descended into riots and unrest.
Foch appeared only twice in the three days of negotiations: on the first day, to ask the German delegation what they wanted, and on the last day, to see to the signatures. The armistice was formally signed in Foch’s carriage on 11 November. Above is the only picture of the signing ceremony. The armistice initially ran for 30 days but was regularly renewed until the formal peace treaty was signed at Versailles the following year. Before the Treaty of Verseilles, the Allies kept their armies ready to begin hostilities back again within 48 hours.
In 1940, Hitler exacted revenge by forcing the French to sign an armistice in the same railway carriage. The Nazis destroyed the building housing it, the Clairiere de l’Armistice and took the carriage to Berlin. With the Allied advance into Germany, the carriage was removed to Ohrdruf, where it was destroyed.
More information about armistice, see here .
Rate this:
with 3 comments
“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice was signed, ending “The War to End All Wars”. With the military morale in its ebb and revolution brewing at home, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated two days before on 9 November. The German government had decided to negotiate an armistice with the Allies starting 7th November, when the German Army Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg exchanged a series of telegrams with the Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch.
In the forest of Compiègne, In the railcar given to Foch for military use by the manufacturer, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the armistice was signed. The photograph was taken after reaching an agreement. The diplomatic situation was terse: The German signatory, Matthias Erzberger made a short speech, protesting the harshness of the terms, and concluded by saying that “a nation of seventy millions can suffer, but it cannot die”. Foch then refused to shake Erzberger’s hand and said, “Très bien“.)
Although it was signed at 5 am, the terms of the agreement didn’t come into effect until six hours later at 11 am. The hour was chosen by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, First Sea Lord and Britain’s official delegate to oversee the Armistice. He was explicitly ordered by his Prime Minister David Lloyd George to delay the terms until 3 pm to coincide with parliment sitting so that PM could get the credit of announcing it officially to the house on the hour. Weymss thought the delay would cause unnecessary killing and decided that the eleventh hour would add to the poignancy of the date. Lloyd George was furious. Erzberger, too, was not kindly received back–he was assassinated later by a right-wing extremist group, Organisation Consul for signing the Armistice. Foch on the other hand was elected to the Académie des Sciences on the very day of the Armistice [and ten days later, to the Académie française].
In the above picture, front row from left to right: Rear-Admiral George P.W. Hope, Wemyss’s deputy; General Maxime Weygrand, Foch’s righthand man and one who read out the armistice conditions; Wemyss; Foch and Royal Navy captain JPR Marriott, attache to two admirals. On the train, clockwise from top right: Interpreter Laperche, Captain le Mierry, Commander Riedinger, and General Desticker, Foch’s ADC. The German delegation was notably absent. The photo was taken at 7:30 am as Foch was about to return to Paris with the signed documents in his briefcase.
Although Germany had insisted that it would only enter into negotiations on the understanding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s so-called ‘Fourteen Points’ would form the basis for a settlement, the armistice terms were nevertheless punitive. The Allies agreed to an armistice only on the basis that Germany effectively disarm herself; the cause preventing the latter from renewing hostilities backfired spectacularly: her ignominious “reparations” agreement sowed the seeds for the rise of a nationalist movement and subsequently the Second World War.
Rate this:
leave a comment »
In 1922, West African and French dignitaries place flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier in Paris. The Senegalese statesman Blaise Diagne stands at the center with hat in hand. Photo by Roger Viollet for Getty Images.
The first black African elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, Blaise Diagne transformed Senegalese and French colonial politics and helped prepare the way for development of democracy in Senegal. The Four Communes of Senegal had a unique status in which they were given the right to have a deputy to the French Parliament. (Senegal was the only colony north of South Africa where ordinary Africans had the right to vote). Those elected were usually from the mulatto elite, called the metis, but in the first years of the twentieth century, educated Africans, organized in a group called the Young Senegalese, wanted a more important role in government.
Blaise Diagne, son of a cook, was adopted by a leading metis family. In 1914, he won the election and served in the Parliament. In 1915, as a leading recruiter for the French army during World War I, when thousands of black West Africans fought on the Western Front, he was able to put forward a law that allowed originaires, the resident of the Senegal to serve in the better-paid regular army rather than with the colonial troops. The next year, he persuaded the Chamber of Deputies to pass a law recognizing originaires as French citizens. After the war, his influence waned–with swing to the right in French elections. In 1923 Diagne forged an alliance with his former enemies, the commercial houses based in Bordeaux. He remained a deputy until his death in 1934.
Rate this:
|
i don't know
|
What is the cube root of 216?
|
Cubes and Cube Roots
Cubes and Cube Roots
To understand cube roots, first we must understand cubes ...
How to Cube A Number
To cube a number, just use it in a multiplication 3 times ...
Example: What is 3 Cubed?
3 Cubed
Note: we write down "3 Cubed" as 33
(the little 3 means the number appears three times in multiplying)
Some More Cubes
A cube root goes the other direction:
3 cubed is 27, so the cube root of 27 is 3
3
The cube root of a number is ...
... a special value that when cubed gives the original number.
The cube root of 27 is ...
... 3, because when 3 is cubed you get 27.
Note: When you see "root" think
"I know the tree, but what is the root that produced it?"
In this case the tree is "27", and the cube root is "3".
Here are some more cubes and cube roots:
4
216
Example: What is the Cube root of 125?
Well, we just happen to know that 125 = 5 × 5 × 5 (if you use 5 three times in a multiplication you will get 125) ...
... so the answer is 5
The Cube Root Symbol
This is the special symbol that means "cube root", it is the "radical" symbol (used for square roots) with a little three to mean cube root.
You can use it like this:
(we say "the cube root of 27 equals 3")
You Can Also Cube Negative Numbers
Have a look at this:
When we cube 5 we get 125:
When we cube −5 we get −125:
So the cube root of −125 is −5
Perfect Cubes
The Perfect Cubes are the cubes of the whole numbers :
3375
...
It is easy to work out the cube root of a perfect cube, but it is really hard to work out other cube roots.
Example: what is the cube root of 30?
Well, 3 × 3 × 3 = 27 and 4 × 4 × 4 = 64, so we can guess the answer is between 3 and 4.
Let's try 3.5: 3.5 × 3.5 × 3.5 = 42.875
Let's try 3.2: 3.2 × 3.2 × 3.2 = 32.768
Let's try 3.1: 3.1 × 3.1 × 3.1 = 29.791
We are getting closer, but very slowly ... at this point, I get out my calculator and it says:
3.1072325059538588668776624275224...
... but the digits just go on and on, without any pattern. So even the calculator's answer is only an approximation !
(Further reading: these kind of numbers are called surds which are a special type of irrational number )
|
6
|
Boulevard Périphérique is the famous Paris?
|
Cube Root of a Rational Number |The cube root of a number is denoted by ∛.
(i) Since (2 × 2 × 2) = 8, we have ∛8 = 2
(ii) Since (5 × 5 × 5) = 125, we have ∛125 = 5
Method of finding the cube root of a given number by factorization
To find the cube root of a given number, proceed as follows:
Step I. Express the given number as the product of primes.
Step II. Make groups in triplets of the same prime.
Step III. Find the product of primes, choosing one from each triplet.
Step IV. This product is the required cube root of the given number.
Note: If the group in triplets of the same prime factors cannot complete, then the exact cube root cannot be found.
Solved Examples of Cube Root using step by step with explanation
1. Evaluate the cube root: ∛216
Solution:
By prime factorization, we have
216 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 × 3
= (2 × 2 × 2) × (3 × 3 × 3)
Therefore, ∛216 = (2 × 3) = 6
2. Evaluate the cube root: ∛343
Solution:
By prime factorization, we have
343 = 7 × 7 × 7
3. Evaluate the cube root: ∛2744
Solution:
By prime factorization, we have
2744 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 7 × 7 × 7
= (2 × 2 × 2) × (7 × 7 × 7).
Therefore, ∛2744 = (2 × 7) = 14
Cube Root of a Negative Perfect Cube
Let (a) be a positive integer. Then, (-a) is a negative integer.
We know that (-a)³ = -a³.
Therefore, ∛-a³ = -a.
Thus, cube root of (-a³) = -(cube root of a³).
Thus, = ∛-x = - ∛x
Find the cube root of (-1000).
Solution:
We know that ∛-1000 = -∛1000
Resolving 1000 into prime factors, we get
1000 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 × 5 × 5
= (2 × 2 × 2) × (5 × 5 × 5)
Therefore, ∛1000 = (2 × 5) = 10
Therefore, ∛-1000 = -(∛1000) = -10
Cube Root of Product of Integers:
We have, ∛ab = (∛a × ∛b).
For example:
|
i don't know
|
The brands Daiwa, Drennan, Hardy, and Berkley famously involve?
|
Brands | Summerlands Tackle
Summerlands Tackle
Brands
Brands
At Summerlands Tackle we also offer quality fishing tackle from Drennan, Daiwa and Hardy Greys at terrific prices plus express shipping. Fishing Tackle by leading companies famous for producing the best fishing tackle all types of fishing, carp fishing, sea fishing or game.
Items 1 to 48 of 2464 total
Show
The World's First Super Braid When Silkworm was first launched back in 1990 it set the car...
£7.99 £9.75
Created in 1992 and fine tuned over the years Merlin remains one of the most popular traditiona...
£7.99 £9.75
|
Fishing
|
Gargoyles on buildings traditionally support?
|
Fishing Rods | Carp | Feeder | Float | Avon | Spinning | Angling Direct
Next
Fishing Rods
Here at Angling Direct, you’ll find hundreds of fishing rods from the market’s leading manufacturers, covering every type of fishing, every angler preference and all budgets across the board. We take huge pride in listing the latest and best rods from the industry’s top suppliers, each of which has a flawless track record for pure performance and rugged reliability. After all, even those who know nothing about angling would probably say the word ‘rod’ if they were asked to name a piece of fishing tackle and there’s certainly no denying that a quality rod is one of the most important pieces of kit in your portfolio. In fact, it was probably the first thing you invested in when you decided to take up angling. However, with hundreds of rods on the market, it can often feel overwhelming when you’re trying to find the perfect rod for you needs and even the most experienced angler can find themselves swamped with choices, especially if they are looking to explore a different area of the sport. If you find yourself stuck for choice (or are confused by all the jargon), you can use this quick guide to help you narrow down your options until you have the perfect rod for you!
Materials and Components
Most top end rods will state that they have a blank (the main body of the rod) that is manufactured from high modulus carbon fibre. Modulus is a stiffness rating, so if carbon fibre has a high modulus rating then it means it is a stiff rod that can perform well under pressure. Different manufacturers will use different methods to ensure that their rods perform well under high-torque (rotation), too. These techniques can vary from super heating the blank to placing the blank under extreme pressure during the construction phase. Cheaper rods might use a slightly lesser quality of carbon fibre or will be made from a composite material that combines carbon fibres with others to give their desired action.
When it comes to the handle of a rod you’ll most often be faced with a choice of EVA or cork – or some combination of the two. Cork is the traditional material used in rod manufacture and old school anglers will always claim its superiority to EVA. Some of the benefits of cork include its heat retention – meaning that on a cold day it won’t leech warmth from your hand – and its ability to provide a good grip in wet conditions. However, cork is very hard to clean once it gets dirty and with constant use it can wear and crumb. EVA is a modern alternative to cork which is often praised for its light weight, as well as its ability to be manipulated into ergonomic positions. Much tougher than cork, EVA is long lasting and will take a lot of use before it begins to show signs of wear. It can also be cleaned easily, allowing you to maintain the ‘like new’ look of your gear. The handle will most likely be finished with a butt cap: a small circle, usually made from metal and engraved with the brand logo, which sits on the very end of the rod. Its main purpose is to protect the blank from damage.
The rod will then be furnished with guides and a reel seat. Guides are the rings that run up the length of the rod and their main purpose is to create a path for your line to run through. They will start with a larger size at the butt of the rod and will gradually decrease in size until they get to the tip. Butt rings of 40mm (for a standard casting rod) or 50mm (for a distance caster) are most common, with tip rings hitting somewhere around the 14mm mark. Reel seats are designed to hold your reel in position and they come in a variety of styles, from DPS to Skeleton. These will vary depending on the kind of reel you’re housing and the style of fishing you want to do. Most manufacturers will state that their guides and reel seats are Fuji products. Fuji is one of the most popular creators of guides and reel seats and it is famous for its high quality. However, some manufacturers like to produce their own custom designed reel seats or line guides, too. The quality of these will vary depending on the manufacturer but, chances are, if the manufacturer can make a good rod blank then they can also make good furnishings and own brand fixtures are nothing to be sniffed at.
These are the basics that you should see on all of the fishing rods we stock at Angling Direct. Some rods will also offer line clips, hook keeper rings, and isotope slots – these are all additions designed to make your angling easier but whether or not you choose them is down to personal preference. It’s also worth noting that you can buy all of the above to fit onto your existing rods, so you shouldn’t let these rod accessories determine your final choice.
Carp Rods
Carp fishing is one of the most popular areas of angling and you’ll find a huge range of rods in the carp fishing section of our store . Prices for a quality carp rod can vary between as little as £30 to as much as £600, but for the most part anglers stick to somewhere in the middle of the road. For £150 - £250 or so you can get yourself a top quality carp rod that more than does the job and, although as a general rule of thumb quality does improve the more money you spend, the average angler can achieve everything they want with a rod in this price range. Many carp anglers choose to fish with two or three rods, too, so you might want to take that into consideration when you’re budgeting for your carp rod.
More often than not, carp rods are available either 12ft or 13ft in length. For many years 12ft rods were seen as the pinnacle in the carp fishing world. Allowing you to target most venues – whether they are commercial carp waters or syndicate lakes – a 12ft rod is the ultimate all round tool that enables you to fish tight to the margins or out towards your favourite features. In the last decade, 13ft rods have been brought to the fore as anglers want to cast further and further out into the water. Often boasting 50mm butt guides and a reel seat that’s large enough to house a big pit, 13ft rods allow you to target the furthest features on your favourite waters – enabling you to explore areas that were previously unthinkable.
Both rod sizes offer similar test curve options. The test curve on a rod will give you an idea of how it will perform under pressure and it refers to the amount of weight needed to pull the tip of the rod to a 90-degree angle with the butt. Carp rods tend to have test curve between 2.75lb and 3.5lb, although you can find rods with lower test curves too. The test curve that you choose will depend on the size of the fish you’re looking to target, your rig setup, and the water you usually fish. At the end of the day, the most important thing to consider is the action on your rod – a parabolic action (that is, somewhere between a fast action and a through action, sometimes referred to as a progressive action) is usually what you’re after as is allows for the killer combination of a responsive tip and a powerful butt section.
Harrison rods and Century rods sit at the top end of the spectrum, whilst Wychwood rods, Prologic rods, and Shakespeare rods are at the slightly cheaper end of things. Big name brands, such as Daiwa , Shimano, and Fox, produce rods for a range of budgets.
Spod Rods and Marker Rods
Spod and marker rods are often used in tandem with a traditional three-rod carp fishing session. A spod rod is a rod that has been purpose designed to chuck rockets full of bait (known as spods) out to your chosen spot. These burst open upon impact with the water and are quickly reeled in, ready to be refilled and re-cast. This is a really effective way of getting huge quantities of bait out to a feature, quickly and accurately. However, since spods are much weightier than a traditional rig setup, the spod rod offers a much heavier test curve than a traditional rod, sometimes exceeding 5lbs. This is to ensure that the rod won’t break under the pressure of launching your rockets in excess of 100 yards, and top end spod rods are designed to be able to cast as far as your main carp rods.
Like spod rods, marker rods often have a slightly heavier test curve than your main rods. The purpose of a marker rod is to cast a brightly coloured marker float onto your feature, giving you something to aim for when you’re casting to ensure accuracy over a long period of time. These rods can also be used to feature find – a technique of casting and retrieving in order to discover the topography of a lake bed.
Coarse and Match Rods
You’ll find three main rods in our coarse fishing section: float rods, feeder rods, and waggler rods. These rods are often produced in tandem with one another and their names refer to the method of fishing that you use them with. Feeder rods (sometimes known as ledgering rods) are designed to chuck heavy feeders, such as the method feeder, or heavy leads to your favourite features. These then slowly release bait and reveal your hook. Waggler rods (sometimes referred to as match rods thanks to their usefulness when fishing the pole isn’t going to plan) are designed for use with a pellet waggler – a stick float that you house bait in to get a great distribution of flavour through the water column. Float rods are used when you’re float fishing or surface fishing. These are used throughout the carp, coarse, and match fishing disciplines and are effective in rivers and still water venues.
These three rods most often come with various tip options. Avon tips are hollow and are used when fishing for smaller barbel, big chub, and roach. These are seen on float rods and ledgering rods. Quiver tips are the most common tip type and are seen on rods across the board. You’ll often find that you’ll get two or three different quiver tips with your rod, each with a different weight rating. These can be as light as 0.5oz or as heavy as 3oz and these ratings refer to the optimal casting weight of the tip. You’ll also find rods with fibreglass tip options, too.
These three rod options are often available in slightly shorter lengths than a carp rod, although it can vary between 9ft and 12ft. Test curves on these rods also tend to be lighter than carp rods, and can be as delicate as 1lb. Once again, the test curve you choose will depend greatly on the venue you’re fishing and the type of fish you’re targeting. For example, if you’re targeting a large or hard fighting fish in a fast flowing river you’ll want a rod with a greater test curve. If you’re targeting a specific fish, you might want to invest in a rod that is designed for it, too. Barbel rods, for example, have been designed with hard fighting barbel in mind. However, to throw more confusion into the mix, there is nothing to say that you can’t use a barbel rod to target tench or bream, a feeder rod to spin for predators, or a waggler rod for float fishing. It is all about picking a rod that suits your needs and conditions of the water. Coarse rods and match rods are slightly cheaper than carp rods on average and range between £20 and £400. The most popular rods often come in between £50 and £150. Once again Daiwa rods are prevalent throughout the price brackets. Maver rods and Drennan rods are both popular among the match fishing scene, too, and these two brands are produce tackle dedicated to match fishing.
Predator Rods, Pike Rods, and Lure Rods
If you’re looking to target fish with teeth then you’ll want a rod designed for a predator. The UK is lucky enough to boast plenty of predators, the most popular freshwater species being pike, perch, and zander. There are also countless saltwater predators that you can fish for and there is often some overlap between sea fishing boat rods and predator rods .
The most popular type of predator rod is a spinning rod, which is often paired with a spinning reel. Spinning rods are typically shorter than carp or coarse rods as you’re likely to be using them from a boat, where a longer rod would feel ungainly and unbalanced. Rather than being measured by test curve, these rods are rated based on their optimal casting weight, which is either listed in grams or ounces. This is because spinning rods are designed to cast lures (imitation fish with a hook built into their body) as well as dead baits (previously caught prey fish which the angler manipulates to look alive in the water). Like coarse rods or specimen rods, you’ll often find spinning rods dedicated for a particular predator. Once again, there’s no reason you can’t mix and match and just because you’re holding a rod designed for a pike it doesn’t mean you can’t target a perch.
Light rock fishing is an area of predator angling that has really grown in popularity in recent years. This involves targeting tiny predators and thus requires highly sensitive rods which are often considerably shorter and lighter than traditional lure rods. Drop shotting is another popular style of angling in the UK and it is a popular method used on the country’s canal system. You can get drop shot rods that are specifically designed for this style of angling.
Predator rods can be as cheap as £15 and at the top end of the spectrum you can expect to part with £150 or so. Rods around £40 or £50 are often considered ‘middle of the road’ in this category. Some brands have their own dedicated predator fishing mini-brands, such as Fox with their Fox Rage rods. You’ll find American names in this section, too, such as Savage Gear and Berkley. Shimano rods and Daiwa rods are prevalent throughout.
Sea Fishing Rods
If you’re sea fishing then chances are you’re either going to be fishing from the land into the water (whether that’s from the end of a pier or stood on a beach) or you’ll be fishing from a boat. These two types of sea fishing not only target different species but they also use wildly different rods.
Surf rods, also known as beach rods, are the rods you use to cast from the beach into the water. In order to get the kind of distance you require to cast out over the surf and into the deeper water where the fish dwell, these rods are often longer than any other rod type on the market – with the shortest surf rods coming in at 13ft and longest stretching out past 16ft. Beach rods can range between £15 and £500 in price, with the average angler choosing something around the £100 mark. Zziplex rods are considered to be the top of the pack by many surf casting anglers. Daiwa’s rods are in the mix again, and names like Imax, Penn, and Sonik are all popular in this category.
Boat rods, often split into general use boat rods and uptide rods, are shorter than their surf casting counterparts in order to allow you to use them effectively in a more compact space. The advantage these boat rods have over standard spinning rods is their resistance to salt water, which is highly corrosive and can cause serious damage to your tackle. Often less than 10ft in length, these rods are graded based on the line break strain you use, so you’ll see ratings such as 6lb-12lb or 30lb-50lb listed on these rods. These rods can range from as little as £10 to £100, with brands like Shakespeare, Leeda, and Daiwa all showing their faces across the price range.
Fly Rods
Fly fishing is the oldest form of angling in the UK and rods range between as little as £15 to well in excess of £800. G Loomis is the premier brand in the fly fishing category and all G Loomis rods are manufactured by hand in the US. If you want your fly rod UK made then Hardy rods are the ones to look out for. These two brands operate at the top end of the spectrum, but there is no need to break the bank if you’re trying out the sport for the first time. Shakespeare and Leeda both produce rods that are very affordable for the angler on a budget and Greys rods are excellent as a mid-range option, too.
Fly rods are differentiated much like sea fishing rods, with ratings based on line rather than test curves or casting weights. However, fly fishing uses its own rating system, with line weights decided by an AFTM (Association of Fishing Tackle Manufacturers) rating. These range from #3 lines, which are the lightest, to #12 lines, for seriously heavy duty fly fishing. In the UK, you’ll most often be faced with line choices between #6 and #9, although you will find rods that accommodate line outside of this range. Fly rods tend to be around 9ft in length, although this can vary too and you’ll find rods anywhere between 7ft and 10ft.
As the UK’s leading specialist in angling supplies, Angling Direct takes pride in covering all bases and the seal of approval from us means peace of mind for you. We’re also determined to give you the best possible price for your gear. Our price checker promise means that we’ll always aim to match the price of any of our UK competitors – whether that’s in-store or online. So, whether you’re looking for a handcrafted piece of perfection from bespoke rod specialist Harrison or you prefer to rely on the experience of a tried and tested rod from a stalwart of the industry such as Fox , we have a top quality rod at an exceptional price for you! As the UK’s leading stockist of the world famous Daiwa brand, we are able to offer exclusive deals across Daiwa’s range of rods.
Angling Direct is composed of a team of dedicated anglers, from all areas of the sport, and we’re proud of the variety of anglers in our ranks. Our own brand Advanta rod range is where we really showcase the variety of knowledge from our team, and as you can see we have rods available for all types of fishing. All rods come complete with extensive warranties and the kind of quality assurance guarantees only possible when buying from the world’s most iconic brands. Most manufacturers will also include their own warranty, so you are getting double the support.
We understand that not every angler is willing or able to spend big money on top-shelf tackle, which is why we’ve covered all entry-level bases with a wide variety of quality budget rods. There is no longer any reason why budget should stop you from competing with the bug guns. For the novice angler who may be intimidated by larger price tags, our range of value-for-money budget rods allows budding anglers to try their hand at the sport without breaking the bank. As our store features excellent value for money across all areas of the sport, it also offers the chance for committed anglers to try their hand at a different style of angling.
Angling Direct: Serious about your fishing…
Narrow Product List
|
i don't know
|
A longhorned grasshopper or bush cricket is also known as a?
|
long-horned grasshopper | Project Noah
long-horned grasshopper
Tweet
Description:
An unidentified long-horned grasshopper, also known as a katydid or bush cricket. The family Tettigoniidae "contains more than 6,400 species, most of which live in the tropics. Tettigoniids may be distinguished from grasshoppers by the length of their filamentous antennae, which may exceed their own body length, while grasshoppers' antennae are always relatively short and thickened." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigoniid...
Habitat:
Spotted along a survey transect in mixed lowland equatorial rainforest (freshwater swamp forest/sago swamp).
No species ID suggestions
|
Tettigoniidae
|
A gazetteer offers indexed information mainly oriented by?
|
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
Walking Sticks Crickets, Praying Mantis, Locusts and Others.
Grasshoppers. About 8,000 species of grasshoppers are known worldwide; more than 600 species occur in North America alone. The term, shorthorned grasshoppers, refers to the fact that all individuals of this family have short antennae that do not exceed the combined length of the head and thorax (Figure 11A). All species are phytophagous, but only a few increase to numbers large enough to become major pests. Grasshoppers typically have a single generation per year and pass the winter as egg pods in the soil. Some species of these grasshoppers are quite colorful (Figure 11B). One of the more famous shorthorned grasshoppers is the lubber grasshopper. This African species is commonly used for decades for classroom dissections (Figure 11C).
Figure 11A. A shorthorned grasshopper illustrating the short antennae.
The term locust is used to refer to some species of migratory shorthorned grasshoppers. A few species of locusts are the most important agricultural pests in the world. They have destroyed crops from Biblical days to the present time, with every continent plagued by migratory locusts. These insects are especially prevalent in semi-arid climates.
Figure 11B. A harlequin shorthorned grasshopper from Arizona-a common migratory species.
Image compliments of Bob Spencer.
Figure 11C. A lubber grasshopper that is commonly used for classroom dissections. Also a migratory species.
Image compliments of Bob Spencer.
A few species of locusts are the most important agricultural pests in the world (Figure 6).� They have destroyed crops from Biblical days to the present time, with every continent plagued by migratory locusts.� The Desert Locust is one of about a dozen species of short-horned grasshoppers (Acridoidea) that are known to change their behavior and form swarms of adults or bands of hoppers (wingless nymphs). The swarms that form can be dense and highly mobile. The Latin name for Desert Locust is Schistocerca gregaria (Forskal). During quiet periods (known as recessions) Desert Locusts are usually restricted to the semi-arid and arid deserts of Africa, the Near East and South-West Asia that receive less than 200 mm of rain annually. This is an area of about 16 million square kilometers, consisting of about 30 countries. During plagues, Desert Locusts may spread over an enormous area of some 29 million square kilometers, extending over or into parts of 60 countries. This is more than 20% of the total land surface of the world. During plagues, the Desert Locust has the potential to damage the livelihood of a tenth of the world's population.
There is no evidence that Desert Locust plagues occur after a specific number of years. Instead, plagues develop intermittently. Plagues of locusts have been reported since the Pharaonic times in ancient Egypt. During this century, Desert Locust plagues occurred in 1926-1934, 1940-1948, 1949-1963, 1967-1969 and 1986-1989. A Desert Locust lives a total of about three to five months although this is extremely variable and depends mostly on weather and ecological conditions. The life cycle comprises three stages: egg, hopper and adult. Eggs hatch in about two weeks (the range is 10-65 days), hoppers develop in five to six stages over a period of about 30-40 days, and adults mature in about three weeks to nine months but more frequently from two to four months.
Desert Locust females lay eggs in an egg pod primarily in sandy soils at a depth of 10-15 centimeters below the surface. A solitary female deposits about 95-158 eggs whereas a gregarious female lays usually less than 80 eggs in an egg pod. Females can lay at least three times in their lifetime usually at intervals of about 6-11 days. Up to 1,000 egg pods have been found in one square mete r.
Desert Locusts usually fly with the wind at a speed of about 16-19 km/h until they encounter a storm, at which point they lay eggs in the ground.� The rainfall in this area will provide plant growth for the next generation of locusts.� Migration is therefore a mechanism to ensure population survival in semi-arid climates where rainfall is irregular and localized.
Locusts can stay in the air for long periods of time. For example, locusts regularly cross the Red Sea, a distance of 300 km. In the past there have been some spectacular and very long distance swarm migrations, for example from North-West Africa to the British Isles in 1954 and from West Africa to the Caribbean, a distance of 5,000 km in about ten days in 1988. Solitary Desert Locust adults usually fly at night whereas gregarious adults (swarms) fly during the day .
Locust swarms can vary from less than one square kilometers to several hundred square kilometers. There can be at least 40 million and sometimes as many as 80 million locust adults in each square kilometer of swarm. Early in 1994, air reconnaissance observations registered 50 swarms that invaded Kenya. The total number of individual insects in these swarms was estimated to exceed 50 billion locusts, weighing about 100,000 tons.� With a very large swarms this could equate to 40,000 million locusts . A Desert Locust adult can consume roughly its own weight in fresh food per day that is about two grams every day. �On their way to oviposition (egg laying) sites, locust swarms frequently descend on agriculture crops and inflict incredible damage.� A swarming cloud of millions of individuals will occasionally land in mass and devour all vegetation in sight, including entire crops.� Because these attacks are typically instantaneous and overwhelming, there is very little farmers can do on their own.
rage swarm (or about one ton of locusts) eats the same amount of food in one day as about 10 elephants or 25 camels or 2,500 people. � Based on simple math the Kenyan locus that year consumed enough food to feed 1,000,000,000 people.
When conditions are favorable for reproduction, locust numbers increase and when they are not, numbers decrease either by natural mortality or through migration. For the Desert Locust, favorable conditions for breeding are moist, sandy or sand/clay soil to depths of 10-15 cm below the surface, �some bare areas for egg-laying, and green vegetation for hopper development. Often favorable conditions may exist in the desert but there are no locusts present. Therefore, the presence of moist soil and green vegetation does not automatically mean that there are locusts around
As Desert Locusts increase in number and become more crowded, they change their behavior from that of acting as an individual (solitarious) insect to that as acting as part of a group (gregarious). The appearance of the locust also changes: solitary adults are brown whereas gregarious adults are pink (immature) and yellow (mature). Up until 1921, it was thought that the Desert Locust was actually two different species of locusts.
Although the Desert Locust is considered to be the most important species of locust due to its ability to migrate over large distances and rapidly increase its numbers, there are several other important species of locusts throughout the world:
African Migratory Locust (Locusta migratoria migratorioides) - Africa;
Oriental Migratory Locust (Locusta migratoria manilensis) - South-East Asia;
Red Locust (Nomadacris septemfasciata) - Eastern Africa;
Brown Locust (Locustana pardalina) - Southern Africa;
Moroccan Locust (Dociostaurus maroccanus) - North-West Africa to Asia;
Bombay Locust (Nomadacris succincta) - South-West to South-East Asia;
Australian Plague Locust (Chortoicetes terminifera) - Australia;
Tree Locusts (Anacridium sp.) - Africa, Mediterranean, Near East.
At present the primary method of controlling Desert Locust swarms and hopper bands is with mainly organophosphate chemicals applied in small concentrated doses (referred to as ultra low volume (ULV) formulation) by vehicle-mounted and aerial sprayers and to a lesser extent by knapsack and hand-held sprayers. Control has to be over huge areas as some of the swarms can reach over several hundred square miles and contain billions of these insects. This typically is accomplished by ultra low volume (ULV) aerial spraying with technical malathion.� Small planes that spray pesticide mixed with water accomplish normal agricultural aerial spraying.� Several gallons of the mixture are sprayed per acre, with each flight covering only 10 to 20 acres before the plane must land and reload spray materials.
ULV spraying is unique, in that 'technical,' or undiluted malathion is sprayed at the rate of one-to-two ounces per acre.� Because WW II bombers are used they can spray huge areas before having to reload.� When possible, these ULV applications are aimed at the migrating nymphal forms before the locusts become airborne.� Because malathion is a selective insecticide, it has essentially no effect on nontarget organisms (such as wildlife, domestic or farm animals, and humans).
Locust survey and control are primarily the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture in locust affected countries and are operations undertaken by national locust units. There are also several regional locust organizations that assist with survey and control operations. During times of outbreaks and plagues, external assistance from the donor community and other international organizations is usually required.
Extensive research is in progress on biological control and other means of non-chemical control of locusts. The current focus is primarily on pathogens and insect growth regulators. Thus far control by natural predators and parasites is limited since locusts can quickly migrate away from most natural enemies. Although giant nets, flamethrowers, lasers and huge vacuums have been proposed in the past, these are not in use for locust control. People and birds often eat locusts but usually not enough to significantly reduce population levels over large areas.
Weather satellites and other satellites used to monitor the environment cannot detect locust individuals or swarms. However, the highly sophisticated satellites used by the military can indeed detect locusts but these images are not available. Even if they were, it is unlikely that national and international locust organizations would have the ability to interpret the hundreds of images that would be produced on a daily basis
There are many reasons as to why it is difficult to successfully combat the Desert Locust. Some of these are: (1) the extremely large area (16-30 million sq. km) within which locusts can be found, (2) the remoteness and difficult access of such areas, (3) the insecurity or lack of safety (such as land mines) in some areas, (4) the limited resources for locust monitoring and control in some of the affected countries, (5) the undeveloped basic infrastructure (roads, communications, water and food) in many countries, (6) the difficulty in maintaining a sufficient number of trained staff and functioning resources during the long periods of recession in which there is little or no locust activity, (7) political relations amongst affected countries, (8) the difficulty in organizing and implementing control operations in which the pesticide must be applied directly onto the locusts, and (9) the difficulty in predicting outbreaks given the lack of periodicity of such incidents and the uncertainty of rainfall in locust areas.
People in several countries collect locusts using large nets and by other means. Locusts are usually stir-fried, roasted or boiled and eaten immediately or dried and eaten later (see some recipes below). Locusts are rich in protein. During periods of increased locust activity, piles of dead locusts can be found in the market places of many locust affected countries. About 62% of the dry weight of an adult Desert Locust consists of proteins, 17% as fats, and the remainder as inorganic constituents (Si, Cu, Fe, Mn, Na, K, Ca, Mg, Ti, Ni, P, S).
One of the mandates of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is to provide information on the general locust situation to all interested countries and to give timely warnings and forecasts to those countries in danger of invasion. Therefore, FAO operates a centralized Desert Locust information service within the Locust Group at FAO Headquarters, Rome, Italy. All locust affected countries transmit locust data to FAO who in turn analyze this information in conjunction with weather and habitat data and satellite imagery in order to assess the current locust situation, provide forecasts up to six weeks in advance and issue warnings on an ad-hoc basis. FAO prepares monthly bulletins and periodic updates summarizing the locust situation and forecasting migration and breeding on a country by country basis. These are distributed by email, fax, and post. All locust information is archived at FAO Headquarters and some of this is available on the Internet.
Furthermore, FAO provides training and prepares publications on various aspects of locusts. FAO undertakes field assessment missions and coordinates survey and control operations as well as assistance during locust plagues.
Of course when a particular area is heavy hit by these crop destroying insects. Here are a few local recipes from locust-affected countries.
Tinjiya (Tswana recipe): remove the wings and hindlegs of the locusts, and boil in a little water until soft. Add salt, if desired, and a little fat and fry until brown. Serve with cooked, dried mealies (corn).
Sikonyane (Swazi recipe): prepare embers and roast the whole locust on the embers. Remove head, wings, and legs, in other words, only the breast part is eaten. The South Sotho people use locusts especially as food for travelers. The heads and last joint of the hindlegs are broken off and the rest laid on the coals to roast. The roasted locusts are ground on a grinding stone to a fine powder. This powder can be kept for long periods of time and is taken along on a journey. Dried locusts are also prepared for the winter months. The legs, when dried, are especially relished for their pleasant taste.
Cambodia: take several dozen locust adults, preferably females, slit the abdomen lengthwise and stuff a peanut inside. Then lightly grill the locusts in a wok or hot frying pan, adding a little oil and salt to taste. Be careful not to overcook or burn them.
Barbecue (grilled): prepare the embers or charcoal. Place about one dozen locusts on a skewer, stabbing each through the centre of the abdomen. If you only want to eat the abdomen, then you may want to take off the legs or wings either before or after cooking. Several skewers of locusts may be required for each person. Place the skewers above the hot embers and grill while turning continuously to avoid burning the locusts until they become golden brow n.
In general, locusts, grasshoppers and cockroaches are common insect allergens. Locust pheromones or hormones produced during mating, in combination with scales that come off the wings and cuticle of the locust, increased amounts of dust in the air and perhaps other chemicals (such as phenols that are released from the breakdown of vegetation), can act as allergens to humans and trigger allergic reactions primarily in people already susceptible to asthma. This form of respiratory illness is often referred to as Lung Eczema or Laboratory Animal Allergy. Exposure is usually unintentional (nuisance) or through professional activities (insect rearing facilities and laboratories where there are strict rules on wearing face masks). Asthma can appear one to two years after initial exposure.
Katydids, Longhorned Grasshoppers. As indicated by their name, members of this family have elongated antennae that often exceed their entire body length (Figure 11D). In most cases the front wings of these insects are leaf-like in appearance. Of course, the advantage of this is to blend in with the leaves of their host-plants and thus avoid potential predators. Even though these insects occasionally are found feeding on agricultural plants, they rarely, if ever, reach numbers high enough to become major pests.
Figure 11D. Top.� A typical longhorned grasshopper or katydid with elongate antennae and leaf-like front wings.� Bottom. Immature longhorned grasshopper-same species as adult.
Some of the mimicry displayed by these insect is amazing. Can you find the dead leaf katydid in Figure 11E?
Figure 11E. A katydid exhibiting a high degree of mimicry. Image courtesy of Peter Chew.
I was once collecting insects in Guatemala and happened to walk by a plant that was severely damaged by some caterpillars with large holes eaten in the leaves.� Out of the corner of my eye one on the leaves appeared to be walking.� On close inspection it was a katydid.� Of course the wings were leaf-like but amazingly its wings also appeared that they had been partially consumed with large holes in them.� More to my astonishment the wings also exhibited several symptoms of bacterial leaf spot-a plant disease.� Bacterial leaf spot on leaves initially starts out as small brown rotting spots.� As the disease progresses the brown spots turn into small holes.� Here was an insect that had wings that looked like leaves that had been feed upon by another insect and had several symptoms of plant disease-all mimicry.� Nature is amazing.� I wish I had taken and picture of that to show you.
�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Mormon Cricket-Anabrus simplex
Mormon Cricket-Anabrus simplex. This one of the more famous of the longhorned grasshoppers. Mormon crickets have variable coloration. The overall color may be black, brown, red, purple or greens.� They may undergo morphological changes triggered by high population densities, similar to those seen in locusts. The best-attested change is coloration: single individuals typically have drab coloration while swarming individuals are often brightly colored. The "shield" (actually vestigial wings) behind the head may have colored markings. The abdomen may appear to be striped. Females have a long ovipositor, which may be mistaken for a stinger. Both sexes have long antennae.
Life Cycle. Mormon cricket eggs mostly hatch the spring after they are laid, although in some high-elevation areas eggs may take two years to hatch. Hatching begins when soil temperatures reach 40 �F (4 �C). The nymphs pass through seven instars before reaching the adult stage, typically taking 60 to 90 day. The female lays her eggs by thrusting her ovipositor deep into the soil. Females can deposit about one hundred eggs each s.
These insects exhibit rather unusual breeding behaviors. Breeding begins within 10 to 14 days of reaching the adult stage. The male passes a large spermatophore (sperm packet) to the female, which can be up to 27% of his body weight. The spermatophore is mostly food for the female to consume but also contains sperm to fertilize her eggs. The value of this nuptial gift is such that swarming-phase females compete for males. This sexual role-reversal is not seen in solitary-phase females.
The Mormon cricket exists in populations of relatively low density throughout most of its range. However, at certain times and places, population explosions or infestations occur in which large numbers of the cricket form roving bands. These bands may include millions of individuals and have a population density of up to 100 individuals per square meter. These infestations may last years or even decades, and are characterized by a gradual increase and then decrease in population. The factors that trigger these infestations are poorly understood, but are thought to be weather-related. When a large band crosses a road it can cause a safety hazard by causing distracted revulsion on the part of the driver, and by causing the road surface to become slick with their fluids.
Damage. The Mormon cricket prefers to eat forbs , especially cultivated crops such as alfalfa , and vegetables . Grasses and shrubs such as sagebrush are also eaten. Insects, including other Mormon crickets, are also eaten, especially individuals that have been killed or injured by automobiles or insecticides. Although Mormon crickets are primarily phytophagus (feed on plants) they will fed on protein, including road kill, dead insects and even become cannibalistic when swarming. Some research indicates the Mormon cricket's cannibalistic behavior causes these crickets to swarm and move in band.� The reasoning being that rickets attack the cricket in front of them every few seconds and must move constantly forward to avoid attacks from behind.
���������������������������������������������� Mormon crickets eating another Mormon cricket. Right swarming Mormon crickets.� Image courtesy Katie Madonia.�
Control. Mormon crickets are preyed upon by a wide variety of birds and mammals. These predators include California Gulls , crows , coyotes and various rodents. They were also eaten by Native Americans . There are no predators that specialize on Mormon crickets, which may be explained by the cricket's migratory habits and large population fluctuations.
The most common chemical control method used is carbaryl (typically sold as "Sevin") bait. This bait kills both the Mormon crickets that eat the bait, and the crickets that eat crickets that eat the bait. Insecticides applied directly to crops may kill the insects, but due to the large size of swarms this method usually does not save the crop from being destroyed.
As Mormon crickets are flightless, physical barriers may be effective. Barriers should be at least two feet high and made of a smooth material. Recently, residents of some small towns have been effectively using boom boxes and sound systems playing hard rock music to divert the moving swarms away from crops and houses, as the insects seem to be deterred by it, although it is unknown if the result is due to the music or the heavy vibrations.
Historical Significance.� After Brigham Young led the first band of Latter-day Saints into what is now Salt Lake City, Utah , the pioneers had the good fortune of a relatively mild winter. Although late frosts in April and May decimated some of the crops, the Mormons seemed to be well on their way to self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, swarms of insects appeared in late May.
These insects, now called " Mormon crickets " are unable to fly, but instead travel in huge devouring hordes. Mormon crickets eat all plant material in their path, but they also cannibalize any insects that die on the way. They're known to cyclically swarm in some areas of the Mountain West, especially in Utah and Nevada . These bugs understandably terrified the pioneers. Stomping on the pests did not dissuade them from entering farms. Indeed, other crickets would advance to eat the remains of their brothers. Mormons, prolific journal writers, often cast this disaster in Biblical terms like the 8th plague of locusts .
According to some pioneers' accounts, legions of gulls appeared by June 9, 1848. Many letters and diaries recount that these birds, native to the Great Salt Lake , ate mass quantities of crickets, drank some water, regurgitated , and continued eating more crickets. Ornithologists don't regard this as particularly unusual because the seagulls around the Great Salt Lake often eat insects in the adjacent valleys, but some pioneers saw the gulls' arrival as a miracle , and the story was recounted from the pulpit by church leaders such as Orson Pratt and George A. Smith . ( Pratt 1880 , p. 275; Smith 1869 , p. 83) The traditional story is that the seagulls annihilated the insects, ensuring the survival of some 4,000 Mormons who had traveled to Utah. For this reason, Seagull Monument was erected and the California gull is the state bird of Utah.
Walking Sticks. There are about 700 species of walking sticks worldwide. Almost all are tropical in origin with relatively few living naturally in the United States. Most species of this family mimic twigs in both body shape and color (Figure 11F). However, there are some tropical species that are quite leaf-like in appearance. Most walking sticks are quite large, with some Thai species reaching 13 inches in length (longest insect species).
Figure 11F. A typical twig-like walking stick.
These insects have developed a variety of protective mechanisms. An example of these behaviors is exhibited by the large Phyllium stick insect from Malaysia. This stick is flattened and leaf-like in appearance (Figure 11G). In fact, when the authors have kept several together in a terrarium, one or two eventually were partially eaten by the other sticks, undoubtedly one confusing the other with leaves, their normal diet. As do most sticks, these insects rarely move; when they do, it is quite slow. There is no advantage in moving rapidly while mimicking a leaf or twig.
Figure 11G.� A Phyllium walking stick from Malaysia.
Heteropterix sp. (Figure 11H) has a whole bag of defensive mechanisms.� It blends in with its host plant as it is flattened, green and somewhat leaf-like.� In addition it will use its hind legs which are armed with sharp spines in order to fend off potential predators. These spines are capable of drawing blood when the insect is handled carelessly. At the same time that this stick attacks with its hind legs, it will spread its hind wings, exposing bright red underwings and produce a hissing noise (caused by scraping wings) in an attempt to startle its attacker. Many insects commonly use flashing bright colors. It is thought that the sudden display of bright color will startle a potential predator. Normally bright colors in nature are a sign of some type of danger (warning coloration). The hissing is assumed to mimic that of a snake. If these mechanisms fail, it will fall to the ground and play dead. Very few predators will attack dead insects.
Figure 11H. A female Heteropterix walking stick from Malaysia.
Another aggressive species is Eurycantha sp. from Papua New Guinea (Figure 11I). This species has a pair of very large spines on its hind legs that it readily uses when threatened. These spines are so large on the males that the natives of this country carve them to make fish hooks. As one might expect, this species commonly is eaten by the natives and is said to taste like shrimp.
Figure 11I. A Male Eurycantha sp. From Papua New Guinea.
There are many stick species that exude a noxious odor when disturbed and some species that mimic leaves will sway back and forth as though being windblown. Both of these defensive mechanisms can be readily observed in McCleay's Spectre, an Australian species that is commonly raised by many stick enthusiasts around the world. As with many species of walking sticks, this species exhibits a high degree of sexual dimorphism, with the female looking totally different that the male. In this case the male is less heavy bodied and bears wings (Figure 11J).
�����������
����� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������Figure 11J. Right-A female McCleays�s Spectre looking totally different than the male-Left.
There is an Australian species of walking stick that is closely related to McCleays�s Spectre that feeds mainly on the plant Casuarina.� The seeds of this plant are small, round and appear very similar to the eggs of the walking stick (Figure 11K).� The plant seeds have a small fleshy part that is highly nutritious and prized by a few species of long-legged ants which readily collect and store them below ground for the winter months.� Due to the similarities in appearances these ants also mistakenly collect and store the walking stick eggs.� However, when the ants begin feeding they recognize that the eggs are of little value and leave them below ground in their nest.� This is obviously advantageous to the walking sticks as the eggs are protected from poor weather and potential predators. Once the sticks hatch the new nymphs are similarly colored and rapidly run around like adult ants.� This allows them to walk out of the ant�s nest unharmed by these predators (the ants).
�� �����������������������
���� ������������������Figure 11K.� Left.� Australian walking stick egg.� Right.� Ant-like walking stick that is very active.
All walking sticks are phytophagous and most will feed on a large variety of host-plants. There is a large walking stick society based in England that has over 700 members throughout the world. Members are primarily amateurs who enjoy raising and studying these delightful insects. The standard plants used to raise most stick species from throughout the world are the leaves of deciduous oak and bramble (blackberry, raspberry etc.). Even though these are not the natural hosts of these insects, most species do quite well on them.
In the United States an USDA permit is required to legally raise or keep walking sticks from foreign countries. The reasoning behind this requirement is that these insects are plant feeders and have quite a wide host range. If some were to get loose, it is possible that they could become pests; consequently, very few permits have been issued in the last few years. Unfortunately, there is a walking stick underground and many people now own colonies of several species. Some pet stores now illegally sell them and the authors have even seen them for sale at a well-known California amusement park. The most commonly reared stick in the United States is Baculun thai (Figure 11L). As with many species, this insect is parthenogenetic. That is, males are not needed to reproduce and only females are reproduced from the unfertilized eggs.
It should be noted that a few exotic species of sticks have escaped from captivity and actually have caused some plant damage in Southern California (mainly San Diego).� However, considering the number of people that are keeping cultures of exotic species of these insects they will probably not cause any major damage to our crops even if escaped.
������� �����������������������������������Figure 11L. A female Baculum thai, the most commonly raised walking stick��
��������������� ������������������������������������in the U.S. Males of this species have not been discovered in nature.
Praying Mantis. These insects are comparatively long-lived, with many species requiring from three to twelve months in the egg stage. After hatching, development to adulthood may range from Three months to two years, with adults living similar periods (depending on the species).
The first name of the mantis is often spelled with either an "e" or an "a." "Preying" refers to the fact that they are predators. "Praying" refers to the behavior of holding their front legs up near their head when hunting. In this case they look as though they are praying. "Praying" mantis is more commonly used than "preying" mantis.
These well-known insects are easily recognized by their elongate prothorax and well-developed raptorial front legs (in raptorial legs the femur is swollen). Since the femur is the bulkiest segment of the leg it houses most of the muscles in the leg.� It follows that mantids would benefit from an enlarged femur to house more muscles and give the front legs additional strength to catch and hold its prey.� Mantids are also well armed with large spines that line the ventral margins of the femur and tibia (Figure 11M). The tibia is also capable of being folded back on the femur forming an efficient grasping organ for their predaceous way of life.
�
Figure 11M.� A common praying mantis with raptorial front legs.
Other characteristics of these beautiful creatures are their huge eyes that help them find prey and the wedge or triangular-shaped head that can rotate in almost any direction (Figure 11N). Mantids are chiefly tropical in origin with over 600 species occurring worldwide. There are only about 20 species in the United States, with most occurring in the southern states.
Figure 11N. A common praying mantis with raptorial front leg and huge compound eyes.
A few year ago I was reminded how fascinated people are with these amazing insects.� I was in Malaysia working with my friend Michael Yeh (an insect dealer) and he asked me if I wanted a few egg cases of the orchid mantid.�� The orchid mantid is a beautiful species that is frequently found on orchid flowers (Figure 11O).� Its coloration blends in perfectly with these flowers. In addition their legs and even abdomen are expanded laterally to blend in with the petals of the orchids on which they frequently sit waiting for a potential prey.� I didn�t think much about it at the time but brought them home.� Once home I forgot about them and most hatched and subsequently died.� I was getting ready for the Cal Poly Insect Fair and found some the mantids with approximate 60 first instar nymphs still living.� I decided to see if anyone would be interested in buying these young so I took them to the fair.� I was amazed how many people wanted to the young at $25 each.� At one point there was a line a dozen or more deep who wanted a baby orchid mantid.
Figure 11O.� An immature orchid mantid.� Image courtesy of Michael Yeh.
Mantids are general predators, feeding on any insect of appropriate size (neither too small nor too large). As a rule, they are not considered very important in the natural, or biological, control of pest species. Typically, the insect species most important for the biological control of a pest species are those that are host-specific and which feed only on that pest. Because their life cycle is closely tied to that pest, their numbers in the environment will increase as the population of the pest increases and eventually will reduce the pest to a non-problem level. Because mantids are not host-specific, the practice of buying their egg cases in order to turn the hatched nymphs loose for backyard pest control is of little, if any, value.
The praying mantis is cannibalistic, with larger forms commonly eating smaller ones. The female frequently consumes the male after mating. Any male mantid attempting to mate approaches females with great caution (very, very slowly) because he doesn�t want to be eaten before mating. In most cases, he will take several minutes to travel a few inches, especially in her immediate vicinity. Most predators, including female mantids, recognize their prey by movement. In some species, once the male mounts the female and copulation begins, he has a difficult time releasing his sperm packet due to a neurological hang-up located in the brain. However, once the male mounts the female, she reaches backward and bites his head off, thus releasing the neurological block. Then the sperm packet is released and the female consumes the rest of the male.
In the United States, eggs are typically deposited on branches or bark in an egg case or mass, (ootheca) (Figure 11P). This is the overwintering stage. In the spring the young nymphs emerge to grow to adults by late summer or fall.
Figure 11P.� An egg case or ootheca of a common preying mantis.
Being large common insects, mantids in many countries are subject to considerable folklore. In Guatemala, children are told that these insects will eat your tongue, if given a chance; consequently, it is not uncommon for children, upon seeing a mantid to slap their hands over their mouths and run as fast as they can. The translation of the Vietnamese name for mantis is heaven�s horse. There it is believed that if you see a mantis, it is considered good luck if you place a drop of honey or sugar on its head as the insect will fly to the heavens and present this gift to the gods. It is no wonder that many people are fascinated by these creatures and there are many myths associated with them considering their interesting behaviors, large size and in some cases, beautiful and striking appearance (Figure 11Q).
Figure 11Q. An exotic looking praying mantis from Zaire.
The coloration and anatomy of many of the mantids blend in with their surrounding environment (Figure 11R).� This could serve two possible functions, namely to protect them from potential predators or hide them from their prey making capture easier.
Figure 11R.� Four species of mantids with a high degree of mimicry. �Images courtesy of Michael Yeh.
Pet stores occasionally sell praying mantids, with the most common species available being a large green or tan African mantid (Figure 11S). It is best to buy a small nymph, as the adults are not long lived. Mantids can be kept in a small aquarium at room temperature. They will eat almost any insect (adult or immature) of appropriate size (1/4 to 3/4 their size) and should be fed several times a week. Occasionally egg cases can be found in the late fall through spring. In this case, up to 80 or 90 nymphs will hatch in the spring. The young can be kept together if they are provided enough room. When they reach the third instar they will begin to eat one another. Fruit flies are an easily obtained diet for the early instars. Simply let a ripe banana sit for a few days and an instant colony will appear. An alternative source of food for the early instar nymphs is aphids. Mantids do not require a source of water, as they will get enough moisture from their food.
����������
����������������� ��Figure 11S.� A mantis that is commonly available in pet stores and occurs naturally in the US.
Crickets. Everyone has enjoyed the peaceful chirping of a cricket on a warm summer night (Figure 11T). And most know that the male produces this chirping to attract the opposite sex for mating. The forewings possess a hardened tooth ("file") and a ribbed ridge ("scraper") on the hindwings. When the wings are rapidly opened and closed, it causes the file to rub over the scraper, thus producing the characteristic chirping.
Actually it is possible to determine the prevailing temperature by counting cricket chirps.� As with all insects, crickets are cold blooded meaning that their body temperature is determined by prevailing temperatures.� And as might be expected the rate of metabolism and activity slows or increases as prevailing temperatures decrease or increase, respectively. As a result, the rate of cricket chirping (number of chirp in a given time) increases or decreases with changes in prevailing temperature. The formula for determining temperature is � count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and add 38.� For example if a cricket chirps 30 times in 15 seconds the prevailing temperature would be 68 F.
An interesting fact, over the past 20 years 90 to 95% of the male field crickets in the Hawaiian Islands have progressively lost their chirp and therefore cannot attract females for mating.� This is apparently due to the process of evolution which in most cases takes hundreds if not thousand of years.� This phenomenon was undoubtedly initiated by genetic mutations in a few individuals of the overall population.� Mutated males lack the scraper and file thus preventing them from chirping.� As amazing as it may seem this loss actually gave these crickets a competitive advantage over those crickets that could sing or chirp.� In the Islands there is a parasitic fly that is attracted to cricket chirping.� Of course these flies then deposit their eggs on the crickets with their larvae subsequently feeding inside and eventually killing them.� The chirp-less crickets do not attract these flies thus the competitive advantage for survival.� At first glance it may seem that since the silent cricket cannot call females this may prevent them from finding a mate and thus reduce their ability to perpetuate their existence.� However they have avoided this disadvantage by merely congregating around the few remaining males that can chirp and thus mating with attracted females.
Figure 11T. A common field cricket found throughout the United States.
Crickets have historically played a very important role in Chinese folklore, entertainment and recreation. Cricket culture in China encompasses a 2000-year history of insect singing and cricket fighting. The Chinese appreciation of crickets extends far beyond the entertainment value to include their powerful vitality and interesting life cycles. The fact that crickets are capable of laying hundreds of eggs was in line with the historical Chinese beliefs that the one ingredient to a successful life was to have as many children as possible. It was considered a compliment if someone blessed another to have as many children as a cricket. Ground crickets or katydids were even thought to possess aphrodisiac properties.
The keeping of crickets in cages purely for appreciation of their songs became very popular in the Tang dynasty (400 BC). This became popular with both the common people and members of the Royal Palace. In the fall, ladies of the palace would catch crickets and put them in golden cages to appreciate their song during the lonely evening hours. Because most of these ladies were among the 3000 or more concubines of the emperors, their lives were rich in material goods, but lacked social contacts. It is easy to draw similarities between the life of the solitary cricket in a golden cage and the lonely concubines of the palace. Rather than enjoying the sweet chirp of a singing cricket, the concubines may have heard a reflection of their own loneliness and sadness in the cricket chirp.
In some palaces cricket culture was highly refined, with professional cricket "keepers" on the palace payroll. In some cases a mixture of brass powder and rosin was applied with a fine needle to the file-scraper apparatus. This application was said to heighten and refine the volume of the insect's voice.
From the beginning of the Song dynasty (960 to 1278 AD) recreational cricket fighting became very popular in the Chinese culture. At its peak, cricket fighting was as popular with the common people and royalty as profession sports are today in the United States. China even produced the famous Cricket Emperor (Jia Shi-Dao 1213-1275 AD) who was accused of slacking on his duties due to his every encompassing passion of cricket fighting. Thousands of carefully selected crickets were sent to the capital each year, with many a fortune won or lost on the outcome of a single fight. Volumes were written on how to select or selectively breed good fighters.
It is written when a minister of a local rice granary saw a good fighting cricket; he traded a prized horse for it. When he was away on business, his wife took the lid off the cricket pot for a peek at the prize cricket that quickly escaped only to be eaten by a cockatiel (bird). In despair of possible repercussions from her returning husband, the wife committed suicide. Upon his return, the minister seeing his dead wife and lost cricket also committed suicide. It is not known whether he committed suicide over his dead wife or lost cricket.
Anyone who has kept any of a variety of insect-eating pets is well aware of the cost of using crickets for pet food. Generally these can be purchased in a local pet shop or bait store and typically cost around $2.00 per 50 crickets, regardless of size. Of course an alternative to buying crickets is to raise them. This is a fairly easy task with a few minor challenges; the main two are prevention of their escape from the rearing containers and providing the correct environment for egg hatching. Rearing containers should be steep-walled and fairly deep to prevent the later instars and adults from jumping out. Because the hatchlings can climb most surfaces, it is a good idea to coat the upper inside lip of the container with a thin layer of Vaseline. The bottom of the rearing container should be covered with a 1 to 2 inch layer of moist vermiculite, which serves as a substrate for egg laying. The degree of moisture in the vermiculite is critical, as dry or excessively wet conditions will result in death of the eggs. Reaching this ideal level is a matter of experimentation. Start off with fairly moist vermiculite and introduce several adult crickets for about three weeks. After that interval, if small white first instar crickets have not appeared, try again using less moisture until the proper level is determined. Crickets will reproduce and grow at room temperature but when raised at 80 to 85 degrees (F), they will complete one life cycle in about half the room temperature time (three weeks). Water can be provided by a piece of sponge sitting in a dish of water. Crickets eat a variety of foods but chicken mash is a cheap and tidy standby. A cut potato will also provide additional moisture and food.
Jerusalem Crickets. This insect, also called a potato bug, is one of the best known insects in California. Adults are approximately 1 inch long, with a very large, rounded head and a striped abdomen (Figure 11U). As with most Orthoptera, the Jerusalem cricket is a plant feeder. These insects are totally harmless; although, there are many rumors that they are dangerous. These stories are spread in elementary schools and it is a common belief in the Mexican culture that these insects will kill you. The Jerusalem cricket is also known as 'Nino de la Tierra' (Child of the Earth). This name may refer to the somewhat human embryonic look of this ground dweller.
Figure 11U. A Jerusalem cricket, child of the earth or potato bug.
In Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries a close relative of the Jerusalem cricket is considered a delicacy. In this case the abdomen is split and stuffed with a peanut and subsequently fried. This is another insect that can be easily kept in a terrarium. They do best in a humid environment and will readily feed on most types of vegetables.
|
i don't know
|
Cockney rhyming slang 'bottle' traditionally means?
|
Cockney Rhyming Slang
Cockney Rhyming Slang
Close this window
Cockney rhyming slang is a form of English slang which originated in the East End of London . Many of its expressions have passed into common language, and the creation of new ones is no longer restricted to Cockneys. Up until the late 20th Century, rhyming slang was also common in Australian slang, probably due to the formative influence of cockney on Australian English.
It developed as a way of obscuring the meaning of sentences to those who did not understand the slang , though it remains a matter of speculation whether this was a linguistic accident, or whether it was developed intentionally to assist criminals or to maintain a particular community.
Rhyming slang works by replacing the word to be obscured with the first word of a phrase that rhymes with that word. For instance, "face" would be replaced by "boat," because face rhymes with "boat race." Similarly "feet" becomes "plates" ("plates of meat"), and "money" is "bread" (a very common usage, from "bread and honey"). Sometimes the full phrase is used, for example "Currant Bun" to mean "The Sun" (often referring to the British tabloid newspaper of that name). There is no hard and fast rule for this, and you just have to know whether a particular expression is always shortened, never shortened, or can be used either way.
Other examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang, or phrases inspired by it, are:
Adam and Eve = believe = as in "would you Adam and Eve it?"
Almond Rocks = socks
Aris = Aristotle = bottle & glass = arse (a two-stage rhyme) [see Plaster below]
Artful Dodger = lodger
Berk or Burk = Berkshire Hunt = cunt (used as an insult, never as an anatomical reference)
Boat = boat race = face
Bob Hope = soap
Boracic (freq. contracted to brassic) = boracic lint = skint (i.e. penniless)
Bottle = bottle and glass = arse (i. e. courage; Courage also happens to be the name of a brewery)
Brahms = Brahms and Liszt (classical composers) = pissed (i.e. drunk)
Brass Tacks = facts
Bristol = Bristol City = titty (i.e. breast)
Brown bread = dead
Chalfonts = Chalfont St Giles = piles (i.e. haemorrhoids)
Chalk Farm = arm
China = china plate = mate
Cobblers = cobblers' awls = balls or 'bollocks' (i.e. testicles , but usually meant in the sense of 'rubbish' as in "You're talking a load of cobblers")
Cock and Hen = ten
Creamed = cream crackered = knackered (i.e. exhausted or beaten)
Currant bun = sun or The Sun newspaper
Daisies = daisy roots = boots
Darby and Joan = moan
Dicky = dicky dirt = shirt
Dicky or Dickie = dickie bird = word = as in "not a dickie", or even "not a dickie bird"
Dog = dog and bone = phone
Duck and Dive = skive
Ducks and Geese = F--k-in' Police
Duke of Kent = rent
Dukes = Duke[s] of York = fork, i.e. hand, now chiefly when balled into a fist
Dustbin Lid = kid
Emmas = Emma Freud (English author and columnist) = haemorrhoids
Farmers = Farmer Giles = piles (slang for haemorrhoids )
Flowery Dell = ( prison ) cell
Gregory = Gregory Peck = neck, or cheque
Gypsy's = Gypsy's kiss = piss
Hampton Wick = prick (i.e. penis)
Half-inch = pinch (i.e. steal)
Jack = Jack Jones = alone ("On my Jack" = "On my own")
Jam jar = car
Jam tart = heart
J. Arthur = J. Arthur Rank (1930s UK flour magnate and film producer) = wank (i.e. masturbate)
Jimmy = Jimmy Riddle (unknown person, not the character killed during the Waco siege)= piddle or widdle (urinate)
Jugs = jugs of beer = ears
Khyber = Khyber Pass = arse
Lady Godiva = fiver (i.e. five- pound note)
Lionels = Lionel Blairs (English variety performer) = flares (as in flared trousers)
Loaf = loaf of bread = head ("use your loaf")
Lucy Lockett = pocket
Mickey Bliss = piss (as in "take the Mickey" = "take the piss" = satirise)
Minces (or mincers) = mince pies = eyes
Mutton = Mutt and Jeff = deaf = named after Mutt and Jeff , two early 20th century comic strip characters
Nobbies = Nobby Stiles (English footballer) = piles (haemorrhoids)
North and South = mouth
Oily rag = fag (i.e. cigarette)
Ones and twos = shoes
Orchestras = orchestra stalls = balls (Orchestra stalls = part of a concert or other hall. Example = "A kick in the orchestras.") [Coincidentally, "orchi-" is also the Greek root meaning "testicle."]
Peckham Rye = tie (i.e. necktie)
Pen and Ink = stink
Pigs ears = big beers (large glasses of Ale )
Plaster = Plaster of Paris = Aris = Aristotle = bottle = bottle and glass = arse (a three-stage rhyme)
Plates = plates of meat = feet
Porky = pork pie = lie, e.g. "He's telling porkies!"
Pony = pony and trap = crap (note: Cockneys also use "pony" to mean £25 - hopefully the meaning is clear from the context)
Rabbit = rabbit and pork = talk
Raspberry = raspberry tart = fart (as in "blowing raspberry/ies" = making rasping noises with your mouth)
Richard = Richard the Third = turd (lump of faeces)
Richard = Dicky Bird = bird (slang for girl) but also Dicky Bird = word
Rosie = Rosie Lee = tea e.g. "Have a cup of Rosie"
Round the houses = trousers
Ruby = Ruby Murray (popular singer in the 1950s born in Belfast ) = curry
Salmon and Trout = snout
Scarper = Scapa Flow = go (as in "run for it!")
Septic = septic tank = Yank (slang for an American)
Sexton Blake = cake
Skin = skin and blister = sister
Sky = sky rocket = pocket
sweaty = sweaty sock = jock = Scottish person
Syrup / sirrup = syrup of figs = wig(s)
Tea leaf = thief
The Sweeney = Sweeney Todd =Flying Squad , a special division of the Metropolitan Police ; used as the title of TV series The Sweeney
Taters = Potatoes in the mould = cold
Titfer = tit for tat = hat
Tod = Tod Sloane = own (as in "on your tod", meaning "alone")
Tom and Dick = sick
Treacle = treacle tart = sweetheart
Trouble = trouble and strife = wife
Vera = Vera Lynn (famous British wartime singer)= 'skin' or cigarette paper, eg, "got any Veras?", or chin, or gin
Whistle = whistle and flute = suit = as in "a nice whistle"
|
Courage
|
What famous French 1970s-designed anti-ship missile means 'flying fish'?
|
What is the origin of the term to "bottle it", meaning to back out, give up? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk
What is the origin of the term to "bottle it", meaning to back out, give up?
Cath Bennett, Deptford, London
In cockney rhyming slang, "bottle" means "arse" (bottle and glass). Originally, you would "lose your bottle" - i.e. be so scared as to lose control of your bowel function. This has been shortened down to just "bottle it".
Paul Wright, Rochford
It MAY have originated in Italy as the provincial phrase "ma gavte la nata" (spelling questionable, sorry) - put a cork in it (or, as we tend to say today, fuhgedabout it!)
Robert del Valle, Detroit, USA
Rhyming slang. "Bottle and glass":arse. "Bottle it," means lose your bottle. Graphic, isn't it?
Roger Barrett, South Woodford, London
Slang usage: "no bottle" means no good or useless; a "bottle" is a Naval reprimand. Speculation: glass-blowing? All the glass slides down and makes a bottle-shape (an hour-glass figure that slid to the bottom); "bottled up": on your mettle after a reprimand.
Nicholas Hewlett, Bradford, UK
Sorry Robert, but "ma gavte la nata" is Piedmontese for "please take the cork OUT", when the speaker thinks someone is being pompous. This is a running gag in "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco.
Peter Telford, Reigate, UK
Bottle was 19th Century slang for courage or nerve and the phrase came about then. However, an example of the bottle representing courage or success also figures with the word fiasco- fiasco (n.) 1855, theater slang for "a failure," by 1862 acquired the general sense of any dismal flop, on or off the stage. Via French phrase fiare fiasco "turn out a failure" (19c.), from Italian far fiasco "suffer a complete breakdown in performance," literally "make a bottle," from fiasco "bottle," from Late Latin flasco, flasconem (see flask). The reason for all this is utterly obscure today, but "the usual range of fanciful theories has been advanced" (Ayto). Weekley finds it utterly mysterious and compares French ramasser un pelle "to come a cropper (in bicycling), literally to pick up a shovel." OED makes nebulous reference to "alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history." Klein suggests Venetian glass-crafters tossing aside imperfect pieces to be made later into common flasks. But according to an Italian dictionary, fare il fiasco used to mean "to play a game so that the one that loses will pay the fiasco," in other words, he will buy the next bottle (of wine). That plausibly connects the word with the notion of "a costly mistake." ...
Joanna Cohn, London UK
|
i don't know
|
The 'Acts' book of the Bible is fully titled 'Acts of The (What?)'?
|
Acts Summary
Acts Summary
by Jay Smith
The genre of the book of Acts is Narrative History with several Sermons. Luke, the author of the Gospel of Luke, was a doctor and Gentile. He wrote this book circa 60-62 A.D. It is Luke’s sequel to the Gospel of Luke. It is titled "Acts" to emphasize that this book records the "Acts of the Apostles through the work of the Holy Spirit". The key personalities of Acts are Peter, Paul, John, James, Stephen, Barnabas, Timothy, Lydia, Silas, and Apollos.
Luke wrote the book of Acts (Acts of the Apostles) to record how believers were empowered by the Holy Spirit, worked to spread the Gospel of Christ, and are a model for the future church.
The book of Acts is also the history of the birth, the founding, and the spread of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome. It also records the transition of the Church from being almost exclusively a Jewish institution into becoming a Gentile and an international institution. Consequently, it records the transition of Christianity from a Jewish religion into an international faith. The Gospel of salvation is for all because Jesus Christ is Lord of all.
• Chapters 1-6:7, contains the events that surround Jerusalem and the infancy of the church. The contents of these passages surround the early evangelistic work in Jerusalem. It describes the events of Pentecost, and the amazingly bold sermon presented by the Apostle Peter to all the Jews who gathered for the Feast of Weeks. The result of this sermon was 3000 new believers surrendering to Jesus Christ.
• In chapters 6:8-9:31, there is a shift in the focus of evangelism to other areas. Although the ministry continued in Jerusalem, witnessing the Gospel also included those who were not completely Jewish (Samaritans and Proselytes). In 8:5, Philip traveled down to Samaria, “and began proclaiming Christ to them”. Stephen is falsely accused and stoned to death while he preaches to the religious leaders. As Stephen was dying, he prayed to Jesus Christ, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (7:59). Stephen’s executioners laid their robes at the feet of a young persecutor named Saul, who would soon become known as “Paul the Apostle”. Saul spent his early days oppressing Christians and imprisoning them, until he had a life changing experience with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus in chapter 9:3.
• From chapters 9:32-12:24, evangelism of the gospel among the gentiles begins. Peter received a revelation that the gospel was also to be shared among the Gentiles. Cornelius, a Roman Commander and some of his men become followers of Christ. Saul (the persecutor) has become a passionate follower of Christ and immediately begins preaching the gospel. We also find that the term “Christians” is first used in Antioch.
• In 12:25-16:5 the gospel is shared geographically to the Gentiles in a different region farther outside Jerusalem. Saul changes his Hebrew name to Paul, a Greek name, to reach the Gentiles. Paul and Barnabas begin their first and second missionary journeys to the Gentile world with both success and opposition. In chapter 15, the Jerusalem Council takes place to authorize spreading the gospel message to the Gentile nations.
• From 16:6-19:20, after they are forbidden to enter Asia, Paul receives a vision. He and Silas head farther West to Macedonia to preach the gospel message in the Gentile European regions. Lydia, a woman who sold purple fabric, became the first convert along with her entire household. Paul preached to the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill and next sets out on his third missionary journey. “The word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing” (19:20).
• The final chapters from 19:21-28, describe Paul’s travel to Jerusalem where he was arrested, and then his difficult travel to Rome to be put on trial. When he arrives, he is imprisoned in house arrest and the book of Acts abruptly ends without describing the events of his trial before Caesar.
|
Apostle (Christian)
|
After international electronic surveillance revelations in 2014, German government officials reportedly reverted to using?
|
Acts 1 NIV - Jesus Taken Up Into Heaven - In my - Bible Gateway
Acts 1New International Version (NIV)
Jesus Taken Up Into Heaven
1 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with[ a ] water, but in a few days you will be baptized with[ b ] the Holy Spirit.”
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
Matthias Chosen to Replace Judas
12 Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk[ c ] from the city. 13 When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. 14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
15 In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) 16 and said, “Brothers and sisters,[ d ] the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. 17 He was one of our number and shared in our ministry.”
18 (With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. 19 Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)
20 “For,” said Peter, “it is written in the Book of Psalms:
“‘May his place be deserted;
let there be no one to dwell in it,’[ e ]
and,
“‘May another take his place of leadership.’[ f ]
21 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, 22 beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”
23 So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. 24 Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen 25 to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” 26 Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Footnotes:
|
i don't know
|
Generally what metalwork process extracts a metal from its ore?
|
gcse 1. Introduction to the Extraction of Metals method related to the activity of reactivity series of metals igcse O Level KS4 science chemistry revision notes revising
The social, economic and environmental impacts of exploiting metal ores are discussed on a separate page.
The rock must contain enough of the metal compound, hence enough of the metal, to be worth exploiting the ore reserve and extract the metal by physical and chemical processes.
Low grade ores are usually uneconomic to mine and process, but high grade ores have a high enough metal content to be worth mining and extracting the metal.
The metal ore, a mineral or mixture of minerals from which economically viable amounts of metal can be extracted, i.e. its got to have enough of the metal, or one of its compounds, in it to be worth digging out!
Ores are often oxides, carbonates or sulphides because these non-metals readily combine with many metals.
e.g. iron + oxygen ===> iron oxide ores
Fe + O2(air) ===> Fe2O3 or Fe3O4 (not balanced equations, just the idea!)
This the typical chemistry involved in metal ore formation.
In extracting metals from ores you have to reverse the process e.g. by heating the ore with carbon (coke or charcoal) in a very hot smelting furnace e.g. in a blast furnace to make iron ...
iron oxide ore + carbon ===> free iron + carbon dioxide waste gas
Fe3O4 + 2C ===> 3Fe + 2CO2
The iron oxide is reduced (oxygen loss) and the carbon reducing agent is oxidised (oxygen gain).
This is typical extraction chemistry for less reactive metals.
These ores are all finite resources so we should use them wisely!
Any ore must contain enough of the metal to make it worthwhile to mine and then extract the metal.
High grade ores will therefore be the most economical to exploit BUT over time the better quality�richer sources will decrease, especially with the power of the global economy and powerful and growing economies of Brazil, China, India and other Asian economies.
The economics of metal extraction are not only dependent on the quality of the ore and the cost of extraction (ie richer ores lead to cheaper production), but also depend on the market price and demand. If demand is high the metal price rises and may off�set the price of mining lower grade ores, but if demand is low, the metal price falls and inefficient mines and smelters will go out of business ie its not worth extracting the metal. Of course it is possible to improve the technology of metal extraction and enable companies to produce more metal from the ore than was previously possible and even utilise low grade ores previously discarded and not considered worthwhile mining.
Since the majority of metals are found combined with non�metals like oxygen (oxide ion) or sulfur (sulfide ion) or the carbonate ion, chemical reactions are needed to free the metal from its mineral source.
In order to extract a metal, the ore or compound of the metal must undergo a process called REDUCTION to free the metal i.e.
The oxide/sulfide loses oxygen/sulfur, to form the free metallic atoms, or
the positive metal ion gains negative electrons to form the neutral metal atom.
The chemical that removes the oxygen from an oxide is called the reducing agent i.e. carbon, carbon monoxide or sometimes hydrogen.
Order of decreasing reactivity related to the earliest know date of extraction and use:
francium (1939, very radioactive), caesium (1860, ?), rubidium (1861, ?)
potassium (1807, 1855 from electrolysis), sodium (1807, from electrolysis)
lithium (1817, electrolysis?), calcium (1808, from electrolysis)
magnesium (1755, 1808 from electrolysis), aluminium (1825, by electrolysis)
zinc (before 1500, ), iron (extracted with charcoal before 3000 BP)
tin (~4500 BP, used to make bronze)
lead (over 9000 BP, archaeologist have found lead beads 9000 years old, used by the Romans for plumbing well over 2000 years ago)
copper (~11000 BP extracted via charcoal from ores >4000 years ago, found 'native' and was beaten out of rocks and into a useful shape!)
silver (~7000 BP, used by ancient civilisations)
gold (~8000 BP, used by ancient civilisations, e.g. Egyptian civilisations, found 'native' in streams and extracted by 'panning')
platinum (~1735, rare metal but known to ancient South American civilisations before Europeans arrived in the 15th century, brought to Europe ~1750)
Detailed notes on the 'Reactivity Series of Metals'
I've tried to indicate the earliest date of extraction and use, however impure the metal might be, like bronze age copper and iron age iron!). The date is quoted as the 'normal' year (BCE/AD) or BP meaning years before present year (I've not used BC).
'native' seems a politically incorrect term, but it is a term that means finding the element in its free chemically uncombined state e.g. gold in alluvial deposits washed into mountain streams or 'native' copper was beaten out of rocks over 6000 years ago.
The understanding of electricity and the development of d.c. electrical supplies e.g. using simple voltaic batteries meant that reactive metals could then be extracted by electrolysis.
Once more reactive metals could be produced in larger quantities by electrolysis, these metals themselves were (and still are) used to extract other metals e.g. chromium, which were often difficult to extract by conventional smelting furnaces using carbon.
Generally speaking the more reactive the metal the later it is extracted and used as the technology of metal extraction improves.
Detailed notes on the 'Reactivity Series of Metals'
As described above, historically as technology and science have developed the methods of extraction have improved to the point were all metals can be produced. The reactivity is a measure of the ease of compound formation and stability. The more reactive the metal, the more readily the metal forms a stable compound eg with oxygen or sulfur, and therefore because of this greater compound stability, the more difficult it is to reduce the compound to the metal.
The least reactive (unreactive) metals such as gold, silver and copper have been used for the past 10000 years because the pure metal was found naturally.
Their lack of chemical reactivity allows them to exist as the uncombined element.
Conversely, the more reactive a metal, the stronger it bonds to other elements like oxygen and sulfur. Therefore it is far less likely such a metal is found as the uncombined element AND the more reactive a metal the more difficult it is to extract from its ores AND more costly to extract it from the compounds the metal had formed over geological time.
Moderately reactive metals like copper, iron, lead, tin have been extracted using carbon based smelting for the past 2000�4000 years.
This is possible because carbon is sufficiently reactive to displace these less reactive metals.
Any metal below carbon can theoretically be extracted from its oxide by heating with carbon (coke or charcoal).
Compounds of these less reactive are reduced by heating with carbon e.g. copper and silver.
Reduction is the loss of oxygen from a compound.
BUT it is only in the last 200 years that very reactive metals like sodium or aluminium have been extracted by electrolysis.
Electrolysis is required because carbon is NOT sufficiently reactive to displace these more reactive metals. Electrolysis doesn't even require a high voltage to split a metal from its molten ore.
In other words, our exploitation of metal mineral resources as developed and expanded as the technology of metal extraction has also developed and improved.
Therefore the economics of extraction may change over time with eg reduced costs by technological advances or increased by depletion of high grade ore reserves.
The depletion of high grade ore reserves has resulted in technology research increasingly looking at ways of extracting metals from low grade ores which were previously uneconomic to use.
The crucial point is that generally speaking, the method of extraction depends on the metals position in the reactivity series.
The reactivity series of metals can be presented to include two non�metals, carbon and hydrogen, to help predict which method could be used to extract the metal.
lower Pt Au Ag Cu (H) Pb Sn Fe Zn (C) Al Mg Ca Na K higher in series
RULE: Any element higher in the series can displace any other lower element
Notes on Reactivity Series of Metals & Metal Reactivity Experiments�Observations
Generally speaking, the more reactive a metal, the more difficult it is to extract.
This is because the more reactive a metal, the more strongly it combines with another non�metallic element like as oxygen or sulfur and therefore the oxide or sulfide is more difficult to reduce to the metal.
Although most metals occur as compounds, some metals are so unreactive that they do not readily combine with oxygen in the air or any other element present in the Earth's crust, and so can be found as the metal itself (sometimes referred to as 'native' metal).
For example, a metal, most frequently found as the uncombined metal is gold (and sometimes copper and silver) and no chemical separation is needed.
In fact all the metals below hydrogen can be found as the 'free' or 'native' element, though they occur mainly as compounds combined with non�metals like oxygen (oxide ion) or sulfur (sulfide ion) or the carbonate ion in their ores.
Therefore, for most metals, their naturally occurring compounds require processing via chemical reactions to obtain the free metals.
At this point we need to say more about oxidation and reduction and redox reactions.
One definition of oxidation is oxygen gain.
Somewhere in the past aluminium combined with oxygen to form aluminium oxide, the main compound in bauxite ore from which aluminium is extracted.
aluminium + oxygen ==> aluminium oxide.
We would therefore say the aluminium was oxidised by oxygen gain.
Therefore to extract aluminium we must reduce it and remove the oxygen.
One definition of reduction is oxygen loss.
Copper ores are processed to give copper oxide from which copper may be obtained by a reduction process to remove the oxygen (reduction). This can be done by heating with carbon.
copper oxide + carbon ==> copper + carbon dioxide.
Here the copper oxide is reduced by oxygen loss, and the carbon is the 'oxygen remover' and is referred to as the reducing agent.
Similarly in a blast furnace, the iron oxide is reduced with carbon to free the iron from oxygen.
iron oxide + carbon ==> iron + carbon dioxide.
The method employed to extract a metal by a reduction process largely depends on its reactivity
See a separate page for a detailed discussion of oxidation - reduction ('redox') reactions
Metals below carbon in the reactivity series (see table on right) can be extracted by heating the oxide with carbon or carbon monoxide. The non�metallic elements carbon will displace the metals less reactive than carbon in a smelter or blast furnace e.g. iron or zinc and metals lower in the series.
Therefore metals like iron, copper, tin, lead, zinc can readily be extracted by reaction�reduction of their e.g. oxides using cheap carbon (i.e. coke made from coal).
As described above, the carbon removes the oxygen from the metal oxide.
Iron ore is used to make iron and steel and iron is produced in a blast furnace by reducing iron oxides with carbon and it is the carbon that removes the oxygen from the iron oxides � the carbon is known as the reducing agent.
The metal copper can be easily extracted BUT copper�rich ores are becoming scarce so new methods of extracting copper are being developed to exploit low grade ores.
A low grade ore is one with low concentrations of copper and research is going on to try and exploit waste material left over from processing high grade ores.
Metals below hydrogen will not displace hydrogen from acids. Their oxides are easily reduced to the metal by heating in a stream of hydrogen, though this is an extraction method rarely used in industry.
In fact most metal oxides below carbon can be reduced when heated in hydrogen, even if the metal reacts with acid.
Metals above carbon in the reactivity series cannot usually be extracted with carbon or carbon monoxide.
So, metals more reactive than carbon are usually extracted by electrolysis of the purified molten ore or other suitable compound.
Electrolysis is the process of breaking down a compound using electrical energy and is needed to extract the most reactive metals.
The process of electrolysis uses of large amounts of energy in the extraction of these reactive metals and makes them expensive to produce.
The metal ions in the ore compound are forced by electrical energy into accepting electrons and producing free metal atoms.
Another definition of reduction is electron gain.
e.g. during the electrolysis of molten aluminium oxide the following reaction happens ..
aluminium ion (3+) + 3 electrons (�) ==> neutral and free aluminium atoms
Al3+ + 3e� ==> Al
so, once again the metal ore compound is reduced to the metal, that is the positive metal ion in the ore is reduced to the metal by electron gain.
Aluminium is a very useful metal but expensive to produce.
e.g. aluminium from molten aluminium oxide or sodium from molten sodium chloride.
The ore or compound must be molten or dissolved in a solution in an electrolysis cell to allow free movement of ions (electrical current). The conducting melt or solution is called the electrolyte. Theory given in the appropriate sections.
Because these reactive metals cannot be obtained by relatively cheap carbon reduction methods, their extraction tends to be more costly due to more specialised stages in the extraction process, more energy is needed (maybe costly electricity) and more costly specialist chemicals like a more reactive metal or chlorine (remember carbon�coke is relatively cheap e.g. as used in the blast furnace extraction of iron).
Other methods are used in special cases using the displacement rule.
A more reactive metal can be used to displace and extract a less reactive metal but these are costly processes since the more reactive metal also has to be produced in the first place!
Titanium is another very useful metal but expensive to produce.
See Titanium or see at the end of the section on copper extraction .
Sometimes electrolysis is used to purify less reactive metals which have previously been extracted using carbon or hydrogen (e.g. copper and zinc ). Electrolysis is also used to plate one metal with another.
The demand for raw materials does have social, economic and environmental implications e.g. conservation of mineral resources by recycling metals, minimising pollution etc.
Metals can be mixed together to make alloys to improve the metal's properties to better suit a particular purpose.
|
Smelting
|
Which country is markedly the largest producer of garlic globally?
|
gcse 1. Introduction to the Extraction of Metals method related to the activity of reactivity series of metals igcse O Level KS4 science chemistry revision notes revising
The social, economic and environmental impacts of exploiting metal ores are discussed on a separate page.
The rock must contain enough of the metal compound, hence enough of the metal, to be worth exploiting the ore reserve and extract the metal by physical and chemical processes.
Low grade ores are usually uneconomic to mine and process, but high grade ores have a high enough metal content to be worth mining and extracting the metal.
The metal ore, a mineral or mixture of minerals from which economically viable amounts of metal can be extracted, i.e. its got to have enough of the metal, or one of its compounds, in it to be worth digging out!
Ores are often oxides, carbonates or sulphides because these non-metals readily combine with many metals.
e.g. iron + oxygen ===> iron oxide ores
Fe + O2(air) ===> Fe2O3 or Fe3O4 (not balanced equations, just the idea!)
This the typical chemistry involved in metal ore formation.
In extracting metals from ores you have to reverse the process e.g. by heating the ore with carbon (coke or charcoal) in a very hot smelting furnace e.g. in a blast furnace to make iron ...
iron oxide ore + carbon ===> free iron + carbon dioxide waste gas
Fe3O4 + 2C ===> 3Fe + 2CO2
The iron oxide is reduced (oxygen loss) and the carbon reducing agent is oxidised (oxygen gain).
This is typical extraction chemistry for less reactive metals.
These ores are all finite resources so we should use them wisely!
Any ore must contain enough of the metal to make it worthwhile to mine and then extract the metal.
High grade ores will therefore be the most economical to exploit BUT over time the better quality�richer sources will decrease, especially with the power of the global economy and powerful and growing economies of Brazil, China, India and other Asian economies.
The economics of metal extraction are not only dependent on the quality of the ore and the cost of extraction (ie richer ores lead to cheaper production), but also depend on the market price and demand. If demand is high the metal price rises and may off�set the price of mining lower grade ores, but if demand is low, the metal price falls and inefficient mines and smelters will go out of business ie its not worth extracting the metal. Of course it is possible to improve the technology of metal extraction and enable companies to produce more metal from the ore than was previously possible and even utilise low grade ores previously discarded and not considered worthwhile mining.
Since the majority of metals are found combined with non�metals like oxygen (oxide ion) or sulfur (sulfide ion) or the carbonate ion, chemical reactions are needed to free the metal from its mineral source.
In order to extract a metal, the ore or compound of the metal must undergo a process called REDUCTION to free the metal i.e.
The oxide/sulfide loses oxygen/sulfur, to form the free metallic atoms, or
the positive metal ion gains negative electrons to form the neutral metal atom.
The chemical that removes the oxygen from an oxide is called the reducing agent i.e. carbon, carbon monoxide or sometimes hydrogen.
Order of decreasing reactivity related to the earliest know date of extraction and use:
francium (1939, very radioactive), caesium (1860, ?), rubidium (1861, ?)
potassium (1807, 1855 from electrolysis), sodium (1807, from electrolysis)
lithium (1817, electrolysis?), calcium (1808, from electrolysis)
magnesium (1755, 1808 from electrolysis), aluminium (1825, by electrolysis)
zinc (before 1500, ), iron (extracted with charcoal before 3000 BP)
tin (~4500 BP, used to make bronze)
lead (over 9000 BP, archaeologist have found lead beads 9000 years old, used by the Romans for plumbing well over 2000 years ago)
copper (~11000 BP extracted via charcoal from ores >4000 years ago, found 'native' and was beaten out of rocks and into a useful shape!)
silver (~7000 BP, used by ancient civilisations)
gold (~8000 BP, used by ancient civilisations, e.g. Egyptian civilisations, found 'native' in streams and extracted by 'panning')
platinum (~1735, rare metal but known to ancient South American civilisations before Europeans arrived in the 15th century, brought to Europe ~1750)
Detailed notes on the 'Reactivity Series of Metals'
I've tried to indicate the earliest date of extraction and use, however impure the metal might be, like bronze age copper and iron age iron!). The date is quoted as the 'normal' year (BCE/AD) or BP meaning years before present year (I've not used BC).
'native' seems a politically incorrect term, but it is a term that means finding the element in its free chemically uncombined state e.g. gold in alluvial deposits washed into mountain streams or 'native' copper was beaten out of rocks over 6000 years ago.
The understanding of electricity and the development of d.c. electrical supplies e.g. using simple voltaic batteries meant that reactive metals could then be extracted by electrolysis.
Once more reactive metals could be produced in larger quantities by electrolysis, these metals themselves were (and still are) used to extract other metals e.g. chromium, which were often difficult to extract by conventional smelting furnaces using carbon.
Generally speaking the more reactive the metal the later it is extracted and used as the technology of metal extraction improves.
Detailed notes on the 'Reactivity Series of Metals'
As described above, historically as technology and science have developed the methods of extraction have improved to the point were all metals can be produced. The reactivity is a measure of the ease of compound formation and stability. The more reactive the metal, the more readily the metal forms a stable compound eg with oxygen or sulfur, and therefore because of this greater compound stability, the more difficult it is to reduce the compound to the metal.
The least reactive (unreactive) metals such as gold, silver and copper have been used for the past 10000 years because the pure metal was found naturally.
Their lack of chemical reactivity allows them to exist as the uncombined element.
Conversely, the more reactive a metal, the stronger it bonds to other elements like oxygen and sulfur. Therefore it is far less likely such a metal is found as the uncombined element AND the more reactive a metal the more difficult it is to extract from its ores AND more costly to extract it from the compounds the metal had formed over geological time.
Moderately reactive metals like copper, iron, lead, tin have been extracted using carbon based smelting for the past 2000�4000 years.
This is possible because carbon is sufficiently reactive to displace these less reactive metals.
Any metal below carbon can theoretically be extracted from its oxide by heating with carbon (coke or charcoal).
Compounds of these less reactive are reduced by heating with carbon e.g. copper and silver.
Reduction is the loss of oxygen from a compound.
BUT it is only in the last 200 years that very reactive metals like sodium or aluminium have been extracted by electrolysis.
Electrolysis is required because carbon is NOT sufficiently reactive to displace these more reactive metals. Electrolysis doesn't even require a high voltage to split a metal from its molten ore.
In other words, our exploitation of metal mineral resources as developed and expanded as the technology of metal extraction has also developed and improved.
Therefore the economics of extraction may change over time with eg reduced costs by technological advances or increased by depletion of high grade ore reserves.
The depletion of high grade ore reserves has resulted in technology research increasingly looking at ways of extracting metals from low grade ores which were previously uneconomic to use.
The crucial point is that generally speaking, the method of extraction depends on the metals position in the reactivity series.
The reactivity series of metals can be presented to include two non�metals, carbon and hydrogen, to help predict which method could be used to extract the metal.
lower Pt Au Ag Cu (H) Pb Sn Fe Zn (C) Al Mg Ca Na K higher in series
RULE: Any element higher in the series can displace any other lower element
Notes on Reactivity Series of Metals & Metal Reactivity Experiments�Observations
Generally speaking, the more reactive a metal, the more difficult it is to extract.
This is because the more reactive a metal, the more strongly it combines with another non�metallic element like as oxygen or sulfur and therefore the oxide or sulfide is more difficult to reduce to the metal.
Although most metals occur as compounds, some metals are so unreactive that they do not readily combine with oxygen in the air or any other element present in the Earth's crust, and so can be found as the metal itself (sometimes referred to as 'native' metal).
For example, a metal, most frequently found as the uncombined metal is gold (and sometimes copper and silver) and no chemical separation is needed.
In fact all the metals below hydrogen can be found as the 'free' or 'native' element, though they occur mainly as compounds combined with non�metals like oxygen (oxide ion) or sulfur (sulfide ion) or the carbonate ion in their ores.
Therefore, for most metals, their naturally occurring compounds require processing via chemical reactions to obtain the free metals.
At this point we need to say more about oxidation and reduction and redox reactions.
One definition of oxidation is oxygen gain.
Somewhere in the past aluminium combined with oxygen to form aluminium oxide, the main compound in bauxite ore from which aluminium is extracted.
aluminium + oxygen ==> aluminium oxide.
We would therefore say the aluminium was oxidised by oxygen gain.
Therefore to extract aluminium we must reduce it and remove the oxygen.
One definition of reduction is oxygen loss.
Copper ores are processed to give copper oxide from which copper may be obtained by a reduction process to remove the oxygen (reduction). This can be done by heating with carbon.
copper oxide + carbon ==> copper + carbon dioxide.
Here the copper oxide is reduced by oxygen loss, and the carbon is the 'oxygen remover' and is referred to as the reducing agent.
Similarly in a blast furnace, the iron oxide is reduced with carbon to free the iron from oxygen.
iron oxide + carbon ==> iron + carbon dioxide.
The method employed to extract a metal by a reduction process largely depends on its reactivity
See a separate page for a detailed discussion of oxidation - reduction ('redox') reactions
Metals below carbon in the reactivity series (see table on right) can be extracted by heating the oxide with carbon or carbon monoxide. The non�metallic elements carbon will displace the metals less reactive than carbon in a smelter or blast furnace e.g. iron or zinc and metals lower in the series.
Therefore metals like iron, copper, tin, lead, zinc can readily be extracted by reaction�reduction of their e.g. oxides using cheap carbon (i.e. coke made from coal).
As described above, the carbon removes the oxygen from the metal oxide.
Iron ore is used to make iron and steel and iron is produced in a blast furnace by reducing iron oxides with carbon and it is the carbon that removes the oxygen from the iron oxides � the carbon is known as the reducing agent.
The metal copper can be easily extracted BUT copper�rich ores are becoming scarce so new methods of extracting copper are being developed to exploit low grade ores.
A low grade ore is one with low concentrations of copper and research is going on to try and exploit waste material left over from processing high grade ores.
Metals below hydrogen will not displace hydrogen from acids. Their oxides are easily reduced to the metal by heating in a stream of hydrogen, though this is an extraction method rarely used in industry.
In fact most metal oxides below carbon can be reduced when heated in hydrogen, even if the metal reacts with acid.
Metals above carbon in the reactivity series cannot usually be extracted with carbon or carbon monoxide.
So, metals more reactive than carbon are usually extracted by electrolysis of the purified molten ore or other suitable compound.
Electrolysis is the process of breaking down a compound using electrical energy and is needed to extract the most reactive metals.
The process of electrolysis uses of large amounts of energy in the extraction of these reactive metals and makes them expensive to produce.
The metal ions in the ore compound are forced by electrical energy into accepting electrons and producing free metal atoms.
Another definition of reduction is electron gain.
e.g. during the electrolysis of molten aluminium oxide the following reaction happens ..
aluminium ion (3+) + 3 electrons (�) ==> neutral and free aluminium atoms
Al3+ + 3e� ==> Al
so, once again the metal ore compound is reduced to the metal, that is the positive metal ion in the ore is reduced to the metal by electron gain.
Aluminium is a very useful metal but expensive to produce.
e.g. aluminium from molten aluminium oxide or sodium from molten sodium chloride.
The ore or compound must be molten or dissolved in a solution in an electrolysis cell to allow free movement of ions (electrical current). The conducting melt or solution is called the electrolyte. Theory given in the appropriate sections.
Because these reactive metals cannot be obtained by relatively cheap carbon reduction methods, their extraction tends to be more costly due to more specialised stages in the extraction process, more energy is needed (maybe costly electricity) and more costly specialist chemicals like a more reactive metal or chlorine (remember carbon�coke is relatively cheap e.g. as used in the blast furnace extraction of iron).
Other methods are used in special cases using the displacement rule.
A more reactive metal can be used to displace and extract a less reactive metal but these are costly processes since the more reactive metal also has to be produced in the first place!
Titanium is another very useful metal but expensive to produce.
See Titanium or see at the end of the section on copper extraction .
Sometimes electrolysis is used to purify less reactive metals which have previously been extracted using carbon or hydrogen (e.g. copper and zinc ). Electrolysis is also used to plate one metal with another.
The demand for raw materials does have social, economic and environmental implications e.g. conservation of mineral resources by recycling metals, minimising pollution etc.
Metals can be mixed together to make alloys to improve the metal's properties to better suit a particular purpose.
|
i don't know
|
Jam, Wing, Acorn, T, and Hex are types of what?
|
Stainless Steel Nuts | 18-8 Stainless Steel Nuts
18-8 Stainless Steel
Nuts
Hex Finished Nuts ~ Hex Jam Nuts ~ Heavy Hex Nut ~ Hex Machine Screw Nuts ~ Stainless Steel Lock Nuts ~ Nylon Insert Lock Nuts ~ Serrated Flange Lock Nuts ~ Acorn Nuts ~ Cap Nuts Stainless Steel ~ T Nuts ~ Hex Rod Coupling Nuts ~ Wing Nuts ~ Square Nuts
Sub-Categories
|
Nut
|
The eminent British economist Richard Layard is noted for pioneering work on?
|
Nuts - Motion Industries
Nuts
Search
Nuts are female, or internal, threaded fasteners typically used with bolts. Hex and jam nuts are the most common type of nut. Lock nuts have a locking element that resists loosening. Also find T-slot nuts and coupling nuts in the below product categories.
|
i don't know
|
The Berlin S-Bahn is what sort of system?
|
Home - S-Bahn Berlin GmbH
S-Bahn Berlin
ترحيب / Welcome to Berlin & Brandenburg
يوجد في برلين والمقاطعة المجاورة براندنبورغ الكثير من وسائط النقل العامة: قطارات المدينة، قطارات الأنفاق، قطارات الشوارع، الباصات والعبارات وقطارات الأقاليم. يتبع جميعها اتحاد مواصلات برلين – براندنبورغ. مختصرها VBB. تستطيع هنا أن تعرف كيف يمكنك استخدام وسائط النقل العامة في برلين وبراندنبورغ.
There are many public transport options in Berlin and neighbouring Brandenburg: S-Bahn (local railway), U-Bahn (underground), trams, buses, ferries and regional trains. They are all part of the Verkehrsverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (the public transport authority for Berlin and Brandenburg), or VBB for short. The following provides information on how to use public transport in Berlin and Brandenburg.
اضغط هنا / click here
Explore Berlin and surrounding areas
Berlin offers a sophisticated and comprehensive public transportation system that is almost incomparable to other cities. It is easy to use and you can get almost anywhere in the city, 24 hours a day. At night there are numerous night buses and trains at your service.
|
Rail transport
|
As at the early 2000s (2000-12 official figures) what country is the world's biggest wine producer?
|
Berlin Metro (U-Bahn) Map Free - Android Apps on Google Play
Berlin Metro (U-Bahn) Map Free
( 79)
Description
Berlin Metro (U-Bahn) Map - a simple free and offline map, very useful for tourists and visitors.
The Berlin U-Bahn (from "Untergrundbahn", meaning "underground railway") is a rapid transit railway in Berlin, the capital city of Germany, and is a major part of the public transport system of the city. Opened in 1902, the U-Bahn serves 173 stations spread across ten lines, with a total track length of 146.3 kilometres (90.9 mi), about 80% of which is underground. Trains run every two to five minutes during peak hours, every five minutes for the rest of the day and every ten minutes in the evening. They travel 20.9 million km (13 million mi), carrying 496 million passengers, over the year. The entire system is maintained and operated by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, commonly known as the BVG.
Designed to alleviate traffic flowing into and out of central Berlin, the U-Bahn rapidly expanded until the city was divided into East and West Berlin at the end of World War II. Although the system initially remained open to residents of both sides, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent restrictions imposed by the East German government limited travel across the border: The East Berlin U-Bahn lines were severed from West Berlin; while two West Berlin lines that ran through East Berlin (U6 and U8) were allowed to pass through without stopping, although the stations were closed, with the exception of Friedrichstraße, used as a transfer point (between U6 and the West Berlin S-Bahn system) and a border crossing into East Berlin. The system was reopened completely following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and German reunification.
As of 2007, the Berlin U-Bahn is the most extensive underground network in Germany. True to its original goal, it has been calculated that, in 2006, use of the U-Bahn amounted to the equivalent of 122.2 million km (76 million mi) of car journeys. Together with the S-Bahn, it serves as the main means of transport of the capital and in addition the Tram operates in the eastern parts of the city.
Read more
|
i don't know
|
Suchen, Buscar, Rechercher and Zoeken appear commonly on German, Spanish, French and Dutch language websites, all meaning what?
|
thesaurus | BARTOC.org
BARTOC.org
Kerameikos
"Kerameikos.org is a collaborative project dedicated to defining the intellectual concepts of pottery following the tenets of linked open data and the formulation of an ontology for representing and sharing ceramic data across disparate data systems. While the project is focused primarily on the definition of concepts within Greek black- and red-figure pottery, Kerameikos.org is extensible toward the definition of concepts in other fields of pottery studies."
"Wortnetz Kultur ist ein Thesaurus [...] zur Erschließung kulturhistorischer Fachinformationen [...] z.B. in der Bau- und Bodendenkmalpflege, aber auch zur Beschreibung von Museumsobjekten und Umweltdaten."
Rate
Thesaurus für die Fachgebiete Informatik, Wirtschaft und Verkehr
"Seit 2013 wird an der Bibliothek der TH Wildau ein zweisprachiger Thesaurus (dt./en.) für die Fachgebiete Informatik, Wirtschaft und Verkehr aufgebaut. Ziel ist es, den Studierenden einen Überblick über ihr Studienfach und angrenzende Fachbereiche zu bieten. Darüberhinaus ist der Thesaurus als Recherchehilfe in der Bibliothekssuchmaschine Wilbert integriert."
DAMT
"Le DAMT a été conçu et entrepris en 2004 par Jeanne Dancette, professeure au Département de linguistique et de traduction, Université de Montréal, avec l’aide de collaborateurs rédactionnels et techniques. Le DAMT présente sous forme de mini-articles encyclopédiques les concepts liés à la mondialisation économique et sociale et notamment à ses répercussions sur les relations industrielles. Il touche à des disciplines multiples : la sociologie, le droit, l’économie, le commerce et la gestion.
Textile Museum Thesaurus
"The Textile Museum Thesaurus is a data management tool for cataloging and searching for textiles in The Textile Museum’s collection in its electronic database. The Thesaurus functions both as a controlled vocabulary for cataloging our collections and as an electronic querying aid structured to permit the highest level of success in retrieving the appropriate objects during searches.
Graphik-Vokabular
"Die Verwendung von kontrolliertem Vokabular für die Katalogisierung ist die Grundlage für eine konsistente Objektdokumentation. Die Abstimmung über ein gemeinsames kontrolliertes Vokabular ist umso wichtiger bei der Zusammenführung heterogener Metadaten verschiedener Sammlungen in einem Portal, um optimale Voraussetzungen für die Recherche zu gewährleisten.
Natural England Corporate Vocabulary
"The Corporate Vocabulary is a purpose-built indexing tool which can be used for many applications across Natural England to search for and retrieve information more effectively. It facilitates accurate and consistent indexing and, by showing the relationships between different terms, it allows the most appropriate terms to be chosen, which improves the relevance of the information found."
Everglades Online Thesaurus
"The Everglades Online Thesaurus is a structured vocabulary of concepts and terms relating to the south Florida environment. Designed as an information management tool for both researchers and metadata creators, the Thesaurus is intended to improve information retrieval across the many disparate information systems, databases, and web sites that provide Everglades-related information. The vocabulary provided by the Everglades Online Thesaurus expresses each relevant concept using a single ‘preferred term’, whereas in natural language many terms may exist to express that same concept.
|
Searching
|
The speed of sound in a vacuum is?
|
thesaurus | BARTOC.org
BARTOC.org
Kerameikos
"Kerameikos.org is a collaborative project dedicated to defining the intellectual concepts of pottery following the tenets of linked open data and the formulation of an ontology for representing and sharing ceramic data across disparate data systems. While the project is focused primarily on the definition of concepts within Greek black- and red-figure pottery, Kerameikos.org is extensible toward the definition of concepts in other fields of pottery studies."
"Wortnetz Kultur ist ein Thesaurus [...] zur Erschließung kulturhistorischer Fachinformationen [...] z.B. in der Bau- und Bodendenkmalpflege, aber auch zur Beschreibung von Museumsobjekten und Umweltdaten."
Rate
Thesaurus für die Fachgebiete Informatik, Wirtschaft und Verkehr
"Seit 2013 wird an der Bibliothek der TH Wildau ein zweisprachiger Thesaurus (dt./en.) für die Fachgebiete Informatik, Wirtschaft und Verkehr aufgebaut. Ziel ist es, den Studierenden einen Überblick über ihr Studienfach und angrenzende Fachbereiche zu bieten. Darüberhinaus ist der Thesaurus als Recherchehilfe in der Bibliothekssuchmaschine Wilbert integriert."
DAMT
"Le DAMT a été conçu et entrepris en 2004 par Jeanne Dancette, professeure au Département de linguistique et de traduction, Université de Montréal, avec l’aide de collaborateurs rédactionnels et techniques. Le DAMT présente sous forme de mini-articles encyclopédiques les concepts liés à la mondialisation économique et sociale et notamment à ses répercussions sur les relations industrielles. Il touche à des disciplines multiples : la sociologie, le droit, l’économie, le commerce et la gestion.
Textile Museum Thesaurus
"The Textile Museum Thesaurus is a data management tool for cataloging and searching for textiles in The Textile Museum’s collection in its electronic database. The Thesaurus functions both as a controlled vocabulary for cataloging our collections and as an electronic querying aid structured to permit the highest level of success in retrieving the appropriate objects during searches.
Graphik-Vokabular
"Die Verwendung von kontrolliertem Vokabular für die Katalogisierung ist die Grundlage für eine konsistente Objektdokumentation. Die Abstimmung über ein gemeinsames kontrolliertes Vokabular ist umso wichtiger bei der Zusammenführung heterogener Metadaten verschiedener Sammlungen in einem Portal, um optimale Voraussetzungen für die Recherche zu gewährleisten.
Natural England Corporate Vocabulary
"The Corporate Vocabulary is a purpose-built indexing tool which can be used for many applications across Natural England to search for and retrieve information more effectively. It facilitates accurate and consistent indexing and, by showing the relationships between different terms, it allows the most appropriate terms to be chosen, which improves the relevance of the information found."
Everglades Online Thesaurus
"The Everglades Online Thesaurus is a structured vocabulary of concepts and terms relating to the south Florida environment. Designed as an information management tool for both researchers and metadata creators, the Thesaurus is intended to improve information retrieval across the many disparate information systems, databases, and web sites that provide Everglades-related information. The vocabulary provided by the Everglades Online Thesaurus expresses each relevant concept using a single ‘preferred term’, whereas in natural language many terms may exist to express that same concept.
|
i don't know
|
What parts of the human body are surrounded by protective skin called the eponychium and paronychium?
|
Fingernail & Toenail Anatomy - Nail Structure & Growth
Our nails are constantly growing, but the growth rate slows down due to poor circulation and with age .
Fingernails grow faster than toenails at a rate of 3 millimeters per month. It takes 6 months for a fingernail to grow from the root to the free edge. Toenails grow much slower, at just 1 millimeter per month. It takes a toenail 12 to 18 months to grow from root to tip.
Nail Structure
The structure of the nail is divided into six parts: the root, nail bed, nail plate, eponychium, paronychium, and hyponychium. Each of these six components has a specific function, and if a component is disrupted it can result in the abnormal appearance of the nail.
Nail Root: The root of the fingernail is also known as the germinal matrix. Its edge appears as a white crescent, known as the lunula. The root portion of the nail lies below the skin, underneath the fingernail, and it extends several millimeters into the finger. It produces most of the volume of the nail and the nail bed.
Nail Bed: The nail bed is also referred to as the sterile matrix. It extends from the edge of the nail root, or lunula, to the hyponychium. The nail bed contains blood vessels, nerves, and melanocytes that produce melanin. As the root grows the nail, the nail streams down along the nail bed and adds material to the underside of the nail to make it thicker. When the nail grows properly, the nail bed is smooth, but if it doesn't grow correctly, the nail may split or develop ridges that aren't cosmetically attractive.
Nail Plate: The nail plate is the actual fingernail, and it's made of translucent keratin. The pinkish appearance of the nail comes from the blood vessels underneath it. The underside of the nail plate has grooves that run along the length of the nail and help anchor it to the nail bed.
Eponychium: The eponychium is more commonly known as the cuticle. The cuticle is situated between the skin of the finger and the nail plate. It fuses these structures together and provides a waterproof barrier.
Perionychium: The paronychium is the skin that overlaps onto the sides of the nail plate, also known as the paronychial edge. The paronychium is the site of hangnails, ingrown nails , and paronychia , a skin infection.
Hyponychium: The hyponychium is the area between the nail plate and the fingertip. It is the junction between the free edge of the nail and the skin of the fingertip. It also provides a waterproof barrier.
Continue Reading
|
Nail
|
The Ebola disease is named after an African?
|
Chapter 4: The skin, hair and nails
Chapter 4: The skin, hair and nails
Layers of skin
Common integument refers to skin and subcutaneous tissue, hair, nails, and breast. The last-named is described with the upper limb. The skin (cutis) provides a waterproof and protective covering for the body, contains sensory nerve endings, and aids in the regulation of temperature. The skin is important, not only in general medical diagnosis and surgery, but also as the seat of many diseases of its own. The study of these is called dermatology (Gk derma, skin).
The area of the body surface is about 2 sq m. The temperature of the skin in general is normally about 32 to 36 degrees C. (90 to 96 degrees F.).
The skin (fig. 4-1 ) varies in thickness from about 0.5 to 3 mm. It is thicker on the dorsal and extensor than on the ventral and flexor aspects of the body. It is thinner in infancy and in old age. The stretching of the abdominal skin during pregnancy may result in red streaks (striae gravidarum) that remain as permanent white lines (lineae albicantes).
The skin consists of two quite different layers: (1) the epidermis, a superficiallayer of stratified epithelium that develops from ectoderm, and (2) the dermis, or corium, an underlying layer of connective tissue that is largely mesodermal in origin. The dermis makes up the bulk of the skin.
Corium (dermis)
The corium, or dermis, contains down growths from the epidermis, such as hair follicles and glands. It presents a superficial papillary layer of loose collagenous and elastic fibers, together with fibroblasts, mast cells, and macrophages. Elevations (papillae) project toward the epidermis. The thicker, deep reticular layer of the dermis consists of dense, coarse bundles of collagenous fibers. Some of the fibers enter the subcutaneous tissue, where they form bundles between lobules of fat. Smooth muscle is found in some regions (areola and nipple, scrotum and penis, and perineum). In some areas, muscle fibers of skeletal type (e.g., platysma) may be inserted into the skin. In tattooing, foreign particles, such as carbon, are introduced into the dermis.
The skin lies on the subcutaneous tissue ("superficial fascia"), a layer of fatty areolar tissue that overlies the more densely fibrous fascia. It should be remembered that fat is liquid, or nearly so, at body temperature. The subcutaneous tissue serves as a depot for fat storage and aids in preventing loss of heat. When a pinch of skin is picked up, subcutaneous tissue is included. A hypodermic injection is one given into the subcutaneous tissue.
Epidermis
The skin is covered by a film of emulsified material produced by glands and by cornification. The epidermis is an avascular layer of stratified squamous epithelium that is thickest on the palms and soles. The epidermis, where it is thick, presents five layers, as listed in table 4-1 . In the outer layers, which may conveniently be grouped as the horny zone, the cells become converted into soft-keratin flakes that are worn away from the surface continuously. The stratum corneum is a tough, resilient, semitransparent cellular mem brane that acts as a barrier to water transfer. Under normal conditions, mitotic figures are practically confined to the deepest layer, the stratum basale, which is, therefore, the normal germinative layer of the epidermis. The various layers show the stages through which the basal cells pass before their keratinization and shedding. The cells of the epidermis are replaced approximately once per month. Keratin is a protein that is present throughout the epidermis, perhaps in a modified form. It is readily hydrated-hence the swelling of skin on immersion in water-and dryness of the skin is due chiefly to a lack of water.
Human epidermis displays a rhythmic mitotic cycle. Mitosis is more active at night, and it is stimulated by a loss of the superficial, or horny, zone. A part, or the whole thickness, of the epidermis may be raised up in the form of blisters by plasma when the skin is damaged (e.g., by a second-degree burn), and prolonged pressure and friction result in callosities and corns.
Several pigments, including melanin, melanoid, carotene, reduced hemoglobin, and oxyhemoglobin, are found in the skin. Melanin, which is situated chiefly in the stratum basale of the epidermis, protects the organism from ultraviolet light.
When an area of epidermis, together with the superficial part of the underlying dermis, is destroyed, new epidermis is formed from hair follicles, and also from sudoriferous and sebaceous glands, where these are present. If the injury involves the whole thickness of the dermis (e.g., in a deep burn), however, epithelization can take place only by a growing over of the surrounding edge of the epidermis or alternatively by the use of an autograft. Free skin grafts of the epidermis and a part or all of the thickness of the dermis can be applied, and vascularization takes place through connections between the subcutaneous vessels and those in the graft. A defect of the skin that extends into the dermis is termed an ulcer.
Lines of thickened epidermis known as papillary ridges form a characteristic pattern on the palmar aspect of the hand and the plantar aspect of the foot. They are concerned with tactile sensation. They contain the openings of the sweat glands and overlie grooves in the dermis; these grooves are situated typically between rows of double ridges known as dermal ridges (fig. 4-1 ). The papillary ridges appear in fetal life in a pattern that remains permanently. They are especially well developed in the pads of the digits, and finger prints in adults and foot prints in infants are used as a means of identification of an individual.
Specialized structures of skin
Sweat (sudoriferous glands)
The sweat, or sudoriferous, glands regulate body temperature, because perspiration withdraws heat from the body by the vaporization of water. The sweat glands develop in the fetus as epidermal downgrowths that become canalized. They are simple tubular glands, each having a coiled secretory unit in the dermis or in the subcutaneous tissue and a long, winding duct that extends through the epidermis and opens by a pore on the surface of the skin (fig. 4-1 ). Sweat glands are particularly numerous in the palms and the soles, where they open on the summits of the papillary ridges. The chief stimuli to sweating are heat and emotion. Emotional perspiration occurs characteristically on the forehead, axillae, palms, and soles.
Large sweat glands in certain locations, such as the axilla, areola, external acoustic meatus, and eyelid, develop from hair follicles and differ from the more common (eccrine) glands in being apocrine; that is to say, portions of the secreting cells disintegrate in the process of secretion. The perspiration from the apocrine glands is rich in organic material that is susceptible to bacterial action, resulting in an odor.
Water passes through the epidermis also by diffusion. This is termed insensible perspiration because it cannot be seen or felt.
Hairs
Hairs (or pili; pilus in the singular) are characteristic of mammals. The functions of hair include protection, regulation of body temperature, and facilitation of evaporation of perspiration; hairs also act as sense organs. Hairs develop in the fetus as epidermal downgrowths that invade the underlying dermis. Each downgrowth terminates in an expanded end that becomes invaginated by a mesodermal papilla. The central cells of the downgrowth become keratinized to form a hair, which then grows outward to reach the surface. The hairs first developed constitute the lanugo, or down, which is shed shortly before birth. The fine hairs that develop later constitute the vellus. Although hairs on many portions of the human body are inconspicuous, their actual number per unit area is large. In a few places (such as the palms and the soles and the dorsal aspect of the distal phalanges) the skin is glabrous, that is, devoid of hair.
The shaft of a hair consists of a cuticle and a cortex of hard-keratin surrounding, in many hairs, a soft-keratin medulla (fig. 4-2 ). Pigmented hairs contain melanin in the cortex and medulla, but pigment is absent from the surrounding sheaths. The color of hair depends mainly on the shade and the amount of pigment in the cortex and, to a lesser extent, on air spaces in the hair. In white hairs pig ment is absent from the cortex, and the contained air is responsible for the whiteness; "gray hair" is generally a mixture of white and colored hairs.
The root of a hair is situated in an epidermal tube known as the hair follicle, sunken into either the dermis or the subcutaneous tissue. The follicle is dilated at its base to form the bulb (matrix).
In the obtuse angle between the root of a hair and the surface of the skin, a bundle of smooth muscle fibers, known as an arrector pili muscle, is usually found. It extends from the deep part of the hair follicle to the papillary layer of the dermis. On contraction it makes the hair erect. The arrectores pilorum are innervated by sympathetic fibers and contract in response to emotion or cold. This results in an unevenness of the surface called "goose pimples" or "goose skin."
Sebaceous glands
Sebaceous glands develop from the epidermis in the fetus, usually from the walls of hair follicles. Sebaceous glands are absent from the palms and the soles. They are simple alveolar glands that form lobes in the dermis, generally in the acute angle between an arrector pili and its hair follicle. The basal cells of the gland proliferate, accumulate fat droplets, and are excreted as sebum through a short, wide duct into the lumen of the hair follicle. Contraction of the arrector pili may perhaps aid in expelling the sebum. Sebum keeps the stratum corneum pliable and, in cold weather, conserves body heat by hindering evaporation. Fat-soluble substances may penetrate the skin through hair follicles and sebaceous glands. Hence ointment vehicles are used when penetration is desired. Medicaments should be rubbed into the skin.
Sebaceous glands that are not related to hairs are found in the eyelids as tarsal glands; these are said to be apocrine in type, as are the ceruminous glands of the external acoustic meatus. Seborrhea involves an excessive secretion of sebum; the sebum may collect on the surface as scales known as dandruff. Acne is a chronic inflammatory condition of the sebaceous glands. When the exit from a sebaceous gland becomes plugged, a blackhead (comedo) forms; complete blockage may result in a wen (sebaceous cyst). At birth an infant is covered with vernix caseosa, a mixture of sebum and desquamated epithelial cells.
Nails
The nails (or ungues; unguis in the singular) are hardenings of the horny zone of the epidermis. They overlie the dorsal aspect of the distal phalanges (fig. 4-3 ). They protect the sensitive tips of the digits and, in the fingers, serve in scratching. Nails develop in the fetus as epidermal thickenings that undercut the skin to form folds from which the horny substance of the nail grows distally.
The horny zone of the nail is composed of hard-keratin and has a distal, exposed part, or body, and a proximal, hidden portion, or root. The root is covered by a distalward prolongation of the stratum corneum of the skin. This narrow fold is composed of soft-keratin and is termed the eponychium. Distal to the eponychium is the "half-moon," or lunula, a part of the horny zone that is opaque to the underlying capillaries.
Deep to the distal or free border of the nail, the horny zone of the fingertip is thickened and is frequently termed the hyponychium. The horny zone of the nail is attached to the underlying nail bed. The matrix, or proximal part of the bed, produces hard-keratin. Further distally, however, the bed may also generate nail substance. Moreover, the most superficiallayer of the nail may be produced by the epithelium immediately dorsal to the root and proximal to the eponychium. The growth of the nail is affected by nutrition, hormones, and disease. Nail growth involves considerable protein synthesis, as a result of which nonspecific changes occur in the nails in response to various local and systemic disturbances. White spots indicate incomplete keratinization.
Blood supply and innervation of skin
The skin has a profuse blood supply, which is important in temperature regulation. The subcutaneous arteries form a network in the subcutaneous tissue, and from this is derived a subpapillary plexus in the dermis. Capillary loops in the dermal papillae arise from the subpapillary plexus, and from these loops the avascular epidermis is bathed in tissue fluid. A subpapillary plexus of venules gives the skin its pink color: the vessels become dilated when the skin is heated, and thereby make it look red. Most birthmarks consist of dilated capillaries (hemangioma). The dermis contains a lymphatic plexus that drains into the collecting vessels in the subcutaneous tissue. The cutaneous lymphatics can be shown in vivo by injecting vital dyes, and every intradermal injection is an intralymphatic one.
The skin has a rich sensory innervation (fig. 4-4 ). The cutaneous nerves pierce the fascia and ramify in the subcutaneous tissue to form plexuses both there and in the dermis. Finer axonal ramifications may run between the deeper cells of the epidermis. The cutaneous nerves supply both the skin and the subcutaneous tissue. The area of distribution of a given nerve, however, varies, and considerable overlapping of adjacent nerve territories takes place.
Nerves supplying the skin may form several different types of nerve endings, and these endings have been related in a general way to the basic types of sensations that can be appreciated in the skin and the subcutaneous tissue, namely, pain, touch, temperature changes, and pressure, or deep touch.
Hairy skin contains simple, free endings and plexuses around the hair follicles. Skin without hair, that of the palm, for example, presents the three types of sensory endings that are characteristic of the somatic nervous system: (1) free nerve endings arising from small myelinated fibers, (2) expanded tips, and (3) encapsulated endings. The basic types of sensation, however, can be elicited from both hairy and glabrous skin. Hence correlations between the type of sensation and a specific type of nerve ending are not justified. Lamellated corpuscles are particularly large, encapsulated endings that are found chiefly in the subcutaneous and deeper tissues.
Additional reading
Jarrett, A. (ed.), The Physiology and Pathophysiology of the Skin. Academic Press, New York, 1973, 1974. Volume 1 is on the epidermis, volume 2 on nerves and blood vessels, and volume 3 on the dermis.
Montagna, W., and Parakkal, P. F., The Structure and Function of Skin, 3rd ed. Academic Press, New York, 1974. A good introduction.
Pinkus, H., Die makroskopische Anatomie der Haut, in Normale und pathologische Anatomie der Haut. ed. by O. Gans and G. K. Steigleder, Springer, Berlin, vol. 2, 1964. An excellent account.
Questions
4-1 How do the two layers of the skin differ?
4-1 The two layers of the skin differ structurally and developmentally. The epidermis is a stratified epithelium of ectodermal origin. The dermis is a connective tissue largely of mesodermal origin.
4-2 Into which layer is a hypodermic injection given?
4-2 A hypodermic injection is given into the subcutaneous tissue, formerly called" superficial fascia."
4-3 What is normally the germinative layer of the epidermis?
4-3 The deepest layer of the epidermis, stratum basale, is normally its germinative layer.
4-4 What is a second-degree burn?
4-4 In Dupuytren's classification (1832) a second-degree burn affects part of the epidermis, resulting in vesiculation (blisters) in addition to redness (erythema). See figure 4-1 .
4-5 How does water leave the skin?
4-5 Water leaves the skin not only through the glands as perspiration but also by diffusion through the epidermis (insensible perspiration).
4-6 What is an arrector pili and how does it function?
4-6 The arrectores pilorum are bundles of smooth muscle associated with hair follicles. On exposure to cold or under emotion (sympathetic nerves), they elevate the hair in a lever-like manner, and the nearby skin is depressed, whereas the surrounding skin is elevated ("goose skin").
4-7 What is the function of sebum?
4-7 Sebum (from sebaceous glands) keeps the stratum corneum pliable and conserves body heat by hindering evaporation. Seborrhea involves an excessive secretion of sebum, which may collect on the surface as scales (dandruff).
4-8 Can the different types of nerve endings in the skin be related to the basic types of sensation (pain, touch, temperature changes, and pressure, or deep touch)?
4-8 Different types of nerve endings of the skin can be related to basic kinds of sensation in only a general way. Correlations between type of sensation and a specific type of nerve ending are not justified.
Figure legends
Figure 4-1 General view of skin and subcutaneous tissue. A, "Thin" skin from abdomen. B, "Thick" skin from pal m of hand. X, Y, and Z represent the levels of a superficial (Thiersch) graft, a split thickness graft (including one third to one quarter of the dermis), and a full thickness (Wolfe) graft, respectively. The numerals 1 to 6 represent the levels of degrees of burns, according to Dupuytren's classification. Other classifications of burns are also used.
Figure 4-2 Diagram of a hair follicle. The follicle consists of an external root sheath, mainly the basal-cell layer of the epidermis, and an internal root sheath of soft-keratin, which includes a cuticle firmly anchored to that of the shaft of the hair.
Figure 4-3 Diagram of a sagittal section of a fingernail. The arrow indicates the junction between the root and body of the nail.
Figure 4-4 Diagram of the innervation of the skin. The numerals 1, 2, and 3 indicate the epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue, respectively. The letters A and C stand for adrenergic and cholinergic nerve fibers, respectively.
Jump to:
|
i don't know
|
A mattock (alternatively called a dibber in some countries) is used mainly for?
|
Climate Risk Map – Mainly Countries Hostile to the USA | Watts Up With That?
Watts Up With That?
The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change
Menu
Guest Blogger / January 14, 2015
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
UK Climate experts have prepared a map of countries they think are most at risk of climate change. However their map could easily be mistaken for a geopolitical risk map – the most “endangered” countries are, with few exceptions, countries which are neutral to or even hostile to the USA and Western interests.
http://blog.theecoexperts.co.uk/climate-change-map
High on their risk are countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, countries whose populations regularly express hostility towards the USA and Western values.
US allies such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and most of Europe score well on the risk map – they are listed as countries least likely to be severely impacted by climate change.
All of this poses an obvious question – if we accept the map at face value, why should we care about climate change?
Rate this:
179 thoughts on “Climate Risk Map – Mainly Countries Hostile to the USA”
Mac the Knife
“Why should we care about Climate Change?”
Because the Enema of my Enema is my friend that is full of $#IT
george e. smith
“””””…..All of this poses an obvious question – if we accept the map at face value, why should we care about climate change?…..”””””
Well there’s the rub; “if we accept…bla bla bla….
The “Map” is absurd on its face.
The currently inhabited countries deemed most unable to accept / adapt to climate change, are well known from history and paleontological research, to have survived, and flourished, and remained inhabited for hundreds of thousands; maybe millions of years longer than other countries that are mere hundreds of years inhabited, and many more that were uninhabited say 2,000 years ago.
So nyet, on that map being real or even having any face value.
It is sheer poppycock.
Smack dab in the middle of obummer’s homeland… Now it is starting to make sense. /sarc (kind of)
Louis
Right. What difference does climate change make? Those countries would be “at risk” whether there is climate change or not.
AndyG55
interesting. no country with a healthy economy is at risk from climate change. so the UN proposes we cripple our economies to defend ourselves. Only the UN could come up with such a plan.
Anything is possible
January 14, 2015 at 11:21 pm
What do they mean by “at risk of climate change”? Risk is probability multiplied by consequence. What is the probability of climate change? What is the consequence of climate change? Do they tell us?
Since the source article was written by green troughers, members of the green blob, not UK climate experts, it has no worth.
Harrowsceptic
By UK climate Experts do you mean the staff of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit,and thier “climategate” background, or did you miss off the sarc notification
Alan the Brit
Funnily enough, no! Some Environment Dept at the Uni of Notre Dame, by inference, pre-loaded conclusions from the get go!
John the Cube
January 15, 2015 at 8:18 am
“What do they mean by “at risk of climate change”? Risk is probability multiplied by consequence. What is the probability of climate change? What is the consequence of climate change? Do they tell us?”
There ya go with that arithmetic stuff again. Next you’ll want the tmperature numbers to make sense.
January 15, 2015 at 5:05 am
I find it a bit odd that they would put the Netherlands among those to be least impacted by ‘climate change’. A post yesterday on WUWT had a couple of researchers claiming an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. It’s all a pack of crap anyway.
January 15, 2015 at 9:47 pm
Jimbo – Not a problem. At the supposed rate of sea level rise, a few grains of sand added to the dykes every year in the Netherlands will suffice. Probably not as much road sand as we use each winter … (coarse sand 0.2 mm to 2 mm)
BioBob
What’s the probability of any value multiplied times ZERO risk ? Inquiring minds want to know !
Ian H
January 14, 2015 at 11:30 pm
There has always been a transfer of wealth agenda lurking in the background very thinly disguised as the notion that rich countries should pay “carbon reparations”to the poor. This looks like a list of the intended targets of UN generosity. No wonder it looks like it has more to do with geopolitics than geography.
brians356
January 14, 2015 at 11:32 pm
Those UK “climate experts” seems to me more socio-economist(with some marxist view). The map show in fact(with some exception) the distribution of wealth on the earth. From the global warming real risk it’s a piece of sh__t.
What want to tell us the “scientist”? the green countries must quickly send a lot of money to th red countries.
Because all it’s about money.
Berényi Péter
January 15, 2015 at 9:28 am
the green countries must quickly send a lot of money to the red countries
It is much better to send money directly to climate activists, who know perfectly well in their wisdom how to spend it in the most efficient manner.
That is, on conferences held in splendid tropical resorts, where one can gain first hand experience of the lurking danger (of having too much Margarita).
commieBob
January 15, 2015 at 11:09 am
Because all it’s about money.
Prosperous countries can adapt to climate change (manmade or natural). As many posters have pointed out before, prosperity is a good thing. Many folks have also pointed out that prosperous countries can afford to take much better care of their environments.
The green activists are trying to prevent prosperity and are therefore promoting much greater environmental degradation and human misery. It’s the law of unintended consequences writ large.
“… the law of unintended consequences has come to be used as an adage or idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. Akin to Murphy’s law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them. ” (the emphasis is mine) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
The one thing the gods reliably punish is hubris.
gbaikie
Silly goose, only poor brown people can be negatively impacted by CAGW.
Krudd Gillard of the Commondebt of Australia
says:
This is something that really needs to be impressed on the voters in western democracies. Your tax dollars for terrorists.
Doug UK
January 15, 2015 at 12:26 am
I have long felt that AGW was a ruse to support a particular agenda. Thankfully the truth of this agenda is now understood by many:-
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official
“We routinely wrote scare stories…Our press reports were more or less true…We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment.”
Jim Sibbison, environmental journalist, former public relations official for the Environmental Protection Agency:
So why are North Korea and Somalia not included? Or is the blue off-scale. Either no risk at all or now completely destroyed by CC.
schitzree
January 15, 2015 at 8:50 am
I’m assuming the grayed out countries like N Korea were outside the peramters for the study. They were figuring the survival chances for these countries a hundred years from now, and the grayed out ones won’t survive that long no matter what the Climate does.
Miguel Sanchez
January 15, 2015 at 2:02 pm
The Gray color is not a rating. There’s just no data available. Most such studies don’t deal with North Korea and leave it dark or gray.
Since no North Korean would ever be able to read it it’s probably not worth the effort of asking the government for information and trying to dissect any credible data from it.
Lank
January 15, 2015 at 12:45 am
I wonder how much time and money went Ito this ‘research’.
Rather than climate risk I suggest the result should be viewed more as employment risk for the author of this nonsense.
Peter Azlac
the line is between PNG and Indonesia.
Leo Morgan
January 15, 2015 at 7:35 am
@ ferdberple
Although you’re right about what the line is, the point that David was making was slightly subtler. He’s asking “How does Global Warming know about the border?”
Now it’s true that assigning unitary values for a country will often produce distinct value differences at a border, so the map isn’t necessarily wrong- but for that particular border it looks highly likely to be incorrect. All other factors except the political do look to be identical as far as the impact of ‘Global Warming’ is concerned.
I note that ‘ability to cope with Climate Change’ on that map, appears to be a direct function of per-capita CO2 emissions.
I doubt the map is correct in terms of harm to countries. I also believe that even if it were correct Australian support for PNG would mean it did not ‘suffer’ as badly as the map-makers depict.
My doubt is not merely wishful thinking, but based on the huge and ever-increasing discrepancy between forecasts and actuality, as well as their colleagues’ practice of graphing only gross negatives without offsetting benefits.
JJM Gommers
Anyone notice some countries are kind of blue greyish on the map? There are a couple countries in Africa (Somalia and some country in north western Africa), Asia (North Korea) and in South America. What do they mean by that?
There is no blue greyish colour on the scale…
MikeH
January 15, 2015 at 2:28 am
If you go to the source web site for the map, they also break it down to the different regions. In the legends of the zoomed maps, it does state “No Data”..
Funny thing, scrolling down on their web page, the United States ranks 8th in ability to survive “Climate Change”. I wonder if our ranking would improve if we “gave” more “assistance” to the “at risk” countries. Can forgiveness be bought? Probably in their minds, they’d like us to try.
Kip Hansen
January 15, 2015 at 6:15 am
Reply to Mr J ==> It means “inadequate data to make a judgement”.
This is why links to original materials are useful — I think one has to do a double jump (link to news article, then link to original web site) to discover this.
Just an engineer
January 15, 2015 at 1:38 am
Oddest map I’ve ever seen. I suspect what they are trying to show is that the hottest countries, by getting hotter (in their scenario), will pass a tipping point beyond which crops will stop growing, cattle will die, and human beings will have to leave or die; but wait! If the current cooling (“pause”) continues, the coolest countries, by getting cooler, may pass a tipping point beyond which crops will stop growing, cattle will die, and human beings will have to leave, which would reverse the color scheme of the map. I think a more likely scenario is that none of this will happen, and we will stay where we are and die of disease or being hit by a Mack truck.
Stephen Richards
“High on their risk are countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, countries whose populations regularly express hostility towards the USA and Western values.
[…]
if we accept the map at face value, why should we care […]?”
====================================
Because “we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children’s future.
And we are all mortal.”
-John F. Kennedy
King Crane Commission Report, 1919
Wishes of the People
“The Moslems constitute about four-fifths of the actual population of Palestine, according to a recent British census. Except for certain official groups they were practically unanimous for the independence of United Syria, and were responsive to the current political influences. The organizations met at Jaffa took the position that Syria is capable of self-government without a mandatory power, but if one should be insisted upon by the Peace Conference, they preferred the United States.
I often express hostility to the United States too. Most Australians do.
evanmjones
Whereas I often express gratitude for the loyal support of our Australian allies in our most difficult and painful endeavors. (Most Americans do.)
asybot
January 15, 2015 at 1:05 pm
The same scenario is in Canada. I believe it is linked to the total lack of education MOST Americans have about the world as far as geography and history is concerned, so when a survey is done it becomes slanted. Some of the things said about Canada, Australia and others by the general USA public (in some cases not so general look at the nominees for ambassadors for the US) is downright insulting!
Jack
Climate change is being used as a weapon.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it for a One World agenda.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it for more government controls.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it for the de-industrialisation of the West.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it for a socialist agenda.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it for personal gain.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it because of a genuine concern for the environment.
Some of those using climate change as weapon are using it because of a genuine concern for humanity.
Like any weapon, the use it is put to depends upon the motives of the person using it which means some motives will be altruistic, some will be selfish and some will be driven by an agenda.
evanmjones
Get a sense of humor people, he was joking!
Jack
January 15, 2015 at 2:08 am
It is a guilt map obscenely used to redistribute money. Would like to know how the nations in central Africa are going to perish from sea rise.
Also notice the Australia map is least risk but our greens convinced the Labor government to have the most onerous carbon tax in the world.
Lastly, there mission to abuse CO2 and fossil fuels as vandalising the world is going to hurt those poor countries even more.
Just airheads that can only handle one idea thrust in there by slogans at a time.
Simon
January 15, 2015 at 2:44 am
Try blowing away all the smoke & mirrors rhetoric & approach it from this angle.
I believe that carbon tax & foreign aid distribution in both US & UK goes from the middle class taxes to the political class/dictators in poor countries.
In other words, money flows from the taxpaying poor in rich countries, to the rich in poor countries.
The result ? The rich get richer & the poor get poorer. This is an undeniable trend.
Another result is the propping up of dictators friendly to the central bankster dominated US & UK in the
‘Club of dictators’ known as the United Nations.
If anyone on here is clever enough & has the time to do this, I believe an interesting correlation might well emerge.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
January 15, 2015 at 2:53 am
The map is as good as bad!!! Unless, you first define on what basis this is characterized in terms of climate change? For this secondly, you must define what is climate change? Risk relates to several natural factors and man induced factors that vary with location to location, region to region, country to country. We can not use blindly the type of climate classifications that were used in 40s, 50s & 60s. Take the case of India, the map includes India under 40-49 risk group but in India, the risks are quite different from north to south and east to west. East is affected by cyclonic activity, north is affected by earthquakes, etc.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
http://index.gain.org/
from a quick look at the site it appears this is not just a scribbled together map, but rather has the data publicly available for download, with many different categories of vulnerability and readiness considered.
For example, the interactive map shows that India is much less at risk for climate change today than it was in 1995.
Joe Born
January 15, 2015 at 3:03 am
What the map really shows–to the extent that the boys and girls who prepared it had a creditable basis for their results–is which countries are most vulnerable to climate, independently of whether it changes. That is, these are the ones whose failure to avail themselves of fossil fuel’s benefits has left them the most vulnerable to weather events of which most would happen even if all fossil-fuel use stopped tomorrow. They can transform themselves into less-vulnerable regions by using fossil fuels as the rich countries have.
And do we really think Mongolia will be harmed by a warmer, moister climate?
evanmjones
Define ‘survive’? Does this mean a significant fraction of the least likely to survive all mostly die then? I smell a strong putrescent woof of self-serving wedge-politics in that little map.
i.e. Brown against pale-face, and ‘Rich’ (most indebted) against poor.
Plus I thought it was ‘game-over’ for Australia? Well waddaya know! It’s a bloomin’ miracle! And apparently China’s development will kill the world, but not China … must be the low pollution levels and complete absence of air, food or water contamination issues, and lack of live stock diseases.
Alternatively it’s another bunch of knobs gazing into a digital crystal-ball.
How would you tell?
January 15, 2015 at 4:10 am
I went to the linked source to see if it defines survive and not survive, but there were only three instances of the word survive in the text, one in the Title of the article, one in the opening line, and one in the next paragraph, which says just this (my caps):
“… The map also shows that countries in the West, who are arguably most responsible for CAUSING climate change, are less vulnerable and better prepared, making them most likely to SURVIVE the SEVERE IMPACTS of climate change. …”
So it’s cheap catastroph-AGW propaganda and mischief-making again. But heavens to Betsy! Why?
“… The Eco Experts is the leading Solar Panel Comparison Website in the United Kingdom …”
Nope, no self-serving BS agenda there.
Countries hostile to the USA? what about the UN? this is the real socialist zealot!
YEP
January 15, 2015 at 5:26 am
Many here have wondered why x country (say Papua New Guinea) is more at risk than y (say Northern Australia) since they are very similar geographically, thereby dismissing the map as nonsense. Well, think about it. Richer countries with strong institutions would be able to cope much better with any kind of adverse event. Instead of looking at this as a map of climate risk, I look at it as one that shows the ability to cope with any kind of emergency, and as such it works pretty well. And it’s no accident that all our friends are countries at low risk, because they are also affluent democracies.
I wouldn’t dismiss the high-risk countries by effectively saying, like Eric, screw ’em, they are not our friends anyway. Failed states and countries at risk of humanitarian catastrophes have a way of biting us in the rear, with civil wars, famines, insurgencies and jihads. It’s good to know who they are.
John West
January 15, 2015 at 5:28 am
So, the areas of the planet that will supposedly see the least actual change from climate change (the tropics) are the least equipped to deal with climate change; while the areas that will supposedly see the most change are well equiped to deal with it. Problem solved.
markopanama
January 15, 2015 at 5:31 am
If this is so, why are the only places complaining about “extreme weather” and linking it to climate change in the green zones? Canada, the U.S., UK, Austrailia…
As TRM just pointed out, the only existential threat from climate would be a sudden end to the Holocene. One year, the snow never melts in Buffalo NY, next year snow storms in July in NY. THEN we will know we are in trouble.
January 15, 2015 at 6:28 am
why are the only places complaining about “extreme weather” and linking it to climate change in the green zones? Canada, the U.S., UK, Austrailia
it is because the news has turned into reality TV. They take a newscaster, stick them outside in a hurricane, and roll the cameras for a story on how extreme the weather is. Then they all step inside for a double latte espresso and a good laugh.
Tom in Florida
January 15, 2015 at 6:39 am
Another useless expenditure of money. It seems we see more and more of this type of fiscal waste. Apparently a group can brainstorm an idea that on the surface would sound good in a grant request but in reality just provides more bs.
An old saying was clearly meant for climatologists
BS – bullsh*t
MS – more of the same
PHD – pile it higher and deeper
patrick healy
TerryS and others,
As a practicing Catholic I do try to have compassion for all mankind.
What I refuse to accept is the Marxist corruption of my faith by institutions like Notra Dame, who published this drivel, and our supreme pontiff who apparently aquiests.
I would urge – even implore – any contributors on Anthony’s site to read -“http/planetshifter.com/node/1724” (without the quotes).
It is a frightening expose of the greatest scientific scam of all time.
The involvement of the Catholic church in this fraud is particularly gauling for me in my twilight years.
Please keep up the good fight for truth and the integrity of science.
Phil R
January 15, 2015 at 6:55 am
WTF is Mongolia at risk of? and after all the scare of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and all the droughts, flooding rains, flooding droughts, and whatever in Australia, it’s nice to see that these are two of the countries least at risk.
TRM
January 15, 2015 at 4:09 pm
During the last glaciation the Gobi desert was 2-3 times its current size and encompased all of Mongolia. So it is in danger of climate change, just not the type the authors are thinking of. When (not if) our little inter-glacial is over it will slowly go back to being to dry for man nor beast to survive in.
Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7
says:
And we will subsidize the slash and burn CO2 emitters in the rain forests so CO2 will continue to rise for sure.
TRM
January 15, 2015 at 4:11 pm
While it is part of it there is no way to match the roll out of one coal burning plant a week by China for CO2 output. My plants and plants everywhere would like to say thanks to China but could you burn the coal cleanly so all the real pollutants are removed? Just CO2 is all the plants want.
southerncross
January 15, 2015 at 7:16 am
The risk portrayed in this map is poorly represented by colour.
What it actually shows is the hoped for and predicted redistribution of wealth (green) from the developed fossil fuel using country’s with electricity networks to those with bugger all power networks and very little development (red).
I thought Global Warming was melting the Greenland glaciers. That would certainly be a change. How can Greenland be one the least at risk?
JimS
January 15, 2015 at 8:00 am
When they can grow barley in Greenland again, in sufficient quantities to feed livestock and make beer like the Vikings did one thousand years ago, then it will be a paradise once more. … at least for folks with a Medieval lifestyle who are currently liviing.
Alx
January 15, 2015 at 7:39 am
Yes I am sure the populations of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan when they wake up, have as the last thing on their mind terrorism, civil war, drones from the United States, crime, crumbling infrastructure, destroyed economies and violent death around every corner. I mean their real concern is the climate changing. If a drone is sending missiles into your neighborhood, or a warlord decapitates a member of your family, what you really need to know is whether combined land and sea surface temperature has gone up 1 hundredths of a degree or 3 hundredths of a degree since 2007.
Certified GWA. Global Warming Absurdium.
Robert of Ottawa
Looks like a map of third world countries and various other basket cases. As someone else pointed out, these would be “at risk” if the weather remained the same.
UK Sceptic
January 15, 2015 at 7:47 am
The earth has experienced constant climate change for over four billion years and it will continue to experience climate change for the next four billion years. In poor countries as well as rich ones. Anyone who believes they have the power to control climate by limiting atmospheric plant food, thereby impoverishing us all, and that we should waste trillions trying is not only crazy but inhuman.
kenw
I’m feeling guilty for “Climate Privilege!!”
Miguel Sanchez
January 15, 2015 at 8:23 am
This looks like a map of GDP per capita, standard of living, HDI or some other measure of prosperity. The climate risk must have been a tiny little factor in the risk evaluation. Look at sub-Sahara Africa where the climate is almost identical climate, nevertheless business-friendly and prospering Botswana is the only green spot inbetween all the ailing countries with identical climate but leftist governments.
So the correlation between foes/allies with high/low risk is no coincidence.
The losers have always blamed the US for their misery.
Keith Willshaw
What a despicable post.
It is the governments of these countries that you consider to be your “enemies”.
The rest of the population are human beings like the rest of us. And deserve all the help possible to pull them up to our standard of living.
In the last few months much has been said on wuwt about how the green agenda will impoverish the impoverished and this disgusting green conspiracy should be halted. Now all of a sudden these people you were so worried about should be thrown to the wolves man, woman, and child.
I am truly sadden by such an attitude (I’m alright jack! Bu**er everyone else!) shown by the author and many of the posters.
Robert W Turner
January 15, 2015 at 11:20 am
Sergei –
In my state of Vermont, the loonies are preparing to impose carbon taxes and subsidies to bulldoze more of our ridge lines and erect wind deals that don’t work and will require natural gas back-up.
OK, now they’ve got my money and my neighbors.
I don’t believe for one moment that those green backs are headed to Nigeria. Why would they give away the money? They are NOT generous.
Miguel Sanchez
January 15, 2015 at 1:40 pm
Would you give money to someone who is blaming you for all of his problems and openly threatens you like the thousands or maybe millions of people in those countries shouting “death to USA” ?
This is not the first map which shows that a developed economy is the best guard against any kind of risk. Giving unconditioned money to poor countries has kept them poor for decades.
You better don’t try to offer them something else than cash like economic advice or attach conditions to the donations. Africans think you are trying to colonize their continent, Arabs claim you’re a Zionist or Israeli spy and South American’s tell you to go back to the ‘Empire’ if you tell them what to do.
Even humanitarian help is often found conspicious and only accepted when the desaster already happened.
The green’s way of destroying our own economy is insane and dosn’t help anybody.
So what else is on the table?
Barry
January 15, 2015 at 5:20 pm
It’s not only despicable, but incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted. One should ask, why are these countries “hostile”, and why do terrorist cells form in these countries? It’s because some people are desperate and feel taken advantage of or ignored by the “industrialized west.” Religion is then used by some to incite this distrust, resentment, and even hatred. I suggest a book called “The Prosperity Agenda,” by Soderberg and Katulis, which outlines how to build relationships with these countries by helping them prosper.
Patrick
January 16, 2015 at 3:58 am
Ethiopia is a threat to the US of A? I don’t think so. Most people there worry more about feeding themselves for a day, and many don’t. Strangely, some of the poorest people I’ve seen there live in makeshift huts, made from items such as sacks that once contained grains supplied by…the US of A during the 1980’s famine!!!
Doug Proctor
On what basis? [Tropics] have least change. Bet this BS refers to danger of ” climate-induced war”.
Doesn’t look like temperature or sealevel rise threat.
otsar
January 15, 2015 at 11:08 am
I see something interesting and ironic in this map. Those countries most deemed at risk are the most likely to survive in an economic- technologic crash. During the depression of 1930 and WW2 people living in remote places with weak governments did not notice much change. Their population was in balance with their support infrastructure. They were basically living off the grid in a non monetarised existence as they had for most of time.
Right after WW2, I went with my father to a very remote place in the central Andes. An old man in his nineties or older asked my father if those people up north were still killing and destroying each other. He stumbled around a bit for an answer, and finally said yes. My father later told me he was not certain of which instance of destruction the old man was talking about.
The reason for the visit to the remote places was a yearly health check and delivery of pharmaceuticals for residents of remote places. The people in the remote places were in better health and nutrition than their counterparts that visited the clinics in the large cities.
Neo
You mean all that hype with the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” with the North Atlantic currents is now passe. How else can you explain North Europe and the North Sea area with such shining scores ?
Patrick
January 15, 2015 at 11:52 am
Not one Govn’t or person in the “non-green” areas of this map are the least bit “worried” about “climate change”. None! Finding dinner for the family, that day, sure! Of course that cost has been exaserbated by corrupt Govn’ts and all the usual “climate scams” so much so that most people CANNOT afford to buy enough food for a day!
Kevin Kilty
January 15, 2015 at 12:00 pm
So Netherlands and Greenland, to pick two examples, have low probability of severe consequences according to this map. Yet, the bleating I hear is that the Netherlands are more than a third below sea level already and Greenland will melt away and become a large lake. Why does a rational person tend to ignore work of this sort?
January 15, 2015 at 1:22 pm
Countries with a low CO2 output seem to be at the greatest risk! Those countries, which are at risk on the map, are mainly at risk from their low standard of economic development or political and social stability. The weather would be the least of their worries. It is definitely drawn from some political-economic source as ferdberple says.
Gunga Din
January 15, 2015 at 2:20 pm
Elmer upstream brought in the satellite CO2 map. ( http://m4gw.com/ ) It seems that Nature trumps coal plants in in CO2 production.
(Oh Gosh! Lew is going to put out a paper that says efficient energy production is a conspiracy against all the “lesser” nations!)
rogerthesurf
Eric Worrall reads the graph wrongly.
Now look at the pattern of vulnerability.
Why is Mongolia more vulnerable than Russia or China?
Why is Haiti more vulnerable than Guatemala & El Salvador, which in turn are more vulnerable than Mexico, which in turn is more vulnerable than the USA?
Why is Zimbabwe more vulnerable than Botswana?
Why is Burma more vulnerable than Thailand?
The answer is that climate change vulnerability is related to economic development, not to regional climate change. It is the same as vulnerability to earthquakes. Economically failed states – due to conflict and/or oppressive governments – are most vulnerable to economic shocks.
The most populous country with a high risk is India. In fact it has more people than the 50+ nations of Africa, or nearly twice the population of the OECD – the rich nations club. It is determined not to constrain the rapid growth in emissions if it means sacrificing the rapid economic growth that is pulling people out of poverty. Even if climate change is real, this is the most sensible policy, rather than climate mitigation. I explain more at my blog.
Well said Doug. I wonder if it represents a cross-section of the readership, or just the those who comment
Andrew
January 16, 2015 at 4:03 am
Frankly, they only got themselves to blame… the poor people should have invested more heavily in coal-fired electricity output, air-conditioning units, and a free-market capitalist philosophy (like wot we got) and they could have been just as green as us and less shitty-brown coloured. Wait a minute…. more green…????…think i saw a pussy cat!
more soylent green!
January 16, 2015 at 10:09 am
It looks to me like the more industrialized and wealthy a nation is, the less the risk. Some people look at this and cry “unfair.” Others look at this and say “Let’s help make the poor nations wealthier.”
The former type believes there is only so much wealth to go around. if one nation gets a bigger slice of the pie, then somebody else just gets a sliver. The latter type (the non-Marxists) know that wealth is not limited. Economic growths creates a bigger pie.
Kiwi Gary
January 17, 2015 at 12:34 am
I have recently heard African reasonably educated people say that there is a belief about in their area that combating climate change by de-industrialisation is just a method by the rich “West” to prevent them from improving their lot by getting on to the industrialisation bandwagon like China has.
|
Digging
|
A negotiating offer that is available for discussion is said to be 'On the (What?)'?
|
Newsletter - EDWBA - Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association
{autocontent:21-|max:20|order:ordering,ASC|type:full|pict:1}
Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
{modify}Modify your Subscription{/modify}
The Docket - March 2012
titleThe Docket - The Newsletter of the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association
March 2012
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
President Elect
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Vice President
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Secretary
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Treasurer
U.S. District Court Eastern District
414-297-3071
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Program Co-chairs
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Elizabeth C. Perkins
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Board of Directors
Hon. Charles N. Clevert, Jr.
Terri L. Full
A Lesson Learned from a Great Bankruptcy Judge
Thomas L. Shriner, Jr.
*This article is from the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog.
Judge Dale Ihlenfeldt died right after Christmas. He was 92 years old and hadn’t sat on the bankruptcy court bench in Milwaukee for many years, though he remained active until fairly recently, including by teaching an annual CLE program in Madison in which I also participate. Teaching CLE required him to keep up on developments in bankruptcy law, and that suited him just fine, because he loved the law. He also liked lawyers, and his warm, engaging personality was always welcome whenever he could join us.
I learned a lot from Judge Ihlenfeldt over the years, but one of the most valuable lessons he taught me came very early in my legal career, and I see this story as making an important point for law students and new lawyers. The practice of law requires constant learning; you’ve barely begun to know what you need to know when you leave law school. And you can - must - learn the lessons of the law (and life) from everyone, not just your professors, but your colleagues, your adversaries, your clients, and even from judges.
Back in the mid ’70s, as an associate at Foley & Lardner, I first appeared in bankruptcy court for banks and other creditors, often seeking to recover collateral or to oppose the discharge of a debt. I had appeared before Judge Ihlenfeldt a few times, and on this particular occasion he had ruled against me. I don’t remember the details, but the decision may well have involved the judge’s exercising some discretion, and he exercised it against my client. The case was over, and (as often happened in his court) the lawyers had lingered in chambers to talk. He could tell that I was upset at losing (not then having much experience at it—a condition that time has healed), and he turned to me, in his gentle way, and said, “Oh, Tom, you have to understand that we’re the bankruptcy court. Bankruptcy law is intended to benefit debtors, and you shouldn't expect to win all the time when you represent creditors.”
This comment struck me at the time and many times since as one of the best lessons that a judge could teach a young lawyer. And it has implications beyond bankruptcy law. Good judges like Judge Ihlenfeldt call them as they see them and follow the law as they understand it. But a lawyer should never lose sight of the fact that much of the law (understood as being what judges do) is not black and white, but gray, and a judge’s instincts in the gray area—whether to afford a debtor relief, to let a plaintiff try to prove her case, or to cut a lawyer some slack—are every bit as much a part of the law as the stuff in the books. I’m glad that I learned that lesson early from a great judge.
A Memorial Service will be held for Judge Ihlenfeldt on Monday, May 14 at the Federal Courthouse. More tributes to Judge Ihlenfeldt will appear in the next edition of The Docket.
Winning from the Beginning
Laurna Jozwiak
On Wednesday, February 22, 2012, members of the EDWBA were privileged to attend “Winning from the Beginning: Building a Winning Case from Complaint to Closing Argument,” presented by Judge Pamela Pepper. Judge Pepper’s program and advice was insightful, humorous, interactive and - most importantly – extremely practical.
While Judge Pepper has served as a United States Bankruptcy Court Judge since 2005, the information she presented was in no way particular to bankruptcy practitioners. Judge Pepper called upon her time and experience as an Assistant United States Attorney, a criminal defense attorney and, most importantly for EDWBA members, a Judge in the Eastern District, to develop an outline of how to effectively manage litigation, from initial client meeting through the close of trial.
The impetus for the program was, unfortunately for practitioners, a discussion Judge Pepper recalled having with her colleagues. She found that they were often left asking themselves “Is that everything?” at the close of the plaintiff’s case or at the end of trial. Regrettably for those of us practicing in the Eastern District, that answer was often "yes." A common reason for dismissal was that plaintiff’s counsel failed to prove (or in egregious cases, even discuss) an element of their client’s claim. In an effort to assist attorneys in avoiding problems such as these, Judge Pepper developed her “Winning from the Beginning” approach to case development, focusing on the importance of a well-drafted complaint.
In demonstrating her strategy for success, Judge Pepper took participants step-by-step through the process of developing a case, from the first client interview through closing statements. She emphasized the importance of thinking of the case as a “single entity,” and how that perspective helps attorneys to hone in on critical information necessary to achieve results for your client. Her materials laid out a thoughtful roadmap for attorneys to use in developing, proving, and ultimately succeeding in their client’s causes of action.
While the program was bursting with helpful, handy, step-by-step advice, what follows are some of "Judge Pepper's to dos" applicable to all attorneys when drafting and later using a complaint to guide litigation:
Know the law. State the law clearly. Your complaint should lay out each element of every cause of action specifically.
Know the facts. Interview the client yourself. Interview your client more than once. Make sure that you have evidence that directly supports each element of your causes of action. If you do not have the evidence when you file your case, make sure that you reasonably believe that you can obtain the necessary evidence. If you do not, do not move forward with that cause of action. Know which facts are important. Eliminate extraneous information, and avoid reciting a litany of “bad acts” that does not further your client’s position.
Narrow your causes of action. Be creative when brainstorming, and discriminating in your final determination of how to proceed. Avoid “kitchen sink” drafting at the outset, and focus on those causes of action you can support with the evidence you have or know you can obtain.
Determine what you really want. Be sure that there is a basis in the law for the relief that you are seeking. Make sure that you have proved up everything you need in order for your client to be entitled to that relief.
Refer to the complaint often. A carefully-drafted complaint should serve as an invaluable tool to any litigator. Use the complaint to draft discovery. Allow the complaint to guide settlement negotiations. Analyze whether a summary judgment motion is appropriate in light of the facts set out in the complaint. Prepare for trial using your complaint as an outline. Draft closing arguments centered on the complaint. Use the complaint as a checklist during trial to ensure that you have all elements of your case.
Reminding us that Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there,” Judge Pepper’s program showed that a well-drafted complaint does more than get you through the courtroom doors. It determines where you want to end up, and establishes a roadmap to get your client there. By following Judge Pepper’s wonderful advice, carefully analyzing a case, and referring to the complaint often throughout litigation, EDWBA members can help to maximize the likelihood of achieving a successful outcome for their clients.
Spotlight on United States Magistrate Judge James R. Sickel
Elizabeth K. Miles
James R. Sickel serves as part-time magistrate judge for the Eastern District's Green Bay division and maintains a law practice at Hinkfuss, Sickel, Petitjean & Wieting in downtown Green Bay.
Raised in Green Bay, Judge Sickel earned an undergraduate degree in history from Marquette University in 1967 and a law degree from Marquette University Law School in 1974. Between college and law school he spent several years with the Peace Corps in Colombia,where he worked in orphanages, juvenile courts, and food distribution centers. It was there Judge Sickel decided to pursue law.
In law school Judge Sickel gravitated to litigation, and he joined Crooks and Parins in Green Bay after graduation. A year later, he joined Bittner, Petitjean & Hinkfuss which subsequently became his current firm, Hinkfuss, Sickel, Petitjean & Wieting. Judge Sickel’s practice focuses on business litigation, real estate transactions, municipal law and estate work. When just out of law school, Judge Sickel was the only Spanish-speaking attorney in an area that had little demand for one. That changed, however, as the Spanish-speaking population of Green Bay increased significantly, giving the Judge many opportunities to use his second language in his private practice.
In 1991, Judge Sickel was appointed part-time magistrate judge for the Eastern District's Green Bay division. He has been re-appointed to consecutive four-year terms ever since. Judge Sickel handles preliminary proceedings for all criminal cases and presides over misdemeanor cases from initial appearance through sentencing. He also issues writs, warrants and complaints for the Green Bay division, including search, arrest, postal service, and OSHA warrants. A large part of Judge Sickel's duties involve conducting mediations in civil cases. Judge Sickel enjoys helping parties reach a mutually agreeable solution and finds it particularly gratifying when businesses can settle their case through mediation, salvage their relationship and continue working together.
If practicing before Judge Sickel in a criminal matter, he advises that counsel augment the pretrial services report as comprehensively as possible. The pretrial services report helps him determine whether to release or detain a defendant before trial, so practitioners are encouraged to highlight any information that will help inform this decision. If you are before Judge Sickel or one of his colleagues in mediation, Judge Sickel encourages you to think creatively, and to consider solutions that involve more than just paying or accepting money. Judge Sickel also encourages litigants to consider early mediation before plunging into expensive motion practice and to avoid a scattershot approach to a case. Hone in on the real issues and focus your efforts where your client is likely to succeed, he advises, and be flexible when considering potential resolutions.
In his free time Judge Sickel enjoys time with his family - his wife, daughter, two sons and daughters-in-laws, and baby granddaughter. Judge Sickel has been active in historical preservation projects in Green Bay - restoring a Carnegie Library building (now the Jefferson Court Building), helping to preserve Hazelwood, the home of the Brown County Historical Society, and serving on the board of Heritage Hill Historical Park Foundation. He also serves on the boards of the Wisconsin Equal Justice Fund, Inc., and the Marquette University Law School Alumni Association.
Judge Sickel's office is located in the Jefferson Court Building, also housing the Federal District Court in Green Bay. He can be reached at (920) 432-7716.
EDWBA Federal Sentencing Panel
Bridget J. Domaszek
On February 3, 2012, the EDWBA sponsored a Bench and Bar event at the Federal Courthouse, which included lunch followed by a panel discussion of federal sentencing issues. The panel featured United States District Court Judges Lynn Adelman, William C. Griesbach, and Rudolph T. Randa, and was moderated by Michael M. O’Hear, Associate Dean for Research at Marquette University Law School. In response to questions posed by Dean O’Hear and members of the audience, the panel covered a wide array of sentencing issues, including application of the guidelines, the need for sentencing consistency at the district and national levels, the right of allocution, the need for individualized sentences that are tailored to the offense and the offender, and substantial assistance motions. Additionally, panel members discussed particular sentencing issues in their respective courts, including the importance of sentencing memoranda. Many thanks to Jonathan Koenig, Chris Donovan and Katy Borowski for their work organizing this event.
Accepting a Pro Bono Appointment in the Eastern District of Wisconsin: Representing an Incarcerated Person in a Section 1983 Civil Rights Claim
William F. Sulton
There are more than 2 million Americans in our federal and state prisons and local jails. In Wisconsin alone there are more than 23,000 incarcerated persons.
Mass incarceration results in lawsuits. When a prisoner’s constitutional and/or statutory rights are violated, they need private lawyers to accept pro bono appointments. Civil rights cases, although counterintuitive, are prosecuted by private attorneys.
I was recently appointed to represent a man named Jessie Williams. Mr. Williams filed suit against several correctional officers at Waupun Correctional Institution (WCI). Only one of the defendants remained in the lawsuit by the time I was appointed. Mr. Williams alleged that the officers violated his Eighth Amendment rights to adequate medical care and treatment by ignoring his requests for medical assistance during an asthmatic attack. Mr. Williams was on suicide watch at the time.
During one of several trips to WCI, I chatted up an officer who was not a defendant in the case. I asked him about his experience at WCI. What he told me was shocking. He said that WCI’s population is currently twice its capacity. The officer described the negative impact overpopulation had on the inmates and officers, such as safety concerns, sleeping arrangements and the decrease in the quality of the food.
Overpopulation helps to explain Mr. Williams’ plight at WCI and his case. At the time of trial, he had spent the past eight years in solitary confinement. He was originally segregated for disciplinary reasons; but he stayed because there was no other place to put him. He is totally dependent on the officers for everything, including companionship.
Mr. Williams’ case was further complicated by his illiteracy. Opposing counsel began Mr. Williams’ deposition by asking him how far he got in school. He told her that he completed his junior year of high school but did not graduate. It is difficult to imagine how Mr. Williams made it that far with less than a third-grade reading level. His father, who is also a prisoner at WCI, wrote the complaint.
With his father’s assistance, Mr. Williams litigated his case through the process required by the Prisoner’s Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The PLRA requires prisoners to exhaust the administrative remedies created by the prison before filing a complaint in federal court. After several appeals through WCI’s internal grievance procedure, Mr. Williams filed a complaint in the Eastern District. He was inundated with disclosures he could not read and discovery requests he could not understand. Despite these obstacles, Mr. Williams managed to defeat the officer’s motion for summary judgment and the court appointed counsel to represent him at trial.
Representing Mr. Williams was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. His complaints were legitimate and deserved legal representation. I ask all of you to think back to why you went to law school. Chances are you were like me: you wanted to use the legal system to help others. You can help others and our legal system by accepting a pro bono appointment.
If you are willing to be appointed to a pro bono litigant in the Eastern District of Wisconsin or for more information regarding pro bono appointments please contact the court’s pro se law clerks, Jenny Hong (414-297-3362) or Kelly Mangan (414-297-3361).
EDWBA 10th Annual Meeting and Presentation: A Preview
Katy Borowski
The Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association is hosting its 10th Annual Meeting and Presentation on Thursday, April 26. The morning will be filled with CLE seminars beginning with a plenary program featuring the state’s law school deans. Marquette University Law School Dean Joseph D. Kearny and the University of Wisconsin Law School Dean Margaret Raymond will each discuss a case pending before the Supreme Court this term. Following the plenary, guests will have the option to choose between three interesting breakout programs.
The luncheon begins at 11:30 a.m. and will start with a keynote from Collins T. Fitzpatrick, Circuit Executive of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Following Mr. Fitzpatrick’s remarks, the awards will be presented. This year’s recipients include: Hon. James E. Shapiro, recipient of the Judge Myron L. Gordon Lifetime Achievement Award; Hon. Charles N. Clevert, Jr., recipient of the Nathan A. Fishbach Founder’s Award; the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, recipient of the Judge Robert W. Warren Public Service Award; Bruce A. Lanser, recipient of the Judge Dale E. Ihlenfeldt Bankruptcy Award; Hon. Patricia J. Gorence and Hon. Nancy Joseph, recipients of the Judge John W. Reynolds Community Building Award.
The program will conclude with the election of new officers and board members.
Please watch your mailbox later this month for your invitation. It will include all the program details as well as profiles of each of the award recipients.
For questions, please contact Katy Borowski at 414-276-5933 or
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Docket - October 2012
titleThe Docket - The Newsletter of the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association
October 2012
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
President Elect
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Vice President
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Secretary
U.S. District Court Eastern District
414-297-3071
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Treasurer
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Past President
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Program Co-chairs
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Daniel E. Conley
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Board of Directors
Hon. Nelson W. Phillips III
Prof. Ryan Scoville
Hon. Charles N. Clevert, Jr.
Terri L. Full
Hon. Nelson W. Phillips III
Newsletter
If you are having problems viewing the contents of this newsletter, please click here.
Letter from the President
"Condolences" were offered to me more than once when I started this year as President of the EDWBA. Although the comments were made in jest, the message was clear -- there was a great deal of work ahead. Looking back, the first few months on the job have been very busy, but pursuing our mission has never felt like work.
As described in this issue of The Docket, we held an entertaining and very informative Introduction to the Eastern District program for attorneys new to federal practice, and we got to know each other better while honoring Judge Clevert at our Evening at the Courthouse last month. This week we honored 37 pro bono volunteers at a luncheon with our judges. Next week Judge Gorence will be moderating a discussion between our U.S. Attorney, Jim Santelle, and our Federal Defender, Dan Stiller. And we have several great programs lined up for November, including a celebration of Judge Shapiro's career, our annual e-Discovery program, and a CLE and Evening at the Courthouse in Green Bay to welcome Judge Griesbach as our new Chief Judge. Honestly, all this has been great fun. And there is much more to come throughout the year. Stick with us, and I promise you will feel the difference as we continue to foster bench-bar relations, improve the administration of justice, and promote professionalism in our community.
On a different note, this issue is reaching you during National Pro Bono Celebration Week. I talk often about our need to dig deep and do more, but we need to continue that conversation. While driving to the office one morning recently, the radio news reported another co-sleeping fatality, a woman who was killed and whose unborn child was taken from her body, and a two year old girl that was pushed back into a burning house by her father after she had escaped the fire. And as I am writing this, another mass shooting occurred today in our community -- this time at a spa in Brookfield.
These are the headlines, but so much tragedy never makes the news. It occurs every day in the lives of those around us. As an example, several students spent the day at the courthouse a few weeks ago with Judge Joseph during her Kids, Courts and Citizenship program. As we talked, it became clear that serious struggles with crime, violence, drugs and teen pregnancy were common for these high-schoolers. And they certainly are not alone. I am very blessed to be able to work with so many kind and talented people in this organization. I know you already are doing a lot to help others, but we need to do more.
Why you? The truth is, very few people have the ability to do what you do. Most cannot stand up for others in the courtroom. You can. Whether you believe that your talents were given to you by chance or through God's Grace, we all can agree that our gifts are special. Because they are so unique, we have a responsibility to share our talents with those that cannot help themselves.
So, please, take a pro bono case, support a charity with your time or treasure, or help mentor the youth in our community to break through the walls that confine them. We also have several specific new opportunities for you, including staffing the legal help line (described in this issue) and staffing the bankruptcy pro se help desk. If you would like other suggestions, please don't hesitate to call me or our Pro Bono Committee chairs.
If we work together, our federal court family can do great good, we can obtain justice, and we can change lives. If we all do just a little bit, it will add up to quite a lot. And in the end, we just might realize that the lives we changed were our own.
Good luck, and many blessings.
Allen C. Schlinsog, Jr.
President
Evening at the Courthouse
On Thursday, September 27, 2012, the Eastern District Bar Association sponsored its 4th Annual Evening at the Courthouse. Nearly 200 guests were in attendance. All were treated to good food, music and conversation, as well as a special program.
After a welcome from EDWBA President Al Schlinsog, the program spotlighted the career and contributions of Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr., who takes senior status October 31. Those who paid tribute to Judge Clevert included former District Attorney E. Michael McCann, Georgette Williams from the Careers in Law and Justice Program, and Judge William C. Griesbach representing the district court.
To conclude the program, two of Judge Clevert’s current law clerks, Joan Harms and Margo Kirchner, spoke of the judge from the perspective of his chambers and observing his administration of the law on a daily basis. On behalf of the bar association, they presented him with the following proclamation from Mayor Tom Barrett:
The City of Milwaukee joins family, friends, and colleagues in commemorating the career of the Honorable Charles N. Clevert, Jr. on Thursday, September 27, 2012; and,
WHEREAS, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. has served Milwaukee and the Eastern District of Wisconsin since 1977, as a United States Bankruptcy Judge and United States District Judge and has chosen to continue to serve and maintain a caseload as a Senior District Judge; and,
WHEREAS, in the past 35 years, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. has demonstrated his commitment to the administration of justice and to the federal judiciary, and continues to treat each case and individual appearing in his court with the utmost respect; and,
WHEREAS, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. has served the judiciary nationally through his work with the Executive Committee of the National Conference of Federal Trial Judges; the Budget Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States; the ABA’s American Jury Project, Federal Judicial Improvements Committee, and House of Delegates; the Boards of Directors of the American Judicature Society, Justice at Stake, and the American Bankruptcy Institute; his role as the Past President of the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges; and his support of the Just the Beginning Foundation; and
WHEREAS, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. is recognized locally for his inspiration, guidance, and leadership in the Men of Tomorrow, Careers in Law and Justice, the Milwaukee Bar Association, the Wisconsin Association of African American Lawyers, the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association, the State Bar of Wisconsin, and as co-founder of the Thomas E. Fairchild American Inn of Court; and
WHEREAS, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. was the first African American in Wisconsin to be appointed United States Bankruptcy Judge and United States District Judge; and
WHEREAS, Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr. through his work, mentoring and volunteer activities, demonstrates his ongoing commitment to ensuring equal opportunities for all;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, TOM BARRETT, Mayor of the City of Milwaukee, do hereby proclaim Thursday, September 27, 2012 to be
CHARLES N. CLEVERT, JR. DAY
throughout the City of Milwaukee.
The Honorable Thomas J. Curran
(1924-2012)
On July 1, 1975, Attorney Thomas Curran was driving through Sauk County with his wife and children when a 1967 Ford Mustang, which was stopped at an intersection and pointed in the opposite direction, was rear ended by a third car and pushed across the median into the path of the Curran car. The Mustang’s fuel tank erupted leaving the occupants engulfed in flames. Although both he and his wife had been injured, Curran had the presence of mind to triage the victims. He grabbed a blanket from his car and used it to rescue one of the occupants of the Mustang from the fire.
A lawsuit followed with the Ford Motor Company being sued for punitive damages. See Wangen v. Ford Motor Company, 294 N.W.2d 437 (1980). For the first time, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that punitive damages are recoverable incident to a claim for compensatory damages in an action based upon negligence or strict liability.
Nine years after this rare confluence of a trial lawyer’s life with law of first impression, Judge Curran was presiding over trials (including diversity cases with parties seeking punitive damages) in the federal court in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. His quick-thinking, lifesaving actions at the Wangen crash scene demonstrate the character of the man appointed as a federal judge by President Reagan in 1983. That appointment capped a distinguished career which ended with his death on July 17.
Curran was born in 1924, in Mauston, the county seat of rural Juneau County in south central Wisconsin where his father farmed and operated a grain elevator. After graduating from Mauston High School, he followed his brothers and sister to Marquette University where he joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. Soon, World War II cut short his undergraduate studies. Ordered to the South Pacific while the decisive naval battles of the war were raging, he was, for a time, the youngest line officer in the Pacific. He was aboard a ship waiting to invade Japan when the Japanese surrendered in 1945.
Returning to Marquette, Curran enrolled in the Law School’s Class of 1948. He considered going into practice with classmates and future judges Patrick Sheedy and Robert Curley or becoming an associate at a large firm. Instead, his love for his native Juneau County brought him back to Mauston, where he joined his two brothers already in practice. After graduation in July, Curran married Colette Saether, whom he had met before the war when she was a student at Mount Mary.
Curran’s practice in Mauston grew rapidly. He focused on trial work, but as a general practitioner in a small town, he dealt with a wide variety of legal issues and became an astute judge of human nature. He served as city attorney, worked on economic development projects in Juneau County, and occasionally was called upon to advise the Diocese of La Crosse. When he ran his successful campaign for President of the State Bar of Wisconsin, one of his earliest supporters for that office was Rice Lake’s Edward Conley, father of William Conley, federal district judge in the Western District of Wisconsin, and Daniel Conley, a partner at Quarles & Brady and former member of the Board of Governors of the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association. After his 1972-73 term as bar president expired, Curran served on the Wisconsin Judicial Council, the State Judicial Commission, and the Governor’s Commission on Crime and Law Enforcement. His exceptional thirty-five year career in private practice earned him an invitation to be a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.
In 1983, President Reagan appointed Curran to the federal district bench with the unanimous consent of the Senate. He filled the slot left by Judge Myron Gordon who had assumed senior status. Faced initially with a crushing case load, Judge Curran attempted to maximize his use of time. WTMJ Radio talk show host Jeff Wagner, formerly an Assistant United States Attorney, related that:
"One of my most vivid recollections of Judge Curran also involves one of my most challenging weeks as a prosecutor. Through a quirk of scheduling, I had two separate narcotics prosecutions scheduled to start on the same day before Judge Curran. When neither case settled, I assumed (naively as it turns out) that Judge Curran would reschedule one of the two until a later date. Silly me! Bright and early one Monday morning, we picked a jury for the first case. Once the jury was selected, Judge Curran informed the jurors that we'd be proceeding from 8 until 12:30 each day and that they should return Tuesday morning for opening statements. We then picked a jury in the second case - which was to be tried from 1:15 until 5:00 p.m. each day. Most attorneys can go months or years without trying a case in federal court. Thanks to Judge Curran, I had two federal jury trials in one week. To be precise, I had two simultaneous federal jury trials before the same judge. I'm willing to bet that there aren't too many attorneys who can make that claim.”
Coming from a practice dealing mainly with state law, Judge Curran, with his Navy background, particularly enjoyed the admiralty cases. He also came to appreciate the challenge of the federal intellectual property cases which required him to become a student of low alcohol beer trademarks, turkey decoy copyrights, and superstar wrestling. The wrestler witnesses in the latter case, United Wrestling Association, Inc. v. Titan Sports, Inc., No. 2:90-cv-00991, entertained courtroom onlookers for several days by performing such feats as breaking boards with karate chops. Despite the testimony of defense witness Linda McMahon, a former performer and officer of the behemoth Titan Sports/World Wrestling Entertainment (and now a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut), the local plaintiff, Albert Patterson, won the case. Other Curran decisions in cases involving city-suburban school desegregation, county jail conditions, group homes for the disabled, and the funding of Miller Park will continue to affect the citizens of the Eastern District for years to come.
While Curran had many professional and civic accomplishments, he was most proud of his family, which also grew rapidly. Judge Curran and his lifelong love Colette had six children, whom he would be proud to report are all college graduates, practicing Catholics, happily married, and blessed him with 16 grandchildren. Three of his children – William, Catherine (Orton), and Paul – followed in their father’s footsteps and became lawyers, as did two of his grandsons, Peter Curran and Richard Orton. William and Catherine are still partners at the family’s 75+ year old law firm, Curran, Hollenbeck & Orton S.C., and Paul is now a Juneau County Circuit Court Judge. Grandson Peter also recently joined the family firm in Mauston. Grandson Richard Orton is an associate at Crivello Carlson and one of the EDWBA’s newest members.
Richard Orton, Grandson
‘Papa’ (as I knew him) was the complete gentleman. He treated everyone with the same unwavering courtesy, patience, kindness, and good humor, no matter the situation or their station in life. Modest and filled with a sense of gratitude, he was always quick to attribute whatever successes he enjoyed to the help he received from those around him (particularly to my grandmother when it came to his family). He was the ultimate role model for his grandchildren, but especially for Peter and me, who recently began practicing law and enjoyed discussing legal issues with him over the past several years.
Some of my fondest memories are of our large, frequent family gatherings at his lake home, where Papa was often ‘holding court’ with us grandchildren. He would regularly interview all of us about school, our sports teams, and other typical topics. But more serious inquiries were also occasionally required, such as determining the location of someone’s coveted marshmallow stick, how sand from the bottom of the lake got in someone’s hair, or whether someone’s ‘head was cold’ at the dinner table (translation: take your hat off!). As in the Eastern District, he ran a ‘tight ship.’
Jacqueline Dee, Law Clerk
It was my privilege to serve as Judge Curran’s law clerk during his twenty-three years on the federal bench. His infectious optimism and good humor pervaded his chambers from the first day he set up shop in temporary quarters on December 31, 1983. Working in his chambers was not only an education in the law, but a continuing first-hand example of how to live a successful life balancing work and family. Studies have concluded that the majority of lawyers are unhappy in their chosen field, but Judge Curran revered the profession and the rule of law. He encouraged support for the mission of the State Bar, the Wisconsin Law Foundation, and his alma mater Marquette. He even undertook to promote the benefits of bar dues and CLE requirements to disgruntled government lawyers. His decision to leave the bench to assume the unsung role of his wife’s caretaker during her lengthy illness was done cheerfully and with his usual “can do” attitude.
In 1985, Judge Reynolds transferred the city-suburban school desegregation case to Judge Curran. In addition to calling upon the Judge’s extensive experience dealing with Wisconsin school boards while in private practice, this litigation highlighted many of his personal and professional talents. Always eager to use his handyman skills, the Judge directed the transformation of his small courtroom to accommodate the plaintiffs (four school children and their mothers, the Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee, and the NAACP) and the defendants (twenty four suburbs, then-Governor Tommy Thompson, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction). He had the spectator seats removed and replaced with counsel tables, put the press in the jury box, and set up a remote viewing room where the public could watch via a cable feed.
After listening to testimony for three months, the Judge, who had been studying school desegregation cases from other districts, became quite concerned about the length of time many of these other cases had been pending while the costs to the taxpayers mounted. Brown v. Board of Education I and II, for example, was first-filed in 1951, and would remain before various courts until 1999. Another case, arising in Baton Rouge, was active for forty seven years.
One morning the Judge, having considered these precedents, confided that he thought the Milwaukee lawsuit could and should be settled. He asked the superintendents of the school board parties to convene at the Federal Building where he installed them in separate vacant rooms. He visited each room, listened attentively to all of their positions, found common ground, and settled the case, thereby saving the taxpayers of Milwaukee County untold millions of dollars.
When Judge Curran received the Myron L. Gordon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Eastern District Bar Association in 2002, he used the occasion to thank his staff and he would surely want them recognized now. His Judicial Assistant Barbara Furlick had a long lineage with the federal government, having worked two stints for the Office of the United States Attorney before she joined the Judicial Branch. Howard Erickson served Justice Louis Ceci in state court before becoming the first Curran court reporter. During the lengthy city-suburban school litigation, John Schindhelm and his wife Carol, both court reporters, augmented the staff. After Howard’s retirement, John joined the chambers and introduced real time reporting to the courthouse where he is still recording eastern district trials. Judge Curran’s first courtroom deputy was Bobbie Patterson, now retired. Dee Brock McLeod, who joined the Clerk’s Office under Ruth LaFave, took her place and is currently in charge of scheduling interpreters and court reporters. The Judge’s first court security officer was Ed Trucksa, who, as an Arms, Tobacco, and Firearms agent, traced the gun that Lee Harvey Oswald used to assassinate President Kennedy. When Ed retired, he was succeeded by Tom Hultgren, a former member of an elite Milwaukee Police Department intelligence unit. The staff will forever miss Judge Curran’s genial company and sage advice. To us he was the touchstone of The Greatest Generation.
Federal Courthouse Opens Its Doors to Milwaukee
Elizabeth Miles and Stephanie Quick
Did you know that the atrium of the federal courthouse in Milwaukee was once the mail sorting space for the post office? Can you spot the dragons and faces on the interior and exterior of the courthouse building? On September 22, 2012, visitors learned these facts and more as the historic federal courthouse participated in the second annual Doors Open Milwaukee, an event that allows visitors to explore over 125 buildings in downtown Milwaukee not generally open to the public.
Visitors to the courthouse explored the atrium, the ceremonial courtroom, the centennial courtroom, and the courthouse exterior. They also enjoyed the rare opportunity to photograph the courthouse’s beautiful interior. The atrium was open to all and contained pictures of the construction of the courthouse, an original mail cart, and information on the desegregation of Milwaukee’s public schools. It also held a cardboard cut out of one of the building’s stone figures through which people could insert their faces for a fun picture. A limited number of ticketed visitors toured the ceremonial courtroom (Judge Adelman’s courtroom) and the centennial courtroom (Judge Randa’s courtroom) and learned about the historical features of each courtroom and their current uses.
During the exterior tour, many visitors were intrigued by the courthouse’s castle-like features. Tour leaders pointed out the lions, dragons and faces on the outside of the building and the clock tower and time capsule at the front of the building. Visitors learned about building additions and why a garden exists at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Jefferson Street. (Answer: George Hrin, a member of the maintenance staff of the building, originally started the garden, and the garden is now dedicated to him.)
An overwhelming response to the tour was excitement in seeing spaces typically not open to the public. Numerous visitors remarked that they had lived in the Milwaukee area their whole lives and had never been inside the courthouse. One visitor remarked that “it must be wonderful to work in this building.” Another was impressed by his tour leader’s obvious respect for the court system. Visitors also commented on the beautiful woodwork in the courtrooms, declaring the courtrooms “fantastic” and “very cool!” Many people were intrigued by the work of the court, asking about the role of federal judges, how often the courtrooms are used, and even how jurors are selected. One couple who visited many of the buildings open to the public over the weekend said the federal courthouse was their favorite!
Barbara Fritschel, courthouse librarian, estimates that between 1,000 and 1,200 people visited the courthouse during Doors Open Milwaukee. Many thanks to the volunteers who guided visitors through the courthouse – including courthouse employees, Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association members, and the interior decorator for one of the courtroom renovations – for making this a successful event.
An Introduction to the Eastern District of Wisconsin
Eric L. Andrews & Ashley E. Fale
On September 13, 2012, the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association sponsored a program at the Federal Courthouse for lawyers in their first three years of practice. The program began with a continental breakfast and was followed by sound advice from several individual speakers and two panel discussions. The individual speakers included United States District Court Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert, Jr.; United States Bankruptcy Court Chief Judge Pamela Pepper; First Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Haanstad; and Assistant Federal Defender Craig Albee. There was also a session led by three of the trusted members of the U.S. District Court Clerk's Office, who provided significant insight into the world of e-filing. The final panel of speakers offered advice regarding “dos and don’ts of federal practice” and was lead by three local attorneys who frequently practice in the Eastern District. The program concluded with a guided tour of the architecturally-significant Federal Courthouse.
The over-arching theme of the program was the importance of civility among attorneys who practice in Eastern District. Due to the small size of the federal bar, civility among practitioners is crucial. Judge Pepper expressed this concept best when she stated that “how you say something is often as important as what you say.” The individual speakers and panelists also reminded the recent graduates and potential Eastern District practitioners to know and respect the local rules, paying close attention to the preferences of different judges. Additional valuable advice was to develop good relationships with fellow attorneys, to provide direct and honest answers to a judge’s questions, to never shy from addressing authority contrary to your position, and to always be on time, prepared, and with an error-free brief in hand. Many thanks to Katy Borowski for organizing and notifying new attorneys of this event.
Pro Bono Recognition Luncheon
Jennifer C. Hong
The Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association hosted its second annual Pro Bono Recognition Luncheon on October 23, 2012, which fell within the American Bar Association-sponsored National Pro Bono Celebration Week. Attorneys who had completed pro bono requests from the court over the past year were recognized and honored at this luncheon with the judges of the Eastern District.
Please join us in thanking the following attorneys who have shown their committment to pro bono work in the Eastern District of Wisconsin:
Dillon J. Ambrose
Welcoming New Citizens Through Naturalization Ceremonies
Laura Cronin
Every month, District, Magistrate, and Bankruptcy Judges of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin preside over naturalization ceremonies. While the number of ceremonies held at the federal courthouse vary from month to month, typically anywhere from four to six ceremonies are held each month.
According to Michelle Lipsey, Administrative Assistant to the Clerk of Court, 52 naturalization ceremonies were held in 2011. This year, Ms. Lipsey estimates the court will hold as many as 63 ceremonies. The applicants’ home countries are very diverse. Ms. Lipsey stated she has been present at ceremonies where 30 different nationalities were represented. Generally around 60 applicants are naturalized at each ceremony.
Each presiding judge has his or her own individual style in conducting naturalization ceremonies; however, many of the ceremonies have common themes. For example, the judges will often share with the applicants their personal experiences with the immigration and naturalization process. Bankruptcy Judge Margaret Dee McGarity shared with the citizens her memory of bringing her children from South Korea and taking the oath of citizenship with them. Magistrate Judge William E. Callahan, Jr. told of how his great grandfather came from Ireland during the famine searching for a better life. And Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph shared the story of an immigrant family who moved from Haiti and worked hard to learn English, save money, and buy a house. She described how they fulfilled a dream for their family in the United States. She then revealed she was telling the story of her own family’s journey to America, and encouraged the new citizens to remember their own stories and pass them down so that future generations know of the sacrifices that were made to bring their families to the United States.
The presiding judges will also commonly explain to the applicants the oath they are about to take. As Magistrate Judge Callahan explained, the oath has two parts. In the first part, the applicants renounce their allegiance and fidelity to their former countries of citizenship. In the second part, the applicants promise to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and to bear arms, perform noncombatant services, or perform work of national importance on behalf of the United States when required by law.
Although they renounce their prior citizenship, the judges tell the applicants not to forget the cultures they came from. Chief Judge Charles N. Clevert emphasized that the “fabric of America is strengthened by an ever diverse citizenry.” Finally, the judges impart on the applicants that while citizenship brings with it opportunities, it also brings responsibilities, such as voting and jury duty. As Judge Clevert stated “citizenship is not a spectator sport.”
Magistrate Judge Callahan says he enjoys naturalization ceremonies because it is an opportunity as a judge to preside over a courtroom where everyone leaves happy. One such new citizen was Ainah, who was naturalized on May 3, 2012. Ainah, originally from Liberia, said regarding his new citizenship that it was a “great opportunity to participate in democracy” and he was “excited to be a part of it.”
EDWBA Pro Se Legal Help Line
Kelly Mangan
The Pro Bono Committee of the EDWBA is proud to announce its new Pro Se Legal Help Line, which will be up and running in early 2013.
The purpose of the Help Line is to assist non-prisoner pro se civil litigants in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Help Line volunteer attorneys will provide one-to-one consultations with the litigants. We anticipate that questions will include how to file a civil case, write litigation documents, and respond to requests for information. Help Line volunteer attorneys also may help the pro se litigants understand deadlines, procedures, statutes, local rules, and case law.
Calls to the Help Line will be routed through the already existing Milwaukee Bar Association Lawyer Referral and Information Service to Help Line volunteer attorneys. Pro se litigants will be required to sign and return and acknowledgment and agreement regarding the limited representation before they receive a referral to a volunteer attorney for legal advice. Malpractice insurance is available at no charge for Help Line volunteer attorneys through the State Bar of Wisconsin.
To kick off the search for Help Line volunteers, the Pro Bono Committee will be hosting an ethics CLE luncheon at noon on Monday, November 26, 2012. The CLE will focus on the issues of limited representation and prepare prospective Help Line volunteers for the parameters and pitfalls of limited representation. This ethics CLE will be free for attorneys willing to serve as Help Line volunteers or accept pro bono cases from the Eastern District of Wisconsin. For all others, there will be a cost. The invitation with all the details will be emailed to members soon.
If you are interested in attending, please contact Katy Borowski at (414) 276-5933 or
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.
The Honorable John C. Shabaz
(1931-2012)
Statement by the Court Upon the Death of the Honorable John C. Shabaz August 31, 2012
The entire court family is saddened by the news of Judge Shabaz's passing. He left an indelible mark on this Court by his unwavering commitment to securing "the just, speedy and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding" that came before him, which was both his "Rule 1" and Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. No one worked harder than Judge Shabaz to regularly meet that standard and his presence and example will be missed, as will the Judge himself by his many friends and admirers. Our sincere condolences go out to Patty and their children at this difficult time.
- Chief Judge William M. Conley
Thank You
The Docket thanks Laura Schulteis Kwaterski of Foley & Lardner for her years of service as Co-Chair of the Newsletter Committee. Laura provided wonderful leadership and contributions to the Committee and continues to serve on the EDWBA Board of Directors. We welcome our new Co-Chair, Elizabeth Miles of Davis & Kuelthau.
Comments about The Docket or ideas for future articles may be sent to Katy Borowski, Julie Wilson or Liz Miles.
Upcoming EDWBA Events
October 29
Criminal Law Policies and Practices in the Eastern District of Wisconsin: Perspectives from United States Attorney James L. Santelle and Federal Defender Daniel W. Stiller
November 14
5th Annual Electronic Discovery Conference
All the latest and greatest in the practice of electronic discovery
November 15
Celebrating the Ten-Year Anniversary of the District Court in Green Bay
The event will feature a two-hour CLE followed by a reception at the courthouse.
November 26
Pro Bono CLE
Timothy J. Pierce, Ethics Counsel for the State Bar of Wisconsin, will present a program focused on ethical considerations for lawyers providing limited scope representation to pro se litigants.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Docket - June 2012
titleThe Docket - The Newsletter of the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association
June 2012
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
President Elect
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Vice President
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Secretary
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Treasurer
U.S. District Court Eastern District
414-297-3071
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Program Co-chairs
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Elizabeth C. Perkins
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Board of Directors
Hon. Charles N. Clevert, Jr.
Terri L. Full
Dale Ihlenfeldt: A Man in Full
Rusty Long and Len Leverson
Dale Ihlenfeldt loved to learn. He loved to teach. And he loved lawyers.
Dale Elwood Ihlenfeldt served as a bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin from 1966 to 1995. He was born in his parents’ farmhouse in the Town of Two Creeks, north of Manitowoc, on August 22, 1919. He grew up there and later, when his father became a school administrator in the Kenosha area, in the Town of Wilmot and in Kenosha. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1940 with a degree in accounting. After first registering as a conscientious objector, Dale enlisted in the Navy and served his country as a supply officer on the U.S.S. Henry W. Tucker. After World War II, Dale attended law school at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1948. He practiced law from 1948 to 1951 with the Milwaukee law firm of Bitker & Marshall.
In 1950, Dale ran as a Democrat for the Wisconsin Assembly. He lost. In his autobiography (available at the federal courthouse library and at the archives at Golda Meir Library at UWM), Dale tells this story about his decision to run in that race. Congressman Andy Biemiller offered Dale $100 if he would run. Dale asked the Congressman’s secretary, Jeannie Vlasis – who later, as Jean Lucey, became Wisconsin’s First Lady – what he should do. Her advice: “Get the money first.”
Dale speculated that if he had won that race, he probably would never have become a bankruptcy judge. We are all fortunate that he lost.
Most of us who came to know Judge Ihlenfeldt knew him as a bankruptcy judge, but he was a member of what Judge Pam Pepper has called our federal courthouse family well before he became a “referee in bankruptcy” – what bankruptcy judges were called in 1966, when Dale was first appointed. Dale first went to work at 517 East Wisconsin Avenue as a law clerk for District Judge Robert Tehan. He served as Judge Tehan’s law clerk from 1951 to 1955, when Judge Tehan recommended his appointment as Clerk of the District Court. Judge Tehan was later instrumental in Dale’s appointment as referee in bankruptcy.
Judge Tehan was a mentor to Dale Ihlenfeldt, as Dale was to be to many young lawyers and others. They shared the same politics, in an era when Democrats were a distinct minority in a state long dominated by Republicans. Dale was an invaluable helpmate to Judge Tehan – chauffeur, confidant, as well as law clerk. When Judge Tehan retired, he arranged for Dale’s chambers to inherit his beaten-up green leather couch. That couch became the seat of honor in innumerable conferences in Judge Ihlenfeldt’s chambers. And, when Judge Ihlenfeldt finally retired, for real, at the end of 1995, Andy Herbach and Judge Jim Shapiro went through hoops with the General Services Administration to figure out how to buy the couch for Judge Ihlenfeldt. This required, Judge Shapiro tells us, the posting of a notice in the bankruptcy clerk’s office (size and conspicuousness not specified).
In retirement, in addition to authoring his own autobiography, Judge Ihlenfeldt wrote a biography of his mentor, Judge Tehan.
Mentoring others was a characteristic of Dale Ihlenfeldt’s career. Having been Clerk of the District Court, Dale took a particular interest in and protective fondness for the personnel of the Bankruptcy Court clerk’s office. He secured the appointment of Betty Small, the first African-American clerk of the Eastern District Bankruptcy Court, and encouraged her to hire capable minority employees. He is fondly remembered by many current and former members of the clerk’s office staff for his generosity in bringing Door County cherries and apples, Walworth County strawberries, wieners from Konop’s Meat Market in Stangelville, and kringle from Racine whenever he returned from hearing cases outside Milwaukee.
Judge Ihlenfeldt was a mentor to lawyers, as well. He read every bankruptcy decision that was reported – a slightly (but only slightly) less onerous task than it would be today – and wrote up summaries of those he felt were important, which he kept in a notebook. He began most discussions of contested matters by conducting off-the-record chambers conferences with counsel, referring to the cases in his notebook he felt were on point, and what his initial views were. He reserved the right to change those views after hearing the evidence. But most of the time his proactive technique led counsel to settle their cases – and they usually learned something, too.
Judge Ihlenfeldt was happy to share his knowledge, and the contents of that notebook, with anyone who asked. The cases compiled in the notebook became the basis for Judge Ihlenfeldt’s “Annual Case Law Update,” which he delivered for many years, even after his 1995 retirement, at the State Bar’s Annual Bankruptcy Update in Milwaukee and Madison and other continuing legal education seminars. Invariably this segment of the program got the best reviews.
His mentoring went beyond teaching case law. Bruce Lanser recalls the Judge teaching him that our children – Dale and his beloved wife Ellie had seven of them – are not ours, but only on loan from God. Judge Ihlenfeldt was approachable; he commiserated when a lawyer faced a professional disappointment.
Judge Ihlenfeldt was a mentor to other bankruptcy judges, as well. He took senior status in 1986 (serving thereafter as a “recalled annuitant”) to open up a bankruptcy judgeship in the hope a woman judge would be appointed. He believed it was high time for women to be appointed to the bench. Margaret Dee McGarity was appointed to fill Judge Ihlenfeldt’s judgeship. Today, of course, we have three women bankruptcy judges in Milwaukee. Judge Ihlenfeldt was also an advocate for the appointment of others who have graced our bankruptcy bench.
By nature, and, with seven children, of necessity, Dale Ihlenfeldt was thrifty. It was the Judge’s practice, when travelling to Green Bay overnight, to stay at the YMCA. When his first law clerk (a coauthor of this article) objected to this plan, the two of them splurged – on one hotel room, having one bed. Rusty and the Judge shared the bed. When the Judge and his family traveled on vacation, they took their station wagon, and, frequently, Ellie’s mother or Dale’s mother, Grandma Esther, as well.
Judge Ihlenfeldt was a patient man. His son Tom recalls that one of the very few times he ever saw his father angry was when they were driving through Amish country in that same station wagon, and a few of the kids made fun of the clothes the Amish were wearing. The kids learned not to make fun.
Dale Ihlenfeldt took particular pleasure in the company of lawyers, and was not shy about saying so. At a speech he gave in 1986 at the Milwaukee Bar Association’s Annual Memorial Service, Dale had this to say:
By and large, the lawyers I have known, young and old, men and women, of whatever color, have with few exceptions been intelligent, friendly, honest,
conscientious, pragmatic, with a sense of humor and a gift of laughter. We are brothers, sisters, partners in the calling and since my law school days I have
felt blessed by my friendship with them.
Dale Ihlenfeldt died on December 28, 2011, at the age of 92.
In the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer introduces, among others, the Clerk. Because Dale was the Clerk here, and for other reasons, the tale seems most apt. We have changed one word and added one:
A clerk from Milwaukee was with us also,
Who’d turned to getting knowledge, long ago.
As meager was his horse as a rake,
Nor he himself too fat, I’ll undertake.
But he looked hollow and went soberly;
Right threadbare was his corduroy overcoat, for he
Had got him yet no churchly benefice,
Nor was so worldly as to gain office.
For he would rather have at his bed’s head
Some twenty books, all bound in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher,
He had but little gold within his coffer;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he’d pray right hastily for the souls
Of those who gave him wherewithal for schools.
Of study took he utmost care and heed.
Not one word spoke he more than was his need,
And that was said in fullest reverence,
And short and quick and full of high good sense.
Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech,
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.
Track 1: Federal Receiverships as an Alternative to Chapter 11
Laura D. Steele
Court decisions made in the wake of the financial fallout are revealing the use of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 66, which governs federal receivers, as a possible alternative to Chapter 11 reorganizations and Section 128 state receiverships. The Bankruptcy Panel at the Eastern District Bar Association Meeting, led by Ryan S. Stippich, Jeffrey J. Liotta, and Bruce G. Arnold, noted that important Rule 66 decisions made in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and the Seventh Circuit are on par with newsworthy securities receivership cases such as Madoff and Stanford Financial Group.
Rule 66 authorizes federal district courts to appoint receivers in cases arising from the violation of federal laws. Secured creditors may also invoke Rule 66 by satisfying diversity jurisdiction requirements under 11 U.S.C. § 1332. Ultimately, the appointment of a federal receiver is regarded as an extraordinary remedy within the discretion of the court. Rule 66 protects a plaintiff’s interest in property, particularly where there is evidence of fraudulent conduct or inadequate legal remedies, by empowering the federal receiver to clawback fraudulent transfers, sell assets, sue, and propose a plan of distribution.
Despite the broad powers available under the Rule, the panel remarked on its brevity—coincidentally only 66 words long—and the limited guidance available for practitioners, courts, and receivers. The Rule’s terseness and the lack of secondary resources means that Rule 66 proceedings are often fact-specific and governed largely by the court’s discretion. While this gives parties leverage to propose applicable law and procedures to the court, the panel observed that Rule 66 proceedings are not entirely the “wild, wild west.” Rather, courts frequently apply legal and equitable principles found within the Bankruptcy Code and state receivership statutes.
The panel discussed the case of Wealth Management LLC as a recent example of how courts in this district have applied bankruptcy principles to a Rule 66 case. In Wealth Management, private hedge funds managed by an Appleton investment firm failed. The SEC investigated and alleged myriad securities law violations. Upon the SEC’s request, U.S. District Court Judge Griesbach appointed a Rule 66 receiver to formulate a plan of asset distribution for the failed company. The plan treated investors, many of whom requested redemption prior to the receiver’s appointment, as equity holders rather than creditors. Assets were then distributed on a pro rata basis of each investor’s net cash invested, without priority for redeeming investors—in essence, applying the bankruptcy principle of equitable subordination under 11 U.S.C. § 510. Over the objection of redeeming investors, the Seventh Circuit affirmed approval of the distribution plan, deeming the plan “fair and equitable.” SEC v. Wealth Mgmt. LLC, 628 F.3d 323 (7th Cir. 2010). See also Feinstein v. Long, No. 11-C-57, 2011 WL 3555727 (E.D. Wis. Aug. 11, 2011) (contrasting Scholes v. Schroeder, 744 F. Supp. 1419 (N.D. Ill. 1990)).
At the conclusion of the discussion, audience members asked the panel whether a Rule 66 case could be heard by the Bankruptcy Court. While the panel noted Rule 66 proceedings take place in District Court, it may be appropriate for the District Court to refer such a case to the Bankruptcy Court given its particular expertise in deciding equitable matters, or alternatively, to sit in tandem with a Bankruptcy Court to hear certain matters.
Track Two: Twombly Five Years Later: An Overview of the Impact of Twombly and Iqbal
Laura L. Cronin
During Track Two, Attorney Cristina D. Hernandez moderated a session entitled Twombly Five Years Later: An Overview of the Impact of Twombly and Iqbal. On the panel were United States District Judge William C. Griesbach; Sandra Gegios, Law Clerk to United States District Judge Rudolph T. Randa; Attorney Scott W. Hansen of Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren S.C., and Attorney Robert K. O’Reilly of Ademi & O’Reilly LLP. The session began with an overview of Twombly and Iqbal, including a history of the pleading standard under Conley. The panel noted that the vagueness and uncertainty of the pleading standard laid out in Twombly and Iqbal prevent them from achieving the goals they were meant to achieve, such as minimizing litigation costs. The issue of whether the Twombly and Iqbal standard applies to the pleading of affirmative defenses was also discussed. The session ended with a discussion of the practical implications of the heightened pleading standard, such as plaintiffs needing to “beef up” complaints and state court practitioners needing to conform their pleadings to the heightened federal standard in cases removed from state court. The attendees were also provided with useful materials, including a paper authored by Attorney Hansen and his colleague Attorney Alexander B. Handelsman on Twombly and Iqbal.
Track Three: Jones and the Future of the Fourth Amendment
Stephanie Quick
For the criminal law breakout session, Judge Diane S. Sykes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Court, moderated a panel discussion on the recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones and the future of the Fourth Amendment. Panelists included United States Magistrate Judge Aaron E. Goodstein, Daniel D. Blinka of Marquette University Law School, John J. Manning of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Dean A. Strang of Hurley, Burish & Stanton. The session began with an overview of the facts, as well as the key points from each of the three opinions filed in the case. The discussion included whether Jones could have been classified as a seizure case rather than a search case, whether Jones clarified the legal standard for GPS tracking, and how Jones impacts the relationship between property rights and the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. The panel also discussed how the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test may change with emerging technology. Finally, panel members noted how GPS tracking is only one tool for law enforcement to gather evidence and practitioners should be aware of the various legal standards governing the use of different tools. Attendees were provided with several handouts, including a copy of the Jones case, an outline of the various opinions in the case, an article from The New York Times on cell phone tracking as a tool for law enforcement, and a list of resources for further reading.
New EDWBA Officers and Board Members
New officers of the bar association were announced during the luncheon at the annual meeting. New officers, whose terms begin June 15, include:
President: Allen C. Schlinsog, Jr., Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren
President Elect: Tony S. Baish, Godfrey & Kahn
Vice President: Jonathan H. Koenig, U.S. Attorney’s Office
Secretary: Sandra R. Gegios, U.S. District Court
Treasurer: T. Wickham Schmidt, Liebmann, Conway, Olejniczak & Jerry
Six new board members were also announced. They include:
Craig W. Albee, Federal Defender Services of Wisconsin
Donald A. Daugherty, Jr., Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek
Christopher D. Donovan, Pruhs & Donovan
Michelle L. Jacobs, Michael Best & Friedrich
Katherine Maloney Perhach, Quarles & Brady
Hon. Nelson W. Phillips III, Milwaukee County Circuit Court
Farewell to a Trailblazer – U.S. Magistrate Ruth W. LaFave
Rufino Gaytán III
U.S. Magistrate Ruth LaFave was truly a woman ahead of her time. She broke through barriers few women of her day dreamed possible, leaving behind an inspiring legacy of social justice and compassion.
Magistrate LaFave met her husband, Lloyd LaFave, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The young couple attended the University of Wisconsin Law School together, all the while sharing a set of law books. According to her son, John LaFave, who serves as Register of Deeds for Milwaukee County, Magistrate LaFave had a hard time sharing – Mr. LaFave often struggled to get his studies done because she would study incessantly. It’s no wonder that Lloyd LaFave referred to her as “the smart one.” When she graduated from law school in 1945, Ruth LaFave was one of four women in her class.
After a short stint in private practice with her husband, Magistrate LaFave experienced several rejections from Milwaukee law firms because they simply did not hire women. Undeterred by the discriminatory reality of the time, Magistrate LaFave went on to become the Clerk of Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin in 1967. At that time, only six other women across the country served as clerks of federal courts.
In 1970, Ruth LaFave took on part-time duties as a U.S. Magistrate for the Eastern District of Wisconsin while maintaining her role as Clerk of Court. Back then, the role of a Magistrate was fairly limited, as the Federal Magistrates Act, which created the position, was only two years old. In 1990, Congress amended the Act to change the position’s formal title to U.S. Magistrate Judge.
As the role of Magistrates evolved, Ruth LaFave took on additional judicial duties, including overseeing pretrial hearings, ruling on pretrial motions and setting bail in certain criminal cases. Eventually, the Court tasked Magistrate LaFave with screening prisoner cases. In this role, Magistrate LaFave saw prisoners file complaints alleging violations of their civil rights. By 1979, Magistrate LaFave regularly assisted Judge Aaron Goodstein, who was then the full-time Magistrate, with criminal intake proceedings.
In particular, Magistrate LaFave assisted with petty offenses that occurred in federal enclaves, such as the Veterans Affairs Hospital. These cases were typically resolved in hearings (mini-trials) held before Magistrates.
Judge Goodstein recalls one of Magistrate LaFave’s cases in which a veteran was charged with being intoxicated at the VA Hospital. Following this hearing, Judge Goodstein took the bench for a separate case, when he soon realized that Magistrate LaFave left all of her case’s exhibits – vodka bottles confiscated from the veteran – on the bench and in plain sight. Given the numerous responsibilities Magistrate LaFave had on any given day, it is not surprising that something like this was overlooked. Nevertheless, Judge Goodstein had a tough time explaining the “exhibits” to the litigants already waiting for him in his courtroom.
In what was likely her most publicized case, Magistrate LaFave presided over a dispute between the Milwaukee Public Schools and parents of North Division High School students, who were predominantly African-American. The legal fight involved the school board’s decision to transform North Division High School into a city-wide magnet school. African-American residents fought the plan, essentially fighting against the school board’s desegregation efforts, because the plan would have displaced many African-American students. The case eventually settled after the school board decided to abandon its initial plan.
Magistrate LaFave always took an interest in civil rights and equality. While an undergraduate and law student in Madison, she actively participated in the Madison Chapter of the NAACP. She also remained active in the League of Women Voters and often worked as a poll worker.
When she retired in 1983, Magistrate LaFave admitted to a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter that she felt sorry for some of the prisoners she saw in court. She also expressed concern for individuals who were denied social security benefits but could not afford legal representation to challenge those denials. True to her belief that everyone deserved equal treatment under the law, Magistrate LaFave even considered continuing to practice law as a private attorney after retiring from the bench.
While she never actually practiced law again, Magistrate LaFave did more than her fair share in advancing civil rights and equality for the people of Wisconsin. With her passing, the people of this state, and especially the Wisconsin legal community, have lost a great source of pride and inspiration and a true believer in equal justice.
|
i don't know
|
The adjacent African nations Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, and Benin have coastlines facing?
|
High Sea Piracy in West Africa stokes widespread security concerns | West Africa
High Sea Piracy in West Africa stokes widespread security concerns
By Nirit Ben-Ari
While piracy in Somalia's Gulf of Aden is currently on the decline, it has spread to West Africa. But for many people, the phrase maritime piracy evokes images of a one-eyed sailor drinking rum and singing obscene songs, or like Hollywood actor Johnny Depp, wearing a headband in a scene from the film Pirates of the Caribbean.
But maritime piracy is not just an action movie. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea defines piracy as "illegal acts of violence or detention" committed on the high seas against ships or aircrafts.
Piracy is a serious problem and it poses a real threat not only to the safety of vessels and their crews, but also to the economies of affected countries.
The scale of losses is staggering—more than $100 billion worth of oil has gone missing...
In Africa, while piracy in Somalia's Gulf of Aden is currently on the decline, it has spread to West Africa. Although most attacks in the region take place in Nigeria's Niger Delta region, there have also been attacks in Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Togo, among others, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Reuters news agency reported that one such attack took place in October 2013 off Nigeria's coast, where pirates attacked an oil supply vessel and kidnapped the captain and chief engineer, both American citizens.
The report says that "pirate attacks off Nigeria's coast have jumped by a third this year as ships passing through West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, a major commodities route, have increasingly come under threat from gangs wanting to snatch cargoes and crews."
Unlike pirates along Somalia's coast, who are often only after ransom, pirates in West Africa also steal goods, particularly oil. Many attacks end up with crew members injured or killed.
But pirate attacks do not only result in killings and injuries, tragic as those are; they also damage the economy.
In some cases, affected countries in West Africa have become less concerned with direct losses from piracy than with the ways in which these losses affect international insurance rates and other trade-related costs. In Benin, for example, taxes on trade account for half of government revenue, and 80% of these are derived from the port of Cotonou, according to UNODC figures published in March 2013.
Last year the spike in pirate attacks in West Africa led London-based Lloyd's Market Association, an umbrella group of maritime insurers, to list Nigeria, neighboring Benin and nearby waters in the same risk category as Somalia, says Claims Journal, a magazine for insurance professionals.
The result was a significant decrease in maritime traffic in the region, which meant a 28% loss in Benin's government revenue.
The decrease also affected the livelihoods of the country's citizens, says UNODC, by increasing the cost of imports and decreasing the competitiveness of exports.
According to Reuters news agency, though ships now speed with armed guards on board through the dangerous waters off Somalia and the Horn of Africa on the east coast of the continent, many vessels have to anchor to do business with West African countries, with little protection.
This makes them a soft target for criminals, says Reuters, and jacks up insurance costs.
Corruption drives piracy
As is often the case, corruption, weak law enforcement and poverty are the main causes of piracy, according to Dr. Christian Bueger, a Cardiff University researcher and editor of Piracy-Studies.org, an online research portal.
In an interview with Africa Renewal, Bueger said, "Piracy tends to be conducted or supported by marginalized communities that have not been participating in economic development." This appears to be the case for Nigeria, for example, where the majority of the recent African pirate attacks have occurred, driven mainly by corruption in the oil sector.
Chatham House, a British research group, reported in September 2013 that "corruption and fraud are rampant in the country's oil sector," and "lines between legal and illegal supplies of Nigerian oil can be blurry."
In such a climate pirates have an incentive to steal oil, since they know that they will be able to sell it on the black market. "Illegal bunkering [filling ships with fuel] is enormously profitable" in Nigeria, writes Martin Murphy, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States, a policy think tank, in his article "Petro-Piracy: Oil and Troubled Waters," published in Orbis for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"The scale of losses is staggering—more than $100 billion worth of oil has gone missing since 1960," says Murphy.
The damage caused by thieves has forced oil companies to shut down pipelines. Royal Dutch Shell is selling off four of its onshore Nigerian oil blocks because of the constant theft of large volumes of oil from its pipelines, United Press International reported in October 2013.
As a result of the shutting down of pipelines, Nigeria is producing about 400,000 barrels a day below its capacity of 2.5 million barrels a day, according to the Economist, a British weekly.
The New York Times reported in September 2013 that Nigeria's former top anti-corruption official, Nuhu Ridabu, had written a report in 2012 charging that over the preceding decade, thieves had stolen between 6% and 30% of the country's oil production.
Countering piracy
In his interview with Africa Renewal, Bueger suggested four steps to counter piracy. First, the key is for affected states to share information on what's happening on their coastlines and their neighbours'.
Second, joint training activities are required so countries can develop procedures and learn how to use technology. Training not only educates future generations of maritime security professionals, but also creates confidence and trust between different agencies.
Third, states that face maritime and piracy challenges should develop strong legislation to prosecute criminals. And finally, states should set aside enough money to build local capacity.
"Even if a state has the information, even if the state has well-trained coast guards, and even if the state has incorporated all the right laws," Bueger explains, "without vessels, the state is powerless."
At the moment, of the states most affected by piracy, only South Africa and Nigeria have a professional navy. Most other countries have small and outdated coast guards with no more than three to five skiffs. What has been done?
Several international legal instruments are in place to combat threats posed by piracy.
The key agreement is the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which prescribes exclusive economic zones over which individual states have the rights for exploration, energy production from water and wind, and the use of marine resources. For this agreement to be operative, states have to adopt and incorporate it into their national laws.
All West African countries have signed and ratified the Law of the Sea Convention. However, the UN Security Council has yet to call for concerted international action against piracy along the Gulf of Guinea, as it did in the Somali case when, in June 2008, it authorized other countries to enter Somali territorial waters to stop pirates.
In 2011 the council passed two resolutions expressing its concern about piracy in the Gulf of Guinea and urging states to reinforce domestic legislation, develop a comprehensive regional counter-piracy framework, issue appropriate guidance to shipping and cooperate in prosecuting pirates and their backers. Despite the absence of any Security Council action so far, and unlike in the Gulf of Aden, in West Africa there is already an institutional infrastructure to combat piracy.
The Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS) has in its treaty of 1993 a maritime component intended to harmonize all maritime issues across the region; the Maritime Organization of West and Central Africa, established in the 1970s, holds member countries to a similar agreement.
Last year ECOWAS, the Gulf of Guinea Commission and the Economic Community of Central African States signed a memorandum of understanding between the International Maritime Organization and the Maritime Organization of West and Central Africa, to establish a subregional integrated coast guard network in West and Central Africa, among other things. Records show that despite these regional actions, the number of pirate attacks continues to increase.
The International Maritime Bureau, a specialised division of the International Chamber of Commerce, reports that while pirate attacks (actual and attempted) in the Gulf of Guinea fell from 54 in 2008 to 37 in 2010, there has been a steady increase since then: 49 in 2011 and 58 in 2012.
As of August 2013, there were 28 attacks in Nigeria alone. These numbers, however, might be deceptive because many attacks go unreported. But piracy is not the only security threat at sea. "Piracy has drawn attention to wider problems of maritime insecurity," says Bueger, such as trafficking and smuggling of humans, weapons and narcotics, and illegal and unregulated fishing activities.
Hence, he says, the attention currently being given to the fight against piracy could be used as a stepping stone by the international community to create sustainable institutions of maritime security. International institutions are crucial for counter-piracy efforts, but they require long-term commitment.
The African Union has already declared that its objective is to implement the African Maritime Security Strategy by 2050.
Among the strategy's goals are to "ensure security and safety of maritime transportation systems," and to "prevent hostile and criminal acts at sea, and to coordinate/harmonize the prosecution of the offenders." It's a long-term strategy, but without a doubt concerted action is needed now to stop piracy in West Africa before it deteriorates and spreads to other African coastal areas.
The author, Nirit Ben-Ari writes for United Nations Africa Renewal Magazine
Tags:
|
South
|
Traditional 'western' breadmaking generally requires flour defined as?
|
Togo facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Togo
République Togolaise
CAPITAL: Lomé
FLAG: The national flag consists of five alternating horizontal stripes of green and yellow. A five-pointed white star is at the center of a red square that spans the height of the top three stripes.
ANTHEM: Terre de nos aïeux (Land of Our Fathers).
MONETARY UNIT: The Communauté Financière Africaine franc (CFA Fr) is a paper currency of 100 centimes. There are coins of 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, and 500 CFA francs and notes of 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 CFA francs. CFA Fr1 = $0.00192 (or $1 = CFA Fr521.74) as of 2005.
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: The metric system is the legal standard.
HOLIDAYS: New Year's Day, 1 January; National Liberation Day, 13 January; Economic Liberation Day, 24 January; Victory Day, 24 April; Independence Day, 27 April; Labor Day, 1 May; Martyrs' Day, 21 June; Assumption, 15 August; All Saints' Day, 1 November; Anniversary of the failed attack on Lomé, 24 September; Christmas , 25 December. Movable religious holidays include Easter Monday, Ascension, Whitmonday, 'Id al-Fitr, and 'Id al-'Adha'.
TIME: GMT.
LOCATION, SIZE, AND EXTENT
Situated on the west coast of Africa, Togo has an area of 56,785 sq km (21,925 sq mi), extending 510 km (317 mi) n–s and 140 km (87 mi) e–w. Comparatively, the area occupied by Togo is slightly smaller than the state of West Virginia . Togo is bounded on the n by Burkina Faso , on the e by Benin, on the s by the Gulf of Guinea , and on the w by Ghana , with a total boundary length of 1,703 km (1,058 mi), of which 56 km (35 mi) is coastline.
Togo's capital city, Lomé, is located on the Gulf of Guinea coast.
TOPOGRAPHY
Togo is traversed in the center by a chain of hills, the Togo Mountains, extending roughly southwest into Ghana and northeastward into Benin and averaging about 700 m (2,300 ft) in height. The highest elevation is Mt. Agou (986 m/3,235 ft). To the north and west of these hills, the Oti River drains in a southwesterly direction into the Volta River, which constitutes a part of the upper boundary with Ghana. To the north of the Oti River Valley lies gently undulating savanna country. From the southern spurs of the central hills, a plateau stretches gradually southward to a coastal plain. The coastline consists of a flat sandy beach thickly planted with coconut trees and partially separated from the mainland by lagoons and lakes that are the former estuaries of several rivers.
CLIMATE
Togo has a humid, tropical climate, but receives less rainfall than most of the other countries along the Gulf of Guinea. In the south there are two rainy seasons, from March to early July and in September and October. The heaviest rainfall occurs in the hills of the west, southwest, and center, where the precipitation averages about 150 cm (60 in) a year. North of the Togo Mountains there is one rainy season, lasting from April to August. Rainfall in this region averages 100 cm (40 in) a year. The coast gets the least rainfall, about 78 cm (31 in) annually. The average maximum and minimum temperatures are 30°c (86°f) and 23°c (73°f) at Lomé, on the southern coast, and 35°c (95°f) and 15°c (59°f) at Mango, in the north.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Natural vegetation is chiefly of the savanna type, luxuriant in the rainy season, brittle grass and shrub during the dry season. Dense belts of reeds are found along the coastal lagoons. Much of the largest wildlife has been exterminated in the southern area, but in the north, elephants and lions still can be found. Hippopotamuses and crocodiles live in and along the rivers, and monkeys are fairly common. The coastal swamps abound in snakes. As of 2002, there were at least 196 species of mammals, 117 species of birds, and over 3,000 species of plants throughout the country.
ENVIRONMENT
The dense tropical rain forests that once covered much of the country are now found only along the river valleys and in isolated pockets of the Atakora Mountains. Slash-and-burn agriculture and the cutting of wood for fuel are the major causes of forest depletion. Between 1990 and 2000, Togo lost an average of 3.4% of its forest and woodland each year. Soils are generally of poor quality, requiring intensive fertilization and cultivation to be productive. The soil and water supply are threatened by pesticides and fertilizers. The nation's land is also threatened by desertification.
Water pollution is a significant problem in Togo, where only 80% of urban dwellers and 36% of the people living in rural areas have access to improved water sources. Contamination of the water supply contributes to the spread of disease.
Responsibility in environmental matters is vested in the Ministry of Rural Development and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism. The government of Togo has tried to protect the nation's environment through a comprehensive legislative package, the Environmental Code of 1988. As of 2003, 7.9% of Togo's total land area was protected.
The nation's wildlife population is at risk due to poaching and the clearing of land for agricultural purposes. According to a 2006 report issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the number of threatened species included 7 types of mammals, 2 species of birds, 2 types of reptiles, 3 species of amphibians, 8 species of fish, and 10 species of plants. Threatened species included the African elephant, Diana monkey, and West African manatee.
POPULATION
The population of Togo in 2005 was estimated by the United Nations (UN) at 6,145,000, which placed it at number 101 in population among the 193 nations of the world. In 2005, approximately 3% of the population was over 65 years of age, with another 43% of the population under 15 years of age. There were 98 males for every 100 females in the country. According to the UN, the annual population rate of change for 2005–2010 was expected to be 2.7%, a rate the government viewed as satisfactory. The projected population for the year 2025 was 9,613,000. The population density was 108 per sq km (280 per sq mi), with density greatest in the south, exceeding 500 per sq km (200 per sq mi) in some areas.
The UN estimated that 33% of the population lived in urban areas in 2005, and that urban areas were growing at an annual rate of 3.96%. The capital city, Lomé, had a population of 799,000 in that year. Other important centers with estimated populations are Sokodé, 86,500; Kpalimé, 75,000; Atakpamé, 64,000; and Aného, 24,000.
The prevalence of HIV/AIDS has had a significant impact on the population of Togo. The number of AIDS orphans increased by 17,000 from 2003–04. The UN estimated that 6% of adults between the ages of 15–49 were living with HIV/AIDS in 2001. The AIDS epidemic causes higher death and infant mortality rates, and lowers life expectancy.
MIGRATION
There is a steady migration of laborers from rural to urban areas. Members of the Ewe group migrate to and from Ghana. Formerly, an estimated 100,000 workers went to Ghana from Togo each year, but because of Ghana's declining economy, this number has probably decreased. There is also much movement of Ouatchi, Adja, Kabré, and Losso peoples to and from Benin. Some of the aliens expelled from Nigeria in 1983 were Togolese; moreover, Togo suffered the disruptive effect of the hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians who returned home from Nigeria via the Togolese coastal roads. Foreign refugees in Togo, including Ewe dissidents in exile from Ghana, are entitled to employment and free medical treatment, although they retain the status of aliens. About 7% of the population consists of noncitizens. The total number of migrants in Togo in 2000 was 179,000 including refugees. As of 2004, there were 11,285 refugees, including 11,208 Ghanaian refugees in northern Togo, and 390 asylum seekers, and 120 returned refugees. In 2005, the net migration rate was estimated as zero migrants per 1,000 population. This was a significant change from -6.7 per 1,000 in 1990. The government views the migration levels as satisfactory.
ETHNIC GROUPS
Native Africans constitute 99% of Togo's total population. About 40 tribal groups comprise a mosaic of peoples of distinct languages and histories. The main ethnic group consists of the Ewe and such related peoples as the Ouatchi, Fon, and Adja; they live in the south and constitute about 20–25% of the population. Next in size are the Kabye, accounting for about 10–15% of the population. As elsewhere in Africa, political and ethnic boundaries do not coincide. Thus, the Ewe are divided by the Togo–Ghana boundary, and large numbers of Ouatchi, Adja, Kabye, and Losso live in adjacent Benin. Other significant groups are the Mina (5% of the population), Cotocoli (10–15%), Moba (10–15%), Gourma, Akposso, Ana, Lamba, Ehoué, and Bassari. Despite Togo's complex ethnic, linguistic, and racial makeup, a major distinction can be made between the tribes of Sudanic origin that inhabit the northern regions and those of the true Negroid Bantu type found in the south. The remaining 1% of Togo's populace is non-African, mostly European and Syrian-Lebanese.
LANGUAGES
French is the official language. Most newspapers are printed in French, and trade and commerce passing through Anécho and Lomé usually are conducted in that language; however, the public schools combine French with Ewe and Mina in the south, Kabiye and Dagomba in the north. In northern Togo, Hausa is also widely spoken. Pidgin English and French are used widely in the principal trading towns. In all, more than 44 different languages and dialects are spoken in Togo.
RELIGIONS
The most recent statistics indicate that about 47% of the population are Christian. Of these nearly 28% are Catholic. About 14% of the population are Sunni Muslim. Nearly 33% practice a variety of traditional indigenous religions or other faiths, including Vodoun (Voodoo), which is believed to have originated in the region that is now Togo. Most of the Muslims live in the central and northern parts of the country, while Christians are found primarily in the south.
The government requires registration of religious groups, but this involves a fairly easy process and no applications have been rejected outright. The constitution provides for freedom of religion and this right is generally respected in practice. Certain Muslim and Christian holidays are celebrated as national holidays.
TRANSPORTATION
Togo has a relatively well-developed road system of about 7,520 km (4,673 mi), of which 2,376 km (1,476 mi) were paved in 2002. One main road, completely paved since 1980, runs north from Lomé to the border with Burkina Faso; another runs east along the coast from Lomé to Aného and onward to the Benin border; and a third runs west along the coast to the Ghana border. Because of extreme variations in weather, the roads that are not paved require constant attention. During the dry season, they are very dusty and crack easily, but during the rainy season they become extremely muddy and are frequently washed out. In 2003, there were 97,800 passenger cars and 43,200 commercial vehicles.
As of 2004, Togo had 568 km (326 mi) of meter gauge (narrow gauge) railroad, including three major lines from Lomé: to Kpalimé (116 km/72 mi), to Aného (44 km/27 mi), and to Atakpamé and Blitta (276 km/171 mi). An 80-km (50-mi) spur goes to Tabligbo. The rail system is operated by Chemin de Fer Togolais.
Togo lacks a natural harbor, but in 1968 a major deepwater port east of central Lomé was completed with a loan from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). An autonomous free port at Lomé serves landlocked Burkina Faso, Niger , and Mali . There is also a phosphate-handling port at Kpémé. A small merchant-shipping fleet was created in 1974 as a joint venture with the FRG. In 2005 there were two ships of 1,000 GRT or over, totaling 3,918 GRT. As of 2003, Togo's navigable inland waterways consisted of a 50 km (31 mi) stretch of the Mono River, in which navigation is seasonal and dependent upon rainfall.
There were an estimated nine airports in 2001, only two of which had paved runways as of 2005. The international airport at Lomé links Togo with other countries of West and Central Africa and with Europe ; a second international airport, at Niamtougou, was completed in the early 1980s. Among the international airlines serving Togo is Air Afrique, of which Togo owns a 7% share. Air Togo operates domestic service, flying to airstrips at Atakpamé, Sokodé, Sansanné-Mango, Lama-Kara, Niamtougou, and Dapaong. In 2003, about 46,000 passengers were carried on scheduled domestic and international airline flights.
HISTORY
Between the 12th and the 18th century, the Ewe, Adja, and related peoples, who now constitute a majority of the population of southern Togo and adjoining Ghana, came to this area from the Niger River Valley as a result of pressure from the east. Portuguese sailors visited the coast in the 15th and 16th centuries. Slave shipments began from Grand Popo (now in Benin), Petit Popo (now Anécho), and other coastal villages; traders introduced the growing of cassava, coconuts, corn, and other crops in order to provision their slave ships. The French established trading posts at Petit Popo in 1626 and again in 1767, but abandoned them each time. The French were again active there and at Porto-Séguro, east of Lomé, from 1865 to 1883.
German traders came to Grand Popo as early as 1856, but did not arrive in significant numbers until 1880. Germany finally established control over the area, its first African acquisition, on 5 July 1884, when Dr. Gustav Nachtigal made a treaty with the chief of Togo, a village on the north side of a lagoon behind Porto-Séguro. The treaty established a German protectorate over a small coastal enclave, and the village name eventually was given to the entire territory. The Germans established a capital first at Baguida, then at Zebe, and in 1897 at Lomé. Boundary delimitations with the British and French were made in 1897 and 1899. Although the Volta River formed a natural boundary between Togo and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), as a result of the negotiations, the frontier diverged from the river about 320 km (200 mi) north of Lomé and descended diagonally, so that the so-called Volta Triangle on the left bank became part of the Gold Coast. The boundary arrangements resulted in splitting the Ewe, Adja, Ouatchi, Fon, and other peoples between the Gold Coast, Togo, and Dahomey (now Benin). As the Germans extended their control to the north, they built roads and railroads and established administrative, legal, economic, educational, and other institutions.
Soon after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, neighboring French and British units gained control of Togo. In a provisional arrangement, the British took the coastal area and the railways, and the French assumed control of the interior. League of Nations mandates were established in 1922.
Following World War II , both the United Kingdom and France placed their spheres of Togoland under UN trusteeship. Beginning in 1947, leaders of the Ewe people repeatedly petitioned the UN first for Ewe unification and subsequently for Togoland unification. At the time, the Ewe were under three different administrations: the Gold Coast, British Togoland, and French Togoland. For nine years thereafter, the Togoland question was before the UN. Its resolution was difficult not only because of the resistance of the British and French governments to the Ewe demands, but also because both the Ewe and non-Ewe of the two Togolands were deeply divided on the form self-determination should take. The problem was partially resolved by a plebiscite held in British Togoland on 9 May 1956 under UN supervision. A majority of the registered voters decided in favor of integration of British Togoland with an independent Gold Coast. Consequently, when the Gold Coast became the independent state of Ghana, British Togoland ceased to exist.
On 28 October 1956, in a referendum held in French Togoland, 72% of the registered voters chose to terminate French trusteeship and to accept the status of internal autonomy and continued association with France that had been proffered them by the French government. This unilateral effort to terminate French trusteeship was not accepted by the UN.
In April 1958, new elections were held under UN supervision. The Committee for Togolese Union, pledged to secure complete independence, won control of the Togo Assembly, and its leader, Sylvanus Olympio, subsequently became prime minister. On 13 October 1958, the French government announced that full independence would be granted, and on 27 April 1960, the Republic of Togo became a sovereign nation, with Olympio as president.
President Olympio was assassinated on 13 January 1963 by military insurgents. At the insurgents' behest, Nicolas Grunitzky, the exiled leader of the Togolese Party for Progress, returned to Togo and formed a provisional government. He abrogated the constitution, dissolved the National Assembly, and called new elections. In the May 1963 balloting, Grunitzky was elected president, a new 56-member National Assembly was chosen, and a new constitution was approved by national referendum.
Grunitzky held office through 1966. The final months of his presidency were marked by antigovernment demonstrations involving many of Olympio's former supporters and sympathizers. On 13 January 1967, the Grunitzky government was overthrown by a military coup led by Col. Kléber Dadjo, who was succeeded in April 1967 by Lt. Col. Étienne Éyadéma. The constitution was again suspended and the Assembly dissolved, and Éyadéma declared himself president.
In 1969, Éyadéma proposed the establishment of a national party of unification, the Togolese People's Rally (Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais—RPT). At its first party congress in November 1971, the RPT representatives opposed the idea of constitutional government and asked for a national referendum in support of the Éyadéma regime. This took place in January 1972, with 99% of the population voting for Éyadéma. Survivors of a 1970 plot to overthrow the regime were pardoned after the referendum, and several former members of Olympio's government joined the RPT. Others of Olympio's supporters went into exile or into business, and there was no coherent opposition to the government.
In 1974, Éyadéma began to advocate a "cultural authenticity" policy, stimulated at least in part by the crash of his private plane in January 1974, from which he escaped uninjured. The crash (the cause of which he believed suspicious) followed his nationalization of the phosphate industry and appeared to spur his drive for further Africanization in Togo. At this time, Éyadéma dropped his first name, Étienne, using instead his African second name, Gnassingbé.
Éyadéma was reelected as president without opposition on 30 December 1979, when the voters also approved a draft constitution for what was called the Third Republic (succeeding the republics headed by Olympio and Grunitzky). A 67-member National Assembly was elected at the same time. Éyadéma remained firmly in control in the early 1980s, despite the disruptions caused by Nigeria's expulsion of illegal aliens and the economic decline attributable to falling phosphate prices. An alleged plot to assassinate Éyadéma on 13 January 1983, while French president, François Mitterrand, was visiting Togo, apparently misfired. Éyadéma reportedly blamed Gilchrist Olympio, the son of the former president, for the coup attempt.
On 23–24 September 1986, about 60 insurgents, mostly Togolese in exile, attempted to seize control of Lomé but were repulsed. About 150 French and 350 Zairian troops were flown in to help restore order. The official death toll was 26. The coup attempt was reportedly financed by Gilchrist Olympio, who was sentenced to death in absentia. Another 12 men were given death sentences, and 14 were sentenced to life imprisonment. Éyadéma accused Ghana and Burkina Faso of aiding the insurgents. In National Assembly elections on 24 March 1985, 216 candidates, all approved by the RPT, contested 77 seats; only 20 deputies were reelected. Éyadéma was elected unopposed to a new seven-year term as president on 21 December 1986.
Opposition to Éyadéma's rule came to a head in March 1991 when, after police clashes with thousands of antigovernment demonstrators, the government agreed to institute a multiparty system and to grant amnesty to dissidents. On 28 August 1991, Éyadéma ended 24 years of military rule by surrendering authority to Joseph Kokou Koffigoh, an interim prime minister selected by a National Conference. The RPT was to be disbanded and Éyadéma barred from running for the presidency.
In October and November 1991, armed forces loyal to Éyadéma failed several times to overthrow Koffigoh. On 3 December 1991, however, they attacked the government palace and seized him. The French refused to help Koffigoh; instead, he was forced to compromise; he then formed a coalition government with Éyadéma and legalized the RPT.
On 5 May 1992, opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio was severely wounded in an ambush, and in July another opposition figure was assassinated. The transitional government several times rescheduled the referendum on a new constitution. Finally, on 27 September 1992, it was approved. The legislative and presidential elections were postponed again and again until August 1993.
The Army, composed largely of Kabyé (Éyadéma's group) has never accepted Éyadéma's ouster, the National Conference, or Koffigoh. Eventually, Koffigoh's interim government was dissolved in 1992, and Éyadéma consolidated his powers. However, in January 1993 he reappointed Koffigoh prime minister of a government which cooperated closely with Éyadéma, now president. On 25 August 1993, Éyadéma easily won reelection as president (97% of the vote). The electoral process, however, was marred by a low turnout (all major opposition candidates refused to participate) and serious irregularities.
Following delays, legislative elections were held in two rounds in February 1994. With the exception of Olympio's Union of the Forces of Change (UFC), the main opposition parties participated. The RPT reportedly took 33 of the 81 seats in the first round. The Action Committee for Renewal (CAR), won 19. Koffigoh's New Force Coordination failed to take a single seat. Nonetheless, the armed forces continued to attack opposition politicians. The second round voting was marred by violence, with armed gangs attacking voting stations and opposition supporters. Still, international observers declared the election satisfactory.
On 24 February 1994 the National Electoral Commission released results for 76 seats as follows: opposition, 38 seats; RPT, 37 seats; Koffigoh, 1 seat. The Supreme Court ordered new elections for 3 seats of the Action Committee for Renewal and the Togolese Union for Democracy, lowering their totals to 34 and 6 seats, respectively. Defections from the CAR to the RPT and the merging of the Union of Justice and Democracy (UJD) with the RPT gave the RPT a narrow majority with 42 seats.
In June 1998 Éyadéma officially won the presidential elections with 52%, but the opposition rejected the election as rigged. Éyadéma's dubious victory precipitated a national crisis, and led the opposition to boycott the legislative elections delayed and then scheduled for March 1999. In July, the RPT and opposition parties signed the Lomé Framework Agreement, which included a pledge by Éyadéma to respect the constitution and not to seek another term. The Agreement ensured among other things political rights for opposition leaders, the safe return for refugees, and compensation for victims of political violence. Éyadéma also agreed to dissolve the National Assembly in March 2000 and hold new legislative elections, to be supervised by an independent national election commission (CENI). The March deadline passed, as did deadlines in October 2001 and March 2002. The elections were finally held on 27 October 2002, but under a boycott from the Union of the Forces for Change (UFC) and the Action Committee for Renewal (CAR), grouped as the Coalition of Democratic Forces (CFD). The RPT took 72 of the 81 seats.
In December 2002, parliament amended the constitution to allow Éyadéma to seek a third term, and to bar Gilchrist Olympio, leader of the UFC, from running by instituting residence requirements. In February 2003, a new nine-member CENI was formed, including four representatives each of the RPT and the opposition umbrella group CFD. The ninth member was the president of the Lomé Court of Appeal. However, the UFC withdrew from the CFD because it regarded CENI's mandate as curtailed by the government, and because it regarded the CFD's actions and strategies as incoherent. In June, Éyadéma won the election with 57.8% of the vote, but no international observers were present, and the opposition refused to accept the outcome as a free and fair expression of the will of the people.
Facing a new political stalemate, the government initiated talks in late 2003 and into 2004 with the opposition via the Cotonou Convention platform (2000) sponsored by the EU. Despite the regime's new promises to implement reforms, the opposition mostly boycotted the talks. In December 2004, the boycott seemed to be having an effect as Éyadéma dissolved the parliament and announced new elections for 2005. However, in February 2005, he died unexpectedly leaving a succession void, which was precipitously filled by his son, Faure Gnassingbé. Although Gnassingbé had the support of the army, strong pressure from ECOWAS forced him to step down and to organize fresh elections. On 24 April, Gnassingbé won the election, but again the opposition dismissed the exercise as fraudulent, and neither the EU nor the United States recognized the outcome as legitimate. In rioting that followed, more than 150 people were killed, and thousands fled the country in the face of government crackdowns. Gnassingbé also appointed his brother Kpatcha Gnassingbé to be defense minister.
In the months that followed, Nigerian president Obasanjo insisted on a government of national unity with an opposition prime minister. Bowing to concerted pressure, Gnassingbé finally appointed an opposition leader, Edem Kodjo—a former head of the OAU—to be the new prime minister, however, this appointment was refused by the UFC. Talks held in Rome between Gnassingbé and Gilchrist Olympio sponsored by the Italian Catholic community of Sant Egidio, revealed a number of sticking points including a mutually acceptable electoral framework and constitutional rules.
Specifically, the opposition demanded a return to the 1992 constitution while the RPT refused to reverse the amendments made in 2002 that disqualify Olympio's candidacy, but allow Gnassingbé to hold office. In the meantime, Lomé became a dangerous city beset by violent organized crime. Owing to government crackdowns, poor military accountability and harassment by pro-government militias, the number of Togolese seeking refuge in neighboring Benin and Ghana grew to about 45,000 by 2006.
GOVERNMENT
The constitution of 30 December 1979 provided for a president nominated by the RPT and elected for a seven-year term by universal adult suffrage at age 18. The president nominated and presided over the cabinet and may rule by decree after declaring a state of emergency. Members of the National Assembly were nominated by the RPT and directly elected for five years. The legislature, which may be dissolved by the president, met twice a year.
A new constitution mandating multiparty elections was approved in a referendum on 27 September 1992. Although opposition parties are permitted, they are subjected to intimidation and coercion. Chief of state, President Gen. Gnassingbé Éyadéma, held power between April 1967 and February 2005, which made him sub-Saharan Africa's longest ruling leader at the time. The cabinet is a Council of Ministers appointed by the president and the prime minister. Given the weakness of the legislature, and the RPT's majority, public decision-making authority resides with the executive.
According to the constitution, the president is elected by popular vote for a five-year term. In December 2002, the National Assembly amended the constitution, revoking the two-term limit on the presidential office (allowing Éyadéma to run again), instituting a single rather than two-round system of voting (to prevent the opposition from forcing a run-off against their best-placed candidate), insisting that presidential candidates be residents of Togo for at least 12 months prior to the election (to prevent Gilchrist Olympio from running), and to lower the minimum age for presidential candidates to 35, (enabling Faure Gnassingbé to run). The 81-seat National Assembly is selected in national, multiparty elections.
The next presidential election was scheduled in principle for 2010, and the next parliamentary election was scheduled for 2007 with the possibility that an agreement would be reached to hold it in 2006.
POLITICAL PARTIES
Political parties in Togo were considerably more active and competitive before independence than after, and from 1969 till the legalization of opposition parties in 1991, Togo was a one-party state. In the first Territorial Assembly elections in 1946, there were two parties, the Committee of Togolese Unity (Comité de l'Unité Togolaise—CUT) and the Togolese Party for Progress (Parti Togolais du Progrès—PTP). The CUT was overwhelmingly successful, and Sylvanus Olympio, the CUT leader and Assembly president, campaigned for Ewe reunification. The CUT controlled all Assembly seats from 1946 to 1952. In the 1952 elections, however, the CUT was defeated, and it refused to participate in further elections because it claimed that the PTP was receiving French support. In the territorial elections of 1955, the PTP won all 30 Assembly seats, and when Togo was given autonomy in 1956, Nicolas Grunitzky, PTP leader, became prime minister.
In the UN-supervised elections of April 1958, the CUT regained power with a demand for independence from France, while the PTP and the Union of Chiefs and Peoples of the North (Union des Chefs et des Populations du Nord—UCPN) advocated that Togo remain an autonomous republic within the French Union. The two defeated parties merged in October 1959 to form the Togolese People's Democratic Union (Union Démocratique des Populations Togolaises—UDPT), under Grunitzky's leadership.
In March 1961, the National Assembly enacted legislation that based elections to the Assembly on a party-list system, with a single ballot in which a majority would be decisive. In the April 1961 elections, which were held on this single-list system, candidates from the alliance of the UDPT and the Togolese Youth Movement (Mouvement de la Jeunesse Togolaise—Juvento) were prevented from registering and were not permitted on the ballot. Consequently, the new Assembly consisted entirely of CUT members.
After Olympio (who had become president in 1960) was assassinated by military insurgents, Grunitzky, who was living in exile in Benin (then Dahomey), was invited back to Togo to form a provisional government. Grunitzky announced that free elections would be held, but in fact the delegates of the four leading parties—UDPT, Juvento, the Togolese Unity Movement (Unité Togolaise, formed from the CUT after Olympio's assassination), and the Togolese Popular Movement (Mouvement Populaire Togolais)—as well as the insurgents' Committee of Vigilance, agreed on a single national union list of candidates. In the elections of 5 May 1963, Grunitzky became president and Antoine Meatchi vice-president; a new 56-member Assembly was elected; and a new constitution was approved by national referendum. In early 1967, however, Grunitzky was deposed, and a military regime took power, with no constitution and no legislature.
Organized political activity was suspended until 1969, when the Togolese People's Rally (Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais—RPT) was founded as the nation's sole legal political party. The President heads the RPT, which has a Central Committee and a Political Bureau. In the 1979 and 1985 legislative elections, all candidates were nominated by the RPT. In the 1994 legislative elections, however, other parties participated.
Political opposition to Éyadéma became bolder after 1990. For years, an anti-Éyadéma group, the Togolese Movement for Democracy (Mouvement Togolais pour la Démocratie), functioned in exile from Paris . After opposition parties were legalized on 12 April 1991, and especially after the National Conference engineered a governmental change in August 1991, other parties began to function, albeit in an atmosphere of threat from the armed forces and pro-Éyadéma gangs. Among the country's parties as of 1996 were the Coordination des Forces Nouvelles (CFN), Rally of the Togolese People (RPT), Togolese Union for Democracy (UTD), Action Committee for Renewal (CAR), Union for Democracy and Solidarity (UDS), Pan-African Sociodemocrats Group (GSP—an alliance of three radical parties: CDPA—Democratic Convention of African Peoples, PDR–Party for Democracy and Renewal, and PSP—Pan-African Social Party), Union of Forces for Change (UFC), and Union of Justice and Democracy (UJD).
All major opposition parties boycotted the 1993 elections, delaying elections until February 1994. The winners distributed the seats as follows: CAR 36, RPT 35, UTD 7, UJD 2, CFN 1. However, as a result of defections from the CAR to the RPT and the merging of the UJD with the RPT, representation in the National Assembly in August 1997 was RPT 42, CAR 32, UTD 5, CFN 1, independent 1, giving Eyadema's party a narrow majority.
Disagreements between the divided opposition and the RPT thwarted efforts to achieve a national consensus on how the 1998 elections were to be conducted. The opposition boycotted the elections in March 1999 to protest the alleged cheating by Éyadéma and his supporters in the June 1998 presidential election. But progress was made in defining the role of the national electoral commission (CENI), and by April 2000, the two sides agreed to return to the table to discuss endorsement of an electoral bill, and related issues pertaining to national reconciliation. Legislative elections were delayed throughout 2000, 2001, and early 2002; they were finally held on 27 October 2002. The elections were judged to be democratic and transparent by international election observers, but the two main opposition parties--the UFC and the CAR--grouped as the Coalition of Democratic Forces (CFD), boycotted the elections, and the RPT emerged with 72 of the 81 seats. Also winning seats were the Rally for Democracy and Development (Rassemblement pour le souteien de la démocratie et du développement—RSDD), 3; the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (Union pour la démocratie et le progrès social—UDPS), 2; Juvento, 2; the Believers' Movement for Equality and Peace (Mouvement des croyants pour l'égalité et la paix—MOCEP), 1; and an independent won 1 seat.
In early 2003, the UFC pulled out of the CFD umbrella opposition organization, due to disagreements with its strategies and its agreement to sit on the newly reformed electoral commission, CENI, which the UFC judged to be manipulated by the government. In the June 2003 presidential contest, Éyadéma scored 57.8% of the vote to 33.7% for the UFC candidate, Emmanual Bob-Akitani, Gilchrist Olympio's replacement. In the April 2005 presidential contest, Bob-Akitani ran against Éyadéma's son, Faure Gnassingbé, and was defeated 60.1% to 38.3%. The main opposition declared both polls fraudulent, and has refused to accept the results. The UFC and the CAR remained outside the government of national unity.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Togo is divided into five administrative regions—Maritime, Plateaux, Centrale, Kara, and Savanes—each supervised by an inspector. The regions are subdivided into 30 prefectures and four sub-prefectures. Inspectors and prefects are appointed by the president. The prefectures and sub-prefectures are subdivided into cantons. The prefectures in theory are supposed to be governed by elected councils, but these elections have never been held.
A policy of decentralization has been undertaken in Togo, and local communities comprise 30 communes, 9 of them "fully independent" with an elected mayor, and 21 "semi-independent" with the prefect acting as mayor. Communes have popularly elected municipal councils.
JUDICIAL SYSTEM
Maintaining the independence of the judiciary is the responsibility of the Superior Council of Magistrates, which was set up in 1964 and includes the president of the republic as chairman, the minister of justice, the president and vice president of the Supreme Court, and others. A Constitutional Court is the highest court of jurisdiction in constitutional matters. The Supreme Court sits in Lomé; there is also a sessions court (Court of Assizes), and Appeals Courts. Tribunals of first instance are divided into civil, commercial, and correctional chambers; labor and children's tribunals; and the Court of State Security, set up in September 1970 to judge crimes involving foreign or domestic subversion. A Tribunal for Recovery of Public Funds handles cases involving misuse of public funds.
The judicial system blends African traditional law and the Napoleonic Code in trying civil and criminal cases. In practice, the judiciary is subject to the influence and control of the executive branch.
Defendants in criminal cases are presumed innocent and are afforded the right to counsel. Village chiefs or a Council of Elders may try minor criminal cases in rural areas. Appeals from such rulings may be taken to the regular court system.
Trials are open and judicial procedures are generally respected. However, the judicial system suffers from the lack of personnel and remains overburdened.
ARMED FORCES
In 2005, Togo's armed forces numbered 8,550 active personnel. The Army numbered some 8,100 troops including a Presidential Guard unit. Equipment included two main battle tanks and nine Scorpion light tanks. The 250-member Air Force had 16 combat capable aircraft that included 4 fighter ground attack aircraft. The country's estimated 200-member Navy had two coastal patrol vessels. Paramilitary forces numbered 750 members. In 2005, the defense budget totaled $38.3 million.
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
Togo was admitted to the United Nations on 29 September 1960. It is a member of ECA and several nonregional specialized agencies, such as the World Bank, UNESCO, UNIDO, the ILO, FAO, and the WHO. Togo also belongs to the African Development Bank, the ACP Group, the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, ECOWAS, G-77, the WTO, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the West African Economic and Monetary Union, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the Community of Sahel and Saharan States (CENSAD), and the African Union. Togo has been an active member of the Conseil d'Entente, which includes Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Benin. Togo hosted the signing ceremony for the Lomé Convention (providing for preferential treatment by the European Community for developing countries) in February 1975. The nation is part of the Franc Zone.
In environmental cooperation, Togo is part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Ramsar, CITES, International Tropical Timber Agreements, the Kyoto Protocol, the Montréal Protocol, MARPOL, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea, Climate Change, and Desertification.
ECONOMY
Togo has an agricultural economy with over 65% of its people engaged in subsistence and commercial agriculture. Togo is drought-prone but is food self-sufficient in years of ample rainfall. Coffee, cocoa, and cotton are the major cash crops, and the food crops include corn, sorghum, millet, cassava, and yams. The nation also has an active commercial sector and significant phosphate deposits upon which it draws for foreign exchange.
Political instability led to the suspension of international aid in 1992 as donors pressured the government into quicker action toward democratic reforms. Economic activity was further disrupted by an eight-month general strike that lasted until July 1993.
In January 1994 France suddenly devalued the CFA franc, cutting its value in half overnight. Immediately, prices for almost all imported goods soared, including prices for food and essential drugs. The devaluation was designed to encourage new investment, particularly in the export sectors of the economy, and discourage the use of hard currency reserves to buy products that could be grown domestically. Unfortunately, political instability and a general atmosphere of uncertainty prevented the country from taking advantage of the devaluation to improve the economy. Excessive military expenditures and stalled progress on privatizing state-owned enterprises were factors keeping the World Bank and IMF from resuming aid. During the 1995 to 1997 structural adjustment program, Togo succeeded in meeting demands and capturing funds only for the last year.
The 1998 presidential elections and 1999 legislative elections were characterized as undemocratic. These events led to reconciliation talks in July 1999 that laid the groundwork for a more democratic government, bringing back substantial development aid. However, legislative elections held in 2002 were boycotted by opposition parties, and the presidential elections of 2003 were deemed by opposition leaders to be marred by irregularities and fraud. This political climate did little to encourage foreign investors, increase donor contributions, and provide the stability needed for economic progress. While most bilateral and multilateral aid to Togo remained frozen as of early 2006, the EU initiated a partial resumption of cooperation and development aid to Togo in late 2004, based upon commitments by Togo to expand opportunities for political opposition and liberalize portions of the economy.
INCOME
The US Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) reports that in 2005 Togo's gross domestic product ( GDP ) was estimated at $9.0 billion. The CIA defines GDP as the value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year and computed on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP) rather than value as measured on the basis of the rate of exchange based on current dollars. The per capita GDP was estimated at $1,600. The annual growth rate of GDP was estimated at 2.8%. The average inflation rate in 2005 was 5.5%. It was estimated that agriculture accounted for 39.5% of GDP, industry 20.4%, and services 40.1%.
According to the World Bank, in 2003 remittances from citizens working abroad totaled $103 million or about $21 per capita and accounted for approximately 5.9% of GDP. Foreign aid receipts amounted to $45 million or about $9 per capita and accounted for approximately 2.6% of the gross national income (GNI).
The World Bank reports that in 2003 household consumption in Togo totaled $1.49 billion or about $307 per capita based on a GDP of $1.8 billion, measured in current dollars rather than PPP. Household consumption includes expenditures of individuals, households, and nongovernmental organizations on goods and services, excluding purchases of dwellings. It was estimated that for the period 1990 to 2003 household consumption grew at an average annual rate of 3.9%. It was estimated that in 1989 about 32% of the population had incomes below the poverty line.
LABOR
Togo's labor force in 2002 (the latest year for which data was available) was estimated at two million. In 1998, about 65% of the labor force engaged in agriculture, 30% in services, and 5% in industry. The majority of families engage in subsistence farming. Data on unemployment in Togo was not available.
Trade unions in Togo, which once were the base for left-wing opposition to the military regime, have been incorporated into the one-party system. The Central Committee of the RPT dissolved the central bodies of all Togolese trade unions in December 1972, and the National Workers Confederation of Togo (Confédération Nationale des Travailleurs du Togo—CNTT) was established in 1973 as the sole national union. In 1991, the National Conference suspended the automatic withholding of CNTT dues for all workers, and it froze CNTT's assets. Several trade unions left the CNTT, some of which then affiliated with two new federations: the Labor Federation of Togolese Workers and the National Union of Independent Syndicates. Since 1991, all of Togo's labor federations have taken a more active role in independent collective bargaining. About 60–70% of the workforce in the formal (wage) sector (about 20% of the entire workforce) was unionized as of 2002.
The minimum working age is 14 (18 for certain industrial employment) but it is not enforced and many children work, especially on their family's subsistence farms. The minimum wage varies for different categories of employment and ranged from $20 to $33 monthly in 2002. This does not provide a living wage for a family. The workweek is limited to 72 hours, with one mandatory rest period of 24 hours.
AGRICULTURE
Togo is predominantly an agricultural country, with about four-fifths of the work force engaged in farming. Approximately 12% of the land area is arable. Most food crops are produced by subsistence farmers who operate on family farms of less than 3 hectares (7 acres). Peanuts and sorghum are grown in the extreme north; sorghum, yams, and cotton in the region around Niamtougou; sorghum, cotton, and corn in the central region; coffee, cocoa, and cotton in the southern plateau; and manioc, corn, and copra near the coast. Agriculture accounted for about 39.5% of GDP in 2003.
In the late 1990s, the government emphasized food production. Main food crops in 2004 (in tons) included manioc, 725,000; yams, 570,000; corn, 485,000; sorghum, 180,000; and millet, 50,000. Although Togo is basically self-sufficient in food, certain cereals—notably wheat, which cannot be grown in Togo—must be imported.
Leading cash crops are coffee and cocoa, followed by cotton, palm kernels, copra, peanuts, and shea nuts (karité). Coffee production decreased from 22,000 tons in 1991 to 13,500 tons in 2004. Cocoa production amounted to just 8,500 tons in 2004—less than half the amount produced 15 years earlier. When world prices for both coffee and cocoa fell in the mid-1980s, there was a greater emphasis on cotton production, with cotton exports increasing by over 400% from 1984 to 1992. Cotton production averaged 7,000 tons annually from 1979 to 1981; production in 2004 totaled 76,000 tons of fiber. A new state organization, the Togolese Cotton Co., had been set up in 1974 to develop the industry. Production of palm kernels, historically erratic, was estimated at 21,000 tons in 2004. There are over 100,000 coconut trees in Togo; about 2,000 tons of copra are produced annually. The peanut crop in 2004 was 33,000 tons (shelled). Some attempts are being made to export pineapples, house plants, vegetables, and palm oil.
ANIMAL HUSBANDRY
Alleviation of the tsetse fly in the savanna area north of the Atakora Mountains has permitted the development of small-scale cattle raising. Most of the cattle thus produced, principally the humpless West African shorthorn type, are either consumed locally or, when there are surpluses, driven south for consumption in the main cities and towns. Few cattle are exported. Grazing is communal, in the south on family group lands and in the north on tribal lands. Water supplies are short in certain areas.
Livestock in 2005 included an estimated 1.48 million goats, 1.85 million sheep, 320,000 hogs, 280,000 head of cattle, and 9 million chickens. There are slaughterhouses at Lomé, Atakpamé, Sokodé, Lama-Kara, Sansanné-Mango, and Dapaong.
FISHING
Fishing remains relatively unimportant, in part because of the country's limited territorial waters. Production, mostly by small operators employing pirogues, amounted to an estimated 28,706 tons in 2003; about 78% of that was caught in Atlantic waters and the rest inland. Almost all fish is sold smoked or dried. A new fishing quay has been constructed at Lomé, and a joint Libyan-Togolese fishing company has been established. Togo imports fish from Europe and its West African neighbors.
MINING
As of 2004, Togo was a producer of cement, clinker, diamonds, gold, limestone and phosphate rock, the latter of which is found mostly in the coastal region and whose production accounts for most of the country's industrial activity. Phosphate rock is also a leading export commodity, accounting for around 24% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Phosphate rock production (by gross weight) in 2004 was 1.115 million metric tons, down from 1.441 million metric tons in 2003. Togo's output of phosphate rock has been declining since production hit a high of 2.73 million metric tons in 1996. Virtually the entire output was exported, the principal destination being the European Union (EU). However, the phosphate rock currently mined in the coastal region contains a high amount of cadmium (about 150 milligrams per kilogram; mg/kg), and the EU is considering setting a 60mg/kg cadmium limit on imports of phosphate rock within five years, followed by a 20mg/kg limit within 15 years. Although cadmium-free resources have been identified in Togo's northwest, they are not currently being mined. The phosphate industry was nationalized in 1974, and production was carried-on by the Togolese Office of Phosphates (Office Togolais des Phosphates—OTP), one of Togo's largest employers. Although the government was pursuing the privatization of its phosphate mines; no serious offers were made.
Exploitation of marble reserves in the region around Niamtougou was begun in 1970 by the Togolese Marble Co. The state-run Nouvelle Sotoma closed operations in 1991, and the government has been looking for private investors to lease or purchase the operation.
Iron ore reserves, east of Bassari, were 95 million tons, averaging more than 40% iron. There was some artisanal recovery of diamond and gold. Other mineral deposits included attapulgite, barite, bauxite, bentonite, brick clay, chromite, copper, dolomite, garnet, granite, gypsum, kaolin, kyanite, limestone, manganese, monazite, nickel, peat, rutile, silica sand, and dimension stone. The government considered many of these potential small-scale operations.
ENERGY AND POWER
Togo, as of 1 January 2003 had no proven reserves of crude oil, natural gas, or oil refining capacity. All hydrocarbon needs were met by imports. In 2002, Togo's imports and consumption of refined petroleum products averaged 11,870 barrels per day. There were no recorded imports or consumption of natural gas in 2002.
Togo's main energy source is electricity. Togo's installed electrical generating capacity in 2002 totaled 0.035 million kW, of which 0.032 million kW of capacity came from conventional thermal plants, and 0.003 million kW came from Hydroelectric sources. Electric power production in 2002 amounted to 0.115 billion kWh, of which conventional thermal plants produced 0.112 billion kWh, and hydroelectric plants the rest. Demand for electric power that year came to 0.602 billion kWh, necessitating electricity imports of 0.500 billion kWh.
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing represents a small part of the economy (6–8%), with textiles and the processing of agricultural products—palm oil extraction, coffee roasting, and cotton ginning and weaving—being the most important sectors. Cocoa, coffee, and cotton generate some 40% of export earnings, with cotton being the most important cash crop. Other industries were developed to provide consumer goods—footwear, beverages, confectioneries, salt, and tires. Phosphate mining, however, is the most important industrial activity, accounting for 5% of GDP and 26–28% of exports in 2002. Togo as of 2006 was the world's fourth-largest producer of phosphate. Until the mid-1980s, most industries were partly or totally government owned. Sales and leases reduced the parastatal sector by nearly half by 1990, but by 2006 most privatization had stalled.
The government-owned phosphates plant put out a maximum of 3.3 to 3.5 metric tons a year, at the Office Togolaise de Phosphates (OTP). Togo's cement clinker plant, Cimtogo, is operated and owned by a Norwegian company, Scancem. The textile complex at Kara, along with a second plant at Dadja, were bought by American and Korean interests in 1987. A cotton ginning plant opened in 1991 in Talo; as of 2002 there were six cotton-producing factories in Togo, with a capacity of 205,000 metric tons. A plastics factory is 25% state owned and 75% owned by Danish and Swiss interests. The steel rolling mill in Lomé reopened in 1991. The state-owned national oil refinery was leased to Shell Togo and converted into a storage facility. The national dairy was bought by a Danish company in 1995. A free-trade zone opened in Lomé in 1990. Following the election of Faure Gnassingbé as president in 2005, there was more interest in this program, as the country wished to attract foreign business from Asia and Europe in the industry and service sectors.
Togo is involved in the $500 million West Africa Gas Pipeline. The pipeline's estimated capacity is 400 million cubic feet per day, and is expected to supply industry in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, and Togo. Construction of the pipeline began in 2005.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The National Institute of Scientific Research, founded in 1965 at Lomé, is the central scientific coordinating body. Several French research institutes have branches in the capital, and there are pilot farm projects throughout the country. The University of Benin at Lomé maintains faculties of sciences and medicine and schools of engineering and agriculture. Togo also has an agricultural school at Kpalimé and a technical college at Sokodá. In 1987–97, science and engineering students accounted for 35% of college and university enrollments. In the same period, expenditures for research and development totaled 0.5% of GNP. For the period 1990–2001, there were an estimated 102 scientists and engineers, and 65 technicians engaged in research and development per million people. High technology exports in 2002 were valued at $1 million, accounting for 1% of the country's manufactured exports.
DOMESTIC TRADE
The Togolese are among the most active traders on the West African coast, with much of the domestic trade handled by women. The national trade organization, Société Nationale de Commerce (SONACOM), has a monopoly on importation and distribution of soaps, cereals, sugar, salt, and industrial products, but there is still a flourishing free market both within Togo and with neighboring countries.
Most wholesalers have their headquarters in Lomé, the principal commercial and financial center. In Lomé, some shops specialize in such lines as dry goods, foodstuffs, and hardware. Elsewhere, retailers deal in a wide variety of goods rather than specializing in a few products. In the smaller towns, individual merchants deal in locally grown products and items of the first necessity. Kpalimé, Sokodé, and Tsévié are smaller regional commercial and trade centers.
Business hours are from 8 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through Friday, and from 7:30 am to 12:30 pm on Saturday. Banks are normally open from 8 am to 4 pm on weekdays only.
FOREIGN TRADE
Togo's export earnings in 2000 fell to nearly half their 1999 level due to sharp declines in coffee, cotton, and gold output. Togo's main export commodities are crude fertilizers, cotton, and cement. Other exports include coffee and cocoa.
In 2004, Togo's primary export partners were: Burkina Faso (16.3%), Ghana (15%), Benin (9.4%), Mali (7.6%), China (7.4%), and India (5.6%). Primary import partners included: China (25.5%), India (13.3%), and France (11.5%).
Country
BALANCE OF PAYMENTS
In 2005, the value of Togo's exports was estimated at $768 million, and the value of imports at $1.047 billion. The current account balance was estimated at -$223 million. Togo had an external debt burden of $2 billion in 2005. The country had $331 million in reserves of foreign exchange and gold.
BANKING AND SECURITIES
The bank of issue is the Central Bank of the West African States (Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest-BCEAO), based in Dakar , which also acts in that capacity for Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Senegal , and Burkina Faso. Togo has a 10% share in the BCEAO, the development bank of which has its headquarters in Lomé.
The most important commercial and savings banks include the Banque Internationale de L'Afrique (BIA), ECOBANK Togo, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Libyan Arab-Togolese Bank of Foreign Commerce, the Banque Togolaise de Commerce et de L'Industrie (BTCI), and the Union Bank of Togo (the latter two with a state share of 35%).
Development banks include the Togolese Development Bank, founded in 1967, which has a 50% state share; the 36.4% state-owned National Farm Credit Fund; and the state-owned National Investment Co., which is intended to mobilize savings, guarantee loans to small- and medium-sized domestic enterprises, and amortize the public debt. The banking and credit systems are not well developed, and large sections of the population remain outside the monetary economy. The banking system was virtually shut down by the general strike in the first half of 1993 and a limited service operated until the second half of 1994.
The International Monetary Fund reports that in 2001, currency and demand deposits—an aggregate commonly known as M1—were equal to $220.3 million. In that same year, M2—an aggregate equal to M1 plus savings deposits, small time deposits, and money market mutual funds—was $327.0 million. The money market rate, the rate at which financial institutions lend to one another in the short term, was 4.95%. The discount rate, the interest rate at which the central bank lends to financial institutions in the short term, was 6.5%.
There are no securities exchanges in Togo.
PUBLIC FINANCE
By the late 1970's, public investment expenditures had reached an unsustainable level (exceeding 40% of GDP), touched off by an earlier rise of commodity prices. As a result, large payment arrears on the external debt began to mount. In the mid-1980s, the fiscal deficit was reduced largely through IMF credits and debt reschedulings. The civil unrest of 1991 resulted in decreased revenues and increased expenditures, and led to an overall budget deficit of 7.5% of GDP. In 1992, further civil unrest widened the budget deficit to 8.5% of GDP. In 1994, Togo entered into new programs with the IMF and the World Bank.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated that in 2005 Togo's central government took in revenues of approximately $251.3 million and had expenditures of $292.9 million. Revenues minus expenditures totaled approximately -$41.6 million. Total external debt was $2 billion.
TAXATION
Taxes are levied on individual incomes and on corporate profits and capital gains. A transactions tax, a tax on fuel consumption, and social security contributions are also paid. There are also registration and stamp taxes and a tax on income from securities. A 5% "solidarity" surtax on salaries was imposed in 1983 as an austerity measure. There was a value-added tax of 18% in 1998.
CUSTOMS AND DUTIES
There are no export controls. Tariffs are based on a nondiscriminatory schedule at 5%, 10%, or 20% and there is a customs stamp tax and a 3% statistical tax. A common external tariff (CET) for members of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) is set at a maximum of 22% for goods coming from outside the WAEMU. Restricted or prohibited goods include arms, ammunition, narcotics, and explosives.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
In the 1980s, Togo was distinguished by a relatively pro-Western, entrepreneurial stance, but incidents of political violence from 1991 to 1994—including the targeting of foreign-owned shops (principally Lebanese and Indian) by rioters in January 1993—and in 1998, following the contested presidential election in June, together with the maintenance of many restrictions on foreign investment and evidence of increased corruption have deterred foreign investment as well as stalled the privatization process. Togo's current investment code, enacted April 1990, was designed as an improvement over the previous code, and offers foreign investors guaranteed repatriation of capital and profits. The former investment code offered tax exemptions, but these were abused, and were removed in the 1990 revision. The investment code, which applies only to foreign investment of about $42,000, allows foreign participation up to 100% ownership in eight listed sectors (agriculture, fishing, and forestry; manufacturing; mining; low-cost housing; tourist infrastructure; agricultural storage; applied research; and socio-cultural activities), requires that the business must employ at least 60% local workers and provide at least 25% of the funding. The 1989 export processing zone (EPZ) law gives companies the advantages of duty-free imports of materials for production, a less restrictive labor code, and the ability to hold foreign currency accounts. About 35 firms were operating in the EPZ in 2002, representing investments from France, Italy, Norway , Denmark , the United States, India, and China. A severe electricity shortage in the EPZ from March to May 1998 hurt manufacturing enterprises particularly. Prospects for foreign investment in the EPZ in the industrial and service sectors looked brighter after the election of Faure Gnassingbé in 2005. In 2000 a Franco-Canadian consortium took over the state power company.
The annual inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Togo rose from $23 million in 1997 to a high of almost $70 million in 1999. FDI inflow declined to $57.2 million in 2000, but recovered to $67 million in 2001. As a percent of gross fixed capital formation, FDI inflows rose from 11.3% in 1997 to nearly 35% in 1999, averaging about 30% in 2000 and 2001. In 2003, FDI amounted to 1.12% of GDP.
Major foreign investors include the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. Petroleum products distribution, seafood processing, construction, textile milling, and agricultural processing are the main foreign businesses. The top corporate tax rate in 2006 was 40%.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The 1981–85 development plan called for spending roughly equal allocation levels for rural development (26.5%), industry (29.2%), and infrastructure (29.5%). In the 1986–90 development plan, principal allocations were for infrastructure and rural development.
Of the development funds for the 1986–90 plan, 90% were sought from foreign sources. Principal sources of development aid are France, Germany, the United States, China, the EU, the World Bank, and IDA. France ranked first among the bilateral donors, with Germany second. The government was diverted from implementing the plan by international financial considerations and concerns over the process of democratization. In 1998 the EU and World Bank suspended aid because of such considerations, and poor economic performance. Accords signed in 1999 brought back some interest in developing the country economically, but the major setback remained inadequate political development. While most bilateral and multilateral aid to Togo remained frozen as of early 2006, the EU initiated a partial resumption of cooperation and development aid to Togo in late 2004, based upon commitments by Togo to expand opportunities for political opposition and liberalize portions of the economy.
Togo is a member of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), whose development fund is located in Lomé. The country is also a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). Affiliated with the UEMOA is the West African Development Bank, also based in Lomé.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
The government's social welfare program, under a 1973 law, amended in 2001, includes family allowances and maternity benefits; old age, disability, and death benefits; and workers' compensation. Retirement is normally allowed at age 55. The program covers employed persons, students, apprentices and members of cooperatives. Maternity benefits are provided for 14 weeks to working women. The labor code requires employers to provide paid sick leave. Family allowances are available for almost all workers with children, including domestic, casual, and temporary laborers. The program supplements a continued strong sense of social obligation to one's family or clan, even among those in urban centers.
The status of women is improving, but they are still subject to legal and social restrictions. A husband may deny his wife the right to work and has legal control over her earnings. Women face discrimination in employment and access to education. A wife has no financial rights in a divorce and no inheritance rights upon the death of her husband. Polygamy is practiced. Although illegal, female genital mutilation is performed on numerous girls and women. Domestic abuse and violence are widespread. Child labor also continued to be a problem.
The human rights record of the Togolese government remains poor. Abuses include political repression, excessive force by police (with little accountability), and arbitrary arrest and detention. Prison conditions remained very harsh. Human rights organizations are permitted to exist, although they may be subject to intimidation by the government.
HEALTH
Medical services include permanent treatment centers and a mobile organization for preventive medicine. Special facilities treat leprosy, sleeping sickness, and mental illness. All services are free except at the clinic attached to the hospital in Lomé, where some patients pay a nominal fee. In 2004, there were an estimated 6 physicians, 17 nurses, 1 dentist, 3 pharmacists, and 7 midwives per 100,000 people. About 61% of the population had access to health care services, and total health care expenditure was estimated at 2.6% of GDP. Approximately 54% of the population had access to safe drinking water and 34% had adequate sanitation.
The Mobile Service for Hygiene and Preventive Medicine performs mass inoculations, carries out pest control campaigns, and provides education in hygiene and basic preventive measures. Its activities have led to significant decreases in mortality caused by smallpox, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness. Yaws, malaria, and leprosy continue to be major medical problems. Immunization rates for children up to one year old were: tuberculosis, 73%; diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, 71%; polio, 71%; and measles, 58%. Rates for DPT and measles were, respectively, 41% and 43%.
The crude birth rate and overall mortality rate were estimated at, respectively, 36.1 and 11.3 per 1,000 people. The fertility rate in 2000 was five children per woman living through her childbearing years. The infant mortality rate was 62.20 per 1,000 live births in 2005 and the maternal mortality rate was 480 per 100,000 live births. Average life expectancy in 2005 was 57.01 years.
The HIV/AIDS prevalence was 4.10 per 100 adults in 2003. As of 2004, there were approximately 110,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the country. There were an estimated 10,000 deaths from AIDS in 2003.
At least 50% of the women in Togo underwent female genital mutilation. The government has published a policy opposing the practice.
HOUSING
With the limited resources at its disposal, the government is endeavoring to solve the problem of urban overcrowding by promoting housing schemes and establishing sanitation facilities. According to the latest available information for 1980–88, total housing units numbered 470,000 with 6.2 people per dwelling.
Rural dwellings are generally made from sun-dried mud bricks and mud plaster, with straw roofs. Urban dwellings are made of cement blocks and/or bricks with brick or iron sheeted roofs.
EDUCATION
Six years of primary education (ages 6–12) is compulsory and free of charge. Secondary education lasts for seven years, with students attending either general or technical secondary schools. Mission schools play an important role in education.
In 2001, about 2% of children between the ages of three and five were enrolled in some type of preschool program. Primary school enrollment in 2003 was estimated at about 91% of age-eligible students. In 2000, secondary school enrollment was about 26.6% of age-eligible students. It is estimated that about 77.8% of all students complete their primary education. The student-to-teacher ratio for primary school was at about 34:1 in 2000; the ratio for secondary school was about 31:1. In 2000, private schools accounted for about 40% of primary school enrollment and 18% of secondary enrollment.
The University of Lomé and the University of Kara are the primary sites for higher education. Lomé also has colleges of administration, architecture, and urban planning. In 1999, it was estimated that about 4% of the tertiary age population were enrolled in tertiary education programs. The adult literacy rate for 2004 was estimated at about 53%, with 68.5% for men and 38.3% for women.
As of 2003, public expenditure on education was estimated at 2.6% of GDP, or 13.6% of total government expenditures.
LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS
The National Library in Lomé has a collection of approximately 18,000 volumes. The University of Lomé Library offers some library services to the public. There is a public library with 26 service points holding a total of 63,000 volumes. The National Museum, founded in Lomé in 1975, has ethnography, history, and art exhibits. There are regional museums in Aného, Kara, Savanes, and Sokode.
MEDIA
Telecommunications links are maintained with major African, European, and American cities. There is an automatic telephone exchange in Lomé. In 2003, there were an estimated 12 mainline telephones for every 1,000 people; about 27,500 people were on a waiting list for telephone service installation. The same year, there were approximately 44 mobile phones in use for every 1,000 people.
The government owns the only major television station as well as the primary radio stations. The radio network presents programs in French, English, and local languages. Television service, broadcast in French and local languages, began in 1973. In 2003, there were an estimated 263 radios and 123 television sets for every 1,000 people. The same year, there were 32 personal computers for every 1,000 people and 42 of every 1,000 people had access to the Internet . There was one secure Internet server in the country in 2004.
The Journal Official de la République du Togo is published daily in Lomé; another Lomé daily, Togo-Presses, published in French and Ewe, had a circulation of 15,000 in 1999. Both are government owned. In 2005, there were at least six privately owned weekly papers.
The constitution of Togo provides for freedom of speech and of the press; however, though the government is said to generally respect these rights, it has on one occasion intimidated journalists through threats, detention, and other persecution. Opposition media are tolerated, though sometimes censored or prevented access to information.
ORGANIZATIONS
The Chamber of Commerce, Agriculture, and Industry is active in Lomé. The Federation of Non-Government Organizations of Togo helps promote small enterprise development by providing training and lobbying services. The African Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions, a large multinational organization promoting high ethical business and accounting standards, is based in Lomé.
The major women's and youth groups are affiliated with the RPT. There is also a Junior Chamber, the Scout Association of Togo, and YMCA/YWCA programs for youth. Sports associations promote amateur competitions in such pastimes as tae kwon do, baseball and softball, badminton, and track and field. Cultural organizations, all located in Lomé, include the Alliance Française, American Cultural Center, Goethe-Institute, and Togolese Association for Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries.
Social action organizations include Islands of Peace, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, and the Togo Association of Volunteers for Development. Volunteer service organizations, such as the Lions Clubs International, are also present. There are national chapters of the Red Cross Society, Caritas, UNICEF, and CARE Togo.
TOURISM, TRAVEL, AND RECREATION
Tourist attractions include the Mandouri hunting reserve in the northeast, and the beaches and deep sea fishing of the Gulf of Guinea coast. Even though social and political calm has been restored after disturbances in the early 1990s, there has been lack of financial resources for the development of tourism. In 2003, there were 60,592 tourist arrivals creating an 11% occupancy rate in the 4,480 hotel rooms with 6,720 beds. Tourism receipts totaled about $16 million in 2002.
According to 2005 estimates of the US Department of State, the average daily cost of staying in Lomé was $170, and Lama Kara and other small areas were significantly smaller averaging $72.
FAMOUS TOGOLESE
Togo's most prominent statesman was Sylvanus Olympio (1902–63), who led his country's fight for independence and was its first president. Gnassingbé Éyadéma (Étienne Éyadéma, 1937–2005) was president of Togo from 1967 until his death in 2005, when his son Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé (b.1966) became president. Edem Kodjo (b.1938) was OAU secretary-general, 1978–84.
Aného, Atakpamé, Dapaong, Kpalimé, Mango, Sokodé, Tsévié
EDITOR'S NOTE
This chapter was adapted from the Department of State Post Report dated September 1995. Supplemental material has been added to increase coverage of minor cities, facts have been updated, and some material has been condensed. Readers are encouraged to visit the Department of State's web site at http://travel.state.gov/ for the most recent information available on travel to this country.
INTRODUCTION
The West African Republic of TOGO , which had existed as part of the German protectorate of Togoland, as a League of Nations mandate and, later, as a United Nations trust territory under French administration, has been independent since 1960. Four years earlier, Togo had gained autonomy within the French Union.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the Togolese coast, arriving late in the 15th century. Between 1600 and 1800, Brazilian, British, and other slave traders repeatedly and tragically raided the region, and Togo became known as the Slave Coast.
This small republic gives the visitor an unusual, first-hand look at developing Africa. Densely populated by African standards, it has a variety of cultures among its more than 35 ethnic groups, many of whom still follow their African traditions and customs.
MAJOR CITIES
Lome
Lome, the capital and chief commercial center of Togo, is on the Atlantic coast at Togo's extreme southwest corner. Part of the city lies on a mile-wide sandbar that rises 15-20 feet above the sea. The center of the city is a 20-minute walk from the Ghanaian border. Lome shares the climate of Togo's southern zone, and its sea breeze blows pleasantly all year. The city proper has 658,000 residents, and the greater area has a population of 727,000.
The major central thoroughfares are lined with small shops, occasional parks, and countless street vendors. In the Grand Marche, a bustling three-story building, vendors sell food, cloth (largely wax-print cottons locally made or imported from England and the Netherlands ), housewares, small fetish objects, and almost anything else found in Lome. The railroad, as well as some buildings and roads still in use today, were built by the Germans.
Only main city streets have lights. Some streets are paved; others are of red laterite earth and sand—dusty in the dry season, muddy when it rains, and usually full of potholes.
Most buildings are cement over soft-brick or concrete blocks. However, traditional rectangular one-or two-room mud-brick with corrugated metal or palm-thatch roofs built along the walls of a compound are still common. Residential areas with large houses include Lome proper, the suburb of Tokoin above the lagoons, Kodjoviakope, and a housing project located near the University of Benin.
The larger businesses are, for the most part, controlled by the French. A small but economically important Lebanese population also engages in commerce. Lome has 11 resident foreign diplomatic missions, 8 honorary consulates, U.N. and other country aid organizations, and regional banks.
Food
Lome has a good supply of fresh foods, although supply can be seasonal. Local vegetables include leaf lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, green beans, sweet peppers, cabbage, eggplant, spring onions, onions, carrots, palm hearts, potatoes, sweet yams, African yams, hot peppers, mint, parsley, and several other herbs. The local fruits available are avocado, lemon, lime, orange, pineapple, banana, papaya, guava, grapefruit, cantaloupe, watermelon, coconut, mango, and passion fruit. Imported apples, pears, kiwi, and a few other European fruits can sometimes be found. Local fruits and vegetables are generally available in open markets throughout the year. Imported fresh fruits and vegetables are sometimes available in supermarkets at high prices.
Fresh meat, imported and domestic, includes beef, veal, pork, lamb and poultry. Locally made and imported French and German sausage, pate, ham and other prepared meats are available in the butcher section of local supermarkets. Duck, rabbit and guinea fowl are available at the local market, as well as the local delicacy, bush rat or agouti. Fresh fish, shrimp, lobster, mussels, hard-shell crabs and other seafood are sold in season either in the local market or in one supermarket.
Imported fresh foods arrive by air every week and some by ship every 2 weeks. These stocks include meat, cheese, fish, vegetables (artichokes, mushrooms, celery, endive, and lettuce), and fresh fruits. A limited variety of wines, herbs, and spices is imported, as are specialty items like canned Chinese and Lebanese foods. Prices for imported items are high. Imported frozen foods are available at several locations, include meats, poultry, fish, fruits, vegetables, prepared foods, and desserts.
Imported UHT and powdered milk are readily available, as are puddings and whipping cream. Local milk products such as yoghurt and sour cream can be found in the supermarkets. A local Danish-run factory produces ice cream. Some better quality, but very high-priced, imported brands are also available in supermarkets. Good French breads and fair pastries are made in Lome.
Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta, soda water, tonic and a variety of other local soft drinks is bottled here. A good beer is also bottled by a German-established factory.
Most Americans do their shopping at one or more of the three modern supermarkets in Lome. In the heart of the business district is a lively congested Grand Marche, a three-story, open-air market where Togolese sell their fresh produce, fish and other foodstuffs. Clothes, household items, glass beads, wax cloths, and an endless variety of goods can be found. Many intriguing items can be discovered on a walking tour of the central business area, which abounds in small shops selling a wide diversity of items. Every "quartier" has its own open market. Many small provision stores, mostly run by members of the Indian community, are located around town. Necessary items are rarely all available in one place and sometimes not at the expected place, so shopping requires several trips and lots of time.
Clothing
Men: Dress is less formal than in Washington. Safari suits or slacks and shirt combinations may be worn during office hours. Formal clothing (light-weight dinner jacket and black dress trousers) is optional. Sport shirts and slacks or safari suits suffice for most social engagements. Cotton or cotton polyester blend slacks and short-sleeved shirts are advisable for road travel. All clothes should be light-weight and washable since dry cleaning services are expensive and limited. Clothing wears out quickly due to frequent washing. All synthetic fabrics are less comfortable in the heat and humidity than cotton, linen or cotton-blend fabrics.
Women: Warm-weather washable dresses, blouses, and slacks or skirts are the norm. Simple dresses are worn at daytime and evening affairs. Cocktail dresses are often worn, and more formal long gowns are worn on few occasions. A light wrap or shawl may be useful at night during the cooler rainy season. Outdoor clothing and sometimes a sweater are convenient.
A limited supply of imported dress materials, as well as extensive supply of African-style cotton prints, both imported and locally manufactured, are available in the market area. Dressmakers do adequate work with supervision. A few expensive boutiques carry dresses and fancy dresses and accessories. Hats, gloves, and stockings are seldom worn. Lingerie in cotton or the cooler synthetic fabrics is usually not available. Walking on Lome's sandy streets is easier with sensible shoes. Several pairs of sandals are suggested.
Children: Bring a good supply of outdoor, hot-weather washable children's clothes, underwear, and shoes. Some sandals, underwear, and clothes are sold locally. Local seamstresses do a fair job making children's clothing.
Bring plenty of suitable sportswear and equipment for the entire family, including tennis or golf clothes and equipment as these are either expensive or not available locally.
Supplies and Services
Supplies: Consider bringing your own brand of toiletries, cosmetics, medicines, etc., as many American brand products are not available.
Basic Services: In general, community services are not well developed, and materials are often not available.
Dry-cleaning is not recommended except at the Hotel 2 Fevrier or Sarakawa, and at one dry-cleaning shop in town. Several beauty shops are recommended, as are several barbers in Lome. Some Togolese barbers will come to your home for a moderate fee. Shoe repair is satisfactory, but the materials used are usually of poor quality. Tailors or dressmakers do adequate-to-good work. Wicker and wooden furniture can be made locally and wears well in the humid climate. Due to high humidity, mildew is a problem.
Religious Activities
Baptist , Seventh Day Adventist, Roman Catholic, Church of Christ, Islamic, Lutheran, Protestant, Pentecostal and Methodist places of worship can be found in Lome. Most services are in French and Ewe and occasional Protestant services are in English. An English-language non-denominational Christian service meets every Sunday at the Hotel 2 Fevrier and an English-Language Roman Catholic mass is celebrated each Sunday at the cathedral in Lome.
Education
The American International School in Lome, established in 1967, follows the general academic curriculum for American schools. The private, coeducational international school, encompassing pre-school through eighth grade, is currently applying for accreditation. The school year extends from September to June. The school day begins at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 1:00 p.m. Instruction is in English. The school is housed in a large two-story building, and has a library, science room, and music room. In addition to basic academic subjects, AIS's curriculum includes French, art, music, drama, P.E. and health.
None of the several Togolese primary and secondary schools in Lome are recommended. Lome has one very good French Government supported lycee. The school ranges from kindergarten through the end of secondary school and prepares students for the French university entrance examination. The school program is identical to that of schools in France . Instruction is conducted in French; inability to speak the language presents a major drawback for all levels except grade 1. Several privately-run French-language nursery schools for 2-5 year olds are open most of the year.
In addition to the American and French schools, the privately-owned International Primary School offers an accredited American-based curriculum in English for children 2-12. The British school of Lome offers 3-16 year olds instruction in English following the British system.
Recreation and Social Life
Lome is a generally pleasant place and offers the opportunity for year-round sports activities. Many Americans enjoy touring in-country and taking short trips to the several neighboring countries which can be easily and quickly reached by road.
Sports
Swimming is possible in hotel pools. Due to the heavy surf and a dangerous undertow, saltwater swimming is limited to certain beaches. The sea and lagoons offer limited fishing. Lac Togo, located about 20 minutes from Lome, has sailing, wind-surfing, and pedal boating.
Several tennis clubs, including hotel clubs that Americans can join, are available, as well as volleyball, badminton, and table tennis facilities. The golf club has a nine-hole course about 8 miles from Lome. There is a riding club at the Hotel Sarakawa, and another near the airport. There are several fitness centers offering karate, weight lifting, body building, aerobics, and sports therapy massage.
Soccer is the principal spectator sport. Tennis, basketball, volleyball, and handball are other sports that are enjoyed by both Americans and Togolese. Sporting stores are few and merchandise that is available is expensive.
Touring and Outdoor Activities
In Lome itself, tourist attractions include the National Museum and the Village Artisanal Center where handcrafts are made and sold.
Outside of Lome, you may join tours of Togo and Benin arranged by hotels for their guests or by the Bureau of Tourism. Most in-country touring is done individually by private car. A main road extends from Lome northward to the Burkina Faso border. The road is paved and suitable for motoring, but the driver must be alert for animals and people on the road. Daylight travel is best.
The paved coastal road from the Ghana to Benin borders provides a continuous view of beaches, coconut palms, and small, scattered fishing villages. About 18 miles east of Lome and a short distance inland is Lac Togo, a lagoon with a hotel, restaurant, bar, swimming pool, and boat dock next door. Residents visit the Lac for a mild change in scenery; visitors from neighboring countries appreciate its French cuisine. On the hillside bordering the lake is Togoville, a small village that was the first permanent German settlement in Togo. It can be reached by car or pirogue.
An automobile trip to Kpalime and its environs can include the Centre Artisanal in Kloto, the Blind school and the Chateau Viale, which offers a mountain view and an occasional glimpse of Lake Volta.
Two hours beyond Kpalime brings you to the Akowa waterfall, just 7 miles from Badou. The Akowa waterfall, 35 meters high, descends vertically from an underground spring. It is accessible to the reasonably hardy. Following an animal trail, under vines and over rotting logs, one must hike for nearly one half hour before reaching the allegedly therapeutic falls. The scenery is beautiful. Guides must be hired at the village. The trip can be made in one long day, or visitors can stay at a hotel in Badou.
North of Atakpame, you journey more deeply into Togo's traditional culture. Acceptable but very modest hotels at Atakpame and Sokode provide overnight lodging. Many visit the game park at Fazao in central Togo, which suffers from a lack of wildlife at present, however. The hotel at Lama-Kara offers good accommodations and a swimming pool. Further north, the traditional African-architecture accommodations in the Keran reserve are adequate.
Places of interest in the neighboring country of Benin (also French-speaking) are within easy driving distance from Lome and include: Ouidah, the center of voodoo and the site of an old Portuguese fortress whose museum houses relics of the slave trade and illustrates cultural exchanges between Brazil and Africa; Cotonou, Benin's capital and major city; the villages of Lac Nakous and Ganvie, built on stilts in the middle of the lake; Porto Novo, 19 miles from Cotonou, which has a museum of handicrafts; and Abome, a day's drive from Lome and the seat of the ancient kingdom of Abomey (1600-1900), with an interesting historical museum in a former palace.
Entertainment
For those who like to dine out, Lome has a number of good restaurants offering French cuisine as well as Chinese, German, Italian, Lebanese, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, and traditional Togolese dishes. Restaurants are comparable to those in U.S. cities. Lome has many night clubs and discotheques, including those at the major hotels. Saturdays are disco nights in Lome, and discos are generally crowded and lively, with a variety of music and atmosphere. The Hotel Palm Beach, the Sarakawa, the 2 Fevrier, and the Hotel de la Paix all have casinos with tables for Blackjack and Roulette.
The German, French, and American Cultural Centers are active in Lome, offering scheduled monthly activities, as well as occasional special programs such as jazz and classical music concerts, art exhibits, and other cultural offerings.
Foreign films and a few American films (with the soundtrack dubbed in French) are shown at the cinemas. Sound equipment, projectors, seats and overall cleanliness could be better at some.
The USIS library, available to the public, is well stocked with American periodicals, books in French and English, and some recordings of American music. The German Cultural Center has books available for public use. The British School has a large book and video (PAL system) library available for those who have children enrolled in their school or otherwise sponsored. Bookshops in Lome are well supplied with French books and periodicals but quite limited in English-language periodicals and books. Avid readers should bring a supply of reading material and arrange to receive subsequent mailings from one or two book clubs.
Other activities available in Lome include dance classes and lessons and the International Choir.
Since both Accra and Cotonou are within 2 1/2 hours of Lome, Americans often visit these cities for a day or weekend of shopping and sightseeing.
Social Activities
Among Americans: The home is the center of evening activities such as cocktail parties, barbecues, and card games. Other social activities may also include one or two dances a year, occasional concerts, and national day celebrations.
International Contacts: Brazil, China , Egypt , France, Gabon , Germany , Ghana, Nigeria , Libya , North Korea and Zaire have embassies in Lome, and several countries are represented by Honorary Consuls. The U.N. has a resident representative and personnel from various nations working in Togo. The European Union is represented. Several nations have technical assistance teams. Rotary, Lions, Zonta and Soroptomist Clubs are active. A newly formed International Women's Association provides opportunities to make friends quickly with women of other nationalities and engage in charitable work.
OTHER CITIES
ANÉHO , 26 miles east of Lomé, dates to the slave-trade period. Later, the Germans and French made the town Togo's capital. Aného is an important intellectual center for Togo, although it hasn't grown as rapidly as other cities in Togo. Still standing are many of the thick-walled colonial homes built by the Germans. The current population is about 25,000.
The town of ATAKPAMÉ was settled in the nineteenth century by the Ewe and Yoruba peoples. It is situated in an important cotton-growing area, and serves as a major trading center for cocoa and coffee. The current population is 62,000.
Situated in northern Togo, DAPAONG is renowned for its temperate climate. People from all over Togo and Burkina Faso come to this city of 30,000 for the festive marketplaces and local dances.
KPALIMÉ (often written Palime) is Togo's cocoa city, about 65 miles northwest of Lomé. Coffee and oil palms are cultivated here. Kpalimé is a major center for commercial trade in Togo. Scenic areas surround Kpalimé, including the massive Mount Aghou and Kpime and Kolme waterfalls. The Pottery Centre is a haven for ceramics lovers. The population is about 72,000 (2002).
Inhabited by the Anoufo people, MANGO is on the Oti River in northern Togo. It is the center for the cattle and peanut trade in the region and currently has a population of 23,000.
In the central region lies SOKODÉ , the nation's second largest city. Because of its location in the middle of the forest, hunting is popular. The city is a major commercial trade center for the country's northern regions. Industrial activities include cotton ginning and sugar processing. Muslim holidays are celebrated in Sokodé, especially Adossa, or Festival of the Knives. The population is approximately 82,000 (2002).
Located 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Lomé TSÉVIÉ is home to the Ewe people. The town is an important palm oil processing center and a major commercial trading area. In 2002, Tsévié had a population of roughly 36,000.
COUNTRY PROFILE
Geography and Climate
Togo, a narrow country of 21,853 square miles, about the size of West Virginia , stretches 370 miles from north to south and averages 56 miles in width. It is bounded on the west by Ghana, on the east by Benin, on the north by Burkina Faso, and on the south by the Bight of Benin on the Atlantic Ocean .
Brackish lagoons cross the country to the southeast, separating the mile-wide sandbar along the Bight of Benin from the geographical mainland. To the southwest a low plateau gradually rises, followed by a southwest-northeast mountain range that is from 2,300 to 3,300 feet high. Another plateau lies to the north of the mountain chain. An open savanna then unfolds and extends to the Burkina Faso border.
Togo is mostly flat. Much of the land lies at an altitude of less than 660 feet; scarcely one-sixth of the land exceeds 1,300 feet. Togo has no navigable rivers, but several rivers have the potential for irrigation, which the Togolese are beginning to exploit. The country's most fertile areas are in and around the mountain range; the northern savannas are the poorest.
Savanna-type vegetation dominates. Large trees, including the baobab, common in the south, are rarer in the north. Mangrove and reed swamps dot the coastal region, and coconut plantations grow along the sea.
Some deer, antelope, buffalo, wart hogs, and hippopotamuses roam the north. Togo's most common animal life includes monkeys, snakes, lizards, and birds. Chickens, sheep, goats, and a few other domestic animals are kept in the city as well as the rural areas.
There are protected forest game reserves at Fazao and Keran, in the central and savanna regions.
The country is divided climatically into southern and northern zones. The southern tropical temperatures fluctuate between 70°F and 89°F, with February and March the hottest months, and June, July, and August the coolest. Humidity is high (80%-90%) most of the year. The major dry season extends from the end of November to the end of March; August and early September are also sometimes quite dry. The two wet seasons are from the end of March to July, with maximum rainfall in June, and from September to mid-November, with the greatest rainfall in October. The coastal area receives the least rainfall; the region of Kpalime, about 65 miles inland, receives the most. Equatorial conditions in the mountains of Togo support the country's only rain forest.
Northern temperatures fluctuate between 65°F and over 100°F, and humidity is less severe than in the south. The northern zone has one rainy and one dry season. In December-January, a cool, dry, dust-laden "harmattan" wind from the Sahara sweeps across the land.
Population
The population of Togo was estimated at 5.2 million persons in 2001. Lome, the capital city, has a population of about 727,000. Other major population centers are Sokode, 82,000; Kara, 49,000; Atakpame, 62,000; Kpalime, 72,000; Tsévié, 36,000; Dapaong, 30,000; Bassar, 30,000; Aneho, 25,000; and Mango, 23,000.
In Togo, 59 percent of the population are animists; 29 percent are Christians ; and 12 percent are Muslims. In the south, most of the Ewe, Guen, Ouatchi, Akposso, and Ife-Ana ethnic groups are Catholics and Protestants. In the north, most of the Kabiye, Losso, and Lamba are Catholics and Protestants, but the Cotocoli, Bassar, Konkomba, Tchamba, Anoufo, and Moba are primarily Muslims.
Although Togo has some 37 different ethnic groups, three major ethnic groups dominate the population. These are the Ewe, the Kabiye, and the Mina groups. The Ewe group includes the subgroups of Ouatchi and Guen. They live in the Maritime region and a large part of the plateau region. The Kabiye group includes the Cotocoli and Losso groups. The Kabiye are mostly located in the Kara region. The Mina group is dominated by the Moba, followed by the Gourma, the Bassar, and the Konkomba groups. The home area of these groups is the savanna region.
Togo's prehistory and early history were marked by the migrations of various African peoples: prehistoric Sangoan hunting and gathering tribes who settled in central and southern Togo; people from the Sudan-Nile region who came to the north in the 10th-13th centuries; and the Ewes and other tribes from Nigeria who migrated between the 14th and 16th centuries; the Mina and other peoples from Ghana; and the Cotocoli and other ethnic groups from Burkina Faso who came in the 17th century. The boundaries of these kingdoms extended beyond present-day Togo.
The Portuguese, the first Europeans to explore the Togolese coast, came in the late 1400s. Between 1600 and 1800, Brazilian, British, and other slave traders raided the coast and later the interior, and Togo became part of what was known as the Slave Coast. German traders and missionaries reached Togo in the mid-1800s. In 1884, Germany set up a small coastal protectorate, gradually moved inland, and developed the social and economic infrastructure so successfully that Togo became its sole self-supporting colony. From 1885 to 1914. Lome was the administrative and commercial center of German Togo (called Togoland), which included what is now Togo and the Volta region (now part of Ghana). In 1914, Britain and France jointly invaded and took control of Togo. After World War I, Togo came under a League of Nations mandate and was divided into British and French Togo. The U.N. took over the mandate in 1946. Social and economic repercussions of the British-French trusteeship continue to be felt, particularly the splitting of the Ewe and other tribes and their territories.
In late 1956, French Togo voted for status as an autonomous republic within the French Union; the British-ruled people of the Volta region opted to join Ghana, which became independent in 1957. On April 27, 1960, French Togo gained full independence from France.
Although Western contact has affected the life and outlook in the towns, much of the countryside remains less affected. Traditional animist culture, and the customs peculiar to it, continues to strongly influence the Westernized population. Polygamy is widely practiced in rural areas and even in Lome and other towns. As in the rest of Africa, Togolese life centers on the extended family, which includes those far from the immediate family circle. Loyalties reach out beyond the family to the tribe. Traditional mud-brick homes and communal wells give way, in urban areas, to more modern housing and facilities. However, walled courtyards as centers of family life, cooking with charcoal or wood fires, and communal piped-water taps with the customary social life they create, are still common. Complex traditional women's hairstyles and dress for both men and women provide interesting contrasts to European fashions.
Western culture and Christianity have had the greatest influence in the south, the area that has been the source of most government officials, teachers, journalists, office workers, artisans, and traders. Recently, however, more northerners have become civil servants and professionals through an active government program to rectify past disparities.
The literacy rate in Togo is 51 percent. There are about 50 African dialects spoken. French is the official language, as well as the language of commerce. Some people also speak English or German. The government has a policy of developing two national languages—Kabiye and Ewe—as languages of instruction. Some broadcasting (both radio and TV) is done in these languages, and one page in the daily newspaper is devoted to news in each of these languages. The principal native languages are Ewe and Mina in the South, and Kabiye and Hausa in the North.
Public Institutions
Togo's first President, Sylvanus Olympio, was overthrown and killed in a coup d'etat on January 13, 1963, in which the current President, General Gnassingbe Eyadema, participated. After 4 years of rule under civilian President Grunitsky, Togolese President Eyadema came to power as a result of a bloodless coup d'etat staged on January 13, 1967. The country's constitution and National Assembly were abolished, and the President ruled by decree. In 1969, the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT) was founded as the sole political party, with Eyadema as its President and founder. However, beginning in late 1990, strike actions and demonstrations led by students and taxi drivers began a movement that demonstrated the Togolese wish for a more democratic form of government.
A transitional government was named in August 1991 to lead Togo through constitutional, local, legislative, and presidential elections. The transition process was not smooth. Demonstrations, an opposition-sponsored political general strike from November 1992 through July 1993 that severely shocked the economy, and sporadic outbreaks of violence from elements of the security forces and others created an unsettled atmosphere for much of 1991 through 1994.
Progress toward free elections and installation of a definitive government was slow and painful. A new, democratic constitution was approved in a referendum in September 1992. In seriously flawed presidential elections in August 1993 and again in 1998, President Eyadema was reinstated for a 5-year term. However, these elections were boycotted by the major opposition parties and a majority of the voters and therefore did not resolve underlying divisions between the opposition and pro-Eyadema factions of Togolese society. After extensive negotiations between the opposition and the presidential side, legislative elections were held in February 1994. The parties opposed to Eyadema won a slim majority in a poll that was generally held to have been free and fair. The 1999 parliamentary elections were boycotted by the major opposition parties, allowing the RPT to gain control of 79 of the 81 seats.
The constitution requires the president to name the prime minister from among the parliamentary majority. President Eyadema selected Agbeyome Messan Kodjo to be Prime Minister, and his government was installed in August 2000. Overall, the government, while faced by severe economic difficulties, shares the generally free-market, pro-Western orientation of previous governments and has declared its intention to promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law but faces a major challenge fulfilling its promises of political and economic betterment.
Arts, Science, and Education
All public education in Togo is free. In principle, all children must begin school at the age of 6, but attendance is not compulsory. The attendance situation varies from region to region. In almost all villages, there are primary schools, and in the administrative districts, some junior secondary schools and lycee (secondary schools). Educational institutions, whether primary, secondary or technical, are either government affiliated or are associated with the Catholic church, Christian missionaries, or private institutions.
The Universite du Benin, founded in 1970, has a faculty of sciences and letters, schools of law, medicine, agronomy and science, and an advanced Institute for Industrial Engineering. Many Togolese go abroad to study, usually to France. Some also study in Germany and the U.S.
Paul Ahyi, sculptor, muralist, and painter, is the country's best known artist. Many of his works are publicly displayed in Lome. Several other artists occasionally exhibit works at Lome's hotels, the Palais du Congres, or the American, French, or German Cultural centers.
Many bronze, wood, ivory, and semi-precious stone artifacts are peddled by the ubiquitous traders in Lome and in other cities. Handicraft making has been boosted by the creation of a crafts center in Kloto, about a 30-minute drive from the capital. Craftsmen fashion batiks, hand-carve wood, weave cloth, and produce glazed pottery. Jewelers, sandal-makers, embroiderers, cloth and basket weavers, and workers in wood, ivory, and bone can be found in major cities.
Folklore remains an integral part of Togolese life, particularly in the villages, where you will find spontaneous plays and community singing and dancing. Traditional regional festivals are celebrated throughout the year.
Commerce and Industry
Togo is a small country on the coast of West Africa. Its economy depends heavily upon agriculture, phosphate mining, and regional trade. Togo had a per capita income of $1,500 and GDP of $7.3 billion in 2000. The majority of the population depends on subsistence agriculture. The agricultural sector accounts for 42 percent of the GDP and employs over 65 percent of the population. Principal food crops include yams, cassava, millet, corn, sorghum and groundnuts. Agricultural production rose to a record high in 1993 due to political disturbances and an 8-month general strike (1992-93) that forced many unpaid civil servants to migrate from Lome to rural areas and farms. Coffee, cotton, and cocoa are the major cash crops produced for export and account for approximately 40% of export earnings. Some attempts are being made to export pineapples, houseplants, vegetables, and palm oil. There has been a greater emphasis in cotton production in the last decade, leading to major growth in exports. Cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs are also raised.
Phosphate mining is the most important industrial activity. Togo has an estimated 130 million tons of phosphate reserves, and the government-owned Togolese Phosphates Office (OTP) has a production capacity of 3.25 million tons a year.
Industry plays a growing role in the Togolese economy, accounting for 21 percent of the GDP. Much of Togo's industrial base dates back to the government's industrialization program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which resulted in a number of poorly run parastatals. Demands for higher wages have had a particularly negative impact on domestic industry. The government has liquidated some parastatals, privatized others, and improved the management of many of those remaining under state control. The government's privatization campaign has brought foreign investment in several former state-owned companies, including a steel mill, a dairy factory, a cookie factory, a pasta factory, a brewery, a flour mill, a detergent factory, and an edible oil refinery. In 1989, Togo created an export processing zone to encourage foreign investment and an export-led economic growth. Growth has been limited by Togo's political troubles.
Togo has few energy resources of its own and relies heavily on hydroelectric power from Ghana for its electrical needs. Togo's energy production capacity, however, increased with the completion of the Nangbeto hydroelectric dam, which was built on the Mono River in central Togo, near the Togo/Benin border. Electricity supplies in Lome and in several smaller cities are generally reliable, but wide fluctuations are common.
Regional trade is a very important component of the economy of Togo. In fact, commerce is the single most important economic activity in Togo, after traditional agriculture, and Lome has long been known as an important regional trading center. The commercial sector is dominated by five major trading companies, which control roughly half of the registered import activity. There are also many smaller registered commercial enterprises. Togo has a well-developed banking sector, with five full-service commercial banks. Lome's position as a regional banking center, however, has been reduced because of the political and economic difficulties of the early 1990s.
The modern and autonomous port of Lome, an extensive paved road network, and an improving telecommunications system all help to make Togo's infrastructure one of the best in the region. The country has over 2,250 miles of paved roads, the most important of which are the north-south road from Lome to the Burkina Faso border and the coastal road linking Ghana and Benin. The port of Lome, which was inaugurated in 1968 and expanded in 1984, has piers capable of handling a large variety of ships. The port operates daily and has extensive transit and storage facilities. It has a 173-acre free port area and an additional 1,581-acre industrial park, making it an attractive regional base. Warehousing, assembling, and manufacturing operations can receive customs exoneration on imported raw materials and exported finished exports. Togo's good infrastructure has made Togo an important transshipment center, particularly for goods going to Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger .
Togo's relative advantages as a regional trading center have eroded in recent years due to improvements in the business climates in neighboring countries and the political instability in Togo. The decline in regional trade was accelerated from late 1990 to 1993, due to political unrest. Trade through the port of Lome has dropped.
Capital and consumer goods in Togo are imported mainly from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Lebanon and China. Some 60 percent of the imports consist of consumer goods, one-third of which are foodstuffs and beverages.
In the past the Togolese Government had put a high priority on developing the country's tourist trade. Lome has 5 modern European-style hotels and many smaller tourist hotels. There is one nice, government-owned hotel in Kara, 430 kilometers north of Lome. The tourist industry has been badly affected by the long period of political instability and periodic violence.
Transportation
Local
In-town taxis provide inexpensive transportation to any point within central Lome, although vehicles are often in poor condition. Tipping is not expected. Taxis can be easily obtained during business hours. American drivers should exercise extreme caution while driving. Personnel should wear seat belts and have car seats for infants and small children. The condition of motor vehicles on the road is quite poor, so defensive driving is very important. The majority of Lome's population walks or cycles and frequently ignores traffic rules. Sheep, goats, chickens, and dogs wander the streets freely.
Cars can be rented with or without a chauffeur from a car rental firm, but prices are high.
Bicycles, motorscooters, and motorcycles are numerous on already congested streets. Limited brands/models of bicycles, motorscooters, and motorcycles (Yamaha, Honda, etc.) can be obtained locally. Togolese law requires the wearing of helmets, however, many cyclists do not wear them or wear inadequate protection.
Avoid night driving whenever possible. Many roads are full of large potholes and most are without street lights, additionally, many cars do not have proper headlights or tail-lights.
Most police vehicles are blue and white. Fire department vehicles are red. Official government vehicles are generally black. It is common practice to stop or reroute traffic if a VIP is going to pass. Everyone is required to obey either police or military persons directing traffic.
Most Americans travel by privately owned vehicle, although taxis and mini-buses provide regular (if crowded and not very safe) transportation to all towns. A railroad provides limited service from Lome to Blitta and Kpalime.
Regional
Togo's air-conditioned airport officially opened in 1988. Air services to and from neighboring countries are available although delays are common. Air Afrique flies three times weekly between Paris and Lome, making stopovers in other African cities. KLM offers two flights a week between Lome and Amsterdam , with connections to New York . Sabena airlines also offers two flights a week between Lome and Brussels , with connections to New York. Air France has a weekly flight between Lome and Paris. No American carriers serve Lome.
Togo has limited rail transport, but the two-lane macadam roads to Cotonou, Benin and Accra, Ghana permit automobile travel. All driving within the west African region is done on the right-hand side of the road. Cotonou and Accra are both about 3 hours by car from Lome; Lagos, Nigeria is approximately two hours beyond Cotonou, but road travel is not recommended to Lagos for safety reasons. It is also possible to drive to Burkina Faso via a serviceable paved road completed to Togo's northern border in 1980.
Togo's roads are not in good condition, with many potholes and bad stretches of road. Most country roads are dirt or sand routes. four-wheel drive vehicles are popular among the American community.
Communications
Telephone and Telegraph
France Cable operates a satellite communications system linking Lome, Europe and the U.S., 24 hours daily. Service is reliable and efficient (especially on weekends) but expensive. Phone connections to cities in Francophone Africa, such as Cotonou and Abidjan , can be made without too much delay, but calls to other African cities are difficult and sometimes impossible to make in a day.
PTT Lome, in conjunction with France Cable, provides commercial telegraph service 7:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Saturday, and 8:00 am to noon, Sundays and holidays.
Telex service to all parts of the world is fair.
Radio and TV
Radio Lome broadcasts from 5:00 a.m. to midnight daily, with news broadcast in French and local languages. Radio Kara, in northern Togo, broadcasts 97 hours per week. Radio France International (RFI) has received approval to set up an FM transmitter in Togo. Privately-owned Radio Kanal Plus, the station most listened to by English-speaking expatriates, plays an eclectic selection of music, ranging from European classical to rap. The Voice of America (VOA) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) transmit shortwave English-language broadcasts to West Africa.
Government-owned TV Togo (one station, one channel) was officially inaugurated in 1973. Programming is in color. Broadcasts are generally in French from 6:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. weekdays, and from noon to 11:30 p.m. on weekends. There is a prime-time newscast in French at 8:00 p.m., which is repeated at 10:00p.m. TV fare features movies, music videos, documentaries, and some American TV situation comedy reruns dubbed into French.
The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC-TV) can be received with an outside antenna and booster. GBC-TV offers a wider variety of programs than TV Togo. Most programs are in English. They transmit from 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. on weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. on weekends and holidays. Prime-time news is shown at 7:00 p.m. and retransmitted at 10:00 p.m. CNN International is featured from midnight to 1:00 a.m. American TV sitcom reruns are shown, as well as feature films.
There is a cable company in Lome that offers access to CNN International and Canal France International for those with special antennas. The company is currently negotiating with several other cable operators, including BET International.
Newspapers, Magazines, and Technical Journals
The government-owned Togo Presse is published six days a week. Most of the paper is in French with one page (half-page each) in Ewe and Kabiye, the major Togolese languages. Several independent French-language weeklies can be bought from street hawkers or local bookstores, which also carry the French dailies Le Monde and L'Express, and other French and European magazines. European editions of Time, Newsweek, and the International Herald Tribune are available. Air subscriptions of these publications are available, but they are expensive and arrive with delays.
English-language books can be found on rare occasions in some local shops. Those who have children enrolled at the British School can borrow English-language books from their well-stocked library.
Health and Medicine
Medical Facilities
Bring eye-glass prescriptions with you in case you need emergency replacement. Bring any cleaning solution/equipment for contact lenses with you as you won't be able to find these in Lome.
Local dental care is adequate for routine care, such as fillings and cleaning, but you should complete any special treatment (endodontal, periodontal, crowns, or oral surgical problems) before coming.
The Lome city hospital is below American standards and is not used for health care by the American community. A small missionary hospital staffed by American surgeons is situated 2 1/2 hours north of Lome. The hospital has an adequate laboratory, x-ray unit and a clean, well-equipped operating room.
Lome's physicians, both generalists and specialists, are European or locally trained, and are called in for consultation on occasion. Obstetrical and diagnostic services are extremely limited. Prenatal care is substandard, and expatriates must be medevaced for delivery. Pregnant women are at increased risk from malaria.
Community Health
The level of sanitation in Lome, while good by African standards, is far below that of cities in developed countries. Water from the public system is contaminated and must be boiled and filtered. Most of the city is not served by a sewer system. Waste and contaminated water are discharged on the beaches. Garbage and trash are collected irregularly. Local government funds for food inspection, insect control, and disease prevention are extremely limited. Therefore, locally butchered meat must be thoroughly cooked, and fruits and vegetables should be soaked in a suitable disinfecting solution.
Many diseases unknown in the United States are present in Togo. These include malaria, dysentery, typhoid fever, leprosy, Guinea worm, Schistosomiasis, skin diseases, and various intestinal parasites, to name a few. For expatriates living in Lome and observing ordinary sanitary precautions, most of these illnesses are not a hazard. Rabies is present in Togo and care must be taken to avoid infected animals. Childhood diseases such as measles, diphtheria, polio, and strep infections are common. With the advent of chloroquine-resistant Falciparium malaria to West Africa, malaria has been a major concern for expatriates. Malaria in Togo is a pervasive, year round disease. The mortality rate among the Togolese is high. Expatriates are extremely susceptible to the disease and constant attention to preventive medications and mosquito control is necessary.
Preventive Measures
Most Americans remain remarkably well in Lome by following a number of preventive measures that soon become routine:
Bring water to a rolling boil for 3 minutes and then filter.
Wash fresh fruits and vegetables well, and soak in chlorine or iodine solution for 30 minutes, then rinse with boiled water.
Maintain a clean kitchen; foods spoil quickly here—refrigerate and store foods carefully; ensure that servants are not disease carriers by obtaining a pre-employment medical exam; periodic follow up tests for parasites every 6 months, and chest X-rays every 2 years; also ensurethat servants are carefully instructed in sanitary working habits.
Be sure that the entire family has received, and remains up-to-date on, recommended inoculations. Yellow fever is required for entry into Togo. Inoculations recommended include: measles, mumps, German measles, polio, hemophilus, meningitis, hepatitis, tetanus, rabies, and typhoid.
Teach children basic health and hygiene practices. Contact with infected soil causes hookworm infestation and larva migrate. Contaminated food and carriers can be the source of several intestinal parasites.
Machine dry or iron all clothes to prevent larval infestation of the skin.
Do not swim in or drink from bodies of water or streams of fresh water anywhere in Togo. Schistosomiasis due to infected snails is prevalent and enters through the skin. Guinea worm is contracted by drinking contaminated water.
The State Department's Office of Medical Services recommends that all Americans take mefloquine to prevent malaria. Mefloquine is an effective prophylaxis regimen in Togo and most other areas where there is chloroquine resistance. Mefloquine is safe and well tolerated when given weekly. Doxycycline has comparable effectiveness. However, those unable to take mefloquine or doxycycline should take chloroquine in combination with paludrine to prevent malaria.
Dosages for the prevention of malaria should begin 2 weeks before arrival, continue while in Togo and 4 weeks after you leave. While in Togo, screen houses, use mosquito nets at night; use repellents and aerosol sprays as necessary; and control local mosquito breeding areas. Malaria is a life-threatening disease.
NOTES FOR TRAVELERS
Air travel to Lome is the only feasible transportation for visitors coming long distances.
Visas for Togo are issued by the French consular officers in the countries with no Togolese diplomatic mission. Americans may enter Togo without a visa and obtain a resident visa after arrival.
Dogs and cats being imported into to Togo must have a current rabies vaccination and a certificate of good health issued within 48 hours of departure. With the exception of Accra, which allows dogs to accompany visitors, entering British or former British areas en route to Togo requires special permits, which are difficult to arrange. If possible, avoid such areas and bring dogs and cats by air directly to Lome. Although available locally, pet supplies are very expensive.
Togo's currency is the CFA franc (Communaute Financiere Africaine) which is fixed to the euro. The exchange is about 656 CFA to one euro, and in January 2001 was 699 CFA to the U.S. dollar.
Commercial banks in Togo include: Ecobank, Union Togolaise de Banque (UTB), Banque Internationale pour l'Afrique Occidentale (BIAO), and Banque Togolaise pour le Commerce et l'Industrie (BTCI).
Commercial banks provide checking facilities, sell travelers checks, and will accept currency, drafts, and travelers and personal checks. Banks charge for service when a deposit in dollars is made to a franc account and do not return cancelled checks with periodic statements. While some larger hotels and restaurants may accept credit cards, not all types are accepted.
The metric system of weights and measures is used.
No ceiling is imposed on the amount of CFA francs you can legally import. However, permission must be obtained from the Togolese Government to convert CFA into dollars, except in the case of official personnel to whom the privilege is extended automatically.
LOCAL HOLIDAYS
Jan. 1 … New Year's Day
Jan. 13 … Liberation Day
*variable
RECOMMENDED READING
Few specific descriptions of Togo in English are available to the public. Most public libraries have the standard selection of recent books on formerly British Africa that may have some pertinence to Togo. Writings on formerly French African territories often contain a section on Togo. The French Embassy and Information Services have published excellent pamphlets.
Consult the American Association of Foreign Service Women (AAFSW) in the Foreign Service Lounge and the Overseas Briefing Center at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center.
Articles in various news magazines, such as Time, Newsweek, and The Economist have carried the events of the past few years.
Aithnard, K.M. Some Aspects of Cultural Policy in Togo. UNESCO: Studies and the Documents on Cultural Policies, 1976.
Carey, Joyce. Mr. Johnston. Harper& Row: New York. An English administrator's frustration and a young Nigerian employee's bewilderment and disappointment on a bush road development scheme.
Carpenter, Allan and James Frostman. Togo. PLB: Enchantment of Africa Series, 1977.
Conton, William. The African. This novel, by a Sierra Leonean, depicts the path from village hut to dominant politician's villa.
Cornevin, Robert. Histoire du Togo. Editions Berger-Levtault: Paris, 1969. General history of Togo with interesting chapters on early Togolese history, a long selection on the colonial period, and details of colonial administration.
Crowder, Michael. West Africa Under Colonial Rule. Hutchinson & Co., Ltd.: London, 1970. Africa in the mid-19th century, subsequent imposition of colonial rule, and local efforts to resist various colonial powers. Includes a section on Togo.
Decalo, Samuel. Army Rule in Africa: Studies in Military History. Yale University Press: New Haven.
——. Historical Dictionary of Togo. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987.
Francois, Yvonne. Le Togo, Karthala, Paris, 1993.
Gess, Denise. Togo. Places & Peoples of the World Series. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
July, Robert W. A History of the African People. Faber & Faber: London, 1970. A well-written, accurate, and up-to-date history of Africa with good maps, pictures, and excellent bibliographies.
Knoll, Arthur J. Togo Under Imperial Germany, 1884-1914. Hoover Institute Press: Stanford, 1978.
Laye, Camara. The African Child. (L'Enfant Noir, also The Dark Child). Fontana Press. A warm and moving autobiography of the youth of a well-educated Guinean under French colonial rule.
Levtzion, Nehemia. Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1968. The Dagomba, Mamprusi, and Gonja areas of northern Ghana, the Chokossi State centered around Mango in northern Togo, and another part of the Kotokoli of north-central Togo.
Oliver, Roland and J.D. Fage. A Short History of Africa. Penguin African Library: Baltimore , 1966. Paperback. Excellent introduction to African history.
Packer, George. The Village of Waiting. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Piraux, Maurice. Togo Today. Editions Jeune Afrique: Paris, 1977. Good touristic summary. Many photos, maps, and suggested road tour itineraries.
Reindorf, Carl Christian. The History of Gold Coast and Asante. Panther House: New York. Early Togolese history including the arrival of the Mina to the Aneho area.
Stoecker, H., ed. German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War . Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Stride, G.T. and D. Ifeka. Peoples and Empires of West Africa: West Africa in History 1000-1800. Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.: London, 1971. Paperback. One of the best books on pre-colonial African history. Excellent maps and detailed discussions on the various empires and states in West Africa including Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Hausa, Benin, and Ashanti .
Unger, Sanford J. Anger. Simon &Shuster: New York, 1985. Discusses the complexity, beauty, tragedy, importance and fascination of the whole of Africa. It is a journey through virtually all the African nations and their bursting cities. He traces the emergence of the second largest continent from its post-colonial era. Includes section on Togo.
Winslow, Zachery. Togo. New York:Chelsea House, 1988.
Yagla, Wen'saa Ogma. l'Edification de la Nation Togolaise. Librarie-Editions l'Harmattan: Paris, 1978.
Magazines
Africa Report. Monthly of the African-American Institute. Excellent coverage of events and outstanding personalities. Book reviews. Cultural, political, economic, and sociological subjects examined with careful historical perspective. Exchange visitors and special projects reported regularly.
Foreign Affairs. Serious discussions by scholars, administrators, and African politicians, plus a bibliography.
Jeune Afrique. French-language weekly that covers African news and current events. Published in Paris.
National Geographic. West, Central, and sub-Saharan Africa at their most photogenic, with usually accurate observations in the text. New African. West Africa.
Cite this article
COUNTRY OVERVIEW
LOCATION AND SIZE.
The Togolese Republic is situated in West Africa. It is a narrow rectangle of land which extends north from the Bight of Benin, on which it has a small coastline of 50 kilometers (31 miles). To the west lies Ghana , to the east is Benin, and Burkina Faso borders on the north. It has a land area of 56,785 square kilometers (21,925 square miles), making it slightly smaller than West Virginia . Lomé, the capital city, is situated on the coast and is the only city with an international airport.
POPULATION.
In mid-1999 the United Nations estimated Togo 's population at 4.5 million. With an average annual population growth of 2.6 percent, the population is projected to grow by the year 2025 to 8.5 million. Some 31 percent of the population lives in towns, which have an urban growth rate of 4.8 percent. Togo has a young age profile, with half the population aged less than 14 years. Life expectancy in Togo is 48.8 years. Although infant mortality is down from 110 per 1,000 births in 1980 to 70 in 1995, it remains high. (In the United States , by way of comparison, the rate is 7 per 1,000 births). Fertility rates remain high, with an estimated average of 6.05 children born per woman. The country's workforce stands at 1.74 million and this comprises about 41.7 percent of the population.
The largest ethnic group, the Ewe, live predominantly in the south and on the coast, and have cross-border ties to Ghana. Also in the south live the Mena and the Ana. The Kabre people are concentrated in the Kozah and Binah prefectures of the Kara region in the north. The Losso and Tchokossi live in north Lamba. The Bassar inhabit Central Kotokoli and Kotokoli, and have strong links to northern Ghana. The population is 10 percent Muslim , one-third Christian, and the remainder follow traditional beliefs.
OVERVIEW OF ECONOMY
Togo is a small economy in terms of the total value of its output. This is because the population is small, at around 4.5 million, and the GDP per capita in 1999 was very low at US$1,700 a year (by way of comparison the U.S. figure is US$33,900 per capita). The population is growing rapidly, at 3.4 percent a year, which adds to the problems of generating higher incomes. Most people (66 percent of the total) depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, mostly from small family farms. The economy of Togo has not performed well in recent years. Output has increased less rapidly than population, and average living standards have fallen. The agriculture sector has performed better than industry and services, however, and agricultural output per person has increased in recent years.
Togo is by all accounts a severely underdeveloped country. Low income levels mean that most income is devoted to subsistence, and more than 80 percent of GDP goes to private consumption. Savings (7 percent of GDP) and investment (13 percent of GDP) are both low. But underdevelopment is more than just a matter of income levels. The United Nations (UN) includes education and health as well as income in its Human Development Index, and the problems in both these areas helped place Togo 145th out of the 174 countries listed by the Human Development Index in 1998.
There are, however, some bright spots in Togo's economic picture. Mineral exploration in 1998 showed oil deposits in Togo waters, which may be exploited if shown to be viable. Hoping to attract investment, the government inaugurated what it calls an "industrial free zone " (actually, a free trade zone) with fiscal benefits in exchange for company guarantees on export levels and employment. And electricity imports fell after the completion in 1988 of a hydroelectric dam, built in conjunction with Benin.
In 1994, Togo embarked upon a strategy to achieve currency and other fiscal stabilization in consultation with the IMF. This program has been delayed due to political instability. The IMF has also since been very critical of the government's loss of momentum in tightening public finances. In the lead-up to the election in 1998 the government overspent, which meant the budget deficit grew to 6.7 percent of GDP, well outside the IMF guidelines of 3 percent of GDP. There is pressure to establish effective control of the budget and to reduce public sector wages, with spending reallocated to poverty alleviation and other high priority issues. Despite efforts to rationalize and broaden the tax system, heavy deficits were still recorded. In the 2000 budget many cutbacks were made. Health spending decreased by 16.3 percent, defense spending decreased by 17.7 percent, presidential office spending decreased by 32.7 percent, and expenditures by the prime minister's office decreased by 51.1 percent. However, the government is still dependent on foreign aid to cover the US$40 million deficit.
Togo is a member of the CFA Franc Zone, with its currency linked by a fixed exchange rate to the French franc. This provides a convertible currency with other countries that share the CFA franc and exchange rate stability. However, in order to achieve this, Togo has agreed to give control of its monetary policy to the regional central bank of the CFA Franc Zone, the Banque Centrale des Etats de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (BCEAO). Since more rapid inflation makes it difficult to maintain the fixed exchange rate, the money supply is under the control of the BCEAO. The BCEAO changed its 1980s policy of expansion and started to restrict credits to the private and government sectors in the early 1990s, which meant a slowdown in the growth of the money supply. As inflation fell after a 1994 devaluation of the currency, BCEAO was able to ease its monetary policy by reducing interest rates from 19.5 percent (1994) to 6 percent (1997). In 1998 BCEAO raised interest rates to 6.25 percent and increased commercial bank minimum reserve ratios (which restrict the banks' ability to lend) to forestall inflation. In 1999 the CFA franc became tied to the euro (the European Union 's common currency) at a rate that reflected the euro's relationship to the French franc. A smooth transition meant that the BCEAO was able to cut interest rates to 5.75 percent, making it easier for people and business to borrow money.
Steady economic growth in the 1970s (averaging about 4 percent) gave way to low growth in the 1980s, with GDP growth becoming less than population growth, leading to a reduction in GDP per capita. Political and social unrest in the early 1990s meant that GDP contracted by 3.7 percent in 1992 and 13.7 percent in 1993. The situation was aggravated by depressed world commodity markets and an economic crisis in the West African Franc Zone.
After a return to relative domestic normality and de-valuation in 1994, the economy had a positive, if patchy, recovery. Real GDP increased by 16.7 percent in 1994 (albeit from a very low base), 6.8 percent in 1995, and by 9.7 percent in 1996. Growth fell back to 4.3 percent in 1997, but it became negative in 1998 (at-1.3 percent) due to the energy crisis. GDP growth rallied in 1999, on the back of a good harvest, to 3.5 percent. This improvement partly reflected higher phosphate production, but manufacturing, which is still state dominated, suffered due to weak demand and inefficiency.
On average, consumer inflation is normally around 5 percent or less. In 1994 the CFA devaluation caused inflation to rise to approximately 40 percent, although it fell back down over the next 2 years. Inflation then rose again to 8.7 percent in 1998 due to an increase in the value-added tax (VAT), higher oil and food prices, and increased government spending. By 2000, however, inflation had settled to the targeted 3 percent, and is expected to remain at this level.
POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND TAXATION
Politics have been dominated since 1967 by President Gnassingbé Eyadema, Africa's longest-serving head of state. Despite the introduction of a multi-party system in 1992 and elections in 1994, democracy still seems a long way off. The 1998 elections were boycotted and were deemed flawed by outside observers. A process of national reconciliation was forced on the president by the donor community, and talks with opposition groups resumed with a promise of a re-run of elections in 2000. Most bilateral and multilateral aid remains frozen, and the country has had a poor human rights record.
Togoland was originally a German protectorate from 1884 until the end of World War I. Britain and France split Togoland after the war and ruled under a League of Nations mandate. The western sector was controlled by Britain as part of the Gold Coast, which went on to become Ghana. French Togo became independent in 1960. The first leader, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated in 1963, and the army appointed a civilian, Nicolas Grunitzky, to rule. Four years later the army overthrew Grunitzky, and Colonel Eyadema took over control of the government. Eyadema formed the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolese (RPT) party in 1971 and drew civilian technocrats into government. Cabinet reshuffles in the late 1970s were designed to add legitimacy to the military regime.
A constitution based on universal suffrage was introduced in 1979, but the RPT remained the only legal party. After demonstrations and international pressure, Eyadema called a national conference in April 1991. A transitional government was appointed with opposition representation and was led by a lawyer, Joseph Koffigoh. However, the new government came under attack from the president's armed forces. Trade unions and opposition parties launched a general strike in 1992 which lasted for 9 months. A quarter of a million Togolese took shelter in neighboring countries from massacres perpetrated by the armed forces. The presidential election in 1993 was held amid further violence. The opposition boycotted the presidential election, only a third of the electorate voted, and all international observers (with the notable exception of France) rejected Eyadema's victory.
There was a legislative election in 1994. Two opposition parties gained 43 seats out of 81 in the assembly and hence the majority. The pro-Eyadema parties gained 37 seats, with Koffigoh's party winning only 1 seat. The major opposition party, the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), boycotted the election. Eyadema maintained supremacy by convincing the opposition leader, Edem Kodjo, to form an RPT-dominated government. In 1996 Kodjo was thrown out and a technocrat with links to Eyadema took control.
In the lead-up to the 1998 election there were opposition protests, social unrest, and military repression, although not nearly on the same scale as in the early 1990s. After chaos on election day, during which vote-counting stopped, the multi-party election was abandoned and Eyadema was proclaimed the winner. However, this led to violent demonstrations in Lomé. All 5 major opposition party leaders supported the claim of Gilchrist Olympio (son of the former leader and head of the UFC) that he won with 59 percent of votes. International observers condemned the result.
Legislative elections were held again in 1999. There is a National Assembly of 81 seats, with members elected for 5-year terms. The main opposition parties boycotted the election and the RPT gained all but 3 seats. There was much international pressure, including European Union threats to strike Togo off the Lomé Convention (a European Union aid program which compensates certain African and Pacific countries when the prices of their export products fall on world markets). This led to the government and opposition having reconciliation talks, mediated by the European Union and other bodies. A framework agreement was signed in July 1999 to hold a new election by March 2000, with an independent electoral commission. Disagreements have delayed this election, which may not take place until late 2001.
Eyadema remains in power with the support of the army. He has stated that he will not run in the 2004 election, although he has been known in the past to change his mind.
Government revenue comprises around 30 percent of GNP. Of this, about a third comes from taxes on incomes, profits, and capital gains, and a further third from customs duties . Of the rest, about 15 percent comes from indirect taxes on goods and services, and 14 percent is generated by government enterprises (mainly the surpluses from the phosphate sector).
INFRASTRUCTURE, POWER, AND COMMUNICATIONS
Togo's main port and growing road transport sector have an important role in the sub-regional economy. The commercial and transport sector earns 35 percent of Togo's GDP. Togo has 9,600 kilometers (5,965 miles) of roads, 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) of which are paved. The World Bank has introduced a US$200 million transport infrastructure program, which was instituted in 1997. Parts of the 700 kilometer (435 miles) north-south road (the main road to Burkina Faso) have already been rehabilitated. The main east-west road which links Togo to Benin and Ghana also has money earmarked for rehabilitation. The railway network is limited and needs modernizing. There are 275 kilometers (171 miles) of track leading from Lomé to Blitta, and 262 kilometers (163 miles) from Kpalimé to Aného.
Lomé's deep-water port has benefitted from under-capacity in other countries and competes successfully within the region. In the 1970s the port grew rapidly, reflecting increased trade with Niger , Burkina Faso, and Mali . Togo's social upheaval and a general regional economic downturn has led to a trade slump, with re-exports dropping from 2.7 million metric tons to 1.1 million metric tons in 1993. Under a government privatization program, new installations are planned, including computerization to speed up loading and unloading in order to make the port competitive.
Telecommunications are operated by Togo Telecom, which is a parastatal . Togo Telecom sought to increase the number of telephone lines in the country from 21,500 in 1998 to 30,400 in 2000. The company has been slated for privatization since 1997. One of its subsidiaries, Togocellulaire, manages the digital network, which had 6,000 subscribers by the end of 1998.
Apart from the government-run Togo Presse, there are several outspoken opposition newspapers. Since 1998 privately-owned television and radio stations have been allowed to operate alongside the parastatals.
In a US$400 million agreement with Nigeria , Ghana, and Benin in 1999, Togo hopes to find a solution to its energy supply problems. A gas pipeline will supply industry and power stations in recipient countries, which should reduce Togo's dependence on Ghana's unpredictable hydroelectricity supply. The pipeline should be in operation by 2002, and is funded by ECOWAS, the World Bank, the United States, and Italy, and will be managed by Chevron Oil of the United States. The problems of Togo's dependency on Ghana for energy were highlighted in 1998, when it received less than 5 percent of its requirements for electricity, severely disrupting the economy.
CEET, the Togolese electricity company, still relies heavily on Ghana. The hydroelectric dam that is jointly owned by Togo and Benin has produced output only sporadically. In 1996 CEET produced 35.1 million kilowatt-hours,
Communications
aData are from International Telecommunication Union, World Telecommunication Development Report 1999 and are per 1,000 people.
bData are from the Internet Software Consortium ( http://www.isc.org ) and are per 10,000 people.
SOURCE: World Bank. World Development Indicators 2000.
hours, but 349.3 million kilowatt hours (kWh) were required. CEET has also been earmarked for privatization.
ECONOMIC SECTORS
The agricultural sector provided 42.1 percent of Togo's GDP in 1997, and was responsible for 65 percent of employment. Core food crop production and livestock rearing make up most of the sector's output. Togo is self-sufficient in beans, ground nuts, yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes. Roughly 20 percent of cereals are imported. Export crops—including cotton, coffee, and cocoa—account for 20 percent of agricultural output.
The industrial sector is dominated primarily by phosphate production, which is the principal foreign exchange earner. The sector provided 21 percent of GDP in 1997 and employed 5 percent of the active population. Industry in Togo is also involved in agro-processing, construction, and energy. The government has recently set up a small Export Processing Zone in Lomé, which is designed to lure foreign companies who can take advantage of relaxed labor laws and hold large foreign exchange accounts.
The services sector (which includes commerce, transport, and tourism) provided 37 percent of GDP and 30 percent of employment in 1997.
AGRICULTURE
Agriculture is the most important sector to most Togolese. It employs two-thirds of the active population, who predominantly work on small land holdings. Food crops (mainly cassava, yams, maize, millet, and sorghum) account for two-thirds of production, and are mostly used domestically. Togo's cash crops are mainly cocoa, coffee, cotton, and to a lesser extent, palm oil. These cash crops provide a valuable return for small farmers, and they provide 40 percent of exports. Some foodstuffs need to be imported. The main imported foodstuff is rice, although production has increased 6-fold since the mid-1980s. Production increased by 9.1 percent in 1999 due to good weather, although depressed world prices for exports affected Togo (especially in cotton).
Agricultural exports are dominated by cotton. The cotton production sector employs 230,000 people, predominantly small farmers. Cultivation has expanded rapidly since the mid-1980s. Output has quadrupled from the 1985-1986 season to 200,000 metric tons in 1998, stabilizing at 190,000 metric tons in the 1999-2000 season. About 163,420 hectares were under cotton cultivation during the 1999-2000 season. Soil degradation is likely to become a problem.
Most farmers are under contract to the state-owned marketing board, Sotoco. In 1995 Sotoco lost its monopoly on processing and the external marketing of cotton, and a private company, Sicot, was given export and processing rights. Sotoco still has a dominant purchasing position and is the sole provider of fertilizers and pesticides. Several new ginning plants opened in the late 1990s, and they should be running at full capacity by early 2001.
Cocoa and coffee production appear less important than cotton, but unrecorded cross-border trade distorts the figures. Togo's production of these 2 commodities is small compared to its neighbors, producing 13,000 metric tons of coffee and 9,000 metric tons of cocoa in 1998. The state-owned OPAT was in charge of marketing, processing, and exporting until 1996, when private companies were introduced.
INDUSTRY
Togo is the world's fourth-largest phosphate producer. Phosphate is a mineral used to produce fertilizers. Reserves are estimated at 260 million metric tons of first-class phosphate and 1 billion metric tons of carbonate phosphate. Deposits were found in 1952 not far from Lomé. The good geological characteristics and geographical position led to a low cost for extraction.
Established in 1974, the parastatal OTP has a monopoly on phosphates. Annual production was around 3.3 million metric tons in 2000, and OTP employed 2,200 people. After expansion during the 1980s, the industry suffered in the 1990s. In 1993 production was only 1.79 million metric tons, and prices bottomed at US$33 per metric ton, putting the company on the verge of bankruptcy. The devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 restored the profitability of the phosphate industry. In 1997 output was 2.69 million metric tons, which realized US$110 million, though production fell in 1998 to 2.24 million metric tons. Although the industry looks good in the short term, it is likely to face growing international competition, especially as world phosphate fertilizer demand is falling. After World Bank negotiations, 40 percent of the OTP is to be privatized, mainly to outside investors.
The overvaluation of the CFA franc in the early 1990s hit the industrial sector hard. In addition, it was not helped by the political instability of the early 1990s, when industry's GDP contribution fell by a fifth. Once order was restored, and following the devaluation in 1994, industry's GDP contribution grew by 26 percent, and 20 percent in 1995, before settling to around 5 percent growth in 1997. Industrial activity recovered in 1998 after 2 bad years, despite the 1994 devaluation boost. The privatized construction sector led the recovery. In November 1999, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the agency of the World Bank which lends to the private sector , announced a US$6 million loan to the building materials sector.
A duty-free "Export Processing Zone" was launched in 1989, and now includes 41 industrial units, which involve a US$50 million investment and 7,000 new jobs. It has attracted international interest, predominantly French, and advantageous terms for foreign investors if they export 80 percent of their production and give jobs to Togolese.
SERVICES
A recent World Bank report shed doubt on the stability of Togo's banks, once thought to be amongst the most stable in West Africa, following the crises of the 1990s, during which period many banks suspended activities. The commercial banks, already faced with falling deposits and increased lending, also had to absorb public sector deficits in the early 1990s. Weak capital flows and stagnant exports led to a US$24 million decrease in bank assets by 1990-94. Credit grew by US$12 million in the same period, reflecting increased lending, while the government indebtedness increased by US$19 million. This meant that banks had to borrow heavily from BCEAO. The 2 state-owned banks fared the worst, and accounted for 74 percent of all lending and 62.5 percent of all deposits. The rest of the sector is shared between a variety of foreign banks, including French and Belgian interests.
In 1993, the hotel industry included 4,163 beds and employed 1,309 people. During the problems of the 1990s, hotel occupancy dropped to less than 20 percent of capacity. International arrivals halved, and visitors stayed on average only 3.5 nights. The 80,000 arrivals were a record in 1996, although many of these were business travelers and returning Togolese. Several state-owned hotels have been slated for privatization, and the government has allowed foreign leasing of the more prestigious hotels.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
For the past 20 years Togo has had a net trade deficit , reaching $50 million in 1999, with exports at US$400 million and imports at US$450 million. Exports and imports both contracted in 1992 and 1993, but in 1994 the currency devaluation boosted agricultural exports, which meant that the trade deficit fell to $37 million from US$111 million in 1993. The main destinations for exports in 1994 were France, Benin, Ghana, and Canada , while imports came from France, Germany , Côte d'Ivoire, and China .
In 1998 trade revenue from cotton and cocoa fell, despite an increase in the volume exported, due to unfavorable world prices. However, phosphate exports increased both in terms of volume and revenue collected.
Trade (expressed in billions of US$): Togo
Exports
1996
511.55
Note: From January 1, 1999, the CFA Fr is pegged to the euro at a rate of 655.957 CFA Fr per euro.
SOURCE: CIA World Factbook 2001 [ONLINE].
Re-exports increased in 1998 (as in every year since 1994), and accounted for 20 percent of exports in 1998. France is historically the main importer of goods, but the suspension of aid led to a decrease in French imports and an increase in Chinese imports. However, the published data underestimate cross-border trade with Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria, much of which goes unrecorded.
MONEY
Togo is part of the 8-member Union Economique et Monetaire Ouest-Africaine (UEMOA) and uses the CFA franc. The BCEAO issues currency notes and regulates credit expansion throughout the region. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc at a 50:1 exchange rate from 1948, but was overvalued in the late 1980s; the 1994 devaluation dropped the value to a 100:1 exchange rate. With France having joined the European Monetary Union, the CFA franc is now valued at CFA Fr 655.959 to 1 euro.
POVERTY AND WEALTH
Togo is a poor country; GDP per capita stood at $1,700 in 1999, and 32 percent of the population was thought to be living below the poverty line (according to 1987-89 estimates).
GDP per Capita (US$)
394
SOURCE: United Nations. Human Development Report 2000; Trends in human development and per capita income.
Education provisions have deteriorated in Togo in recent years. The one university, the University of Benin, was established in 1970. Originally designed for 6,000 students, it currently is trying to cope with 17,000, which has led to many campus demonstrations. A second university is planned in Clara, Eyadema's hometown, but its development is at a standstill due to the political situation.
Education has suffered during the 1990s due to demographic pressures and the freeze on hiring civil servants. A World Bank-sponsored scheme to provide 6,000 primary-level educators is under way. Despite these problems, Togo has traditionally had good education standards for a sub-Saharan African country. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) put adult literacy in Togo at 53.2 percent in 1997, with 82.3 percent of primary school age children attending school and 58.3 percent of children of the appropriate age attending secondary school. The government provided 24.7 percent of the money required for education. However, gender imbalances are rife throughout the education system. Roughly 43 percent of males and only 31 percent of females are literate in Togo, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Togolese health care has struggled due to a lack of resources and population growth. The number of AIDS cases is expected to increase up to 2005, when the number of new cases is expected to stabilize and then begin a slow fall, although this depends on the success of AIDS education programs. In 1993 there were 6 doctors and 31 nurses per 100,000 population, and this figure is unlikely to change in the near future. Regional disparities are huge, as 50 percent of all medical staff work in the capital. Infant mortality stands at 78 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 125 children per 1,000 die before the age of 5. The maternal mortality rate stands at 640 per 100,000. In 1997 there were 185 AIDS cases per 100,000.
WORKING CONDITIONS
A Labor Tribunal is provided for in Togo's judicial system. The Collectif des Syndicates Independents (CSI) was founded in 1992 and is a coordinating body for labor organizations. The other main trade union in Togo is the Confederation Nationale des Travailleurs de Togo (CNTT), which was affiliated with the RPT party until 1991. The trade unions can be militant in Togo, as was shown in a 9-month general strike in 1992.
In the 1990 budget a mere US$1.2 million was spent on social security and welfare. Togo has no minimum wage. The labor force was estimated at 2 million in 1998, of which 40 percent were women. Unemployment figures have little significance in Togo. There are very few people with no work at all, but few people work at what is considered full employment , and much work is informal or subsistence labor. There are no unemployment benefits, and those who do not work tend to rely on support from charities or their families. Many people would like a modern sector job, but eke out an existence on family farms or in casual informal sector activities in the urban areas.
COUNTRY HISTORY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
1884-1919. Togoland is a German protectorate.
1919. Britain and France take Togoland from Germany during World War I; they split the country—with France ruling French Togoland—and rule under a League of Nations mandate.
1960. On April 27, the newly named Republic of Togo becomes independent, and Sylvanus Olympio is elected president under a provisional constitution.
1963. President Olympio is assassinated by army officers, and Nicolas Grunitzky leads a provisional government as prime minister and, later, as president.
1967. President Grunitzky's government is overthrown by the military, and Colonel Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadema takes control.
1972. Eyadema is reelected to the presidency in a national referendum in which he is the only candidate.
1979. Eyadema is reelected once more in elections in which he is the only candidate. A new constitution provides for a national assembly which will consult with the president, but Eyadema holds all the power.
1991. Facing pressure from pro-democracy protestors, Eyadema agrees to a transitional government leading up to free elections. Kokou Joseph Koffigoh is selected as prime minister, and Eyadema's powers are limited.
1992. Fearing that Eyadema will not relinquish power, trade unions and opposition parties launch a general strike, which lasts for 9 months and decimates Togo's economy.
1993. Presidential elections are held, but alleged fraud keeps many opposition parties and voters away. Eyadema wins with 96 percent of the votes and declares the success of democracy in Togo.
1994. Multiparty legislative elections are held, giving parties opposed to Eyadema's RPT control in the legislature. Edem Kodjo is named prime minister but has little power in a country that is still dominated by Eyadema.
1994. The CFA franc is devalued, leading to a surge in exports for Togo.
1998. Presidential elections are again boycotted by the opposition and deemed flawed by outside observers. Eyadema retains presidency.
1999. CFA franc becomes tied to the euro. Legislative elections are won by Eyadema's RPT.
FUTURE TRENDS
It is very difficult to have economic progress without a platform of political stability, as both domestic and foreign investors are unwilling to risk their resources unless they are confident that they will be secure. In the Togolese context, the lack of consensus over the operation of the political system between the government and the opposition parties is the main worry for international donors and the business community. Until these matters are resolved, Togo cannot expect to make progress in improving the living standards of its people.
Disagreements between the opposition and the ruling parties may lead to such a delay that new legislative elections (to replace the elections in 1999, widely seen as flawed) may not be carried out until the end of 2001. European Union aid will resume if new elections are seen to be free and transparent. It is likely that the United States and the IMF will follow suit. The government plans to restore stability to public finances, including the banking and financial sectors, and to revive the privatization process. Real GDP is expected to grow to 3.5 percent in 2001, and 3.8 percent in 2002, thanks to external assistance. Assuming a satisfactory harvest and a downturn in oil prices, inflation is forecast to fall to 2 percent in 2001 and 1.5 percent in 2002. Aid inflow means Togo's economy can be expected to improve between 2001 and 2002.
Following international pressure, a national independent electoral commission will oversee the 2001 election. The president has strengthened his international position through the presidency of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). A joint UN and OAU investigation is underway into the murder of political opponents in the 1998 election.
Though there has been little increase in revenue, a decrease in public expenditures has resulted in a lower deficit. In 2000 the economy was recovering from the 1998 recession , helped by an agricultural upturn and by the fact that the OAU summit was held in Lomé. Cotton output is estimated to have fallen to 110,000 metric tons in 2000 due to uneven rainfall, but cereal and coffee production both increased in the 2000-2001 season. The new Togo, Benin, and Nigeria power scheme should improve Togo's power situation.
DEPENDENCIES
Togo has no territories or colonies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Economist Intelligence Unit. Country Profile: Togo. London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2001.
Hodd, Michael. The Economies of Africa. Dartmouth: Aldershot,1991.
Togo. <http://www.republicoftogo.com/english/index.htm>.Accessed September 2001.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. World Factbook 2000. <http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html>. Accessed August 2001.
U.S. Department of State. Background Notes: Togo, October 1997. <http://www.state.gov/www/background_notes/togo_9710_bgn.html> . Accessed September 2001.
U.S. Department of State. FY 2000 Country Commercial Guide: Togo. <http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/business/com_guides/2001/africa/index.html> . Accessed September 2001.
Welcome to the Republic of Togo (official home page). <http://www.afrika.com/togo> . Accessed September 2001.
—Jack Hodd
Lomé.
MONETARY UNIT:
Communauté Financiére Africaine franc (CFA Fr). The CFA franc is tied to the French franc at an exchange rate of CFA Fr50 to Fr1. One CFA franc equals 100 centimes. There are coins of 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 CFA francs, and notes of 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, and 10,000 CFA francs.
CHIEF EXPORTS:
Ginned cotton, coffee, cocoa, phosphate.
CHIEF IMPORTS:
Consumer goods, foodstuffs, petroleum products.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT:
US$8.6 billion (purchasing power parity, 1999 est.).
BALANCE OF TRADE:
Exports: US$400 million (f.o.b., 1999 est.). Imports: US$450 million (f.o.b., 1999 est.).
Cite this article
See also: Kinship
Bibliography
anipah, k.; mboup, g.; ouro-gnao, a. m.; boukpessi, b.;adade, m. p.; and salami-odjo, r. (1999). enquête démographique et de santé, togo 1998. calverton, md: direction de la statistique et macro international.
assogba, m. l. (1990). "transition du statut de la femme,transition dans les structures familiales et transition de la fécondité dans le golfe du bénin." etudes togolaises de population 15:55–105.
decalo, s. (1996). "historical dictionary of togo." africanhistorical dictionaries, no. 9, 3rd. ed. lanham, md: scarecrow press.
ekouevi, k. (1994). "family and reproductive behavior in a changing society: the case of urban togo." union for african population studies, no. 7.
fiawoo, d. k. (1984). "some reflections on ewe socialorganization." in peuples du golfe du bénin (aja-ewe), ed. f. de meideros. paris: editions karthala.
knoll, a. j. (1978). togo under imperial germany1884–1914: a case study in colonial rule. stanford, ca: hoover institution press.
kuczynski, r. (1939). the cameroons and togoland: ademographic study. oxford, uk: oxford university press.
lange, m-f. (1991). "cent cinquante ans de scolarisation au togo: bilan et perpectives." dossiers de l'urd. unité de recherche démographique. lomé, togo: université du benin.
locoh, t. (1984). "l'evolution de la famille en afrique de l'ouest: le togo méridional contemporain." institut national d'etudes démographiques travaux et documents cahier no. 107. paris: presses universitaires de france.
manoukian, m. (1952). the ewe-speaking people of togoland and the gold coast. ethnographic survey ofafrica, western africa, part vi. london: international african institute.
nukunya, g.k. (1969). "kinship and marriage among theanlo ewe." monographs on social anthropology no. 37. london school of economics, university of london. london: the athlone press.
nyassogbo, k. (1984). "l'urbanization et son evolution autogo." cahier d'outre-mer 37:135–158.
pokanam, g. (1982). "quelques aspects du code togolais de la famille." etudes togolaises de population 4:1–40.
KOFFI EKOUEVI
Higher: 1%
History & Background
The Republic of Togo is situated in West Africa. It is bounded by Benin (previously Dahomey) in the east, Ghana in the west, Burkina ( Burkina Faso , and earlier, Upper Volta) in the north, and the Atlantic Ocean in the south. Togo's landmass is 56,000 square kilometers. It is approximately 600 kilometers in length and about 70 kilometers at its widest point. Its government is constitutionally based on a parliamentary system. In practice, however, it has had a lifetime president in the person of General Gnasimbe Eyadéma, who took power in 1969.
Togo was placed under French administration first as a League of Nations "mandate," then as a United Nations "trust" territory. Up to and through World War I, the country now known as Togo and a sizable eastern segment of what is now Ghana were one entity under German colonial rule. In the transition from a German colony to a French "trust" territory, a significant western portion of German Togoland was ceded to Britain 's colonial administration of Ghana. In the process, a major speech community, the Éwé, found themselves partitioned in roughly equal numbers into two different political entities, Ghana and Togo. The percentages are now slightly in favor of the Éwé population in Ghana. Whereas the Togolese government has not fully reconciled itself to the loss of its western territories of German Togoland, it takes no practical steps to exercise its frustrations. The area in question is fully integrated into the Ghanaian industrial and agricultural infrastructure.
Togo's population at independence and up to the late 1970s was between 2 and 3 million. The population is cited, as of 2000, to be between 5 and 7 million. The large disparity in population estimates is due to the difficulty in gathering population statistics, especially in assessing birth and mortality rates. The vast majority of the population lives in the southern third of the country. The capital, Lomé, is in the extreme southwestern corner adjacent to Ghana and actually spills over into that country. This portion is known as Aflao. The southern third also includes the best educational, industrial, infrastructural, medical, and economic facilities available in the country. Hence there is a strong southern migration by central and northern inhabitants. The Éwé speech community predominates in this all-important southern third.
The term "speech community" is preferred here because there are a large number of clusters of groups within which several ethnic groups distinguish themselves on historical and social grounds but who speak mutually intelligible languages. The significant four in terms of numbers and political dynamism are the Éwé cluster (45 percent of the population), the Kabiyê cluster (22 percent), the Moba cluster (10 percent), and the Tem, often called Kotokoli and sometimes spelled Cotocoli, (7 percent). The Éwé cluster belongs to the Kwa subfamily of languages within the broad Niger-Congo family of sub-Saharan Africa. The Kwa subfamily covers the languages from southeastern Nigeria , including Ibo, all the way west along the coast to the Akan languages of Ghana. The other three language clusters, or "speech communities," belong to the Gur (also known as Voltaic) family of languages within Niger-Congo. The Gur subfamily is primarily spoken in the Sahel region of West Africa, including the northern segments of Togo and Ghana, and much of Burkina, and Mali .
In geographic terms, the four main clusters from south to north are as follows. The Éwé occupy the southern third of the country. The Tem occupy the central section just north of the Éw. The Kabiyê occupy the northwest section to the northwest of the Tem bordering on Benin. The Moba occupy the northernmost section of the country bordering on Burkina. However, Togo's ethnolinguistic map is more complicated than these four neat clusters might suggest. There are approximately 30 ethnolinguistic groups that form part of the clusters mentioned above as well as outside those clusters.
Several communities grouped within large clusters would prefer to be listed separately. The most prominent among them are the Mina in the southeastern corner of the country around the city of Aneho, sometimes spelled Anecho. The Mina, along with many among the Fon speech community on the Benin side of the border, are descendants of Afro-Brazilian returnees in the 1800s. The Mina, particularly, insist on calling their language Mina, not Éwé. Yet lexically and structurally it is a variant, a marginally distinct dialect, of Éwé. The same is mostly true of Fon. Fon, however, is slightly more distinct. Political ambition, economic status, and a consciousness of their Brazilian heritage motivate the Mina position. It is interesting to note that members of their community held leadership positions in the immediate aftermath of independence until overthrown by General Eyadéma in 1969. The conflict between the Eyadéma government and the families and descendants of the pre-Eyadéma leadership continues, muted most of the time, but with frequent and vehement public discourse.
Educational System—Overview
Superimposed on the linguistic, ethnic, and social mosaic of Togo is the French language and culture. In spite of the legally designated "trust" territory status, after independence on April 27, 1960, Togo was, for all practical purposes, a French colony and remained within the French sphere of influence, including the Franc zone and a commonwealth-like association of Francophone countries. Inevitably Togo has inherited a wholly French educational system in programmatic structure, curriculum, and language of instruction at all levels. French is also the official language used in government and the practical language for all commercial activity. This is not to suggest that Éwé and Kabiyê, and indeed any of the other Togolese languages, are excluded. Togolese languages have in fact a surprising degree of presence in all facets of life at the informal level, including informal exchanges between teachers and students at all educational institutions.
The government, in power since 1969, instituted in the late 1970s and early 1980s the adoption of two African languages, indigenous to Togo, as national languages. The two are Éwé and Kabiyê, sometimes spelled as Kabyê or Kabrê. In 1977 the government established a pedagogical research institute, Direction de la Formation Permanente de l'Action et de la Recherche Pedagogique (DIFOP) to produce Éwé and Kabiyê textbooks and generally oversee the training and preparation of teachers for these two languages. DIFOP was located on the campus of the University of Benin (Université du Benin) in Lomé. The ultimate intention was to replace French, the colonial language, with the two designated Togolese languages. Concurrent with the switch in language was the intention to "nationalize" the curriculum so as to be more Togo sensitive and to produce educated citizens in harmony with Togolese culture and the needs of Togo. Mr. Kondé Gnon-Samwa, Director of DIFOP at the time, in a speech in 1979 at a conference organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Dakar claimed that more than 2,000 primary school teachers were trained to teach the two languages in question and that more than 7,000 pieces of instructional material were distributed to various schools. However, the financial component of such a linguistic transformation is staggering. The results as of 2001 are inconclusive, and the effort is inevitably slow. As a result French continues to dominate the formal aspects of Togolese life, including the educational system.
There is a concern among some Togolese that the effectiveness of French, currently the only medium of education and the communicational medium of society's infrastructure and commercial life, will be reduced prematurely. There is evident decline in the instructional standards of the French language. Formal and universal instruction of Éwé and the use of Éwé, and of Kabiyê for that matter, in formal and official contexts is not yet feasible. Also the capacity for enforcing universal education at the primary level is absent. The rate of failure from one grade to the next is exceptionally high. The numbers of enrollees appear high in official statistics because of the large numbers of repeaters. This is especially true at the university level.
The United States Information Services has a strong presence in Lomé. It offers nightly classes to large numbers of young Togolese adults. The role of the United States in the world lends credence to the need for English language competence. The strongest effort for English language within the educational system is at the university level. To fulfill this need the University of Benin has a very strong English department.
Togo's educational system is highly restricted. It is broadest at the primary level then sharply reduced at the secondary level and even more sharply reduced at the university level. Moreover, Togolese society lacks a traditional system of formal education in the context of its respective ethnolinguistic communities that might possibly apply throughout the country.
Summary
The challenges that educational policy planners in Togo face are not simply financial. Informal education at the very age levels when children would attend primary schools progresses as it has from time immemorial. Cultural information and language fluency is passed down from generation to generation quite effectively. However, the trouble with this mode of education is that it is naturally and inevitably splintered across ethnic lines. In real terms this kind of education is divisive. The numbers of those who attend school long enough to learn French and as a result acquire a common denominator across ethnic lines are very small. The small number educated in French and the French system provides further problems by introducing an elite group that is by definition estranged from the rest of Togolese society. This further complicates the development of a rational educational system.
Bibliography
Cornevin, Robert. Histoire du Togo. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1969.
Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Togo. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976.
——. Historical Dictionary of Togo. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987.
Der-Houssikian, Haig. "Togo's Choice." In The Linguistic Connection, ed. Jean Casagrande, 73-82. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1983.
François, Yvonne. Le Togo. Paris: Karthala, 1993.
Menthon, Jean de. A la recontre du Togo. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993.
UNESCO. Statistical Yearbook. Lanham, MD: Berman Press, 1999.
—Haig Der-Houssikian
Background & General Characteristics
Socio-political Background
Several brief socio-political discussions, including ethnography, geography, and literacy are necessary for an appreciation of the press in Togo. Togo was placed under French administration first as a League of Nations "mandate" then as a United Nations "trust" territory at the end of World War I (WWI). Up to and through WWI, the country now known as Togo and a sizeable eastern segment of what is Ghana were one entity under German colonial rule. In the transition from a German colony to a French "trust" territory, a significant western portion of German Togoland was ceded to Britain 's colonial administration of Ghana. In the process, a major speech community, the Éwé, found themselves partitioned in roughly equal numbers into two different political entities, Ghana and Togo.
Ethnography & Geography
To the east of Togo is Benin (previously Dahomey), to the north is Burkina Faso (previously Upper Volta). These two countries are significant because the Éwé speech community extends into coastal Benin in the form of Mina and Fon. Éwé, starting in Ghana and ending as Fon in Benin, belongs to the Kwa language family in the larger Niger-Congo family of languages which incorporates most of sub-Saharan Africa. The Éwé occupy roughly the southern third of the country. To their north are the Tem. To the northeast of the Tem are the Kabiyê. Moré speaking people who have strong linguistic affinity with the majority population of Burkina Faso inhabits the remaining northern tier of the country.
The Tem and the groups north of them all the way to Burkina are very predominantly Muslim . The Kabiyê and the Éwé for the most part observe their traditional religions. A significant educated elite segment in both ethnic groups is Christian, mostly Catholic among the Éwé and mostly Protestant among the Kabiyê. In Togo these ethno-religious boundaries are hard.
Literacy and Education
The population of Togo is estimated to be slightly more than 5 million. According to UNESCO's 1999 Statistical Yearbook, illiteracy among those aged 15 and over is approximately 43 percent. Approximately 76.5 percent of the population over 25 years of age have had no schooling. In 1997, 859,574 students were enrolled in primary schools. Some 178,254 students were enrolled in secondary schools. In 1996, 11,462 students were enrolled at Université du Benin in Lomé, the capital of Togo. These statistics present an accurate impression of the rate of literacy and the very steep educational pyramid. The significance of this impression is enhanced when the fact that all formal schooling or education at all levels is presented strictly in French, the language of colonial legacy and the official language. Not surprisingly the reading public reads largely in French.
Language Policy
The government, in power since 1969, in the late 1970s and early 1980s adopted two African languages. They are indigenous to Togo, as national languages, Éwé and Kabiyê. In 1977, the government established a pedagogical research institute, Direction de la Formation Permanente de l'Action et de la Recherche Pedagogique (DIFOP) to produce Éwé and Kabiyê textbooks and generally oversee the training and preparation of teachers for these two languages. DIFOP was located on the campus of the University of Benin in Lomé. The ultimate intention was to replace French with the designated two Togolese languages. The one daily newspaper, Togo Press, in French (at the time called La Nouvelle Marche ), includes a page in Éwé and another in Kabiyê. Radio and television broadcasts are the only other major outlets for these and other national languages indigenous to Togo. In the meantime French remains the official language and permeates every formal aspect of Togolese life.
The Press
As mentioned above, there is one daily newspaper, the Togo Press. The paper is mostly in French with segments in Éwé and Kabiyê. According to Africa South of the Sahara 2001, the circulation of Togo-Press is 8,000. The same source lists a number of other periodicals and their circulation numbers where special political or linguistic interests constitute their respective audiences.
L'Aurore (Lomé, Weekly, Circulation 2,500)
La Conscience (Lomé, Circulation 3,000)
Crocodile (Lomé, Twice weekly, Circulation 5,000)
La Dépêche (Lomé, Bimonthly, Circulation 3,000)
L'Eveil du Travailleur Togolais (Lomé, Quarterly, Circulation 5,000)
Game su/Teu Fema (Lomé, Monthly, in Éwé and Kabiyê, Circulation 3,000)
Politicos (Lomé, Twice monthly, Circulation 2,000)
Le Regard (Lomé, Weekly, Circulation 3,000)
Tingo Tingo (Lomé, Weekly, Circulation 3,500)
Togo-Images (Lomé, Monthly, Circulation 5,000)
The numbers given the periodicals addressed to special audiences would suggest a total readership in substantial numbers within the literate educated population. The government's efforts towards the promotion of Éwé and Kabiyê at least through the press are reflected accurately. The vast majority of the literate population is literate in French. Nevertheless a small but a critical mass of citizens has become literate in the national languages. The latter, however, are not sufficient in number to disturb the overwhelming balance of power in favor of the former. More importantly, an overwhelming inclination for French remains intact among the governing elite whatever their political and ideological perspectives might be.
State-Press Relations
The newspapers and periodicals listed may not all be available at all times. The number and identity of the periodicals are subject to change from year to year under political and financial stresses. Editors and editorial boards may change. This instability reflects the political and social stresses and strains within which both the press and the body politic at large exist and interact. The socio-political status of Togo has not evolved to a point where one could consider the "government," the "press," the "economic sector," the "judiciary," the "military," and so on as distinct entities. The individual participants in these various sectors for the most part belong to a small French educated elite. There is a great deal of mobility of participants from one sector to the other. A qualification somewhat peculiar to Togo needs to be made here. The President, General Gnasimbe Eyadema, is ethnically a Kabiyé and is a Protestant. He is rightly claimed to have close connections with German economic-agrarian and food distribution interests on the one hand and on the other, British interests with reference to the one oil refinery in the country. He has been president since 1969 with strong support from his own ethnic group, which tends to predominate in the military and bureaucracy.
It is not surprising that there is only the Togo Press ; it is heavily government controlled. The issue of "censorship" does not really arise directly, however, the influence does exist. A Press and Communication Code passed through the National Assembly in January 1998. "Articles 90 to 98 make defamation of state institutions or any member of certain classes of persons, including government officials, a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to 3 months and fines of up to $4,000 (2 million CFA francs)." Article 89 applies a similar provision to protect the president (U.S. Department of State).
Attitude toward Foreign Media
In addition to the publications within Togo, Lomé and several other major towns in the country provide ample access to French publications such as Le Monde, Jeune Afrique, and Le Nouvel Observateur. These are of special interest to the expatriate communities as well as the university educated Togolese segment of society. Several major countries have cultural centers in Lomé. Their libraries make available promotionally oriented publications in their respective languages. Newsweek, Time, and The Herald Tribune are available through the American Cultural center as well as bookstores and hotel newsstands. There are also a number of English language publications available from neighboring Ghana and Nigeria .
The governing elite does not seem to have a policy on foreign publications. One major reason is that only the educated elite who can afford these publications would read them. Another reason is that for the most part the expatriate community reads them, and they insist on having them available. A third reason, and likely the most important one, is that criticism within the foreign media is rarely initiated internally. The Ghanaian and Nigerian papers and journals are quite free in comparison, and frequently provide unfavorable information. These are promptly "corrected" by the daily Togo Press and its periodic sup plements.
Broadcast Media
Observers would have to turn to radio broadcasts and television transmissions to find some diversity and some recognition of indigenous languages other than Éwé and Kabiyê. Radio and television in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, form a continuum with print press especially where indigenous African languages are concerned. They provide a window on the relative influence of external and internal forces as well as the relative influence within internal power blocs.
Radio Kanal FM broadcasts in French and Mina (a socio-political dialect of Éwé spoken in the southeastern segment of the country centered around the city of Aneho. Radiodiffusion du Togo (National) broadcasts from Kara, the capital of the Kabiyê region to the northeast of the Éwé, and broadcasts in French, Kabiyê, and other languages indigenous to Togo. Télévision Togolaise transmits programs in French and languages indigenous to Togo. The latter is true especially where the news is concerned.
Within the country, according to the CIA , there were 940,000 radios and 73,000 televisions in the late 1990s.
Bibliography
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The World Fact-book—Togo. Available from http://www.cia.gov/cia/ publications/factbook/geos/to.html .
Cornevin, Robert. Hiostoire du Togo. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1969.
Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Togo. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1987.
Der-Houssikian, Haig. "Togo's Choice" In The Linguistic Connection, Ed. Jean Casagrande, 73-82. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc. 1983.
Europa Publications 2000. Africa South of the Sahara 2001, 30th Edition. London: Europa Publications, Taylor and Francis Group, 2001.
Francois, Yvonne. Le Togo. Paris: Karthala, 1993.
UNESCO. African Community Languages and their Use in Literacy and Education. Dakar, 1985.
UNESCO. Statistical Yearbook. Lanham, MD: Berman Press, 1999.
U.S. Department of State. "1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices." Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor/U.S. Department of State: February 25, 2000. Available from www.state.gov/www/ global/human_rights/1999_hrp_report/togo.html.
Haig Der-Houssikian
Official name: Republic of Togo
Area: 56,785 square kilometers (21,925 square miles)
Highest point on mainland: Mount Agou (986 meters/3,235 feet)
Lowest point on land: Sea level
Hemispheres: Northern and Eastern
Time zone: Noon = noon GMT
Longest distances: 510 kilometers (317 miles) from north to south; 140 kilometers (87 miles) from east to west
Land boundaries: 1,647 kilometers (1,023 miles) total boundary length; Benin 644 kilometers (400 miles); Burkina Faso 126 kilometers (78 miles); Ghana 877 kilometers (545 miles)
Coastline: 56 kilometers (35 miles)
Territorial sea limits: 56 kilometers (30 nautical miles)
1 LOCATION AND SIZE
Togo is a long, narrow country in West Africa, sandwiched between Ghana and Benin. With an area of 56,785 square kilometers (21,925 square miles), it is almost as large as the state of West Virginia .
2 TERRITORIES AND DEPENDENCIES
Togo has no territories or dependencies.
3 CLIMATE
Located only eight degrees north of the equator, Togo has a tropical climate. The northernmost part of the country, which is farther from the coast, has the greatest variations in temperature. The average high and low temperatures in the northern town of Mango are 35°C (95°F) and 15°C (59°F), compared with 30°C (86°F) and 23°C (73°F) in Lomé, which is on the southern coast.
Togo's climate, while moist, is drier than those of its neighbors on the Gulf of Guinea . The coast receives an annual average rainfall of about 78 centimeters (31 inches), although it has two rainy seasons: one between April and early August, and a second, shorter one in October and November. The plateau region to the north experiences only the April-to-Au-gust rainy season but still averages 100 centimeters (40 inches) of rainfall annually. The heaviest rainfall occurs in the Togo Mountains, which receive an average of around 150 centimeters (60 inches) of rain per year.
4 TOPOGRAPHIC REGIONS
Togo's dominant physical feature is a chain of low mountains that stretches across the country from southwest to northeast. Several different types of terrain lie to the north and south of these mountains. At the southernmost end is a narrow coastal strip, bordered by the low Ouatchi Plateau, which, in turn, gives way to the higher plateau that rises to the mountains. North of the Togo Mountains is yet another plateau, drained by the Oti River and crossed from southwest to northeast by granite escarpments.
5 OCEANS AND SEAS
Togo is bounded on the south by the Bight of Benin, which is part of the Gulf of Guinea.
Seacoast and Undersea Features
The waters off Togo's coast have a strong undertow, making its beaches generally unsafe for swimming; one coastal area, however, is protected by a natural coral reef. Fishing is possible from the shoreline or from boats. Whales can often be seen nearby.
Coastal Features
Togo's narrow coast is fringed with sandy beaches separated from the rest of the land by lagoons and tidal flats, which give this area a swampy character.
6 INLAND LAKES
Lake Togo is the largest of the inland lagoons lining Togo's coast; it is also Togo's largest natural body of inland water.
7 RIVERS AND WATERFALLS
The Mono River flows north to south, traversing more than half the length of Togo before flowing into the Gulf of Guinea. Together with its tributaries, it drains most of Togo south of the central mountain chain. North of the mountains is the Oti River, a major tributary of the Volta River and Togo's longest river, traveling a total length of 550 kilometers (340 miles). Besides the Mono and the Oti, Togo's two other major waterways are the Kara River, which crosses the Togo Mountains in the north, and the Haho River in the south, which drains into Lake Togo.
8 DESERTS
There are no deserts in Togo.
9 FLAT AND ROLLING TERRAIN
Togo has a flat, low-lying coastal plain, from which plateaus rise gradually to the central mountains. In the far north, there is rolling savannah terrain to the north of the Oti River.
10 MOUNTAINS AND VOLCANOES
The Togo Mountains, which cross Togo from southwest to northeast, belong to a mountain system that extends from the Atakora Mountains in Benin to Ghana's Akwapim Hills. Togo's highest peak, Mt. Agou, is located at the southern edge of these mountains, rising to a height of 986 meters (3,235 feet).
11 CANYONS AND CAVES
Togo has no significant caves.
12 PLATEAUS AND MONOLITHS
Togo has three different plateaus. The Ouatchi Plateau, which borders the coastal strip, is a transitional belt of reddish, lateritic clay soil. At elevations of between 61 and 91 meters (200 and 300 feet), it ex-tends some 32 kilometers (20 miles) from the edge of the coastal region to a higher plateau drained by the Mono River. This second plateau stretches northward to the edge of the Togo Mountains. North of the mountains, the Oti River drains a third sandstone plateau traversed by granite ridges in the northwest.
13 MAN-MADE FEATURES
The reservoir of the Nangbeto Dam, on the Mono River at the Togo-Benin border, is Togo's largest inland body of water.
14 FURTHER READING
Books
Curkeet, A. A. Togo: Portrait of a West African Francophone Republic in the 1980s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.
Knoll, Arthur J. Togo Under Imperial Germany, 1884-1914: A Case Study in Colonial Rule. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978.
Packer, George. The Village of Waiting. New York : Vintage Books, 1988.
Web Sites
Lonely Planet: Destination Togo. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/africa/togo/ (accessed April 14, 2003).
Mbendi Information for Africa: Togo. http://www.mbendi.co.za/land/af/to/p0005.htm (accessed April 14, 2003).
Cite this article
Republic of Togo; Republique du Togo; Togoland
Orientation
Identification. Togo is named after the town of Togoville, where Gustav Nachtigal signed a treaty with Mlapa III in 1884, establishing a German protectorate. Togo is an Ewe (pronounced Ev'hé) word meaning "lake" or "lagoon." Since 1884, Togoland and later Togo became synonymous for the entire region under colonial control. The term Togolese first appeared after World War I, and the population increasingly identified with this term, culminating in 1960 with the choice of the Republic of Togo as the official name.
Location and Geography. Covering a total area (land and inland water) of 21,925 square miles (56,785 square kilometers), Togo extends 365 miles (587 kilometers) inland, 40 miles (64 kilometers) wide at the coast and 90 miles (145 kilometers) wide at its widest point. It is bordered by Ghana , Burkina Faso , and Benin.
Togo consists of six geographical regions. The coastal region is low-lying, sandy beach backed by the Tokoin plateau, a marsh, and the Lake Togo lagoon. The Tokoin (Ouatchi) Plateau extends about 20 miles (32 kilometers) inland at an elevation of 200 to 300 feet (61 to 91 meters). To the northeast, a higher tableland is drained by the Mono, Haho, Sio, and tributaries. The Atakora massif stretches diagonally across Togo from the town of Kpalime northeast; at different points it is known as the Danyi and Akposso Plateau, Fetish massif, Fazao mountain, Tchaoudjo massif, and Kabye mountains. The highest point is the Pic d'Agou at 3,937 feet (986 meters). North of the mountain range is the Oti plateau, a savanna land drained by the river of the same name. A higher, semi-arid region extends to the northern border.
The climate is tropical and humid for seven months, while the dry, desert winds of the Harmattan blow south from November to March, bringing cooler weather though little moisture. Annual temperatures vary between 75 and 98 degrees Fahrenheit (23 and 35 degrees Celsius) in the south and 65 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (18 to 38 degrees Celsius) in the north.
The thirty Togolese ethnic groups are now found in all parts of the country, most notably in the capital Lomé, which is situated on the border with Ghana.
Demography. The population of Togo is estimated by the United Nations to be 5 million in 2000, with growth at approximately 3.5 percent per annum (though the last government census dates from 1981). One fifth of the population lives in Lomé, the capital. Kara, the second largest city, has approximately two hundred thousand inhabitants. Population density reached 42 per square mile (67 per square kilometer) in 1991, with 75 percent in rural villages.
Linguistic Affiliation. French is the official language of government, but both Ewe of the Kwa and Kabye of the Gur language families have semi-official status. Ewe has a much wider use than its ethnic boundaries, partly as a consequence of German colonial education policies. Mina—a constantly evolving melange of Ewe, French, English, and other languages—is the lingua franca of Lomé, of the coastal zone, and of commerce in general.
Symbolism. National symbols include Ablodé (an Ewe word meaning freedom and independence), immortalized in the national monument to independence; the African lion on the coat of arms (though long since extinct in Togo); and colorful Kente cloth, originating in the Awatime region shared with neighboring Ghana.
History and Ethnic Relations
The population of the central mountains is perhaps the oldest in Togo, with recent archeological research dating the presence of the Tchamba, Bogou, and Bassar people as far back as the ninth century. Northern Mossi kingdoms date back to the thirteenth century. Ewe migration narratives from Nigeria and archaeological finds in the region of Notse put the earliest appearance of Ewe speakers at c. 1600. Other research suggests the Kabye and others were the last to settle in the Kara region coming from Kete-Krachi in Ghana as recently as two hundred fifty years ago. Parts of north Togo were for a long time under the influence of Islamic kingdoms, such as that of Umar Tal of the nineteenth century.
European presence began in the fifteenth century and became permanent from the sixteenth. Though the Danish, Dutch, Spanish, British, German, and French all sailed the coastal region, the Portuguese were the first to establish local economic control. For the next three centuries the area that is Togo today was sandwiched between the two powerful slave trading kingdoms of Ashanti and Dahomey. Consequently the Togolese population was overrepresented among those unfortunates sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the same period a growing Arab controlled trans-Saharan trade in slaves, kola, and gold passed through Togo.
Missionaries arrived in the mid-1800s and set up schools and churches in the regions of Ho (present-day Ghana), Kpalimé, and Agou. The Berlin Conference led to the annexation of Togo as a Schutzgebiet (protectorate) by the German Empire in 1884, under the leadership of Captain Gustav Nachtigal. Initially the treaty negotiated covered only the coastal region of about fifteen miles, though over the next fifteen years the German colonial administrators moved their capital from Zebe to Lomé and extended control north as far as present day Burkina Faso. The borders were finalized in treaties with France (1897) and Britain (1899).
German colonial rule consisted largely of export-oriented agricultural and infrastructural development, and frequent accounts of barbarity reached international attention. The most significant contribution was an system of roads and railroads built by German money and Togolese forced labor.
British and French troops invaded and captured German Togoland in 1914. For the duration of World War I, British troops controlled much of the region, including the capital, but with the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations Mandate system, Togoland was repartitioned. Officially in 1922, one third came under British control, and two-thirds under the administration of France (modern-day Togo), including the capital Lomé. After World War II , the mandates passed to the control of the United Nations (UN) Trusteeship in 1946. In 1956, in a UN-sponsored plebiscite, the British section voted to join the Gold Coast Colony as independent Ghana in 1957.
Emergence of the Nation. During the interwar period, several organizations—including the Cercle des Amitiés Françaises, the Duawo, and the Bund der deutschen Togoländer—organized and militated in public and private against French rule. The Cercle became the Committee for Togolese Unity Party (CUT), under the leadership of Sylvanus Olympio. The Togolese Party for Progress, led by Nicolas Grunitzky, offered a more conservative message. In 1956 France made French Togoland a republic within the French Union, with internal self-government. Grunitzky was made prime minister and against the wishes of the UN, France attempted to terminate the trusteeship. In a UN-sponsored election, the CUT won control of the legislature and Olympio became the country's first president on 27 April 1960. In 1963 Togo gained the dubious distinction of being the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to experience a military coup d'état.
National Identity. Until the dictatorship of Gnassingbé Eyadema, the southern Ewe culture predominated in all realms of life and was second only to the influence of French. After 1967, however, the president deigned to redress the southern bias in cultural, political, and social life, and to this end created authenticité, modeled on the same program of the Zaire dictator Mobutu. This movement attempted to highlight the many and diverse cultures of Togo, but resulted in reducing them to two only: that of the north and south. More recently, the idea of Togolese nationhood has become submerged to that of Kabye ethnicity.
Ethnic Relations. Ethnic tensions are minimal, despite the persistent murmurings of certain politicians. Political strife came to a head in 1991–1994 and did result in south against north violence and the reverse, with its concomitant refugees and resettlement, but Togo's thirty ethnic groups continue to mix and intermarry throughout the country.
Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space
The city of Lomé and the coastal region are deeply influenced by the architectural programs of the successive colonial regimes. Vestiges of the German administrative buildings, several cathedrals and many churches, as well as private houses can be found throughout the country, though German influence was less pervasive in the north. The British period featured no architectural innovation, but more than forty years of French administration left its mark, most prominently in the work of Georges Coustereau. The works of this Frenchman are to be found throughout the country and include the national independence monument and an unusual church in the small town of Kpele-Ele.
During the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, the president inaugurated an extravagant program, lavishing upon Lomé and his home town of Kara five-star hotels, a new port, and sports and government buildings. The skyline of Lomé is broken by four enormous skyscrapers, most prominently the five-star Hotel Deux Février. Since the economic decline of the 1980s and indebtedness, few new projects have succeeded. The Chinese government, however, funded the building of a forty-thousand-seat stadium, which opened in 2000. In the dire economic climate at the end of the twentieth century, private Togolese citizens invest their small incomes in private building, usually constructed by homemade concrete bricks. The vast majority, however, live in rural settings in a variety of traditional village designs: centralized, dispersed, on stilts, or in two-story conical mud huts like those of the Tamberma. Enclosures are gendered spaces, with the external kitchen area a female realm.
Food and Economy
Food in Daily Life. Togolese usually have two or three meals per day, each consisting largely of a starch product, such as cassava, maize, rice, yams, or plantains. A hot, spicy sauce is served with midday or evening meals, consisting of a protein—fish, goat, beans, or beef—and often rich in palm (red) oil or peanut paste. Fruits and vegetables, though readily available, are eaten more by the bourgeoisie. Traditional French staples, including baguettes, are mainstream in the cities.
Food Customs at Ceremonial Occasions. Food does not serve a significant ceremonial function, except perhaps in terms of animist rituals, when the sacrificed animals are prepared, cooked, and served. Beer, gin, and sodabi (distilled palm wine) are, however, essential. Among wealthy middle-class Togolese, the usual French three- or four-course meals are always served at functions.
Basic Economy. Agriculture provides the mainstay of the economy, employing close to four-fifths of the active population. Farmers grow food for subsistence and for sale.
Land Tenure and Property. Private property exists in Togo alongside traditional community custodianship, and land is bought and sold under both systems. Private ownership of land began during the German period, as small parcels were purchased for commerce and for missions. The French continued this policy of gentle aggrandizement, but post-independence this was complicated by the president's illegal seizure and redistribution of plantations owned by his opponents. Thus, much land in the south, and particularly in the capital Lomé, remains the site of intense litigation, which takes place in the civil courts. Warnings are often written in red on the walls of land parcels to deter sale or deception.
Commercial Activities. Agricultural and manufactured products are sold both retail and wholesale in shops and markets. The informal economy is significant and is found in every town and village market, including the Assigamé (Grand Marché) in Lomé.
Major Industries. The 1990s saw most government industries privatized. Phosphates, run as a monopoly, remain Togo's largest industry, with electricity production a distant second. The once highly favored banking sector is in permanent decline, and tourism is insignificant. Togo has a small oil refinery, and animal husbandry, telecommunications, and information technology are growth industries. Togo has possibly the highest use of Internet and email services per capita in West Africa.
Trade. Togo's stagnant, underdeveloped economy is largely dependent on agricultural exports. In the mid 1990s, over 50 percent of Togo's exports were of four primary products—coffee, cocoa, cotton, and phosphates. Until the relaunching of ports in Cotonou and Lagos, Lomé was one of the busiest on the coast. The roads and rail infrastructure are rapidly declining, however, despite the launching of the Free Trade Zone in 1989.
France is by far Togo's largest trading partner. Fifty percent of imports from France are consumption goods, of which a minority are re-exported to Burkina and Niger . Forty-two percent of imports are of equipment, building, and agricultural supplies. Togo imports all its petroleum needs.
Division of Labor. Child labor has been ubiquitous, and in 1996 and 1998 several incidents of child slavery were exposed. Girls are more likely to work than go to school in much of Togo.
Professional positions are usually occupied by individuals who have had post-secondary school education. Successful business people may or may not have formal educations, but often they have relatives, friends, or patrons who helped finance their establishment.
Social Stratification
Classes and Castes. Society is divided along traditional and nontraditional lines. The elite includes kings, paramount chiefs, and vodou priests. The modern elite includes government functionaries, business professionals, and the educated. Poor rural families often send their children to city-living relatives for schooling or employment.
Symbols of Social Stratification. During the colonial period, all but the simplest clothing was considered a social distinguishing factor in villages, while brick houses and cars were in towns. During the last decades of the twentieth century, wealthy villagers could afford tin roofs and some even telephones, while in the cities, large houses, cable television, western dress, and restaurant dining were hallmarks of success.
Political Life
Government. The Fourth Republic provides for a constitution modeled on that of the Fifth French Republic, with the president, the prime minister, and the president of the National Assembly being the three chief posts. The constitution limits the president to two successive five-year terms, although he has amended the constitution frequently in the past.
Leadership and Political Officials. President Gnassingbe Eyadema came to power by force in 1967, though he was implicated in the assassination of the first president, Sylvanus Olympio, and played kingmaker from 1961 until coming to power. There were no obvious successors within his party—the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT)—at the end of the twentieth century. After the 1991 national conference, Eyadema made the transition to being a democratically elected leader, though the 1998 presidential election was condemned internationally as flawed and fraudulent.
A one-party state from 1961 until 1991, Togo experienced a renaissance in multiparty politics, though political in-fighting beleaguer the chances of the Committee for Action and Renewal and the Union for Democratic Change (UDC). The leader of the UDC, Gilchrist Olympio, widely considered to have won the 1998 presidential election, lives in voluntary exile in Ghana.
Social Problems and Control. Large-scale social upheaval followed the political violence of 1992– 1993 and approximately one-third of the population moved to neighboring countries. With the political deadlock, relative calm returned. The cancellation of all international aid projects and withdrawal of most nongovernmental organizations, however, put strain on the economy. Unemployment, unsustainable wages, and poverty rose rapidly. Crime increased, particularly violent robberies and car-jackings. Most educational institutions were on strike throughout much of 1999–2000.
Military Activity. Togo has a small army and minimal naval and air forces. Eighty percent of the gendarmerie and 90 percent of the military are of the Kabye ethnic group. Most regularly go unpaid and set up ad hoc roadblocks to extort money. The French and Chinese were the leading suppliers of military hardware to Togo from the latter portion of the twentieth century to the present day.
Social Welfare and Change Programs
Welfare is almost nonexistent, though pensioners who paid contributions to the Francophone cooperative system continue to receive payments. Structural readjustment is hardly a success story, but a great number of state industries have been privatized under the guidance of the IMF/World Bank.
Nongovernmental Organizations and Other Associations
Most nongovernmental and aid organizations quit Togo in the 1990s, with only Population Services International and Organizacion Ibero Americana de Cooperacion Inter Municipal (OICI) still operating throughout the country. Voluntary service organizations, such as Rotary, Lions, and Zonta continue to operate.
Gender Roles and Statuses
Division of Labor by Gender. Customary divisions of labor generally do not still hold in Togo, though men do most heavy construction work. Women perform almost all other manual labor in towns and villages, though less machine work, and control small market commerce.
The Relative Status of Women and Men. Women, though having attained legal equality, remain unequal in all walks of life. Women and men are kept apart in most social gatherings. Women usually eat after men but before children. Discrimination against women in employment is common practice and widespread. Women have little place in political life and less in government programs, though there is a ministry allocated to women's and family affairs. Only women descended from ruling tribal families, successful businesswomen, or women politicians enjoy privileges equal to that of men, more won than granted. Togo recently banned the practice of female genital mutilation.
Marriage, Family, and Kinship. Traditional systems of social organization are significant in the daily lives of Togolese. Kinship systems provide networks for support and are visible during all major life-cycle ceremonies.
Marriage. Marriage practices vary throughout Togo according to the ethnic group, though organized religions and the State have altered the ceremonies of even the most secluded villages. Social disapproval of ethnic exogamy is lessening, though the government unofficially discourages it. Marriage law follows French legal statutes and requires an appearance before a magistrate for all state apparatuses to be in effect. Customary marriages, without state sanction, are still widespread. A bride-wealth, but not a dowry, remains important throughout Togo. Polygyny is officially decreasing, though unofficial relationships uphold its role.
Domestic Unit. The basic family structure is extended, although nuclear family units are increasingly commonplace, particularly in urban areas. In most cases, the man is the supreme head of the household in all major decisions. In the absence of the husband, the wife's senior brother holds sway. The extended family has a redistributive economic base.
Inheritance. Inheritance laws follow French legal statutes in the case of a legal marriage. In the event of a customary marriage only, customary inheritance laws are enforced. Most ethnic groups in Togo are patrilineal by tradition or have become so as a consequence of colonization.
Kin Groups. Kinship is largely patrilineal throughout Togo and remains powerful even among Westernized, urban populations. Village and neighborhood chiefs remain integral to local dispute resolution.
Socialization
Infant Care. Infants are cared for by their mothers and female members of their households, including servants. Among some ethnic groups, infants are often only exposed to the father eight days after birth. Vaccination against all childhood diseases has been strongly encouraged by the government.
Child Rearing and Education. Until the age of five, children remain at home. Initiation ceremonies occur from this age and throughout adolescence. After the age of five, all children can commence school, providing they can pay the school fees. On average, boys are three times more likely to complete primary schooling than girls. This discrepancy increases into secondary schooling and is most marked in the rural central and northern regions.
Higher Education. Secondary schooling is more common in the south, and numerous private and public schools offer the French baccalaureate system. Often children are sent abroad during strikes. Togo has one university, located in the capital, and it offers first- and second-level degrees in the arts and sciences, as well as in medicine and law.
Etiquette
Public displays of affection are seldom. Men and boys hold hands, but not boys and girls. Courting remains private and is not generally arranged by parents except among some ethnic groups; for example, the Tchamba. Old people and village elders are highly esteemed, though the climate of political fear has brought the undue influence of youths. Eating is done most often with the right hand, though among the bourgeoisie flatware is prevalent. When guests arrive, water is offered and the traditional greeting—asking about the family and their health—ensues.
Religion
Religious Beliefs. Since the inception of the mandate, freedom of religious worship has been protected by law. The French interpreted this to include animistic African religions, and this perhaps partly accounts for the popularity of traditional vodou cults and rituals.
Throughout the country, many different forms of Christianity and Islam are practiced. Roman Catholicism is the most prevalent form of Christianity. Various American Baptist sects, the Assemblies of God , Mormons, Jehovah 's Witnesses, and Eckankar have been making inroads among urban and rural populations alike. Islam is virtually paramount in the north.
Religious Practitioners. Religious officials, whether Catholic priests or vodou sofo, are held in the highest esteem in both rural and urban settings. They are always invited to bless traditional ceremonies as well as building projects or any new initiative. Traditional healers also hold sway, and—in the wake of the AIDS epidemic—are regaining popularity.
Death and the Afterlife. A Togolese funeral is a most important event. Wildly extravagant (by Western standards), funeral celebrations are a daily occurrence. Marching bands, choirs, football tournaments, banquets, and stately services are as fundamental as an expensively decorated coffin. Funerals often take place over a month or more, and families frequently sell or mortgage land or homes to pay for the funeral of a beloved and elderly relative. If the person dies in an accident, however, or some other sudden tragedy (AIDS, for example), this is considered a "hot death," and the funeral services are concluded more quickly, with little circumstance.
Medicine and Health Care
Similar to other underdeveloped, tropical nations, Togo's population is challenged by numerous health problems, including parasitic, intestinal, nutritional, venereal, and respiratory diseases.
Public health problems are exacerbated by inadequate waste disposal, sewerage, drinking water, and food storage.
In the 1990s, life expectancy at birth was fifty-one years, though this is declining steeply with the onset of AIDS. Malaria, commonly referred to as palu, remains the leading cause of illness and death. Other common diseases include schistosomiasis, meningitis, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and HIV/AIDS.
Traditional healing methods and preparations continue to be the most widely used form of health care in Togo. Every small town has an herbalist, and one market in Lomé specializes in the sale of medicinal herbs. Frequently medical treatments are coupled with visits to the local vodou house or fetish priest.
Secular Celebrations
Major state holidays are 1 January; the Fête Nationale, 13 January; Fête de la Libération Economique, 24 January; Fête de la Victoire, 24 April; May Day, 1 May; Day of the Martyrs, 21 June; and Day of Struggle, 23 September. 27 April, Independence Day, is not officially celebrated by President Eyadema and is frequently a day of opposition activity.
The Arts and Humanities
There is little government support for the arts in Togo, beyond the rudimentary presence of a Ministry of Culture and the poorly funded and maintained departments of the university. Private organizations include the Centre Culturel Français, the American Cultural Center, and the Goethe Institut.
The State of the Physical and Social Sciences
There is little government support for the physical and social sciences in Togo, beyond the existence of a Ministry for Scientific Research and Education. Private organizations and nongovernmental organizations provide various services, and a private academy of social sciences was created.
Bibliography
Agier, Michel. Commerce et sociabilité: les négociants soudanais du quartier zongo de Lomé (Togo), 1983.
Comhaire-Sylvain, Suzanne. Femmes de Lomé, 1982.
Cornevin, Robert. Histoire du Togo. 3d ed., 1969.
Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Togo. 3d ed., 1996.
Delval, Raymond. Les Musulmans au Togo, 1980.
Gérard, Bernard. Lomé: capital du Togo, 1975.
Greene, Sandra. "Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe," in Cahiers d'Etudes African, 169:489–524, 1996.
Lawrance, Benjamin Nicholas. Most Obedient Servants: The Politics of Language in German Colonial Togo, 2000.
Marguerat, Yves. Lomé, les étapes de la croissance: Une Brève Histoire de la capitale du Togo, 1992.
——, et al. "Si Lomé m'etait contée . . . ": dialogues avec les vieux Loméens, 1992.
Piot, Charles. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa, 1999.
Prigent, Françoise. Encyclopédie nationale du Togo, 1979.
Rosenthal, Judy. Possession, Ecstasy and the Law: Spirit Possession in Ewe Vodou, 1998.
Sebald, Peter. Togo 1884–1914: Eine Geschichte der deutschen "Musterkolonie" auf der Grundlage amtlicher Quellen, 1987.
Spieth, Jakob. Die Ewe-Stmme: Material zur Kunde des Ewe Volkes in Deutsch-Togo, 1906.
Viering, Erich. Togo Singt ein neues Lied, 1967.
Winslow, Zachery. Togo, 1988.
Westermann, Dietrich. Die Glidyi-Ewe in Togo, 1935.
—Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance
|
i don't know
|
Likud, Yesh Atid, and Shas are political parties of which country?
|
Political Parties - Fanack Chronicle
Political Parties
October 28th, 2013 / December 12th, 2016
Political Parties
The current nineteenth Knesset , elected on 22 January 2013, is made up of twelve political parties.
A number of new political parties were founded ahead of the 2013 elections . Yesh Atid (There is a Future) was founded by former anchor man Yair Lapid. The party aims to fight corruption, improve the middle class’ economic position and mandate that all Israelis perform national service. Former Kadima leader and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni established HaTnua (The Movement) as a diplomatic alternative to Netanyahu’s Likud . The ultra-nationalist HaBayit HaYehudi (The Jewish Home), led by Naftali Bennett, gave Likud a run for its votes.
In order of number of seats the nineteenth Knesset is composed of: Likud (Consolidation)/ Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) (right-wing/extreme-right wing, Zionist, 31 seats out of a total of 120 Knesset seats, 20 of which went to Likud; the remaining 11 went to Yisrael Beiteinu); Yesh Atid (centrist, Zionist, 19 seats); Israeli Labour Party (or HaAvoda, centrist, Zionist 15 seats); HaBayit HaYehudi (extreme-right wing, Zionist, 12 seats); Shas (Sfarad’s Guards [of the Torah], Sephardic ultra-Orthodox, 11 seats); United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox, Zionist, 7 seats); HaTnua (right wing, Zionist, 6 seats); Meretz (Energy, centre-left, Zionist, 6 seats); Hadash (New, left wing, non-Zionist, 4 seats); United Arab List (or Ra’am-Ta’al)/ Arab Movement for Renewal (Palestinian, non-Zionist, 4 seats); Balad (the Land; Palestinian, non-Zionist, 3 seats); and Kadima (Forward, right wing, Zionist, 2 seats). A range of other parties did not succeed in passing the threshold. Voter turnout was 67.8 percent (64.7 percent in 2009); among Israeli Palestinians it was 56 percent (53.4 percent in 2009), according to the Central Elections Committee (election results).
On 14 March 2013 a coalition government was formed, made up of Likud/Yisrael Beiteinu, Yesh Atid, HaBayit HaYehudi and HaTnua, which between them held 68 seats out of a total of 120 Knesset seats. Four days later it won a vote of confidence in the Knesset and was sworn in later that day. Benjamin Netanyahu , the leader of Likud, remained Prime Minister . Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) resigned as Minister of Foreign Affairs due to corruption charges in December 2012. Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) became Minister of Finance , while Naftali Bennett (HaBayit HaYehudi) was appointed as Minister of Industry, Trade and Labour , as well as Minister of Religious Services . Tzipi Livni of HaTnua (The Movement) became Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinian National Authority.
The Knesset in West Jerusalem
Likud
Likud (Consolidation) was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin as an alliance of a number of small right wing and liberal parties. Likud’s first success was its victory in the general elections of 1977, as a result of which Begin became the first non-socialist Prime Minister of Israel. In 2005, after a long political struggle with opponents within the party, and after Labour had left the governing coalition, the then leader of Likud, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, announced he would leave the party and would found a new centrist party under the name of Kadima.He was succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu, who since 2009 holds the post of Prime Minister.
Yisrael Beiteinu
Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) was founded in 1999 by Avigdor Lieberman , former director-general of Likud, who left this party as a result of misgivings about concessions Prime Minister Netanyahu made to the Palestinian National Authority in 1997 in the so-called Wye River Memorandum . Yisrael Beiteinu is a nationalist party on the extreme right that essentially serves the interests of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, of whom more than 800,000 entered Israel in the 1990-1997 period. In the 2009 and 2013 elections the party joined Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Yesh Atid
Yesh Atid (There is a Future) was founded in 2012 by former anchor man Yair Lapid and functions as a political platform for the secular middle class. In the 2013 election, the party came out as the big winner. Yesh Atid advocates among others economic and educational reform, the drafting of all Israelis in the Armed Forces (i.e. including yeshiva students), instituting civil marriage, and a fight against corruption. In 2013 it joined Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Israeli Labour Party
Israeli Labour Party (HaAvoda). From the foundation of the State of Israel until the 1970s the Israeli Labour Party (formerly called Mapai, or Land of Israel Workers’ Party) was the major political force in the country. Mapai was founded in 1930. One of the founding fathers was David Ben-Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community (or Yishuv) in Palestine before 1948 and the country’s Prime Minister (with one two-year interruption) from 1948 until 1963. In 1968, Mapai merged with two smaller leftist parties in the Israeli Labour Party. Until its defeat in the 1977 general elections, all Israeli Prime Ministers were members of Mapai and later of Labour. Afterwards the party returned as junior partner in several coalition governments. The current party leader is Shelly Yachimovich.
HaBayit HaYehudi
HaBayit HaYehudi (The Jewish Home), which shortly before the 2013 general election merged with the like minded Tkuma (Resurrection) party, is an extreme-right wing, ultra-nationalist, religious Zionist party and can be regarded as the mouthpiece of the organized settler movement. In 2013 it joined Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Shas
Shas (also known as The Worldwide Sephardic Association of Torah Guardians) is a conservative religious party that was formed in 1984 as an alliance of several small religious political parties. One of the founders was Rabbi Ovada Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel. Shas strongly advocates the strict application of the Halacha, the Jewish laws originating from the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. The party is led by Aryeh Deri.
Electoral Law
The electoral system in Israel is based on nation-wide proportional representation: the number of seats that each list receives in the Knesset is proportional to the number of votes. A party has to pass the qualifying threshold, which is currently 2 percent. Until the elections of 1992 the qualifying threshold was only 1 percent.
The election system was inherited from the rigid system of proportional representation of the Yishuv, the organized Jewish community in Palestine before and during the British Mandate . The justification given for the large number of parties resulting from the system was that ‘in a period in which major, far-reaching and rapid changes were still taking place in the population make-up as a result of immigration, it was important to enable maximal representation for various groups and opinions’. (See Electoral System in Israel , Israeli government website)
The electoral system is based primarily on two laws: the Basic Law on the Knesset of 1958 and the Knesset Elections Law of 1969. The Knesset elections are supposed to take place once every four years. The Knesset can decide, by simple majority, to dissolve itself and call for early elections. Since the Parties Law of 1992, a party has to be legally registered with the Party Registrar in order to participate in the elections. A list which acts against ‘the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people’ or against its democratic nature, a list which incites racism, or a list which ‘supports the armed struggle of a terrorist organization against Israel’ cannot run in the elections. Suffrage is universal among Israeli citizens of 18 years and older, but compulsory voting does not exist.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the members of the Knesset Photo Shutterstock
Copyright 2006 - 2017 Fanack | All Rights Reserved
|
Israel
|
The UK government was criticized in 2014 for promoting the euphemistic term 'Mitochondrial transfer' to avoid controversy about genetic modification of?
|
Majority of MKs recommend Netanyahu for PM | The Times of Israel
Majority of MKs recommend Netanyahu for PM
Kulanu and Yisrael Beytenu give Likud leader the nod for premiership; Yesh Atid abstains, signaling opposition stint
Members of the Yesh Atid party meet with President Reuven Rivlin at the president's residence in Jerusalem on Monday, March 23, 2015 (photo credit: Mark Nyman/GPO)
Newsroom
Rivlin to meet parties for 2nd round of coalition consultations
Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party on Monday recommended that President Reuven Rivlin choose Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu as the next prime minister, giving Netanyahu the requisite majority of 67 MKs.
The elected members of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party told Rivlin earlier that it wouldn’t recommend anyone for the premiership and that the centrist faction would sit in the opposition.
Yesh Atid MK Yael German met Rivlin at the start of the second day of consultations about the formation of a governing coalition. The former health minister, whose party dropped from 19 seats in the previous Knesset to just 11 in last week’s vote, said Yesh Atid would recommend neither Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu nor Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog for prime minister.
Instead, Lapid’s party would “serve our constituents and all the voting public” from the opposition, German said.
Rivlin told the party’s representatives that the country was “already four months without an approved budget and it’s causing many problems for different institutions.”
Rivlin also met with representatives of Yisrael Beytenu and Meretz Monday to receive their nomination for prime minister.
Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman told Rivlin that “I have to point out that in recent days — if I must specify the issue that bothers me even more than building this government it’s the baseless hatred that is developing among the Jewish people.”
Following Monday’s meetings, Rivlin is expected to task Netanyahu with forming a coalition. Coalition negotiations between various parties are expected to begin in earnest Wednesday, and Netanyahu will have four weeks to form his government, with an option to extend talks for another two.
Meretz, like Yesh Atid, Zionist Union and the Joint (Arab) List, is expected to sit in the opposition.
On Sunday, Rivlin met with the Likud, Zionist Union, Joint List, Jewish Home, Shas, and United Torah Judaism parties, urging party membersto form a broad, inclusive coalition able to withstand growing international pressure on the Jewish state.
Of 88 MKs representing the first group to meet with Rivlin on Sunday, a total of 51 nominated Netanyahu to lead the government.
“The political issues and the pressure that our best friends in Europe and the US will exert require a broad coalition in the upcoming Knesset,” the president said while meeting with the ultra-Orthodox UTJ party.
President Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem on March 22, 2015, in a meeting with the Likud party. (photo credit: Mark Neyman/GPO)
UTJ MK Moshe Gafni, however, rebuffed the president’s wishes, saying his party would not be willing to sit with certain other parties, and said that if those unnamed parties were to join the coalition, United Torah Judaism — and its six seats — would head to the opposition.
Although Gafni did not mention the party by name, UTJ has long been at odds with Yesh Atid, which calls for the mandatory enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men and cuts to the welfare and social benefits that affect many in the ultra-Orthodox community.
The party, along with the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas (seven seats), nominated Netanyahu to lead the government.
The Jewish Home party also nominated Netanayhu, fulfilling a campaign promise it made to its voters. The right-wing party affirmed its support for the prime minister’s leadership, calling for increased construction in the contested areas of the West Bank and Golan Heights.
MK Uri Ariel, leader of the hardline Tekumah faction within Jewish Home, dismissed reports that his faction would splinter if not offered the Housing Ministry, a position he retained in the last cabinet, according to the right-wing Israel National News website.
Ariel and party chief Naftali Bennett were reported to be at odds following the election, as the two were involved in several well-documented spats. The Tekumah faction holds two of the party’s eight seats.
Following the meetings with Rivlin, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely addressed the coalition negotiations, asserting the Likud’s need to hold onto high-level ministerial posts while telling other parties to tone down their demands in the interest of securing a stable coalition.
“I am certain it’s of mutual interest to establish a lasting, strong and stable coalition, and for this the other sides need to lower their demands,” she said. “It’s important that key ministries such as the foreign, defense, and education [ministries] stay in the Likud.”
The Zionist Union and the Joint List were the only two parties not to nominate Netanyahu on Sunday, with the Zionist Union’s 24 members nominating party leader Isaac Herzog center-left party and the Joint (Arab) List (13 seats) opting to not nominate anyone, due to its rejection of Zionist parties.
|
i don't know
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.