Monday, December 31, 2007


Christopher Cross (born Christopher Geppert on May 3, 1951) is an American singer-songwriter. His works have earned him five Grammy Awards, an Oscar, and a Golden Globe. Native of San Antonio, Texas

Christopher Cross Singles

Academy Award for Best Song, 1981, "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)"
Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, 1981, "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)"
Grammy, 1981 - Record of the Year - "Sailing"
Grammy, 1981 - Album of the Year - Christopher Cross
Grammy, 1981 - Best New Artist - Christopher Cross
Grammy, 1981 - Song of the Year - "Sailing"
Grammy, 1981 - Best Arrangement - "Sailing" Discography

Many people associate "Think of Laura" with the Luke and Laura plotline of the soap opera, General Hospital, which was very popular at the time, but it was actually written about a friend of Christopher's girlfriend at the time (named Laura) who had recently been killed by a stray bullet while riding in the back of a car[1].
Cross contributed backing vocals, (along with The Beach Boys' Carl Wilson,) to David Lee Roth's 1985 hit "California Girls."
Cross performed the song "Sailing" alongside the pop band 'Nsync at the Fourth Annual Blockbuster Awards in 1999.
Cross also performed lead vocals on "So Far Away", a song from Alan Parsons' album On Air. When Parsons was touring in support of that album, Cross would sometimes join the band onstage to sing the song if he was available.
Cross' single "All Right" was used as the music for a montage of highlights following the championship game of the 1983 NCAA men's basketball tournament by CBS.
Cross spent much of his youth living in a home on Newbury Terrace in Terrell Hills, just outside San Antonio, Texas. That home had earlier belonged to the Cummins family and another notable San Antonian, the historian and author Light Townsend Cummins, grew up in that same house a decade earlier. It has since been demolished.
His daughter, Madison is a singer and actress. She wrote and recorded a single dedicated to poet Mattie Stepanek in 2005.
In the Seinfeld episode "The Millennium", Newman reveals that he booked Cross for his Millennium Eve party, which he has been planning since 1978.
Cross' single "Ride Like the Wind" is included in the Time Life compilation Soft Rock.
"Ride Like the Wind" was used as a video in an episode of Second City Television. Rick Moranis plays the part of Michael McDonald doing the backing vocals. He rushes to the studio and arrives just in time to sing the background vocals Such a long way to go. A video clip is available at: SCTV Ride Like the Wind Video

Friday, December 28, 2007


Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003) was a case heard before the Supreme Court of the United States, challenging the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). Oral argument was heard on October 9, 2002, and on January 15, 2003, the court held the CTEA constitutional by a 7-2 decision.

Eldred v. Ashcroft District Court
The plaintiffs appealed the decision of the District Court to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, filing their initial brief on May 22, 2000, and arguing the case on October 5 of the same year in front of a three-judge panel. Arguments were similar to those made in the District Court, except for those regarding the public trust doctrine, which were not included in the appeal.
Instead, the plaintiffs extended their argument on the copyright clause to note that the clause requires Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and argued that retroactive extensions do not directly serve this purpose in the standard quid pro quo previously required by the courts.
The case was decided on February 16, 2001. The Appeals Court upheld the decision of the District Court in a 2 to 1 opinion. In a forceful dissent, Judge David Sentelle agreed with the plaintiffs that CTEA was indeed unconstitutional based on the "limited Times" requirement. Supreme Court precedent, he argued, held that one must be able to discern an "outer limit" to a limited power; in the case of retrospective copyright extensions, Congress could continue to extend copyright terms indefinitely through a set of limited extensions, thus rendering the "limited times" requirement meaningless.
Following this ruling, plaintiffs petitioned for a rehearing en banc (in front of the full panel of nine judges). This petition was rejected, 7–2, with Judges Sentelle and David Tatel dissenting.

Court of Appeals
On October 11, 2001, Plaintiffs filed a Petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States. On February 19, 2002, the Court granted Certiorari, agreeing to hear the case.
Oral arguments were presented on October 9, 2002. Lead counsel for the plaintiff was Lawrence Lessig; the government's case was argued by Solicitor General Theodore Olson.
Lessig refocused the Plaintiffs' brief to emphasize the Copyright clause restriction, as well as the First Amendment argument from the Appeals case. The decision to emphasize the Copyright clause argument was based on both the minority opinion of Judge Sentelle in the appeals court, and on several recent Supreme Court decisions authored by Chief Justice William Rehnquist: United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison.
In both of those decisions, Rehnquist, along with four of the Court's more conservative justices, held Congressional legislation unconstitutional, because said legislation exceeded the limits of the Constitution's Commerce clause. This profound reversal of precedent, Lessig argued, could not be limited to only one of the enumerated powers. If the court felt that it had the power to review legislation under the Commerce clause, Lessig argued, then the Copyright clause deserved similar treatment, or at very least a "principled reason" must be stated for according such treatment to only one of the enumerated powers.
On January 15, 2003, the Court held the CTEA constitutional by a 7–2 decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsburg, relied heavily on the Copyright Acts of 1790, 1831, 1909, and 1976 as precedent for retroactive extensions. One of the arguments supporting the act was the life expectancy has significantly increased among the human population since the 1700s, and therefore copyright law needed extending as well. However, the major argument for the act that carried over into the case was that the Constitution specified that Congress only needed to set time limits for copyrights; the length of which was left to their discretion. Thus, as long as the limit is not "forever," any limit set by Congress can be deemed constitutional.
A key factor in the CTEA's passage was a 1993 European Union (EU) directive instructing EU members to establish a baseline copyright term of life plus 70 years and to deny this longer term to the works of any non-EU country whose laws did not secure the same extended term. By extending the baseline United States copyright term, Congress sought to ensure that American authors would receive the same copyright protection in Europe as their European counterparts. [1]
The Supreme Court declined to address Lessig's contention that Lopez and Morrison offered precedent for enforcing the Copyright clause, and instead reiterated the lower court's reasoning that a retroactive term extension can satisfy the "limited times" provision in the copyright clause, as long as the extension itself is limited instead of perpetual. Furthermore, the Court refused to apply the proportionality standards of the Fourteenth Amendment or the free-speech standards in the First Amendment to limit Congress's ability to confer copyrights for limited terms.
Justice Breyer dissented, arguing that the CTEA amounted to a grant of perpetual copyright that undermined public interests. While the constitution grants Congress power to extend copyright terms in order to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," CTEA granted precedent to continually renew copyright terms making them virtually perpetual. Justice Breyer argued in his dissent that is highly unlikely any artist will be more inclined to produce work knowing their great-grandchildren will receive royalties. With regard to retroactive copyright extension he viewed it foolish to apply the government's argument that income received from royalties allows artists to produce more work saying, "How will extension help today's Noah Webster create new works 50 years after his death?" [2]
In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens also challenged the virtue of an individual reward, analyzing it from the perspective of patent law. He argued that the focus on compensation results only in "frustrating the legitimate members of the public who want to make use of it (a completed invention) in a free market." Further, the compelling need to encourage creation is proportionally diminished once a work is already created. Yet while a formula pairing commercial viability to duration of protection may be said to produce more economically efficient results in respect of high technology inventions with shorter shelf-lives, the same perhaps cannot be said for certain forms of copyrighted works, for which the present value of expenditures relating to creation depend less on scientific equipment and research and development programmes and more on unquantifiable creativity.[3][4]
Lessig expressed surprise that no decision was authored by Chief Justice Rehnquist or by any of the other four justices who supported the Lopez or Morrison decisions. Lessig would later regret basing his defence on legal arguments based on precedent, rather than attempting to demonstrate that the weakening of the public domain would cause harm to the economic health of the country. [5]

Related cases

Copyright
United States copyright law
Intellectual property clause
List of United States Supreme Court cases
Public Domain Enhancement Act
Free Culture
List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 537

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Hits
Hit and the acronym HIT may refer to:
Hit (baseball)
High intensity training, a form of strength training
Hit (album), by Peter Gabriel
Hits (disambiguation), for albums with that title
Hit Records, a record label
Hit single, a song that makes the top 40 of the sales charts or hit parade
"Hit", a song by Guided by Voices from the 1995 album Alien Lanes
"Hit", a single by The Wannadies from the 1997 album Bagsy Me
Hit (pronoun) in Old English — it in Modern English
Hunter Institute of TAFE, Australia
Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Huazhong Institute of Technology,China
Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, low platelet counts due to the administration of heparin
Hibernation induction trigger, a substance found in the blood of hibernating animals
Heavy Industries Taxila, a military complex in Pakistan
A brand of cookies by German food company Bahlsen
Hitachi's ticker symbol on the NYSEHIT
Hongkong International Terminals Ltd.
Hit (web request), a request for a single file from the web server
Health Information Technology, associated with Health informatics
Human Intelligence Task, see Amazon Mechanical Turk
Hypertext Induced Topic Selection or HITS algorithm, a means to rank web pages in search results
An item found by a search engine to match specified search conditions
An approximately correct answer in a test set
HIT Entertainment, British television production company formerly called Henson International Television.
Asking the dealer for another card in blackjack, as in the expression "hit me"
A Contract killing
A single dose in recreational drug use
Having sexual intercourse
An ugly person
Hīt, Iraq, a town
HITS

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Vestmannaeyjar
See also Vestmanna.
Latitude Longitude
63°25′N, 20°17′W
Vestmannaeyjar (English: The Westman Islands) is a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. Only the largest, Heimaey, is inhabited.
The islands are named after the Irish who were captured into slavery by the Norse Gaels. The Old Norse word Vestmenn, literally "Westmen", was applied to the Irish, and retained in Icelandic even though Ireland is more easterly than Iceland. Not long after Ingólfur Arnarson arrived in Iceland, his brother Hjörleifur was murdered by the slaves he had brought with him. Ingolfur tracked them down to Vestmannaeyjar and killed them all in retribution.
On June 20, 1627, the islands were captured by an Ottoman fleet of 15 ships (12 galleys and 3 other types of vessels), accompanied by the Barbary Pirates from Algiers, under the guidance of Murat Reis; who stayed there for 26 days until July 16, 1627. The forces of Murat Reis enslaved 400 people from the islands and took them to Algiers (after a voyage which lasted 27 days) where most of them spent the rest of their lives in bondage. One of the captives, Oluf Eigilsson, later managed to return back and wrote a book about his experience. Subsequently, a Turkish corsair named Ali Biçin Reis also came to the archipelago and Iceland itself, from where he took 800 slaves.
The area is very volcanically active, like the rest of Iceland. There were two major eruptions in the 20th century: the Eldfell eruption of January 1973 which created a 700-foot-high mountain where a meadow had been, and caused the island's 5000 inhabitants to be temporarily evacuated to the mainland, and an eruption in 1963 created the new island of Surtsey.
From 1998 to 2003 the islands were home to Keiko the killer whale, star of Free Willy.
The islands are famed in Iceland for their yearly festival, "Þjóðhátíð", which attracts a large portion of the nation's youth. The festival was originally held because of the islanders' inability to participate in the festivities for the 1000th anniversary of the inhabitation of Iceland, and decided to hold their own festival. The word "Þjóðhátíð" means "national festival". For the first seventy years or so it was a large family-oriented festival, but has in the last century become a rite of passage for teenagers, and involves much consumption of alcohol.
Current Mayor of Vestmannaeyjar is Elliði Vignisson.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007


Presidential election results map. Purple denotes states won by Harrison/Tyler, Red denotes those won by Van Buren & one of his three running mates. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
Before Election Martin Van Buren Democratic
After ElectionUnited States presidential election, 1840 William Henry Harrison Whig
The United States presidential election of 1840 saw President Martin Van Buren fight for re-election against an economic depression and a Whig Party unified for the first time behind war hero William Henry Harrison. Rallying under the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too," the Whigs easily defeated Van Buren.
This election was unique in that electors cast votes for four men who had been or would become President of the United States: current President Martin Van Buren; President-elect William Henry Harrison; Vice-President-elect John Tyler, who would succeed Harrison upon his death; and James Polk, who received one electoral vote for Vice President.

Nominations
Van Buren, the incumbent, was renominated in Baltimore in May 1840. The party refused to renominate his sitting Vice-President, Richard Mentor Johnson. In the electoral college, the Democratic vice presidential votes were divided between Johnson, Littleton W. Tazewell, and James Knox Polk.

Democratic Party nomination
For the first time in their history, the Whigs held a national convention to determine their presidential candidate. It opened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on December 4, 1839, almost a full year before the general election. The three leading candidates were William Henry Harrison, a war hero and the most successful of Van Buren's opponents in the 1836 election; Winfield Scott, another general, active in skirmishes with the British in 1837 and 1838; and Henry Clay, the Whigs' congressional leader and former Speaker of the House.
Clay led on the first ballot, but circumstances conspired to deny him the nomination. First of all, the convention came on the heels of a string of Whig electoral losses. Harrison had managed to distance himself from the losses, but Clay, as the party's philosophical leader, could not. Had the convention been held in the spring, when the economic downturn had led to a string of Whig victories, Clay would have had much greater support. Secondly, the convention rules had been drawn up so that whoever won the majority of delegates from a given state would win all the votes from that state; this worked against Clay because he had almost the whole of Southern delegations, which meant that he didn't capture many votes from his opponents in the South, while he had large minority support in Northern delegations, which meant that his opponents poached many delegates from him in the North. Finally, several Southern states which supported Clay had abstained from sending delegates to the convention. As a result, the nomination went to Harrison.
The state by state roll call was printed in the newspaper the Farmer's Cabinet on 12/13/1839:
Because Harrison was considered a Northerner, the Whigs needed to balance the ticket with a Southerner. They also sought a Clay supporter to help unite the party. After being turned down by several Southern Clay supporters, the convention finally found a Southern nominee who had faithfully supported Clay throughout the convention and who would agree to run: former Senator John Tyler of Virginia.

Whig Party nomination

General election
In the wake of the Panic of 1837, Van Buren was widely unpopular, and Harrison, following Andrew Jackson's strategy, ran as a war hero and man of the people while presenting Van Buren as a wealthy snob living in luxury at the public expense. Although Harrison was comfortably wealthy and well educated, his "log cabin" image caught fire, sweeping all sections of the country.
Harrison avoided campaigning on the issues, with his Whig Party a broad coalition with few common ideals.

Campaign
Although his popular vote margin was only about 6 points, Harrison's electoral victory was overwhelming, carrying North, West, and South.


Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1840 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (July 27, 2005).
Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 31, 2005).
The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

Consequences

Campaign songs/slogans
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too"

Abbreviated version (file info) — play in browser (beta)

  • First verse and chorus.
    Problems listening to the file? See media help.
    Full version (file info) — play in browser (beta)

    • All twelve verses.
      Problems listening to the file? See media help. Harrison


      Rockabye, baby, Daddy's a Whig When he comes home, hard cider he'll swig When he has swug He'll fall in a stu And down will come Tyler and Tippecanoe.

      Rockabye, baby, when you awake You will discover Tip is a fake. Far from the battle, war cry and drum He sits in his cabin a'drinking bad rum.


      Rockabye, baby, never you cry You need not fear OF Tip and his Ty. What they would ruin, Van Buren will fix. Van's a magician, they are but tricks.

      Electoral college selection

      Second Party System
      History of the United States (1789-1849)

Monday, December 24, 2007


Compassionate conservatism is a political philosophy that stresses using traditionally Conservative techniques and concepts in order to improve the general welfare of society.

Compassionate conservatism In the United States
More fundamentalist conservatives and many on the political left have criticized compassionate conservatism as just another word for a political moderate, in addition to expressing significant doubt of its existence, regardless of whether the person taking the position is a Democrat, Republican or a member of a third party.
Political opponents of conservatives have also claimed that compassionate conservatism is a meaningless phrase or an oxymoron, and an example of hypocrisy intended to confuse voters and simultaneously appeal to the middle and right of the political spectrum. Proponents often respond to this objection by noting that critics seem more concerned about religious community involvement than for the individuals receiving aid from these faith-based organizations.
Comedian Robin Williams has regularly described compassionate conservatism as sounding like "a Volvo with a gunrack."

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Gabriel Auguste Daubrée
Gabriel Auguste Daubrée (June 25, 1814-May 29, 1896) was a French geologist.
Daubrée was born at Metz, and educated at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. At the age of twenty he had qualified as a mining engineer, and in 1838 he was appointed to take charge of the mines in the Bas-Rhin (Alsace), and subsequently to be professor of mineralogy and geology at the Faculty of Sciences, Strasbourg. In 1859 he became engineer in chief of mines, and in 1861 he was appointed professor of geology at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and was also elected member of the French Academy of Sciences. In the following year he became professor of mineralogy at the Ecole des Mines, and in 1872 director of that school. In 1880 the Geological Society of London awarded to him the Wollaston medal.
His published researches date from 1841, when the origin of certain tin minerals attracted his attention; he subsequently discussed the formation of bog-iron ore, and worked out in detail the geology of the Bas-Rhin (1852). From 1857 to 1861, while engaged in engineering works connected with the springs of Plombieres, he made a series of interesting observations on thermal waters and their influence on the Roman masonry through which they made their exit. He was, however, especially distinguished for his long-continued and often dangerous experiments on the artificial production of minerals and rocks. He likewise discussed the permeability of rocks by water, and the effects of such infiltration in producing volcanic phenomena; he dealt with the subject of metamorphism, with the deformations of the earth's crust, with earthquakes, and with the composition and classification of meteorites. He died in Paris.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Coimbra Group
The Coimbra Group (CG) is a network of European universities that gathers 38 universities, some of which are among the oldest and most prestigious in Europe. It was founded in 1985 and formally constituted by charter in 1987.
The group took its name from the city of Coimbra, Portugal and the university located there, itself one of the oldest in Europe. The University of Coimbra celebrated its 700th anniversary in the same year the group was founded.

Mission
In pursuit of its Mission the Coimbra Group aims to:

Facilitate knowledge transfer between its constituent universities by means of staff and student interchange so that they can benefit from the added value given by membership of the Coimbra Group, whilst respecting the cultural and national identities of individual universities and their individual freedom in learning and research.
Work with European Union (EU) institutions with a view to participating in or organizing EU higher education and research projects to the benefit of Coimbra Group members.
Contribute to the debate within Europe on quality in higher education and promote the adoption of quality assurance mechanisms within its member universities.
Become a driving force in the creation and further development of the European Higher Education Area and promote the academic expertise of its members within this area and the European Research Area.
Be recognized as an expert body, able to advise its members and EU institutions on various matters relating to higher education, such as information technology (IT) as applied to new teaching methods and lifelong learning.
Encourage co-operation in cultural, social and sporting activities between its members.
Promote the Coimbra Group worldwide as a source of academic excellence in Europe, with a view to attracting students to the universities in the Coimbra Group and encouraging academic collaboration and interchange with its members.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Turkish dotted and dotless I
The Turkish alphabet, which is a variant of the Latin alphabet, includes two distinct versions of the letter I, one dotted and the other dotless.
I ı is the letter which describes the close back unrounded vowel sound (/ɯ/). Neither the upper nor lower case version has a dot.
İ i describes the variant close front unrounded vowel sound (/i/). Both the upper and lower case versions have a dot.
Examples:
In contrast, the Turkish alphabet uses the letter "j" (pronounced /ʒ/) the same way as in other Latin scripts, with the tittle only on the lower case character: J j.

İstanbul /isˈtanbul/ (starts with an i sound, not an ı).
Diyarbakır /dijaɾˈbakɯɾ/ (the first and last vowels are spelled and pronounced differently) Consequence for ligatures
In Unicode U+0131 is a lower case letter dotless i (ı). U+0130 (İ) is capital i with dot. ISO-8859-9 has them at positions 0xDD and 0xFD respectively. In normal typography, when lower case i's is combined with other diacritics, the dot is generally removed before the diacritic is added; however, Unicode still lists the equivalent combining sequences as including the dotted i, since logically it is the normal dotted i character that is being modified.
Software handling Unicode uppercasing and lowercasing will generally change ı to I and İ to i but unless it is specifically set up for Turkish it will change I to i and i to I rather than I to ı and i to İ. This means that the effect of uppercasing followed by lowercasing can be different from the effect of just lowercasing for texts that contain these characters.
In the Microsoft Windows SDK, beginning with Windows Vista, several relevant functions have a NORM_LINGUISTIC_CASING flag, to indicate that for Turkish and Azerbaijani locales, I should map to ı and i to İ.
In the LaTeX typesetting language the dotless i can be written with the backslash-i command: i.
Dotless i (and dotted capital I) is also famous for its problematic handling under Turkish locales in several software, including Oracle DBMS, Java (this bug in Java will be fixed in the upcoming Java 6.0 release), and Unixware 7, where implicit capitalization of keywords, variables, tables names are not foreseen by the application developers. When applications written for such software acts strangely, it is better to switch locale to C or US English via System-wide or application-specific settings. Bugs should be logged in such situations, and if necessary patches submitted by developers to the software involved.

Thursday, December 20, 2007


Mark Strand (born April 11, 1934) is an American poet, essayist, and translator.
Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. His early years were spent in North America, while much of his teenage years were spent in South and Central America. IN 1957, he earned his B.A. from Antioch College. Strand then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960-1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer. Strand has since taught at many universities and published eleven books of poetry, in addition to translations from the poetry of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others. In 1997, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He currently teaches at Columbia University.
In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990-1991 term. Strand has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for A Blizzard of One.

Awards

Mark Strand Prose

Poems from the Quechua (Halty Ferguson, 1971)
Alberti, Rafael, The Owl's Insomnia (Atheneum, 1973)
Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, Souvenir of the Ancient World (Antaeus Editions, 1976)
Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti, with Songs from the Quechua (2002)

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Rotational period
In astronomy, a rotation period is the time an astronomical object takes to complete one revolution around its rotation axis relative to the background stars. For the Earth this is a sidereal day. It differs from a solar day, which is measured by the passage of the Sun across the local meridian.

Rotational period Rotation period of selected objects

Orbital period
Sidereal time
Synchronous rotation
Prograde and retrograde motion
Precession

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Grand Committee
The grand committees are committees of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Bristol Observer
The Bristol Observer started out as a Kingswood and Keynsham Observer, a weekly paper, but at this time it was a paid for publication. In 1981 it became the Bristol Observer Series and was distributed free.

陶喆

陶喆(英文名:David Tao,1969年7月11日- )(喆字是「哲」的異體字),台灣流行歌手及流行音樂製作人。陶喆擅長節奏藍調(R&B)曲風的創作和演唱,並一度引領了台灣的R&B潮流,因此他被譽為華語世界的「R&B教父」。
陶喆原名陶緒忠,祖籍上海,出生於香港,在台北長大,目前定居美國洛杉磯。陶喆小時候英文名叫Anthony,不過後來他自己改了和父親一樣的名字叫David 。

家庭
陶喆曾於台北公館伯大尼美國學校就讀,15歲到美國,定居加州,曾就讀加利福尼亞大學爾灣分校,畢業於洛杉磯分校,主修心理學和電影。畢業後曾在美國當了18個月的警察。

就學
1993 年,陶喆回到台灣發展,開始創作歌曲和擔當音樂製作人,並為港台的一些知名歌手製作專輯。1997年,陶喆從幕後躍至台前,發行了自己的第一張專輯《陶喆》,為台灣流行音樂圈帶來重要影響,其中改編自台灣歌謠的R&B版「望春風」,更可謂開啟老歌新唱R&B復古風的風潮。而陶式情歌如「沙灘」、「愛很簡單」、「十點半的飛機場」等,也都在日後成為膾炙人口的經典情歌。自此,陶喆也廣為華語世界所熟知。

出道


陶喆 | I'm OK | 黑色柳丁 | 樂之路 | 太平盛世 | 太美麗
陶喆並不算是一名多產的歌手,平均兩年才推出一張專輯。但他每張專輯的發行都引起了廣泛的關注,獲得眾多獎項和好評。陶喆目前的幾張個人專輯中,歌曲大多都由他自己作曲,而作詞的任務常常由娃娃或他自己擔當,而專輯的編曲、合聲、演奏、錄音甚至是母帶前期製作也幾乎都是由他一手包辦。
2001年,迪士尼卡通年度鉅片《失落的帝國》在台上映,音樂才子陶喆與台灣本土天後張惠妹為中文版本男女主角配音獻聲。陶喆早在配音過程中就有創作靈感,沒多久便譜出《I Believe》這首歌曲,並被迪士尼選為失落的帝國國際中文版主題曲。

Sunday, December 16, 2007

University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
Formally established on the 24 January 1857, the University of Calcutta (also known as Calcutta University) (Bengali: কলকাতা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়), located in the city of Kolkata (previously Calcutta), India, was the first modern university in the Indian subcontinent. It is a state-government administered urban-based affiliating and research university. It has its main campuses in College Street, Rajabazar, Alipore, Hazra, South Sinthi and a host of affiliated colleges in greater Kolkata .

Campus
Faculties of the university
Faculty of Agriculture
Faculty of Arts
Faculty of Commerce, Social Welfare & Business Management
Faculty of Education, Journalism and Library Science
Faculty of Engineering & Technology
Faculty of Fine Arts, Music and Home Science
Faculty of Law
Faculty of Science Academics
University of Calcutta has fifty five departments organised into eight faculties — Agriculture; Arts; Commerce, Social Welfare & Business Management; Education, Journalism and Library Science; Engineering & Technology; Fine Arts, Music and Home Science; Law and Science.

Faculties
Undergraduates enroll for a three-year program. Students are assigned to a major when they enter the university, and cannot change it later. Science and business disciplines are in high demand, as these fields are perceived to have better job opportunities. Most programs are organized by years, though some programs use a semester system. Most departments offer masters programs that are one or two years in duration. Research in the university is conducted in specialized institutes as well as individual departments, many of which have doctoral programs.
The university has 18 research centers, 650 teachers,

Education and research

The first university located to the east of Suez to teach European Classics, English Literature, European and Indian Philosophy and Occidental and Oriental History.
The first medical school of Asia, the Calcutta Medical College was set up in 1835. Later it was affiliated to the university.
The first college for women in India, the Bethune College was set up in 1879.
The nation's first homeopathy college was established in 1880.
The Science College was established in 1917, the first in India.
The first blind school in India came into being in 1925.
The first university museum in India, The Ashutosh Museum, came into being in 1937.
The Government Arts College was established in 1951.
The Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM) was set up in 1953 as the country's first management institute. A tradition of notable firsts
The university was awarded the 'five star university' status by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council in 2001.
The Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China recently prepared a list of the world's top 500 institutions of higher learning (universities, research institutes etc.). The complete list is now available on the internet under the heading "Academic Ranking of World Universities, 2004" (see link above). The University of Calcutta was the only multi-disciplinary university from India to appear on the list. The other institutions from India on the list, for that year, were the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
On December 8, 2005, the Indian University Grants Commission declared Calcutta University as a ''University with Potential for Excellence''.
On November 10, 2005, The Times Higher Education Supplement published its list of the world's top arts and humanities universities. CU, ranked 39, was the only Indian university to make it to the top 50 list in that year.

NAAC Five Star Recognition
Ranking of Institute of Higher Education,Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
CU gets "Potential for Excellence" tag of University Grants Commission
The world's top arts and humanities universities Notable alumni/faculty

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms (lower case), is a software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU project he started the free software movement, and in October 1985 set up the Free Software Foundation. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.[4] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger.

Early years
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the hacker culture that Stallman thrived in began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software can be regarded as a consequence triggered by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as stated by Stallman's MIT fellow Brewster Kahle. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons — pragmatic for example: because it may lead to improved software.
In January 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983. He did not complete a Ph.D. but has been awarded six honorary degrees (see list below).

MIT's hacker culture declines

Main article: GNU project Activism
Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He untiringly asks people to say "free software", "GNU/Linux", and to avoid the term "intellectual property". His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology, are a source of regular mis-understanding and friction with parts of the free and open source software community.
One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout their article., but Stallman's term is not widely used.
Avoiding "piracy" for the act of copying information, arguing that "piracy" has always designated the act of robbery or plunder at sea, and that the term is misused by corporations to lend a greater importance to the act of copying software or other intangible things.
"Corrupt discs" or "Fake CDs" to describe digital audio compact discs which employ Copy Control or other similar technology to prevent copying, arguing that they break the Red Book standard and noting that recently such discs are printed without the Compact Disc logo.
"Treacherous Computing" rather than "Trusted Computing", which limits the freedoms of users by denying them the ability to control their computers.
"Website Revision System (WRS)" as a replacement for "Content management system (CMS)" arguing that:
Stallman refers to "Digital Restrictions Management" (DRM) rather than "Digital Rights Management", because DRM is designed to limit what the user can do, not grant the user more rights. He also suggests calling it "handcuffware", a term which has not caught on in English. The Free Software Foundation has started the "Defective by Design" campaign in response to these issues. Terminology
By all accounts, including his own,

Personal life
Stallman has received the following recognition for his work:

1986: Honorary life time membership of the Chalmers Computer Society
1990: Receives the exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship
1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."
2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.
2005: Fundazione Pistoletto prize. Recognition

Stallman, Richard M. & Sussman, Gerald J. (November 1975). Heuristic Techniques in Computer-Aided Circuit Analysis, published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Vol. CAS-22 (11)
Stallman, Richard M. & Sussman, Gerald J. (1977). Forward Reasoning and Dependency-Directed Backtracking In a System for Computer-Aided Circuit analysis, published in Artificial Intelligence 9 pp.135-196
Stallman, Richard M. (1981). EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self-Documenting Display Editor. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory publication AIM-519A. Also available over the web in HTML and PDF formats.
Stallman, Richard M. (2002). GNU Emacs Manual: Fifteenth edition for GNU Emacs Version 21. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-85-X. Also available over the web in different formats.
Gay, Joshua (ed) (2002): Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-98-1. Also available over the web in PDF, Texinfo, and Postscript formats
Williams, Sam (2002): Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. ISBN 0-596-00287-4.
Stallman, Richard; McGrath, Roland; & Smith, Paul D. (2004). GNU Make: A Program for Directed Compilation. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-83-3. Also available over the web in different formats. See also

stallman.org, Richard Stallman's personal homepage.
Stallman's weblog of his travels
Stallman's political and human rights related commentary and an RSS-feed of the same.
Essays on the GNU philosophy pages, mostly by Stallman, on the free software movement
Essays on the FSF essays page
The original GNU announcement

Friday, December 14, 2007

Reading (HM Prison)
Reading (HM Prison), formally HM Prison & YOI Reading is a British prison.
HM Prison Reading was built in 1844 as the Berkshire County gaol in the heart of Reading, Berkshire on the site of the former county prison, alongside the site of Reading Abbey and beside the River Kennet. Designed by George Gilbert Scott it was based on London's New Model Prison at Pentonville with a cruciform shape and is a good example of early Victorian prison architecture. It was designed to carry out what was the very latest penal technique of the time, known as the separate system. As a county gaol it also served as the site for executions, the first one in 1845 before a crowd of 10,000, the last one being carried out in 1913.
From 1916, it was used to hold Irish prisoners involved in the Easter Rising. It closed as gaol in 1920 and has also been used as internment site in both world wars, a borstal and for a variety of other purposes.
In 1973, Reading was redesignated as a local prison and around that time its old castle wall was removed. In 1992 it became a Remand Centre and Young Offenders Institution, holding prisoners between the ages of 18 and 21 years. It now has about 270 inmates. The Remand centre Library service is run by Reading Borough Libraries.

Thursday, December 13, 2007


Communities and Local Government, rebranded from the Department for Communities and Local Government, is the United Kingdom government department for communities and local government. It was formed in July 2001 as part of the Cabinet Office with the title Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), headed by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, John Prescott. In May 2002 the ODPM became a separate department after absorbing the Local Government and Regions portfolios from the defunct Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. During the 5 May 2006 reshuffle of Blair's government, it was renamed and Ruth Kelly was made the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. The Deputy Prime Minister became a minister without portfolio and his office had purely secretarial functions. Hazel Blears was appointed Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on 28th June 2007.
It is responsible for largely the same issues listed on the ODPM website (from June 2005). They are:


  • Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme

  • Neighbourhood Renewal Fund



On its creation it also assumed the community policy function of the Home Office and has since established the Commission on Integration and Cohesion and the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights.
In January 2007, Ruth Kelly announced proposals to bring together the delivery functions of the Housing Corporation, English Partnerships and parts of Communities and Local Government to form a new unified housing and regeneration agency, Communities England, which is likely to become operational during 2008 or 2009.
The department has many offices including 26 Whitehall, Eland House and Ashdown House in London. It is in charge of the Government Offices in the nine regions of England.

Building Regulations
Civil Resilience
Fire and the Fire Service in the UK
Homelessness
Housing
Local Government
Neighbourhood Renewal
Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme
Neighbourhood Renewal Fund
Planning
Regions
Social Exclusion
Sustainable Communities
Urban Policy ODPM Ministers and civil servants
The Permanent Secretary is Peter Housden.

Secretary of State: The Rt Hon. Hazel Blears, MP

  • Minister of State: John Healey, MP
    Minister of State for Housing: The Rt Hon. Yvette Cooper, MP (also attends cabinet)

    • Parliamentary Under Secretary of State: Iain Wright, MP
      Parliamentary Under Secretary of State: Parmjit Dhanda, MP
      Parliamentary Under Secretary: The Rt Hon. The Baroness Andrews, OBE

Wednesday, December 12, 2007


Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden", and analýein, "to loosen" or "to untie") is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. Typically, this involves finding the secret key. In non-technical language, this is the practice of codebreaking or cracking the code, although these phrases also have a specialised technical meaning (see code).
"Cryptanalysis" is also used to refer to any attempt to circumvent the security of other types of cryptographic algorithms and protocols in general, and not just encryption. However, cryptanalysis usually excludes attacks that do not primarily target weaknesses in the actual cryptography; methods such as bribery, physical coercion, burglary, keystroke logging, and so forth, although these latter types of attack are an important concern in computer security, and are often more effective than traditional cryptanalysis.
Even though the goal has been the same, the methods and techniques of cryptanalysis have changed drastically through the history of cryptography, adapting to increasing cryptographic complexity, ranging from the pen-and-paper methods of the past, through machines like Enigma in World War II, to the computer-based schemes of the present. The results of cryptanalysis have also changed — it is no longer possible to have unlimited success in codebreaking, and there is a hierarchical classification of what constitutes a rare practical attack. In the mid-1970s, a new class of cryptography was introduced: asymmetric cryptography. Methods for breaking these cryptosystems are typically radically different from before, and usually involve solving carefully-constructed problems in pure mathematics, the best-known being integer factorization.

Cryptanalyst History of cryptanalysis
Although the actual word "cryptanalysis" is relatively recent (it was coined by William Friedman in 1920), methods for breaking codes and ciphers are much older. The first known recorded explanation of cryptanalysis was given by 9th century Arabian polymath Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah Al-Kindi in A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages. This treatise includes a description of the method of frequency analysis (Ibrahim Al-Kadi, 1992- ref-3).
Frequency analysis is the basic tool for breaking classical ciphers. In natural languages, certain letters of the alphabet appear more frequently than others; in English, "E" is likely to be the most common letter in any given sample of text. Similarly, the digraph "TH" is the most likely pair of letters, and so on. Frequency analysis relies on a cipher failing to hide these statistics. For example, in a simple substitution cipher (where each letter is simply replaced with another), the most frequent letter in the ciphertext would be a likely candidate for "E".
Frequency analysis relies as much on linguistic knowledge as it does on statistics, but as ciphers became more complex, mathematics gradually became the predominant approach to cryptanalysis. This change was particularly evident during World War II, where efforts to crack Axis ciphers required new levels of mathematical sophistication. Moreover, automation was for the first time applied to cryptanalysis with the Bomba device and the Colossus — one of the earliest computers.

Classical cryptanalysis
Even though computation was used to great effect in cryptanalysis in World War II, it also made possible new methods of cryptography orders of magnitude more complex than ever before. Taken as a whole, modern cryptography has become much more impervious to cryptanalysis than the pen-and-paper systems of the past, and now seems to have the upper hand against pure cryptanalysis. The historian David Kahn notes, "Many are the cryptosystems offered by the hundreds of commercial vendors today that cannot be broken by any known methods of cryptanalysis. Indeed, in such systems even a chosen plaintext attack, in which a selected plaintext is matched against its ciphertext, cannot yield the key that unlock other messages. In a sense, then, cryptanalysis is dead. But that is not the end of the story. Cryptanalysis may be dead, but there is - to mix my metaphors - more than one way to skin a cat." (Remarks on the 50th Anniversary of the National Security Agency, 1 November 2002). Kahn goes on to mention increased opportunities for interception, bugging, side channel attacks and quantum computers as replacements for the traditional means of cryptanalysis [1].
Kahn may have been premature in his cryptanalysis postmortem; weak ciphers are not yet extinct, and cryptanalytic methods employed by intelligence agencies remain unpublished. In academia, new designs are regularly presented, and are also frequently broken: the 1984 block cipher Madryga was found to be susceptible to ciphertext-only attacks in 1998; FEAL-4, proposed as a replacement for the DES standard encryption algorithm, was demolished by a spate of attacks from the academic community, many of which are entirely practical. In industry, too, ciphers are not free from flaws: for example, the A5/1, A5/2 and CMEA algorithms, used in mobile phone technology, can all be broken in hours, minutes or even in real-time using widely-available computing equipment. In 2001, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), a protocol used to secure Wi-Fi wireless networks, was shown to be susceptible to a practical related-key attack.

Cryptanalyst Modern cryptanalysis
Successful cryptanalysis has undoubtedly influenced history; the ability to read the presumed-secret thoughts and plans of others can be a decisive advantage, and never more so than during wartime. For example, in World War I, the breaking of the Zimmermann Telegram was instrumental in bringing the United States into the war. In World War II, the cryptanalysis of the German ciphers — including the Enigma machine and the Lorenz cipher — has been credited with everything between shortening the end of the European war by a few months to determining the eventual result (see ULTRA). The United States also benefited from the cryptanalysis of the Japanese PURPLE code (see MAGIC).
Governments have long recognised the potential benefits of cryptanalysis for intelligence, both military and diplomatic, and established dedicated organisations devoted to breaking the codes and ciphers of other nations, for example, GCHQ and the NSA, organisations which are still very active today. In 2004, it was reported that the United States had broken Iranian ciphers. (It is unknown, however, whether this was pure cryptanalysis, or whether other factors were involved: [2]).

The results of cryptanalysis
Cryptanalytic attacks vary in potency and how much of a threat they pose to real-world cryptosystems. A certificational weakness is a theoretical attack that is unlikely to be applicable in any real-world situation; the majority of results found in modern cryptanalytic research are of this type. Essentially, the practical importance of an attack is dependent on the answers to the following three questions:

What knowledge and capabilities are needed as a prerequisite?
How much additional secret information is deduced?
How much effort is required? (What is the computational complexity?) Prior knowledge: scenarios for cryptanalysis
The results of cryptanalysis can also vary in usefulness. For example, cryptographer Lars Knudsen (1998) classified various types of attack on block ciphers according to the amount and quality of secret information that was discovered:
Similar considerations apply to attacks on other types of cryptographic algorithm.

Total break — the attacker deduces the secret key.
Global deduction — the attacker discovers a functionally equivalent algorithm for encryption and decryption, but without learning the key.
Instance (local) deduction — the attacker discovers additional plaintexts (or ciphertexts) not previously known.
Information deduction — the attacker gains some Shannon information about plaintexts (or ciphertexts) not previously known.
Distinguishing algorithm — the attacker can distinguish the cipher from a random permutation. Classifying success in cryptanalysis
Attacks can also be characterised by the amount of resources they require. This can be in the form of:
In academic cryptography, a weakness or a break in a scheme is usually defined quite conservatively. Bruce Schneier sums up this approach: "Breaking a cipher simply means finding a weakness in the cipher that can be exploited with a complexity less than brute force. Never mind that brute-force might require 2 encryptions would be considered a break...simply put, a break can just be a certificational weakness: evidence that the cipher does not perform as advertised." (Schneier, 2000).

Time — the number of "primitive operations" which must be performed. This is quite loose; primitive operations could be basic computer instructions, such as addition, XOR, shift, and so forth, or entire encryption methods.
Memory — the amount of storage required to perform the attack.
Data — the quantity of plaintexts and ciphertexts required. Complexity
Asymmetric cryptography (or public key cryptography) is cryptography that relies on using two keys; one private, and one public. Such ciphers invariably rely on "hard" mathematical problems as the basis of their security, so an obvious point of attack is to develop methods for solving the problem. The security of two-key cryptography depends on mathematical questions in a way that single-key cryptography generally does not, and conversely links cryptanalysis to wider mathematical research in a new way.
Asymmetric schemes are designed around the (conjectured) difficulty of solving various mathematical problems. If an improved algorithm can be found to solve the problem, then the system is weakened. For example, the security of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme depends on the difficulty of calculating the discrete logarithm. In 1983, Don Coppersmith found a faster way to find discrete logarithms (in certain groups), and thereby requiring cryptographers to use larger groups (or different types of groups). RSA's security depends (in part) upon the difficulty of integer factorization — a breakthrough in factoring would impact the security of RSA.
In 1980, one could factor a difficult 50-digit number at an expense of 10 operations. Advances in computing technology also meant that the operations could be performed much faster, too. Moore's law predicts that computer speeds will continue to increase. Factoring techniques may continue do so as well, but will most likely depend on mathematical insight and creativity, neither of which has ever been successfully predictable. 150-digit numbers of the kind once used in RSA have been factored. The effort was greater than above, but was not unreasonable on fast modern computers. By the start of the 21st century, 150-digit numbers were no longer considered a large enough key size for RSA. Numbers with several hundred digits are still considered too hard to factor in 2005, though methods will probably continue to improve over time, requiring key size to keep pace or new algorithms to be used.
Another distinguishing feature of asymmetric schemes is that, unlike attacks on symmetric cryptosystems, any cryptanalysis has the opportunity to make use of knowledge gained from the public key.

Cryptanalysis of asymmetric cryptography
Quantum computers, which are still in the early phases of development, have potential use in cryptanalysis. For example, Shor's Algorithm could factor large numbers in polynomial time, in effect breaking some commonly used forms of public-key encryption.
By using Grover's algorithm on a quantum computer, brute-force key search can be made quadratically faster. However, this could be countered by increasing the key length.

Methods of cryptanalysis

Black-bag cryptanalysis
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis
Side-channel attack
Decipherment
Cryptography
Cryptography portal
Topics in cryptography
National Cipher Challenge
Zendian Problem