AcharyaChanakya/simple-wikipedia huggingface dataset:
It is very hard to save palm seeds because they are killed by cooling them, which is the normal way of keeping rare seeds for the future. Also, planting rare kinds in parks can never truly recreate the wild areas they come from, and the plants may not do well in these parks.
The Palm Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) started in 1984, supported by the WWF. The group gathered a lot of information from different parts of the world. An action plan to save rare palms was made by this group in 1996.
Pests that attack species of palm trees include:
Human use of palms is as old as, or even older than, civilization itself, starting with the growing of date palms by Mesopotamians and other Middle Eastern peoples 5000 years or more ago. The Date Palm had a great effect on the history of the Middle East. Historian W.H. Barreveld wrote:
The early importance of palms in the Middle East is shown in scripture. They are mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible, and more than 22 times in the Qur'an.
Apart from the well-known coconut and date, there are other kinds of food from palms. Palm oil, Sago, heart of palm and palm wine are all eaten or drunk in different parts of the world. Palm oil is used in everything, from cosmetics to food ingredients.
South Carolina is nicknamed the Palmetto State, after the sabal palmetto, logs from which were used to build the fort at Fort Moultrie. During the American Revolutionary War their spongy wood helped stop the British cannonballs.
Coir is a coarse, water-resistant fibre from the outer shell of coconuts. It is used in doormats, brushes, mattresses, and ropes. 'Dragon's blood' is a resin used in dyes, varnishes and incense, can come from the fruit of the rattan. The "Washingtonia robusta" trees line Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California.
Today, palms are popular in parks and gardens in countries outside the tropics. two of the most cold-tolerant species are the Chusan palm, from eastern Asia, and the needle palm from the United States.
The palm branch was a symbol of triumph and victory in Roman times. The Romans rewarded champions of the games and celebrated success in war with palm branches.
Jews also had a tradition of carrying palm branches during festive times.
The motto of the University of Southern California is "Palmam qui meruit ferat", which means in Latin, "Let him bear the palm who has deserved it".
Palms appear on the flags and seals of several places where they are native, including those of Haiti, Guam, Florida, South Carolina, and Samoa.
The palm has many meanings in both ancient and modern Middle Eastern religions.
Early Christians used the palm branch to symbolize the victory of the faithful over enemies of the soul, as in the Palm Sunday festival celebrating the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.
In Christian art, martyrs were usually shown holding palms representing the victory of spirit over flesh, and it was widely believed that a picture of a palm on a tomb meant that a martyr was buried there. Origen calls the palm "the symbol of victory in that war waged by the spirit against the flesh. In this sense it was especially applicable to martyrs, the victors par excellence over the spiritual foes of mankind; hence the frequent occurrence in the Acts of the martyrs of such expressions as "he received the palm of martyrdom".
In Judaism, the palm represents peace and plenty. The palm may also symbolize the Tree of Life in Kabbalah.
The Prophet Muhammad is said to have built his home out of palm, and the palm represents rest and hospitality in many cultures of the Middle East.
Palm stems represented long life to the Ancient Egyptians, and the god Huh was often shown holding a palm stem in one or both hands.
The sacred tree of the Assyrians was a palm that represents the god Ishtar connecting heaven, the crown of the tree, and earth, the base of the trunk. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, who had a part in the sacred marriage ritual, was thought of as the one who made the dates abundant.
The palm tree was a sacred sign of Apollo in Ancient Greece because he had been born under one.
The palm, especially the Coconut, remains a symbol of tropical island paradise.
The palm tree also represents Oasis.
Rabindranath Tagore has written a long famous poem about a special genus of palm tree.
Bailiwick of Guernsey
The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a territory belonging to the British Crown in the Channel Islands. The bailiwick includes the islands of Guernsey, Alderney and Burhou, Herm and Jethou as well as Sark, Little Sark and Brecqhou.
A bailiwick is a territory governed by a bailiff. The Bailiff of Guernsey is the head of the parliament, the States of Guernsey, which makes the laws for the Bailiwick. But Sark and Alderney also have their own parliaments and pass some of their own laws.
The Casquets (49°43.′4″N, 2°22.′7″W) are a group of rocks 13 km northwest of Alderney and are part of an underwater sandstone ridge. Other rocks which appear above the water are the islets of Burhou and Ortac. Not many plants grow on them.
Lihou is a small tidal island (95 vergees; 7ha) that is part of the Channel Islands. It lies off the west coast of Guernsey and is the most westerly point in the Channel Islands. Coordinates: 49°27′38.16″N, 2°40′4.44″W. The island was bought by the States of Guernsey in January 1995. Lihou is joined to Guernsey at low tide by an ancient stone path between the island and L'Eree headland. It is part of the Parish of St. Peter's.
The country code (also used for internet) is GG.
Alderney
Alderney is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel between England and France. It forms part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, but its parliament, The States of Alderney, still has the right to make laws for the island.
The traditional language was Auregnais, but nobody speaks it now.
During World War II Alderney was used to house four concentration camps by the Germans, who had occupied each of the Channel Islands.
In Greek Mythology, Hera is the goddess of woman, marriage, family, childbirth and Queen of Olympus. She is considered as one of the Twelve Olympians that rule on top of Mount Olympus. She is the youngest daugter of Kronos and Rhea. Hera is also the sister and wife of Zeus making her the Queen of the Greek Gods and Queen of Heaven. She is generally seen as the chief goddess of the Greek Pantheon.
According to the Ancient Greeks, Hera was once the most beautiful of all the goddesses, many of the gods lusted for her and wanted her to be their wife but only Zeus managed to gain her as his wife by using his slyness and tricks. She is also associated with many other things such as sky, air, woman's fertility, queenship, kingdoms, empires, heirs and etc. However her main role in the Greek Pantheon is being the goddess of woman and marriage. Her duty as a goddess is to protect woman from any circumstances and bless (or curse) marriages. Hera is known to be a loyal but jealous and vindictive wife.
Hera's sacred animals are cows, cuckoo and peacock. Her sacred symbols are diadem, crown, throne, pomegranate and lotus. She is generally depicted as a mature, very tall and beautiful woman with large, beautiful eyes and soft white skin with an unblemished complexion. She is shown to be wearing a diadem or a crown, holding a sceptre, wearing a luxurious robe and decorating herself with precious jewelries. Her childrens are Angelos, Ares, Hebe, Eileithyia and Hephaestus. Other sources also claim that Enyo and Eris is her daughters.
Zagreus is a son of Zeus with the goddess Persephone. Hera tried to kill him when he was a baby with the Titans. The Titans were going to make Zagreus come to him by showing him toys, and then eat him. Zeus scared the Titans away with his thunderbolts, but the Titans had already eaten everything but Zagreus' heart. Zeus used the heart to re-make Zagreus again. He did this by putting the heart in the womb of Semele. Zagreus is therefore reborn as Dionysus.
Echo is a nymph in Greek mythology. She once had the job of distracting Hera from Zeus having relationships with other women. She did this by leading Hera away and flattering her. When Hera found out she was very angry with Echo. She put a curse on her that meant that she could only speak the words of other people after she had heard them. It is due to this story that we get the meaning behind the word "echo".
Io is a mistress of Zeus. Hera almost caught Io and Zeus together, but Zeus hid Io by turning her into a cow. Hera was not fooled and said that Zeus had to give her the cow as a present. Once Io belonged to Hera she was looked after by Argus. It was Argus's job to make sure that Io and Zeus were never together. Zeus ordered Hermes to kill Argus so that Io would be free. Hermes did this by killing Argus after he had been lulled to sleep. Hera then sent a gadfly to sting Io as she walked about on the earth.
Lamia is a queen of Libya who Zeus was in love with. Hera was jealous of Lamia and turned her into a monster. When she was a monster, Lamia then killed her children. Another version of this story is that Hera killed Lamia's children and was then so sad that she turned into a monster. Hera also put a curse on Lamia. The curse was that Lamia could not close her eyes. Hera chose this curse because she wanted Lamia to always think about the picture of her dead children. Zeus then gave Lamia the gift of being able to take her eyes out, so that she could rest. She could then put them back in again afterwards.
When Hera found out that Leto was pregnant with twins by Zeus she was angry. She banished Leto from Olympus, she also banned her from giving birth on any mainland or island that was known. Leto found a floating island, called Delos. It was neither a mainland or a "real" island, so Leto was allowed to give birth there. Artemis was born first, who then helped Leto to give birth to Apollo. After Artemis and Apollo was born, Hera was furious. So she sent the snake-monster, Python to hunt Leto and her twins. When Apollo reached to his adulthood, he slayed Python in Delphi and decreed that the humans will built a temple there in honour of his victory against Python. Few years later, Hera sent a giant named Tityos to rape Leto, but he was killed by Apollo and Artemis. Delos was later held down with four pillars so that it would not float around anymore. It is said to be surrounded by swans and later became a sacred place to Apollo.
Heracles is the stepson and enemy of Hera. Hera discovered that her husband, Zeus had an affair with a mortal women named Alcmene and she became extremely jealous at the mortal woman. Hera used all the power she had to prevent Alcmene from giving birth to Heracles. When Alcmene was about to give birth to Heracles, Hera requested that Zeus swore an oath and declare upon all the other Gods that the descendant of Perseus will be born on that day and the child will rule eveything around him. Then Hera descended from Olympus to Argos and cause the wife of Sthenelus, son of Perseus to gave birth to Eurystheus after only seven months while Hera tried to prevent Alcmene into giving birth to Heracles by sending her daughter Eileithyia and witches. This cause the fullfilment of Zeus' oath in that it was Eurystheus instead of Heracles. Hera continues her wrath on Heracles while he was still an infant. She send two poisonous snakes to Heracles to kill him in his cradle. Heracles throttled the snake with his bare hands and the nurse saw him playing with the dead snake as if they were a child's toy. Hera continues to torture her stepson throughout his life.
There was a certain woman named Gerana, who became the queen of the Pygmies. She was worshipped as a goddess. They honour her greatly with prayers and sacrficial rituals. Gerana soon became very arrogant and claim that she was more beautiful than Hera. When Hera learned about this, she was enraged. So she turned Gerana into a crane bird and proclaimed that birds who were descendants of Gerana will wage an eternal war with the Pygmy people evrytime they migrated near Okeanus' lake.
Aegina was one of Zeus' many lovers. Suprisingly, Zeus was able to hide Aegina from the watchful eyes of his wife. Zeus slept with Aegina and she bore him a son named Aeacus. He grew up to a king. However, Hera soon dicovered about Aeacus. As usual Hera was very upset and angry when she knew about this. As an act of vengeance, Hera sent two snakes to poison the entire island's water which ultimately led the death of it's population.
A mirror or looking-glass is something that reflects light. One common "plane mirror" is a piece of special flat glass that a person can look into to see a reflection of themselves or what is behind them.
Sometimes, a flat piece of metal or the surface of water can act like a mirror.
The reason you are able to see yourself in a mirror is because light comes in and gets reflected, and that's how you are able to see your reflection.
Mirrors can have magnification properties, making images appear smaller or larger than their actual size. They can also be concave (curved inward) or convex (curved outward), making the reflected angle and view to be smaller or larger, respectively. Special mirrors can make a person's appearance look quite strange.
Also, in a mirror, writing appears backwards, as a "mirror image" of the original writing.
Mirrors are usually made out of glass with metal on the back, called "silvering" even if the metal is not silver. Some mirrors are made of polished metal, which is less breakable.
Mirrors with a curved surface can make things appear bigger or smaller, like a lens does.
Space probe
A space probe is an unmanned space mission, usually a small spacecraft sent out to find out information about a planet or other far away thing. As a tool of space exploration a planetary probe may land on the planet, or orbit around it, or merely fly by closely. Probes use radio waves to send information back to Earth or sometimes to a manned spacecraft. A space observatory leaves the Earth to look at distant objects, but does not go near the objects, so it is not called a "probe".
Blue's Clues
Blue's Clues is an American television series for young children. It aired on Nickelodeon from September 8, 1996 to August 6, 2006, and has been repeated since then. On the show, Blue is a blue dog. Her owner was Steve, until 2002, when Steve went off to college. Now Steve's younger brother, Joe, owns her.
The producers got ideas from child development and early-childhood education. Innovative animation and other techniques helped their viewers learn. The show follows an animated blue-spotted dog named Blue as she plays a game with the host and the viewers.
"Blue's Clues" became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on American commercial television and was critical to Nickelodeon's growth. It has been called "one of the most successful, critically acclaimed, and ground-breaking preschool television series of all time".
"Blue's Clues" was developed during difficult period for children's television. In 1990, Congress had passed the Children's Television Act. This required networks and TV stations to devote a portion of their programming to children's shows. The legislation set no guidelines or criteria for educational programs and had no provisions for enforcement. According to author Diane Tracy, "The state of children's television was pretty dismal.
Since the late 1960s, PBS was one of the few sources for children's educational television programming in the U.S., and most other U.S. children's TV shows were violent and created for the purpose of selling toys. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in 1997 that the commercial broadcast networks had to air educational children's programs for a minimum of three hours per week. The cable network Nickelodeon, which had been airing programs for six- to twelve-year-olds, was not legally bound by this legislation but complied with it anyway many years before the laws and regulations were passed.
The show's producers and creators presented material in a narrative format instead of the more traditional magazine format. They used repetition to reinforce its curriculum, and structured every episode the same way.
They used research about child development and young children's viewing habits that had been done in the thirty years since the start of "Sesame Street" in the U.S. This revolutionized the genre by inviting their viewers' involvement. Research was part of the creative and decision-making process in the production of the show and was integrated into all aspects and stages of the creative process. "Blue's Clues" was the first cutout animation series for preschoolers. It looks like a storybook with primary colors and simple construction paper shapes of familiar objects with varied colors and textures.
Its home-based setting is familiar to American children, but has a look unlike other children's TV shows. A live production of "Blue's Clues", which used many of the production innovations developed by the show's creators, toured the U.S. starting in 1999. As of 2002, over 2 million people had attended over 1,000 performances.
Malcolm Gladwell noted that Sesame Street appealed to both children and adults, but Blue's Clues was solely aimed at preschool children. They like stories, repetition and joining in the answers. "Every" episode of Blue was tested on preschool children, and the research noted how much of the time children watched the screen. The order of clues was tested. All aspects of the program could be changed if the testing suggested it would work better some other way.
By 2002, "Blue's Clues" had received several awards for excellence in children's programming, educational software, and licensing, and had been nominated for nine Emmy Awards. It has been syndicated in 120 countries and translated into 15 languages. Regional versions of the show featuring local hosts have been produced in other countries. It was one of the first preschool shows to incorporate American Sign Language into its content. The show's extensive use of research in its development and production process inspired several research studies that have provided evidence for its effectiveness as a learning tool.
The Ford Motor Company (often known as Ford) is an American company that makes vehicles. This company is named after its founder, Henry Ford.
These brands are also made by Ford:
In 1896, Henry Ford had an idea to make a Quadricycle, the first "horseless carriage" he built. This four-wheeled vehicle was very different from cars we drive now. It was very different even from vehicles Ford produced just a few years later. Even so, this was the start of Ford's career as a businessman. Until the Quadricycle, Ford's work had been experimental and theoretical. For example, in the 1890s, Ford built a gas engine on his kitchen table — just an engine with nothing to power. Enough people liked the Quadricycle, and much could be done with the it, so it led to the beginning of Ford's business.
Ford Motor Company started on June 16, 1903, when Henry Ford and 11 business helpers signed papers to form the company. Their first Ford production car, the Model A, was sold in Detroit, Michigan a few months later. (This Model A should not be confused with their more famous Model A, which came out in 1927). With $280,000 (around 165 000 pounds), the early businessmen made what was to become one of the world's largest companies. Few companies changed the history and development of industry and society in the 20th century as much as Ford Motor Company.
Ford Motor Company's most important contribution to automotive manufacturing was the (moving) assembly line. First implemented at the Highland Park plant (in Michigan, US) in 1913, this new method let each workers to stay in one place, to do the same job repeatedly as the vehicles went by on the assembly line. The line proved to be very efficient; it helped the company make more cars, and make them cheaper than other car companies could do at the time. Before using the assembly line, Ford made 12,000 Model T's in a year. With the assembly line, Ford could make 12,000 Model T's in just two days. Ford had discovered how to make more cars that more people could afford to buy. He even paid his workers higher salaries than other car companies and still made money.
Henry Ford insisted that the company's future lay in the production of affordable cars for a mass market. In 1903, the company began using the first 19 letters of the alphabet to name new cars. In 1908, the Model T was born, and it was sold for 19 years. By selling 15 million Model T's, Ford Motor Company became a giant company which spanned the globe. They built plants in the Soviet Union, Japan and other places. Ford started making farm tractors, trucks and school buses. In 1925, Ford Motor Company bought the Lincoln Motor Company. It uses that name to build luxury cars. In the 1930s, the name "Mercury" was given to its mid-priced cars. Ford Motor Company was growing.
The 1920s
The 1930s
1932 Ford Model B Coup
The 1960s
The 1970s
The 1980s
The 1990s
The 2000s
Rastafari movement
A Rastafarian (often called a Rasta) is a member of the Rastafari movement. Most Rastafarians live in the Caribbean, most notably Jamaica.
Rastafarians say that Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, is Jah (shortened from Jehovah). They say that Jesus has returned again in the form of Haile Selassie I, or Jah, as he promised in the Bible, and he will deliver them to Zion, their name for paradise or Ethiopia.
There are several things that define a Rastafarian: they do not drink alcohol, they do not cut their hair, they spiritually smoke marijuana, they have a strict all-natural (often vegetarian) diet, and they believe in Jah and Zion.
Their diet is called "I-tal" derived from the word "vital", and is something like Jewish kosher, but sometimes with no meat at all.
Dreadlocks are a common hairstyle of Rastafarians. For them, dreadlocks are an expression of spirituality: the term "dread" refers to a "fear of the Lord".
Naturality is an important part of the Rastafari way of life. They want to return to Africa and live naturally. They believe that smoking marijuana helps them to get in touch with Jah, and their way of life is improved when they practice meditation.
Many reggae musicians are part of the Rastafari movement, including the famous musician Bob Marley, who died in 1981. Rapper Snoop Dogg became a Rastafarian in 2012. He has made an album of reggae music.
John Constable (East Bergholt, Suffolk 11 June 1776 – London, 31 March 1837) was an English painter and artist.
His family had plenty of money because his father owned a business running corn mills. Constable's father wanted his son to take over the business after him, but Constable started painting at an early age, and convinced his father to let him follow art as a career.
He married Maria Bicknell in 1816, and they had seven children. She died in 1829 of tuberculosis.
His paintings are treasures of British art, but in his lifetime his work was appreciated more in France. Constable's most famous painting, "The Hay Wain" (now in the National Gallery in London), was first shown at the Paris Salon in 1824. He had to wait until he was 52 years old before the Royal Academy voted that he should be a member.
Constable was influenced by the French painter Claude Lorrain. His most famous paintings are landscapes showing the countryside around Dedham and Flatford, where his father's mills were.
Constable's idea was to use nature itself, rather than imagination. He told Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".
Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, on-the-spot studies were essential. He never just followed a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other".
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time. The sketches for and convey a vigour missing from his finished oil paintings of the same subjects. Compare the composition of this preliminary study with the finished painting: . Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him to be an avant-garde painter, one who showed that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time. The almost mystical "Stonehenge", 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted. When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period".
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous studies of landscapes and clouds, to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. , for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella".
The sketches were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he worked over lighter passages. This gave an impression of sparkling light over the landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is "Seascape Study with Rain Cloud", painted in around 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes an exploding shower at sea. Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows", 1831, and in "", 1833.
To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting. In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds. "I have done a good deal of skying", Constable wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821.
Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up". He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.
Alyssa Milano
Alyssa Milano (born December 19, 1972) is an American actress. She is best known for her appearance in the 1980s television series "Who's The Boss?". She was one of the stars of The WB's series "Charmed" since 1998.
Milano was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She moved to Great Kills, Staten Island early in her life.
In 2015, Milano supported Bernie Sanders for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election.
In October 2017, Milano helped popularized the #MeToo movement, an international internet movement, to raise awareness of the dangers and victims of sexual abuse and sexual harassment.
A Beautiful Mind (movie)
A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 biographical movie about the mathematician John Nash and his experiences of schizophrenia. It is set in Massachusetts and New Jersey. It stars Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Bettany. It was directed by Ron Howard.
The movie is based on a book by Sylvia Nasar.
The movie won four Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Connelly won for Best Supporting Actress.
McGurk effect
The McGurk effect shows how hearing and vision are used for speech perception. Named after the man who found it, Harry McGurk (23 February 1936 – 17 April 1998), it says that people hear speech with their ears, and use other senses to help interpret what they hear. The McGurk effect happens when watching a video of a person saying /ga/ with a sound-recording saying /ba/. When this is done, a third sound is heard: /da/.
The McGurk effect is robust: that is, it still works even if a person know about it. This is different from some optical illusions, which do not work anymore once a person can see it.
The McGurk effect describes a phenomenon that shows how speech perception is not dependent only on auditory information. Visual information in the form of reading the lips is also taken into account and combined with the auditory information that is heard to produce the final stimuli perceived. This can get particularly interesting when the auditory information of one sound, paired with the spoken lips of another sound, ultimately combine to form the perception of a third different sound.
When humans perceive speech, they not only take in auditory information but also visual information as well in the form of reading lips, facial expression, and other body bodily cues. Usually, these two sources of information are consistent with each other so the brain simply combines them to form one unified perceived stimuli. When the McGurk effect is tested and the incoming information from the ears and eyes differ, the brian tries to make sense of the contradictory stimuli which ultimately results in a fusion of both. In humans, information received from the eyes dominates other sensory modalities, including audition, so for instance when 'ba' is heard and 'ga' is seen, the resulting stimuli is heard is 'da'. The resulting stimuli is what happens when the brain tries to make sense of the two different sets of information.
Interestingly enough, around the same time that Harry McGurk and John Macdonald discovered what is now known as the McGurk effect, another British researcher also stumbled upon this phenomenon. Barbara Dodd discovered a similar effect with audio-visual speech interpretation but instead it was with the visual cue of 'hole' and the audio cue of 'tough' which ultimately generated the audio perception of 'towel'. These discoveries in audio-visual speech perception ultimately changed the way scientists and researchers view the interaction of different senses in the brain.
Infants also show signs similar to the McGurk effect. Obviously you cannot ask the infant what they hear since they cannot verbally communicate yet but by measuring certain variables such as their attention to audiovisual stimuli, effects similar to the McGurk effect can be seen. Very soon after infants are born, sometimes even within minutes of birth, they are able to imitate adult facial movements; an important first step in audiovisual speech perception. Next comes the ability to recognize lip movements and speech sounds a couple of weeks after birth. Evidence of the McGurk effect is not visible though until about 4 months of age, with a much stronger presence at around 5 months after birth. To test this effect on infants, infants are first habituated to a stimuli. Once the stimuli gets changed, the infant exhibits an effect similar to the McGurk effect. As infants grow older and continue to develop, the McGurk effect also becomes more prominent as visual cues start to override purely auditory information in audiovisual speech perception.
Although the McGurk effect has been primarily studied in English because of its origins in English speaking countries, research has now spread to others countries with different languages as well. In particular, the comparison between English and Japanese has been prominent. Research has shown that the McGurk effect is much more prominent in English listeners compared to Japanese listeners. One strong hypothesis for this is the difference between cultures and how each culture behaves and interacts. Japanese culture is notable for being politeness and avoiding direct eye or face contact when interacting.
This phenomenon has also been studied in French Canadian children and adults with similar findings. When compared to adults though, children tend to show less susceptibility to the McGurk effect since their primary sense of speech perception is dominated by auditory information. This is evident in children scoring lower on lip reading tasks when compared to adults. Nevertheless, the McGurk effect was present in certain contexts but the effects were much more variable than when the tests were run on adults.
Although the McGurk effect's importance may seem isolated to just psychological researchers and scientists, this phenomenon has been expanded to everyday audio and visual speech perception as well. Two researchers by the name of Wareham and Wright conducted a study in 2005 that may suggest that the McGurk effect can influence how everyday speech is perceived. This is especially important in witness testimony where the observations and accounts of the witness are usually expected to be accurate and correct. With this information, witness testimonies now must be interpreted with the notion that the witness may be unaware of their own inaccurate perception.
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner (Covent Garden, London, 23 April 1775 – Chelsea, London, 19 December 1851) was an English painter and artist. He was one of the greatest artists of landscape painting, with a great mastery of light and colour.
His father was a maker of wigs. His mother was ill with mental problems, and the young Turner was sent to live with his uncle in Brentford, where he first started to paint.
Turner became a student at the Royal Academy of Art school in London when he was 14 years old. He was accepted into the Academy a year later. He had a watercolour painting in 1790 in the Academy's important art show. He had only been studying for a year. In 1802, at the age of only 28, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, and later became its Professor of Perspective.
In 1802, Turner travelled around Europe, visiting France and Switzerland. He also went to the Louvre in Paris. During his life, he often travelled across Europe, visiting Venice in Italy several times. As his personal style developed, he began to produce paintings that were generalised or exaggerated in form and colour, rather than realistic or detailed. These caused much argument as to their artistic value, but nowadays are his best loved works. On his death, he left 300 oils and 20,000 watercolours to the British nation. Some of his watercolours are the most abstract or generalised of his paintings.
Turner never married, although he had two children with his mistress Sarah Danby. For much of his life, he lived with his father, who helped him in his studio until he died in 1829.
In his early career, Turner was influenced by the painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who painted "historical" landscapes.
Turner became interested in natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea. His paintings revolve around the light of the sun, shown in infinite variety. His work showed some of the ideas of the impressionists decades before they arrived on the scene. Monet, in particular, studied Turner's methods.
His most famous paintings include "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up". Often called just "The Fighting Temeraire", this is a picture of a famous warship that was used in the Battle of Trafalgar. Other pictures include "Rain, Steam and Speed", which shows a steam train crossing a bridge, and "Snowstorm" which shows a steamship in a snowstorm trying to get into a harbour. In order to get the right feeling into this painting, he had himself tied to a ship's mast during a storm, so that he could see what it was like. Some of his most famous paintings show the roughness of nature, with bleak landscapes and violent storms.
But also there is beauty and a sense of calmness in pictures such as Crossing the Brook, a stunning scenic view of the Tamar Valley and River from New Bridge near Gunnislake in Cornwall, painted in 1815, a view which can still be admired today.
As he grew older, Turner's behaviour became a bit odd, and he became depressed quite often. He died in Chelsea on 19 September 1851, and was buried next to the painter Joshua Reynolds in St Paul's Cathedral.
Even while Turner was alive, some people thought he was a genius. Some people complained that the pictures he painted when he was older were not realistic, and some even joked that they could have been painted with a mop. However, most think that his way of painting shows complete mastery.
Mug
Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French impressionist artist.
One of his most famous paintings was called "Water Lilies", which he repeated many times in various conditions.
Monet was born in Paris, France. His father wanted him to help run the family's grocery business. However, Monet wanted to be an artist. When he was young he met the painter Eugène Boudin who taught him to use oil paints, and encouraged him to paint out of doors.
Monet joined the French Army in Algeria for two years from 1860-1862. When he became ill he left the army to study art at university. He did not like the way art was taught, and joined the painter Charles Gleyre in his studio. He met other artists here, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. They shared their ideas about painting.
In 1866 Monet had a child with Camille Doncieux, who had been his model. They married in 1870 and had two children, Michel and Joseph. In 1870 he moved to England to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1871 he moved to Argenteuil near Paris where he painted some of his most famous pictures. In 1873 he painted "Impression, Sunrise", showing the sea at Le Havre. When this picture was shown in 1874 one critic took its title and called the group of artists "Impressionists". He intended to make fun of the artists, but the name has stuck and this is what people today call this style of painting.
In 1879 Camille died of tuberculosis. Alice Hoschedé decided to help Monet by taking care of his children as well as her own. In 1883 they moved to a house in Giverny where Monet planted a large garden. Monet married Alice in 1892.
Monet found that his garden inspired him to paint pictures of it, particularly the water lilies. Alice died in 1911, and his son Jean was killed in World War I in 1914.
Monet used broad brush strokes to build up his pictures, and painted quite quickly to try and get the idea of the light he could see into his paintings. If you go very close to one of his pictures it is hard to see what it shows, but if you stand back everything becomes clear.
His later paintings include series, in which he paints the same subject in different lights. For example, he painted a series of pictures of haystacks in a field, and another series of pictures of the west front of Rouen Cathedral. There are many paintings of the lilies in his garden at Giverny.
A Video is a technology. It records moving images onto some medium. The recorder may be a separate machine such as a videocassette recorder (also called a VCR) or built into something else such as a video camera.
A popular 20th century videotape format was VHS. It was used by many people to record television programmes onto cassettes. This is usually an analog format. In the 21st century digital recording is used more often than analog recording.
By extension, a video clip is a short movie. A music video usually stars someone who recorded an (audio) album. One purpose is to promote the album.
Exodus is the second book in the Torah. Exodus in Hebrew is called "Shmowt", which means 'names.'
Exodus means 'going out' in Latin. It is about how the Hebrew people were led out of Egypt by God. Moses, their leader, hears God's words and then tells the Israelites. Exodus ends with God's laws and his instructions on how to build a holy container called the Ark of the Covenant.
After the Hebrews went to Egypt to get food, the old Pharaoh died, and a new Pharaoh came to power and made each Hebrew a slave. The Pharaoh made the Hebrews work very hard and told his soldiers to throw their babies into the Nile River. One baby, Moses, was put in a reed basket set adrift on the Nile. He was later rescued by an Egyptian princess, grew up in Pharaoh's palace, and later killed an Egyptian slaveowner. Moses escaped from Egypt and lived away from his people in Midian. He lived with Jethro, his father-in-law.
One day, while Moses was tending his flocks, God appeared in a burning bush to Moses and instructed him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. As Moses had no confidence in doing this, God gives him his brother Aaron to help him. Aaron was a good talker and helped Moses speak to the Pharaoh.
When he returned to Egypt, Moses asked the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, but the Pharaoh refused. Through God's power, Moses causes ten plagues to come on Egypt.
The last plague was the death of all the firstborns in Egypt. Only the Israelites' firstborns were spared, as they had the blood of a young lamb on their door, so God did not let the Angel of Death enter their houses (12:23). The Pharaoh finally decided to let the Israelites go.
While the Israelites were crossing the Red Sea, the Pharaoh changed his mind and decided to pursue them with his troops. The Israelites passed safely as Moses parted the Sea with his staff by God's power. Once the Hebrews all passed the sea closed, leaving all the Pharaoh's troops to drown.
Later, at Mount Sinai, Moses received the law and the Ten Commandments from God. But the Israelites sinned against God by worshiping an idol (a golden calf). Moses broke the first two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in anger. God later gave him another two. He also told Moses how to build the Ark of the Covenant.
Ten Times the Israelites rebeled and tested the L-D during Exodus despite his revealation to them; according to rabbanic literature it was because "..They were still laboring under the slave mentality of the Egyptian bondage."
The book has been filmed several times, as "The Ten Commandments" and "The Prince of Egypt".
Stretching (body piercing)
Stretching is a word used to describe a kind of body modification. It is when a person widens a pierced hole in their body.
Stretching is usually done a little bit at a time, so the pierced hole would not bleed or get infected.
There are some common ways used to stretch piercings, of different origins and useful for different people.
Body jewellery is measured in gauges from 20g up to 000g; sizes larger than that are measured in fractions of inches. In Europe they are measured in millimeters.
The table below is not exact, but very close.
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear disaster which occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The station was situated just 110 km North of Kyiv.
This event was one of the worst accidents in the history of nuclear power. It was rated level 7, the most severe level, on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The only other accident with a level 7 rating is Fukushima. Because the RBMK reactors used at the plant had no containment building to keep the radiation in, radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, and the eastern United States. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus. About 360,000 people needed to be moved to other places, where they could live after the accident. In addition, many people suffered from acute radiation poisoning and long term illnesses such as thyroid cancer.
On the day of the accident, there was a planned power reduction. By the beginning of the day shift, the power level had reached 50%. Following this, randomly, one of the regional power stations went offline. It was then requested that the further power reduction would be postponed. Despite this request, the reduction and preparations for a test that was to happen continued.
The accident occurred when the fourth reactor suffered a huge power increase. This led to the core of the reactor exploding. The explosion was so powerful that it blew the 1000 ton steel lid off the reactor. Due to this explosion, large amounts of radioactive materials and fuel were released. This caused the neutron moderator, made of graphite, to start to burn. The fire caused more radioactive fallout to be released, which was carried by the smoke of the fire into the environment.
After the accident, Reactor 4 was covered by a "sarcophagus" made from steel and concrete to stop the escape of more radiation from the lost corium as well as radioactive dust. The sarcophagus was covered in 2016 with the New Safe Confinement structure.
The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry. The Soviet Union slowed the process of making its nuclear industry bigger for some time. The Soviet government also had to become less secretive as a result of the accident. Since 1991, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have become separate countries. Those countries have continued to pay the high costs for decontamination (removing the radiation) and health care because of the accident. Exposure to radiation leads to a higher risk of getting cancer.
It is difficult to accurately tally the number of deaths caused by the events at Chernobyl. A 2005 IAEA report tells of 56 direct deaths; of those, 47 were accident workers and 9 were children who died of thyroid cancer. The report thinks that up to 4,000 people may die from long term diseases related to the accident. However, other estimates range from 4,000 to 27,000 by the Union of Concerned Scientists or Greenpeace who estimate that between 93,000 - 200,000 people died as a result of the disaster.
The other three reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate after the disaster because there were not enough other power plants in Ukraine to meet energy demands. Reactor 2 was decommissioned (permanently turned off and stopped being used) in 1991 after a fire in its turbine hall. Reactor 1 was decommissioned in 1996, and reactor 3 was decommissioned in 2000. In 2018, a 3800 panel, 1 megawatt solar plant was opened next to the former nuclear plant.
Prypiat
Pripyat (Ukrainian: При́п'ять, "Pryp”iat’") is an abandoned city in northern Ukraine. It lies in Kiev Oblast, near the border with Belarus. It was home to Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers. The city was abandoned in 1986 after the Chernobyl accident, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. Before being abandoned, about 48,000 people lived in the city. The city was founded in the 1970s, when the nuclear power plant opened.
The site today is practically a museum showing the late Soviet era. With entirely abandoned buildings, including abandoned apartment buildings (four of which were yet to be used), swimming pools and hospitals, everything inside remains, from records to papers to children's toys and clothing. Pripyat and the surrounding area will not be safe for people to live there for several centuries. Scientists think that the most dangerous radioactive elements will take up to nine hundred years to decay sufficiently to render the area safe.
The city is entirely accessible and is relatively safe on the road, although it is unsafe to go around the city without a radiation dosimeter that measures exposure. The doors of all the buildings are open to reduce the risk to visitors, although many have accumulated too much radioactive material to be safe to visit.
Thyroid cancer
Thyroid cancer is cancer in the thyroid gland.
There are four types of thyroid cancer:
Thyroid cancer can be diagnosed in a few different ways:
"Basic Tests:"
"Special Tests:"
Containment building