title: Sint Eustatius

text: In 2001, its walls were restored as part of the Historic Core Restoration Project, although there are no known images showing what the synagogue looked like when still in use, so that archeological research is attempting to restore the structure to the best estimate of its former condition. The grounds include a Jewish ritual bath (mikveh) and an oven used on Passover.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: A restored and respectfully maintained Jewish cemetery is located adjacent to the Old Church Cemetery, at the top of Oranjestad, Sint Eustatius.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: The wealth Rodney and General Vaughan discovered on St. Eustatius exceeded their expectations. There were 130 merchantmen in the bay as well as the Dutch frigate and five smaller American armed merchantmen. In total the value of goods seized, including a very rich Dutch convoy captured off Sombrero, was estimated to be well in excess of £3 million. On 5 February 1781 Rodney and Vaughan signed an agreement stating that all goods taken belonged to the Crown. Rodney and Vaughan, by British custom, expected to personally receive a significant share of the captured wealth from the King once it reached England. Instead of delegating the task of sorting through and estimating the value of the confiscated property Rodney and Vaughan delayed their departure and oversaw this themselves.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Rodney, privately, wrote to his family with promises of a new London home. To his daughter he promised "the best harpsichord money can purchase". He confidently wrote of a marriage settlement for one of his sons and a soon-to-be-purchased commission in the Foot Guards for another son. He wrote of a dowry for his daughter to marry the Earl of Oxford. He noted he would have enough to pay off the young prospective bridegroom's debts.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: The excessive amount of time Rodney spent on St. Eustatius led to allegations that Rodney and Vaughan had neglected their military duties. In particular, Viscount Samuel Hood suggested that Rodney should have sailed to intercept a French fleet under Lieutenant général de Grasse, traveling to Martinique. The French fleet instead turned north and headed for the Chesapeake Bay.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Rodney's delay at St. Eustatius was not the first time he had taken the opportunity to capture prizes over the immediate and expeditious fulfilment of his military duties. During the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763, Rodney had delayed transporting Major General Jeffrey Amherst in order to pursue prizes. Later, Rodney had been ordered to Barbados to link up with Admiral Sir George Peacock and the Earl of Albemarle for an attack on Cuba. Instead, Rodney sent valuable ships off in search of prizes. In 1762, after the fall of Martinique, Rodney quarrelled with the army over prize-money. During Rodney's command in Jamaica (1771–1774) the Earl of Sandwich feared that Rodney might provoke a war with Spain to obtain prize money.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Rodney further weakened his fleet earlier by sending a strong defending force to England to accompany his treasure ships. After months on St. Eustatius, capturing additional merchants and treasure, Rodney was prevailed upon to send part of his fleet north to aid General Cornwallis and British armed forces fighting the Americans. He did not dispatch the bulk of his fleet from St. Eustatius until July/August 1781. The ships arrived too late to affect the events that were taking place in North America.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Outside of the Chesapeake Bay, a much stronger combined French fleet under Grasse defeated the weakened British fleet (5 September 1781). The battle between Grasse and Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves became known as the Battle of the Chesapeake or the Battle of the Capes, one of the most pivotal battles in history.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: British General Cornwallis, trapped at Yorktown, Virginia, desperately awaited much-needed supplies and men that Rodney would have brought. American General George Washington, with French siege-artillery and supporting forces, closed the vise from the land side. Cornwallis could not be aided from the sea because of the British naval defeat. The French controlled the Bay. Cornwallis' predicament linked directly to Rodney's failure to depart St. Eustatius promptly following its capture and the destruction of the military stores there. Cornwallis had no choice, and surrendered on 19 October 1781; the American Revolutionary war was over, and the Americans had won, partially due to Rodney's anti-Semitic and avaricious delays.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: A series of disastrous French and British occupations of Sint Eustatius from 1795 to 1815 diverted trade to the occupiers' islands. St. Eustatius' economy collapsed, and the merchants, including the Jews left. St. Eustatius reverted permanently to Dutch control from 1816.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: After 1848, slavery only existed on the Dutch and Danish Eastern Caribbean islands, which caused unrest on the islands colonized by the Netherlands. As a result, a proclamation declared on 6 June 1848 on Sint Maarten that enslaved Africans would be treated as free persons.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Unrest also arose on Sint Eustatius. On 12 June 1848, a group of free and enslaved Africans gathered in front of Lieutenant Governor Johannes de Veer's home demanding their declaration of liberty, increased rations, and more free hours. The Island Governor addressed the group, but it persisted in its demands. The militia was mobilized and, after consultation with the Colonial Council and the main residents, an attack was decided by the Lieutenant Governor. After another warning to leave the city or otherwise experience the consequences, fire was opened on the group. The insurgents fled the city, leaving two or three seriously injured. From a hill just outside the city they pelted the militia with stones and pieces of rock. A group of 35 shooters stormed the hill, killing two insurgents and injuring several. The six leaders of the uprising were exiled from the island and transferred to Curaçao. Thomas Dupersoy, a free African, is considered the chief leader of the uprising. One of the other leaders sent a death notice to his "owner" in 1851. After the uprising, the largest plantation owners on Sint Eustatius decided to give their enslaved workers a certain wage for fear of repetition of revolt.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: In 1863 slavery was officially abolished in the Netherlands. The Dutch were among the last to abolish slavery. The freed slaves no longer wanted to live in the field and moved to the city. Due to a lack of trade, the bay of Sint Eustatius underwent a recession. Natural disasters such as the hurricane of September 1928 and May 1929 accelerated the process of economic decline on the island.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Sint Eustatius became a member of the Netherlands Antilles when that grouping was created in 1954. Between 2000 and 2005 the member islands of the Netherlands Antilles voted on their future status. In a referendum on 8 April 2005, 77% of Sint Eustatius voters voted to remain within the Netherlands Antilles, compared to 21% who voted for closer ties with the Netherlands. None of the other islands voted to remain.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: After the other islands decided to leave, ending the Netherlands Antilles, the island council opted to become a special municipality of the Netherlands, like Saba and Bonaire. This process was completed in October 2010. In 2011 the island officially adopted the US dollar as its currency.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Sint Eustatius is 6 miles (10 km) long and up to 3 miles (5 km) wide. Topographically, the island is saddle-shaped, with the 602-meter-high dormant volcano Quill (Mount Mazinga), (from Dutch "kuil", meaning 'pit'—originally referring to its crater) to the southeast and the smaller summits of Signal Hill/Little Mountain (or "Bergje") and Boven Mountain to the northwest. The Quill crater is a popular tourist attraction on the island. The bulk of the island's population lives in the flat saddle between the two elevated areas, which forms the centre of the island.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: St. Eustatius has a tropical monsoon climate. Tropical storms and hurricanes are common. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, sharply peaking from late August through September. Tropical Cyclone Climatology


title: Sint Eustatius

text: As St. Eustatius is a volcanic island and very small, all of the beaches on the island are made up of black volcanic sand. These volcanic sands, especially one of the more popular nesting beaches called Zeelandia, are very important nesting sites for several endangered sea turtles such as: the green turtle, leatherback, loggerhead and hawksbill.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Sint Eustatius is home to one of the last remaining populations of the critically endangered Lesser Antillean iguana ("Iguana delicatissima"). The population was strongly affected during the high-intensity hurricane year of 2017, with especially Hurricane Maria, during which the population reduced by 25%.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Sint Eustatius has three nature parks – on land and at sea: the Sint Eustatius National Marine Park, Quill/Boven National Park, and Miriam Schmidt Botanical Garden. Two of them have national park status. These areas have been designated as important bird areas. The nature parks are maintained by the St Eustatius National Parks Foundation (STENAPA).


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Due to its turbulent history, Sint Eustatius is rich in archaeological sites. Nearly 300 sites have been documented. The island is said to have the highest concentration of archaeological sites of any area of comparable size. In the 1920s, J.P.B. Josselin de Jong conducted archaeological research into Saladoid sites on the island and in the 1980s a great deal of research was done by archaeologist Aad Versteeg of Leiden University. Around 1981, under the direction of archaeologist Norman F. Barka, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia also started archaeological research on Sint Eustatius. The documented archaeological sites include prehistoric sites, plantations, military sites, commercial trading sites (including shipwrecks), and urban sites (churches, government buildings, cemeteries, residences). The St. Eustatius Center for Archaeological Research (SECAR) has been conducting archaeological research on the island since 2004.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: In June 2021, SECAR became involved in protests against excavations at an 18th-century slave cemetery on the island. The Ubuntu Connected Front and other concerned citizens of Sint Eustatius denounced the non-involvement of the community in the excavation process through a petition and letters to the government. The majority of the population on St. Eustatius are of African descent. Participation in cultural heritage, i.e. involving the community whose ancestors are being excavated, is good practice in contemporary archaeology. Archaeological excavations on St. Eustatius apparently fall under the old Monuments Act for the BES islands that is very brief on these issues. The 2016 Dutch Heritage Act offers more protection for cultural heritage. The Committee on Kingdom Relations asked Secretary of State Raymond Knops questions about the matter. A Statia Heritage and Research Commission (SHRC) set up by the government of St. Eustatius is investigating the allegations of the protest groups and should come up with recommendations.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: As of January 2019, the population is 3,138, with a population density of 150 inhabitants per square kilometre.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: The official language is Dutch, but English is the "language of everyday life" on the island and education is solely in English. A local English-based creole is also spoken informally. More than 52% of the population speak more than one language. The most widely spoken languages are English (92.7%), Dutch (36%), Spanish (33.8%) and Papiamento (20.8%).


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Sint Eustatius is predominantly a Christian territory. The main denominations are Methodist 28.6%, Catholics 23.7%, Adventist 17.8%, Pentecostal 7.2% and Anglicans 2.6%.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: In the 18th century, "Statia" was the most important Dutch island in the Caribbean and was a center of great wealth from trading. At this time it was known as the "Golden Rock" because of its immense wealth. A very large number of warehouses lined the road that runs along Oranje Bay; most (but not all) of these warehouses are now ruined and some of the ruins are partially underwater.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: According to the Sint Eustatius government website, "Statia's economy is stable and well placed to grow in the near future. With practically no unemployment and a skilled workforce, we have a infrastructure in place to ensure sustained growth." The government itself is the largest employer on the island, and the oil terminal owned by NuStar Energy is the largest private employer on the island.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Statia Utility Company N.V. provides electricity to the island, as well as drinking water per truck and on part of the island by a water network. The electricity supply is rapidly being made green. Until 2016 all electricity was produced by diesel generators. In March 2016 the first phase of the solar park with 1.89 MWp capacity became operational, covering 23% of entire electricity demand. In November 2017 another 2.15 MWp was added, totaling 14,345 solar panels, with 4.1 MW capacity and a yearly production of 6.4 GWh. The solar park includes lithium ion batteries of 5.9 MWh size. These provide power for grid stability, as well as energy shifting. On a sunny day the diesel generators are switched off from 9 a.m. to 8 pm. This is made possible by grid forming inverters produced by SMA. This is one of the first such solar parks in the world, and provides 40% to 50% of the island's electricity.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: Dutch government policy towards St. Eustatius and other SSS islands promoted English medium education. Sint Eustatius has bilingual English-Dutch education.


title: Sint Eustatius

text: The most popular sports on Sint Eustatius are football, futsal, softball, basketball, swimming and volleyball. Due to the small population, there are few sport associations. One of them, the Sint Eustatius Volleyball Association, is a member of ECVA and NORCECA. Currently St. Eustatius is a non-active member of the Caribbean zone of Pony Baseball and Softball leagues.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: The Collector is a 2009 American horror film written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, and directed by Dunstan. It stars Josh Stewart, Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth, Juan Fernandez, Karley Scott Collins, Madeline Zima, and Robert Wisdom. The film follows a man who, in order to pay a debt, decides to rob a house, only to find out somebody with far more sinister intentions has already broken in.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: The original script, titled "The Midnight Man", was at one point shopped as a spin-off prequel to the "Saw" franchise, as an origin story for the villain John Kramer/Jigsaw, but the producers opposed the idea and dismissed it, leading to the script getting reworked to an original story.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: "The Collector" was released on July 31, 2009, by LD Entertainment. It received generally negative reviews from critics. A sequel, "The Collection", was released in 2012.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Married couple Larry and Gena Wharton return home to find the power is out. They discover a large trunk upstairs, and are horrified by its contents. They are then attacked by an unseen assailant.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Former convict Arkin O'Brien works as a handyman for the Chase family. He is generally well-liked by the Chases, especially the younger daughter Hannah. After work, Arkin meets his wife, whose debt to several loan sharks is due by midnight. To protect her and their daughter, Arkin plans to steal a valuable ruby from the Chase home.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: As Arkin attempts to crack the safe, a masked figure locks the door. Michael, the father, appears with several injuries. Mistaking Arkin for the perpetrator, he grabs a golf club. Michael's action triggers a trap that incapacitates him, and the masked man drags Michael into the basement. Arkin attempts to call 911, but the phone is rigged with a spike that punctures his ear. The windows have been boarded up and lined with razors, making escape impossible.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Arkin retreats to the basement, where Michael informs him that his wife Victoria has also been captured, his older daughter Jill is out, and Hannah is hiding somewhere in the house. Michael gives Arkin the combination to the safe, which contains a gun. Arkin finds Victoria and has her distract the intruder in order for him to get to the safe. Arkin grabs the gun (which has no bullets) and pockets the ruby.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: While searching for Hannah, he finds a trunk containing a bloodied Larry. Larry explains that the masked man is a "collector" of people; he only collects one person in a household and kills everyone else. Horrified, Arkin flees, while the Collector locks Larry back in the trunk. Back in the basement, Arkin discovers that Michael is now dead. He frees Victoria, who had been tortured. As they make their way out of the basement, Victoria sees Michael's corpse and panics, alerting the Collector, who stabs her several times.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Jill arrives home with her boyfriend Chad. As the two prepare to have sex on the kitchen table, they notice the Collector watching them. Chad attacks him but is killed when he is pushed into a room filled with several bear traps. Jill manages to make a 911 call before being captured. Arkin frees Jill, but she doesn't trust him and reaches for a pair of scissors, only to be killed by a trap. Arkin escapes the house alone, but sees the Collector approaching Hannah. Changing his mind, he reenters the house.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Arkin prepares a trap to kill the Collector, but the trap kills Larry instead. Arkin gets to Hannah, and sends her down a laundry chute to the basement to hide. Before Arkin can do the same, the Collector knocks him out, ties him up and brutally tortures him.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: A police officer responding to Jill's 911 call is killed by the Collector's dog. Taking advantage of the distraction, Arkin frees himself and discovers a dead Victoria and armed explosives in the basement. After killing the Collector's dog with a flaming bucket and trapping the Collector in one of his own traps, Arkin escapes with Hannah.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Seeing approaching police cars, Arkin runs into the road to get their attention and is hit by one of the cars. He sees Hannah carried away by the police. He tells the police that the Collector was an exterminator working at the Chase house. The explosives detonate and destroy the house, but the Collector gets away unharmed. While Arkin is being taken to the hospital, The Collector ambushes the ambulance and kills everyone except Arkin, whom he kidnaps.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: In a post-credits scene, the Collector watches film slides on the trunk containing Arkin, who threatens to kill him.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: "The Collector" was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana in the spring of 2008 over 19 days. It used 16mm film stock. The final scene (featuring the van in the rain) was part of a reshoot in Los Angeles' Griffith Park.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: When Dunstan announced to his producing team he wanted to direct, he set off to make a sizzle reel – a prolonged trailer of the proposed film. He reunited with many of his friends from "Feast" (his first writing credit) and employed John Gulager as his cinematographer, and used actors Clu Gulager to play Roy and Tom Gulager as Arkin. It was this reel that was used to sell the pitch to Dimension Films, who put up the money to produce the film. Before its release, Dimension chose not to put a P&A budget into the movie and opted to release it direct to DVD. However, Dimension gave the filmmakers a chance to sell the film. In the end, Mickey Liddell bought the movie from Dimension. Liddell organized the reshoots and changed the title from "The Midnight Man" to "The Collector".


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: The film was theatrically released on July 31, 2009, in the United States, and on DVD on April 6, 2010. A rental version was made available February 12, 2010, through Blockbuster Video's Exclusive Line. The DVD includes two deleted scenes, and also an alternative ending which is Arkin leaving after seeing Hannah in the windowthus cutting off the remaining 25 minutes of the film.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 29% of 74 critics gave the film a positive reviews, with an average rating of 4.12/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Increasingly tedious displays of gore makes this torture porn home-invasion-horror more programmatic than provocative." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 29 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Clay Cane of BET noted that, "You will squirm, but aren't we getting a bit desensitized to these routine torture flicks? It's like seeing a pop songstress get naked for the billionth time – yeah, she's hot, but we have all seen it before." Bloody Disgusting gave the film a 3.5/5 and wrote that "The Collector" is "a raw, gritty and uncompromising horror film that puts the previous "Saw" film to shame." The reviewer also believed that the character of the Collector had the potential to become a new horror icon.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: On the opening day, the film opened in 1,325 theaters, grossing $1,325,000. The film has grossed $7,712,114.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: I didn't think it necessarily would happen because while the movie did well for its budget, it certainly wasn't a blockbuster, but it did well enough that the film's producer, Mickey Liddell, wants to make a sequel and of course wants me and Marcus to be involved again.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: So we are seeing if we can work out some sort of a deal for us to write it and for Marcus to direct, but right now it's just in the deal stage. It is a possibility. I couldn't imagine it being made without Marcus directing it."


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: Shooting on the second film, "The Collection", began in October 2010, and the film was released on November 30, 2012. Josh Stewart reprised his role as Arkin.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: On May 2, 2019, Josh Stewart tweeted that another sequel titled "The Collected", stylized as "The Coll3cted", was happening along with a poster.


title: The Collector (2009 film)

text: In April 2021, writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton admitted that the third film may not happen due to "creative disinterest".


title: Jackie Fox

text: Jacqueline Louise Fuchs (born December 20, 1959) is an American attorney and former musician. Under her stage name Jackie Fox, she played bass guitar for the pioneering all-girl teenage rock band The Runaways. She is the sister of screenwriter Carol Fuchs and sister-in-law of Castle Rock Entertainment co-founder Martin Shafer.


title: Jackie Fox

text: A Merit scholar, Fuchs had gained early admission to UCLA to study math when the opportunity to join the fledgling rock band the Runaways arose. Fuchs was "discovered" dancing at the Starwood by Rodney Bingenheimer (the self-proclaimed "mayor of the Sunset Strip"), who introduced her to producer/impresario Kim Fowley. Initially she auditioned for lead guitar, but the band hired Lita Ford for that. Some time later, she was called back to play bass; she accepted the offer, and joined the Runaways in 1975, shortly before her 16th birthday.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs played on the Runaways' second studio album, "Queens of Noise," but not on their 1976 debut album. According to multiple sources, including Cherie Currie's memoir "Neon Angel" and the liner notes of the Raven Records release of "The Runaways", Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison was hired to play bass on the first album due to Fowley's refusal to let Fuchs play on the record. Fuchs confirms this.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs's final appearance with the Runaways was on their 1977 "Live in Japan" album. It was during the Japanese Tour on which that album was recorded that Fuchs decided to leave the band. According to Fuchs, in the 2005 documentary film "", she was distraught over the band members' inability to get along with each other and called her close friend Randy Rhoads of the L.A. band Quiet Riot, who encouraged her to come home. Victory Tischler-Blue (AKA "Vicki Blue") was quickly hired as her replacement.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs could still be seen on "Flaming Schoolgirls" (1980), an outtakes compilation featuring songs recorded during the "Queens of Noise" recording sessions in 1976. She later appeared again on the compilation albums "Neon Angels" and "The Best of the Runaways".


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs played bass at the Runaways reunion in 1994 with Currie and West. Currie's sister Marie also performed with the band that night.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs denied permission for her name to be used in the 2010 feature film "The Runaways". Instead, the producers created a fictional character, Robin (portrayed by actress Alia Shawkat), as the band's bassist in the film.


title: Jackie Fox

text: In the years following her tenure with the Runaways, Fuchs worked in a variety of fields, most notably as a record promotions executive, a modeling agent, the promoter of Tony Robbins's "Firewalking" seminars, and most recently an entertainment attorney in the motion picture and television business, representing actors, writers, directors, authors, and producers.


title: Jackie Fox

text: In a live rendition of the song "Suicide Machine" by punk rock band Germs, Darby Crash is heard saying he is looking for Jackie and that the song is dedicated to her.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Fuchs earned her B.A. summa cum laude from UCLA in linguistics and Italian, with a specialization in computing, and her J.D. from Harvard, where Barack Obama was one of her classmates. She has written a script called "Delilah's Scissors" with Victory Tischler-Blue and appeared in Tischler-Blue's 2005 documentary "". Fuchs has also written for the "Huffington Post" blog.


title: Jackie Fox

text: In 2013, Fuchs appeared as a contestant in the fourth episode of "The Chase", and on September 6, 2013, she was a contestant on the syndicated version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", then hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. She had banked $16,100, but ended up with only $1,000 after missing a question. In December 2018, she appeared on "Jeopardy!", winning four games and $87,089.


title: Jackie Fox

text: In July 2015, six months after Fowley's death, Fuchs alleged that Kim Fowley raped her on New Year's Eve 1975 at a party following a Runaways performance at an Orange County club. Sixteen years old at the time, Fuchs was reportedly given Quaaludes by a man she thought was a roadie, and while she was incapacitated, Fowley allegedly raped her in full view of a group of partygoers and her bandmates Currie, West and Jett; Ford was not present. "Look Away", a documentary about sexual abuse in the rock music industry features Fuchs' story.


title: Jackie Fox

text: West's location at the time of the incident is unknown, but Fuchs said that her last memory of the night was seeing Currie and Jett staring at her as Fowley raped her. Kari Krome (co-founder and songwriter for the group) stated that she saw "Jett and Currie sitting off to the side of the room for part of the time, snickering" during the rape. Jett has publicly denied witnessing the incident "as described", while Currie said she spoke up against Fowley's actions, then stormed out of the room when he refused to stop.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Before Fuchs came forward, there were already allegations that Fowley had raped an underage girl at the party on New Year's Eve 1975. The victim had not been publicly identified. Currie described the incident in the documentary "" and also, in detail, in an updated edition of her memoir "Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway". In the chapter titled "Kim Fowley's Sex Education Class" Fuchs is originally mentioned as a bystander, and asks for more food after witnessing the rape. As Fuchs threatened legal action against Currie if the chapter was published in its original form because "the event described in Cherie's book never happened", Currie edited the chapter to exclude her.


title: Jackie Fox

text: Referring to Fowley's rape of Fuchs, Victory Tischler-Blue (Fuchs's replacement in the group) said that all the members of the group "have always been aware of this ugly event."


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Jeffrey Adam Zucker (born April 9, 1965) is an American former media executive. Between January 2013 and February 2022, Zucker was the president of CNN Worldwide. Zucker oversaw CNN, CNN International, HLN, and CNN Digital. He was previously CEO of NBCUniversal. Zucker served as an executive in residence at Columbia Business School.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Zucker was born into a Jewish family in Homestead, Florida, near Miami, on April 9, 1965. His father, Matthew Zucker, was a cardiologist, and his mother, Arline, was a school teacher.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: He was a captain of the North Miami Senior High School tennis team, editor of the school paper, and a teenage freelance reporter ("stringer") for "The Miami Herald". Zucker also was president of his sophomore, junior, and senior classes, running on the slogan "The little man with the big ideas." He graduated from North Miami Senior High School in 1982. Before college, he took part in Northwestern University's National High School Institute program for journalism. Zucker went on to Harvard University. He was president of the school newspaper, "The Harvard Crimson", during his senior year. As such, he encouraged the "Crimson"'s decades-old prank rivalry with the "Harvard Lampoon", then headed by future NBC employee Conan O'Brien, which culminated in Zucker having O’Brien arrested. Zucker graduated from Harvard in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in American history.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: When he was not admitted to Harvard Law School, he began working at NBC by accepting an internship at the 1988 Summer Olympics.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In 1989, he was a field producer for "Today," and at 26 he became its executive producer in 1992. He introduced the program's trademark outdoor rock concert series and was in charge as "Today" moved to the "window on the world" Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza in 1994. He is credited with managing the show during its most successful years and launching it into its 16 years of ratings dominance.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In 2000, he was named NBC Entertainment's president. A 2004 BusinessWeek Profile stated that "During that time he oversaw NBC's entire entertainment schedule. He kept the network ahead of the pack by airing the gross out show "Fear Factor", negotiating for the cast of the hit series "Friends" to take the series up to a tenth season, and signing Donald Trump for the reality show "The Apprentice". He is credited with the idea to extend "Friends" episodes by 10 minutes and convinced the cast to extend their contracts by two years. The "Friends" era was one of the most profitable ever for NBC. The Zucker era produced a spike in operating earnings for NBC, from $532 million the year he took over to $870 million in 2003."


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Zucker introduced "Las Vegas", "", and "Scrubs". He originated the idea of airing "Supersized" (longer than the standard 30-minute slot) episodes of NBC's comedies and aggressively programming in the summer months as cable networks began to draw away viewers with original programming from the network's rerun-filled summer slate. Bravo changed its programming direction towards reality television, while the newly acquired Spanish network Telemundo was positioned to be more competitive with leading network Univision.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Following the merger with French media empire Vivendi Universal, he became president of the newly formed NBC Universal Television Group in May 2004. Vivendi Universal had acquired Fox Interactive a year earlier in 2003. During Zucker's tenure, shows that he championed such as "Father of the Pride" and the "Friends" spinoff "Joey" were considered failures.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: On December 15, 2005, Zucker was promoted by NBC Universal to Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal Television Group behind Robert Charles Wright, vice chairman of General Electric and chairman & CEO of NBC Universal. Zucker was responsible for all programming across the company’s television properties, including network, news, cable, sports and Olympics. His responsibilities also included the company’s studio operations and global distribution efforts.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In 2010, in response to a public controversy over the network's reported rescheduling of late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, "Los Angeles Times" reporters Meg James and Matea Gold wrote that Zucker's tenure had led to "a spectacular fall by the country's premier television network" and dubbed the intra-network feud and subsequent public relations fallout "one of the biggest debacles in television history". Under Zucker NBC fell from being the number one rated network to the lowest rated of the four broadcast networks and was occasionally being beaten in the ratings by programming on some of the more popular cable channels.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Days later, "The New York Times" columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that in Hollywood "there has been a single topic of discussion: How does Jeff Zucker keep rising and rising while the fortunes of NBC keep falling and falling? ...many in the Hollywood community have always regarded him as ...a network Napoleon who never bothered to learn about developing shows and managing talent." She explained that Zucker "is a master at managing up with bosses and calculating cost-per-hour benefits, but even though he made money on cable shows, he could not program the network to save his life."


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Dowd also reported that an unnamed "honcho at another network" stated that "Zucker is a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist... You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network and literally destroyed it."


title: Jeff Zucker

text: On June 2, 2010, the "New York Post" reported that Zucker would be paid between $30 million and $40 million to leave NBC Universal shortly after Comcast completed its 51% acquisition in the company.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Zucker worked with fellow NBC News alum, former "Today" host Katie Couric, producing her daytime talk show for Disney-ABC Domestic Television, "Katie". However, Zucker left the show to be the president of CNN Worldwide.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Zucker became president of CNN Worldwide on January 1, 2013. His appointment was widely welcomed by the network and its anchors. Anderson Cooper told colleagues that Zucker was "the first CNN president to actually watch CNN". In December 2013, Zucker stated that his goal for the channel was to offer an "attitude and a take" to viewers, with a larger focus on reality-style documentary series (expanding upon the success of its documentary acquisition "Blackfish", and new series ""). Zucker explained that he wanted CNN to appeal more to regular viewers of factual networks (such as A&E, Discovery, and History), and make larger investments into the network's digital properties.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: With the 2014 cancellation of "Piers Morgan Live", CNN experimented with airing factual programming in primetime as an alternative, with Zucker stating that it would cater to younger demographics than pundit-oriented programs. However, Zucker still insisted that news remained CNN's first priority, and that these programs could be preempted for continuing coverage of breaking news events when needed. 2014 saw an increase in daytime and primetime viewership of CNN; by October 2014, CNN had overtaken MSNBC in primetime key demographic viewership, placing second behind Fox News.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: During the 2016 presidential election campaign, a large focus was placed upon on-air debates between partisan pundits surrounding issues relating to the candidates (including, in particular, Republican candidate Donald Trump). In an interview with "The New York Times", Zucker stated that aspects of its election coverage were influenced by sports channels (with the "Times" citing, specifically, debates between pundits reminiscent of shows such as ESPN's "First Take", and large outdoor "pre-game" shows for the presidential debates), explaining that "the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way." In 2016, CNN reached a monthly average of 105 million unique visitors to its web and mobile properties.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In March 2019, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) criticized Zucker and CNN for lack of diversity within the CNN ranks.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: On February 2, 2021, Zucker announced he would step down at the end of the year. In August 2021, however, it was reported that he did not plan to leave until the completion of the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In March 2019, CNN parent WarnerMedia announced a reorganization in which Zucker would become chairman of the company's news and sports division, overseeing Turner Sports, Bleacher Report and AT&T SportsNet, in addition to maintaining his role as head of CNN.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: On February 2, 2022, Zucker resigned from CNN. In his resignation letter, Zucker acknowledged that he did not disclose a consensual relationship he had with CNN's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Allison Gollust, when it began. The relationship was made public in early January 2022 during the network's investigation into Chris Cuomo. Following his resignation from CNN, Zucker also resigned from his position as chief of WarnerMedia News & Sports.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: In 1996, Zucker married Caryn Stephanie Nathanson, then a supervisor for "Saturday Night Live", with whom he has four children; the two divorced in 2017.


title: Jeff Zucker

text: Diagnosed at ages 31 and 34 with colon cancer, Zucker successfully underwent surgery twice and chemotherapy after the first surgery. In July 2018, Zucker took a six-week leave of absence from CNN to recover from heart surgery.


title: 2021–22 CAF Champions League

text: The 2021–22 CAF Champions League (known as the 2021–22 TotalEnergies CAF Champions League for sponsorship purposes) was the 58th season of Africa's premier club football tournament organized by the Confederation of African Football (CAF), and the 26th season under the current CAF Champions League title.


title: 2021–22 CAF Champions League

text: Wydad Casablanca won their 3rd title with a 2–0 win against the defending champions, Al Ahly, in the final at Stade Mohammed V in Casablanca, Morocco, which hosted a second consecutive final. As winners, Wydad earned the right to play against RS Berkane, the winners of the 2021–22 CAF Confederation Cup, in the 2022 CAF Super Cup.


title: 2021–22 CAF Champions League

text: A toal of 42 out of the 54 CAF member associations entered this season's CAF Champions League, with the 12 highest ranked associations according to their CAF 5-Year Ranking eligible to enter two teams in the competition. For this season, the CAF utilized the 2017–2021 CAF 5-Year Ranking, which calculated points for each entrant association based on their clubs’ performance over those 5 years in the CAF club competitions. The criteria for points were as follows:


title: 2021–22 CAF Champions League

text: The following 54 teams from 42 out of the total 54 member associations entered this season's tournament.


title: 2021–22 CAF Champions League

text: "Associations are shown according to their 2017–2021 CAF 5-Year Ranking – those with a ranking score have their rank and score (in parentheses) indicated."


title: Carol Kaye

text: Carol Kaye (née Smith, born March 24, 1935) is an American musician. She is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 50 years.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye began playing guitar in her early teens and after some time as a guitar teacher, began to perform regularly on the Los Angeles jazz and big band circuit. She started session work in 1957, and through a connection at Gold Star Studios began working for producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. After a bassist failed to turn up to a session in 1963, she switched to that instrument, quickly making a name for herself as one of the most in-demand session players of the 1960s, playing on numerous hits. She moved into playing on film soundtracks in the late 1960s, particularly for Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin, and began to release a series of tutoring books such as "How To Play The Electric Bass". Kaye became less active towards the end of the 1970s, but has continued her career and attracted praise from other musicians.


title: Carol Kaye

text: During the peak of her years of session work, she became part of a stable of Los Angeles-based musicians which went by a variety of informal names, but has since become known as "The Wrecking Crew". Her work with the collective led to her prominent role in the 2008 documentary film titled "The Wrecking Crew".


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye was born in Everett, Washington, to professional musicians Clyde and Dot Smith. Her father was a jazz trombonist who played in big bands. In 1942, he sold a piano in order to finance a move to Wilmington, California. She later said her father was violent towards her, and she persuaded her mother to separate from him, but music was the one thing that could unite the family.


title: Carol Kaye

text: At age 13, Kaye received a steel string guitar from her mother, and began teaching professionally the following year. She began playing sessions in jazz clubs around Los Angeles. During the 1950s, Kaye played bebop jazz guitar with several groups on the Los Angeles club circuit, including Bob Neal's group, Jack Sheldon backing Lenny Bruce, Teddy Edwards and Billy Higgins. She played with the Henry Busse Orchestra in the mid-1950s, and toured the US with them.


title: Carol Kaye

text: In 1957, Kaye was playing a gig at the Beverly Cavern, Hollywood, when producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell invited her to a recording session for Sam Cooke's arrangement of "Summertime". She realised she could make significantly more money with session work than playing in jazz clubs, so took it up as a full-time career. In 1958, she played acoustic rhythm guitar on Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba", recorded at Gold Star Studios, Hollywood. Through Gold Star, she began to work with producer Phil Spector, playing electric guitar on Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans' "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" and The Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me", and acoustic guitar on The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". Along with several other musicians including drummer Hal Blaine and guitarist Glen Campbell, her work with Spector attracted the attention of other record producers and she found herself in demand as a regular session player.


title: Carol Kaye

text: In 1963, when a bass player failed to show for a session at Capitol Records in Hollywood, she was asked to fill in on the instrument. She quickly discovered she preferred playing bass, and found it was a key component of a backing track and allowed her to play more inventively than the relatively simpler guitar parts she had been playing until then. From a pragmatic viewpoint, it was easier to carry a single bass to sessions instead of swapping between three or four guitars depending on the song. After bassist Ray Pohlman left studio work to become a musical director, Kaye became the most in-demand session bassist in Los Angeles.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye continued to play guitar on numerous other hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s, including the twelve-string electric guitar on several Sonny & Cher songs. She also played twelve-string on Frank Zappa's album "Freak Out!" At the time, it was unusual for women to be experienced session players; nevertheless Kaye remembered sessions being generally good-humoured and united by the music.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye was the sole regular female member of The Wrecking Crew (though she has said the collective were never known by this name, which was later invented by Hal Blaine), a collective of studio musicians who played on a large number of hit records from Los Angeles in the 1960s. Throughout the decade, while at the time unknown to the public, Kaye played bass on a substantial number of records that appeared on the "Billboard" Hot 100. According to the "New York Times", she played on 10,000 recording sessions. She appeared on sessions by Frank Sinatra, Simon & Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, The Supremes, The Temptations, the Four Tops and The Monkees. She played electric bass on Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", while Chuck Berghofer played double bass. She also came up with the introduction on fellow session player Glen Campbell's hit "Wichita Lineman". Kaye later said that during the 1960s, she would sometimes play three or four sessions per day, and was pleased that so many of them created hit records.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Through her work with Spector, Kaye caught the attention of The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, who used her on several sessions, including the albums "Beach Boys Today", "Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)", "Pet Sounds" and "Smile". Unlike other sessions, where she was free to work out her own bass lines, Wilson always came in with a very specific idea of what she should play. By "Pet Sounds", Wilson was asking musicians such as Kaye to play far more takes than typical sessions, often running over ten passes of a song, with sessions stretching well into the night.


title: Carol Kaye

text: By 1969, Kaye was exhausted and had become disillusioned from doing session work, saying that the music had "started to sound like cardboard". At the same time, many newer rock bands disapproved of using session players, preferring to play the instruments themselves. She decided to make a change so her career evolved from playing primarily pop music to performing mostly soundtrack work, as well as writing and teaching. She wrote "How To Play The Electric Bass", the first in a series of tutoring books and instructional video courses. Her soundtrack sessions from this time included playing on the themes to "M.A.S.H.", "The Streets of San Francisco" and "Across 110th Street". Kaye had already performed on a number of soundtracks and had worked closely with Lalo Schifrin, playing on the theme to "" and the soundtrack for "Bullitt". She regularly collaborated with Quincy Jones, later saying that he "wrote some of the most beautiful themes I've ever heard in my life". Kaye was also a part of Jones' orchestra at the 43rd Academy Awards.


title: Carol Kaye

text: In the early 1970s, she toured with Joe Pass and Hampton Hawes, and continued to do sessions. In 1973, she played on Barbra Streisand's single "The Way We Were", which was cut live, and was told off by producer Marvin Hamlisch for improvising bass lines. In 1976, she was involved in a car accident, and semi-retired from music. She continued to play sporadically, appearing on J. J. Cale's 1981 album "Shades".


title: Carol Kaye

text: In 1994, Kaye underwent corrective surgery to fix injuries stemming from the accident, and resumed playing and recording. She collaborated with Fender to produce a lighter version of the Precision Bass that reduced strain on her back and made it more comfortable to play. In 1997, she collaborated with Brian Wilson again, playing on his daughters' album, "The Wilsons", while in 2006, Frank Black asked her to play on his album "Fast Man Raider Man" alongside fellow session stalwart, drummer Jim Keltner. She was featured in the 2008 film "The Wrecking Crew" along with a cast of other studio musicians. In one interview segment, she said that she believed at the peak of her session activity she was making more money than the US president.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye's main instrument during the 1960s was the Fender Precision Bass, though she also used the Danelectro bass on occasion. During the 1970s, she sometimes used the Gibson Ripper Bass, and in the 21st century she has used an Ibanez SRX700 bass. She uses Thomastik-Infeld JF344 flatwound strings with a high action and preferred to use guitar amplifiers in the studio when playing bass, including the Fender Super Reverb and the Versatone Pan-O-Flex. Kaye primarily uses a pick, or plectrum, on both guitar and bass, rather than plucking the strings with her fingers. She put a piece of felt between the strings behind the bridge on her bass to enhance the sound and reduce unwanted overtones and undertones. Later she said, "for 25 cents, you could get the best sound in town".


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye preferred to play melodic and syncopated lines on the bass, rather than simply covering a straightforward part. In the studio, she particularly liked to use the upper register on her bass, while a stand-up double bass would be used to cover the low end.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye has achieved critical acclaim as one of the best session bassists of all time. Michael Molenda, writing in "Bass Player" magazine, said that Kaye could listen to other musicians and instantly work out a memorable bass line that would fit with the song, such as her additions to Sonny & Cher's "The Beat Goes On". Paul McCartney has said that his bass playing on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was inspired by her work on "Pet Sounds". Alison Richter, writing in "Bass Guitar" magazine, has called Kaye the "First Lady" of bass playing, adding "her style and influence are in your musical DNA."


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye's solo bass line in Spector's production of "River Deep, Mountain High", was a key part to the song's "Wall of Sound" production. The recording is now in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Quincy Jones said in his 2001 autobiography "Q" that "... women like... Fender bass player Carol Kaye... could do anything and leave men in the dust." Brian Wilson has said that Kaye's playing on the "Good Vibrations" sessions was a key part of the arrangement he wanted. "Carol played bass with a pick that clicked real good. It worked out really well. It gave it a hard sound." Dr. John has said that Kaye "is a sweetheart as well as a kick-ass bass player".


title: Carol Kaye

text: Despite being admired as one of the studio greats, Kaye never expected to be well-remembered. At the time of the sessions, most of the players thought pop music would not last longer than ten years, and she is surprised that people still listen to tracks on which she played. Although the Amazon hit series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" paid homage to Kaye and her career with the character of Carole Keen, introduced in season three and played by Liza Weil, Kaye described the character as "having nothing to do with me or my history. They took a few things out of my book and created a character that's not even me at all." In 2020, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked Kaye number five in its list of the 50 greatest bassists of all time.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye was raised a Baptist, but practiced Judaism in the early 1960s. She has been married three times and has two living children.


title: Carol Kaye

text: At age 13, Kaye took guitar lessons from Horace Hatchett (1909–1985), an esteemed instructor and graduate of the Eastman School of Music who eventually set her up with gigs playing bebop in L.A. nightclubs. At age 16, Kaye gave birth to their child.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Two years later, she married musician Al Kaye and they had one son together. However, Al Kaye, 22 years her senior, had a drinking problem and they would divorce soon after. Kaye’s second husband didn’t approve of her job’s late hours, and he especially didn’t like it when she was playing with black musicians. They had one daughter together. Kaye divorced him, got a live-in nanny, and went back to working again. Kaye's third husband was jazz drummer and session musician Spider Webb. They cofounded a jazz/funk group Spiders Webb, which went on to record the album "I Don't Know What's on Your Mind", for Fantasy Records in 1976.


title: Carol Kaye

text: Kaye played on hundreds of commercially released recordings and soundtracks. This list represents only a small fraction of her recorded performances.


title: Sunflower seed

text: The sunflower seed is the seed of the sunflower ("Helianthus annuus"). There are three types of commonly used sunflower seeds: linoleic (most common), high oleic, and sunflower oil seeds. Each variety has its own unique levels of monounsaturated, saturated, and polyunsaturated fats. The information in this article refers mainly to the linoleic variety.


title: Sunflower seed

text: For commercial purposes, sunflower seeds are usually classified by the pattern on their husks. If the husk is solid black, the seeds are called black oil sunflower seeds. The crops may be referred to as oilseed sunflower crops. These seeds are usually pressed to extract their oil. Striped sunflower seeds are primarily eaten as a snack food; as a result, they may be called confectionery sunflower seeds.


title: Sunflower seed

text: The term "sunflower seed" is actually a misnomer when applied to the seed in its pericarp (hull). Botanically speaking, it is a cypsela. When dehulled, the edible remainder is called the sunflower kernel or heart.


title: Sunflower seed

text: In 2020, global production of sunflower seeds was 50 million tonnes, led by Russia and Ukraine with 53% of the world total combined (table). Argentina, China, and Romania also contributed significant volumes.


title: Sunflower seed

text: Sunflower seeds are more commonly eaten as a snack than as part of a meal. They can also be used as garnishes or ingredients in various recipes. The seeds may be sold as in-shell seeds or dehulled kernels. The seeds can also be sprouted and eaten in salads.


title: Sunflower seed

text: When in-shell seeds are processed, they are first dried. Afterwards, they may also be roasted or dusted with salt or flour for the preservation of flavor.


title: Sunflower seed

text: Sunflower seeds sold by the bag are either eaten plain, salted (sometimes called 'plain') or with flavoring added by the manufacturer. Flavor examples include barbecue, pickle, hot sauce, bacon, ranch, and nacho cheese.


title: Sunflower seed

text: In-shell, sunflower seeds are particularly popular in Mediterranean, Eastern European, and Asian countries where they can be bought freshly roasted and are commonly consumed as street food, the hull being cracked open with the teeth and spat out, while in many countries, they can be bought freshly packed in various roasted flavors. In the United States, they are commonly eaten by baseball players as an alternative to chewing tobacco.


title: Sunflower seed

text: Mechanically dehulled kernels are sold raw or roasted and are sometimes added to bread and other baked goods for their flavor. Sunflower seed brittle is produced by embedding the kernels in hard sugar candy. In Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Romania, roasted ground seeds are used to make a type of halva. Sunflower butter is similar to peanut butter, but uses sunflower seeds instead of peanuts, and is a common substitute in schools for children with nut allergies. Sunflower seeds are also used as food for pets and wild birds.


title: Sunflower seed

text: In a 100-gram serving, dried whole sunflower seeds provide 584 calories and are composed of 5% water, 20% carbohydrates, 51% total fat and 21% protein (table). The seeds are a rich source (20% or higher of the Daily Value, DV) of protein (42% DV), dietary fiber (36% DV), many B vitamins (23–129% DV) and vitamin E (234% DV). The seeds also contain high levels of dietary minerals, including magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, iron and zinc (40–94% DV).


title: Sunflower seed

text: Half of a 100-gram serving is fat, mainly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, principally linoleic acid. Additionally, the seeds contain phytosterols which may contribute toward lower levels of blood cholesterol.


title: Sunflower seed

text: Over the decades, sunflower oil has become popular worldwide. The oil may be used as is, or may be processed into polyunsaturated margarines. The oil is typically extracted by applying great pressure to the sunflower seeds and collecting the oil. The protein-rich cake remaining after the seeds have been processed for oil is used as livestock feed.


title: Sunflower seed

text: The original sunflower oil (linoleic sunflower oil) is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (about 68% linoleic acid) and low in saturated fats, such as palmitic acid and stearic acid. However, various hybrids have been developed to alter the fatty acid profile of the crop for various purposes.


title: Sunflower seed

text: The hulls, or shells, mostly composed of cellulose, decompose slowly and may be burned as biomass fuel. Sunflower hulls of the cultivated sunflower ("Helianthus annuus") contain allelopathic compounds which are toxic to grasses and the vast majority of cultivated garden plants. Only a small number of garden plants, such as day lilies, are unaffected by the allelopathic compounds found in sunflower hulls.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Roger Bacon (; or "", also " Rogerus"; ), also known by the scholastic accolade "Doctor Mirabilis", was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the 19th century) as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.


title: Roger Bacon

text: His linguistic work has been heralded for its early exposition of a universal grammar, and 21st-century re-evaluations emphasise that Bacon was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books in the scholastic tradition. He was, however, partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional "".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon's major work, the "Opus Majus", was sent to Pope Clement IV in Rome in 1267 upon the pope's request. Although gunpowder was first invented and described in China, Bacon was the first in Europe to record its formula.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, in the early 13th century, although his date of birth is sometimes narrowed down to , "1213 or 1214", or "1215". However, modern scholars tend to argue for the date of , but there are disagreements on this. The only source for his birth date is a statement from his 1267 ' that "forty years have passed since I first learned the '". The latest dates assume this referred to the alphabet itself, but elsewhere in the " it is clear that Bacon uses the term to refer to rudimentary studies, the trivium or quadrivium that formed the medieval curriculum. His family appears to have been well off.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon studied at Oxford. While Robert Grosseteste had probably left shortly before Bacon's arrival, his work and legacy almost certainly influenced the young scholar and it is possible Bacon subsequently visited him and William of Sherwood in Lincoln. Bacon became a Master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle. There is no evidence he was ever awarded a doctorate. (The title " was a posthumous scholastic accolade.) A caustic cleric named Roger Bacon is recorded speaking before the king at Oxford in 1233.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In 1237 or at some point in the following decade, he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Paris. While there, he lectured on Latin grammar, Aristotelian logic, arithmetic, geometry, and the mathematical aspects of astronomy and music. His faculty colleagues included Robert Kilwardby, Albertus Magnus, and Peter of Spain, the future Pope John XXI. The Cornishman Richard Rufus was a scholarly opponent. In 1247 or soon after, he left his position in Paris.


title: Roger Bacon

text: As a private scholar, his whereabouts for the next decade are uncertain but he was likely in Oxford –1251, where he met Adam Marsh, and in Paris in 1251. He seems to have studied most of the known Greek and Arabic works on optics (then known as "perspective", '). A passage in the ' states that at some point he took a two-year break from his studies.


title: Roger Bacon

text: By the late 1250s, resentment against the king's preferential treatment of his émigré Poitevin relatives led to a coup and the imposition of the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster, instituting a baronial council and more frequent parliaments. Pope Urban IV absolved the king of his oath in 1261 and, after initial abortive resistance, Simon de Montfort led a force, enlarged due to recent crop failures, that prosecuted the Second Barons' War. Bacon's own family were considered royal partisans: De Montfort's men seized their property and drove several members into exile.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In 1256 or 1257, he became a friar in the Franciscan Order in either Paris or Oxford, following the example of scholarly English Franciscans such as Grosseteste and Marsh. After 1260, Bacon's activities were restricted by a statute prohibiting the friars of his order from publishing books or pamphlets without prior approval. He was likely kept at constant menial tasks to limit his time for contemplation and came to view his treatment as an enforced absence from scholarly life.


title: Roger Bacon

text: By the mid-1260s, he was undertaking a search for patrons who could secure permission and funding for his return to Oxford. For a time, Bacon was finally able to get around his superiors' interference through his acquaintance with Guy de Foulques, bishop of Narbonne, cardinal of Sabina, and the papal legate who negotiated between England's royal and baronial factions.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In 1263 or 1264, a message garbled by Bacon's messenger, Raymond of Laon, led Guy to believe that Bacon had already completed a summary of the sciences. In fact, he had no money to research, let alone copy, such a work and attempts to secure financing from his family were thwarted by the Second Barons' War. However, in 1265, Guy was summoned to a conclave at Perugia that elected him . William Benecor, who had previously been the courier between Henry III and the pope, now carried the correspondence between Bacon and Clement. Clement's reply of 22 June 1266 commissioned "writings and remedies for current conditions", instructing Bacon not to violate any standing "prohibitions" of his order but to carry out his task in utmost secrecy.


title: Roger Bacon

text: While faculties of the time were largely limited to addressing disputes on the known texts of Aristotle, Clement's patronage permitted Bacon to engage in a wide-ranging consideration of the state of knowledge in his era. In 1267 or '68, Bacon sent the Pope his ", which presented his views on how to incorporate Aristotelian logic and science into a new theology, supporting Grosseteste's text-based approach against the "sentence method" then fashionable.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon also sent his ', ', ", an optical lens, and possibly other works on alchemy and astrology. The entire process has been called "one of the most remarkable single efforts of literary productivity", with Bacon composing referenced works of around a million words in about a year.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Pope Clement died in 1268 and Bacon lost his protector. The Condemnations of 1277 banned the teaching of certain philosophical doctrines, including deterministic astrology. Some time within the next two years, Bacon was apparently imprisoned or placed under house arrest. This was traditionally ascribed to Franciscan Minister General Jerome of Ascoli, probably acting on behalf of the many clergy, monks, and educators attacked by Bacon's 1271 "".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Modern scholarship, however, notes that the first reference to Bacon's "imprisonment" dates from eighty years after his death on the charge of unspecified "suspected novelties" and finds it less than credible. Contemporary scholars who do accept Bacon's imprisonment typically associate it with Bacon's "attraction to contemporary prophesies", his sympathies for "the radical 'poverty' wing of the Franciscans", interest in certain astrological doctrines, or generally combative personality rather than from "any scientific novelties which he may have proposed".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Sometime after 1278, Bacon returned to the Franciscan House at Oxford, where he continued his studies and is presumed to have spent most of the remainder of his life. His last dateable writing—the ""—was completed in 1292. He seems to have died shortly afterwards and been buried at Oxford.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Medieval European philosophy often relied on appeals to the authority of Church Fathers such as St Augustine, and on works by Plato and Aristotle only known at second hand or through Latin translations. By the 13th century, new works and better versions – in Arabic or in new Latin translations from the Arabic – began to trickle north from Muslim Spain. In Roger Bacon's writings, he upholds Aristotle's calls for the collection of facts before deducing scientific truths, against the practices of his contemporaries, arguing that "thence cometh quiet to the mind".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon also called for reform with regard to theology. He argued that, rather than training to debate minor philosophical distinctions, theologians should focus their attention primarily on the Bible itself, learning the languages of its original sources thoroughly. He was fluent in several of these languages and was able to note and bemoan several corruptions of scripture, and of the works of the Greek philosophers that had been mistranslated or misinterpreted by scholars working in Latin. He also argued for the education of theologians in science ("natural philosophy") and its addition to the medieval curriculum.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon's 1267 "Greater Work", the ', contains treatments of mathematics, optics, alchemy, and astronomy, including theories on the positions and sizes of the celestial bodies. It is divided into seven sections: "The Four General Causes of Human Ignorance" ('), "The Affinity of Philosophy with Theology" ('), "On the Usefulness of Grammar" ('), "The Usefulness of Mathematics in Physics" ('), "On the Science of Perspective" ('), "On Experimental Knowledge" ('), and "A Philosophy of Morality" (').


title: Roger Bacon

text: It was not intended as a complete work but as a "persuasive preamble" ('), an enormous proposal for a reform of the medieval university curriculum and the establishment of a kind of library or encyclopedia, bringing in experts to compose a collection of definitive texts on these subjects. The new subjects were to be "perspective" (i.e., optics), "astronomy" (inclusive of astronomy proper, astrology, and the geography necessary to use them), "weights" (likely some treatment of mechanics but this section of the ' has been lost), alchemy, agriculture (inclusive of botany and zoology), medicine, and "experimental science", a philosophy of science that would guide the others. The section on geography was allegedly originally ornamented with a map based on ancient and Arabic computations of longitude and latitude, but has since been lost. His (mistaken) arguments supporting the idea that dry land formed the larger proportion of the globe were apparently similar to those which later guided Columbus.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In this work Bacon criticises his contemporaries Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus, who were held in high repute despite having only acquired their knowledge of Aristotle at second hand during their preaching careers. Albert was received at Paris as an authority equal to Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes, a situation Bacon decried: "never in the world [had] such monstrosity occurred before."


title: Roger Bacon

text: In Part I of the "Opus Majus" Bacon recognises some philosophers as the "Sapientes", or gifted few, and saw their knowledge in philosophy and theology as superior to the "vulgus philosophantium", or common herd of philosophers. He held Islamic thinkers between 1210 and 1265 in especially high regard calling them "both philosophers and sacred writers" and defended the integration of Islamic philosophy into Christian learning.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In Part IV of the ", Bacon proposed a calendrical reform similar to the later system introduced in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII. Drawing on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy recently introduced to western Europe via Spain, Bacon continued the work of Robert Grosseteste and criticised the then-current Julian calendar as "intolerable, horrible, and laughable".


title: Roger Bacon

text: It had become apparent that Eudoxus and Sosigenes's assumption of a year of 365¼ days was, over the course of centuries, too inexact. Bacon charged that this meant the computation of Easter had shifted forward by 9 days since the First Council of Nicaea in 325. His proposal to drop one day every 125 years and to cease the observance of fixed equinoxes and solstices was not acted upon following the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268. The eventual Gregorian calendar drops one day from the first three centuries in each set of 400 years.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In Part V of the ", Bacon discusses physiology of eyesight and the anatomy of the eye and the brain, considering light, distance, position, and size, direct and reflected vision, refraction, mirrors, and lenses. His treatment was primarily oriented by the Latin translation of Alhazen's "Book of Optics". He also draws heavily on Eugene of Palermo's Latin translation of the Arabic translation of Ptolemy's "Optics"; on Robert Grosseteste's work based on Al-Kindi's "Optics"; and, through Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham), on Ibn Sahl's work on dioptrics.


title: Roger Bacon

text: A passage in the ' and another in the ' are usually taken as the first European descriptions of a mixture containing the essential ingredients of gunpowder. Partington and others have come to the conclusion that Bacon most likely witnessed at least one demonstration of Chinese firecrackers, possibly obtained by Franciscans—including Bacon's friend William of Rubruck—who visited the Mongol Empire during this period. The most telling passage reads:


title: Roger Bacon

text: We have an example of these things (that act on the senses) in [the sound and fire of] that children's toy which is made in many [diverse] parts of the world; i.e. a device no bigger than one's thumb. From the violence of that salt called saltpetre [together with sulphur and willow charcoal, combined into a powder] so horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a thing so small, no more than a bit of parchment [containing it], that we find [the ear assaulted by a noise] exceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning.


title: Roger Bacon

text: At the beginning of the 20th century, Henry William Lovett Hime of the Royal Artillery published the theory that Bacon's "" contained a cryptogram giving a recipe for the gunpowder he witnessed. The theory was criticised by Thorndike in a 1915 letter to "Science" and several books, a position joined by Muir, Stillman, Steele, and Sarton. Needham et al. concurred with these earlier critics that the additional passage did not originate with Bacon and further showed that the proportions supposedly deciphered (a 7:5:5 ratio of saltpetre to charcoal to sulphur) as not even useful for firecrackers, burning slowly with a great deal of smoke and failing to ignite inside a gun barrel. The ~41% nitrate content is too low to have explosive properties.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon attributed the "Secret of Secrets" (""), the Islamic "Mirror of Princes" (), to Aristotle, thinking that he had composed it for Alexander the Great. Bacon produced an edition of Philip of Tripoli's Latin translation, complete with his own introduction and notes; and his writings of the 1260s and 1270s cite it far more than his contemporaries did. This led Easton and others, including Robert Steele, to argue that the text spurred Bacon's own transformation into an experimentalist. (Bacon never described such a decisive impact himself.) The dating of Bacon's edition of the "Secret of Secrets" is a key piece of evidence in the debate, with those arguing for a greater impact giving it an earlier date; but it certainly influenced the elder Bacon's conception of the political aspects of his work in the sciences.


title: Roger Bacon

text: The "Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature and on the Vanity of Magic" ('), also known as "On the Wonderful Powers of Art and Nature" ('), a likely-forged letter to an unknown "William of Paris," dismisses practices such as necromancy but contains most of the alchemical formulae attributed to Bacon, including one for a philosopher's stone and another possibly for gunpowder. It also includes several passages about hypothetical flying machines and submarines, attributing their first use to Alexander the Great. "On the Vanity of Magic" or "The Nullity of Magic" is a debunking of esoteric claims in Bacon's time, showing that they could be explained by natural phenomena.


title: Roger Bacon

text: He wrote on the medicine of Galen, referring to the translations of Avicenna. He believed that the medicine of Galen belonged to an ancient tradition passed through Caldeans, Greeks and Arabs. Although he provided a negative image of Hermes Trismegistus, his work was influenced by the Renaissance Hermetic thought. Bacon's endorsement of Hermetic philosophy is evident, as his citations of the alchemical literature known as the Secretum Secretorum made several appearances in the Opus Majus. The Secretum Secretorum contains knowledge about the Hermetic Emerald Tablet, which was an integral component of alchemy, thus proving that Bacon's version of alchemy was much less secular, and much more spiritual than once interpreted. The importance of Hermetic philosophy in Bacon's work is also evident through his citations of classic Hermetic literature such as the Corpus Hermeticum. Bacon's citation of the Corpus Hermeticum, which consists of a dialogue between Hermes and the pagan deity Asclepius, proves that Bacon's ideas were much more in line with the spiritual aspects of alchemy rather than the scientific aspects. However, this is somewhat paradoxical as what Bacon was specifically trying to prove in the Opus Majus and subsequent works, was that spirituality and science were the same entity. Bacon believed that by using science, certain aspects of spirituality such as the attainment of "Sapientia" or "Divine Wisdom" could be logically explained using tangible evidence. Bacon's Opus Majus was first and foremost, a compendium of sciences which he believed would facilitate the first step towards "Sapientia". Bacon placed considerable emphasis on alchemy and even went so far as to state that alchemy was the most important science. The reason why Bacon kept the topic of alchemy vague for the most part, is due to the need for secrecy about esoteric topics in England at the time as well as his dedication to remaining in line with the alchemical tradition of speaking in symbols and metaphors.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon's early linguistic and logical works are the "Overview of Grammar" ("Summa Grammatica"), ', and the ' or "". These are mature but essentially conventional presentations of Oxford and Paris's terminist and pre-modist logic and grammar. His later work in linguistics is much more idiosyncratic, using terminology and addressing questions unique in his era.


title: Roger Bacon

text: In his "Greek" and "Hebrew Grammars" (' and '), in his work "On the Usefulness of Grammar" (Book III of the ""), and in his "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy", Bacon stresses the need for scholars to know several languages. Europe's vernacular languages are not ignored—he considers them useful for practical purposes such as trade, proselytism, and administration—but Bacon is mostly interested in his era's languages of science and religion: Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon is less interested in a full practical mastery of the other languages than on a theoretical understanding of their grammatical rules, ensuring that a Latin reader will not misunderstand passages' original meaning. For this reason, his treatments of Greek and Hebrew grammar are not isolated works on their topic but contrastive grammars treating the aspects which influenced Latin or which were required for properly understanding Latin texts. He pointedly states, "I want to describe Greek grammar for the benefit of Latin speakers". It is likely only this limited sense which was intended by Bacon's boast that he could teach an interested pupil a new language within three days.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Passages in the "Overview" and the Greek grammar have been taken as an early exposition of a universal grammar underlying all human languages. The Greek grammar contains the tersest and most famous exposition:


title: Roger Bacon

text: However, Bacon's lack of interest in studying a literal grammar underlying the languages known to him and his numerous works on linguistics and comparative linguistics has prompted Hovdhaugen to question the usual literal translation of Bacon's " in such passages. She notes the ambiguity in the Latin term, which could refer variously to the structure of language, to its description, and to the science underlying such descriptions: i.e., linguistics.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon states that his "Lesser Work" (') and "Third Work" (') were originally intended as summaries of the ' in case it was lost in transit. Easton's review of the texts suggests that they became separate works over the course of the laborious process of creating a fair copy of the ', whose half-million words were copied by hand and apparently greatly revised at least once.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Other works by Bacon include his "Tract on the Multiplication of Species" ('), "On Burning Lenses" ('), the ' and ', the "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy" and "of Theology" (' and '), and his "Computus". The "Compendium of the Study of Theology", presumably written in the last years of his life, was an anticlimax: adding nothing new, it is principally devoted to the concerns of the 1260s.


title: Roger Bacon

text: "The Mirror of Alchimy" ("), a short treatise on the origin and composition of metals, is traditionally credited to Bacon. It espouses the Arabian theory of mercury and sulphur forming the other metals, with vague allusions to transmutation. Stillman opined that "there is nothing in it that is characteristic of Roger Bacon's style or ideas, nor that distinguishes it from many unimportant alchemical lucubrations of anonymous writers of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries", and Muir and Lippmann also considered it a pseudepigraph.


title: Roger Bacon

text: The cryptic Voynich manuscript has been attributed to Bacon by various sources, including by its first recorded owner, but historians of science Lynn Thorndike and George Sarton dismissed these claims as unsupported, and the vellum of the manuscript has since been dated to the 15th century.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon was largely ignored by his contemporaries in favour of other scholars such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, although his works were studied by Bonaventure, John Pecham, and Peter of Limoges, through whom he may have influenced Raymond Lull. He was also partially responsible for the addition of optics (") to the medieval university curriculum.


title: Roger Bacon

text: By the early modern period, the English considered him the epitome of a wise and subtle possessor of forbidden knowledge, a Faust-like magician who had tricked the devil and so was able to go to heaven. Of these legends, one of the most prominent was that he created a talking brazen head which could answer any question. The story appears in the anonymous 16th-century account of "The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon", in which Bacon speaks with a demon but causes the head to speak by "the continuall fume of the six hottest Simples", testing his theory that speech is caused by "an effusion of vapors".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Around 1589, Robert Greene adapted the story for the stage as "The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay", one of the most successful Elizabethan comedies. As late as the 1640s, Thomas Browne was still complaining that "Every ear is filled with the story of Frier Bacon, that made a brazen head to speak these words, "Time is"". Greene's Bacon spent seven years creating a brass head that would speak "strange and uncouth aphorisms" to enable him to encircle Britain with a wall of brass that would make it impossible to conquer.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Unlike his source material, Greene does not cause his head to operate by natural forces but by "nigromantic charms" and "the enchanting forces of the devil": i.e., by entrapping a dead spirit or hobgoblin. Bacon collapses, exhausted, just before his device comes to life and announces "Time is", "Time was", and "Time is Past" before being destroyed in spectacular fashion: the stage direction instructs that ""a lightening flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer"".


title: Roger Bacon

text: A necromantic head was ascribed to Pope Sylvester II as early as the 1120s, but Browne considered the legend to be a misunderstanding of a passage in Peter the Good's "Precious Pearl" where the negligent alchemist misses the birth of his creation and loses it forever. The story may also preserve the work by Bacon and his contemporaries to construct clockwork armillary spheres. Bacon had praised a "self-activated working model of the heavens" as "the greatest of all things which have been devised".


title: Roger Bacon

text: As early as the 16th century, natural philosophers such as Bruno, Dee and Francis Bacon were attempting to rehabilitate Bacon's reputation and to portray him as a scientific pioneer who had avoided the petty bickering of his contemporaries to attempt a rational understanding of nature. By the 19th century, commenters following Whewell considered that "Bacon... was not appreciated in his age because he was so completely in advance of it; he is a 16th- or 17th-century philosopher, whose lot has been by some accident cast in the 13th century". His assertions in the "" that "theories supplied by reason should be verified by sensory data, aided by instruments, and corroborated by trustworthy witnesses" were (and still are) considered "one of the first important formulations of the scientific method on record".


title: Roger Bacon

text: This idea that Bacon was a modern experimental scientist reflected two views of the period: that the principal form of scientific activity is experimentation and that 13th-century Europe still represented the "Dark Ages". This view, which is still reflected in some 21st-century popular science books, portrays Bacon as an advocate of modern experimental science who emerged as a solitary genius in an age hostile to his ideas. Based on Bacon's apocrypha, he is also portrayed as a visionary who predicted the invention of the submarine, aircraft, and automobile. Consistent with this view of Bacon as a man ahead of his time, H.G. Wells's "Outline of History" attributes this prescient passage to him:Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved "cum impetu inaestimabili", as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.


title: Roger Bacon

text: However, in the course of the 20th century, Husserl, Heidegger and others emphasised the importance to modern science of Cartesian and Galilean projections of mathematics over sensory perceptions of nature; Heidegger in particular noted the lack of such an understanding in Bacon's works. Although Crombie, Kuhn and Schramm continued to argue for Bacon's importance to the development of "qualitative" areas of modern science, Duhem, Thorndike, Carton and Koyré emphasised the essentially medieval nature of Bacon's "".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Research also established that Bacon was not as isolated—and probably not as persecuted—as was once thought. Many medieval sources of and influences on Bacon's scientific activity have been identified. In particular, Bacon often mentioned his debt to the work of Robert Grosseteste: his work on optics and the calendar followed Grosseteste's lead, as did his idea that inductively-derived conclusions should be submitted for verification through experimental testing.


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon noted of William of Sherwood that "nobody was greater in philosophy than he"; praised Peter of Maricourt (the author of "A Letter on Magnetism") and John of London as "perfect" mathematicians; Campanus of Novara (the author of works on astronomy, astrology, and the calendar) and a Master Nicholas as "good"; and acknowledged the influence of Adam Marsh and lesser figures. He was clearly not an isolated genius. The medieval church was also not generally opposed to scientific investigation and medieval science was both varied and extensive.


title: Roger Bacon

text: As a result, the picture of Bacon has changed. Bacon is now seen as part of his age: a leading figure in the beginnings of the medieval universities at Paris and Oxford but one joined in the development of the philosophy of science by Robert Grosseteste, William of Auvergne, Henry of Ghent, Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Lindberg summarised:


title: Roger Bacon

text: Bacon was not a modern, out of step with his age, or a harbinger of things to come, but a brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century, endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just becoming available while remaining true to traditional notions... of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge".


title: Roger Bacon

text: A recent review of the many visions of Bacon across the ages says contemporary scholarship still neglects one of the most important aspects of his life and thought: his commitment to the Franciscan order.


title: Roger Bacon

text: His was a plea for reform addressed to the supreme spiritual head of the Christian faith, written against a background of apocalyptic expectation and informed by the driving concerns of the friars. It was designed to improve training for missionaries and to provide new skills to be employed in the defence of the Christian world against the enmity of non-Christians and of the Antichrist. It cannot usefully be read solely in the context of the history of science and philosophy.


title: Roger Bacon

text: With regard to religion's influence on Bacon's philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce noted, "To Roger Bacon... the schoolmen's conception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth... [but] Of all kinds of experience, the best, he thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about Nature which the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation of bread."


title: Roger Bacon

text: In Oxford lore, Bacon is credited as the namesake of Folly Bridge for having gotten himself placed under house arrest nearby. Although this is probably untrue, it had formerly been known as "Friar Bacon's Bridge". Bacon is also honoured at Oxford by a plaque affixed to the wall of the new Westgate shopping centre.


title: Roger Bacon

text: To commemorate the 700th anniversary of Bacon's approximate year of birth, Prof. J. Erskine wrote the biographical play "A Pageant of the Thirteenth Century", which was performed and published by Columbia University in 1914. A fictionalised account of Bacon's life and times also appears in the second book of James Blish's "After Such Knowledge" trilogy, the 1964 "Doctor Mirabilis". Bacon serves as a mentor to the protagonists of Thomas Costain's 1945 "The Black Rose", and Umberto Eco's 1980 "The Name of the Rose".


title: Roger Bacon

text: Greene's play prompted a less successful sequel "John of Bordeaux" and was recast as a children's story for James Baldwin's 1905 "Thirty More Famous Stories Retold". "The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon" also appears in Daniel Defoe's 1722 "Journal of the Plague Year", Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1843 "The Birth-Mark" and 1844 "The Artist of the Beautiful", William Douglas O'Connor's 1891 "The Brazen Android" (where Bacon devises it to terrify King Henry into accepting Simon de Montfort's demands for greater democracy), John Cowper Powys's 1956 "The Brazen Head", and Robertson Davies's 1970 "Fifth Business".


title: Autoencoder

text: An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient codings of unlabeled data (unsupervised learning). The encoding is validated and refined by attempting to regenerate the input from the encoding. The autoencoder learns a representation (encoding) for a set of data, typically for dimensionality reduction, by training the network to ignore insignificant data (“noise”).


title: Autoencoder

text: Variants exist, aiming to force the learned representations to assume useful properties. Examples are regularized autoencoders ("Sparse", "Denoising" and "Contractive"), which are effective in learning representations for subsequent classification tasks, and "Variational" autoencoders, with applications as generative models. Autoencoders are applied to many problems, including facial recognition, feature detection, anomaly detection and acquiring the meaning of words. Autoencoders are also generative models which can randomly generate new data that is similar to the input data (training data).


title: Autoencoder

text: An autoencoder is defined by the following components: Two sets: the space of decoded messages formula_1; the space of encoded messages formula_2. Almost always, both formula_1 and formula_2 are Euclidean spaces, that is, formula_5 for some formula_6. Two parametrized families of functions: the encoder family formula_7, parametrized by formula_8; the decoder family formula_9, parametrized by formula_10.For any formula_11, we usually write formula_12, and refer to it as the code, the latent variable, latent representation, latent vector, etc. Conversely, for any formula_13, we usually write formula_14, and refer to it as the (decoded) message.


title: Autoencoder

text: Usually, both the encoder and the decoder are defined as multilayer perceptrons. For example, a one-layer-MLP encoder formula_15 is:


title: Autoencoder

text: where formula_17 is an element-wise activation function such as a sigmoid function or a rectified linear unit, formula_18 is a matrix called "weight", and formula_19 is a vector called "bias".


title: Autoencoder

text: An autoencoder, by itself, is simply a tuple of two functions. To judge its "quality", we need a "task". A task is defined by a reference probability distribution formula_20 over formula_1, and a "reconstruction quality" function formula_22, such that formula_23 measures how much formula_24 differs from formula_25.


title: Autoencoder

text: With those, we can define the loss function for the autoencoder asformula_26The "optimal" autoencoder for the given task formula_27 is then formula_28. The search for the optimal autoencoder can be accomplished by any mathematical optimization technique, but usually by gradient descent. This search process is referred to as "training the autoencoder".


title: Autoencoder

text: In most situations, the reference distribution is just the empirical distribution given by a dataset formula_29, so thatformula_30


title: Autoencoder

text: and the quality function is just L2 loss: formula_31. Then the problem of searching for the optimal autoencoder is just a least-squares optimization:formula_32


title: Autoencoder

text: An autoencoder has two main parts: an encoder that maps the message to a code, and a decoder that reconstructs the message from the code. An optimal autoencoder would perform as close to perfect reconstruction as possible, with "close to perfect" defined by the reconstruction quality function formula_33.


title: Autoencoder

text: The simplest way to perform the copying task perfectly would be to duplicate the signal. To suppress this behavior, the code space formula_2 usually has fewer dimensions than the message space formula_35.


title: Autoencoder

text: Such an autoencoder is called "undercomplete". It can be interpreted as compressing the message, or reducing its dimensionality.


title: Autoencoder

text: At the limit of an ideal undercomplete autoencoder, every possible code formula_36 in the code space is used to encode a message formula_25 that really appears in the distribution formula_20, and the decoder is also perfect: formula_39. This ideal autoencoder can then be used to generate messages indistinguishable from real messages, by feeding its decoder arbitrary code formula_36 and obtaining formula_41, which is a message that really appears in the distribution formula_20.


title: Autoencoder

text: If the code space formula_2 has dimension larger than ("overcomplete"), or equal to, the message space formula_35, or the hidden units are given enough capacity, an autoencoder can learn the identity function and become useless. However, experimental results found that overcomplete autoencoders might still learn useful features.


title: Autoencoder

text: In the ideal setting, the code dimension and the model capacity could be set on the basis of the complexity of the data distribution to be modeled. A standard way to do so is to add modifications to the basic autoencoder, to be detailed below.


title: Autoencoder

text: The autoencoder has also been called the autoassociator, or Diabolo network. Its first applications date to the 1980s. Their most traditional application was dimensionality reduction or feature learning, but the concept became widely used for learning generative models of data. Some of the most powerful AIs in the 2010s involved autoencoders stacked inside deep neural networks.


title: Autoencoder

text: Various techniques exist to prevent autoencoders from learning the identity function and to improve their ability to capture important information and learn richer representations.


title: Autoencoder

text: Inspired by the sparse coding hypothesis in neuroscience, sparse autoencoders are variants of autoencoders, such that the codes formula_45 for messages tend to be "sparse codes", that is, formula_45 is close to zero in most entries. Sparse autoencoders may include more (rather than fewer) hidden units than inputs, but only a small number of the hidden units are allowed to be active at the same time. Encouraging sparsity improves performance on classification tasks.


title: Autoencoder

text: There are two main ways to enforce sparsity. One way is to simply clamp all but the highest-k activations of the latent code to zero. This is the k-sparse autoencoder.


title: Autoencoder

text: The k-sparse autoencoder inserts the following "k-sparse function" in the latent layer of a standard autoencoder:formula_47where formula_48 if formula_49 ranks in the top k, and 0 otherwise.


title: Autoencoder

text: Backpropagating through formula_50 is simple: set gradient to 0 for formula_51 entries, and keep gradient for formula_52 entries. This is essentially a generalized ReLU function.


title: Autoencoder

text: The other way is a relaxed version of the k-sparse autoencoder. Instead of forcing sparsity, we add a sparsity regularization loss, then optimize forformula_53where formula_54 measures how much sparsity we want to enforce.


title: Autoencoder

text: Let the autoencoder architecture have formula_55 layers. To define a sparsity regularization loss, we need a "desired" sparsity formula_56 for each layer, a weight formula_57 for how much to enforce each sparsity, and a function formula_58 to measure how much two sparsities differ.


title: Autoencoder

text: For each input formula_25, let the actual sparsity of activation in each layer formula_60 beformula_61where formula_62 is the activation in the formula_63 -th neuron of the formula_60 -th layer upon input formula_25.


title: Autoencoder

text: The sparsity loss upon input formula_25 for one layer is formula_67, and the sparsity regularization loss for the entire autoencoder is the expected weighted sum of sparsity losses:formula_68Typically, the function formula_69 is either the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, as