title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Princess Elisabeth, the couple's eldest child, is the first in line to the throne and ahead of her younger brothers and sister, who are second, third, and fourth in line to succeed, owing to a change in Belgian succession laws in 1991, allowing for the eldest child to succeed, regardless of sex.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Queen Mathilde is concerned with a range of social issues including education, child poverty, intergenerational poverty, the position of women in society and literacy.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Since 2009, Queen Mathilde has been the honorary president of Unicef Belgium. She serves as the World Health Organization's Special Representative for Immunization. She also the honorary president of the Breast International Group, a non-profit organisation for academic breast cancer research groups from around the world.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: She set up the Princess Mathilde Fund (now the Queen Mathilde Fund) in 2001, which promotes the care of vulnerable people and awards an annual prize for good works in a particular sector. The sector changes each year: examples include early years education, women's health, and protecting young people from violence.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Queen Mathilde deploys the Queen's Charities to offer help to citizens who are struggling to cope with financial hardship in their daily lives and often turn to her as a last resort. The Queen is the honorary president of Child Focus, a foundation for missing and sexually exploited children.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Queen Mathilde is also a patron of the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, an international competition founded in 1937 as an initiative of Queen Elisabeth and Belgian composer and violist Eugène Ysaÿe.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: In 2018, Queen Mathilde became the honorary president of the Federal Council for Sustainable Development. According to the royal tradition, Queen Mathilde became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Queen Mathilde is a member of the Schwab Foundation Board for Social Entrepreneurship. She was a United Nations Emissary for the International Year of Microcredit 2005, which focused in particular on financial inclusion and financial literacy. The Queen also attends the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.


title: Queen Mathilde of Belgium

text: Queen Mathilde was named a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Advocate in 2016, promoting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (2030 Agenda for global sustainable development). As an SDG Advocate, she is particularly focused on mental health.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The secretary of the Navy (or SECNAV) is a statutory officer () and the head (chief executive officer) of the Department of the Navy, a military department (component organization) within the United States Department of Defense.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: By law, the secretary of the Navy must be a civilian at least five years removed from active military service. The secretary is appointed by the president and requires confirmation by the Senate.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The secretary of the Navy was, from its creation in 1798, a member of the president's Cabinet until 1949, when the secretary of the Navy (and the secretaries of the Army and Air Force) were by amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 made subordinate to the secretary of defense.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: From 2001 to 2019, proposals to rename the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Navy and Marine Corps, which would have also renamed the secretary of the Navy to the secretary of the Navy and Marine Corps, were introduced with wide support in the United States Congress, but failed due to the opposition of Senator and former U.S. Navy officer John McCain.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The Department of the Navy (DoN) consists of two Uniformed Services: the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. The secretary of the Navy is responsible for, and has statutory authority () to "conduct all the affairs of the Department of the Navy", i.e. as its chief executive officer, subject to the limits of the law, and the directions of the president and the secretary of defense. In effect, all authority within the Navy and Marine Corps, unless specifically exempted by law, is derivative of the authority vested in the secretary of the Navy.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: Specifically enumerated responsibilities of the SECNAV in the aforementioned section are: recruiting, organizing, supplying, equipping, training, mobilizing, and demobilizing. The secretary also oversees the construction, outfitting, and repair of naval ships, equipment, and facilities. SECNAV is responsible for the formulation and implementation of policies and programs that are consistent with the national security policies and objectives established by the president or the secretary of defense.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The secretary of the Navy is a member of the Defense Acquisition Board (DAB), chaired by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. Furthermore, the secretary has several statutory responsibilities under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) with respect to the administration of the military justice system for the Navy & the Marine Corps, including the authority to convene general courts-martial and to commute sentences.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The principal military advisers to the SECNAV are the two service chiefs of the naval services: for matters regarding the Navy the chief of naval operations (CNO), and for matters regarding the Marine Corps the commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC). The CNO and the Commandant act as the principal executive agents of the SECNAV within their respective services to implement the orders of the secretary.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The United States Navy Regulations is the principal regulatory document of the Department of the Navy, and all changes to it must be approved by the secretary of the Navy.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: Whenever the United States Coast Guard operates as a service within the Department of the Navy, the secretary of the Navy has the same powers and duties with respect to the Coast Guard as the secretary of homeland security when the Coast Guard is not operating as a service in the Department of the Navy.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The Office of the Secretary of the Navy, also known within DoD as the "Navy Secretariat" or simply just as the "Secretariat" in a DoN setting, is the immediate headquarters staff that supports the secretary in discharging his duties. The principal officials of the Secretariat include the under secretary of the Navy (the secretary's principal civilian deputy), the assistant secretaries of the Navy (ASN), the general counsel of the Navy, the judge advocate general of the Navy (JAG), the Naval inspector general (NIG), the chief of Legislative Affairs, and the chief of naval research. The Office of the Secretary of the Navy has sole responsibility within the Department of the Navy for acquisition, auditing, financial and information management, legislative affairs, and public affairs.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: Pursuant to SecNavInst 5090.5F, the Department of the Navy "Environmental Programs Manual", the secretary of the Navy and chief of naval operations recognize a number of commands annually for achievements in such areas as environmental quality, environmental cleanup, natural resources conservation, cultural resources management, pollution prevention, and recycling.


title: United States Secretary of the Navy

text: The chief of naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps have their own separate staffs, the "Office of the Chief of Naval Operations" (also known by its acronym OPNAV) and "Headquarters Marine Corps".


title: Tunic

text: A tunic is a garment for the body, usually simple in style, reaching from the shoulders to a length somewhere between the hips and the knees. The name derives from the Latin "tunica", the basic garment worn by both men and women in Ancient Rome, which in turn was based on earlier Greek garments that covered wearers' waists.


title: Tunic

text: Indus valley civilization figurines depict both women and men wearing a tunic-like garment. A terracotta model called Lady of the spiked throne depicts two standing turban-wearing men wearing what appears to be a conical gown marked by a dense series of thin vertical incisions that might suggest stiffened cloth. A similar gold disc in the al-Sabah Collection from the Kuwait National Museum appears to be from the Indus Valley civilization depicts similar conical tunic-wearing men holding two bulls by their tails under a pipal tree shown in an Indus-like mirror symmetry. A mother goddess figurine from the


title: Tunic

text: Worn in the Indian sub-continent, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the tunic is usually referred to as kurta and is an emerging women's top style increasingly liked by many in the West. An Asian tunic is typically adorned with delicate embroidery, bead-work or intricate threadwork as well. Embroidery or thread work on such tunics usually combines threads of many different colors.


title: Tunic

text: Tunics were also worn in ancient Greece, whence the Roman version was adopted. Later Greek and Roman tunics were an evolution from the very similar chiton, chitoniskos, and exomis all of which can be considered versions of the garment. In ancient Greece, a person's tunic was decorated at the hemline to represent the city-state in which he lived. Tunics might be dyed with bright colors, like red, purple, or green.


title: Tunic

text: There was also the "sisura" (σισύρα), which according to Pollux was a tunic with sleeves of skins. According to the Suda, it was a type of inexpensive cloak, like a one-shoulder tunic. The "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities" mentions that it seems to have been more of a cloak than a tunic, and was worn for warmth or used to sleep in. According to the same source, late authors may use the term to mean a piece of cloth.


title: Tunic

text: The Roman "tunica" was adopted by the Roman citizens in the 3rd century BC. It was often worn by citizens and non-citizens alike; citizens, though, might wear it under the toga, especially at formal occasions. The length of the garment, the presence or lack of stripes, as well as their width and ornamentation, would indicate the wearer's status in Roman society. Roman senators, for example, used the "Laticlavus", with broad purple stripes, and members of the equestrian class wore the "Angusticlavia", with narrower stripes. Soldiers, slaves and manual workers generally had tunics to a little above the knee; those in more sedentary occupations to about the ankle (unless they were expecting to ride a horse, when a shorter one would be worn).


title: Tunic

text: The tunic or chiton was worn as a shirt or gown by all genders among the ancient Romans. The body garment was loose-fitting for males, usually beginning at the neck and ending above the knee. A woman's garment could be either close fitting or loose, beginning at the neck and extending over a skirt or skirts.


title: Tunic

text: The various Celtic and Germanic peoples living in the colder Middle and Northern Europe wore long-sleeved tunics from as long back as pictorial evidence goes. Such tunics are often found depicted on the various Roman monuments depicting victories over these peoples, and show the tunic as a simple pull-over construction reaching to the mid-thighs or to the knees. Similar tunics were eventually taken up by the Romans, and continued to be used into the Byzantine period.


title: Tunic

text: After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the long-sleeved Celto-Germanic tunic continued to be worn. The construction was more elaborate than the earlier Graeco-Roman garment, with a tight-fitting neck with a split down the front for pulling it over the head, and gusset under the arms and inserted around the lower half to give a flaring skirt. Being used by both Vikings and Normans, the garment continued as a general male garment into the Middle Ages, still being used in Norway as late as the 17th century.


title: Tunic

text: The tunic continued to be the basic garment of the Byzantine Romans of both sexes throughout the medieval period. The upper classes wore other garments atop the basic tunic, such as the "dalmatica", a heavier and shorter type of tunic, again, worn by both sexes, or the "scaramangion", a riding-coat of Persian origin. Except for the military or riding dress, men and women of higher status wore tunics that came down to the ankles, or nearly so. Tunics were often dyed or richly embroidered, although the plainer ones could be used when layering different types.


title: Tunic

text: Beyond the reduced empire, the tunic continued to be worn with varying sleeve and hem lengths throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. Often reaching the knees or ankles, it was usually worn over underclothes consisting of a shirt (usually hip-length or longer) and drawers (usually knee- or ankle-length pants related to braccae). It may be accompanied by hose. Wool and linen were common fabrics used, though the wealthy sometimes wore fancy silk tunics or a lesser fabric with silk trim.


title: Tunic

text: Tunics worn during the Early Middle Ages often featured decorative embroidery or tablet-woven braids along the neck, hem and wrists. This was the case, for instance, with tunics worn by both rich and poor Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest.


title: Tunic

text: Around 1830, small boys began to be dressed in sashed or belted tunics over trousers, a fashion which replaced the earlier skeleton suit.


title: Tunic

text: During the Crimean War in the 1850s, it was realized that the waist length jackets which had been worn by British soldiers since Napoleonic times were unsuitable for fighting in winter conditions. A new longer jacket was introduced which reached down to the mid thigh and this was named the 'tunic' after the 'tunica' of the intrepid ancient Roman soldier. This type of jacket soon became standard for most armies.


title: Tunic

text: In Western culture, its use continues primarily in a religious and uniform context. It is the primary garment worn by the clergy and members of religious orders. The religious tunic reaches to the feet and was the source of the clerical cassock, as well as, in its liturgical form, the alb, after the long tunic worn by Roman citizens. 'Tunic' is also the name often given to the high-collar uniform coat worn by military and police personnel. Light feminine garments, especially for sports or exercise, usually only coming down to mid-thigh, are also called tunics.


title: Economic bubble

text: An economic bubble (also called a speculative bubble or a financial bubble) is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth (e.g. dot-com bubble), and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment (e.g. Tulip mania). They have appeared in most asset classes, including equities (e.g. Roaring Twenties), commodities (e.g. Uranium bubble), real estate (e.g. 2000s US housing bubble), and even esoteric assets (e.g. Cryptocurrency bubble). Bubbles usually form as a result of either excess liquidity in markets, and/or changed investor psychology. Large multi-asset bubbles (e.g. 1980s Japanese asset bubble and the 2020–21 Everything bubble), are attributed to central banking liquidity (e.g. overuse of the Fed put).


title: Economic bubble

text: In the early stages of a bubble, many investors do not recognise the bubble for what it is. People notice the prices are going up and often think it is justified. Therefore bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect, after the bubble has already popped and prices have crashed.


title: Economic bubble

text: The term "bubble", in reference to financial crisis, originated in the 1711–1720 British South Sea Bubble, and originally referred to the companies themselves, and their inflated stock, rather than to the crisis itself. This was one of the earliest modern financial crises; other episodes were referred to as "manias", as in the Dutch tulip mania. The metaphor indicated that the prices of the stock were inflated and fragile – expanded based on nothing but air, and vulnerable to a sudden burst, as in fact occurred.


title: Economic bubble

text: Some later commentators have extended the metaphor to emphasize the suddenness, suggesting that economic bubbles end "All at once, and nothing first, / Just as bubbles do when they burst," though theories of financial crises such as debt deflation and the Financial Instability Hypothesis suggest instead that bubbles burst "progressively," with the most vulnerable (most highly-leveraged) assets failing first, and then the collapse spreading throughout the economy.


title: Economic bubble

text: There are different types of bubbles, with economists primarily interested in two major types of bubbles:


title: Economic bubble

text: An equity bubble is characterised by tangible investments and the unsustainable desire to satisfy a legitimate market in high demand. These kind of bubbles are characterised by easy liquidity, tangible and real assets, and an actual innovation that boosts confidence. Three instances of an equity bubble are the Tulip Mania, Bitcoin, and the dot-com bubble.


title: Economic bubble

text: A debt bubble is characterised by intangible or credit based investments with little ability to satisfy growing demand in a non-existent market. These bubbles are not backed by real assets and are based on frivolous lending in the hope of returning a profit or security. These bubbles usually end in debt deflation causing bank runs or a currency crisis when the government can no longer maintain the fiat currency. Examples are the Roaring Twenties stock market bubble (which caused the Great Depression) and the United States housing bubble (which caused the Great Recession).


title: Economic bubble

text: The impact of economic bubbles is debated within and between schools of economic thought; they are not generally considered beneficial, but it is debated how harmful their formation and bursting is.


title: Economic bubble

text: Within mainstream economics, many believe that bubbles cannot be identified in advance, cannot be prevented from forming, that attempts to "prick" the bubble may cause financial crisis, and that instead authorities should wait for bubbles to burst of their own accord, dealing with the aftermath via monetary policy and fiscal policy.


title: Economic bubble

text: Political economist Robert E. Wright argues that bubbles can be identified before the fact with high confidence.


title: Economic bubble

text: In addition, the crash which usually follows an economic bubble can destroy a large amount of wealth and cause continuing economic malaise; this view is particularly associated with the debt-deflation theory of Irving Fisher, and elaborated within Post-Keynesian economics.


title: Economic bubble

text: A protracted period of low risk premiums can simply prolong the downturn in asset price deflation, as was the case of the Great Depression in the 1930s for much of the world and the 1990s for Japan. Not only can the aftermath of a crash devastate the economy of a nation, but its effects can also reverberate beyond its borders.


title: Economic bubble

text: Another important aspect of economic bubbles is their impact on spending habits. Market participants with overvalued assets tend to spend more because they "feel" richer (the wealth effect). Many observers quote the housing market in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and parts of the United States in recent times, as an example of this effect. When the bubble inevitably bursts, those who hold on to these overvalued assets usually experience a feeling of reduced wealth and tend to cut discretionary spending at the same time, hindering economic growth or, worse, exacerbating the economic slowdown.


title: Economic bubble

text: In an economy with a central bank, the bank may therefore attempt to keep an eye on asset price appreciation and take measures to curb high levels of speculative activity in financial assets. This is usually done by increasing the interest rate (that is, the cost of borrowing money). Historically, this is not the only approach taken by central banks. It has been argued that they should stay out of it and let the bubble, if it is one, take its course.


title: Economic bubble

text: It has also been variously suggested that bubbles may be rational, intrinsic, and contagious. To date, there is no widely accepted theory to explain their occurrence. Recent computer-generated agency models suggest excessive leverage could be a key factor in causing financial bubbles.


title: Economic bubble

text: Puzzlingly for some, bubbles occur even in highly predictable experimental markets, where uncertainty is eliminated and market participants should be able to calculate the intrinsic value of the assets simply by examining the expected stream of dividends. Nevertheless, bubbles have been observed repeatedly in experimental markets, even with participants such as business students, managers, and professional traders. Experimental bubbles have proven robust to a variety of conditions, including short-selling, margin buying, and insider trading.


title: Economic bubble

text: While there is no clear agreement on what causes bubbles, there is evidence to suggest that they are not caused by bounded rationality or assumptions about the irrationality of others, as assumed by greater fool theory. It has also been shown that bubbles appear even when market participants are well capable of pricing assets correctly. Further, it has been shown that bubbles appear even when speculation is not possible or when over-confidence is absent.


title: Economic bubble

text: More recent theories of asset bubble formation suggest that they are likely sociologically-driven events, thus explanations that merely involve fundamental factors or snippets of human behavior are incomplete at best. For instance, qualitative researchers Preston Teeter and Jorgen Sandberg argue that market speculation is driven by culturally-situated narratives that are deeply embedded in and supported by the prevailing institutions of the time. They cite factors such as bubbles forming during periods of innovation, easy credit, loose regulations, and internationalized investment as reasons why narratives play such an influential role in the growth of asset bubbles.


title: Economic bubble

text: One possible cause of bubbles is excessive monetary liquidity in the financial system, inducing lax or inappropriate standards of lending by the banks, which makes markets vulnerable to volatile asset price inflation caused by short-term, leveraged speculation. For example, Axel A. Weber, the former president of the Deutsche Bundesbank, has argued that "The past has shown that an overly generous provision of liquidity in global financial markets in connection with a very low level of interest rates promotes the formation of asset-price bubbles."


title: Economic bubble

text: According to the explanation, excessive monetary liquidity (easy credit, large disposable incomes) potentially occurs while fractional reserve banks are implementing expansionary monetary policy (i.e. lowering of interest rates and flushing the financial system with money supply); this explanation may differ in certain details according to economic philosophy. Those who believe the money supply is controlled exogenously by a central bank may attribute an 'expansionary monetary policy' to that bank and (should one exist) a governing body or institution; others who believe that the money supply is created endogenously by the banking sector may attribute such a 'policy' to the behavior of the financial sector itself, and view the state as a passive or reactive factor. This may determine how central or relatively minor/inconsequential policies like fractional reserve banking and the central bank's efforts to raise or lower short-term interest rates are to one's view on the creation, inflation and ultimate implosion of an economic bubble. Explanations focusing on interest rates tend to take on a common form, however: when interest rates are set excessively low (regardless of the mechanism by which that is accomplished) investors tend to avoid putting their capital into savings accounts. Instead, investors tend to leverage their capital by borrowing from banks and invest the leveraged capital in financial assets such as stocks and real estate. Risky leveraged behavior like speculation and Ponzi schemes can lead to an increasingly fragile economy, and may also be part of what pushes asset prices artificially upward until the bubble pops.


title: Economic bubble

text: Simply put, economic bubbles often occur when too much money is chasing too few assets, causing both good assets and bad assets to appreciate excessively beyond their fundamentals to an unsustainable level. Once the bubble bursts, the fall in prices causes the collapse of unsustainable investment schemes (especially speculative and/or Ponzi investments, but not exclusively so), which leads to a crisis of consumer (and investor) confidence that may result in a financial panic and/or financial crisis. If there is a monetary authority like a central bank, it may take measures to soak up the liquidity in the financial system in an attempt to prevent a collapse of its currency. This may involve actions like bailouts of the financial system, but also others that reverse the trend of monetary accommodation, commonly termed forms of 'contractionary monetary policy'.


title: Economic bubble

text: These measures may include raising interest rates, which tends to make investors become more risk averse and thus avoid leveraged capital because the costs of borrowing may become too expensive. There may also be countermeasures taken pre-emptively during periods of strong economic growth, such as increasing capital reserve requirements and implementing regulation that checks and/or prevents processes leading to over-expansion and excessive leveraging of debt. Ideally, such countermeasures lessen the impact of a downturn by strengthening financial institutions while the economy is strong.


title: Economic bubble

text: Advocates of perspectives stressing the role of credit money in an economy often refer to (such) bubbles as "credit bubbles", and look at such measures of financial leverage as debt-to-GDP ratios to identify bubbles. Typically the collapse of any economic bubble results in an economic contraction termed (if less severe) a recession or (if more severe) a depression; what economic policies to follow in reaction to such a contraction is a hotly debated perennial topic of political economy.


title: Economic bubble

text: Greater fool theory states that bubbles are driven by the behavior of perennially optimistic market participants (the fools) who buy overvalued assets in anticipation of selling it to other speculators (the greater fools) at a much higher price. According to this explanation, the bubbles continue as long as the fools can find greater fools to pay up for the overvalued asset. The bubbles will end only when the greater fool becomes the greatest fool who pays the top price for the overvalued asset and can no longer find another buyer to pay for it at a higher price. This theory is popular among laity but has not yet been fully confirmed by empirical research.


title: Economic bubble

text: Extrapolation is projecting historical data into the future on the same basis; if prices have risen at a certain rate in the past, they will continue to rise at that rate forever. The argument is that investors tend to extrapolate past extraordinary returns on investment of certain assets into the future, causing them to overbid those risky assets in order to attempt to continue to capture those same rates of return.


title: Economic bubble

text: Overbidding on certain assets will at some point result in uneconomic rates of return for investors; only then the asset price deflation will begin. When investors feel that they are no longer well compensated for holding those risky assets, they will start to demand higher rates of return on their investments.


title: Economic bubble

text: Another related explanation used in behavioral finance lies in herd behavior, the fact that investors tend to buy or sell in the direction of the market trend. This is sometimes helped by technical analysis that tries precisely to detect those trends and follow them, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.


title: Economic bubble

text: Investment managers, such as stock mutual fund managers, are compensated and retained in part due to their performance relative to peers. Taking a conservative or contrarian position as a bubble builds results in performance unfavorable to peers. This may cause customers to go elsewhere and can affect the investment manager's own employment or compensation. The typical short-term focus of U.S. equity markets exacerbates the risk for investment managers that do not participate during the building phase of a bubble, particularly one that builds over a longer period of time. In attempting to maximize returns for clients and maintain their employment, they may rationally participate in a bubble they believe to be forming, as the likely shorter-term benefits of doing so outweigh the likely longer-term risks.


title: Economic bubble

text: Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. A person's belief that they are responsible for the consequences of their own actions is an essential aspect of rational behavior. An investor must balance the possibility of making a return on their investment with the risk of making a loss – the risk-return relationship. A moral hazard can occur when this relationship is interfered with, often via government policy.


title: Economic bubble

text: A recent example is the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on 3 October 2008 to provide a government bailout for many financial and non-financial institutions who speculated in high-risk financial instruments during the housing boom condemned by a 2005 story in "The Economist" titled "The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history". A historical example was intervention by the Dutch Parliament during the great Tulip Mania of 1637.


title: Economic bubble

text: Other causes of perceived insulation from risk may derive from a given entity's predominance in a market relative to other players, and not from state intervention or market regulation. A firm – or several large firms acting in concert (see cartel, oligopoly and collusion) – with very large holdings and capital reserves could instigate a market bubble by investing heavily in a given asset, creating a relative scarcity which drives up that asset's price. Because of the signaling power of the large firm or group of colluding firms, the firm's smaller competitors will follow suit, similarly investing in the asset due to its price gains.


title: Economic bubble

text: However, in relation to the party instigating the bubble, these smaller competitors are insufficiently leveraged to withstand a similarly rapid decline in the asset's price. When the large firm, cartel or "de facto" collusive body perceives a maximal peak has been reached in the traded asset's price, it can then proceed to rapidly sell or "dump" its holdings of this asset on the market, precipitating a price decline that forces its competitors into insolvency, bankruptcy or foreclosure.


title: Economic bubble

text: The large firm or cartel – which has intentionally leveraged itself to withstand the price decline it engineered – can then acquire the capital of its failing or devalued competitors at a low price as well as capture a greater market share (e.g., via a merger or acquisition which expands the dominant firm's distribution chain). If the bubble-instigating party is itself a lending institution, it can combine its knowledge of its borrowers' leveraging positions with publicly available information on their stock holdings, and strategically shield or expose them to default.


title: Economic bubble

text: Some regard bubbles as related to inflation and thus believe that the causes of inflation are also the causes of bubbles. Others take the view that there is a "fundamental value" to an asset, and that bubbles represent a rise over that fundamental value, which must eventually return to that fundamental value. There are chaotic theories of bubbles which assert that bubbles come from particular "critical" states in the market based on the communication of economic factors. Finally, others regard bubbles as necessary consequences of irrationally valuing assets solely based upon their returns in the recent past without resorting to a rigorous analysis based on their underlying "fundamentals".


title: Economic bubble

text: According to the economist Charles P. Kindleberger, the basic structure of a speculative bubble can be divided into five phases:


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Ryse: Son of Rome is a 2013 third-person action-adventure developed by Crytek and published by Microsoft Studios. Set in an alternate version of Ancient Rome, "Ryse" follows the life of the Roman centurion Marius Titus as he becomes one of the leaders in the Roman Legion. Gameplay revolves around Marius using his sword to strike enemies and shield to deflect attacks. Execution sequences are featured in the game, which are quick-time events that serve as an extension to combat. The game features a cooperative multiplayer mode, which tasks players to fight against waves of enemies in maps that are changing dynamically.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's development began in 2006. Originally it was set to be a first-person Kinect-only title for the Xbox 360. However, the developer gradually redesigned the game to become a third-person hack and slash game, with Kinect serving a diminished role. The development of the game was originally handled by Crytek Budapest, but was later transferred to Crytek's headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. The game's combat emphasizes on "flow", a term referring to a player's ability to move on to fight against another enemy upon defeating an enemy with few limitations in between. The team partnered with The Imaginarium Studios to develop the cinematic and motion-capture technology for the game. Competitive multiplayer modes developed by Ruffian Games was planned but it was ultimately cancelled.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Revealed as "Codename: Kingdom" at E3 2010, the game was reintroduced as "Ryse: Son of Rome" two years later. It was released in November 2013 as a launch title for the Xbox One, and was released on October 10, 2014 for Microsoft Windows by Crytek and Deep Silver. It received a mixed critical reaction from reviewers upon launch, being praised for its visuals, story and high production values but criticized for its repetitive and simple gameplay. Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, added that he was not satisfied with the sales of the game. Upon launch, the game was supported with several multiplayer-focused downloadable content, but the originally planned Challenge Editor was cancelled.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: "Ryse: Son of Rome" is an action-adventure hack and slash game played in a third-person perspective. Players assume control of Marius Titus, a Roman general who is on a quest to avenge his murdered family. Throughout the game, players gain access to weapons that can be used to assault enemies or defend themselves. For instance, players are equipped with a sword that can be used to strike and kill enemies, and a shield that can be used to deflect enemies' attack and break their defense. The strength of each attack can be decided by players. In addition to melee-based combat, the game features spears and javelins, which serve as ranged weapons.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's combat puts emphasis on "flow", a term referring to a player's ability to move on to fight against another enemy upon defeating and killing an enemy with few limitations in between. Combat is combo-based, and rewards are given to players who are able to build a long combo. Marius can block attacks to break enemy combos to counterattack. In several segments of the game, Marius is involved in large-scale battles. Players are tasked to co-operate with, or command, other non-playable characters to defeat large numbers of enemies. The game features Kinect voice integration, in which players can issue commands to other characters to provide assistance, such as calling in arrows or catapults.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: When players deal enough damage to an enemy, they can activate an execution sequence. Once the execution sequence has been initiated, enemies involved in the execution are highlighted automatically with colors by the game, and players can perform a series of quick time events by pressing the appropriate buttons. These execution sequences serve to grant additional resources to players, depending on how well the execution is performed. At any time prior to initiating an execution, the player can select one of four categories of executions to perform upon weakened enemies; the selected type of execution determines the type of resource that will be granted when an enemy is executed. Upon completing a successful execution sequence, players are granted the type of execution that was selected. There are four perks available for players. One boosts the player's damage for a short period after the execution; one refills the player's Focus bar; one allows players to regain lost health, and the last significantly boosts the amount of experience points received from the kill. These experience points can be used to purchase upgrades for various attributes, such as health, damage, or Focus bar capacity, and to unlock additional execution moves. The game still automatically completes and finishes these execution sequences when players fail to press the highlighted buttons, but provides a much smaller reward. Lining up two or more weakened enemies in close proximity allows the player to perform a double execution sequence, which greatly increases the reward granted.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: There is also a co-operative multiplayer mode, in which two players team up to accomplish various challenges and fight against waves of increasingly difficult enemies in the Roman Colosseum, a gladiator arena setting. The environments of the Colosseum change dynamically in a match to add variety to the mode. Players can gain access to increasingly advanced armor and weapons as they progress through these multiplayer matches. Microtransactions are also featured, allowing players to purchase in-game upgrades with real-life currency.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game begins "in medias res" with Roman general Marius Titus leading the defence of Rome against a barbarian invasion. Marius leads the Roman emperor Nero into a safe room. At Nero's behest, Marius begins to tell his life story to the emperor.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Marius begins his story as a Roman legionary serving in the II Legion who returns to the Titus family villa in Rome to visit them before he is deployed to Alexandria. His visit is cut short as a sudden barbarian invasion occurs, resulting in the death of his parents and sister. Commander Vitallion, who served alongside Marius' father, transfers him to the XIV Legion, promising Marius vengeance for the death of his family. Vitallion leads the XIV Legion to the rebelling province of Britannia, where the fleet transporting them is almost destroyed by river chains. Marius' ship is hit by a trebuchet shot, but he survives and leads an attack which destroys the towers holding the chains up, preventing the Roman fleet from being destroyed; an impressed Vitallion promoted him to the rank of centurion. The XIV Legion marches on York, fighting numerous battles with Briton rebels on the way. Upon arriving at York, Marius leads the XIV Legion in an attack against a rebel army, capturing British king Oswald and his daughter Boudica.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The XIV Legion brings Oswald and Boudica before Nero's son Basilius, who forces Oswald to reveal where the Britons have sent Basilius' brother Commodus to. After Oswald informs the Romans that Commodus was traded to the inhabitants beyond Hadrian's Wall, Basilius orders the XIV Legion to march north and bring Commodus back. During the campaign there, a Roman scouting party led by Marius and Vitallion is ambushed by barbarians; Vitallion is captured, while Marius falls into a ravine but survives. Making his way to the main barbarian camp (where they are about to burn a wicker man with Vitallion inside), Marius kills the barbarian leader and rescues Vitallion and Commodus. Returning to York, Marius and Vitallion participate in a peace treaty between the Romans and Britons. However, Commodus murders Oswald, sparking a riot while Boudica escapes, and Marius realises that it was in fact the Emperor Nero himself who was responsible for causing the earlier invasion which resulted in the death of his family. Commodus flees York after tasking the XIV Legion to defend the city. Marius sacrifices himself so the last Roman ships can flee the city. However, Marius is resurrected by the Roman goddess Summer, and vows to avenge his family and kill Nero and his sons.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Returning to Rome, Marius enters the "ludi" in order to confront Nero and his sons directly. Dressed as legendary Roman general Damocles, Marius kills Basilius after participating in a private gladiator fight for him. In the aftermath, he sets a fortune teller free who prophesies that Marius will be killed by Damocles, but that he would kill Damocles as well; she also tells Marius that he cannot kill Nero, because the Emperor could only be killed by his own sword. Entering the Colosseum, he participates in a series of staged battles before engaging in a duel with Commodus. Despite Commodus' attempts to rig the fight in his favour, including using a poisonous gas to try and incapacitate him, Marius defeats him as well, decapitating him and promising Nero: "You are next!". Marius escapes the Colosseum and meets up with Vitallion, who informs him that an invading barbarian army led by Boudica is closing in on Rome, eager to seek revenge for Commodus murdering her father. During the ensuing battle, Vitallion is killed by Boudica and Marius assumes command; confronting her in single combat, he decapitates her. The narrative returns to the conversation between Nero and Marius; the Emperor, having long since deduced that Damocles was Marius, flees further into the palace. As Marius gives chase, he is temporarily impeded by god of the north wind Aquilo, who is revealed to have been aiding Nero and his sons for the entire story because he wants to see Rome destroyed. However, Summer intervenes, allowing Marius to confront Nero and launch both the Emperor and himself off a parapet. Marius falls to his death, whilst Nero is viciously impaled on a giant sword belonging to a huge statue of himself, thus fulfilling both prophecies that were made to Marius earlier in the story: that Marius and Damocles would kill each other, and that Nero would perish at the hand of his own sword.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The story ends with a voiceover from Summer revealing that due to Marius' efforts, the invasion was repelled and Rome "would go on to stand for a thousand years", and "endure... until the last days of man."


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: "Ryse: Son of Rome" was originally developed by Crytek Budapest. In 2004, Crytek released its debut title "Far Cry", and in 2006, Microsoft Studios released the Xbox 360 and was working on a prototype for Kinect called "Project Natal". Ideas for "Ryse" originated in 2006 by Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli, who was eager to expand the studio, and wanted the studio to work on multiple projects simultaneously. Early work and concept development began shortly afterwards, with Crytek working on a pair of fantasy games that were set in the same Medieval universe. They were "Kings", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and "Kingdoms", a first-person action role-playing game. They hoped that with "Kingdoms", they could create an "up-close" and "visceral" experience.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Crytek then pitched the game to different publishers, and eventually, in 2009, the company pitched the two projects to Microsoft. According to Nick Button-Brown, the general manager at Crytek, the game was not functional at that time, and only served to prove to the publisher that a first-person melee game was fun for players. The representative from Microsoft, Phil Spencer, admired Crytek's intention to expand, and thought that Microsoft's games line up for the Xbox 360 was lacking a first-person melee-combat game. As a result, they accepted to publish "Kingdoms", and rejected "Kings". The two companies agreed that the project would be a natural fit for Microsoft's yet-to-be-announced Kinect.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: It was originally revealed as "Codename: Kingdoms" during Microsoft's E3 2010 press conference, along with the announcement that the game was being developed by Crytek. During the Microsoft Press Conference at E3 2011, "Ryse" was announced as a Kinect-only title. The announcement entailed a prerendered trailer with minor gameplay footage. The gameplay footage featured players using their own body gestures to control the protagonist to fight against enemies, and perform actions like sword wielding, blocking attacks with a shield, and head-butting. The trailer served as a test for Crytek to see whether the general audience liked the Kinect features or not.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: In early 2011, the game's direction was shifted from building a world of "high fantasy" to building a realistic ancient Rome, and the development of the game was shifted from Crytek Budapest to Crytek's headquarter in Frankfurt, Germany. The Budapest office was significantly downsized afterwards, and its focus was shifted to develop smartphone games. It became one of six projects the company was working on. Development of the game continued after its E3 2011 reveal. Different experiments were carried out for the game to see what elements would work and what would not. A team at Crytek proposed to turn the game to an on-rail interactive movie, which the team believed was suitable for Kinect's features and would able to showcase the power of CryEngine. The idea was later scrapped.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: During the game's development, the team worried that the game may be too tiring for players, and that Kinect may not able to detect their movements accurately, leading to frustration. As a result, the team developed three prototypes for the game. The first prototype allowed players to play the entire game with Kinect, the second one tasks players to play the game with an Xbox 360 controller, with Kinect features, while the third one completely removed the Kinect features. Crytek eventually chose the second prototype, and shifted the game's perspective to become a third-person video game. In June 2012, Phil Spencer, corporate VP of Microsoft Studios, maintained that the game was still in development. and added that Kinect will only be "part of the game". With the changes in the game's control scheme, the game's focus also changed, with the team aiming to create a cinematic and character-focused experience for players. The change also extended the game's development process, and eventually, in May 2013, "Ryse" was confirmed to be a launch title for Microsoft's next game console, Xbox One. In June 2013 at the E3 Microsoft Conference, Crytek showed a gameplay video. Kinect was no longer part of the active battle but had a diminished role by providing squad commands through speech and gesture. The team at Crytek decided to make it a launch title instead of delaying it for further polishing, as they considered the launch of Xbox One an "emotional" event and wanted to be a part of it.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: "Ryse"s combat puts many focuses on "flow" and crowd control. As a result, the team introduced a rhythm-styled combat. The flow was described to be one of the most important part in the game's mechanics, and the artificial intelligence of enemies were designed to break and disrupt players' flow. The team later chose to introduce the execution mechanics as they found that the combat was proven to be too difficult for players, and that the execution mechanics provided an easier way for players to defeat enemies. The game also focused on precision and timing, tasking players to hit enemies at the correct time and position to gain greater rewards. The developer also hoped that players will use creativity when dealing with enemies. A concept called "mashing to mastery" was introduced in "Ryse", in which the game's combat was designed to be accessible for newcomers and be challenging for hardcore players. In order to achieve the "mashing to mastery" mechanic, the team introduced the execution mechanic, which is a series of quick-time events, as the team at Crytek hoped that it would make these scene more rewarding to players, as well as allowing the flow of combat to continue.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: "Ryse"s intention was to build a cinematic story. The team put emphasis on building the game's protagonist, Marius Titus, who was described as a character with three different sides. The game's cinematic director, Peter Gornstein, considered that adding personalities to characters as one of the most important features in creating a good story, as it allows players to care for and emphasize the character. He also hoped that the character is consistent throughout the game. As a result, the team developed transition sequences, in which gameplay can fluidly transit to cinematic. The game also put emphasis on the protagonist's motion capture. To achieve this, the team collaborated with The Imaginarium Studios to develop the cinematic and motion-capture technology for the game. According to Yerli, having good motion capture technology can help "create the ultimate emotion". The game's camera was originally set to be controlled by artificial intelligence, drawing inspirations from "Seven Samurai" and "Children of Men", but the idea was later scrapped and a dynamic camera was designed to replace it. The camera was also made closer to the playable character than other hack and slash games, as they hoped that they could show a "claustrophobic brutality" from it. According to Crytek, having a close up camera has always been the game's core element.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The developers claim to have drawn much of the inspiration for the game's combat and tactics from "...the innumerable Roman campaigns that led to the modern concept of total war". Fifteen hero level characters were given full motion capture with the same detail as Marius. Unlike Crytek's previous projects, the game is set in ancient Rome, a place which the developer thought was underrepresented in video games. The game also features different Renaissance-inspired imagery. In order to create an accurate environment, the team visited different locations in Rome. While the game is set in Rome, its story is not entirely historically accurate. Crytek described it as a "historical mash-up", in which the team selected their favourite historical events and put them together into the game.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Crytek contracted Ruffian Games to develop a competitive multiplayer mode for "Ryse", but the feature was later cut from the final game. Despite that, a co-operative multiplayer mode was introduced, and tasked players to fight against waves of increasingly difficult human enemies. The team originally hoped to add sea battles and animals to the game, but after internal testing, these features were removed. An Xbox SmartGlass feature called the Challenge Editor was set to be introduced to the game after its launch. It allowed players to create custom challenges for the game's co-operative multiplayer. However, Crytek announced that the development of this feature had been ceased in February 2014.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's music is composed by Borislav Slavov and Peter Antovszki, Crytek's in-house composers. Slavov had previously led the soundtrack development of "Crysis 3" and "Warface". The soundtrack development began in February 2013, right after the completion of "Crysis 3". Slavov considered composing the music for "Ryse" a great challenge, as he had to compose 250 minutes of music within a short time frame. Crytek also hired an external composer, Tilman Silescu, to help compose the music for the game.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: "Ryse" was originally revealed as an Xbox 360 title that was set to be released in early 2011. Revealed at E3 2010 as "Codename Kingdom", the game missed its release window, and its official name was revealed during E3 2011 as "Ryse". It was reintroduced as "Ryse: Son of Rome" at Microsoft's press conference at E3 2013 with a gameplay demo. The game served as a launch title for the Xbox One, and was released on November 22, 2013. The season pass, featuring different in-game bonuses and items, was released on the same day. The game was supported with downloadable content upon launch. "Mars’ Chosen", "Morituri Pack", "Duel of Fates Pack", and "Colosseum Pack" were released from 2013 to 2014 and featured new maps and modes for the multiplayer portion of the game. A "Legendary Collection", which featured the base game, the game's seasonal pass, and all the additional content released for the game, was released on October 7, 2014.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: On August 7, 2014, Crytek announced that "Ryse" would be released for the PC platform in the fall of 2014. This version of the game is stated to support 4K resolution and included previously released downloadable content. The PC version was released on October 10, 2014. Crytek published the digital version of the PC version of the game, while Deep Silver published the retail version.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Overall, "Ryse: Son of Rome" received mixed reviews. Aggregating review website Metacritic gave the Xbox One version 60/100 based on 77 reviews, and the Microsoft Windows version 61/100 based on 27 reviews.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's visuals received widespread critical acclaim. Brian Albert from IGN thought that "Ryse" would be the perfect title for people to show off their console due to its high graphical quality. He also praised the game's wide variety of environments and fluid character animation. However, he criticized the game's boss-design. Hollander Cooper from GamesRadar strongly praised the game's graphics and the level of detail. Simon Miller from VideoGamer.com thought that the game fulfilled its purpose as an Xbox One launch title, and demonstrated the power of the console. Andrew Reiner from "Game Informer" considered that the game's cinematic as "towering achievements of visual design". Brad Shoemaker from Giant Bomb thought that the graphics had successfully surprised players.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's story also received praise from most critics. Camron praised the game's voice-acting and setting, which he thought was "intriguing". However, he thought that the narrative was too basic, and missed many details that could have further improved the game's story. Albert admired the game's story, and thought that it was handled with great care. He added that the game's plot was easy for players to follow, even though the game features multiple unexpected twists. Cooper described the game's narrative as surprising, adding that the later part of the game successfully added personalities to both the game's heroes and villains. In stark contrast, Walton called the game's script as "laughable" and said that the dialogue made the plot unbelievable for players.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The game's gameplay received polarized reception. Marc Camron from "Electronic Gaming Monthly" called it "basic", and thought that despite the fluid and smooth combat, and the addition of the reward system which added a layer of strategy to the game, the game's execution system hindered the flow of the game by slowing down the overall pace of combat. He added that the game's combat lacked complexity and depth, and was too repetitive for players to enjoy. Albert also thought that the combat system was too basic. In addition, he noted the repetitive pattern of enemies. He also criticized the game's over-emphasis on graphics, which led to the simple gameplay. Cooper thought that the game's combat was satisfying, and thought that the game's swordplay had successfully captured the sense of weight and impact. However, he also considered the system repetitive. Reiner criticized the execution sequences, which he considered excessive and over-simplistic. Shoemaker also thought that the game lacked both variety and depth. Mark Walton from GameSpot thought that the game design was too linear, and that the game discouraged any form of exploration.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: Critics also had divided opinions on the game's multiplayer. Camron thought that it was a nice addition to the game, even though he thought it lacked the complexity a multiplayer mode should have, and that it failed to extend the game's longevity. Miller echoed this statement, and thought that the multiplayer mode failed to hook players. Walton thought that players would not return the mode after experiencing it once, and he described the mode as "bland". Albert, in contrast, considered the mode a unique addition to the game, and thought that it had successfully added some strategy elements to the game. Chris Carter from Destructoid thought that the multiplayer mode was better than the game's main campaign. He described it as a "pleasant surprise".


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: The amount of content featured in the game received mixed reviews. Miller thought that the game only revolved around one idea, which led to its simplistic gameplay. Camron and Cooper thought that the campaign was too short for most players. Shoemaker thought that for a full-priced game, it lacked content. Reiner further criticized the game's low replay value. Carter advocated that players purchase the game when its price dropped. He added that while the game features many ideas, most of them failed to deliver.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: While no exact sales figure was revealed, Yerli expressed his disappointment with the sales of "Ryse" for the Xbox One in August 2014, blaming the low sales of the Xbox One.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: A Federal Trade Commission investigation uncovered an undisclosed paid endorsement deal between Microsoft Studios and Machinima Inc. Microsoft Studios paid for fake organic reviews, and bound Machinima Inc. to "not portray [Microsoft], the Xbox One, or the Launch Titles in a negative manner". "Ryse: Son of Rome" was specifically listed in the FTC document as being one of the titles to receive fake reviews, and price quotes for these reviews range between $15,000 and $30,000.


title: Ryse: Son of Rome

text: According to Yerli, "Ryse: Son of Rome" was not a "one-off" title and would serve as the beginning of a new franchise. However, several reports claimed that "Ryse 2" was cancelled because of a conflict between Crytek and Microsoft over who would own the rights to the franchise. In exchange for funding "Ryse 2"s development, Microsoft wanted to take over the "Ryse" intellectual property. Crytek would not agree to these terms, so the project was cancelled. Cevat Yerli, however, denied that the game was cancelled in an interview with Eurogamer, adding that the relationship between Microsoft and Crytek remained strong and positive. "Ryse" was one of the last titles developed by Crytek before the company entered financial crisis and re-construction. The new Crytek is focused on developing free-to-play games and being a "game service" instead of a video game developer. Despite this, "Ryse" is still an intellectual property owned by Crytek.


title: Bcrypt

text: bcrypt is a password-hashing function designed by Niels Provos and David Mazières, based on the Blowfish cipher and presented at USENIX in 1999. Besides incorporating a salt to protect against rainbow table attacks, bcrypt is an adaptive function: over time, the iteration count can be increased to make it slower, so it remains resistant to brute-force search attacks even with increasing computation power.


title: Bcrypt

text: The bcrypt function is the default password hash algorithm for OpenBSD and was the default for some Linux distributions such as SUSE Linux.


title: Bcrypt

text: There are implementations of bcrypt in C, C++, C#, Embarcadero Delphi, Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and other languages.


title: Bcrypt

text: Blowfish is notable among block ciphers for its expensive key setup phase. It starts off with subkeys in a standard state, then uses this state to perform a block encryption using part of the key, and uses the result of that encryption (which is more accurate at hashing) to replace some of the subkeys. Then it uses this modified state to encrypt another part of the key, and uses the result to replace more of the subkeys. It proceeds in this fashion, using a progressively modified state to hash the key and replace bits of state, until all subkeys have been set.


title: Bcrypt

text: Provos and Mazières took advantage of this, and took it further. They developed a new key setup algorithm for Blowfish, dubbing the resulting cipher "Eksblowfish" ("expensive key schedule Blowfish"). The key setup begins with a modified form of the standard Blowfish key setup, in which both the salt and password are used to set all subkeys. There are then a number of rounds in which the standard Blowfish keying algorithm is applied, using alternatively the salt and the password as the key, each round starting with the subkey state from the previous round. In theory, this is no stronger than the standard Blowfish key schedule, but the number of rekeying rounds is configurable; this process can therefore be made arbitrarily slow, which helps deter brute-force attacks upon the hash or salt.


title: Bcrypt

text: The input to the bcrypt function is the password string (up to 72 bytes), a numeric cost, and a 16-byte (128-bit) salt value. The salt is typically a random value. The bcrypt function uses these inputs to compute a 24-byte (192-bit) hash. The final output of the bcrypt function is a string of the form:


title: Bcrypt

text: For example, with input password codice_1, cost codice_2, and a random salt, the output of bcrypt is the string


title: Bcrypt

text: The original bcrypt specification defined a prefix of codice_8. This follows the Modular Crypt Format format used when storing passwords in the OpenBSD password file:


title: Bcrypt

text: The original specification did not define how to handle non-ASCII character, nor how to handle a null terminator. The specification was revised to specify that when hashing strings:


title: Bcrypt

text: In June 2011, a bug was discovered in crypt_blowfish, a PHP implementation of bcrypt. It was mis-handling characters with the 8th bit set. They suggested that system administrators update their existing password database, replacing codice_3 with codice_16, to indicate that those hashes are bad (and need to use the old broken algorithm). They also suggested the idea of having crypt_blowfish emit codice_17 for hashes generated by the fixed algorithm.


title: Bcrypt

text: Nobody else, including canonical OpenBSD, adopted the idea of 2x/2y. This version marker change was limited to crypt_blowfish.


title: Bcrypt

text: A bug was discovered in the OpenBSD implementation of bcrypt. It was using an unsigned 8-bit value to hold the length of the password. For passwords longer than 255 bytes, instead of being truncated at 72 bytes the password would be truncated at the lesser of 72 or the length modulo 256. For example, a 260 byte password would be truncated at 4 bytes rather than truncated at 72 bytes.


title: Bcrypt

text: bcrypt was created for OpenBSD. When they had a bug in their library, they decided to bump the version number.


title: Bcrypt

text: The bcrypt algorithm is the result of encrypting the text ""OrpheanBeholderScryDoubt"" 64 times using Blowfish. In bcrypt the usual Blowfish key setup function is replaced with an "expensive" key setup (EksBlowfishSetup) function:


title: Bcrypt

text: The bcrypt algorithm depends heavily on its "Eksblowfish" key setup algorithm, which runs as follows:


title: Bcrypt

text: InitialState works as in the original Blowfish algorithm, populating the P-array and S-box entries with the fractional part of formula_1 in hexadecimal.


title: Bcrypt

text: Hence, codice_18 is the same as regular Blowfish key schedule since all XORs with the all-zero salt value are ineffectual. codice_19 is similar, but uses the salt as a 128-bit key.


title: Bcrypt

text: Many implementations of bcrypt truncate the password to the first 72 bytes, following the OpenBSD implementation.


title: Bcrypt

text: The mathematical algorithm itself requires initialization with 18 32-bit subkeys (equivalent to 72 octets/bytes). The original specification of bcrypt does not mandate any one particular method for mapping text-based passwords from userland into numeric values for the algorithm. One brief comment in the text mentions, but does not mandate, the possibility of simply using the ASCII encoded value of a character string: "Finally, the key argument is a secret encryption key, which can be a user-chosen password of up to 56 bytes (including a terminating zero byte when the key is an ASCII string)."


title: Bcrypt

text: Note that the quote above mentions passwords "up to 56 bytes" even though the algorithm itself makes use of a 72 byte initial value. Although Provos and Mazières do not state the reason for the shorter restriction, they may have been motivated by the following statement from Bruce Schneier's original specification of Blowfish, "The 448 [bit] limit on the key size ensures that the every bit of every subkey depends on every bit of the key."


title: Bcrypt

text: Implementations have varied in their approach of converting passwords into initial numeric values, including sometimes reducing the strength of passwords containing non-ASCII characters.


title: Bcrypt

text: It is important to note that bcrypt is not a key derivation function (KDF). For example, bcrypt cannot be used to derive a 512-bit key from a password. At the same time, algorithms like pbkdf2, scrypt, and argon2 "are" password-based key derivation functions - where the output is then used for the purpose of password hashing rather than just key derivation.


title: Bcrypt

text: Password hashing generally needs to complete < 1000 ms. In this scenario, bcrypt is stronger than pbkdf2, scrypt, and argon2.


title: Bcrypt

text: bcrypt has a maximum password length of 72 bytes. This maximum comes from the first operation of the ExpandKey function that codice_20 the 18 4-byte subkeys (P) with the password:


title: Bcrypt

text: The password (which is UTF-8 encoded), is repeated until it is 72-bytes long. For example, a password of:


title: Bcrypt

text: In the worst case a password is limited to 18 characters, when every character requires 4 bytes of UTF-8 encoding. For example:


title: Bcrypt

text: The encoding used by the canonical OpenBSD implementation uses the same Base64 alphabet as crypt, which is codice_7. This means the encoding is not compatible with the more common RFC 4648.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: The watermelon stereotype is a stereotype that African Americans have an unusually great appetite for watermelons.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: The first published caricature of Black people reveling in watermelon is believed to have appeared in "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper" in 1869. The stereotype emerged shortly after enslaved people were emancipated after the Civil War. Defenders of slavery used it to portray African Americans as a simple-minded people who were happy when provided with watermelon and a little rest. The slaves' enjoyment of watermelon was also seen by the Southern people as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. The stereotype was perpetuated in minstrel shows often depicting African Americans as ignorant and lazy, given to song and dance and inordinately fond of watermelon.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: For several decades in the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, the stereotype was promoted through caricatures in print, film, sculpture and music, and was a common decorative theme on household goods. During the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and the presidency of Barack Obama, watermelon imagery was used by his detractors.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: The link between African-Americans and watermelons may have been promoted in part by African-American minstrels who sang popular songs such as "The Watermelon Song" and "Oh, Dat Watermelon" in their shows, and which were set down in print in the 1870s. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago planned to include a "Colored People's Day" featuring African American entertainers and free watermelons for the African-American visitors whom the exposition's organizers hoped to attract. It was a flop, as the city's African-American community boycotted the exposition, along with many of the performers booked to attend on Colored People's Day.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: At the end of the 19th century, there was a brief genre of "watermelon pictures" – cinematic caricatures of African-American life showing such supposedly typical pursuits as eating watermelons, cakewalking and stealing chickens, with titles such as "The Watermelon Contest" (1896), "Dancing Darkies" (1896), "Watermelon Feast" (1896), and "Who Said Watermelon?" (1900, 1902). The African-American characters in such features were initially played by Black performers, but from about 1903 onwards, they were replaced by white actors performing in blackface.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: Several of the films depicted African-Americans as having a virtually uncontrollable appetite for watermelons; for instance, "The Watermelon Contest" and "Watermelon Feast" include scenes of African-American men consuming the fruits at such a speed that they spew out mush and seeds. The author Novotny Lawrence suggests that such scenes had a subtext of representing Black male sexuality, in which Black men "love and desire the fruit in the same manner that they love sex … In short, black males have a watermelon 'appetite' and are always trying to see 'who can eat the most' with the strength of this 'appetite' depicted by black males uncontrollably devouring watermelon."


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: Early-1900s postcards often depicted African-Americans as animalistic creatures "happy to do nothing but eat watermelon" – a bid to dehumanize them. Other such "Coon cards", as they were popularly known, depicted African-Americans stealing, fighting over, and becoming watermelons. One poem from the early 1900s (pictured right) reads:


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: In March 1916, Harry C. Browne recorded a song titled "Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha!, Ha! Ha!", set to the tune of the popular folk song "Turkey in the Straw". Such songs were popular during that period and many made use of the watermelon stereotype. The script for "Gone with the Wind" (1939) contained a scene in which Scarlett O'Hara's slave Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen, eats watermelon, which the actress refused to perform. Use of this stereotype started to die down around the 1950s, and had mostly vanished by 1970, although its continued power as a stereotype could still be recognized in films such as "Watermelon Man" (1970), "The Watermelon Woman" (1996), and "Bamboozled" (2001). Watermelons also provided a theme for many racial jokes in the 2000s.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: Protesters against African-Americans frequently hold up watermelons, among other things; imagery of Barack Obama consuming watermelon was subject of viral emails circulated by political opponents. After his election to the US presidency, watermelon-themed imagery of Obama continued to be created and endorsed. In February 2009, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose resigned (albeit temporarily) after forwarding to the White House an email displaying a picture of the White House lawn planted with watermelons. Grose said that he was not aware of the watermelon stereotype. Other controversies included a statue of Obama holding a watermelon in Kentucky in 2012 and a 2014 editorial cartoon in the "Boston Herald" asking if Obama has tried watermelon-flavored toothpaste.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: At the National Book Awards ceremony in November 2014, author Daniel Handler made a controversial remark after author Jacqueline Woodson was presented with an award for young people's literature. Woodson, who is Black, won the award for "Brown Girl Dreaming". During the ceremony, Handler noted that Woodson is allergic to watermelon, a reference to the racist stereotype. His comments were immediately criticized; Handler apologized via Twitter and donated $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books, and promised to match donations up to $100,000. In a "New York Times" op-ed published shortly thereafter, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke", Jacqueline Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history" with his joke, Daniel Handler had come from a place of ignorance, but underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past".


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: On January 7, 2016, Australian cartoonist Chris Roy Taylor published a cartoon of Jamaican cricketer Chris Gayle with a whole watermelon in his mouth. Gayle had been in the news for making controversial suggestive comments towards a female interviewer during a live broadcast. The cartoon depicted a Cricket Australia official asking a boy if he could "borrow" the watermelon, so Gayle would be unable to speak. A couple of days earlier, a video of a boy eating a whole watermelon – rind and all – in the stands of a cricket match had gone viral. Taylor said he was unaware of the stereotype, and the cartoon was removed.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: In "Safety Training", an episode of the American television series "The Office," Michael Scott (Steve Carell) throws a watermelon off the roof of the office onto a trampoline. After it bounces and hits a car, Michael fears that the car belongs to Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker), who is African-American, and that Stanley will think he is racist; Michael tells Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), "Deactivate the car alarm, clean up the mess, find out whose car that is. If it's Stanley's, call the offices of James P. Albini. See if he handles hate crimes."


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: On October 22, 2017, the "Fox & Friends" morning show on the Fox News Channel dressed a Hispanic boy, who was mistaken by many as an African-American, in a watermelon Halloween costume, drawing ire on social media.


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: In 2019, the video game "Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled" featured an alternative skin for the character of Tawna, named "Watermelon Tawna". The skin has darker fur and darker hair and wears a watermelon-themed T-shirt. Shortly after the skin was introduced, and after some social media discussion of the issue, a patch was issued that renamed the skin "Summertime Tawna".


title: Watermelon stereotype

text: In 2021, the television comedy series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" season 11 episode "The Watermelon" features Larry David (Larry David) helping his friend Leon Black (J. B. Smoove) to overcome his embarrassment of eating watermelon. Larry takes Leon shopping to purchase a watermelon. At the checkout Larry announces to the store: "It's not a crime for a black man to like watermelon".


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajakumaran Rajaratnam (born June 15, 1957) is a Sri Lankan-American former hedge fund manager and founder of the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund management firm.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: On October 16, 2009, he was arrested by the FBI for insider trading, which also caused the Galleon Group to fold. He stood trial in "U.S. v. Rajaratnam" (09 Cr. 01184) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and on May 11, 2011, was found guilty on all 14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud. On October 13, 2011, Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined a criminal and civil penalty of over $150 million combined.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam was incarcerated at Federal Medical Center, Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts, an administrative facility housing male offenders requiring specialized or long-term medical or mental health care. Rajaratnam was released to home confinement in his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, located on Sutton Place, in the summer of 2019.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam is an ethnic Sri Lankan Tamil born in Colombo in what was then the Dominion of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). His wealthy father, J. M. Rajaratnam, was the head of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. in South Asia. He attended S. Thomas' Preparatory School, Kollupitiya before his family migrated to England. Rajaratnam's family emigrated to England in 1971, concerned that the post-independence Sri Lankan ethnic violence against the Tamils would get more violent. He attended Dulwich College in London and later studied engineering at the University of Sussex, and then earned an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam started his career as a lending officer at Chase Manhattan Bank where he specialized in business loans to technology companies. He joined the investment banking boutique Needham & Co. as an analyst in 1985, where he focused on the consumer electronics industry. He rapidly rose through the ranks, becoming the head of research in 1987 and the president in 1991, at the age of 34. At the company's behest, he started a hedge fund—the Needham Emerging Growth Partnership—in March 1992, which he later bought and renamed "Galleon Group".


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: His hedge fund was valued at $3.7 billion in 2009, down from a peak of $7 billion in 2008. According to a 2009 investor letter his $1.2 billion Diversified Fund had a net annualized return of 22.3 percent. Rajaratnam has been featured among the elite US money managers in a book called "The New Investment Superstars." Initially, he primarily invested in technology and healthcare companies. He said that his best ideas came from frequent visits with the companies in which he invested and from conversations with executives who invested in his fund.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: After Rajaratnam's arrest, Galleon received requests from its investors for the withdrawal of $1.3 billion, which caused the fund to close. In a letter dated October 21, 2009, Rajaratnam informed his employees and investors that he intended to wind down all the funds of the Galleon Group. Investors received the full balance of their initial investments, plus profits, in January 2010.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam alongside other private donors, partnered with the US State Department to fund mine detection dogs for humanitarian demining war-affected areas in Sri Lanka. He recalled his visits to the mine-impacted areas of Sri Lanka and underscored the humanitarian toll that mines have taken. Recalling his encounter with a young child in Kilinochchi who had lost both legs to a land mine, Rajaratnam stated that this particular image that is etched in his memory "made it an easy decision to write the check."


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: He helped Sri Lankans recover after the 2004 tsunami. Rajaratnam was in Sri Lanka when the 2004 Asian Tsunami hit and donated $5,000,000 to for the construction of 400 new homes for the island's various ethnic groups - Sinhalese and Tamils.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam was also a contributor to various causes that promoted development in the Indian subcontinent and programs that benefited low income South Asian youth in the New York area.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam contributed $3.5 million to the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), a group whose assets were frozen by the USA due to its alleged close connections to the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) which are proscribed as a terrorist organization in 32 countries. TRO's offices were raided by the FBI in 2006 but the organization was never charged with any wrongdoing. The chief of the investigations unit of at the Sri Lankan central bank found that Mr. Rajaratnam's donations were made in good faith. At the time the contributions were made the TRO was not outlawed by the U.S. nor Sri Lankan governments. The Sri Lankan justice ministry has acknowledged and thanked Mr. Rajaratnam for the millions of dollars contributed to rehabilitating child soldiers conscripted by the Tamil Tigers.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: The Sri Lankan government stated that Rajaratnam had contributed for several years of the Sri Lankan Civil War to the LTTE with millions of dollars and that, as a consequence, he was under investigation in Sri Lanka. However, the senior military official could not give specific details about the contributions to the LTTE. Rajaratnam had recently pledged a $1 million to rehabilitate former LTTE combatants.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: According to the Federal Election Commission, Rajaratnam has made over $118,000 in political contributions in five years. He contributed to the Democratic National Committee and various campaigns on behalf of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Bob Menendez.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: On Friday October 16, 2009, Raj Rajaratnam was arrested by the FBI for insider trading in the stock of several publicly traded companies. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara put the total profits in the scheme at over $60 million, telling a news conference that it was the largest hedge fund insider trading case in United States history. Jim Walden, an attorney for Rajaratnam, said his client is innocent and would fight the insider-trading charges.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: It was reported that Rajaratnam, Goel, and Kumar were all part of the class of 1983 from Wharton business school.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: The Sri Lankan stock market fell sharply after Rajaratnam was arrested on insider trading charges in October 2009. Sri Lanka's Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing the active stock trading of Raj Rajaratnam with a view of identifying any insider trading.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam also conspired to get confidential information on the $5 billion purchase by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway of Goldman preferred stock prior to the September 2008 public announcement of that transaction. The "Wall Street Journal" reported that a former member of the board of directors of Goldman Sachs and former McKinsey & Company chief executive Rajat Gupta told Rajaratnam about Berkshire's investment before it became public. Gupta stood to profit as would-be chairman of Galleon International, a co-founder of New Silk Route with Rajaratnam, and as a friend of Rajaratnam. In March 2011 Gupta was charged in an administrative proceeding by the SEC. Gupta maintained his innocence, counter-sued, and won dismissal of the administrative charge, but was then arrested on criminal charges.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: On May 11, 2011, Rajaratnam was found guilty on all 14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud. On October 13, 2011, Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison by Judge Richard Holwell. To date, this was the longest prison sentence ever handed out for insider trading. The thirteen other defendants connected to Rajaratnam's case received prison sentences averaging approximately three years each.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam served the first years of his 11-year sentence in Ayer, Massachusetts. His appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was argued in October 2012 by Patricia Millett, who subsequently became a federal Court of Appeals judge herself on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on December 10, 2013.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan on March 3, 2017, rejected Rajaratnam's bid to void much of his insider trading conviction and shorten his 11-year prison sentence, on account of Rajaratnam failing to show his actual innocence on five of the 14 counts on which he was convicted, or that two other counts should be vacated because the main government witness committed perjury. Preska also rejected Rajaratnam's argument that his trial counsel was ineffective, and denied Rajaratnam's bid to reduce the $53.8 million he agreed to forfeit to about $4.3 million.


title: Raj Rajaratnam

text: Rajaratnam served seven and half years in prison of an 11-year sentence and was released in the summer of 2019. In 2021, he published "" detailing the events surrounding his insider trading conviction and the prosecutorial overreach he claims led to it.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Cat's Eye (also known as Stephen King's Cat's Eye) is a 1985 American anthology horror thriller film directed by Lewis Teague and written by Stephen King. It comprises three stories, "Quitters, Inc.", "The Ledge", and "General". The first two are adaptations of short stories in King's 1978 "Night Shift" collection, and the third is unique to the film. The three stories are connected only by the presence of a traveling cat, which plays an incidental role in the first two and is a major character of the third.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: A stray tabby cat hides from a dog in a delivery truck, which drives to New York City. The tomcat sees the disembodied image of a young girl pleading for help and is picked up by a man named Junk.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Smoker, Dick Morrison is advised by a friend to join Quitters, Inc. to kick his habit. Clinic counselor Vinnie Donatti explains that the clinic has a 100% success rate due to a uniquely persuasive method: every time Dick smokes a cigarette, horrors of increasing magnitude will befall his wife and child.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Using the tomcat that Donatti's assistant, Junk, caught in the street, Donatti demonstrates the first of these horrors: the tomcat is put in a cage and tormented with electric shocks coming from the floor. Donatti explains that if his new client is caught with a cigarette, Dick's wife Cindy will be shocked while he is forced to watch. For subsequent infractions, his daughter will be shocked, then his wife raped. Finally, Dick himself will be killed. Dick hides the threats from his family.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: That night, Dick is angered by the methods Quitters, Inc. uses and notices a pack of cigarettes in his desk. He prepares to smoke, but notices a pair of feet in his closet, realizing Quitters Inc. takes their threat seriously. The following day, Dick visits his daughter and gives her a doll. Whilst at the school, Dick sees Donatti, who warns him that the organization will be watching him closely.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: During a stressful traffic jam, Dick smokes after finding an old pack of cigarettes in his glove box. After watching Cindy suffer in the electric cage, Dick futilely attacks Donatti and Junk; the tomcat escapes in the scuffle. Dick is determined never to smoke again and tells his wife everything.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Time passes, and Dick is smoke-free, but has gained weight due to quitting. Donatti prescribes illegal diet pills and sets a target weight for Dick. Dick jokingly asks what will happen if he continues to gain weight; Donatti responds that someone will cut off his wife's little finger. Dick and his wife have a dinner party with the friend who recommended Quitters, Inc. to Dick and his wife, and toast the company. As she raises her glass, Dick sees that his friend's wife is missing her little finger.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Having escaped Quitters, Inc., the tomcat leaves Manhattan via the Staten Island Ferry, traveling to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where it sees the same disembodied girl's image asking for his help. Gambler and former tennis pro Johnny Norris is involved with a woman whose jealous husband, Cressner, is a crime boss and casino owner. Cressner, who will bet on anything, wins a wager that the tomcat will successfully cross the busy road outside his casino, and takes the tomcat home.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Cressner has Norris kidnapped and blackmails him into a dangerous ordeal: he must circumnavigate the exterior ledge of Cressner's penthouse. If he makes it all the way around, Cressner will grant his wife a divorce. If Norris refuses, Cressner will call the police and have him arrested for possession of drugs that have been planted in Norris's Mustang by a henchman named Albert.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Norris agrees. Cressner harasses Norris by startling him with a horn when he attempts to get into a window. A pigeon lands beside Norris and pecks at his foot, causing it to bleed, then Cressner turns on a fire hose to keep Norris from lingering. Norris returns to the apartment. Cressner says he will honor his bet: Albert removed the drugs, and presents Norris with a bag of cash—however, he kicks over the bag to reveal his wife's severed head. Norris attacks Cressner, while Albert is tripped by the tomcat and drops his gun. Norris seizes the gun and kills Albert, then points it at Cressner. Norris forces Cressner to undergo the same ordeal on the ledge. The tomcat watches as Cressner, harassed by the pigeon, falls to his death.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: The tomcat hops a freight train and travels to Wilmington, North Carolina, where it is adopted by the girl who was asking for help earlier, Amanda, who names him General. Amanda's mother believes General will harm their parakeet, Polly.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Despite Amanda's protests, her mother puts General out at night. Consequently, he cannot protect Amanda from a small, malevolent troll that took up residence in the house. When Amanda sleeps, the troll emerges via a hole in one of the walls in Amanda's room. The troll slays the parakeet with a tiny dagger and then tries to steal Amanda's breath. General finds a way into the house and chases the troll. After wounding the tomcat's shoulder with his dagger, the troll flees, leaving Amanda and her parents to discover the dead bird. Amanda's parents are convinced that General killed Polly, but her father, discovering a wound on the tomcat too large for a parakeet to have made, starts doubting the mother's belief that General slew the bird.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Amanda's mother takes General to an animal shelter to be euthanized. When night falls, the troll returns and uses a doorstop to wedge Amanda's door shut, and then reattempts to take the sleeping girl's breath. As General is getting his final meal, he escapes and rushes back to Amanda's house.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: General saves Amanda and fights with the troll, causing a great deal of noise. Amanda's parents awaken, but the blocked door prevents them from reaching her. Though the troll tries to flee, General kills it. After her parents break into the room, Amanda describes how General saved her from the troll. Her parents believe the story when parts of the troll's corpse are discovered, as well as the tiny dagger and the hole in the wall that the troll used.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: The next morning, General feasts on a large fish, then climbs onto a sleeping Amanda's stomach and licks her face. She wakes up and cuddles him.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: "Cat's Eye" was released theatrically in the United States by MGM on April 12, 1985. It grossed $13,086,298 at the domestic box office.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote, "Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and 'Cat's Eye' is one of his most effective films." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called the film "the best screen adaptation of any of King's work since Brian De Palma's 'Carrie'" and "pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order." "Variety" wrote, "The three stories just don't connect and efforts to join them never work. However, an excellent roster of talent does try its best." Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that the opening story "is so funny and so fresh that it's a shock and a disappointment to see it come to an end in a half-hour. The movie's second short story is as dull as can be; No. 3 is kind of fun; so it all adds up to a better-than-average entertainment that sags terribly in the middle." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" stated that "the special effects are impeccable and Giorgio Postiglione's production design meticulous and inspired. Yet it's the well-drawn characters, plus the brisk, stylish direction of Teague and superb camerawork of Cardiff, that make it work." Paul Attanasio of "The Washington Post" wrote that all the stories "repeat the same formula," but the middle one was "the most fun, because of the presence of the peerless Kenneth McMillan," who "plays here with a good-humored burlesque that recalls Jackie Gleason." Kim Newman of "The Monthly Film Bulletin" thought the film "would have been sub-standard even as one of the formula Amicus anthologies of the 60s and 70s," adding, "Despite a few good performances (James Woods, Kenneth McMillan), the film, like "Creepshow" before it, is continually let down by the weak punch lines King provides for his promising anecdotes."


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 70% rating based on 30 reviews. The critical consensus reads: "An effective if knowingly silly Stephen King anthology that combines comedy and terror." On Metacritic the film has a score of 70% based on reviews from 12 critics.


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: Neil Gaiman reviewed "Cat's Eye" for "Imagine" magazine, stating it was "Funny, scary, and one of the best King movies so far."


title: Cat's Eye (1985 film)

text: The film was nominated for the International Fantasy Film Award for Best Film in 1987. Drew Barrymore was nominated for the Young Artist Award for Best Starring Performance by a Young Actress in a Motion Picture in 1986.


title: William Kamkwamba

text: William Kamkwamba (born August 5, 1987) is a Malawian inventor, engineer, and author. He gained renown in his country in 2001 when he built a wind turbine to power multiple electrical appliances in his family's house in Wimbe, 23 km (14 mi) east of Kasungu, using blue gum trees, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrapyard. Since then, he has built a solar-powered water pump that supplies the first drinking water in his village and two other wind turbines, the tallest standing at 12 meters (39 ft), and is planning two more, including one in Lilongwe, the political capital of Malawi.


title: William Kamkwamba

text: Kamkwamba was born in a family of relative poverty and relied primarily on farming to survive. William enjoyed playing with his friends, Gilbert and Geoffrey, using recycled materials. A crippling famine forced Kamkwamba to drop out of school, and he was not able to return to school because his family was unable to afford the tuition. In a desperate attempt to retain his education, Kamkwamba began to frequent the local school library. He discovered his love for electronics there. Before, he had once set up a small business repairing his village's radios, but this work did not earn him much money.


title: William Kamkwamba

text: Kamkwamba, after reading a book called "Using Energy", decided to create a makeshift wind turbine. He experimented with a small model using a cheap dynamo and eventually made a functioning wind turbine that powered some electrical appliances in his family's house. Local farmers and journalists investigated the spinning device and Kamkwamba's fame in international news skyrocketed. A blog about his accomplishments was written on Hacktivate and Kamkwamba took part in the first event celebrating his particular type of ingenuity called Maker Faire Africa in Ghana in August 2009.


title: William Kamkwamba

text: When "The Daily Times" in Blantyre, the commercial capital, wrote a story on Kamkwamba's wind turbine in November 2006, the story circulated through the blogosphere, and TED conference director Emeka Okafor invited Kamkwamba to talk at TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania as a guest. His speech moved the audience, and several venture capitalists at the conference pledged to help finance his secondary education. His story was covered by Sarah Childress for "The Wall Street Journal". He became a student at African Bible College Christian Academy in Lilongwe. He then went on to receive a scholarship to the African Leadership Academy and in 2014 graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.


title: William Kamkwamba

text: Among other appearances, Kamkwamba was interviewed on "The Daily Show" on 7 October 2009 (during which he was playfully compared to the fictional hero Angus MacGyver for his impressive scientific ingenuity). In addition, he was invited to and attended the 2011 Google Science Fair introductory meeting, where he was a guest speaker.