title: BKash

text: bKash started in 2011 as a joint venture between BRAC Bank Limited, Bangladesh, and Money in Motion LLC, United States of America. In April 2013, International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, became an equity partner, in March 2014, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation became an investor in the company, and in April 2018 Ant Financial, the operators of Alipay (an affiliate company of Chinese giant Alibaba Group), became an equity partner, announced a strategic partnership to promote financial inclusion for the unbanked and underbanked communities in Bangladesh. Later, in November 2021, bKash announced an investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to promote financial inclusion by building a digital financial ecosystem in Bangladesh.


title: BKash

text: Shameran Abed is the chairman. He is a senior director at BRAC. Other members of the bKash board include Ant Group nominees Gouming Cheng and Kai Nin Kenny Man; BRAC Bank nominees Selim R F Hussain, K Mahmood Sattar, Meheriar M. Hasan, Asif Saleh, Fahima Choudhury, and Ryan Gilbert; International Finance Corporation (IFC) nominee Shinya Yoshino; Money in Motion nominee Nicholas Hughes, and SoftBank nominees Jason Park and Chris Lee.


title: Shocker (film)

text: Shocker (also known as Wes Craven's Shocker) is a 1989 American slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven, and starring Michael Murphy, Peter Berg, Cami Cooper, and Mitch Pileggi. The film was released by Universal Pictures on October 27, 1989, and grossed $16.6 million.


title: Shocker (film)

text: A news report shows a victim being pulled away on a stretcher. It is revealed that a serial killer, having murdered over thirty people, is on the loose in a Los Angeles suburb. A television repairman with a pronounced limp, named Horace Pinker, becomes the prime suspect. When the investigating detective, Lt. Don Parker, gets too close, Pinker murders Parker's wife, foster daughter, and foster son.


title: Shocker (film)

text: However, his other foster son, a college football star named Jonathan, develops a strange connection to Pinker through his dreams and leads Parker to Pinker's run-down shop. In a shootout in which several officers are killed, Pinker escapes and targets Jonathan's girlfriend Alison in retribution, killing her as a "birthday present" while he is at practice.


title: Shocker (film)

text: Another dream leads Lt. Parker and the police to Pinker, whom they catch in the act of a kidnapping. This time, just as Pinker is about to kill Jonathan, he is arrested. Pinker is quickly convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair.


title: Shocker (film)

text: Prior to his execution, Pinker reveals that Jonathan is, in fact, his son, and that as a boy, Jonathan had shot him in the knee while trying to stop the murder of his mother. But what they do not realize is that Pinker has made a deal with the Devil. When executed, he does not die but instead becomes pure electricity. He is able to possess others to continue his murderous ways. Some of the people who are killed are prison staff and Jonathan's friends.


title: Shocker (film)

text: He soon possesses Lt. Parker, who uses his strength to fight off Pinker, and Pinker escapes into a TV dish. Jonathan and his friends try to find a way to fight him. Jonathan's friends, including Rhino, head to the power station to disable the power.


title: Shocker (film)

text: Jonathan, with the aid of Alison's "spirit", devises a scheme to bring Pinker back into the real world and accidentally discovers that Pinker, as with all energy sources, is bound by the laws of the real world; Jonathan uses this limitation to defeat Pinker, and traps him inside a television. Pinker threatens Jonathan that he will find a way out of his "prison". Alison's voice tells Jonathan to take care of himself, while Jonathan's neighborhood suffers a blackout, caused by his friends blowing out the power main, trapping Pinker in the television. Jonathan goes outside amid all his neighbors and looks up at the sky, agreeing with Alison that they are beautiful.


title: Shocker (film)

text: According to Craven, the film was severely cut for an "R" rating. It took around thirteen submissions to the Motion Picture Association of America to receive an "R" instead of an "X". Some scenes that were cut included Pinker spitting out fingers that he bit off of a prison guard, a longer and more graphic electrocution of Pinker, and a longer scene of a possessed coach stabbing his own hand. Despite fan interest, an uncut version has never been released.


title: Shocker (film)

text: "Shocker" was released on October 27, 1989 in 1,783 venues. It earned $4,510,990 in its opening weekend, ranking second behind the third weekend of "Look Who's Talking". The film ultimately grossed $16.6 million in the United States.


title: Shocker (film)

text: The film received a split vote from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on their weekly television show, with Siskel giving it "a marginal thumbs up" but Ebert voting "thumbs down" and explaining "I felt it would have been a better movie if it had played with more rules." Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" wrote, "If the movie's metaphors are as obvious and as portentous as the heavy metal music that punctuates the action, 'Shocker' at least has the feel of a movie that was fun to make. Just when you think that every trick has been thrown in but the kitchen sink, it goes in too, along with stove and the refrigerator." "Variety" wrote, "At first glance (or at least for the first 40 minutes) 'Shocker' seems a potential winner, an almost unbearably suspenseful, stylish and blood-drenched ride courtesy of writer-director Craven's flair for action and sick humor. As it continues, however, the camp aspects simply give way to the ridiculous while failing to establish any rules to govern the mayhem. The result is plenty of unintentional laughs that undermine the few legitimate chuckles and most of the remaining action." Michael Wilmington of the "Los Angeles Times" stated that the film "is crammed with dazzling bursts of macabre technique" but "is so diffusely organized it's almost three separate movies." Johanna Steinmetz of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "A gory thrill show for underdeveloped sensibilities, it is sloppily organized and jarringly paced. Its single conceit, that a barrage of television programs has weakened both our values and our grasp of realities, while an excuse for a climax of ingenious special effects, can't sustain an entire movie." Richard Harrington of "The Washington Post" said, "For the longest time, 'Shocker' is low voltage, just another gathering of slasher cliches. Toward the end, though, it comes to life thanks to an extended special effects package that is only hinted at earlier." Kim Newman wrote in "The Monthly Film Bulletin" that "all the characters, especially the dumb-hunk hero and his dead but chatty girlfriend, are cardboard, and none of the connective tissue makes any sense. Asked to turn out 'another "Nightmare on Elm Street", Craven has sadly resorted to facile self-imitation rather than coming up with something as fiercely original as his biggest hit movie."


title: Shocker (film)

text: In "Wes Craven: The Art of Horror", John Kenneth Muir described "Shocker" as "Craven's response to the Freddy Krueger film series" for Universal. Muir describes several similarities between the series, though he says "Shocker" is more comedic. Of the film's conclusion, Muir wrote, "Shocker"'s final 20 minutes are a stylistic special effects "tour de force" and well worth the price of admission." As of July 2022, the film holds a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 23 reviews. The site's consensus reads: "With an intriguing enough premise and horror legend Wes Craven on writer-director duty, the real "Shocker" here is just how lame the end results turned out to be".


title: Shocker (film)

text: Later Wes Craven said: “I’d like to redo Shocker just to get the special effects right because we had a real special effects disaster on the film. The guy who was doing all the visual effects kind of flamed out, had a nervous breakdown because he was attempting more than he could actually do. When he told us towards the end of the movie that not a single one of the special effects was actually working, he was working on a new technique, my son’s job specifically became just to find all the negative. It was all around town in unmarked boxes and under people’s editing [benches]. It was a nightmare itself. We pulled every favor in town to get all those special effects done very quickly, and some of them are pretty sketchy.”


title: Shocker (film)

text: The film was released on DVD by Universal Studios in 1999. It was subsequently re-released by the studio in 2007 as a double feature, alongside Craven's "The People Under the Stairs". The film's first Blu-ray edition was released by Shout! Factory on September 8, 2015.


title: Shocker (film)

text: Original musical contributions included songs by Alice Cooper (who would later play Freddy Krueger's abusive foster father, Mr. Underwood, in "") and Megadeth, who covered Alice Cooper's 1973 hit "No More Mr. Nice Guy", among others. The movie's title song was written by Jean Beauvoir and Desmond Child and recorded by The Dudes of Wrath, a supergroup composed of Paul Stanley of Kiss and Desmond Child, both on vocals, Vivian Campbell and Guy Mann-Dude on guitars, Whitesnake's Rudy Sarzo on bass guitar, and Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee on drums. The band also included backing vocals by Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Kane Roberts. The soundtrack was released on Capitol/SBK


title: Daniel Defert

text: Daniel Defert (born 10 September 1937) is a French sociologist and HIV/AIDS activist. Partner to the late Michel Foucault, Defert co-founded France's first AIDS advocacy group, AIDES, following Foucault's death from complications related to the disease. Defert is the heir to Foucault's estate.


title: Daniel Defert

text: Daniel Defert was born on 10 September 1937. He graduated from the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. He earned the agrégation in philosophy. Defert met Foucault while he was a philosophy student at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France and their relationship lasted from 1963 until Foucault's death in 1984.


title: Daniel Defert

text: A professor of sociology, Daniel Defert has been assistant (1969–1970), maître-assistant (1971–1985), then maître de conférence (from 1985) at the Centre Universitaire of Vincennes, which became in 1972 Université Paris VIII Vincennes.


title: Daniel Defert

text: After the death of his partner Michel Foucault from complications related to AIDS, Defert founded AIDES, the first AIDS awareness organization in France. The name invokes the French word for "help" as well as the English acronym for the disease (the French acronym is SIDA). Defert served as president of AIDES from 1984 to 1991.


title: Daniel Defert

text: He has been a member of the scientific committee for human sciences of the International Conference on AIDS (1986–94); member of the World Commission for AIDS (World Health Organization) (1988–93); member of the National Committee for AIDS (1989–98), of the Global AIDS Policy Coalition of Harvard University (1994–1997), and of the French Haut Comité de la Santé Publique (from 1998).


title: Daniel Defert

text: Defert is author of numerous articles in the domain of ethno-iconography and public health. He has been awarded the decoration of "Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur" and received the Alexander Onassis prize for the creation of AIDES in 1998.


title: Daniel Defert

text: After Foucault's death, Defert inherited his estate despite the fact that their partnership preceded French government recognition of gay couples through civil unions (1999) or marriage (2013) and Foucault left no official will; however Foucault had written a letter indicating his intention to bequeath his apartment and all its contents, which included his archive and corrected proofs for an unpublished manuscript, to Defert. Other family members deferred to Foucault's wishes, but without government recognition, Defert, like other surviving partners in a similar position, was still subject to much higher inheritance taxes than he would have been as a recognized family member.


title: Daniel Defert

text: It was Foucault's death from AIDS, a disease about which little was known at the time, that led Defert to enter the field of AIDS activism.


title: Daniel Defert

text: Defert co-edited, with François Ewald, volume 4 of "Dits et Ecrits" of Michel Foucault (1994), a posthumous collection of Foucault's writing.


title: Daniel Defert

text: In 2013, Defert sold for €3.8m ($4.0m, May 2022) Foucault's archives to France's national library, making the material available to researchers; subsequently the family, which owns the literary rights, elected to publish the manuscript ("Confessions of the Flesh", 2018, the fourth and final volume of Foucault's "History of Sexuality"), despite Foucault's instruction that no work be published posthumously. Defert explained the decision that after the material became available to researchers with the credentials to acquire a reader card at the national library, Defert and others close to Foucault felt that access should be either available "to everyone or no one". Additionally, many previous posthumous works had already been published, and Defert felt this new addition did not make any encroachment on Foucault's intimate life, but strictly contributed to the corpus of his intellectual contributions; by contrast, the letters exchanged between the two of them, Defert said in 2012, he intended to "take to his grave."


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: Happily N'Ever After is a 2006 computer-animated family comedy film directed by Paul J. Bolger, produced by John H. Williams, and written by Rob Moreland. It is inspired by fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and is loosely based on the 1999 animated German television series "Simsala Grimm". The title is the opposite of a stock phrase, "happily ever after"; the name is contracted with an apostrophe between the N and the E. The film stars the voices of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Andy Dick, Wallace Shawn, Patrick Warburton, George Carlin, and Sigourney Weaver. This film was one of Carlin's final works before he died. The film was theatrically released in the United States on January 5, 2007, by Lionsgate, and was released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 1, 2007. The film was panned by critics and audiences and was a box office bomb, only earning $38 million worldwide on a production budget of $47 million.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: Despite being a critical and financial failure, a direct-to-video sequel, "", was released on March 24, 2009.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: The story begins with the idea that the Wizard controls all of the fairy tales and governs the Scales of Good and Evil, an artifact that maintains the balance of all good and evil in Fairy Tale Land. With the help of his assistants, the uptight Munk and the goofy Mambo, the Wizard checks to make sure that all the fairy tales under his care are "on track" to have their traditional happy endings. However, the Wizard announces his leave for Scotland for a little vacation, so he leaves the kingdom in the hands of Munk and Mambo. Though Munk intends to have the stories go by their traditional endings, Mambo desires for the characters to break free of their pre-destined fates and choose different endings.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: Right after the Wizard's leave, both Mambo and Munk fulfill their duties by watching over the story of Cinderella taking place. Known as Ella, the character lives as a servant to her evil stepmother, Frieda, and her equally mean stepsisters. Too fearful to stand up for herself, Ella often dreams of the Prince who will rescue her from her life and sweep her off her feet. However, unknown to Ella, she is pined after by her best friend Rick, a servant of the Prince, and the Prince in question is buffoonish and chauvinistic. As a result of Rick's efforts, Ella is invited alongside her stepfamily to the ball, but Frieda refuses to let the girl go. Fortunately, the Fairy Godmother arrives and grants Ella a gorgeous dress, as well as glass slippers, to wear, on the condition she returns home before midnight.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: However, the fairy tale suddenly falls off-track during the ball when Frieda gains access to the Wizard's lair and discovers his book of fairy tales. Once she realizes what will happen to her if Ella succeeds in marrying the Prince, Frieda steals the Wizard's staff from Munk and Mambo, and tips the Scales of Good and Evil, causing a series of fairy tales to go wrong and have unhappy endings. She summons an army of Trolls, evil witches, three Big Bad Wolves, the Giant, and Rumpelstiltskin to her castle. Ella finds out and tries to enlist Rick's help, but Rick, frustrated with her affection for the Prince, refuses, so she escapes to the woods where she meets the exiled Munk and Mambo. They both explain the situation to her and decide to find the Prince (who, unaware of Ella's identity, is searching for his "mystery maiden"), in hopes that he will defeat Frieda. Meanwhile, Frieda sets her villainous army out to capture Ella, causing Rick to have a change of heart and go rescue her.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: The trio find the Seven Dwarfs' home, only to discover Frieda's army waiting there for an attack. The Seven Dwarfs help the trio defend themselves from the attackers, and they successfully escape with the help of Rick. unfortunately, after the battle, Rick and Ella have another falling-out over the Prince, with Rick insisting the Prince is not the hero they need. Ella refuses to believe his claims and leaves him so she can find the Prince herself, but after listening to Munk and Mambo's retelling of her original story, Ella grows uncertain if that is what she wants in life, suddenly realizing her feelings for Rick. With some encouragement from Mambo, Ella decides to go after Rick. However, Frieda, angered by her army's inability to capture Ella, decides to go after her herself. Frieda succeeds in kidnapping Ella, but Rick, Mambo, and Munk manage to sneak into the castle to rescue Ella, and together the foursome enter a battle with Frieda over the staff. During the struggle, Frieda seemingly kills Rick with a blast from the staff, but she accidentally creates a portal and loses the staff as she struggles to fight against Ella. Ella, finally fed up with Frieda's treatment of her, punches her in the rift, banishing her from Fairy Tale Land forever and setting the stories back in place. Ella then goes to mourn over Rick, but to her happiness Rick is revealed to have survived, and they both confess their feelings for each other, while the imprisoned fairy tale characters (including the Prince) drive out the villains.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: With the Scales tipped back into balance and the kingdom regained, Ella and Rick decide to choose their destinies in a world of happy endings and get married, while a few other fairy tale characters (including the reformed Rumplestiltskin) start to follow suite. Finally, the Wizard returns from vacation, and both Munk and Mambo agree not to tell him about the events that occurred.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: The film was theatrically released in Australia on December 15, 2006 by Roadshow Entertainment, followed by a premiere in the United States at Westwood, California on December 16, 2006, and then theatrical release in the United States on January 5, 2007 by Lionsgate. It was then released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 1, 2007 in both countries.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 5% based on reviews from 80 critics. The site's critical consensus is: ""Happily N'Ever After" has none of the moxy, edge or postmodern wit of the other fairy-tales-gone-haywire CG movie it so blatantly rips off." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 28 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “C" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: The film opened #6 behind "Dreamgirls", "Freedom Writers", "Children of Men", "The Pursuit of Happyness", and "Night at the Museum", which was at its third week at the #1 position. The film made $6,608,244 during its opening weekend. The film made a total of $15,589,393 at the US box office and $15,300,096 foreign, grossing a worldwide total of $30.1 million on a $47 million budget, making it a box-office failure. By August 2010, the movie has grossed $38.1 million worldwide. It made $16.7 million in DVD sales in the United States.


title: Happily N'Ever After

text: Ruth Lambert was nominated for "Best Animated Voice-Over Feature Casting" at the 23rd Artios Awards for her work on this movie.


title: Exciton

text: An exciton is a bound state of an electron and an electron hole which are attracted to each other by the electrostatic Coulomb force. It is an electrically neutral quasiparticle that exists in insulators, semiconductors and some liquids. The exciton is regarded as an elementary excitation of condensed matter that can transport energy without transporting net electric charge.


title: Exciton

text: An exciton can form when a material absorbs a photon of higher energy than its bandgap. This excites an electron from the valence band into the conduction band. In turn, this leaves behind a positively charged electron hole (an abstraction for the location from which an electron was moved). The electron in the conduction band is then less attracted to this localized hole due to the repulsive Coulomb forces from large numbers of electrons surrounding the hole and excited electron. These repulsive forces provide a stabilizing energy balance. Consequently, the exciton has slightly less energy than the unbound electron and hole. The wavefunction of the bound state is said to be "hydrogenic", an exotic atom state akin to that of a hydrogen atom. However, the binding energy is much smaller and the particle's size much larger than a hydrogen atom. This is because of both the screening of the Coulomb force by other electrons in the semiconductor (i.e., its relative permittivity), and the small effective masses of the excited electron and hole. The recombination of the electron and hole, i.e., the decay of the exciton, is limited by resonance stabilization due to the overlap of the electron and hole wave functions, resulting in an extended lifetime for the exciton.


title: Exciton

text: The electron and hole may have either parallel or anti-parallel spins. The spins are coupled by the exchange interaction, giving rise to exciton fine structure. In periodic lattices, the properties of an exciton show momentum (k-vector) dependence.


title: Exciton

text: The concept of excitons was first proposed by Yakov Frenkel in 1931, when he described the excitation of atoms in a lattice of insulators. He proposed that this excited state would be able to travel in a particle-like fashion through the lattice without the net transfer of charge.


title: Exciton

text: Excitons are often treated in the two limiting cases of small dielectric constant versus large dielectric constant; corresponding to Frenkel exciton and Wannier–Mott exciton respectively.


title: Exciton

text: In materials with a relatively small dielectric constant, the Coulomb interaction between an electron and a hole may be strong and the excitons thus tend to be small, of the same order as the size of the unit cell. Molecular excitons may even be entirely located on the same molecule, as in fullerenes. This "Frenkel exciton", named after Yakov Frenkel, has a typical binding energy on the order of 0.1 to 1 eV. Frenkel excitons are typically found in alkali halide crystals and in organic molecular crystals composed of aromatic molecules, such as anthracene and tetracene. Another example of Frenkel exciton includes on-site "d"-"d" excitations in transition metal compounds with partially-filled "d"-shells. While "d"-"d" transitions are in principle forbidden by symmetry, they become weakly-allowed in a crystal when the symmetry is broken by structural relaxations or other effects. Absorption of a photon resonant with a "d"-"d" transition leads to the creation of an electron-hole pair on a single atomic site, which can be treated as a Frenkel exciton.


title: Exciton

text: In semiconductors, the dielectric constant is generally large. Consequently, electric field screening tends to reduce the Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes. The result is a "Wannier–Mott exciton", which has a radius larger than the lattice spacing. Small effective mass of electrons that is typical of semiconductors also favors large exciton radii. As a result, the effect of the lattice potential can be incorporated into the effective masses of the electron and hole. Likewise, because of the lower masses and the screened Coulomb interaction, the binding energy is usually much less than that of a hydrogen atom, typically on the order of . This type of exciton was named for Gregory Wannier and Nevill Francis Mott. Wannier–Mott excitons are typically found in semiconductor crystals with small energy gaps and high dielectric constants, but have also been identified in liquids, such as liquid xenon. They are also known as "large excitons".


title: Exciton

text: In single-wall carbon nanotubes, excitons have both Wannier–Mott and Frenkel character. This is due to the nature of the Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes in one-dimension. The dielectric function of the nanotube itself is large enough to allow for the spatial extent of the wave function to extend over a few to several nanometers along the tube axis, while poor screening in the vacuum or dielectric environment outside of the nanotube allows for large (0.4 to ) binding energies.


title: Exciton

text: Often more than one band can be chosen as source for the electron and the hole, leading to different types of excitons in the same material. Even high-lying bands can be effective as femtosecond two-photon experiments have shown. At cryogenic temperatures, many higher excitonic levels can be observed approaching the edge of the band, forming a series of spectral absorption lines that are in principle similar to hydrogen spectral series.


title: Exciton

text: In a bulk semiconductor, a Wannier exciton has an energy and radius associated with it, called exciton Rydberg energy and exciton Bohr radius respectively. For the energy, we have


title: Exciton

text: where formula_2 is the Rydberg unit of energy (cf. Rydberg constant), formula_3 is the (static) relative permittivity, formula_4 is the reduced mass of the electron and hole, and formula_5 is the electron mass. Concerning the radius, we have


title: Exciton

text: So for example in GaAs, we have relative permittivity of 12.8 and effective electron and hole masses as 0.067"m" and 0.2"m" respectively; and that gives us formula_8 meV and formula_9 nm.


title: Exciton

text: In two-dimensional (2D) materials, the system is quantum confined in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the material. The reduced dimensionality of the system has an effect on the binding energies and radii of Wannier excitons. In fact, excitonic effects are enhanced in such systems.


title: Exciton

text: In most 2D semiconductors, the Rytova–Keldysh form is a more accurate approximation to the exciton interaction


title: Exciton

text: where formula_12 is the so-called screening length, formula_13 the average dielectric constant of the surrounding media, and formula_14 the exciton radius. For this potential, no general expression for the exciton energies may be found. One must instead turn to numerical procedures, and it is precisely this potential that gives rise to the nonhydrogenic Rydberg series of the energies in 2D semiconductors.


title: Exciton

text: Monolayers of a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) are a good and cutting edge example where excitons play a major role. In particular, in these systems, they exhibit a bounding energy of the order of 0.5 eV with a Coulomb attraction between the hole and the electrons stronger than in other traditional quantum wells. As a result, optical excitonic peaks are present in these materials even at room temperatures.


title: Exciton

text: An intermediate case between Frenkel and Wannier excitons is the "charge-transfer (CT) exciton". In molecular physics, CT excitons form when the electron and the hole occupy adjacent molecules. They occur primarily in organic and molecular crystals; in this case, unlike Frenkel and Wannier excitons, CT excitons display a static electric dipole moment. CT excitons can also occur in transition metal oxides, where they involve an electron in the transition metal 3"d" orbitals and a hole in the oxygen 2"p" orbitals. Notable examples include the lowest-energy excitons in correlated cuprates or the two-dimensional exciton of TiO. Irrespective of the origin, the concept of CT exciton is always related to a transfer of charge from one atomic site to another, thus spreading the wave-function over a few lattice sites.


title: Exciton

text: At surfaces it is possible for so called "image states" to occur, where the hole is inside the solid and the electron is in the vacuum. These electron-hole pairs can only move along the surface.


title: Exciton

text: Alternatively, an exciton may be described as an excited state of an atom, ion, or molecule, if the excitation is wandering from one cell of the lattice to another.


title: Exciton

text: When a molecule absorbs a quantum of energy that corresponds to a transition from one molecular orbital to another molecular orbital, the resulting electronic excited state is also properly described as an exciton. An electron is said to be found in the lowest unoccupied orbital and an electron hole in the highest occupied molecular orbital, and since they are found within the same molecular orbital manifold, the electron-hole state is said to be bound. Molecular excitons typically have characteristic lifetimes on the order of nanoseconds, after which the ground electronic state is restored and the molecule undergoes photon or phonon emission. Molecular excitons have several interesting properties, one of which is energy transfer (see Förster resonance energy transfer) whereby if a molecular exciton has proper energetic matching to a second molecule's spectral absorbance, then an exciton may transfer ("hop") from one molecule to another. The process is strongly dependent on intermolecular distance between the species in solution, and so the process has found application in sensing and "molecular rulers".


title: Exciton

text: The hallmark of molecular excitons in organic molecular crystals are doublets and/or triplets of exciton absorption bands strongly polarized along crystallographic axes. In these crystals an elementary cell includes several molecules sitting in symmetrically identical positions, which results in the level degeneracy that is lifted by intermolecular interaction. As a result, absorption bands are polarized along the symmetry axes of the crystal. Such multiplets were discovered by Antonina Prikhot'ko and their genesis was proposed by Alexander Davydov. It is known as 'Davydov splitting'.


title: Exciton

text: Excitons are lowest excited states of the electronic subsystem of pure crystals. Impurities can bind excitons, and when the bound state is shallow, the oscillator strength for producing bound excitons is so high that impurity absorption can compete with intrinsic exciton absorption even at rather low impurity concentrations. This phenomenon is generic and applicable both to the large radius (Wannier–Mott) excitons and molecular (Frenkel) excitons. Hence, excitons bound to impurities and defects possess giant oscillator strength.


title: Exciton

text: In crystals, excitons interact with phonons, the lattice vibrations. If this coupling is weak as in typical semiconductors such as GaAs or Si, excitons are scattered by phonons. However, when the coupling is strong, excitons can be self-trapped. Self-trapping results in dressing excitons with a dense cloud of virtual phonons which strongly suppresses the ability of excitons to move across the crystal. In simpler terms, this means a local deformation of the crystal lattice around the exciton. Self-trapping can be achieved only if the energy of this deformation can compete with the width of the exciton band. Hence, it should be of atomic scale, of about an electron volt.


title: Exciton

text: Self-trapping of excitons is similar to forming strong-coupling polarons but with three essential differences. First, self-trapped exciton states are always of a small radius, of the order of lattice constant, due to their electric neutrality. Second, there exists a self-trapping barrier separating free and self-trapped states, hence, free excitons are metastable. Third, this barrier enables coexistence of free and self-trapped states of excitons. This means that spectral lines of free excitons and wide bands of self-trapped excitons can be seen simultaneously in absorption and luminescence spectra. While the self-trapped states are of lattice-spacing scale, the barrier has typically much larger scale. Indeed, its spatial scale is about formula_15 where formula_16 is effective mass of the exciton, formula_17 is the exciton-phonon coupling constant, and formula_18 is the characteristic frequency of optical phonons. Excitons are self-trapped when formula_16 and formula_17 are large, and then the spatial size of the barrier is large compared with the lattice spacing. Transforming a free exciton state into a self-trapped one proceeds as a collective tunneling of coupled exciton-lattice system (an instanton). Because formula_21 is large, tunneling can be described by a continuum theory. The height of the barrier formula_22. Because both formula_16 and formula_17 appear in the denominator of formula_25, the barriers are basically low. Therefore, free excitons can be seen in crystals with strong exciton-phonon coupling only in pure samples and at low temperatures. Coexistence of free and self-trapped excitons was observed in rare-gas solids, alkali-halides, and in molecular crystal of pyrene.


title: Exciton

text: Excitons are the main mechanism for light emission in semiconductors at low temperature (when the characteristic thermal energy "kT" is less than the exciton binding energy), replacing the free electron-hole recombination at higher temperatures.


title: Exciton

text: The existence of exciton states may be inferred from the absorption of light associated with their excitation. Typically, excitons are observed just below the band gap.


title: Exciton

text: When excitons interact with photons a so-called polariton (or more specifically exciton-polariton) is formed. These excitons are sometimes referred to as "dressed excitons".


title: Exciton

text: Provided the interaction is attractive, an exciton can bind with other excitons to form a biexciton, analogous to a dihydrogen molecule. If a large density of excitons is created in a material, they can interact with one another to form an electron-hole liquid, a state observed in k-space indirect semiconductors.


title: Exciton

text: Additionally, excitons are integer-spin particles obeying Bose statistics in the low-density limit. In some systems, where the interactions are repulsive, a Bose–Einstein condensed state, called excitonium, is predicted to be the ground state. Some evidence of excitonium has existed since the 1970s, but has often been difficult to discern from a Peierls phase. Exciton condensates have allegedly been seen in a double quantum well systems. In 2017 Kogar et al. found "compelling evidence" for observed excitons condensing in the three-dimensional semimetal 1T-TiSe2


title: Exciton

text: Normally, excitons in a semiconductor have a very short lifetime due to the close proximity of the electron and hole. However, by placing the electron and hole in spatially separated quantum wells with an insulating barrier layer in between so called 'spatially indirect' excitons can be created. In contrast to ordinary (spatially direct), these spatially indirect excitons can have large spatial separation between the electron and hole, and thus possess a much longer lifetime. This is often used to cool excitons to very low temperatures in order to study Bose–Einstein condensation (or rather its two-dimensional analog).


title: Exciton

text: In semiconducting crystallite nanoparticles which exhibit quantum confinement effects and hence behave as quantum dots, excitonic radii are given by


title: Exciton

text: where formula_3 is the relative permittivity, formula_28 is the reduced mass of the electron-hole system, formula_5 is the electron mass, and formula_30 is the Bohr radius.


title: Shiprock

text: Shiprock (, "rock with wings" or "winged rock") is a monadnock rising nearly above the high-desert plain of the Navajo Nation in San Juan County, New Mexico, United States. Its peak elevation is above sea level. It is about southwest of the town of Shiprock, which is named for the peak.


title: Shiprock

text: Governed by the Navajo Nation, the formation is in the Four Corners region and plays a significant role in Navajo religion, myth, and tradition. It is located in the center of the area occupied by the Ancient Pueblo People, a prehistoric Native American culture of the Southwest United States often referred to as the Anasazi. Shiprock is a point of interest for rock climbers and photographers and has been featured in several film productions and novels. It is the most prominent landmark in northwestern New Mexico. In 1975, Shiprock was designated as a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service.


title: Shiprock

text: The Navajo name for the peak, , "rock with wings" or "winged rock", refers to the legend of the great bird that brought the Navajo from the north to their present lands. The name "Shiprock" or Shiprock Peak or Ship Rock derives from the peak's resemblance to an enormous 19th-century clipper ship. Americans first called the peak "The Needle", a name given to the topmost pinnacle by Captain J. F. McComb in 1860. United States Geological Survey maps indicate that the name "Ship Rock" dates from the 1870s.


title: Shiprock

text: Shiprock, an example of a volcanic neck, is composed of fractured volcanic breccia and black dikes of igneous rock called minette, a type of lamprophyre. It is the erosional remnant of the throat of a volcano, and the volcanic breccia formed in a diatreme. The rock probably was originally formed 2,500–3,000 feet (750–1,000 meters) below the Earth's surface, but it was exposed after millions of years of erosion. Wall-like sheets of minette, known as dikes, radiate away from the central formation. Radiometric age determinations of the minette establish that these volcanic rocks solidified about 27 million years ago. Shiprock is in the northeastern part of the Navajo volcanic field—a field that includes intrusions and flows of minette and other unusual igneous rocks that formed about 30 million years ago. Agathla (El Capitan) in Monument Valley is another prominent volcanic neck in this volcanic field.


title: Shiprock

text: The first ascent was in 1939, by a Sierra Club party including David Brower, Raffi Bedayn, Bestor Robinson and John Dyer. This was the first climb in the United States to use expansion bolts for protection. Pitons were used for direct aid. This first ascent route is featured in the book "Fifty Classic Climbs of North America".


title: Shiprock

text: Since then at least seven routes have been climbed on the peak, all of them of great technical difficulty. A modification of the original route is recorded as the easiest, and it is rated as Grade IV, YDS 5.9, A1.


title: Shiprock

text: It was considered a great unsolved problem by the climbing community in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time there was a widespread rumor of a $1000 prize for climbing the peak, which inspired "dozens of attempts by the experienced and inexperienced alike".


title: Shiprock

text: The idea of climbing Shiprock is repugnant to many Navajo people. Climbing has been illegal since 1970. In spite of this, rock climbers continue to see Shiprock as an interesting place to climb.


title: Shiprock

text: Serious injuries to three climbers in March 1970 caused the Navajo Nation to ban rock climbing not only on Shiprock but all over the Navajo Nation on monoliths, spires and within tribal parks under the jurisdiction of Navajo Parks & Recreation. The Navajo Nation announced that the ban was "absolute, final and unconditional".


title: Shiprock

text: According to reports from the Navajo Parks and Recreation Department, which administers recreational activities on Navajo land, there have been false claims that the department allows rock climbing and cooperates with rock climbing organizations. A 2006 press release addressing Monument Valley, another area of monoliths within the Navajo Nation, states:


title: Shiprock

text: Permits are issued by the department to camp and hike in some areas, but not for sacred monuments such as Shiprock.


title: Shiprock

text: Shiprock and the surrounding land have religious and historical significance to the Navajo people. It is mentioned in many of their myths and legends. Foremost is the peak's role as the agent that brought the Navajo to the southwest. According to one legend, after being transported from another place, the Navajos lived on the monolith, "coming down only to plant their fields and get water." One day, the peak was struck by lightning, obliterating the trail and leaving only a sheer cliff, and stranding the women and children on top to starve. The presence of people on the peak is forbidden "for fear they might stir up the (ghosts), or rob their corpses."


title: Shiprock

text: Navajo legend puts the peak in a larger geographic context. Shiprock is said to be either a medicine pouch or a bow carried by the "Goods of Value Mountain", a large mythic male figure comprising several mountain features throughout the region. The Chuska Mountains comprise the body, Chuska Peak is the head, the Carrizo Mountains are the legs, and Beautiful Mountain is the feet.


title: Shiprock

text: Navajo legend has it that Bird Monsters () nested on the peak and fed on human flesh. After Monster Slayer, elder of the Warrior Twins, destroyed at Red Mesa, he killed two adult Bird Monsters at Shiprock and changed two young ones into an eagle and an owl. The peak is mentioned in stories from the Enemy Side Ceremony and the Navajo Mountain Chant, and is associated with the Bead Chant and the Naayee'ee Ceremony.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: Alison Jane Hargreaves (17 February 1962 – 13 August 1995) was a British mountain climber. Her accomplishments included scaling Mount Everest alone, without supplementary oxygen or support from a Sherpa team, in 1995. She soloed all the great north faces of the Alps in a single season—a first for any climber. This feat included climbing the difficult north face of the Eiger in the Alps. Hargreaves also climbed Ama Dablam in Nepal.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: In 1995, Hargreaves intended to climb the three highest mountains in the world—Mount Everest, K2, and Kangchenjunga—unaided. On 13 May 1995, she reached the summit of Everest without the aid of Sherpas or bottled oxygen; on 13 August, she died while descending from the summit of K2.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: Hargreaves grew up in Belper, Derbyshire and attended Belper High School. After leaving home at 18, she lived with and later married Jim Ballard, and in 1995 the family moved to Spean Bridge, in the Scottish Highlands, closer to conditions suitable for her training.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: She was six months pregnant with her first child, Tom, when she climbed the Eiger north face. Tom Ballard went on to become the first person to solo climb all of the six great north faces of the Alps in a single winter. He died in 2019 while ascending Nanga Parbat.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: In 1993, Hargreaves decided to solo climb the six great north faces of the Alps in a single season, and become the first person to ever do so.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: The spring and summer weather were particularly bad that year, and she was forced to use alternative routes for the Grandes Jorasses and the Eiger. Without pictures to prove her success and with the use of alternative routes, the media and climbing community did not initially approve of her climb. In order to settle things, Hargreaves solo climbed the Croz spur on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses the following winter. With pictures taken from a professional photographer, the media and climbing community believed her claim.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: In June 1995, Hargreaves joined an American team with a permit to climb K2. By 13 August 1995, the remnants of the US team, along with Hargreaves, had joined forces with a team from Canada and New Zealand at Camp 4, around above sea level, and at least 12 hours from the summit. Later that day, having joined with a Spanish team of mountaineers above Camp 4, New Zealander Peter Hillary, son of Everest pioneer Sir Edmund Hillary, decided to turn back, noting that the weather that had been fine for the previous four days appeared to be changing. At 6:45 pm, in fine conditions, Hargreaves and Spaniard Javier Olivar reached the summit, followed by American Rob Slater, Spaniards Javier Escartín and Lorenzo Ortíz, and New Zealander Bruce Grant. All six died in a violent storm while returning from the summit. Canadian Jeff Lakes, who had turned back below the summit earlier, managed to reach one of the lower camps but died from the effects of exposure.


title: Alison Hargreaves

text: The next day, two Spanish climbers, Pepe Garces and Lorenzo Ortas, who had survived the storm at Camp 4, were descending the mountain while suffering from frostbite and exhaustion. Before reaching Camp 3, they found a bloodstained anorak, a climbing boot, and a harness. They recognized the equipment as belonging to Hargreaves. From Camp 3 they could also see a body in the distance. They did not approach the body, so it was not positively identified, but they had little doubt it was Hargreaves and concluded she had been blown off the mountain during the storm. After the incident, Captain Fawad Khan, the Pakistani army officer who was the team's intermediary with the rescue services, claimed that he had urged her not to climb beyond base camp because it would be "suicidal" in the deteriorating weather conditions.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that a New York state law setting maximum working hours for bakers violated the bakers' right to freedom of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The decision has been effectively overturned.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The underlying case began in 1899 when Joseph Lochner, a German immigrant who owned a bakery in Utica, New York, was charged with violating New York's Bakeshop Act of 1895. The Bakeshop Act had made it a crime for New York bakeries to employ bakers for more than 10 hours per day or 60 hours per week. He was convicted and ultimately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. A five-justice majority of the Supreme Court held that the law violated the due process clause, stating that the law constituted an "unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract". Four dissenting justices rejected that view, and the dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in particular, became one of the most famous opinions in US legal history.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: "Lochner" is one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history and gave the name to what is known as the "Lochner" era. During that time, the Supreme Court issued several decisions invalidating federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. The period ended with "West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish" (1937) in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by Washington State.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Joseph Lochner was a German immigrant who owned a bakery in Utica, New York in the late 19th century. Unlike other bakeries, which used two separate shifts for evening and morning work, Lochner's bakery employed only a single crew of bakers. His bakers would arrive in the evening and prepare the bread dough, sleep for several hours in an on-site dormitory, then wake up in the early morning and bake the loaves of bread. Lochner counted his bakers' time spent sleeping in the dormitory as working hours and paid them accordingly. This practice violated New York's Bakeshop Act of 1895, which made it a crime for bakeries to employ workers for more than 10 hours per day or 60 hours per week.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: In 1899, New York authorities indicted Lochner on a criminal charge of violating the Bakeshop Act by wrongfully and unlawfully permitting an employee to work more than 60 hours in one week. At his trial, Lochner's lawyer argued the right to contract freely to be one of the rights encompassed by substantive due process. Lochner's case was argued by Henry Weismann, who had been one of the foremost advocates of the Bakeshop Act when he was Secretary of the Journeymen Bakers' Union. In his brief, Weismann decried the idea that "the treasured freedom of the individual... should be swept away under the guise of the police power of the State." He denied New York's argument that the Bakeshop Act was a necessary health measure by claiming that the "average bakery of the present day is well ventilated, comfortable both summer and winter, and always sweet smelling." Weismann's brief contained an appendix providing statistics showing that bakers' mortality rates were comparable to that of white-collar professionals.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: But Weismann's arguments were unsuccessful. The trial court found Lochner guilty and fined him $50 (). Lochner appealed to the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, which affirmed his conviction, then appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which also affirmed it. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: On April 17, 1905, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 decision in favor of Lochner that struck down the New York Bakeshop Act's limits on bakers' working hours as unconstitutional.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The Court began with the legal question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment's protections applied to freedom of contract. Citing its 1897 decision "Allgeyer v. Louisiana"in which it had struck down a Louisiana law that banned buying shipping insurance from companies in other states on grounds that it violated the freedom to make contracts to carry out a trade or professionthe Court held that freedom of contract was a basic right covered by the protections for "life, liberty, and property" in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The Court explained that by "circumstances which exclude the right", it meant when states passed laws under the "police power"the inherent authority of U.S. state governments to pass laws governing "health, safety, and morals". The Court said that because the Due Process Clause protected freedom of contract, state laws could only interfere with it if they were valid exercises of the police power. To guarantee this freedom, the Court said that American courts had to scrutinize state laws regulating economic freedom, such as New York's bakery law, to ensure they served valid police-power purposes.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Applying these legal principles to the facts of the case, the Court first determined that bakers' jobs were not dangerous enough to need special government protection. The Court distinguished New York's law for bakers from a Utah law for miners the Court had upheld against a Due Process challenge in its 1898 decision "Holden v. Hardy", saying that, unlike mining, baking was not an unusually dangerous activity. The Court also determined that the Bakeshop Act had no relation to public health. Reasoning that the New York Legislature could not rationally have enacted the law for health reasons, the Court concluded that the Act was really a "labor law" that could not be justified under the police power.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The Court concluded that New York had failed to prove that the Bakeshop Act's maximum-hours provision had any close connection to public health. It said that if it were to conclude otherwise, states would have unlimited power over citizens' lives.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Lastly, the Court said that state laws ostensibly enacted for police-power purposes were often really intended to redistribute wealth or help a certain group at the expense of others.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Having determined that Bakeshop Act had no relation to public health and that the baking profession was not unusually dangerous, the Court concluded that "the limit of the police power has been reached and passed in this case", and it struck down the act as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justices Edward Douglass White and William R. Day.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Harlan contended that the liberty to contract is subject to regulation imposed by a state acting within the scope of its police powers. He offered the following rule for determining whether such statutes are unconstitutional:


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Harlan asserted that the burden of proof should rest with the party seeking to have such a statute deemed unconstitutional.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Harlan argued that the Court gave insufficient weight to the state's argument that the law was a valid health measure addressing a legitimate state interest. He contended that it was "plain that this statute was enacted to protect the physical well-being of those who work in bakery and confectionery establishments." Responding to the majority's assertion that the profession of a baker was not an unhealthy one, he quoted at length from academic studies describing the respiratory ailments and other risks that bakers faced. He argued that the Supreme Court should have deferred to the New York Legislature's judgment that long working hours threatened the health of bakery employees: "If the end which the legislature seeks to accomplish be one to which its power extends, and if the means employed to that end, although not the wisest or best, are yet not plainly and palpably unauthorized by law, then the court cannot interfere."


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. also dissented from the Court's decision, and his three-paragraph dissent has become one of the most famous in U.S. Supreme Court history. Holmes began by accusing the majority of deciding Lochner's case by following "laissez-faire" economics rather than legal principles.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Holmes pointed out that there were many American laws restricting citizens' freedom of contract that had never been found unconstitutional. As "ancient examples", Holmes pointed to usury laws, which set maximum interest rates for loans of money, and Sunday laws, which outlawed certain economic activities on Sundays to promote Christian observance of the Sabbath. Holmes analogized the majority's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the writings of Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British sociologist who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and whose ideas later became associated with social Darwinism.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Holmes wrote that, in his view, a duly enacted state law could only be unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause's guarantee of liberty if it could rationally be said to "infringe fundamental principles" in the American tradition, and he maintained that the Bakeshop Act clearly did not do so.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The Supreme Court's due process jurisprudence over the next three decades was inconsistent, but it took a narrow view of states' police powers in several major labor cases after "Lochner". For example, in "Coppage v. Kansas" (1915), the Court struck down statutes forbidding "yellow-dog contracts." Similarly, in "Adkins v. Children's Hospital" (1923), the Supreme Court held that minimum wage laws violated the due process clause, but Chief Justice William Howard Taft strongly dissented and suggested that the Court instead should have overruled "Lochner". The doctrine of substantive due process was coupled with a narrow interpretation of congressional power under the commerce clause. Justices James McReynolds, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler emerged during the 1920s and the 1930s as the foremost defenders of traditional limitations on government power on the Supreme Court and so were collectively dubbed by supporters of the New Deal the "Four Horsemen of Reaction." All four of them believed in "laissez-faire" economics.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: In 1934, the Supreme Court decided in "Nebbia v. New York" that there is no constitutional fundamental right to freedom of contract. In 1937, the Supreme Court decided "West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish", which expressly overruled "Adkins" and implicitly signaled the end of the "Lochner" era by repudiating the idea that freedom of contract should be unrestricted.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Although the Supreme Court did not explicitly overrule "Lochner", it agreed to give more deference to the decisions of state legislatures. The Supreme Court sounded the death knell for economic substantive due process several years later in "Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma" (1955) by unanimously declaring, "The day is gone when this Court uses the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought."


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Since the end of the "Lochner" era, the Supreme Court has applied a lower standard of review to confront restrictions on economic liberty. A higher standard is used in reviewing legislation infringing on personal liberties. A line of cases dating back to the 1923 opinion by Justice McReynolds in "Meyer v. Nebraska", which cited "Lochner" as establishing limits on the police power, has established a privacy right under substantive due process. More recently, in "Roe v. Wade" (1973), the Supreme Court held that women have a privacy right to determine whether or not to have an abortion. In "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" (1992), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that right but no longer used the term "privacy" to describe it. The abortion right was later overruled in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" (2022).


title: Lochner v. New York

text: The Supreme Court's decision in "Lochner v. New York" has been criticized by legal scholars. The law professor Bernard Siegan described it as "one of the most condemned cases in United States history." According to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning thinktank, law professors often use "Lochner", along with "Plessy v. Ferguson" and "Korematsu v. United States", as examples of "how judges should not behave."


title: Lochner v. New York

text: "Lochner" is sometimes used as shorthand for extreme-right-wing constitutional theory. However, it has come under harsh criticism from conservative and libertarian jurists as well because "Lochner" embraced substantive due process, a doctrine that was arguably at odds with the original understanding of the Constitution. For example, the conservative legal scholar Robert Bork called the decision an "abomination" and the "quintessence of judicial usurpation of power." Similarly, former Attorney General Edwin Meese said that the Supreme Court "ignored the limitations of the Constitution and blatantly usurped legislative authority." Siegan, a self-described libertarian, described it as "a symbol of judicial dereliction and abuse."


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Scholars have noted that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, 27 of the 37 state constitutions had adopted references to Locke's labor theory of property, which typically said: "All men are by nature free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring and possessing and protecting property: and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness." As such clauses were "deeply rooted in American history and tradition," they likely informed the original meaning of the scope and nature of the fundamental rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment in the eyes of "Lochner"-era justices.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: However, the decision also has attracted libertarian defenders: the Cato Institute and the scholars Richard Epstein and Randy Barnett, who argue that it correctly protected economic liberty.


title: Lochner v. New York

text: Barnett has argued that the decision was basically correct in its presumption in favor of liberty of contract and that the decision was wrong only by perpetuating the misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that had been established in the Slaughter-House Cases. According to Barnett, the liberty of contract is properly found in the Privileges or Immunities Clause, not in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. David Bernstein, in "Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform", has argued that "Lochner" was well grounded in Supreme Court precedent and that its emphasis on limits to the states' police powers informed the Supreme Court's early civil liberties and civil rights cases.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: The 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season was their 54th season of the franchise in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as well as their 29th season at the currently named Footprint Center, their first full season under that name after taking over the naming rights to the previously named Phoenix Suns Arena on July 16, 2021, during the 2021 NBA Finals.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: The Suns entered the season as the defending Western Conference champions and were attempting to return to the NBA Finals for the second consecutive year. On March 24, with a win over the Denver Nuggets, the Phoenix Suns clinched the #1 spot in the Western Conference and the league for the first time since 2005. With the Suns 63rd win over the Los Angeles Lakers on April 5 (which also eliminated them from playoff/play-in contention), the Suns set a franchise record for most wins in a season, surpassing the 1992–93 and 2004–05 teams with 62.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: In the playoffs, the Suns defeated the New Orleans Pelicans in six games in the first round. The Suns then faced the Dallas Mavericks, where they lost in seven games, becoming the third team to have 64 or more wins and not reach the Conference Finals after the 2006–07 Dallas Mavericks and 2015–16 San Antonio Spurs.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: The Suns agreed to trade their 29th pick and Jevon Carter to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for Landry Shamet.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: For this season, free agency began over a month later than it usually does, starting on August 2, 2021, at 6:00 P.M. EST instead of by June 30 or July 1 like in previous free agency periods due to the aftermath of the 2019–20 NBA season suspension affecting some of the timing for a few things with this season's offseason period. However, instead of starting the free agency period to something like July 31 akin to last season's free agency period starting two days after the last season's draft back on November 20, 2020, free agency began on the proper five days off before free agency begins. Furthermore, official signings were made four days after the starting free agency period (which in this case began on August 6, 2021, instead of by late November like last season), which was on schedule for the five day moratorium period the NBA holds. For this season, the Suns had (starting with the most expensive players downward) E'Twaun Moore, Langston Galloway, Cameron Payne, Abdel Nader, Frank Kaminsky III, and Torrey Craig all entering free agency this year due to all of them signing (or agreeing to) their veteran's minimum salaries for their respective deals last season. In addition to them, superstar point guard Chris Paul also declined his player's option that would have allowed him to get $44,211,146 in the final season of his massive contract he first signed back when he was with the Houston Rockets in 2018, though he's expected to receive a 3-year deal worth $90 million with the Suns in free agency. Not only that, in addition to all of these players, Ty-Shon Alexander's two-way contract was projected to go into its second year with Phoenix, which initially left them only one likely open two-way contract for the season earlier on.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: On August 2, the Suns agreed to new deals for not just back-up point guard Cameron Payne, but also All-Star point guard Chris Paul, both of which became official by August 6. With Payne, his new deal gave him a three-year contract that's worth a total of $19 million, with his third year only guaranteeing him $2 million out of $6,500,000 that would be received there. However, with Chris Paul, his new contract allows him to receive a partially guaranteed four-year deal that would fully grant him up to $120 million, though only his first two years are fully guaranteed, with his third year being partially guaranteed (half of his salary is fully guaranteed for that season) and his final season in that deal being non-guaranteed. Not only that, but they also agreed to sign Denver Nuggets center JaVale McGee (who was also a part of Team U.S.A. for the 2020 Summer Olympics alongside Devin Booker) to a one-year deal for $5 million, though his agreement on August 2 was made official on August 16 instead. However, the Suns also lost Torrey Craig to the Indiana Pacers on August 2, with Craig agreeing to sign a two-year deal worth $10 million for Indiana, which was made official by August 20. A day after that, the Suns also re-signed Abdel Nader to a two-year deal worth $4,200,000 (second year being a team option), with his signing also being official on August 6. On August 5, Frank Kaminsky III agreed to another one-year deal worth his veteran's minimum to return to Phoenix, with former Suns point guard Elfrid Payton agreeing to a one-year deal worth his own veteran's minimum to reunite with the Suns, albeit as a third-string point guard this time around. Kaminsky's deal was made official by August 9, while Payton's was completed a day later.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: On August 26, the Suns announced that they had officially waived Ty-Shon Alexander from his second year of his two-way contract he had signed from his previous season with the team. On September 7, the Suns confirmed that they replaced Alexander's spot with that of former Washington Wizards (and technically San Antonio Spurs) player Chandler Hutchison as a two-way contract player for this season only due to it being his last eligible year for such a contract, with Ty-Shon Alexander confirmed to join the Segafredo Virtus Bologna in Italy later on that same day. The next day, E'Twaun Moore agreed to a one-year deal to return to the Orlando Magic after last playing with Orlando from 2012 to 2014. On September 22, Chasson Randle was confirmed to be a training camp signing for the Suns that's looking to gain a spot on the roster properly in October, which was made official on September 26. However, Randle was officially waived after their preseason ended on October 16. Then, on September 24, Langston Galloway was confirmed to sign a training camp deal with the Golden State Warriors, though he was waived from the Warriors on October 9. With regards to rookie scale contract extensions, Mikal Bridges was given a 4-year, $90 million extension with the Suns on October 17, while Landry Shamet was given a 4-year, $43 million extension with Phoenix a day later. However, Deandre Ayton failed to get a contract extension of his own before the deadline passed, making him a restricted free agent entering next season. On October 22, the Suns filled their second two-way contract with small power forward Ish Wainright, a Ugandan-American that previously last played for the SIG Strasbourg in France before signing a non-guaranteed contract with the Toronto Raptors in the preseason.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: During the 2021 NBA Finals run on July 12, assistant coach Willie Green agreed to become the new head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans to enter this season. On July 25, the Suns agreed to hire Minnesota Timberwolves assistant coach Bryan Gates as a replacement to Willie Green going forward entering this season. On August 7, the Suns officially announced not just the promotion of Kevin Young to Willie Green's former position of associate head coach and the confirmed hiring of Bryan Gates, but also hired former NBA and NBA G League Ignite player Jarrett Jack and Oklahoma City Thunder player development coach Steve Scalzi to initially round out the rest of the coaching staff. On August 22, player development coach Riccardo Fois officially left his position with the Suns to become an assistant coach for the University of Arizona's Wildcats men's basketball team. Finally, on September 24, the Suns confirmed that both Riccardo Fois and Ben Strong left their positions as player development coaches for the team, being replaced by the Suns' assistant video coordinator Corey Vinson and the Portland Trail Blazers' video coordinator and player development coach Jamal Gross as a combination of video coordinator and player development coaches for the team. Not only that, but Fort Wayne Mad Ants assistant coach Michael Ruffin was confirmed to be the official assistant coach replacement for Steve Blake, with Jarrett Jack joining Steve Scalzi as player development assistant coaches going into this season.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: On July 24, Jeff Bower had a mutual agreement with the Suns to officially leave his position as Vice President of Basketball Operations for them going forward. With Larry Fitzgerald confirmed to not be playing in the NFL for at least the majority of the 2021 Arizona Cardinals season, it is presumed likely that Fitzgerald will be given a much greater role with the Suns franchise going into this season under Robert Sarver's ownership group. However, a report from Jordan Schultz on October 22, 2021, suggested that ESPN was going to release a major exposé piece on majority team owner Robert Sarver with regards to rampant racism, sexism, and misogyny involved with him on the team both on and off the court throughout his entire tenure as team owner. While Sarver and other front office members explicitly denied any problems in mind there before the report's release, the actual report on Sarver was released on November 4, detailing all the problems involved with the majority of his time there. While Sarver and a majority of team personnel released public statements on their official website in response to the allegations at hand, the NBA began their investigations on the team's executive conduct the same day ESPN's report was released.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: For this season, the salary cap was set at $112,414,000, with the luxury tax line now being set at $136,606,000.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: After dealing with some changes to the preseason format for last season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NBA made sure to get their preseason period back into its proper starting point in early October going from this season onward, which includes a healthy amount of preseason games to start things out there. While the Suns were still playing in the 2021 NBA playoffs, the Los Angeles Lakers revealed their preseason schedule on June 29, which included a match with the Suns at home on October 6 and a road match in Los Angeles on October 10. Not only that, but on August 17, the Portland Trail Blazers revealed in their preseason schedule that the Suns would play at home against Portland on October 13, with them both revealing they were their final, respective preseason opponents this time around. Then on August 19, the Sacramento Kings revealed they were the first opponent the Suns will have in the preseason with a road game in Sacramento to start things out there. The Phoenix Suns later revealed those four games of theirs were officially their preseason schedule on August 25.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: Before the start of their preseason period, Devin Booker was confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 despite getting the COVID-19 vaccine earlier in the previous season alongside the rest of the team playing there. Despite being able to return to practice early, Booker was held out for at least the majority of the preseason period, returning to play for only the final preseason game. Not only that, but the Suns' home games had to be moved to earlier times than originally scheduled due to the team focusing on their matches as doubleheader matches, with the Phoenix Mercury being considered the main events due to them competing in the 2021 WNBA Playoffs against the Las Vegas Aces and Chicago Sky after the Suns' respective matches against the Lakers and Trail Blazers on October 6 & 13. While their first and last preseason games on October 4 & 13 did not air on TV this season, the Suns had their preseason matches against the Lakers air on NBA TV and ESPN respectively for their October 6 & 10 games. After struggling against the Kings to start the preseason, Phoenix won both of their matches against the Lakers (even blowing the Lakers out 123–94 in their second match) before blowing out the Trail Blazers in a 119–74 win at home, finishing the preseason with a 3–1 record.


title: 2021–22 Phoenix Suns season

text: For the second straight year in a row, the Suns were in the NBA Playoffs after previously experiencing a decade-long drought from it that started back in the 2010–11 season. It is their first time they reached the Playoffs in back-to-back seasons since the Seven Seconds Or Less era from around the 2004–05 season until the 2007–08 season. The NBA also continued utilizing the play-in tournament set-up that first began in the 2020 NBA Bubble, with this season also being the second one in a row where the play-in tournament has the seventh and eighth best teams in each conference compete for the seventh seed in each conference and the ninth and tenth seeds compete for a shot at the eighth seed for each conference instead. However, this is the first full-length season that will feature the same play-in tournament experiment from the previous season at hand.


title: Heteroptera

text: The Heteroptera are a group of about 40,000 species of insects in the order Hemiptera. They are sometimes called "true bugs", though that name more commonly refers to the Hemiptera as a whole. "Typical bugs" might be used as a more unequivocal alternative, since the heteropterans are most consistently and universally termed "bugs" among the Hemiptera. "Heteroptera" is Greek for "different wings": most species have forewings with both membranous and hardened portions (called hemelytra); members of the primitive sub-group Enicocephalomorpha have completely membranous wings.


title: Heteroptera

text: The name "Heteroptera" is used in two very different ways in modern classifications. In Linnean nomenclature, it commonly appears as a suborder within the order Hemiptera, where it can be paraphyletic or monophyletic depending on its delimitation. In phylogenetic nomenclature, it is used as an unranked clade within the Prosorrhyncha clade, which in turn is in the Hemiptera clade. This results from the realization that the Coleorrhyncha are just "living fossil" relatives of the traditional Heteroptera, close enough to them to be united with that group.


title: Heteroptera

text: The infraorders Leptopodomorpha, Gerromorpha, and Nepomorpha, comprise a significant component of the world’s aquatic and semiaquatic insects. There are 23 families, 343 genera and 4,810 species group taxa within these three infraorders. Most of the remaining groups that are common and familiar are in the Cimicomorpha and Pentatomomorpha.


title: Heteroptera

text: The use of the name "Heteroptera" has had the rank of order, dating back to 1810 by Pierre André Latreille. Only recently has it been relegated to a subsidiary rank within a larger definition of Hemiptera, so many reference works still include it as an order. Whether to continue treating it as a suborder is still a subject of some controversy, as is whether the name itself should ever be used, although three basic approaches ranging from abolishing it entirely to maintaining the taxonomy with a slight change in systematics is proposed, two of which (but not the traditional one) agree with the phylogeny. The competing classifications call for a preference for two suborders versus one when the "living fossil" family Peloridiidae is taken into consideration:


title: Heteroptera

text: In one revised classification proposed in 1995, the name of the suborder is Prosorrhyncha, and Heteroptera is a rankless subgroup within it. The only difference between Heteroptera and Prosorrhyncha is that the latter includes the family Peloridiidae, which is a tiny relictual group that is in its own monotypic superfamily and infraorder. In other words, the Heteroptera and Prosorrhyncha "sensu" Sorensen et al. are identical except that Prosorrhyncha contains one additional infraorder, called Peloridiomorpha (comprising only 13 small genera). The ongoing conflict between traditional, Linnaean classifications and nontraditional classifications is exemplified by the problem inherent in continued usage of the name Heteroptera when it no longer can be matched to any standard Linnaean rank (as it falls below suborder but above infraorder). If this classification succeeds, then the "Heteroptera" grouping may be discarded, but in that case it is likely that no ranks will be used at all according to the standards of phylogenetic nomenclature.


title: Heteroptera

text: In the traditional classification, the Peloridiidae are retained as their own suborder, called Coleorrhyncha; "Heteroptera" is treated the same. Functionally, the only difference between this classification and the preceding is that the former uses the name Prosorrhyncha to refer to a particular clade, while the traditional approach divides this into the paraphyletic Heteroptera and the monophyletic Coleorrhyncha. Many believe it is preferable to use only one name because the characteristics of the two traditional suborders are too closely related to be treated as separate.


title: Heteroptera

text: Alternatively, the modified approach of placing Coleorrhyncha 'within' the Heteroptera can be used. Indeed, as that solution preserves the well-known Heteroptera at the taxonomic rank they traditionally hold while making them a good monophyletic group, it seems preferable to the paraphyletic "Heteroptera" used in older works. In that case, the "core" Heteroptera could be considered a section – as yet unnamed, mainly because the Prosorrhyncha were proposed earlier – within the "expanded" Heteroptera, or the latter could simply be described as consisting of a basal "living fossil" lineage and a more apomorphic main radiation. Whether the name "Coleorrhyncha" is to be retained for the basal lineage or whether the more consistent "Peloridiomorpha" is used instead is a matter of taste, as described below.


title: Heteroptera

text: Separate from the question of the actual "closeness" of Heteroptera and Coleorrhyncha is the potential disruption to traditional construction of names; there seems to be reluctance among hemipterists to abandon the use of "Heteroptera". This can be seen by the name itself, as it is a violation of convention to use the ending "-ptera" for any rank above genus other than an order – though since it is a convention rather than a mandatory rule of Linnean nomenclature, taxonomists are technically free to violate it (which is why, for example, not all insect orders end in "-ptera", e.g., Odonata). However, in most cases when such conventions are violated, it does not create an internal conflict as in the present case (that is, the order Hemiptera has a suborder named Heteroptera, which is an internal conflict). At least some hemipterists argue that the name Heteroptera should be dropped entirely to eliminate this internal conflict, though the third possibility offers a workaround. In that case, to achieve full consistency of names "Coleorrhyncha" would probably be dropped in favor of "Peloridiomorpha".


title: Robert Maynard

text: Robert Maynard (19 September 1684 – 4 January 1751) was a British lieutenant, and later captain, in the Royal Navy. Little is known about Maynard's early life, other than he was born in England in 1684 and then later joined the English Navy. He was made a lieutenant in January 1707, and by 1709 was the third lieutenant on .


title: Robert Maynard

text: In November 1718, Maynard was tasked with hunting down and killing the notorious pirate Blackbeard. While leading , Maynard lured Blackbeard into attacking his ship off the coast of North Carolina, and in the ensuing struggle Maynard and his crew killed Blackbeard. Expecting to be rewarded for his actions, Maynard was never fully compensated or paid for the expedition. He was eventually promoted to commander in 1739, and to captain in 1740, before dying at the age of 66 in his home county of Kent, England.


title: Robert Maynard

text: Governor Alexander Spotswood of the Colony of Virginia gave Maynard the command of two sloops, "Ranger" and "Jane". They departed the docks of Hampton, Virginia on 19 November 1718. Maynard caught up with Blackbeard at Ocracoke Inlet off the coast of North Carolina on 22 November 1718. Most of Blackbeard's men were ashore, whilst Maynard out-gunned and out-numbered the pirates three to one. However, Maynard's ship had no cannons and only small-arms, while Blackbeard's had up to eight cannons, though Maynard hid most of his men below deck. Initially, Blackbeard had his ship go to shallower water. Maynard's heavier ship hit a sand-bar and was stuck. Blackbeard then manoeuvred his ship to fire a broadside at Maynard's ship. Meanwhile, Maynard, who was on the sloop "Jane", ordered everything inessential to combat to be thrown overboard to make the ship lighter, and eventually freed the ship. Blackbeard's ship fired at least two more broadsides on Maynard's, killing several of Maynard's men. After the last attack, it appeared to the attackers that only Maynard and another crew member were left alive and Blackbeard and some of his men boarded Maynard's ship. He was then ambushed by a force much larger than he had expected; Maynard had told his surviving soldiers to hide below deck only to come out and attack at a given signal. During the battle, Maynard and Blackbeard ended up in hand-to-hand combat. Both pointed pistols at each other. Maynard shot his adversary at point-blank range, while Blackbeard missed. However the shot failed to stop his opponent. Blackbeard pressed on and a melee ensued between the two. After a short period, Blackbeard manages to break Maynard's sword. When Blackbeard was about to deliver a killing blow to Maynard, another sailor jumped on Blackbeard's back and inflicted a deep wound. Maynard and his crew were then able to kill Blackbeard.


title: Robert Maynard

text: Maynard later examined Teach's body, noting that it had been shot no fewer than five times and cut about twenty. He also found several items of correspondence, including a letter to Teach from Tobias Knight, the Royal Secretary for North Carolina. Blackbeard was decapitated and his head was tied to the bowsprit of his ship for the trip back to Virginia. Upon returning to his home port of Hampton, the head was placed on a stake near the mouth of the Hampton River as a warning to other pirates.


title: Robert Maynard

text: Lieutenant Maynard remained at Ocracoke for several more days, making repairs and burying the dead. Teach's loot – sugar, cocoa, indigo and cotton – found "in pirate sloops and ashore in a tent where the sloops lay", was sold at auction along with sugar and cotton found in Tobias Knight's barn, for £2,238. Governor Spotswood used a portion of this to pay for the entire operation. The prize money for capturing Teach was to have been about £400, but it was split between the crews of HMS "Lyme" and HMS "Pearl". As Captain Brand and his troops had not been the ones fighting for their lives, Maynard thought this extremely unfair. It was later discovered that he and his crew had helped themselves to about £90 of Teach's booty. The two companies did not receive their prize money for another four years, and despite his bravery, Maynard was not promoted, rather, he faded into obscurity.


title: Robert Maynard

text: Maynard's final resting place is in the churchyard of St Martin's Church at Great Mongeham in Kent, southeast England, near the cinque port of Deal. He left an estate in excess of £2,000.


title: Robert Maynard

text: Maynard's success is still celebrated by his successor – the crew of the current HMS "Ranger" – who commemorate Blackbeard's defeat at the annual Sussex University Royal Naval Unit Blackbeard Night mess dinner every year, at a date as close as possible to 22 November.


title: Robert Maynard

text: The city of Hampton, Virginia also celebrates its historic ties to Maynard by recreating the final sea battle on Tall Ships in the Hampton Harbour during the city's annual Blackbeard Festival in June.


title: Venu Madhav (actor)

text: Kunath Venu Madhav (died 25 September 2019) was an Indian actor, television presenter, mimicry artist and comedian known for his works predominantly in Telugu cinema. He was one of the finest comedians in the Telugu cinema, he starred in some 500 films in a variety of roles, starting his career as an impressionist; imitating celebrities, politicians, and local dialects. He received breakthrough in cinema with works such as "Master" (1997), and "Tholi Prema" (1998).


title: Venu Madhav (actor)

text: In 2006, he received the state Nandi Award for Best Male Comedian for his work in the action comedy Lakshmi. He won two CineMAA Awards for best comedian for his work in V. V. Vinayaks' romantic comedy "Dil" (2003); and S. S. Rajamouli's sports comedy "Sye" (2004).


title: Venu Madhav (actor)

text: Venu Madhav was born in Kodad in Suryapet district of Telangana. He was married to Sree Vanisri and has two sons.


title: Venu Madhav (actor)

text: He died on 25 September 2019 at Yashoda Hospitals, Secunderabad, due to liver and kidney complications.


title: Laburnum

text: Laburnum, sometimes called golden chain or golden rain, is a genus of two species of small trees in the subfamily Faboideae of the pea family Fabaceae. The species are "Laburnum anagyroides"—common laburnum and "Laburnum alpinum"—alpine laburnum. They are native to the mountains of southern Europe from France to the Balkans.


title: Laburnum

text: Some botanists include a third species, "Laburnum caramanicum", but this native of southeast Europe and Anatolia is usually treated in a distinct genus "Podocytisus", more closely allied to the "Genisteae" (brooms).


title: Laburnum

text: The "Laburnum" trees are deciduous. The leaves are trifoliate, somewhat like a clover; the leaflets are typically long in "L. anagyroides" and long in "L. alpinum".


title: Laburnum

text: They have yellow pea-flowers in pendulous leafless racemes long in spring, which makes them very popular garden trees. In "L. anagyroides", the racemes are long, with densely packed flowers; in "L. alpinum" the racemes are long, but with the flowers sparsely along the raceme. The fruit develops as a pod and is extremely poisonous.


title: Laburnum

text: The yellow flowers are responsible for the old poetic name 'golden chain tree' (also written as golden chaintree or goldenchain tree).


title: Laburnum

text: All parts of the plant are poisonous, although mortality is very rare. Symptoms of laburnum poisoning may include intense sleepiness, vomiting, convulsive movements, coma, slight frothing at the mouth and unequally dilated pupils. In some cases, diarrhea is very severe, and at times the convulsions are markedly tetanic. The main toxin in the plant is cytisine, a nicotinic receptor agonist.


title: Laburnum

text: It is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species, including the Palearctic moth, the buff-tip.


title: Laburnum

text: "Laburnum" has historically been used for cabinetmaking and inlay, as well as for musical instruments. In addition to such wind instruments as recorders and flutes, it was a popular wood for Great Highland Bagpipes before taste turned to imported dense tropical hardwoods such as "Brya ebenus" (cocus wood), ebony, and "Dalbergia melanoxylon" (African monkeywood). The heart-wood of a laburnum may be used as a substitute for ebony or rosewood. It is very hard and a dark chocolate brown, with a butter-yellow sapwood.


title: Laburnum

text: "Laburnum" species and hybrids are cultivated as ornamental trees for gardens and parks. They are also trained as espaliers on pergolas, for ceilings of pendant flowers in season. In its natural form, "Laburnum" is a shrubby, multi-branched tree, but it is often pruned to maintain a single trunk which displays the smooth green bark.


title: Laburnum

text: Gardeners are advised to remove the spent seedpods after flowering because they sap the strength of the tree and are the most poisonous part. Generally "Laburnum" does not perform well in hot climates, and has a reduced life-span if grown in climates with warm winters. Afternoon shade and the occasional deep watering are advisable in areas with hot, dry summers. They do best in climates with moderate winter and summer temperatures, ideally Oceanic climates like those of the Pacific Northwest and Northern Europe. "Laburnum" trees are ubiquitous in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where they are commonly planted as lawn specimens or in shrub borders.


title: Laburnum

text: Most garden specimens are of the hybrid between the two species, "Laburnum" ×"watereri" 'Vossii' (Voss's laburnum), which combines the longer racemes of "L. alpinum" with the denser flowers of "L. anagyroides"; it also has the benefit of low seed production. It has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Khmelnytskyi (, ), until 1954 Proskuriv ( ), is a city in western Ukraine, the administrative center for Khmelnytskyi Oblast (region) and Khmelnytskyi Raion (district). It hosts the administration of the Khmelnytskyi urban hromada. Khmelnytskyi is located in the historic region of Podolia on the banks of the Buh River. The city received its current local government designation in 1941. The current city's population is estimated , making it the second largest city of the former, archaic Podolia region after Vinnytsia and the largest city of the western part of the region.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: The city foundation date is uncertain. The territory, where Khmelnytskyi is situated, has been inhabited for a very long time. Many archaeological discoveries have been made in the city suburbs. For example, to the East of Lezneve district, there was a settlement from the Bronze Age 2000 B.C., and from Scythian times from 7–3 century B.C. The first mention of the city was written with Cyrillic alphabet. The earliest known mention in historical sources was in 1431, when it was known as "Płoskirów" ("Ploskirov", "Плоскиров") and was part of the Kingdom of Poland. It was a royal city.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Polish rule was briefly interrupted by Ottoman one between 1672 and 1699. During this period, it was nahiya centre in Mejibuji sanjak in Podolia Eyalet as "Poloskiruf". After the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, the city was annexed by the Russian Empire and was renamed "Proskurov" (). According to the Russian census of 1897, Proskurov with a population of 22,855 was the fifth largest city of Podolia after Kamianets-Podilskyi, Uman, Vinnytsia and Balta. In 1920 it became part of Soviet Ukraine. In 1954 the city was finally renamed "Khmelnytskyi" (Хмельницький) in the honor of the 300th anniversary of a treaty negotiated by Bohdan Khmelnytsky.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: After new archival sources presented at the 2006 conference City of Khmelnytskyi in the Context of Ukrainian History post-dated the city’s earliest mention from 1493 to 1431, it changed its official 513th anniversary commemoration to its 575th.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: A series of anti-Jewish pogroms have been carried out in the region, known together as the Proskurov pogrom. According to Vinnytsia's city archives, the pogrom was conducted on the Friday night of February 15, 1919, by one of the otamans (generals) of the Ukrainian People's Army, Otaman Semysenko (also rendered as Semesenko). Estimates vary as to the number of victims, some putting the death toll at 1,500 Jews in Proskurov alone, with 600 more killed in nearby Filshtein.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: The Chief Otaman Petliura had been appointed head of state just two days prior to the tragedy, on February the 13th. Petliura issued Order 131 in which he mentioned the fact that numerous Jewish parties in Ukraine (Bund, Poale Zion, Folks-Partei, Unificationists) rose to defend the sovereignty of the Ukrainian Republic and were cooperating with the Ukrainian government. He condemned such pogroms, calling those initiating them deserters and enemies of the State that must be liquidated. The order was co-signed by the Chief of Staff, Otaman Yunakiv. The order was published in the "Ukraina" newspaper on February 20 (March 4, old style). Later, Petliura issued a special order to execute Semysenko for being the pogrom initiator. According to sources the order was carried out on March 20, 1920. Other sources claim that he was released.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: During the Schwartzbard trial, at the end of which Petliura's assassin was pardoned on the grounds of self-trail (revenge), the main argument of the defense was that Schwartzbard had acted as an avenger of the Jews killed in pogroms perpetrated during Petliura's rule.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: The town was occupied by the German Army from July 8, 1941 to March 25, 1944. On November 4, 1941, 5300 Jewish inhabitants of the town and surrounding villages were shot by an Einsatzgruppe. A ghetto was formed on December 14, 1941, where all surviving Jewish inhabitants had to resettle and were subjected to forced labor. They were subsequently killed in the fall of 1942. More than 9500 Jews were killed in the town in total.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Khmelnytskyi was home to the 19th Division of the 43rd Rocket Army of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces during the Cold War. The intercontinental ballistic missile silos of the division that were housed there were removed and destroyed, partially with U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction funding, during the 1990s.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Until 18 July 2020, Khmelnytskyi was incorporated as a city of oblast significance and served as the administrative center of Khmelnytskyi Raion though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Khmelnytskyi Oblast to three, the city of Khmelnytskyi was merged into Khmelnytskyi Raion.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: On 10 October 2022 however, the city has been targeted by Russian cruise missiles, causing a blackout and limiting water supply.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Khmelnytskyi is the regional center of the Khmelnytskyi region which is located in the western part of Ukraine in the middle of Podillia, its total area makes up . Khmelnytskyi has a favorable geographical position.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Khmelnytskyi is crossed by one of the longest rivers of Ukraine – the Southern Bug. Coincidentally, through the western portion of the city flows the small river Ploska.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: The climate of Khmelnytskyi is moderately continental. The average temperature of Khmelnytskyi in its warmest month (July) is , and the average temperature in the coldest month (January) is . The maximum temperatures in the summer on average reaches , and the minimum temperatures in the winter on average is . Khmelnytskyi's average annual temperature is . Khmelnytskyi's average annual precipitation is .


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: The most abundant make up for the ground in Khmelnytskyi are layers of the following overburden: loess and loess-type rocks. The ground-climatic conditions of Khmelnytskyi are favorable for the cultivation of winter wheat and rye, sugar beet, potato and other crops. Khmelnytskyi is also ideal for the development of gardening and vegetable growing. In the territory of Khmelnytskyi there are the vegetations of two geobotanical zones of Ukraine: Polissya and forest-steppe. Khmelnytskyi and its greater region supplies many rock products, particularly building materials such as limestone, plaster, chalk, tripoli powder, crystal layers (granites, gneisses), sand, sandstones, and also graphite, saponite, kaolin, phosphorite, lithographic stone, and roofing slate. There are also deposits of peat, bitumen, shale, and oil.


title: Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

text: Khmelnytskyi hosts 6 universities, 2 academies, 3 institutes, 12 colleges, 4 technical schools and 15 representative offices of other Ukrainian HEIs.