Friday, August 31, 2007


In medicine, carcinoma is any cancer that arises from epithelial cells. It is malignant by definition: carcinomas invade surrounding tissues and organs, and may spread to lymph nodes and distal sites (metastasis). Carcinoma in situ (CIS) is a pre-malignant condition, in which cytological signs of malignancy are present, but there is no histological evidence of invasion through the epithelial basement membrane.

CarcinomaCarcinoma Classification of carcinoma
(8010-8790) Epithelial

(8010-8040) Epithelial neoplasms, NOS
(8050-8080) Squamous cell neoplasms

  • (M8070/3) Squamous cell carcinoma, NOS
    (8090-8110) Basal cell neoplasms

    • (M8090/3) Basal cell carcinoma, NOS
      (8120-8130) Transitional cell Papillomas And Carcinomas
      (8140-8380) Adenomas And Adenocarcinomas (glands)

      • (M8140/0) Adenoma, NOS
        (M8140/3) Adenocarcinoma, NOS
        (M8142/3) Linitis plastica
        (M8151/0) Insulinoma, NOS
        (M8152/0) Glucagonoma, NOS
        (M8153/1) Gastrinoma, NOS
        (M8155/3) Vipoma
        (M8160/3) Cholangiocarcinoma
        (M8170/3) Hepatocellular carcinoma, NOS
        (M8200/3) Adenoid cystic carcinoma
        (M8240/1) Carcinoid tumor, NOS, of appendix
        (M8271/0) Prolactinoma
        (M8290/0) Oncocytoma
        (M8290/0) Hurthle cell adenoma
        (M8312/3) Renal cell carcinoma
        (M8312/3) Grawitz tumor
        (M8360/1) Multiple endocrine adenomas
        (M8380/0) Endometrioid adenoma, NOS
        (8390-8420) Adnexal And Skin appendage Neoplasms
        (8430-8439) Mucoepidermoid Neoplasms
        (8440-8490) Cystic, Mucinous And Serous Neoplasms

        • (M8440/0) Cystadenoma, NOS
          (M8480/6) Pseudomyxoma peritonei
          (8500-8540) Ductal, Lobular And Medullary Neoplasms
          (8550-8559) Acinar cell neoplasms
          (8560-8580) Complex epithelial neoplasms

          • (M8561/0) Warthin's tumor
            (M8580/0) Thymoma, NOS
            (8590-8670) Specialized gonadal neoplasms

            • (M8590/1) Sex cord-stromal tumor
              (M8600/0) Thecoma, NOS
              (M8620/1) Granulosa cell tumor, NOS
              (M8630/1) Arrhenoblastoma, NOS
              (M8631/0) Sertoli-Leydig cell tumor
              (8680-8710) Paragangliomas And Glomus tumors

              • (M8680/1) Paraganglioma, NOS
                (M8700/0) Pheochromocytoma, NOS
                (M8711/0) Glomus tumor
                (8720-8790) Nevi And Melanomas

                • (M8720/0) Melanocytic nevus
                  (M8720/3) Malignant melanoma, NOS
                  (M8720/3) Melanoma, NOS
                  (M8721/3) Nodular melanoma
                  (M8727/0) Dysplastic nevus
                  (M8742/3) Lentigo maligna melanoma
                  (M8743/3) Superficial spreading melanoma
                  (M8744/3) Acral lentiginous melanoma, malignant

Thursday, August 30, 2007


DragonFly BSD is a free Unix-like operating system created as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8. Matt Dillon, a FreeBSD and Amiga developer since 1994, began work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on July 16, 2003.
Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the methods and techniques being adopted for threading and SMP in FreeBSD 5 would lead to a poorly performing system that would be very difficult to maintain. He sought to correct these suspected problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to ongoing conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, and other reasons, his ability to directly change the FreeBSD code was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together contributing bug fixes, driver updates and other system improvements to each other.
Intended to be "the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series", DragonFly is being developed in an entirely different direction from FreeBSD 5, including a new Light Weight Kernel Threads (LWKT) implementation and a light weight ports/messaging system. Many concepts planned for DragonFly were inspired by AmigaOS.

Kernel design
In DragonFly, threads are locked to CPUs by design, and each processor has its own LWKT scheduler. Threads are never preemptively switched from one processor to another; they are only migrated by the passing of an "Interprocessor Interrupt" (IPI) message between the CPUs involved. Interprocessor thread scheduling is also accomplished by sending asynchronous IPI messages. One advantage to this clean compartmentalization of the threading subsystem is that the processors' on-board caches in SMP systems do not contain duplicated data, allowing for higher performance by giving each processor in the system the ability to use its own cache to store different things to work on.
The LWKT subsystem is being employed to partition work among multiple kernel threads (for example in the networking code; one thread per protocol per processor), reducing contention by removing the need to share certain resources among various kernel tasks. This thread partitioning implementation of CPU localization algorithms is arguably the key differentiating feature of DragonFly's design.

CPU localization
In order to run safely on multiprocessor machines, access to shared resources (files, data structures etc.) must be serialized so that threads or processes do not attempt to modify the same resource at the same time. Atomic operations, spinlocks, critical sections, mutexes, serializing tokens and message queues are all possible methods that can be used to prevent concurrent access. Whereas both Linux and FreeBSD 5 employ fine-grained mutex models to achieve higher performance on multiprocessor systems, DragonFly does not. In order to prevent multiple threads from accessing or modifying a shared resource simultaneously, DragonFly employs critical sections, and serializing tokens to prevent concurrent access. Until recently, DragonFly also employed SPLs, but these were replaced with critical sections.
Much of the system's core including the LWKT subsystem, the IPI messaging subsystem and the new kernel memory allocator among other things are lockless, meaning that they work without using mutexes, and operate on a per-CPU basis. Critical sections are used to protect against local interrupts and operate on a per-CPU basis, guaranteeing that a thread currently being executed will not be preempted.
Serializing tokens are used to prevent concurrent accesses from other CPUs and may be held simultaneously by multiple threads, ensuring that only one of those threads is running at any given time. Blocked or sleeping threads therefore do not prevent other threads from accessing the shared resource unlike a thread that is holding a mutex. Among other things, the use of serializing tokens prevents many of the situations that could result in deadlocks and priority inversions when using mutexes, as well as greatly simplifying the design and implementation of a many-step procedure that would require a resource to be shared among multiple threads. The serializing token code is evolving into something quite similar to the "Read-copy-update" feature now available in Linux. Unlike Linux's current RCU implementation, DragonFly's is being implemented such that only processors competing for the same token are affected rather than all processors in the computer.

Protecting shared resources
Early on in its development, DragonFly acquired a slab allocator, which replaced the aging FreeBSD 4 kernel memory allocator. The new slab allocator requires neither mutexes nor blocking operations for memory assignment tasks, and unlike the code it replaced, it is multiprocessor safe.
DragonFly uses SFBUFs (Super-Fast BUFfers) and MSFBUFs (Multi-SFBUFs). A SFBUF is used to manage ephemeral single-page mappings and cache them when appropriate. They are used for retrieving a reference to data that is held by a single VM page. This simple, yet powerful, abstraction gives a broad number of abilities, such as zero-copy achieved in the sendfile(2) system call.
SFBUFs are used in numerous parts of the kernel, such as the Vnode Object Pager and the PIPE subsystems (indirectly via XIOs) for supporting high-bandwidth transfers. An SFBUF can only be used for a single VM page; MSFBUFs are used for managing ephemeral mappings of multiple-pages.
The SFBUF concept was devised by David Greenman of the FreeBSD Project when he wrote the sendfile(2) system call; it was later revised by Dr. Alan L. Cox and Matthew Dillon. MSFBUFs were designed by Hiten Pandya and Matthew Dillon.

Additional features
DragonFly forked from FreeBSD 4.8 and imports features and bug fixes from FreeBSD 4 and 5 where appropriate, such as ACPI and a new ATA driver framework from FreeBSD 4. As the number of DragonFly developers is currently small, with most of them focused on implementing basic functionality, device drivers are being kept mostly in sync with FreeBSD 5.x, the branch of FreeBSD where all new drivers are being written. The DragonFly developers are slowly moving toward using the "busdma" APIs, which will help to make the system easier to port to new architectures, but it is not a major focus at this time.
As with OpenBSD, the developers of DragonFly BSD are actively replacing "K&R" style C code with more modern, ANSI equivalents. Also like OpenBSD, DragonFly's version of the GNU Compiler Collection has an enhancement called the "Stack-Smashing Protector" (formerly known as "ProPolice") enabled by default, providing some additional protection against buffer overflow based attacks. It should be noted that as of Saturday, July 23, 2005, the kernel is no longer built with this protection by default.
Being a derivative of FreeBSD, DragonFly has inherited an easy-to-use integrated build system that can rebuild the entire base system from source with only a few commands. Like people from the other BSD projects, the DragonFly developers use a version control system called CVS to manage changes to the DragonFly source code. Unlike its parent FreeBSD, DragonFly will have both stable and unstable releases in a single source tree, due to a smaller developer base.
Like the other BSD kernels (and those of most modern operating systems), DragonFly employs a built-in kernel debugger to help the developers find kernel bugs. Furthermore, as of Wednesday, October 20, 2004, a debug kernel, which makes bug reports more useful for tracking down kernel-related problems, is installed by default, at the expense of a relatively small quantity of disk space. When a new kernel is installed, the backup copy of the previous kernel and its modules are stripped of their debugging symbols to further minimize disk space usage.
The operating system is distributed as a live CD that boots into a complete DragonFly system. It includes the base system and a complete set of manual pages, and may include source code and useful packages in future versions. The advantage of this is that with a single CD you can install the software onto a computer, use a full set of tools to repair a damaged installation, or demonstrate the capabilities of the system without installing it. Daily snapshots are available from Simon 'corecode' Schubert via FTP and HTTP for those who want to install the most recent versions of DragonFly without building from source.
Like the other free, open source BSDs (NetBSD being the notable exception, still preferring the original 4-clause BSD license), DragonFly is distributed under the terms of the modern version of the BSD license.

Development and distribution

Releases
DragonFly BSD 1.0, released July 12, 2004, was meant to be a "technology showcase" rather than an integrated production release. It featured the new "BSD Installer," the LWKT subsystem and the associated LW ports/messaging system, a mostly MP safe networking stack, lockless memory allocator and the FreeBSD 4.x ports and packages system (which was very briefly broken following the release).
Amiga-style 'resident' application support was added which takes a snapshot of a large, dynamically linked program's virtual memory space after loading, allowing future instances of the program to start much more quickly than it otherwise would have. This replaces the prelinking capability that was being worked on earlier in the project's history, as the resident support is much more efficient. Large programs like those found in KDE with many shared libraries will benefit the most from this support.
Other features introduced in this release include variant symlinks and application checkpointing support.
Due to a serious bug in the installer, an updated 1.0A release of DragonFly was released shortly afterward.

Version 1.2
The third release of DragonFly was made available on January 7, 2006. Many new drivers and bug fixes have gone into the system. GCC version 3.4 is now required to build the system, and the older compiler suite will no longer work, due to the increasing use of TLS support. NetBSD's pkgsrc is now the default packaging system, although the buildtools are not yet included in DragonFly's CVS repository. So far, there is not an official set of prebuilt packages made specifically for this release, and many packages (KDE and GNOME most notably) in the current pkgsrc snapshot do not build cleanly on the system. Citrus from the NetBSD project has also been imported.

Version 1.4
The fourth major release of DragonFly, on July 25, 2006. The biggest user-visible changes in this release are a new random number generator, a massive reorganization of the 802.11 (wireless) framework, and extensive bug fixes in the kernel. Also made significant progress in pushing the big giant lock inward and made extensive modifications to the kernel infrastructure with an eye towards DragonFly's main clustering and userland VFS goals. DragonFly's team consider 1.6 to be more stable than 1.4.

DragonFly BSD Version 1.6
With the 1.8 release, DragonFly has improved several kernel features and has implemented a virtual kernel (similar to User Mode Linux or Linux KVM). Version 1.8.1 was released on March 27, 2007, primarily to provide security updates and bugfixes, including to the dynamic loader and virtual kernel.

Version 1.8

Future directions
Currently, DragonFly runs on x86 (Intel and AMD) based computers, both single processor and SMP models. A port to the x86-64 architecture has been started, but is not yet usable. A port to the PowerPC processor has been speculated about sometime following the eventual x86-64 port.

Supported processors
DragonFly used to use FreeBSD's Ports system for third party software, with NetBSD's "pkgsrc" available as an option, but since the 1.4 release, pkgsrc [2] is the official package management system. By supporting pkgsrc, the DragonFly developers are largely freed of having to maintain a large number of third party programs, while still having access to up to date applications. The pkgsrc developers also benefit from this arrangement as it helps to ensure the portability of the code.

Package management
Although both system calls and device I/O have been largely converted to DragonFly's threaded messaging interface, both still operate synchronously. Ultimately, the entire messaging system is to be capable of both synchronous and asynchronous operation.
Userland threading support is also a focus for upcoming releases. Currently, DragonFly has only basic userland threading support that does not take advantage of multiprocessor systems (N:1 threading). Work to address this has been ongoing almost since the inception of the project, and a modern implementation is expected for version 2.0. Matt has said that ideally, an M:N implementation is preferable (N userland threads making use of a smaller number of kernel threads (M)), but the support planned for 2.0 is likely going to be a 1:1 implementation (one kernel thread for every userland thread.)

Threading and messaging
Userland VFS - the ability to migrate filesystem drivers into userspace, will take a lot of work to accomplish. Some of this work is already complete, though there is still much to do. The namecache code has been extracted from and made independent of the VFS code, and converting the VFS code to DragonFly's threaded messaging interface is Matt's next major focus. This will be more difficult than converting the device I/O and system calls was, due to the fact that the VFS system inherited from FreeBSD uses a massively reentrant model.
The userland VFS system is a prerequisite of a number of desired features to be incorporated into DragonFly. Dillon envisions a new package management system based at least in part, on "VFS environments" which give the packages the environment they expect to be in, independent of the larger filesystem environment and its quirks. In addition to system call message filtering, VFS environments are also to play a role in future security mechanisms, by restricting users or processes to their own isolated environments.
A new journaling layer is being developed for DragonFly for the purpose of transparently backing up entire filesystems in real-time, securely over a network. What remains to be done is the ability to restore a filesystem to a previous state, as well as general stability enhancements. This differs from traditional meta-data journaling filesystems in two ways: (1) it will work with all supported filesystems, as it is implemented in the VFS layer instead of in the individual filesystem drivers, and (2) it will back up all of the data contained on a disk or partition, instead of just meta-data, allowing for the recovery of even the most damaged of installations.
While working on the journaling code, Dillon realized that the userland VFS he envisioned may be closer than he initially thought, though it is still some ways off.
Matt Dillon started porting ZFS to DragonFly as a plan for the 1.6 release.

Userland VFS and journaling
Ultimately, Dillon wants DragonFly to natively enable "secure anonymous system clustering over the Internet", and the light weight ports/messaging system will help to provide this capability. Security settings aside, there is technically no difference between messages created locally or on another computer over a network. Achieving this "single-system image" capability transparently will be a big job, and will take quite some time to properly implement, even with the new foundation fully in place. While some of the short term goals of the project will be completed in months, other features may take years to complete. SSI clustering will have applications in scientific computing.

SSI clustering

Comparison of BSD operating systems See also

Documentation

The DragonFly BSD Digest
2003 Year-End summary
Matt Dillon IRC Interview from http://www.slashnet.org/
OSNews interview (13 March 2004)
Behind DragonFly BSD interview with DFly developers that was published on O'Reilly OnLamp.com (8 July 2004)
DragonFlyBSD 1.0A: A strong start
Kerner, Sean Michael. "New DragonFly Released For BSD Users", internetnews.com, January 10, 2006. 
Kerner, Sean Michael. "DragonFly BSD 1.6 Cuts the Cord", internetnews.com, July 25, 2006. 

Tuesday, August 28, 2007


History · Timeline · Resources Racial · Religious · New AS Antisemitism around the world Arabs and antisemitism Christianity and antisemitism Islam and antisemitism Nation of Islam and antisemitism Universities and antisemitism Anti-globalization and antisemitism Allegations Deicide · Blood libel · Ritual murder Well poisoning · Host desecration Jewish lobby · Jewish Bolshevism Usury · Dreyfus affair Zionist Occupation Government Holocaust denial
Publications On the Jews and their Lies The Protocols of the Elders of Zion The International Jew
Persecutions Expulsions · Ghetto · Pogroms Judenhut · Judensau · Yellow badge Inquisition · Segregation Holocaust · Nazism · Neo-Nazism Organizations fighting AS Anti-Defamation League Community Security Trust EUMC · Stephen Roth Institute Wiener Library · SPLC · SWC · UCSJ
Categories Antisemitism · Jewish history This is a sub article to Antisemitism.
An antisemitic canard is a deliberately false story inciting antisemitism. The word "canard" is French for "duck," referring to a hoax. Despite having been thoroughly disproven, antisemitic canards are often part of broader theories of Jewish conspiracies. According to Kenneth S. Stern,
"Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel anti-Semitism. The myths that Jews killed Christ, or poisoned wells, or killed Christian children to bake matzo, or "made up" the Holocaust, or plot to control the world, do not succeed each other; rather, the list of anti-Semitic canards gets longer. The militia movement today believes in the conspiracy theory of the Protocols, even if some call it something else and never mention Jews. From the perspective of history, we know that this is the type of climate in which anti-Semitism can grow."

Contradictory accusations

Antisemitic canards

Main article: Deicide Accusations of deicide

Main article: Host desecration Accusations of host desecration

Main articles: Ritual murder and Blood libel against Jews Accusations of ritual murder and blood libel

Main articles: Judensau and Der Stürmer Demonization, accusations of impurity

Main articles: Well poisoning and Black Death Accusations of well poisoning

Main articles: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zionist Occupation Government, Jewish lobby, and Anti-globalization and antisemitism Accusations of plotting to control the world

Main articles: Wandering Jew, Jewish Bolshevism, The Cause of World Unrest, and The Franklin Prophecy Accusations of causing wars, revolutions, and calamities
In January 2005, a group of Russian State Duma deputies demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. "Their seven-page letter... accused Jews of carrying out ritual killings, controlling Russian and international capital, inciting ethnic strife in Russia, and staging hate crimes against themselves. "The majority of antisemitic actions in the whole world are constantly carried out by Jews themselves with a goal of provocation," the letter claimed." After sharp protests by Russian Jewish leaders, human rights activists, and the Foreign Ministry, Duma members retracted their appeal.

Accusations of causing antisemitism

Main articles: Usury and Dolchstosslegende Accusations of usury and profiteering

Main articles: Dreyfus affair, Dolchstosslegende, and Rootless cosmopolitan Accusations of lack of patriotism and cowardice
Sometimes, one antisemitic allegation morphs into another: "Israel disproved the anti-Semitic canard, popular during World War II, that Jews were cowards and poor soldiers. In fact, the image of militarist Israel became popular among fringe elements on the political Left."
See also: New antisemitism

Accusations of excessive militarism and cruelty

Main article: Jews as a chosen people#Charges of racismAntisemitic canards Accusations of racism

Main articles: Holocaust denial and Criticism of Holocaust denial

Monday, August 27, 2007


A turbine is a rotary engine that extracts energy from a fluid flow. Claude Burdin coined the term from the Latin turbinis, or vortex during an 1828 engineering competition. The simplest turbines have one moving part, a rotor assembly, which is a shaft with blades attached. Moving fluid acts on the blades, or the blades react to the flow, so that they rotate and impart energy to the rotor. Early turbine examples are windmills and water wheels.
Gas, steam, and water turbines usually have a casing around the blades that focuses and controls the fluid. The casing and blades may have variable geometry that allows efficient operation for a range of fluid-flow conditions.
A device similar to a turbine but operating in reverse is a compressor or pump. The axial compressor in many gas turbine engines is a common example.

Turbine Types of turbines
Almost all electrical power on Earth is produced with a turbine of some type. Very high efficiency turbines harness about 40% of the thermal energy, with the rest exhausted as waste heat.
Most jet engines rely on turbines to supply mechanical work from their working fluid and fuel as do all nuclear ships and power plants.
Turbines are often part of a larger machine. A Gas turbine, for example, may refer to an internal combustion machine that contains a turbine, ducts, compressor, combustor, heat-exchanger, fan and (in the case of one designed to produce electricity) an alternator. However, it must be noted that the collective machine referred to as the turbine in these cases is designed to transfer energy from a fuel to the fluid passing through such an internal combustion device as a means of propulsion, and not to transfer energy from the fluid passing through the turbine to the turbine as is the case in turbines used for electricity provision etc.
Reciprocating piston engines such as aircraft engines can use a turbine powered by their exhaust to drive an intake-air compressor, a configuration known as a turbocharger (turbine supercharger) or, colloquially, a "turbo".
Turbines can have incredible power density (with respect to volume and weight). This is because of their ability to operate at very high speeds. The Space Shuttle's main engines use turbopumps (machines consisting of a pump driven by a turbine engine) to feed the propellants (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) into the engine's combustion chamber. The liquid hydrogen turbopump is slightly larger than an automobile engine (weighing approximately 700 lb) and produces nearly 70,000 hp (52.2 MW).
Turboexpanders are widely used as sources of refrigeration in industrial processes.

Sunday, August 26, 2007


Andrew Keen (born circa 1960

Andrew KeenAndrew Keen Education and career
He currently lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Samuel Sarphati
Samuel Sarphati (1813-1866) was a Dutch physician and Amsterdam city planner.
Sarphati's ancestors were Sephardim, Portuguese Jews who arrived in the Netherlands in the 17th century. While only middle-class, his parents were able to let him conduct a Latin school. At the age of 20, Sarphati started studying medicine in Leiden, which he finished with a promotion in 1839.
During his work thereafter as a doctor in Amsterdam, Sarphati encountered the bad hygiene among the poor in Amsterdam. His compassion for his patients, many of whom were poor, led him to initiate all sorts of projects to improve the quality of life in the city and the health of its inhabitants. They included a bread factory producing wholesome, affordable bread, and a refuse collection service. Sarphati played an important role in the initiation of waste transport in 1847. He became involved in politics, particularly as a project developer in city planning. Beside public health he also initiated improvements in education and industrialization. He also wanted to enhance Amsterdam's dignity and standing by constructing impressive buildings like the Amstel Hotel and the Paleis voor Volksvlijt.
After his death, Sarphatipark in Amsterdam was designed and named after him in 1885.

Buildings built on Sarphati's initiative

The first trade school
A bread factory (Maatschappij voor Meel-en-Broodfabrieken)
Palace of National Industry (Paleis voor volksvlijt), destroyed by fire in 1929
InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam (Amstel Hotel)

Friday, August 24, 2007


Bradford County is a county located in the U.S. state of Florida. As of 2000, the population was 26,088. The U.S. Census Bureau 2005 estimate for the county is 28,118 [1]. Its county seat is Starke, Florida. Bradford County is best known as the home of the Florida State Prison as well as several other state correctional facilities.

History
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 777 km² (300 mi²). 759 km² (293 mi²) of it is land and 18 km² (7 mi²) of it (2.30%) is water.

Geography

Baker County, Florida - north
Clay County, Florida - east
Putnam County, Florida - southeast
Alachua County, Florida - south
Union County, Florida - west Adjacent Counties
As of the census² of 2000, there were 26,088 people, 8,497 households, and 6,194 families residing in the county. The population density was 34/km² (89/mi²). There were 9,605 housing units at an average density of 13/km² (33/mi²). The racial makeup of the county was 76.28% White, 20.79% Black or African American, 0.34% Native American, 0.61% Asian, 0.10% Pacific Islander, 0.65% from other races, and 1.24% from two or more races. 2.38% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 8,497 households out of which 31.90% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 55.40% were married couples living together, 13.30% had a female householder with no husband present, and 27.10% were non-families. 22.90% of all households were made up of individuals and 9.70% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.58 and the average family size was 3.01.
In the county the population was spread out with 21.90% under the age of 18, 9.50% from 18 to 24, 32.10% from 25 to 44, 23.50% from 45 to 64, and 12.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females there were 127.00 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 132.50 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $33,140, and the median income for a family was $39,123. Males had a median income of $29,494 versus $20,745 for females. The per capita income for the county was $14,226. About 11.10% of families and 14.60% of the population were below the poverty line, including 18.30% of those under age 18 and 17.60% of those age 65 or over.

Bradford County, Florida Demographics

Incorporated
Like much of rural northern Florida, Bradford County votes heavily Republican in presidential and congressional races, although still occasionally supporting Conservative Democrats in local and state contests.

Government links/Constitutional offices

Bradford County Schools
St. Johns River Water Management District

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Biography
Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. At a very early age, Barber became profoundly interested in music, and it was apparent that he had great musical talent and ability. At the age of nine he wrote to his mother:
He wrote his first musical composition at the early age of 7 and attempted to write his first opera at the age of 10. He was an organist at the age of 12. When he was 14, he entered the Curtis Institute, a conservatory where he studied piano, composition, and voice.
Barber was born into a comfortable, educated, social, and distinguished American family. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a pianist. His aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading Contralto at the Metropolitan Opera and his uncle, Sidney Homer, was a composer of American art songs. Louise Homer is noted to have influenced Barber's interest in voice. Through his aunt, Barber had access to many great singers and songs. This background is further reflected in that Barber decided to study voice at the Curtis Conservatory.
Barber began composing seriously in his late teenage years. Around the same time, he met fellow Curtis schoolmate Gian Carlo Menotti, and would form a lifelong personal and professional relationship. At the Curtis Institute, Barber was a triple prodigy of composition, voice, and piano. He soon became a favorite of the conservatory's founder, Mary Louise Bok. It was through Bok that Barber would be introduced to his one and only publisher, the Schirmer family. At the age of 18, Barber won a prize from Columbia University for his Violin Sonata (now lost or destroyed by the composer).

Early years
From his early to late twenties, Barber wrote a flurry of successful compositions, launching him into the spotlight of the classical music community. Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such famous artists as Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. At the young age of 28, Barber's Adagio for Strings was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. Barber was the first American composer to have a composition performed by Toscanini, launching him to international prominence. Barber served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, where he was commissioned to write his Second Symphony, a work he later suppressed (which was resurrected in a Vox recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra). He would go on to win a Pulitzer prize in 1963 for his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

Mid years
Barber spent many years in isolation (eventually diagnosed with clinical depression) after the harsh rejection of his third opera Anthony and Cleopatra (which he believed contained some of his best music. "This was supposed to have been my opera!" he said). The opera was written for and premiered at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House on 16 September 1966. After this setback, Barber continued to write music until he was almost 70 years old. Barber's music in his later years would be lauded as reflective, contemplative, but without the morbidity or unhappiness of other composers who knew they had a limited time to live. The Third Essay for Orchestra (1978) was his last major work and critics received it as having all the vigor and imagination of his earlier works.
Barber died of cancer in 1981 in New York City at the age of 70.

Later years
Barber was president of the International Music Council of UNESCO, where he did much to bring into focus and ameliorate the conditions of international musical problems. He was also one of the first American composers to visit Russia (which was a state-member of USSR). Barber was also influential in the successful campaign of composers against ASCAP, helping composers increase the share of royalties they receive from their compositions. Barber was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the American Prix de Rome, two Pulitzers, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Achievements and awards

Samuel Barber Music
Barber intensely played and studied the music of J.S. Bach. He also was an adherent of Brahms, from whom he learned how to compress profound emotions into small modules of highly charged musical expression (Cello Sonata, 1932). In 1933, after reading the poem "Prometheus Unbound" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Barber composed the tone poem Music for a Scene from Shelley. In 1935, the work was premiered at Carnegie Hall, and this was the first time the composer heard one of his orchestral works performed publicly. Barber's compositional style has been lauded for its musical logic, sense of architectural design, effortless melodic gift, and direct emotional appeal as in Overture to The School for Scandal (1931) and Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933). These characteristics remained in his music throughout his lifetime.
Through the success of his Overture to The School for Scandal(1931), Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933), Adagio for Strings (1938); (First) Symphony in One Movement(1936), (First) Essay for Orchestra (1937) and Violin Concerto (1939), Barber garnered performances by the world's leading conductors — Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Charles Munch, George Szell, Artur Rodzinski, Leopold Stokowski, and Thomas Schippers.
His compositions would later include characteristics of polytonality (Second Symphony, 1944), atonality (Medea, 1946; Prayers of Kierkegaard, 1954), Twelve-tone technique (Nocturne, 1959 and the Piano Sonata, 1949), and even jazz (Excursions, 1944; A Hand of Bridge, 1959). Barber's composition were never lauded to be pathbreaking, but his compositions were an eclectic blend of the "musical currents hovering about in his time". John Corigliano succinctly described Barber's style as "an interesting dichotomy of harmonic procedures — an alternation between post-Straussian chromaticism and often diatonic typical American simplicity."
Among his finest works are his four concertos, one each for Violin (1939), Cello (1945) and Piano (1962), and also the neoclassical Capricorn Concerto for flute, oboe, trumpet and string orchestra. All of these works are extremely rewarding for the soloists and public alike, as all contain both highly virtuosic and extremely beautiful writing, often simultaneously. The latter three have been unfairly neglected until recent years, when there has been a reawakening of interest in the expressive possibilities of these masterpieces.

Orchestral music
Having studied piano at Curtis, Barber composed many piano pieces. The four-piano "bagatelles" Excursions (1942-44), was his first venture into Americana music. Its elements of boogie-woogie, blues, cowboy songs, and hoedown are not typical of Barber's classical and refined music. In 1949, Barber wrote his well received Piano Sonata. The Nocturne for Piano (Hommage to John Field), Opus 33, is another respected piece he produced for the instrument.

Piano
Gian Carlo Menotti, whom Barber had met at Curtis, supplied the libretto (text) for Barber's opera, Vanessa. Barber's beautiful voice and vocal training were more than adequate to impress Rudolf Bing. In 1956, Barber sang him the score of his opera Vanessa; the impresario was so astonished that he accepted and produced the work immediately. Vanessa would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and gain acclaim as the first American "grand" opera. Menotti would also go on to contribute the libretto for Barber's chamber opera Hand of Bridge and direct the production of many of Barber's operas. Barber's Antony and Cleopatra was commissioned to open the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. The elaborate production designed by Franco Zeffirelli was marred by numerous technological disasters; it also overwhelmed and obscured Barber's music, which most critics derailed as uncharacteristically weak and unoriginal. In recent years, a revised version of Antony and Cleopatra, for which Menotti provided collaborative assistance, has enjoyed some success.

Opera
With a background deeply rooted in vocals, Barber's love of poetry and his intimate knowledge and appreciation of the human voice inspired his vocal writing. Barber's most famous vocal compositions, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (to words by James Agee) and Dover Beach (to words from a Victorian text by Matthew Arnold), were greatly successful and received critical acclaim, making a powerful case for Barber as one of the twentieth century's most accomplished composers for the voice.

Vocal

"How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society" – Samuel Barber Quote
For a full list of works with opus number and some without, see List of compositions by Samuel Barber
Summer Music for Wind Quintet op. 31 (1956)

Dover Beach (Baritone and String Quartet) (Op. 3, 1931)
The School for Scandal (Overture) (Op. 5, 1931)
Cello Sonata (Op. 6, 1932)
(First) Symphony in One Movement (Op. 9, 1936)
Adagio for strings (arr. of String Quartet, mov't 2) (Op. 11, 1938)
Essay for Orchestra (Op. 12, 1937)
Violin Concerto (Op. 14, 1939)
Second Essay for Orchestra (Op. 17, 1942)
Excursions (Piano) (Op. 20, 1942-44)
Capricorn Concerto (Op. 21, 1944)
Cello Concerto (Op. 22, 1945)
Medea (Ballet) (Op. 23, 1946)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Soprano & Orchestra) (Op. 24, 1948)
Sonata for Piano (Op. 26, 1949)
Hermit Songs (Op. 29, 1953)
Prayers of Kierkegaard (Soprano, Choir & Orchestra) (Op. 30, 1954)
Vanessa (Opera) (Op. 32, 1957)
A Hand of Bridge (Chamber opera) (Op. 35, 1959)
Piano Concerto (Op. 38, 1962) Reference and further reading

Wednesday, August 22, 2007


Computer programming (often shortened to programming or coding) is the process of writing, testing, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. The source code is written in a programming language. This code may be a modification of existing source or something completely new, the purpose being to create a program that exhibits the desired behavior. The process of writing source code requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.
Within software engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process.
In some specialist applications or extreme situations a program may be written or modified (known as patching) by directly storing the numeric values of the machine code instructions to be executed into memory.
There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline.

Programmers

Main article: Programming language Programming languages
The earliest programmable machine (that is a machine whose behavior can be controlled by changes to a "program") was Al-Jazari's programmable humanoid robot in 1206. Al-Jazari's robot was originally a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns by moving the pegs to different locations.
The Jacquard Loom, developed in 1801, is often quoted as a source of prior art. The machine used a series of pasteboard cards with holes punched in them. The hole pattern represented the pattern that the loom had to follow in weaving cloth. The loom could produce entirely different weaves using different sets of cards. The use of punched cards was also adopted by Charles Babbage around 1830, to control his Analytical Engine.
This innovation was later refined by Herman Hollerith who, in 1896 founded the Tabulating Machine Company (which became IBM). He invented the Hollerith punched card, the card reader, and the key punch machine. These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry. The addition of a plug-board to his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt (the first step toward programming). By the late 1940s there were a variety of plug-board programmable machines, called unit record equipment, to perform data processing tasks (card reading). The early computers were also programmed using plug-boards.
The invention of the Von Neumann architecture allowed programs to be stored in computer memory. Early programs had to be painstakingly crafted using the instructions of the particular machine, often in binary notation. Every model of computer would be likely to need different instructions to do the same task. Later assembly languages were developed that let the programmer specify each instruction in a text format, entering abbreviations for each operation code instead of a number and specifying addresses in symbolic form (e.g. ADD X, TOTAL). In 1954 Fortran, the first higher level programming language, was invented. This allowed programmers to specify calculations by entering a formula directly (e.g. Y = X*2 + 5*X + 9). The program text, or source, was converted into machine instructions using a special program called a compiler. Many other languages were developed, including ones for commercial programming, such as COBOL. Programs were mostly still entered using punch cards or paper tape. (See computer programming in the punch card era). By the late-60s, data storage devices and computer terminals became inexpensive enough so programs could be created by typing directly into the computers. Text editors were developed that allowed changes and corrections to be made much more easily than with punch cards.
As time has progressed computers have made giant leaps in the area of processing power. This has brought about newer programming languages that are more abstracted from the underlying hardware. Although these more abstracted languages require additional overhead, in most cases the huge increase in speed of modern computers has brought about little performance decrease compared to earlier counterparts. The benefits of these more abstracted languages is that they allow both an easier learning curve for people less familiar with the older lower-level programming languages, and they also allow a more experienced programmer to develop simple applications quickly. Despite these benefits, large complicated programs, and programs that are more dependent on speed still require the faster and relatively lower-level languages with todays hardware. (The same concerns were raised about the original Fortran language.)
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, programming was an attractive career in most developed countries. Some forms of programming have been increasingly subject to offshore outsourcing (importing software and services from other countries, usually at a lower wage), making programming career decisions in developed countries more complicated, while increasing economic opportunities in less developed areas. It is unclear how far this trend will continue and how deeply it will impact programmer wages and opportunities. Despite the "outsourcing trend" it can be argued that some of the richest persons on the globe are programmers by profession. Examples: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Steve Wozniak (Apple Inc.), Hasso Plattner (SAP) and so on. Programming is clearly a leading-edge craftsmanship that continues to reward its practitioners both in countries such as India and developed countries like the USA or Germany.

Computer programming Modern programming
The academic field and engineering practice of computer programming are largely concerned with discovering and implementing the most efficient algorithms for a given class of problem. For this purpose, algorithms are classified into orders using so-called Big O notation, O(n), which expresses resource use, such as execution time and memory consumption, in terms of the size of an input. Expert programmers are familiar with a variety of well-established algorithms and their respective complexities and use this knowledge to choose algorithms that are best suited to their circumstances.
Research in computer programming includes investigation into the unsolved proposition that P, the class of algorithms which can be deterministically solved in polynomial time with respect to an input, is not equal to NP, the class of algorithms for which no polynomial-time solutions are known. Work has shown that many NP algorithms can be transformed, in polynomial time, into others, such as the Travelling salesman problem, thus establishing a large class of "hard" problems which are for the purposes of analysis, equivalent.

Computer programming Algorithmic Complexity
The first step in every software development project should be requirements analysis, followed by modeling, implementation, and failure elimination (debugging).
There exist a lot of differing approaches for each of those tasks. One approach popular for requirements analysis is Use Case analysis.
Popular modeling techniques include Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation used for both OOAD and MDA.
A similar technique used for database design is Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER Modeling).
Implementation techniques include imperative languages (object-oriented or procedural), functional languages, and logic languages.
Debugging is most often done with IDEs like Visual Studio, and Eclipse. Separate debuggers like gdb are also used.

Methodologies
It is very difficult to determine what are the most popular of modern programming languages. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications (e.g., COBOL is still strong in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes, FORTRAN in engineering applications, and C in embedded applications), while some languages are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications.
Methods of measuring language popularity include: counting the number of job advertisements that mention the language, the number of books teaching the language that are sold (this overestimates the importance of newer languages), and estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language (this underestimates the number of users of business languages such as COBOL).

Measuring language usage
Debugging is a very important task for every programmer, because an erroneous program is often useless. Languages like C++ and Assembler are very challenging even to expert programmers because of failure modes like buffer overruns, bad pointers or uninitialized memory. A buffer overrun can damage adjacent memory regions and cause a failure in a totally different program line. Because of those memory issues tools like Valgrind, Purify or Boundschecker are virtually a necessity for modern software development in the C++ language. Languages such as Java, PHP and Python protect the programmer from most of these runtime failure modes, but this may come at the price of a dramatically lower execution speed of the resulting program. This is acceptable for applications where execution speed is determined by other considerations such as database access or file I/O. The exact cost will depend upon specific implementation details. Modern Java virtual machines, for example, use a variety of sophisticated optimizations, including runtime conversion of interpreted instructions to native machine code (see HotSpot).

Notes
Main lists: List of basic computer programming topics and List of computer programming topics

Computer programming in the punch card era
Hello world program
Software engineering