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Covenant-breaker

Covenant-breaker is a term used in the Baháʼí Faith to refer to a person who has been excommunicated from the Baháʼí community for breaking the Covenant of Baháʼu'lláh, meaning actively promoting schism in the religion or otherwise opposing the legitimacy of the chain of succession of leadership. Excommunication among Baháʼís is rare and not used for transgressions of community standards, intellectual dissent, or conversion to other religions. Instead, it is the most severe punishment, reserved for suppressing organized dissent that threatens the unity of believers.

Currently, the Universal House of Justice has the sole authority to declare a person a Covenant-breaker, and once identified, all Baháʼís are expected to shun them, even if they are family members. According to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, Covenant-breaking is a contagious disease. The Baháʼí writings forbid association with Covenant-breakers and Baháʼís are urged to avoid their literature, thus providing an exception to the Baháʼí principle of independent investigation of truth. Most Baháʼís are unaware of the small Baháʼí divisions that exist.

Dr. Mikhail Sergeev wrote about the Baháʼí practice of excommunication, "In dealing with organized dissent, and covenant-breaking as the most radical form of opposition, Baháʼís stand, as they do on many other controversial issues, somewhere between modernity and traditional religions. They are not as tolerant as the adherents of the Enlightenment ideology that institutionalizes opposition. Nor do they crush it as harshly as the fervent religious leaders of the past."

The three largest attempts at alternative leadership—whose followers are considered Covenant-breakers—were from Subh-i-Azal, Mírzá Muhammad ʻAlí, and Charles Mason Remey. Others were declared Covenant-breakers for actively opposing or disobeying the head of the religion, or maliciously attacking the Baháʼí administration after leaving it.

Definition
Covenant-breaking does not refer to attacks from non-Baháʼís or former Baháʼís. Rather, it is in reference to internal campaigns of opposition where the Covenant-breaker is seen as challenging the unity of the Baháʼí Faith, causing internal division, or by claiming or supporting an alternate succession of authority or administrative structure. The central purpose of the covenant is to prevent schism and dissension.

In a letter to an individual dated 23 March 1975, the Universal House of Justice wrote: "When a person declares his acceptance of Baháʼu'lláh as a Manifestation of God he becomes a party to the Covenant and accepts the totality of His Revelation. If he then turns round and attacks Baháʼu'lláh or the Central Institution of the Faith he violates the Covenant. If this happens every effort is made to help that person to see the illogicality and error of his actions, but if he persists he must, in accordance with the instructions of Baháʼu'lláh Himself, be shunned as a Covenant-breaker."

The term Covenant-breaker was first used by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá to describe the partisans of his half-brother Mírzá Muhammad ʻAlí, who challenged his leadership. In ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament, he appointed Shoghi Effendi as the first Guardian, an institution of the religion now defined, and called for the election of the Universal House of Justice. ʻAbdul-Bahá defined in the same manner opposition to these two institutions as Covenant-breaking and advised all Baháʼís to shun anyone opposing the Covenant: "...one of the greatest and most fundamental principles of the Cause of God is to shun and avoid entirely the Covenant-breakers, for they will utterly destroy the Cause of God, exterminate His Law and render of no account all efforts exerted in the past."

Included categories of people
Most Covenant-breakers are involved in schismatic groups, but not always. For example, a Baháʼí who refuses to follow guidance on treatment of Covenant-breakers is at risk of being named one. One article originally written for the Baháʼí Encyclopedia, characterized Covenant-breakers that have emerged in the course of Baháʼí history as belonging to one of four categories:

 * 1) Leadership challenge: These are persons who dispute the authority and legitimacy of the head of the religion and advance claims either for themselves or for another. The main examples of these are Mírzá Muhammad ʻAlí and Charles Mason Remey.
 * 2) Dissidence: Those who actively disagree with the policies and actions of the head of the faith without, however, advancing an alternative claim for leadership. This group consisted mostly of opponents of the Baháʼí administration such as Ruth White, Julia Lynch Olin and Mirza Ahmad Sohrab.
 * 3) Disobedience: Those who disobey certain direct instructions from the head of the religion. Mostly the instruction in question is to cease to associate with a Covenant-breaker. Examples of this type include most of the descendants of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá during Shoghi Effendi's time.
 * 4) Apostates who maliciously attack the Baháʼí Faith. Examples include Ávárih, Sobhi and Níkú.

Excluded categories of people
Shoghi Effendi wrote to the National Spiritual Assembly of Canada in 1957: "People who have withdrawn from the Cause because they no longer feel that they can support its Teachings and Institutions sincerely, are not Covenant-breakers -- they are non-Baháʼís and should just be treated as such. Only those who ally themselves actively with known enemies of the Faith who are Covenant-breakers, and who attack the Faith in the same spirit as these people, can be considered, themselves, to be Covenant-breakers."

Beyond this, many other relationships to the Baháʼí Faith exist, both positive and negative. Covenant-breaking does not apply to most of them. The following is a partial list of those who could not rightly be termed Covenant-breakers:
 * Members of other religions or no religion—with or without any particular relationship to the Baháʼí Faith.
 * Baháʼís who simply leave the religion. (see above)
 * Baháʼís who, in the estimation of the head of the religion have insufficiently understood the nature of the covenant from the start. These are sometimes "disenrolled" and are considered to have never actually been Baháʼís, given their fundamental diversion from this core Baháʼí doctrine.

Bábís
Bábís are generally regarded as another religion altogether. Since Covenant-breaking presumes that one has submitted oneself to a covenant and then broken it, and Bábís never recognized or swore allegiance to Baháʼu'lláh, they are not Covenant-breakers.

Followers of Subh-i-Azal, Baháʼu'lláh's half-brother who tried to poison him, engaged in active opposition to Baháʼís, and Shoghi Effendi did inform Baháʼís that they should avoid contact with his descendants, writing that "No intelligent and loyal Baha'i would associate with a descendant of Azal, if he traced the slightest breath of criticism of our Faith, in any aspect, from that person. In fact these people should be strenuously avoided as having an inherited spiritual disease -- the disease of Covenant-breaking!".

Shoghi Effendi's immediate family
Through the influence of Bahíyyih Khánum, the eldest daughter of Baháʼu'lláh, everyone in the household initially rallied around Shoghi Effendi after the death of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá. For several years his brother Husayn and several cousins served him as secretaries. The only ones publicly opposing him were Mírzá Muhammad ʻAlí and his followers, who were declared Covenant-breakers by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá. Contrary to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's specific instruction, certain family members established illicit links with those whom ʻAbdu'l-Bahá had declared Covenant-breakers. After Bahíyyih Khánum died in 1932, Shoghi Effendi's eldest sister – Ruhangiz – married Nayyer Effendi Afnan, a son of Siyyid Ali Afnan, stepson of Baháʼu'lláh though Furughiyyih. The children of Furughiyyih sided with Muhammad ʻAlí and opposed ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, leaving only ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's own children as faithful among the descendants of Baháʼu'lláh. Moojan Momen describes these events as follows:

"All remained quiescent until the late 1930s when the case of the House of Bahá'u'lláh (q.v.) arose in Iraq. Shoghi Effendi asked Husayn Afnán (d. 1952), the son of Sayyid `Alí, to resign a high post that he held with the Iraqi government so that he would not be placed in the position of endorsing that government's actions in the case. Husayn refused and was expelled; one-by-one his brothers Faydí, Hasan, and Nayyir (Nayyir-`Alí, d. 1952) were also expelled.

Events then proceeded rapidly. A series of marriages, engineered, according to Shoghi Effendi (MB), by Nayyir, occurred, linking the grandchildren of `Abdu'l-Bahá with the expelled sons of Sayyid `Alí Afnán."

These marriages caused Ruhangiz, Mehrangiz, and Thurayyá to be declared Covenant-breakers by Shoghi Effendi, though there was some delay and concealment initially in order to avoid public degradation of the family. On 2 November 1941 Shoghi Effendi sent two cables announcing the expulsion of Túbá and her children Ruhi, Suhayl, and Fu'ad for consenting to the marriage of Thurayyá to Faydi. There was also mention that Ruhi's visit to America and Fu'ad's visit to England were without approval. In December 1941 he announced the expulsion of his sister Mehrangiz.

Presumably being faced with a choice between shunning their disobedient family members and being themselves disobedient to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, his cousins, aunts and uncles chose the latter.

Expulsions
In 1944 Shoghi Effendi announced the expulsion of Munib Shahid, the grandson of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's through Ruha, for marrying into the family of an enemy of the Baháʼís. In April 1945, he announced the expulsion of Husayn Ali, his brother, for joining the other Covenant-breakers. In a 1950 Shoghi Effendi sent another cable expelling the family of Ruha, another daughter of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá for showing "open defiance", and in December 1951 he announced a "fourth alliance" of members of the family of Siyyid Ali marrying into Ruha's family, and that his brother Riaz was included among the Covenant-breakers.

In 1953 he cabled about Ruhi Afnan corresponding with Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, selling property of Baháʼu'lláh, and publicly "misrepresenting the teachings and deliberately causing confusion in minds of authorities and the local population".

Resultant groups
Most of the groups regarded by the larger group of Baháʼís as Covenant-breakers originated in the claims of Charles Mason Remey to the Guardianship in 1960. The Will and Testament of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá states that Guardians should be lineal descendants of Baháʼu'lláh, that each Guardian must select his successor during his lifetime, and that the nine Hands of the Cause of God permanently stationed in the holy land must approve the appointment by majority vote. Baháʼís interpret lineal descendency to mean physical familial relation to Baháʼu'lláh, of which Mason Remey was not.

Almost all of Baháʼís accepted the determination of the Hands of the Cause that upon the death of Shoghi Effendi, he died "without having appointed his successor". There was an absence of a valid descendant of Baháʼu'lláh who could qualify under the terms of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's will. Later the Universal House of Justice, initially elected in 1963, made a ruling on the subject that it was not possible for another Guardian to be appointed.

In 1960 Remey, a Hand of the Cause himself, retracted his earlier position, and claimed to have been coerced. He claimed to be the successor to Shoghi Effendi. He and the small number of people who followed him were expelled from the mainstream Baháʼí community by the Hands of the Cause. Those close to Remey claimed that he went senile in old age, and by the time of his death he was largely abandoned, with his most prominent followers fighting amongst themselves for leadership.

The largest group of the remaining followers of Remey, members of the "Orthodox Baháʼí Faith", believe that legitimate authority passed from Shoghi Effendi to Mason Remey to Joel Marangella. They, therefore, regard the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel to be illegitimate, and its members and followers to be Covenant-breakers.

In 2009, Jeffery Goldberg and Janice Franco, both from the mainstream Baháʼí community, joined the Orthodox Baháʼí Faith. Both of them were declared as Covenant-breakers and shunned. Goldberg's wife was told to divorce her husband.

The present descendants of expelled members of Baháʼu'lláh's family have not specifically been declared Covenant-breakers, though they mostly do not associate themselves with the Baháʼí religion.

A small group of Baháʼís in Northern New Mexico believe that these descendants are eligible for appointment to the Guardianship and are waiting for such a direct descendant of Baháʼu'lláh to arise as the rightful Guardian.

Enayatullah (Zabih) Yazdani was designated a Covenant-breaker in June 2005, after many years of insisting on his views that Mason Remey was the legitimate successor to Shoghi Effendi and of accepting Donald Harvey as the third guardian. He is now the fifth guardian of a small group of Baháʼís and resides in Australia.

There is also a small group in Montana, originally inspired by Leland Jensen, who claimed a status higher than that of the Guardian. His failed apocalyptic predictions and unsuccessful efforts to reestablish the Guardianship and the administration were apparent by his death in 1996. A dispute among Jensen's followers over the identity of the Guardian resulted in another division in 2001.

American opposition
Juan Cole, an American professor of Middle Eastern history who had been a Baháʼí for 25 years, left the religion in 1996 after being approached by a Continental Counselor about his involvement in a secret email list that was organizing opposition to certain Baháʼí institutions and policies. Cole was never labeled a Covenant-breaker, because he claimed to be a Unitarian-Universalist upon leaving. He went on to publish three papers in journals in 1998, 2000, and 2002. These heavily criticized the Baháʼí administration in the United States and suggested cult-like tendencies, particularly regarding the requirement of pre-publication review and the practice of shunning Covenant-breakers. For example, Cole wrote in 1998, "Baha’is, like members of the Watchtower and other cults, shun those who are excommunicated." In 2000, he wrote: "Baha'i authorities... keep believers in line by appealing to the welfare and unity of the community, and if these appeals fail then implicit or explicit threats of disfellowshipping and even shunning are invoked. ... Shunning is the central control mechanism in the Baha'i system" In 2002, he wrote: "Opportunistic sectarian-minded officials may have seen this... as a time when they could act arbitrarily and harshly against intellectuals and liberals, using summary expulsion and threats of shunning".

Moojan Momen, a Baháʼí author, reviewed 66 exit narratives of former Baháʼís, and identified 1996 (Cole's departure) to 2002 as a period of "articulate and well-educated" apostates that used the newly available Internet to connect with each other and form a community with its own "mythology, creed and salvation stories becoming what could perhaps be called an anti-religion". According to Momen, the narrative among these apostates of a "fiercely aggressive religion where petty dictators rule" is the opposite experience of most members, who see "peace as a central teaching", "consultative decision-making", and "mechanisms to guard against individuals attacking the central institutions of the Bahá'í Faith or creating schisms." On the practice of shunning, Momen writes that it is "rarely used and is only applied after prolonged negotiations fail to resolve the situation. To the best knowledge of the present author it has been used against no more than a handful of individuals in over two decades and to only the first of the apostates described below [Francesco Ficicchia] more than twenty-five years ago - although it is regularly mentioned in the literature produced by the apostates as though it were a frequent occurrence."

title: Covenant-breaker


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Concord, Michigan

Concord is a village in Jackson County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 1,050 at the 2010 census. The village is within Concord Township.

Settled in 1831, much of the village's downtown area is designated as part of the Concord Village Historic District. The village is located along M-60 about 15 mi southwest of Jackson.

History
Concord first received a post office in 1836. It was incorporated as a village in 1871.

The Michigan Historical Center operates a museum in Concord called the Mann House. The Mann House is an excellent example of typical middle-class domestic architecture of the early 1880s and features the family's sleigh and buggy as well as Jackson's Michigan State Prison made furniture.

Government
Concord is a general-law village incorporated within the Concord Township.

Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 1.62 sqmi, of which 1.50 sqmi is land and 0.12 sqmi (7.41%) is water.

The village is located within the T3S R3W survey township.

Demographics
Concord Community Schools (Enrollment 900) participate in Class C and Division 4 of MHSAA athletics. Their teams are known as the Yellow Jackets and play in the Big 8 Conference. The schools' colors are purple and gold. The boys' cross country and track & field teams both claimed MHSAA State Championships during the 2009–10 school year, as well as back to back MHSAA State Championships in the 2014 and 2015 school years. In 2011 and 2012, the boys cross country team won back to back MHSAA State Championships.

2010 census
As of the census of 2010, there were 1,050 people, 412 households, and 293 families living in the village. The population density was 700.0 PD/sqmi. There were 484 housing units at an average density of 322.7 /sqmi. The racial makeup of the village was 99.0% White, 0.3% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.1% Asian, 0.1% from other races, and 0.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.8% of the population.

There were 412 households, of which 33.7% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 54.6% were married couples living together, 10.4% had a female householder with no husband present, 6.1% had a male householder with no wife present, and 28.9% were non-families. 25.7% of all households were made up of individuals, and 12.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.55 and the average family size was 3.02.

The median age in the village was 40.9 years. 26% of residents were under the age of 18; 8.3% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 21.4% were from 25 to 44; 28.7% were from 45 to 64; and 15.6% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the village was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.

2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 1,101 people, 428 households, and 308 families living in the village. The population density was 748.4 PD/sqmi. There were 499 housing units at an average density of 339.2 /sqmi. The racial makeup of the village was 97.91% White, 0.09% Black or African American, 0.27% Native American, 0.73% Asian, 0.64% from other races, and 0.36% from two or more races. 0.82% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There were 428 households, out of which 34.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 57.9% were married couples living together, 10.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28.0% were non-families. 25.0% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.57 and the average family size was 3.09.

In the village, the population was spread out, with 28.1% under the age of 18, 7.5% from 18 to 24, 28.2% from 25 to 44, 21.7% from 45 to 64, and 14.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females, there were 92.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 87.7 males.

The median income for a household in the village was $46,500, and the median income for a family was $54,531. Males had a median income of $39,167 versus $23,594 for females. The per capita income for the village was $19,348. About 4.8% of families and 5.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.1% of those under age 18 and 7.1% of those age 65 or over.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Concord, Michigan


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Chaos Computer Club

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is Europe's largest association of hackers with 7,700 registered members. Founded in 1981, the association is incorporated as an eingetragener Verein in Germany, with local chapters (called Erfa-Kreise) in various cities in Germany and the surrounding countries, particularly where there are German-speaking communities. Since 1985, some chapters in Switzerland have organized an independent sister association called the Chaos Computer Club Schweiz (CCC-CH) instead.

The CCC describes itself as "a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information…". In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and the human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free universal access to computers and technological infrastructure as well as the use of open-source software. The CCC spreads an entrepreneurial vision refusing capitalist control. It has been characterised as "…one of the most influential digital organisations anywhere, the centre of German digital culture, hacker culture, hacktivism, and the intersection of any discussion of democratic and digital rights".

Members of the CCC have demonstrated and publicized a number of important information security problems. The CCC frequently criticizes new legislation and products with weak information security which endanger citizen rights or the privacy of users. Notable members of the CCC regularly function as expert witnesses for the German constitutional court, organize lawsuits and campaigns, or otherwise influence the political process.

Regular events

The CCC hosts the annual Chaos Communication Congress, Europe's biggest hacker gathering. When the event was held in the Hamburg congress center in 2013, it drew 9,000 guests. For the 2016 installment, 11,000 guests were expected, with additional viewers following the event via live streaming.

Every four years, the Chaos Communication Camp is the outdoor alternative for hackers worldwide. The CCC also held, from 2009 to 2013, a yearly conference called SIGINT in Cologne which focused on the impact of digitisation on society. The SIGINT conference was discontinued in 2014. The four-day conference Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe is with more than 1,500 participants the second largest annual event. Another yearly CCC event taking place on the Easter weekend is the Easterhegg, which is more workshop oriented than the other events.

The CCC often uses the c-base station located in Berlin as an event location or as function rooms.

Publications and outreach
The CCC publishes the irregular magazine Datenschleuder (data slingshot) since 1984. The Berlin chapter produces a monthly radio show called which picks up various technical and political topics in a two-hour talk radio show. The program is aired on a local radio station called and on the internet. Other programs have emerged in the context of Chaosradio, including radio programs offered by some regional Chaos Groups and the podcast spin-off CRE by Tim Pritlove.

Many of the chapters of CCC participate in the volunteer project Chaos macht Schule which supports teaching in local schools. Its aims are to improve technology and media literacy of pupils, parents, and teachers.

CCC members are present in big tech companies and in administrative instances. One of the spokespersons of the CCC, as of 1986, Andy Müller-Maguhn, was a member of the executive committee of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) between 2000 and 2002.

CryptoParty
The CCC sensitises and introduces people to the questions of data privacy. Some of its local chapters support or organize so called CryptoParties to introduce people to the basics of practical cryptography and internet anonymity.

Founding
The CCC was founded in West Berlin on 12 September 1981 at a table which had previously belonged to the Kommune 1 in the rooms of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung by Wau Holland and others in anticipation of the prominent role that information technology would play in the way people live and communicate.

BTX-Hack
The CCC became world-famous in 1984 when they drew public attention to the security flaws of the German Bildschirmtext computer network by causing it to debit DM 134,000 in a Hamburg bank in favor of the club. The money was returned the next day in front of the press. Prior to the incident, the system provider had failed to react to proof of the security flaw provided by the CCC, claiming to the public that their system was safe. Bildschirmtext was the biggest commercially available online system targeted at the general public in its region at that time, run and heavily advertised by the German telecommunications agency Deutsche Bundespost which also strove to keep up-to-date alternatives out of the market.

Karl Koch
In 1987, the CCC was peripherally involved in the first cyberespionage case to make international headlines. A group of German hackers led by Karl Koch, who was loosely affiliated with the CCC, was arrested for breaking into US government and corporate computers, and then selling operating-system source code to the Soviet KGB. This incident was portrayed in the movie 23.

GSM-Hack
In April 1998, the CCC successfully demonstrated the cloning of a GSM customer card, breaking the COMP128 encryption algorithm used at that time by many GSM SIMs.

Project Blinkenlights

In 2001, the CCC celebrated its twentieth birthday with an interactive light installation dubbed Project Blinkenlights that turned the building Haus des Lehrers in Berlin into a giant computer screen. A follow-up installation, Arcade, was created in 2002 by the CCC for the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Later in October 2008 CCC's Project Blinkenlights went to Toronto, Ontario, Canada with project Stereoscope.

Schäuble fingerprints
In March 2008, the CCC acquired and published the fingerprints of German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble. The magazine also included the fingerprint on a film that readers could use to fool fingerprint readers. This was done to protest the use of biometric data in German identity devices such as e-passports.

Staatstrojaner affair

The Staatstrojaner (Federal Trojan horse) is a computer surveillance program installed secretly on a suspect's computer, which the German police uses to wiretap Internet telephony. This "source wiretapping" is the only feasible way to wiretap in this case, since Internet telephony programs will usually encrypt the data when it leaves the computer. The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has ruled that the police may only use such programs for telephony wiretapping, and for no other purpose, and that this restriction should be enforced through technical and legal means.

On 8 October 2011, the CCC published an analysis of the Staatstrojaner software. The software was found to have the ability to remote control the target computer, to capture screenshots, and to fetch and run arbitrary extra code. The CCC says that having this functionality built in is in direct contradiction to the ruling of the constitutional court.

In addition, there were a number of security problems with the implementation. The software was controllable over the Internet, but the commands were sent completely unencrypted, with no checks for authentication or integrity. This leaves any computer under surveillance using this software vulnerable to attack. The captured screenshots and audio files were encrypted, but so incompetently that the encryption was ineffective. All captured data was sent over a proxy server in the United States, which is problematic since the data is then temporarily outside the German jurisdiction.

The CCC's findings were widely reported in the German press. This trojan has also been nicknamed R2-D2 because the string "C3PO-r2d2-POE" was found in its code; another alias for it is 0zapftis ("It's tapped!" in Bavarian, a sardonic reference to Oktoberfest). According to a Sophos analysis, the trojan's behavior matches that described in a confidential memo between the German Landeskriminalamt and a software firm called DigiTask; the memo was leaked on WikiLeaks in 2008. Among other correlations is the dropper's file name scuinst.exe, short for Skype Capture Unit Installer. The 64-bit Windows version installs a digitally signed driver, but signed by the non-existing certificate authority "Goose Cert". DigiTask later admitted selling spy software to governments.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior released a statement in which they denied that R2-D2 has been used by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA); this statement however does not eliminate the possibility that it has been used by state-level German police forces. The BKA had previously announced however (in 2007) that they had somewhat similar trojan software that can inspect a computer's hard drive.

Domscheit-Berg affair
Former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg was expelled from the national CCC (but not the Berlin chapter) in August 2011. This decision was revoked in February 2012. As a result of his role in the expulsion, board member Andy Müller-Maguhn was not reelected for another term.

Phone authentication systems
The CCC has repeatedly warned phone users of the weakness of biometric identification in the wake of the 2008 Schäuble fingerprints affair. In their "hacker ethics" the CCC includes "protect people data", but also "Computers can change your life for the better". The club regards privacy as an individual right: the CCC does not discourage people from sharing or storing personal information on their phones, but advocates better privacy protection, and the use of specific browsing and sharing techniques by users.

Apple TouchID
From a photograph of the user's fingerprint on a glass surface, using "easy everyday means", the biometrics hacking team of the CCC was able to unlock an iPhone 5S.

Samsung S8 iris recognition
The Samsung Galaxy S8's iris recognition system claims to be "one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private" as "patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate", as quoted in official Samsung content. However, in some cases, using a high resolution photograph of the phone owner's iris and a lens, the CCC claimed to be able to trick the authentication system.

Fake Chaos Computer Club France
The Chaos Computer Club France (CCCF) was a fake hacker organisation created in 1989 in Lyon (France) by Jean-Bernard Condat, under the command of Jean-Luc Delacour, an agent of the Direction de la surveillance du territoire governmental agency. The primary goal of the CCCF was to watch and to gather information about the French hacker community, identifying the hackers who could harm the country. Journalist Jean Guisnel said that this organization also worked with the French National Gendarmerie.

The CCCF had an electronic magazine called Chaos Digest (ChaosD). Between 4 January 1993 and 5 August 1993, seventy-three issues were published.

title: Chaos Computer Club


text:
Convention (norm)

A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, social norms, or other criteria, often taking the form of a custom.

In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for example, the manner in which people greet each other, such as by shaking each other's hands). Certain types of rules or customs may become law and sometimes they may be further codified to formalize or enforce the convention (for example, laws that define on which side of the road vehicles must be driven).

In physical sciences, numerical values (such as constants, quantities, or scales of measurement) are called conventional if they do not represent a measured property of nature, but originate in a convention, for example an average of many measurements, agreed between the scientists working with these values.

General
A convention is a selection from among two or more alternatives, where the rule or alternative is agreed upon among participants. Often the word refers to unwritten customs shared throughout a community. For instance, it is conventional in many societies that strangers being introduced shake hands. Some conventions are explicitly legislated; for example, it is conventional in the United States and in Germany that motorists drive on the right side of the road, whereas in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Nepal, India and the United Kingdom motorists drive on the left. The standardization of time is a human convention based on the solar cycle or calendar. The extent to which justice is conventional (as opposed to natural or objective) is historically an important debate among philosophers.

The nature of conventions has raised long-lasting philosophical discussion. Quine, Davidson, and David Lewis published influential writings on the subject. Lewis's account of convention received an extended critique in Margaret Gilbert's On Social Facts (1989), where an alternative account is offered. Another view of convention comes from Ruth Millikan's Language: A Biological Model (2005), once more against Lewis.

According to David Kalupahana, The Buddha described conventions—whether linguistic, social, political, moral, ethical, or even religious—as arising dependent on specific conditions. According to his paradigm, when conventions are considered absolute realities, they contribute to dogmatism, which in turn leads to conflict. This does not mean that conventions should be absolutely ignored as unreal and therefore useless. Instead, according to Buddhist thought, a wise person adopts a Middle Way without holding conventions to be ultimate or ignoring them when they are fruitful.

Social
In sociology, a social rule refers to any social convention commonly adhered to in a society. These rules are not written in law or otherwise formalized. In social constructionism, there is a great focus on social rules. It is argued that these rules are socially constructed, that these rules act upon every member of a society, but at the same time, are re-produced by the individuals.

Sociologists representing symbolic interactionism argue that social rules are created through the interaction between the members of a society. The focus on active interaction highlights the fluid, shifting character of social rules. These are specific to the social context, a context that varies through time and place. That means a social rule changes over time within the same society. What was acceptable in the past may no longer be the case. Similarly, rules differ across space: what is acceptable in one society may not be so in another.

Social rules reflect what is acceptable or normal behaviour in any situation. Michel Foucault's concept of discourse is closely related to social rules as it offers a possible explanation how these rules are shaped and change. It is the social rules that tell people what is normal behaviour for any specific category. Thus, social rules tell a woman how to behave in a womanly manner, and a man, how to be manly. Other such rules are as follows:

 * Strangers being introduced shake hands, as in Western societies, but:
 * Bow toward each other, in Korea, Japan and China
 * Wai each other in Thailand
 * Do not bow at each other, in the Jewish tradition
 * In the United States, eye contact, a nod of the head toward each other, and a smile, with no bowing; the palm of the hand faces sideways, neither upward nor downward, in a business handshake.
 * Present business cards to each other, in business meetings (both-handed in Japan)
 * Click heels together, while saluting in some military contexts
 * In most places it's always polite to ask before kissing or hugging, this is called public display of affection.
 * A property norm is to place things back where we found them.
 * A property norm is used to identify which commodities are accepted as money.
 * A sexual norm can refer to a personal or a social norm. Most cultures have social norms regarding sexuality, and define normal sexuality to consist only of certain sex acts between individuals who meet specific criteria of age, consanguinity, race/ethnicity, and/or social role and socioeconomic status. In the west outside the traditional norm between consenting adults what is considered not normal is what falls under what is regarded as paraphilia or sexual perversion.
 * A form of marriage, polygyny or polyandry, is right or wrong in a given society,  as is homosexual marriage considered wrong in many of the societies. An religious more for an example is that a woman or man must not cohabitate, live together, when romantically involved until they have gotten married. Adultery is considered wrong that is not violating sexual fidelity when there is union of a couple in marriage.
 * A men's and women's dress code.
 * Avoid using rude hand gestures like pointing at people, swear words, offensive language etc.,
 * A woman's curtsey in some societies
 * In the Middle East, never displaying the sole of the foot toward another, as this would be seen as a grave insult.
 * In many schools, though seats for students are not assigned they are still "claimed" by certain students, and sitting in someone else's seat is considered an insult.
 * To reciprocate when something is done for us.
 * Etiquette norms, like asking to be excused from the gathering's table, be ready to pay for your bill particularly in the case you asked people to dinner, it is a faux pas to refuse an offer of food as a guest.
 * Contraception norms, not to limit access to them by women who require it, some cultures limit contraception.
 * Recreational drug use restrictions on access or as popularly accepted in the culture where it is used as an example alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and hashish, there is a disincentive and prohibition for controlled substances where use and sale is prohibited like MDMA and party drugs.
 * The belief that certain forms of discrimination are unethical because they take something away from the person by restrictions and by being ostracised. Furthermore, can "Restrict women's and girls' rights, access to empowerment opportunities and resources".
 * A person has a duty of care for the aged persons within the family. This is particularly true in countries of Asia. Much of aged care falls under unpaid labor.
 * Refuse to favor known persons, as this would be an abuse of power relationship.
 * Do not make a promise if you know that you can not keep it.
 * Do not ask for money if you know that you can not pay it back to that person or place.
 * "Practice honesty and not deceive the innocent with false promises to obtain economic benefits or gratuities."
 * It is suitable to make a pledge of allegiance in the United States, when prompted to in some social contexts.
 * An gentlemen's agreement, or gentleman's agreement, is an informal and legally non-binding agreement between two or more parties. We follow through on our business dealings, when we say we will do something then we do it and will not falter to do so.
 * Do not divulge the privacy of others.
 * Treat friends and family non-violently, be faithful and honest in a couple, to treat with respect the beliefs, activities or aims of our parents, show respect for beliefs, religious and cultural symbols of others.
 * Tolerate and respect people with functional diversity, particularly when they wish to integrate in a game or sports equipment. Also tolerate different points of view than your own, even if contrary, and do not try and change their beliefs by force.
 * Give the seat to people with children, pregnant or elderly, in public and private transportation.
 * Face the front, do not go elevator surfing, and do not push extra buttons in an elevator or stand too close to someone if there are few people.
 * In a library, it is polite to have talk in the same noise volume as that of a classroom.
 * In a cinema, it is correct to not talk during a movie because people are there to watch the film, also it is correct to not have phones on as the light and sound will distract other patrons.
 * If you are going to be punctual, notify friends or acquaintances if you will be late.
 * If you cannot show up to an outing, restaurant, theater, cinema, etc., it's proper to give the reason over your phone or address sometime prior.
 * It is a norm to speak one at a time.
 * A religious vow is a special promise. It made in a religious sense or in ceremonies such as in marriages when there is a couple who are being promised to marriage called "marriage vows", they are also promising one another to be faithful and take care of their children.
 * Helping somebody in need, for social responsibility or to prevent harm. See the parable of the Good Samaritan.
 * Do not go to a non-fast food restaurant or bar unless you have enough to make a good tip, depending on the place.
 * Examples of US social norms or customs turned into laws include the following:
 * People under 21 cannot buy alcohol.
 * You must be 16 to drive.
 * Firearms are legal and relatively accessible to anyone who wants one.
 * In a city you cannot cross the street wherever you like, you must use a zebra crossing. You can be fined if the police catch you breaking this rule.
 * It is a social norm to provide tips in the US to waitresses and waiters.
 * There are numerous gender-specific norms that influence society:
 * Girls should wear pink; boys should wear blue.
 * Men should be strong and not show any emotion.
 * Women should be caring and nurturing.
 * Men should do repairs at the house and be the one to work and make money; while women are expected to take care of the housework and children.
 * A man should pay for the woman's meal when going out to dinner.
 * Men should open doors for women at bars, clubs, workplace, and should clear the way for the exit.

Government
In government, convention is a set of unwritten rules that participants in the government must follow. These rules can be ignored only if justification is clear, or can be provided. Otherwise, consequences follow. Consequences may include ignoring some other convention that has until now been followed. According to the traditional doctrine (Dicey), conventions cannot be enforced in courts, because they are non-legal sets of rules. Convention is particularly important in the Westminster System of government, where many of the rules are unwritten.

title: Convention (norm)


text:
Complete metric space

In mathematical analysis, a metric space $M$ is called complete (or a Cauchy space) if every Cauchy sequence of points in $M$ has a limit that is also in $M$.

Intuitively, a space is complete if there are no "points missing" from it (inside or at the boundary). For instance, the set of rational numbers is not complete, because e.g. $\sqrt{2}$ is "missing" from it, even though one can construct a Cauchy sequence of rational numbers that converges to it (see further examples below). It is always possible to "fill all the holes", leading to the completion of a given space, as explained below.

Definition
Cauchy sequence

A sequence $$x_1, x_2, x_3, \ldots$$ in a metric space $$(X, d)$$ is called Cauchy if for every positive real number $$r > 0$$ there is a positive integer $$N$$ such that for all positive integers $$m, n > N,$$ $$d(x_m, x_n) < r.$$

Complete space

A metric space $$(X, d)$$ is complete if any of the following equivalent conditions are satisfied:
 * Every Cauchy sequence of points in $$X$$ has a limit that is also in $$X.$$
 * Every Cauchy sequence in $$X$$ converges in $$X$$ (that is, to some point of $$X$$).
 * Every decreasing sequence of non-empty closed subsets of $$X,$$ with diameters tending to 0, has a non-empty intersection: if $$F_n$$ is closed and non-empty, $$F_{n+1} \subseteq F_n$$ for every $$n,$$ and $$\operatorname{diam}\left(F_n\right) \to 0,$$ then there is a unique point $$x \in X$$ common to all sets $$F_n.$$

Examples
The space Q of rational numbers, with the standard metric given by the absolute value of the difference, is not complete. Consider for instance the sequence defined by $$x_1 = 1$$ and $$x_{n+1} = \frac{x_n}{2} + \frac{1}{x_n}.$$ This is a Cauchy sequence of rational numbers, but it does not converge towards any rational limit: If the sequence did have a limit $$x,$$ then by solving $$x = \frac{x}{2} + \frac{1}{x}$$ necessarily $$x^2 = 2,$$ yet no rational number has this property. However, considered as a sequence of real numbers, it does converge to the irrational number $$\sqrt{2}$$.

The open interval $(0,1)$, again with the absolute difference metric, is not complete either. The sequence defined by $$x_n = \tfrac{1}{n}$$ is Cauchy, but does not have a limit in the given space. However the closed interval $[0,1]$ is complete; for example the given sequence does have a limit in this interval, namely zero.

The space R of real numbers and the space C of complex numbers (with the metric given by the absolute difference) are complete, and so is Euclidean space Rn, with the usual distance metric. In contrast, infinite-dimensional normed vector spaces may or may not be complete; those that are complete are Banach spaces. The space C$[a, b]$ of continuous real-valued functions on a closed and bounded interval is a Banach space, and so a complete metric space, with respect to the supremum norm. However, the supremum norm does not give a norm on the space C$(a, b)$ of continuous functions on $(a, b)$, for it may contain unbounded functions. Instead, with the topology of compact convergence, C$(a, b)$ can be given the structure of a Fréchet space: a locally convex topological vector space whose topology can be induced by a complete translation-invariant metric.

The space Qp of p-adic numbers is complete for any prime number $$p.$$ This space completes Q with the p-adic metric in the same way that R completes Q with the usual metric.

If $$S$$ is an arbitrary set, then the set $S^{N}$ of all sequences in $$S$$ becomes a complete metric space if we define the distance between the sequences $$\left(x_n\right)$$ and $$\left(y_n\right)$$ to be $$\tfrac{1}{N}$$ where $$N$$ is the smallest index for which $$x_N$$ is distinct from $$y_N$$ or $$0$$ if there is no such index. This space is homeomorphic to the product of a countable number of copies of the discrete space $$S.$$

Riemannian manifolds which are complete are called geodesic manifolds; completeness follows from the Hopf–Rinow theorem.

Some theorems
Every compact metric space is complete, though complete spaces need not be compact. In fact, a metric space is compact if and only if it is complete and totally bounded. This is a generalization of the Heine–Borel theorem, which states that any closed and bounded subspace $$S$$ of $R^{n}$ is compact and therefore complete.

Let $$(X, d)$$ be a complete metric space. If $$A \subseteq X$$ is a closed set, then $$A$$ is also complete. Let $$(X, d)$$ be a metric space. If $$A \subseteq X$$ is a complete subspace, then $$A$$ is also closed.

If $$X$$ is a set and $$M$$ is a complete metric space, then the set $$B(X, M)$$ of all bounded functions $f$ from $X$ to $$M$$ is a complete metric space. Here we define the distance in $$B(X, M)$$ in terms of the distance in $$M$$ with the supremum norm $$d(f, g) \equiv \sup\{d[f(x), g(x)]: x \in X\}$$

If $$X$$ is a topological space and $$M$$ is a complete metric space, then the set $$C_b(X, M)$$ consisting of all continuous bounded functions $$f : X \to M$$ is a closed subspace of $$B(X, M)$$ and hence also complete.

The Baire category theorem says that every complete metric space is a Baire space. That is, the union of countably many nowhere dense subsets of the space has empty interior.

The Banach fixed-point theorem states that a contraction mapping on a complete metric space admits a fixed point. The fixed-point theorem is often used to prove the inverse function theorem on complete metric spaces such as Banach spaces.

$$

Completion
For any metric space M, it is possible to construct a complete metric space M′ (which is also denoted as $$\overline{M}$$), which contains M as a dense subspace. It has the following universal property: if N is any complete metric space and f is any uniformly continuous function from M to N, then there exists a unique uniformly continuous function f′ from M′ to N that extends f. The space M' is determined up to isometry by this property (among all complete metric spaces isometrically containing M), and is called the completion of M.

The completion of M can be constructed as a set of equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences in M. For any two Cauchy sequences $$x_{\bull} = \left(x_n\right)$$ and $$y_{\bull} = \left(y_n\right)$$ in M, we may define their distance as $$d\left(x_{\bull}, y_{\bull}\right) = \lim_n d\left(x_n, y_n\right)$$

(This limit exists because the real numbers are complete.) This is only a pseudometric, not yet a metric, since two different Cauchy sequences may have the distance 0. But "having distance 0" is an equivalence relation on the set of all Cauchy sequences, and the set of equivalence classes is a metric space, the completion of M. The original space is embedded in this space via the identification of an element x of M' with the equivalence class of sequences in M converging to x (i.e., the equivalence class containing the sequence with constant value x). This defines an isometry onto a dense subspace, as required. Notice, however, that this construction makes explicit use of the completeness of the real numbers, so completion of the rational numbers needs a slightly different treatment.

Cantor's construction of the real numbers is similar to the above construction; the real numbers are the completion of the rational numbers using the ordinary absolute value to measure distances. The additional subtlety to contend with is that it is not logically permissible to use the completeness of the real numbers in their own construction. Nevertheless, equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences are defined as above, and the set of equivalence classes is easily shown to be a field that has the rational numbers as a subfield. This field is complete, admits a natural total ordering, and is the unique totally ordered complete field (up to isomorphism). It is defined as the field of real numbers (see also Construction of the real numbers for more details). One way to visualize this identification with the real numbers as usually viewed is that the equivalence class consisting of those Cauchy sequences of rational numbers that "ought" to have a given real limit is identified with that real number. The truncations of the decimal expansion give just one choice of Cauchy sequence in the relevant equivalence class.

For a prime $$p,$$ the $p$-adic numbers arise by completing the rational numbers with respect to a different metric.

If the earlier completion procedure is applied to a normed vector space, the result is a Banach space containing the original space as a dense subspace, and if it is applied to an inner product space, the result is a Hilbert space containing the original space as a dense subspace.

Topologically complete spaces
Completeness is a property of the metric and not of the topology, meaning that a complete metric space can be homeomorphic to a non-complete one. An example is given by the real numbers, which are complete but homeomorphic to the open interval $(0,1)$, which is not complete.

In topology one considers completely metrizable spaces, spaces for which there exists at least one complete metric inducing the given topology. Completely metrizable spaces can be characterized as those spaces that can be written as an intersection of countably many open subsets of some complete metric space. Since the conclusion of the Baire category theorem is purely topological, it applies to these spaces as well.

Completely metrizable spaces are often called topologically complete. However, the latter term is somewhat arbitrary since metric is not the most general structure on a topological space for which one can talk about completeness (see the section Alternatives and generalizations). Indeed, some authors use the term topologically complete for a wider class of topological spaces, the completely uniformizable spaces.

A topological space homeomorphic to a separable complete metric space is called a Polish space.

Alternatives and generalizations
Since Cauchy sequences can also be defined in general topological groups, an alternative to relying on a metric structure for defining completeness and constructing the completion of a space is to use a group structure. This is most often seen in the context of topological vector spaces, but requires only the existence of a continuous "subtraction" operation. In this setting, the distance between two points $$x$$ and $$y$$ is gauged not by a real number $$\varepsilon$$ via the metric $$d$$ in the comparison $$d(x, y) < \varepsilon,$$ but by an open neighbourhood $$N$$ of $$0$$ via subtraction in the comparison $$x - y \in N.$$

A common generalisation of these definitions can be found in the context of a uniform space, where an entourage is a set of all pairs of points that are at no more than a particular "distance" from each other.

It is also possible to replace Cauchy sequences in the definition of completeness by Cauchy nets or Cauchy filters. If every Cauchy net (or equivalently every Cauchy filter) has a limit in $$X,$$ then $$X$$ is called complete. One can furthermore construct a completion for an arbitrary uniform space similar to the completion of metric spaces. The most general situation in which Cauchy nets apply is Cauchy spaces; these too have a notion of completeness and completion just like uniform spaces.

title: Complete metric space


text:
The Amazing Criswell

Jeron Criswell King (August 18, 1907 – October 4, 1982), known by his stage-name The Amazing Criswell, was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions. In person, he went by Charles Criswell King, and was sometimes credited as Jeron King Criswell.

Criswell was flamboyant, with spit curled hair, a stentorian style of speaking, and a sequined tuxedo. He owned a coffin in which he claimed to sleep. He grew up in a troubled family in Indiana with relatives who owned a funeral home, and frequently stated he became comfortable with sleeping in caskets in the storeroom.

He appeared in two films directed by Ed Wood—Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and Night of the Ghouls (1959)—and also appeared in Orgy of the Dead (1965), which was written by Wood.

Early life
Criswell claimed he never actually talked until the age of four. During a thunderstorm he first spoke, making his first prediction, "the rain will stop." From this point on he was talkative, often placing himself center stage at any opportunity.

Career
Criswell said he had once worked as a radio announcer and news broadcaster. He began buying time on a local Los Angeles television station in the early 1950s to run infomercials for his Criswell Family Vitamins. To fill the time, he began his "Criswell Predicts" part of the show. This made him a minor off-beat celebrity in Los Angeles and around Hollywood, and his friendship with old show-business people such as Mae West and rising fringe celebrities such as Korla Pandit made Criswell an entertaining presence at parties. His fame brought him appearances on Tonight Starring Jack Paar (1957–1962).

He published predictions in three issues of Spaceway magazine (February 1955, April 1955, and June 1955), as well as in a weekly syndicated newspaper article starting on September 6, 1951. He later published three books of predictions; From Now to the Year 2000, Your Next Ten Years, and Forbidden Predictions.

He also recorded a long playing record, Your Incredible Future (which was later released on CD), featuring 84 minutes of his predictions in his own voice.

Criswell appeared in the movies of writer and director Ed Wood.

After Criswell's death, his longtime friend Paul Marco released Criswell's song "Someone Walked Over My Grave" on a 7" record which was recorded by Criswell as a memorial song he only wanted released posthumously.

Predictions
Criswell's predictions were nationally syndicated and he appeared on the television show Criswell Predicts on KLAC Channel 13 (now KCOP-13) in Los Angeles as well as being recorded for syndication. His announcer was Bob Shields, who later played the judge on The Judge. Criswell wore heavy makeup in public after his live program was broadcast in Los Angeles. Only selected people were allowed in the KCOP studio during his broadcast.

Criswell wrote several books of predictions, including 1968's Criswell Predicts: From Now to the Year 2000. In it, he claimed that Denver, Colorado, would be struck by a ray from space that would cause all metal to adopt the qualities of rubber, leading to horrific accidents at amusement parks. He predicted mass cannibalism and the end of planet Earth, which he set as happening on August 18, 1999 (which would have been his 92nd birthday).

Criswell was a student of history. He believed history repeated itself, that the United States were the "modern Romans". Each day, he read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looking for clues for his predictions.

Some sources claim Criswell's most famous prediction was on The Jack Paar Program (1962–65) in March 1963, when he predicted US President John F. Kennedy would not run for reelection in 1964 because something was going to happen to him in November 1963.

Sources say that Criswell never claimed to be a real psychic; however, those who knew him, including actress and fellow Plan 9 alumna Maila Nurmi ("Vampira"), believed he was. According to writer Charles A. Coulombe, whose family rented an apartment from him, Criswell told Coulombe's father "[I] had the gift, but [I] lost it when I started taking money for it."

Private life
Criswell married a former speakeasy dancer named Halo Meadows, who once appeared on You Bet Your Life, and whom Coulombe describes as "quite mad": "Mrs Criswell had a huge standard poodle (named "Buttercup") which she was convinced was the reincarnation of her cousin Thomas. She spent a great deal of time sunbathing ... which, given her size, was not too pleasing a sight."

Mae West used Criswell as her personal psychic; he once predicted her rise to President of the United States, whereupon she, Criswell and George Liberace, the brother of showman Liberace, would take a rocket to the Moon. Criswell and West were great friends and she would lavish him with home-cooked food which she had delivered to the studio that he shared with Maila Nurmi ("Vampira"). It is said that West sold Criswell her old luxury cars for five dollars.

Criswell died on October 4, 1982, at the age of 75; he was cremated days later.

Legacy

 * In 1955, Mae West wrote and recorded a song called "Criswell Predicts" for her album The Fabulous Mae West
 * In 1994, Criswell was portrayed in the Tim Burton biopic Ed Wood by actor Jeffrey Jones.
 * In 1997, several actors, including Sean Phillip Mabrey, have played Criswell in Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Musical, written by David G. Smith.
 * In 1999, the film Devil Girls featured a portrayal of Criswell by Rob Gorden.
 * In 2000, the song "Criswell Predicts" by pop punk band Groovie Ghoulies appeared on their album Travels With My Amp.
 * In 2005, Criswell and the Plan 9 cast were lampooned in an episode of the television series, Deadly Cinema, and clips of this episode were featured in the documentary, Vampira: The Movie.
 * In 2006, Craig Brown played Criswell in Plan Live From Outer Space, a stage adaptation of Plan 9 from Outer Space which won a Canadian Comedy Award the following year.
 * In 2009, a teaser trailer was released by Darkstone Entertainment for the John Johnson film Plan 9, a remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space. The voice of popular television horror host Mr. Lobo can be heard narrating the trailer as Criswell. He also portrayed Criswell in the film, in a much larger role in this re-imagining of the original Ed Wood story. In addition, for the purpose of promoting the film on the internet, Mr. Lobo has produced 62 episodes of Criswell Predicts! which is a parody and homage to Criswell's original television program of the same name sans the exclamation mark.

title: The Amazing Criswell


text:
Chain reaction

A chain reaction is a sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place. In a chain reaction, positive feedback leads to a self-amplifying chain of events.

Chain reactions are one way that systems which are not in thermodynamic equilibrium can release energy or increase entropy in order to reach a state of higher entropy. For example, a system may not be able to reach a lower energy state by releasing energy into the environment, because it is hindered or prevented in some way from taking the path that will result in the energy release. If a reaction results in a small energy release making way for more energy releases in an expanding chain, then the system will typically collapse explosively until much or all of the stored energy has been released.

A macroscopic metaphor for chain reactions is thus a snowball causing a larger snowball until finally an avalanche results ("snowball effect"). This is a result of stored gravitational potential energy seeking a path of release over friction. Chemically, the equivalent to a snow avalanche is a spark causing a forest fire. In nuclear physics, a single stray neutron can result in a prompt critical event, which may finally be energetic enough for a nuclear reactor meltdown or (in a bomb) a nuclear explosion.

Another metaphor for a chain reaction is the domino effect, named after the act of domino toppling, where the simple action of toppling one domino leads to all dominoes eventually toppling, even if they are significantly larger.

Numerous chain reactions can be represented by a mathematical model based on Markov chains.

History
In 1913, the German chemist Max Bodenstein first put forth the idea of chemical chain reactions. If two molecules react, not only molecules of the final reaction products are formed, but also some unstable molecules which can further react with the parent molecules with a far larger probability than the initial reactants. (In the new reaction, further unstable molecules are formed besides the stable products, and so on.)

In 1918, Walther Nernst proposed that the photochemical reaction between hydrogen and chlorine is a chain reaction in order to explain what is known as the quantum yield phenomena. This means that one photon of light is responsible for the formation of as many as 106 molecules of the product HCl. Nernst suggested that the photon dissociates a Cl2 molecule into two Cl atoms which each initiate a long chain of reaction steps forming HCl.

In 1923, Danish and Dutch scientists J. A. Christiansen and Hendrik Anthony Kramers, in an analysis of the formation of polymers, pointed out that such a chain reaction need not start with a molecule excited by light, but could also start with two molecules colliding violently due to thermal energy as previously proposed for initiation of chemical reactions by van' t Hoff.

Christiansen and Kramers also noted that if, in one link of the reaction chain, two or more unstable molecules are produced, the reaction chain would branch and grow. The result is in fact an exponential growth, thus giving rise to explosive increases in reaction rates, and indeed to chemical explosions themselves. This was the first proposal for the mechanism of chemical explosions.

A quantitative chain chemical reaction theory was created later on by Soviet physicist Nikolay Semyonov in 1934. Semyonov shared the Nobel Prize in 1956 with Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, who independently developed many of the same quantitative concepts.

Typical steps
The main types of steps in chain reaction are of the following types.
 * Initiation (formation of active particles or chain carriers, often free radicals, in either a thermal or a photochemical step)
 * Propagation (may comprise several elementary steps in a cycle, where the active particle through reaction forms another active particle which continues the reaction chain by entering the next elementary step). In effect the active particle serves as a catalyst for the overall reaction of the propagation cycle. Particular cases are:
 * chain branching (a propagation step where one active particle enters the step and two or more are formed);
 * chain transfer (a propagation step in which the active particle is a growing polymer chain which reacts to form an inactive polymer whose growth is terminated and an active small particle (such as a radical), which may then react to form a new polymer chain).
 * Termination (elementary step in which the active particle loses its activity; e. g. by recombination of two free radicals).

The chain length is defined as the average number of times the propagation cycle is repeated, and equals the overall reaction rate divided by the initiation rate.

Some chain reactions have complex rate equations with fractional order or mixed order kinetics.

Detailed example: the hydrogen-bromine reaction
The reaction H2 + Br2 → 2 HBr proceeds by the following mechanism:
 * Initiation
 * Br2 → 2 Br• (thermal) or Br2 + hν → 2 Br• (photochemical)
 * each Br atom is a free radical, indicated by the symbol "•" representing an unpaired electron.

 * Propagation (here a cycle of two steps)
 * Br• + H2 → HBr + H•
 * H• + Br2 → HBr + Br•
 * the sum of these two steps corresponds to the overall reaction H2 + Br2 → 2 HBr, with catalysis by Br• which participates in the first step and is regenerated in the second step.

 * Retardation (inhibition)
 * H• + HBr → H2 + Br•
 * this step is specific to this example, and corresponds to the first propagation step in reverse.

 * Termination 2 Br• → Br2
 * recombination of two radicals, corresponding in this example to initiation in reverse.

As can be explained using the steady-state approximation, the thermal reaction has an initial rate of fractional order (3/2), and a complete rate equation with a two-term denominator (mixed-order kinetics).

Further chemical examples

 * The reaction 2 H2 + O2 → 2 H2O provides an example of chain branching. The propagation is a sequence of two steps whose net effect is to replace an H atom by another H atom plus two OH radicals. This leads to an explosion under certain conditions of temperature and pressure.
 * H• + O2 → •OH + •O•
 * •O• + H2 → •OH + H•
 * In chain-growth polymerization, the propagation step corresponds to the elongation of the growing polymer chain. Chain transfer corresponds to transfer of the activity from this growing chain, whose growth is terminated, to another molecule which may be a second growing polymer chain. For polymerization, the kinetic chain length defined above may differ from the degree of polymerization of the product macromolecule.
 * Polymerase chain reaction, a technique used in molecular biology to amplify (make many copies of) a piece of DNA by in vitro enzymatic replication using a DNA polymerase.

Acetaldehyde pyrolysis and rate equation
The pyrolysis (thermal decomposition) of acetaldehyde, CH3CHO (g) → CH4 (g) + CO (g), proceeds via the Rice-Herzfeld mechanism:

 * Initiation (formation of free radicals):

 * CH3CHO (g) → •CH3 (g) + •CHO (g)	             k1

The methyl and CHO groups are free radicals.

 * Propagation (two steps):

 * •CH3 (g) + CH3CHO (g) → CH4 (g) + •CH3CO (g)            	k2

This reaction step provides methane, which is one of the two main products.

 * •CH3CO (g) → CO (g) + •CH3 (g)		       k3

The product •CH3CO (g) of the previous step gives rise to carbon monoxide (CO), which is the second main product.

The sum of the two propagation steps corresponds to the overall reaction CH3CHO (g) → CH4 (g) + CO (g), catalyzed by a methyl radical •CH3.

 * Termination:

 * •CH3 (g) + •CH3 (g) → C2H6 (g)             	k4

This reaction is the only source of ethane (minor product) and it is concluded to be the main chain ending step.

Although this mechanism explains the principal products, there are others that are formed in a minor degree, such as acetone (CH3COCH3) and propanal (CH3CH2CHO).

Applying the Steady State Approximation for the intermediate species CH3(g) and CH3CO(g), the rate law for the formation of methane and the order of reaction are found:

The rate of formation of the product methane is

For the intermediates

and

Adding (2) and (3), we obtain

so that

Using (4) in (1) gives the rate law, which is order 3/2 in the reactant CH3CHO.

Nuclear chain reactions
A nuclear chain reaction was proposed by Leo Szilard in 1933, shortly after the neutron was discovered, yet more than five years before nuclear fission was first discovered. Szilárd knew of chemical chain reactions, and he had been reading about an energy-producing nuclear reaction involving high-energy protons bombarding lithium, demonstrated by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932. Now, Szilárd proposed to use neutrons theoretically produced from certain nuclear reactions in lighter isotopes, to induce further reactions in light isotopes that produced more neutrons. This would in theory produce a chain reaction at the level of the nucleus. He did not envision fission as one of these neutron-producing reactions, since this reaction was not known at the time. Experiments he proposed using beryllium and indium failed.

Later, after fission was discovered in 1938, Szilárd immediately realized the possibility of using neutron-induced fission as the particular nuclear reaction necessary to create a chain-reaction, so long as fission also produced neutrons. In 1939, with Enrico Fermi, Szilárd proved this neutron-multiplying reaction in uranium. In this reaction, a neutron plus a fissionable atom causes a fission resulting in a larger number of neutrons than the single one that was consumed in the initial reaction. Thus was born the practical nuclear chain reaction by the mechanism of neutron-induced nuclear fission.

Specifically, if one or more of the produced neutrons themselves interact with other fissionable nuclei, and these also undergo fission, then there is a possibility that the macroscopic overall fission reaction will not stop, but continue throughout the reaction material. This is then a self-propagating and thus self-sustaining chain reaction. This is the principle for nuclear reactors and atomic bombs.

Demonstration of a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was accomplished by Enrico Fermi and others, in the successful operation of Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, in late 1942.

Electron avalanche in gases
An electron avalanche happens between two unconnected electrodes in a gas when an electric field exceeds a certain threshold. Random thermal collisions of gas atoms may result in a few free electrons and positively charged gas ions, in a process called impact ionization. Acceleration of these free electrons in a strong electric field causes them to gain energy, and when they impact other atoms, the energy causes release of new free electrons and ions (ionization), which fuels the same process. If this process happens faster than it is naturally quenched by ions recombining, the new ions multiply in successive cycles until the gas breaks down into a plasma and current flows freely in a discharge.

Electron avalanches are essential to the dielectric breakdown process within gases. The process can culminate in corona discharges, streamers, leaders, or in a spark or continuous electric arc that completely bridges the gap. The process may extend huge sparks — streamers in lightning discharges propagate by formation of electron avalanches created in the high potential gradient ahead of the streamers' advancing tips. Once begun, avalanches are often intensified by the creation of photoelectrons as a result of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the excited medium's atoms in the aft-tip region. The extremely high temperature of the resulting plasma cracks the surrounding gas molecules and the free ions recombine to create new chemical compounds.

The process can also be used to detect radiation that initiates the process, as the passage of a single particles can be amplified to large discharges. This is the mechanism of a Geiger counter and also the visualization possible with a spark chamber and other wire chambers.

Avalanche breakdown in semiconductors
An avalanche breakdown process can happen in semiconductors, which in some ways conduct electricity analogously to a mildly ionized gas. Semiconductors rely on free electrons knocked out of the crystal by thermal vibration for conduction. Thus, unlike metals, semiconductors become better conductors the higher the temperature. This sets up conditions for the same type of positive feedback—heat from current flow causes temperature to rise, which increases charge carriers, lowering resistance, and causing more current to flow. This can continue to the point of complete breakdown of normal resistance at a semiconductor junction, and failure of the device (this may be temporary or permanent depending on whether there is physical damage to the crystal). Certain devices, such as avalanche diodes, deliberately make use of the effect.

Living organisms
Examples of chain reactions in living organisms include excitation of neurons in epilepsy and lipid peroxidation. In peroxidation, a lipid radical reacts with oxygen to form a peroxyl radical (L• + O2 → LOO•). The peroxyl radical then oxidises another lipid, thus forming another lipid radical (LOO• + L–H → LOOH + L•). A chain reaction in glutamatergic synapses is the cause of synchronous discharge in some epileptic seizures.

title: Chain reaction


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Caddie

In golf or disc golf, a caddie (or caddy) is the person who assists a golfer on the course. Typical duties for a caddie include carrying a player's bag and clubs or discs, performing any course maintenance that is the player's responsibility (e.g. repairing divots and raking bunkers) and offering the player advice and moral support. Other nicknames for the position is a looper or jock.

Etymology
The Scots word caddie or cawdy was derived in the 17th century from the French word cadet and originally meant a student military officer. It later came to refer to someone who did odd jobs. By the 19th century, it had come to mean someone who carried clubs for a golfer, or in its shortened form, cad, a man of disreputable behaviour.

History
The first recorded use of a caddie was in Edinburgh in 1681 by the future James VII of Scotland when taking part in the first international golf contest.

Earnings
Caddies tend to be low paid, and usually get only a small share of prize money. At a professional level, they work as contractors to individual players but without guaranteed hours. In 2020, caddies on the PGA European Tour became eligible to earn bonuses through sponsors' logos on their gear.

In popular culture
Caddies have been depicted in television, films, and books, including:

 * The Caddy, a 1953 musical comedy film starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
 * McAuslan in the Rough, a 1974 short story by George MacDonald Fraser in which a disreputable Scottish soldier caddies for his regimental sergeant major
 * Caddyshack, a 1980 comedy film featuring Bill Murray
 * Brown's Requiem, a 1981 crime novel by James Ellroy, who worked as a caddie while writing his first books
 * The Legend of Bagger Vance, a 2000 film based on the 1995 book by Steven Pressfield, The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life, features Vance as an angelic caddie.
 * The Greatest Game Ever Played, a 2005 film about 1913 US open where Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf) wins with his caddie Eddie Lowery (Josh Flitter).
 * Loopers: The Caddie's Long Walk, a 2018 documentary narrated by Bill Murray

title: Caddie


text:
Compound turbine

A compound turbine is a steam turbine in which there are two casings, a high-pressure casing and a low-pressure casing, operating in concert to extract work from a single source of steam. The steam is partially expanded in the high-pressure casing, then exhausted to the low-pressure casing.

Tandem compound or cross compound
The rotor arrangement can be either tandem-compound in which the two axles are joined end to end, or cross-compound in which the two turbines have separate axles. In the cross-compound case two separate generators are usually supplied, although a gearbox can reduce this to one.

Advantages
The principal advantages of compound turbines are the reduction in size of any one casing, the confinement of the highest pressure to the smaller casing (which may be made of stronger and more expensive materials) and the possibility of divided flow in the low-pressure casing for the purpose of equalizing end thrusts.

title: Compound turbine