text:
Talk:Shibboleth

Lead appears to be copyvio
first line of the lead is taken verbatim from the OED. Hairhorn (talk) 20:11, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Musicians use the word 'timbre' to distinguish those who 'know' from those who don't
I have removed this as it simply untrue and a somewhat bizarre claim. I am a musician and when an individual talks about the 'timbre' of an instrument or voice, it would not mean I thought of them as knowledgeable; I might think they were pretentious or mistaken. An individual would have to demonstrate depth of knowledge to be thought of as knowledgeable, but this goes for any field, not just music. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vanda3984 (talk • contribs) 14:06, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

shibbólet
The article tells about the Hebrew word shibbólet but the rest of the article uses Shibboleth. What is the real Hebrew word? --Error (talk) 23:35, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

 * It's the same, just a matter of pronunciation. The difference is how the last Hebrew letter ת is pronounced, the same letter written with and without a dot varies in pronunciation depending on region.  Modern Hebrew pronounces it Sheebbolet not distinguishing between a ת and a .  Biblical Hebrew has variations in pronunciation depending on the tradition in the country they live.  European Jews would have the tradition that it's Sheeboles or Sheeboiles, in Morroco it would be Sheebolet, in Yemen, Sheeboleth.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by JacobGryn (talk • contribs) 21:25, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

 * In modern hebrew it still means the part of the plant (not even all the plant) that containing grains,and in most of the cases - wheat. Avibliz (talk) 20:15, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Catchword
An IP and I are in disagreement about the inclusion of a link to Catchword in the "See also" section. The IP has posted the following comments to my personal Talk page: I am moving them here, which is where they belong.

Read this before you undo the See Also again.

"Hebrew in the sense of "criterion catchword""

"What is more, it appears that this erroneous premise has been chiefly responsible for our failure to recontruct the primary details of the shibboleth incident, even though the catchword itself has long since become proverbial. We have yet to learn how suspects were caught by the catchword."

Also used here: "It is worthwhile, I think, to begin a discussion of mother tongue as shibboleth - as a test word or catchword distinguishing one group of people from another"

By WL Ballard "''The sound complex may not serve as a password, as in Israel (shibboleth 'ear of corn'), but it does appear to have been a "slogan, catchword or saying... distinctive of one group"''"

RE Holt: " A shibboleth is defined as “a word or phrase identified with one particular group; a catchword”."

Lawyer A Carnera uses this: " Shibbolethh takes place in the Trial and Verdict 12,6 as a catchword''" 97.85.173.38 (talk) 12:36, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

 * First of all, please read WP:BRD: "If your bold edit was reverted, then do not re-revert to your version". Discuss (here).

 * As I said in my edit summary, it may be that "catchword" is occasionally used in this sense. Congratulations: what you have done, with a bit of Googling, is to substantiate that. The Oxford English Dictionary includes five variant meanings for "catchword", plus one for "catchword entry", not one of which has anything to do with shibboleths, so it's clearly not a particularly common usage. However, that's not really the point. The purpose of the "See also" section is to refer the reader to pages containing additional information that is relevant (even if only tangentially relevant) to the subject matter of the present article. As Catchword deals solely with the very different printing usage of the term, it can be of no interest to anyone wanting to know about shibboleths, and we are wasting the reader's time by directing him/her to it. If you really think you have sufficient evidence for your usage, you might want to consider adding a short section to that article; in which case, a cross-link from here might become relevant. Until then, it can have no purpose whatsoever and should be removed. GrindtXX (talk) 13:30, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) Congratulations: what you have done, with a bit of Googling, is to substantiate that. - untrue and its obvious you didn't take the time to look at about 12 thesauruses for synonym's of shibboleth and I only added 3 of over 10 pages of sources available on scholar.google.com that discuss the origins of shibboleth and show usage from 1897 till 2015. I added 13 more and the Catchword article certainly needs more work.  Fred Riggs explained how the catchword came to this modern usage by saying Approximate synonyms are "catchword" and "shibboleth." Technically, the words given in bold face at the top of each page in a dictionary are "catchwords," and by extension, any word that is frequently repeated is a "catchword."
 * 2) Oxford dictionaries first definition for catchword is "a briefly popular or fashionable word or phrase used to encapsulate a particular concept: "“motivation” is a great catchword" as proven in this screengrab so you didn't actually go look up the word or the Oxford dictionary used by Bing is updated compared to your old copy.
 * Definitions of shibboleth that include catchword/catchphrase (Which goes against your suggestion that it's very uncommon usage)
 * a) Chambers Dictionary, one of the sources already in the article, uses the definition of shibboleth as - 2 a slogan, catchphrase(extended catchword), custom or belief, especially if considered outdated.
 * b) American Heritage Dictionary - a. A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause; a catchword.
 * c) Princeton Wordnet 3.1 "S: (n) motto, slogan, catchword, shibboleth (a favorite saying of a sect or political group)"
 * d) Dictionary.com - "2. a slogan; catchword."
 * e) Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary (found referenced by The Free Dictionary) gives the definition "2. a slogan; catchword." as seen in this screen grab
 * f) Our sister site, Wiktionary, has had this uncontested definition in their article since 2009: A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth.
 * g) (Tertiary) Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Ed (1989) - Shibboleth "3. fig. A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers may be discerned, or those not their followers may be excluded.” (page 5)
 * h) (Tertiary) Oxford English Dictionary - "defines shibboleth as a catchword or formula"
 * 3) Catchword is not identical to shibboleth nor has the edit to the article suggested as much. The definitions in the sources I used have catchword as an integral part of determining the overall meaning of shibboleth. Catchword refers to a specific word which can discern the difference between two cultures.  Shibboleth can refer to other customs such as religious prayers or music, articles of clothing, lack of knowledge of scripture as well as being unable to pronounce 'sh'.  However, multiple thesauruses on the internet list catchword as synonymous with shibboleth.
 * 4) "As Catchword deals solely with the very different printing usage of the term, it can be of no interest to anyone wanting to know about shibboleths" - As I stated before, the failure of that article to cover the wider usage of the term just means that article needs improvement.  An article's lack of development is not an excuse here.
 * 5) The definition's I included came from a linguist, A Jewish historian of that period and a professor of English. That should be more than  sufficient for the edit and your opposition is baffling.  97.85.173.38 (talk) 10:13, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

 * This revert with the tag ""shibboleth" represented "a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page"." is baffling because we both know that is not the sub-definition of Catchword that is being used in this situation.
 * The meaning is the second sub-meaning catchphrase(singular)- " a word or phrase that is easy to remember and is commonly used to represent or describe a person, group, idea, etc."
 * Or catchword- "1. a memorable or effective word or phrase that is repeated so often that it becomes a slogan, as in a political campaign or in advertising a product."
 * And Oxford dictionary's FIRST definition is "a briefly popular or fashionable word or phrase used to encapsulate a particular concept: "“motivation” is a great catchword"
 * It's not an edit war when I answered your concerns and showed my changes to be valid on the talk page. 97.85.173.38 (talk) 10:27, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

 * What makes the hoops I've had to jump through all that more ridiculous is that this isn't a new usage and Oxford English Dictionary also has catchword used in at least two editions.  RL Lippman used it in 1897 when he wrote about Freud. (Lippman, Robert L., and Ernest Jones. "Sigmund Freud Avoids His double, Theodor Herzl." (1897). ... due to a victorious Jewish military campaign that the Hebrew word shibboleth became a catchword used to tell friends from foes, ) 97.85.173.38 (talk) 13:58, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

 * (A) The reason I didn't provide a link to the Oxford English Dictionary (which is the parent dictionary for all other Oxford dictionaries, and generally regarded as definitive) is that it's a subscription resource to which you may not have access (and "the hoops you've had to jump through" would seem to confirm that). However, the definitions it provides for "catchword" are (with examples of usage omitted, and slightly abridged):
 * "1. Printing. The first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line.
 * 2. A word so placed as to catch the eye or attention; spec.
 * a. The word standing at the head of each article in a dictionary or the like. the word standing at the head of each article in a dictionary or the like.
 * b. The rhyme word in verse.
 * c. The last word in an actor's speech, serving as a guide to the next speaker; a cue.
 * 3. A word caught up and repeated, esp. in connection with a political or other party. (Cf. catch phrase).
 * 4. catchword entry: an entry of the name of a book in a catalogue under its most important word."
 * So yes, definition (3) covers "catchword" as an approximate synonym for "catchphrase" or "slogan", which reappears in most of the dictionary definitions you have quoted above. But nowhere is there any suggestion of "catchword" as an approximate synonym for "password", or "test word", or something intended to "catch" somebody out – a "shibboleth". Having said that, I agree that at least the first 3 of your quotations above do use it in that sense; and also (which I had not appreciated) that although the OED entry for "catchword" doesn't mention "shibboleth", the entry for "shibboleth" does mention "catchword" ("3a. fig. A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect ..."). So I would continue to argue that it is used, but it's a minority usage. The evidence would suggest that it's more of an American than a British usage, although the OED does try to cover all varieties of English.

 * (B) You have failed to understand my objections to your wikilinking to the Catchword article, either in the body of this article or in the "See also" section. If you link to another article, you're saying to the reader, "Here is a slightly obscure term, or name, or specialist reference, and it's only incidental to what I'm talking about at the moment, but if you don't understand it or want to know more, this is where you go". So you only link to it if it expands on the term in the sense you have used it: otherwise it's irrelevant, and you're wasting everyone's time. (You don't link to Perth, Australia, when what you're actually talking about is Perth in Scotland.) In the present instance, the catchword article defines "catchword" specifically as "a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page", so if you link to it, that is the definition you are accepting. So you now have two options: either you do some work on Catchword to explain that the term has other usages, and then link to it; or you don't link to it at all (and just put "catchword" here in quotation marks). I did consider suggesting that you might link to Catchword in Wiktionary, but, again, there is nothing there to support your preferred interpretation of the word.

 * (C) Having got all that out of the way, I honestly don't understand what you're trying to do with your edit. Are you using "catchword" in the sense of "catchphrase" or "slogan", or are you using it in the sense of "password" or "test word"? They're really quite different. The lede now says "A shibboleth originally represented a catchword", which (either way) is just nonsense: either it was a catchword or it wasn't: it didn't represent a catchword. The sentence then refers to a "custom whose whose pronouncing variations were used ...": how can a custom – a habitual way of behaving – possibly have "pronouncing variations"? If you could learn to write correct and clear English, we might get somewhere.

 * The lede is now a complete mess, but I'm going to leave it to others to sort out or revert completely. GrindtXX (talk) 15:03, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

The anon IP confuses the purpose of dictionary and wikipedia. In wikipedia, an article is about a particular meaning of the word In our case the article is about "word to test if he is one of us", and "obsolete slogan" meaning is only tangential to the scope of this article. A word may have different meanings, but they go into different articles. Just the same, the word "catchword" have several meanings, one of them happens to overlap with "shibboleth", and it is bad idea to define one multifaceted word with another ambiguous one. - üser:Altenmann >t 00:39, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

"Sh" / "S" in Judges 12:6
In the section on the origin of the term Shibboleth, the article as it stands currently claims that the Ephraimite dialect of Hebrew lacked a "sh" phoneme. Two sources for this claim are cited:

and.

Neither of these are by biblical scholars. The first is by someone writing about postmodern philosophy, and the other is by someone writing about how to speak good English. I've got a biblical scholarly source, on the other hand, which understands the issue differently:. It says: "The Gileadites plan to identify the Ephraimites involves a dialectical shin/samek contrast. The origin of the variation is not clear, though the issue seems to be phonetic rather than phonemic. This is probably not a case of divergent development of sibilants in Gileadite and Ephraimite dialects of Hebrew, but simply a case of the differentiation of the same sibilant in these regions. To the Gileadites, the Ephraimite pronunciation of shin sounded exactly like a samek." For this reason, I'm going to edit out the claim that the shin phoneme was missing in Ephraimite to reflect the scholarly source, and I'm going to remove the other two, non-expert sources. For all we know, those sources simply worked their opinion of the matter out by reading the Bible in English, where many translations do give the impression that Ephraimites simply lacked a "sh" phoneme. Alephb (talk) 06:14, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

 * Concur; this is the most likely situation in most scholarly opinions. Samek once was likely pronounced /ts/, while Šin once was /s/, and Śin (written the same as Šin) once was both /ɬ/ (similar to hissing from the sides of ones tongue) and /ṯ/ (IPA /θ/; the unvoiced "th" sound). During the two millennia BCE, these sounds shifted and now Samek is /s/, and Šin/Śin are /š/ (IPA /ʃ/; the "sh" sound) and /s/. During this transition, different groups at different points in the transition would be pronouncing some phonemes differently. A person writing about philosophy and a person giving instruction on English diction (and similar sources) probably should not be chosen over sources writing from more related fields (not only because of background knowledge, but the intended audiences are different and thus explanations [even with an author who is well informed] will be likely written quite differently with different intentions). — al-Shimoni  (talk) 09:25, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Pick a topic
Found this article and found the lead to be confusing and not consistent with any of the cited references. I have re-written the lead as follows:
 * A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, particularly a speech pattern, that distinguishes one group of people (an ingroup) from others (outgroups). For example, non-rhotic (r-less) pronunication in English has long been seen by many in England (and even parts of North America) as a shibboleth indicating sophistication and education.
 * Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as simple ways to maintain traditional segregations or to keep out perceived threats. In times of war it has been common for soldiers to use shibboleths to identify enemy spies or others attempting to infiltrate their ranks. Such shibboleths may include testing their speech patterns or testing their knowledge of the culture that they claim to be part of.

Granted the word shibboleth can be used in other ways but this is the way it is mostly used. The article needs to be clear on what its topic. If we start providing every definition of the word then we are violating WP:NAD.

I would toss out one additional thought. This article is currently listed under WP Judaism. Although obviously the word originates from Hebrew, the common English usage of this word does not ostensibly have anything to do with Judaism. So the question is "Is this article supposed to be about the biblical story or is it supposed to be about the concept represented by the English word shibboleth?" I would argue that if the intention is to have an article about the biblical story, then it should be named something like "Biblical shibboleth annecdote" or "Gilead/Ephraim Battle" or some such thing. But an article entitled "Shibboleth" should be about the concept of a "shibboleth" with the biblical story just a detail regarding the origins of the term.

--MC

 * Go for it. Alephb (talk) 03:47, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

 * The trouble is, you have thrown out two babies with the bathwater. The article now omits the two commonest acceptations of the word — leaving a minoritarian one.

 * In everyday modern English a shibboleth is not particularly a speech pattern; it is a "custom, principle or belief" [Oxford Dictionary of English] ""especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important" [ibid]. All other short dictionaries I have consulted agree with this definition.Ttocserp 04:47, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

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Irrelevant Paragraph Removed
Took out the following from section Modern Use:

 * By analogy with the biblical account, in information technology a shibboleth is a community-wide password that enables a member of that community to access an online resource without revealing her individual identity. The individual does not know the password that is actually employed – it is generated internally – hence cannot betray it to outsiders.

The link in the paragraph appears to refer to some sort of unified-login scheme, whose connection to Shibboleths as discussed here is tenuous and doesn't contribute anything to the clarity of this article. Also, saying that the 'individual does not know the password', even if it made sense from the technical standpoint (it doesn't), disagrees with the fact that the existence of a particular shibboleth is well-known to individuals within the group, and outsiders can certainly be made aware of its existence (whether they can take advantage of that knowledge is a different matter). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.168.78.24 (talk) 04:00, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Reverted. Improve not destroy.Ttocserp 10:59, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Though you may have clarified somewhat the mechanism of that unified login scheme, it only served to further highlight its inexistant relation to actual shibboleths. It is not descriptive enough to make the mechanism understandable (and this wouldn't be the place even if it did), and it contributes nothing but confusion to the understanding of shibboleths proper. The mention of that mechanism might be suitable, at most, for a disambiguation page or heading. So, re-reverting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.168.78.24 (talk) 10:23, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Difference between Shibboleth and Sociolect
I'm afraid I'm about to ask a stupid question, but this concept seems to have so much in common with Sociolect yet there is no discussion of that, nor vice versa. Shouldn't there be some sort of cross-mention? Moebeus (talk) 23:16, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
 * There's certainly a degree of overlap, but also significant differences: a sociolect comprises to a swathe of linguistic features that distinguish a particular community, whereas a shibboleth is a single tell-tale identifier. For the moment I have added add both articles to the "See also" section of the other. Slightly fuller discussion would certainly be in order, so be bold! GrindtXX (talk) 13:18, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

"Corn"
The English word "corn" does not mean just maize (Indian corn), except in certain contexts in North America. In other contexts it's a generic term for any kind of edible grain. (For example in the King James Bible the word occurs 235 times; never once does it mean maize, of course.) Please refer to the current editions of the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary. We keep getting editors who just show up at this article and regale us with their (limited) knowledge of the word. It's misleading and it's unnecessary in an article on shibboleths. Ttocserp (talk) 20:26, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Given that corn comes from North America, I don't understand your objection. I am reverting your edit based on the prior talk page discussion, see here. Secondly, I don't take kindly to your characterization of my contributions to Wikipedia as "we keep getting editors who just show up at this article and regale us with their (limited) knowledge of the word". There is no reason why I shouldn't "just show up" at this article or any other. I can assure you that I do have some knowledge of the word, shibboleth. I am a Jewish woman, attended elementary school in Israel and spoke Hebrew. I have since studied the tanakh in Hebrew school, and am fluent in English, with a more than adequate education in English literature from Swarthmore College. (I forgot all my Hebrew from elementary school alas, but this is English Wikipedia). I read the talk page carefully before making any edits.--FeralOink (talk) 06:36, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
 * It distresses me to have given you offence. I was unduly ironic and didn't explain my objection very well.  I apologise.   I don't doubt you know about the word shibboleth and have studied Hebrew in Israel and English in America very thoroughly.  That's not my objection.

 * My objection concerns the use of the word English "corn" in the article in an unduly restrictive North American sense. To users of American English your use of the word is perfectly correct.  In the US "corn" usually means maize, and no other sort of grain.

 * But as you know English is an official language in 94 countries, not all of which use the US variety. In many places "corn" is not thus restricted.  Says the Oxford English Dictionary As a general term the word includes all the cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc.  The word "corn" existed in England many centuries before the New World was discovered, together with its maize.  That's why, when they wanted to translate the Hebrew tanahk into English, the best scholars of the day correctly used the word "corn".  They didn't mean maize — which they knew about, and would have called "Indian corn".   They meant the staple grains of the Middle East, the very ones referred to in the Hebrew.  Ok, I'm labouring the point, but to sum up:  for many users of English Wikipedia, perhaps even the majority, your sentence "corn was found only in the New World" is not correct.  I appreciate you didn't mean it that way, but surely you can find another way of expressing it.   Can we do this consensually?  What would you propose?Ttocserp (talk) 12:57, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Earlier, a link to Ear (botany) was cast as "ear of corn". With the removal of that link, the parenthetical bit about modern usage of maize/corn now stands without context, amounting to a confusing non sequitur. This could be easily fixed by restoring the link, this time piped to "ear of grain" or "head of grain". Even so, I do not see any need for the parenthetical bit about the different usages of "corn".

Also, this edit removed the sense of "river or torrent". Why? Just plain Bill (talk) 13:38, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

 * Agree entirely with Just plain Bill. If we are not quoting or citing a source that uses the word "corn" (as we currently are not), there is no point whatsoever in including this parenthetical aside: it is irrelevant to the topic of this article. And even if we do revert to quoting such a source, there is still very little point in including this comment unless there is a serious risk of ambiguity: surely we can expect the reader to be bright enough to appreciate that languages evolve and that, whatever the modified meaning of the word in Modern Hebrew, the writers of Biblical Hebrew are unlikely to have been referring to a crop that was unknown in the Old World at that time. GrindtXX (talk) 14:45, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

 * I agree with Just plain Bill, that it would be best to restore the wikilink to Ear (botany), but piped to "ear of grain" or "head of grain", and remove the other content about maize I added. What I added was confusing. I had been motivated by the earlier talk page commentary, but didn't go about making such changes properly. As for the meaning of "river or torrent", I think I removed it because it was unsourced and I could find nothing supporting such usage at the time. Is there?--FeralOink (talk) 14:51, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

 * I agree with Just plain Bill and GrindtXX that we should go back to the earlier version, which anyway contained valid historical information, now suppressed for no apparent reason.Ttocserp (talk) 10:54, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

 * As for "river or torrent", this is extremely confusing and seems to refer to Biblical Hebrew about which current and even past scholars of the Bible and Hebrew were uncertain about. William Safire wrote about it, as did many others. Start here, which references Safire: "'The meaning of the word is of minor importance. Elsewhere in the Old Testament it has the sense of 'ear of corn' (Gen 41:5 ff.; Ruth 2:2; Zach 4:12) or, less commonly, 'flood, torrent' (Psalms 69:3,16; Isa. 27:12). In out passage it is taken in the former sense by such versions as the Greek Codex Vaticanus and Aquila, as well as some modern scholars (Cf. Liebmann ZAW 25 (1905) 161). On the other hand, reference to flowing water is assumed by the medieval Hebrew commentators and a majority of the moderns, evidently because such an allusion would be more appropriate to the occasion.'"
 * The Forward doesn't help much: "'Stachys means “an ear of wheat” in Greek, which is also the primary meaning (and in the modern language, the only one) of shibboleth in Hebrew, and the Greek translators, unable to reproduce the first letter of the Hebrew word in Greek, chose to convey the general sense of the episode without specifying the exact nature of the Ephraimites’ mispronunciation. In doing so, however, they made an amusing mistake. This is because shibboleth in ancient Hebrew can also mean “a strong current of water” or “whirlpool” — and in view of the fact that our story takes place at “the fords of the Jordan,” this is clearly the meaning that the Gileadites, who could have chosen any word beginning with shin, had in mind.'"
 * I am really confused now. The word שבלת (shibboleth) is a feminine noun meaning either an ear of grain or a flowing stream but that was supposedly because the men of Gilead connected the growing of grain to the flowing of a river, see this section on the etymology of shibboleth. I don't have anything further to add and will bow out now. Thank you for your patience with me here, all three of you.--FeralOink (talk) 15:37, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Tumblr example of furitive shibboleth
From tumblr, I forget how long ago: "I like your shoelaces!", with the proper response "Thanks! I stole them from the president." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.170.206.214 (talk) 18:42, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Title image
The illustration shows villagers producing icons to avoid being murdered. This is not really an illustration of a shibboleth; however. It is more like a passport. The icon is supposed to work because the persecutors think Jews are unlikely to possess one.

A shibboleth is an innate behavioural characteristic an outsider cannot convincingly imitate. A passport or the like is a physical possession that qualifies you for preferred treatment. A passport, a credit card, a driving license, your fingerprint, even your facial appearance — all these things may indeed distinguish you from outsiders or guarantee you advantageous treatment, but they are not true shibboleths,Ttocserp 02:17, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

 * That's a fair argument. Personally, I feel there's enough overlap to justify including this image in the body of the article (given the difficulty of finding images that illustrate a behavioural characteristic graphically), but probably not to justify having it as the lede image. I would therefore propose restoring the "Tchoupitoulas Street" photo to the lede (where it used to be), and moving the icons image down (at a reduced size) to the Examples section. Other comments? GrindtXX (talk) 15:12, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * "Tchoupitoulas Street" is a valid example. Shibboleths were originally tests of vocal performance, unless I am mistaken. Diction, or choice of words, and verbal pass phrases seem to have come under this category. Haircuts, wardrobe choices, or displayed icons may serve similar aims, but are strictly speaking not shibboleths. Just plain Bill (talk) 17:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, at the moment there seems to be a consensus for swapping the two images.Ttocserp 01:02, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, I've switched them GrindtXX (talk) 14:06, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Offensive example
The image used as an example under Modern Usage is offensive. The image description perpetuates the "out of town" or "Paid protestor" conspiracy theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.80.150.106 (talk) 13:34, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

 * I'm not sure what you find offensive. There's nothing here to suggest any "'Paid protestor' conspiracy theory". The person pictured is making the argument that local decisions should be made by local people: whether you agree with that or not, it's a point of view, and certainly doesn't make the image "offensive". And WP:NOTCENSORED. GrindtXX (talk) 15:00, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Xenophobia is offensive, it's not something you promote, such as by uncritically platforming it. The use of the image is xenophobic. A corresponding image that favoured causes or persons the left doesn't like would be quickly identified as such and removed/replaced.
 * Personofcanada (talk) 02:11, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

"Flood or torrent"?!
The article says that another meaning of the word shibboleth in Hebrew, part of the head of a stalk of wheat or rye, is "flood or torrent". It admits that this is "less commonly (but arguably more appositely)", but as a Hebrew speaker with a deep Biblical knowledge, I'm sorry to say that this is simply a mistake. Yes, I read the sources that claim that this is a possible translation but I'm not convinced and I recommend to delete this addition. Tamar Hayardeni תמר הירדני (talk) 01:33, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, since Ephraim Avigdor Speiser — who was a full professor of Semitics at the University of Pennsylvania — published a paper opining otherwise, maybe you'd better publish a work saying he was wrong. When and if this commands universal support among biblical scholars, then we can revisit the topic.Ttocserp 02:22, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Tchoupitoulas again
diff Image removed, edit comment asserting it was "irrelevant." Pronunciation as a means of identifying out-of-towners (without standing to contest a local matter) seems like a quintessential shibboleth. Kindly discuss... Just plain Bill (talk) 19:28, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I have restored this image, which is plainly and unarguably a relevant example.Ttocserp 19:39, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Shibboleth
Torontonians also distinguish people from Toronto from others by the pronunciation of the city's name. Those from Toronto will usually pronounce it as "Trawna" or "Torawna". To enunciate the name is to mark oneself as an outsider, or suburb dweller. 142.118.70.217 (talk) 12:11, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

 * Definitely a better example than the xenophobic example image at the top of the page.
 * Personofcanada (talk) 02:12, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Nevada example
The Nevada example states the pronunciation with an /ɑ/ vowel is closer to that of the original Spanish than the /æ/ vowel with no citation. Without evidence of a formant chart or similar this claim cannot be so assuredly made Pienasula (talk) 23:08, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

A South African example
In South Africa, during one of our waves of xenophobic attacks, people would often be asked what an elbow was in Zulu (“indololwane”) to identify if they were locals or foreigners. Is this an example of a shibboleth? If so, I think it could be added.

link:

https://mg.co.za/article/2019-09-13-00-the-torment-of-being-a-questionable-south-african/?amp 169.0.54.66 (talk) 18:03, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

The "r" in Thunder is also a shibboleth
"Another sign/countersign used by the Allied forces: the challenge/sign was 'flash', the password 'thunder', and the countersign 'Welcome'. This was used during D-Day during World War II due to the rarity of the voiceless dental fricative (th-sound) and voiced labial–velar approximant (w-sound) in German."

I don't know the phonetic terminology but I've noticed that Germans struggle with the hard "arrrr" sound. A german would probably say "Sund-air" instead of the American "Thundurrr". So this shibboleth has two phonetic challenges, the "th" and "-er".

Keith (Hypergeek14)Talk 21:51, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Pike Place in Seattle?
Tourists in Seattle often add a mistaken "s" and pronounce it "Pike's Place" or possibly "Pikes Place". This is used to identify both tourists around the large market, as well as newcomers to the city generally. I noticed there wasn't any "tourist tests" on this page yet, but I assume that is a very common branch of this phenomenon. Would an example like this be helpful? Jdftba (talk) 17:46, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
 * A better example is already in the title image.Ttocserp 20:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

5 yen and 50 sen
This is in danger of perpetuating "5 yen and 50 sen" into yet another urban myth. It is very poorly supported by the cited sources.

The first source (Lee 2013) is a serious scholarly article. It describes the 1923 earthquake massacre and says that various devices were used to identify Koreans, including racial appearance and inability to pronounce various Japanese phrases. It nowhere mentions yen and sen.

The second source (Hankyoreh 2007) is an English-language newspaper article about a play in a small theatre in Kyoto. In this play there is a scene where Koreans are told to say a Japanese phrase (not specified), which the newspaper article translates as "5 yen and 50 sen". According to the playwright the information comes from his father's diary.

I have looked in vain for serious scholarly sources that support this particular shibboleth.

In the first place, this is a synthesis of two disparate sources contrary to WP:SYNTH.

In the second place, it is clear that "5 yen and 50 sen" was, at most, one of many devices used in an attempt to identify Koreans. Anyway it is not what they actually said, only an English translation.

My understanding is that the Japanese phrase would not have been very hard for Koreans to pronounce anyway; therefore, why should we suppose this particular shibboleth was widely used? It might have been used once, for all we know. No cited source claims otherwise.

Therefore, absent a much better source, it should not be in this article. Ttocserp 22:28, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Shibboleth


text:
Bergen, Limburg

Bergen (Baerge ) is a municipality and a village in south-eastern Netherlands.

Population centres
• Bergen

• Afferden

• Aijen

• Bleijenbeek

• Nieuw-Bergen

• Siebengewald

• Well

• Wellerlooi

The village of Bergen
The village of Bergen lies about 28 km north of Venlo, close to the river Meuse. Although the municipality is named after this village, the municipal hall is located in the town of Nieuw-Bergen, the largest settlement in the municipality. It is located near the German border, approximately 5 miles from Nieuw-Bergen, with Weeze Airport also just a short distance away.

In 2001, Bergen had 304 inhabitants. The built-up area of the village was 0.09 km², and contained 109 residences.

Topography

Gem-BergenL-OpenTopo

Notable people

 * Klaas de Groot (born 1940 in Bergen) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Twente, does research and development of bioceramics
 * Theo Nikkessen (born 1941 in Siebengewald) a retired Dutch amateur track cyclist, competed at the 1960 Summer Olympics
 * Rob Mulders (1967 in Well – 1998) a Dutch road racing cyclist
 * Lieke Martens (born 1992 in Bergen) a Dutch footballer who plays for Paris Saint Germain (PSG), UEFA Women's Player of the Year in 2017 and FIFA Women's Player of The Year

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

title: Bergen, Limburg


text:
Romano-British culture

The Romano-British culture arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest in AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, a people of Celtic language and custom.

Scholars such as Christopher Snyder believe that during the 5th and 6th centuries – approximately from 410 when the Roman legions withdrew, to 597 when St Augustine of Canterbury arrived – southern Britain preserved an active sub-Roman culture that survived the attacks from the Anglo-Saxons and even used a vernacular Latin when writing.

Arrival of the Romans

Roman troops, mainly from nearby provinces, invaded in AD 43, in what is now part of England, during the reign of Emperor Claudius. Over the next few years the province of Britannia was formed, eventually including the whole of what later became England and Wales and parts of Scotland. The Claudian army took over Colchester and eleven tribal kings of Britain also surrendered to the Roman army. By AD 47, the Romans had invaded southern Britain and claimed territory that held many natural resources. This led to an increase in imperial wealth. The Romans developed the city of Colchester through urbanisation and new clusters of public buildings. The Roman army and their families and dependents amounted to 125,000 people, out of Britannia's total population of 3.6 million at the end of the fourth century. There were also many migrants of other professions, such as sculptors (Barates) from Roman Syria and doctors from the Eastern Mediterranean region. Romano-British cultures and religions continued to diversify; while the populace remained mainly Celtic, there was an increase in Romanisation.

The bulk of the population was rural and engaged in agriculture; from a total population of 3.6 million at the end of the fourth century, the urban population was about 240,000 people, with the capital city of Londinium having about 60,000 people. Londinium was an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, including natives of Britannia, and immigrants from continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. There was also cultural diversity in other Roman-British towns, which were sustained by considerable migration, both within Britannia and from other Roman territories, including North Africa, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean, and continental Europe.

Christianity came to Britain in the 3rd century. One early figure was Saint Alban, who (according to tradition) was martyred near the Roman town of Verulamium, on the site of the modern St Albans, during the reign of Emperor Decius.

Roman citizenship
One aspect of Roman influence seen in British life was the grant of Roman citizenship. At first this was granted very selectively: to the council members of certain classes of towns, whom Roman practice made citizens; to veterans, either legionaries or soldiers in auxiliary units; and to a number of natives whose patrons obtained citizenship for them. The granting of Roman citizenship was gradually expanded and more people from provinces became citizens. One way for a provincial inhabitant to become a citizen was to serve in the Roman army or a city council. The number of citizens steadily increased, as people inherited citizenship and more grants were made by the emperors. Eventually in 212 or early 213 AD, everybody living in the provinces except slaves and freed slaves were granted citizenship by the Constitutio Antoniniana. Roman citizenship held many benefits; for example, citizens could make their own decisions, could request protection, and could share possessions/responsibilities within the community under the protection of Roman law.

The other inhabitants of Britain, who did not enjoy citizenship, the Peregrini, continued to live under the laws of their ancestors. Principal handicaps were that they could not own land with a Latin title, serve as a legionary in the army, or, in general, inherit from a Roman citizen. In the Republic, foreign peregrini were further named as peregrini dediticii which meant they were "surrendered foreigners" and forbidden to gain Roman citizenship. These surrendered foreigners were not provided with any of the benefits, duties, status or sense of identity of citizens. Romans continued to stigmatize peregrini dediticii as freedmen or foreigners who were tortured and excluded from citizenship forever.

Roman departure from Britain
Eventually emperor Honorius ordered Roman troops back home to help defend Italy against invasion. Constantine III initially rebelled against Honorius and took further troops to Gaul, but was later recognised as a joint emperor.

After the Roman departure from Britain, the Romano-British were advised by Honorius to "look to their own defences". A written plea with General Flavius Aëtius as one of its believed recipients, known as the Groans of the Britons, may have brought some brief naval assistance from the fading Roman Empire of the West, but otherwise they were on their own.

Post-Roman period

In the early stages the lowlands and cities may have had some organisation or "council" and the Bishop of London appears to have played a key role, but they were divided politically as former soldiers, mercenaries, nobles, officials and farmers declared themselves kings, fighting amongst each other and leaving Britain open to invasion. Two factions may have emerged: a pro-Roman faction and an independence faction. The one leader at this time known by name is Vortigern, which may have been a title meaning "High King". The depredations of the Picts from the north and Scotti (Scots) from Ireland forced the Britons to seek help from pagan Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who then decided to settle in Britain. Some of the Romano-British people migrated to Brittany, the Kingdom of the Suebi and possibly Ireland.

The Anglo-Saxons obtained control of eastern England in the 5th century. In the mid-6th century, they started expanding into the Midlands, then in the 7th century they expanded again into the southwest and the north of England. The unconquered parts of southern Britain, notably Wales, retained their Romano-British culture, in particular retaining Christianity. Members of groups who spoke Germanic also migrated to the southern section of Great Britain. Cultural exchange is seen in the post-Roman period with these Germanic settlements.

Some Anglo-Saxon histories (in context) refer to the Romano-British people by the blanket term "Welsh". The term Welsh is derived from an Old English word meaning 'foreigner', referring to the old inhabitants of southern Britain. Historically, Wales and the south-western peninsula were known respectively as North Wales and West Wales. The Celtic north of England and southern Scotland was referred to in Welsh as Hen Ogledd ("old north").

The struggles of this period have given rise to the legends of Uther Pendragon and King Arthur. There are many theories, but it is sometimes said that Ambrosius Aurelianus, a resistance leader of the Romano-British forces, was the model for the former, and that Arthur's court of Camelot is an idealised Welsh and Cornish memory of pre-Saxon Romano-British civilisation.

title: Romano-British culture


text:
Topkapi (film)

Topkapi is a 1964 American Technicolor heist film produced by Filmways Pictures and distributed by United Artists. The film was produced and directed by the émigré American film director Jules Dassin. The film is based on Eric Ambler's novel The Light of Day (1962), adapted as a screenplay by Monja Danischewsky.

The film stars Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximilian Schell, Robert Morley and Akim Tamiroff. The music score was by Manos Hadjidakis, the cinematography by Henri Alekan and the costume design by Theoni V. Aldredge. The film won an Academy Award in 1965, with Peter Ustinov taking home the trophy for Best Supporting Actor, his second such award in four years.

Plot
Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) visits Istanbul, where she sees a traveling fair featuring replicas of treasures from the Topkapı Palace. Next she cases the Topkapı, fascinated by the emerald-encrusted dagger of Sultan Mahmud I. Leaving Turkey, she recruits her ex-lover, Swiss master-criminal Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell), to plan a theft of the dagger. They engage Cedric Page (Robert Morley), master of all things mechanical; Giulio, "The Human Fly" (Gilles Ségal), a mute acrobat; and the burly Hans (Jess Hahn), who will provide the muscle needed for the job.

Harper and Lipp then hire small-time hustler Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov) to drive a car into Turkey to transport hidden explosives and firearms for use in the burglary. Simpson, knowing nothing of Harper's and Lipp's plans, is arrested at the border when Turkish Customs find the firearms. Because Simpson has no information for Turkish police, they conclude that the weapons are to be used in an assassination. Turkish Major Tufan decides to use Simpson to spy on Harper and Lipp for the police. Page, picking up the car in Istanbul, is told by a police ruse that only the "importer" Simpson is permitted to drive it in Turkey. While traveling with the gang, Simpson leaves cryptic notes for his police handlers, but most of his intelligence is worthless since Simpson is still ignorant of the plan.

Hans' hands are injured in a scuffle with the drunken cook, Gerven (Akim Tamiroff), and Simpson is engaged as a substitute, prompting him to confess that the police are watching them. Knowing they face arrest if they try to escape Turkey, or use their equipment, Harper improvises a new plan in which they will give the still-oblivious police the slip, and steal the dagger without using their weapons. Then they'll "surrender" to the police, and claim to have found explosives in their car. Just before they leave, Simpson discards his last note, then leaves with the others.

Harper arranges to give the police the slip. That evening, Harper, Simpson, and Giulio, after attending a competition of Turkish wrestling, steal the dagger and leave a replica in its place. Unnoticed by the thieves, during the robbery a bird flies through the window they entered by and is trapped inside the room when the window is closed.

The gang deliver the dagger to Joseph (Joe Dassin), proprietor of the traveling fair display, who will smuggle it out of the country. The gang members then go to police headquarters to "reveal" their discovery of weapons in the car. The inspector asks Simpson to vouch for Harper and Lipp's whereabouts that day. Simpson, seeming to waver, throws in his lot with the others, and backs up their alibi. Before the police release Simpson and the others, the trapped bird in the Topkapı triggers the alarm, alerting police officers across Istanbul. When word of the Topkapı alarm reaches the police, Major Tufan confronts the thieves, displaying Simpson's last note, which has just enough information to link all of them to the theft. Tufan tells them all that he now knows why they were in Turkey. "A little bird told me," he says.

Ultimately, the gang is seen in a Turkish prison, where Lipp begins to tell them of her fascination with the Russian Imperial Crown Jewels in the Kremlin. The end title sequence shows them apparently having escaped from jail some time later and walking in snow by a Russian city.

Production
Ambler's novel is different from the movie on several counts, with the story narrated by Simpson (named Arthur Abdel Simpson in the book), so that the reader only gradually comes to work out what Harper and his associates are really up to. Simpson in the book is blackmailed into driving the car to Istanbul after Harper catches him trying to steal Harper's travelers' checks. The book features frequent flashbacks to Simpson's schooldays in England, which help to explain his character and motives more clearly than in the film.

According to Jules Dassin, he originally planned to cast Peter Sellers as Simpson, but Sellers refused to work with Maximilian Schell, who he claimed had a reputation for being difficult. Dassin was not prepared to dispense with Schell, and so cast Ustinov in place of Sellers.

Peter Ustinov won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Simpson. It was his second win in the category, having won four years previously for Spartacus.

Appearing in supporting roles were Gilles Ségal as the “human fly" and Joe Dassin as Joseph, who runs the traveling fair display that is supposed to smuggle the dagger out of Turkey. The athletic Ségal later inspired other 'trickwire' stunts, including a few used for the Mission: Impossible TV show and movie. Joe Dassin was the son of the film's director Jules Dassin: he appeared as an actor in a handful of films, but was better known as a singer-songwriter.

The film was shot on location in Istanbul, Turkey, in Kavala, Greece, and in Paris at the Boulogne-Billancourt Studios starting on August 12th, 1963.

Reception
The film earned $7 million at the box office, earning $4 million in US theatrical rentals.

Legacy
Topkapi later inspired the Mission: Impossible TV show, and the scene in which a character hangs by a wire in order to steal a dagger inspired a similar scene in the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) rappels into a secure room to access a computer.

title: Topkapi (film)


text:
Magnetar

A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field (~109 to 1011 T, ~1013 to 1015 G). The magnetic-field decay powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.

The existence of magnetars was proposed in 1992 by Robert Duncan and Christopher Thompson. Their proposal sought to explain the properties of transient sources of gamma rays, now known as soft gamma repeaters (SGRs). Over the following decade, the magnetar hypothesis became widely accepted, and was extended to explain anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs). , 24 magnetars have been confirmed.

It has been suggested that magnetars are the source of fast radio bursts (FRB), in particular as a result of findings in 2020 by scientists using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

Description
Like other neutron stars, magnetars are around 20 km in diameter, and have a mass of about 1.4 solar masses. They are formed by the collapse of a star with a mass 10–25 times that of the Sun. The density of the interior of a magnetar is such that a tablespoon of its substance would have a mass of over 100 million tons. Magnetars are differentiated from other neutron stars by having even stronger magnetic fields, and by rotating more slowly in comparison. Most observed magnetars rotate once every two to ten seconds, whereas typical neutron stars, observed as radio pulsars, rotate one to ten times per second. A magnetar's magnetic field gives rise to very strong and characteristic bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. The active life of a magnetar is short compared to other celestial bodies. Their strong magnetic fields decay after about 10,000 years, after which activity and strong X-ray emission cease. Given the number of magnetars observable today, one estimate puts the number of inactive magnetars in the Milky Way at 30 million or more.

Starquakes triggered on the surface of the magnetar disturb the magnetic field which encompasses it, often leading to extremely powerful gamma-ray flare emissions which have been recorded on Earth in 1979, 1998 and 2004.

Magnetic field
Magnetars are characterized by their extremely powerful magnetic fields of ~109 to 1011 T. These magnetic fields are a hundred million times stronger than any man-made magnet, and about a trillion times more powerful than the field surrounding Earth. Earth has a geomagnetic field of 30–60 microteslas, and a neodymium-based, rare-earth magnet has a field of about 1.25 tesla, with a magnetic energy density of 4.0 × 105 J/m3. A magnetar's 1010 tesla field, by contrast, has an energy density of $4 J/m3$, with an E/c2 mass density more than 10,000 times that of lead. The magnetic field of a magnetar would be lethal even at a distance of 1,000 km due to the strong magnetic field distorting the electron clouds of the subject's constituent atoms, rendering the chemistry of known lifeforms impossible. At a distance of halfway from Earth to the moon, an average distance between the Earth and the Moon being 384400 km, a magnetar could wipe information from the magnetic stripes of all credit cards on Earth. , they are the most powerful magnetic objects detected throughout the universe.

As described in the February 2003 Scientific American cover story, remarkable things happen within a magnetic field of magnetar strength. "X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron." In a field of about 105 teslas atomic orbitals deform into rod shapes. At 1010 teslas, a hydrogen atom becomes 200 times as narrow as its normal diameter.

Origins of magnetic fields
The dominant model of the strong fields of magnetars is that it results from a magnetohydrodynamic dynamo process in the turbulent, extremely dense conducting fluid that exists before the neutron star settles into its equilibrium configuration. These fields then persist due to persistent currents in a proton-superconductor phase of matter that exists at an intermediate depth within the neutron star (where neutrons predominate by mass). A similar magnetohydrodynamic dynamo process produces even more intense transient fields during coalescence of pairs of neutron stars. An alternative model is that they simply result from the collapse of stars with unusually strong magnetic fields.

Formation
In a supernova, a star collapses to a neutron star, and its magnetic field increases dramatically in strength through conservation of magnetic flux. Halving a linear dimension increases the magnetic field strength fourfold. Duncan and Thompson calculated that when the spin, temperature and magnetic field of a newly formed neutron star falls into the right ranges, a dynamo mechanism could act, converting heat and rotational energy into magnetic energy and increasing the magnetic field, normally an already enormous 108 teslas, to more than 1011 teslas (or 1015 gauss). The result is a magnetar. It is estimated that about one in ten supernova explosions results in a magnetar rather than a more standard neutron star or pulsar.

1979 discovery
On March 5, 1979, a few months after the successful dropping of Landers into the atmosphere of Venus, the two uncrewed Soviet spaceprobes Venera 11 and 12, then in heliocentric orbit, were hit by a blast of gamma radiation at approximately 10:51 EST. This contact raised the radiation readings on both the probes from a normal 100 counts per second to over 200,000 counts a second in only a fraction of a millisecond.

Eleven seconds later, Helios 2, a NASA probe, itself in orbit around the Sun, was saturated by the blast of radiation. It soon hit Venus, where the Pioneer Venus Orbiter's detectors were overcome by the wave. Shortly thereafter the gamma rays inundated the detectors of three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory, all orbiting Earth. Before exiting the solar system the radiation was detected by the International Sun–Earth Explorer in halo orbit.

This was the strongest wave of extra-solar gamma rays ever detected at over 100 times as intense as any previously known burst. Given the speed of light and its detection by several widely dispersed spacecraft, the source of the gamma radiation could be triangulated to within an accuracy of approximately 2 arcseconds. The direction of the source corresponded with the remnants of a star that had gone supernova around 3000 BCE. It was in the Large Magellanic Cloud and the source was named SGR 0525-66; the event itself was named GRB 790305b, the first-observed SGR megaflare.

Recent discoveries
On February 21, 2008, it was announced that NASA and researchers at McGill University had discovered a neutron star with the properties of a radio pulsar which emitted some magnetically powered bursts, like a magnetar. This suggests that magnetars are not merely a rare type of pulsar but may be a (possibly reversible) phase in the lives of some pulsars. On September 24, 2008, ESO announced what it ascertained was the first optically active magnetar-candidate yet discovered, using ESO's Very Large Telescope. The newly discovered object was designated SWIFT J195509+261406. On September 1, 2014, ESA released news of a magnetar close to supernova remnant Kesteven 79. Astronomers from Europe and China discovered this magnetar, named 3XMM J185246.6+003317, in 2013 by looking at images that had been taken in 2008 and 2009. In 2013, a magnetar PSR J1745−2900 was discovered, which orbits the black hole in the Sagittarius A* system. This object provides a valuable tool for studying the ionized interstellar medium toward the Galactic Center. In 2018, the temporary result of the merger of two neutron stars was determined to be a hypermassive magnetar, which shortly collapsed into a black hole.

In April 2020, a possible link between fast radio bursts (FRBs) and magnetars was suggested, based on observations of SGR 1935+2154, a likely magnetar located in the Milky Way galaxy.

Known magnetars
, 24 magnetars are known, with six more candidates awaiting confirmation. A full listing is given in the McGill SGR/AXP Online Catalog. Examples of known magnetars include:
 * SGR 0525−66, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located about 163,000 light-years from Earth, the first found (in 1979)
 * SGR 1806−20, located 50,000 light-years from Earth on the far side of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius and the most magnetized object known.
 * SGR 1900+14, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. After a long period of low emissions (significant bursts only in 1979 and 1993) it became active in May–August 1998, and a burst detected on August 27, 1998, was of sufficient power to force NEAR Shoemaker to shut down to prevent damage and to saturate instruments on BeppoSAX, WIND and RXTE. On May 29, 2008, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope discovered a ring of matter around this magnetar. It is thought that this ring formed in the 1998 burst.
 * SGR 0501+4516 was discovered on 22 August 2008.
 * 1E 1048.1−5937, located 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The original star, from which the magnetar formed, had a mass 30 to 40 times that of the Sun.
 * , ESO reports identification of an object which it has initially identified as a magnetar, SWIFT J195509+261406, originally identified by a gamma-ray burst (GRB 070610).
 * CXO J164710.2-455216, located in the massive galactic cluster Westerlund 1, which formed from a star with a mass in excess of 40 solar masses.
 * SWIFT J1822.3 Star-1606 discovered on 14 July 2011 by Italian and Spanish researchers of CSIC at Madrid and Catalonia. This magnetar contrary to previsions has a low external magnetic field, and it might be as young as half a million years.
 * 3XMM J185246.6+003317, discovered by international team of astronomers, looking at data from ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope.
 * SGR 1935+2154, emitted a pair of luminous radio bursts on 28 April 2020. There was speculation that these may be galactic examples of fast radio bursts.
 * Swift J1818.0-1607, X-ray burst detected March 2020, is one of five known magnetars that are also radio pulsars. By its time of discovery, it may be only 240 years old.

Bright supernovae
Unusually bright supernovae are thought to result from the death of very large stars as pair-instability supernovae (or pulsational pair-instability supernovae). However, recent research by astronomers has postulated that energy released from newly formed magnetars into the surrounding supernova remnants may be responsible for some of the brightest supernovae, such as SN 2005ap and SN 2008es.

title: Magnetar


text:
Avalon

Avalon is a mythical island featured in the Arthurian legend. It first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 1136 Historia Regum Britanniae as a place of magic where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was made and later where Arthur was taken to recover from being gravely wounded at the Battle of Camlann. Since then, the island has become a symbol of Arthurian mythology, similar to Arthur's castle of Camelot.

Avalon was associated from an early date with mystical practices and magical figures such as King Arthur's sorceress sister Morgan, cast as the island's ruler by Geoffrey and many later authors. Certain Briton traditions have maintained that Arthur is an eternal king who had never truly died but would return as the "once and future" king. The particular motif of his rest in Morgan's care in Avalon has become especially popular. It can be found in various versions in many French and other medieval Arthurian and other works written in the wake of Geoffrey, some of them also linking Avalon with the legend of the Holy Grail.

Avalon has often been identified as the former island of Glastonbury Tor. An early and long-standing belief involves the purported discovery of Arthur's remains and their later grand reburial in accordance with the medieval English tradition, in which Arthur did not survive the fatal injuries he suffered in his final battle. Besides Glastonbury, several other alternative locations of Avalon have also been claimed or proposed. Many medieval sources also localized the place in Sicily, and European folklore connected it with the phenomenon of Fata Morgana and Mount Etna.

Etymology
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudo-chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae ("The History of the Kings of Britain", c. 1136) calls the place Insula Avallonis, meaning the "Isle of Avallon" in Latin. In his later Vita Merlini ("The Life of Merlin", c. 1150), he calls it Insula Pomorum, the "Isle of Fruit Trees" (from Latin pōmus "fruit tree"). The name is generally considered to be of Welsh origin (a Cornish or Breton origin is also possible), from Old Welsh, Old Cornish, or Old Breton aball or avallen(n), "apple tree, fruit tree" (cf. Welsh afal, from Proto-Celtic *abalnā, literally "fruit-bearing (thing)").

The tradition of an "apple" island among the ancient Britons may also be related to Irish legends of the otherworld island home of Manannán mac Lir and Lugh, Emain Ablach (also the Old Irish poetic name for Isle of Man), where Ablach means "Having Apple Trees" — from Old Irish aball ("apple") — and is similar to the Middle Welsh name Afallach, which was used to replace the name Avalon in medieval Welsh translations of French and Latin Arthurian tales. All are related to the Gaulish root *aballo "fruit tree" (found in the place name Aballo/Aballone) and are derived from Proto-Celtic *abal- "apple", which is related at the Indo-European level to English apple, Russian яблоко (jabloko), Latvian ābele, et al.

In the early 12th century, William of Malmesbury claimed the name of Avalon came from a man called Avalloc, who once lived on this isle with his daughters. Gerald of Wales similarly derived the name of Avalon from its purported former ruler, Avallo. The name is also similar to "Avallus", described by Pliny the Elder in his 1st-century Naturalis Historia as a mysterious island where amber could be found.

Geoffrey of Monmouth
According to Geoffrey in the Historia, and much subsequent literature which he inspired, King Arthur was taken to Avalon (Avallon) in hope that he could be saved and recover from his mortal wounds following the tragic Battle of Camlann. Geoffrey first mentions Avalon as the place where Arthur's sword Excalibur (Caliburn) was forged.

Geoffrey dealt with the subject in more detail in the Vita Merlini, in which he describes for the first time in Arthurian legend the fairy or fae-like enchantress Morgan (Morgen) as the chief of nine sisters (including Moronoe, Mazoe, Gliten, Glitonea, Gliton, Tyronoe and Thiten) who rule Avalon. Geoffrey's telling (in the in-story narration by the bard Taliesin) indicates a sea voyage was needed to get there. His description of Avalon here, which is heavily indebted to the early medieval Spanish scholar Isidore of Seville (being mostly derived from the section on famous islands in Isidore's work Etymologiae, XIV.6.8 "Fortunatae Insulae"),   shows the magical nature of the island:

In Layamon's Brut version of the Historia, Arthur is taken to Avalon to be healed there through means of magic water by a distinctively Anglo-Saxon version of Morgan: an elf queen of Avalon named Argante. Geoffrey's Merlin not only never visits Avalon but is not even aware of its existence. This would change to various degrees in the later Arthurian prose romance tradition that expanded on Merlin's association with Arthur as well on Avalon itself.

Later medieval literature

In many later versions of Arthurian legend, including Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, Morgan the Fairy and several other magical queens (either three, four or "many") arrive after the battle to take the mortally wounded Arthur from the battlefield of Camlann (Salisbury Plain in the romances) to Avalon in a black boat. Besides Morgan, who by this time had already become Arthur's supernatural sibling in the popular romance tradition, they sometimes come with the Lady of the Lake among them; the others may include the Queen of Northgales (North Wales) and the Queen of the Wasteland. In the Vulgate Queste, Morgan first tells Arthur of her intention to relocate to Avalon, "where the ladies who know all the magic in the world are" (où les dames sont qui seiuent tous les enchantemens del monde) before his final battle. Its Welsh version was also claimed, within its text, to be a translation of old Latin books from Avalon, as was the French Perlesvaus.

In Lope Garcia de Salazar's Spanish version of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, Avalon is conflated with (and explicitly named as) the mythological Island of Brasil, said to be located west of Ireland and afterwards hidden in mist by Morgan's enchantment. Avalon has been occasionally described as a valley. In Le Morte d'Arthur, for instance, Avalon is called an isle twice and a vale once (the latter in the scene of Arthur's final voyage, oddly despite Malory's adoption of the boat travel motif). Notably, the vale of Avalon (vaus d'Avaron) is mentioned twice in Robert de Boron's Arthurian prequel Joseph d'Arimathie (poem) as a place located in western Britannia, to where a fellowship of early Christians started by Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail after its long journey from the Holy Land, finally delivered there by Bron the first Fisher King.

Arthur's fate in Avalon is sometimes left untold or uncertain. Other times, his eventual death is actually confirmed, as it happens in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, where the Archbishop of Canterbury later receives Arthur's dead body and buries it at Glastonbury. In the telling from Alliterative Morte Arthure, relatively devoid of supernatural elements, it is not Morgan but the renowned physicians from Salerno who try, and fail, to save Arthur's life in Avalon. Conversely, the Gesta Regum Britanniae, an early rewrite of Geoffrey's Historia, states (in the present tense) that Morgan "keeps his healed body for her very own and they now live together." In a similar narrative, the chronicle Draco Normannicus contains a fictional letter from King Arthur to Henry II of England, claiming Arthur having been healed of his wounds and made immortal by his "deathless (eternal) nymph" sister Morgan in the holy island of Avalon (Avallonis eas insula sacra) through the island's miraculous herbs. This is similar to the British tradition mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury as having Morgan still healing Arthur's wounds opening annually ever since on the Isle of Avalon (Davalim). In the Vera historia de morte Arthuri, Arthur is taken by four of his men to Avalon in the land of Gwynedd (north-west Wales), where he is about to die but then mysteriously disappears in a mist amongst sudden great storm.

In Erec and Enide, an early Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes, the consort of Morgan early during King Arthur's rule is the Lord of the Isle of Avalon, Guinguemar (also appearing in the same or similar role under alike names in other works). The German Diu Crône says the Queen of Avalon is the goddess (göttin) Enfeidas, Arthur's aunt (sister of Uther Pendragon) and one of the guardians of the Grail. The Venician Les Prophéties de Merlin features the character of an enchantress known only as the Lady of Avalon (Dame d'Avalon), a Merlin's apprentice who is a fierce rival of Morgan as well as of Sebile, another of Merlin's female students. In the late Italian Tavola Ritonda, the lady of the island of Avalon (dama dell'isola di Vallone, likely the same as the Lady of Avalon from the Propheties ) is a fairy mother of the evil sorceress Elergia. An unnamed Lady of the Isle of Avalon (named as Lady Lyle of Avalon by Malory) also appears indirectly in the Vulgate Cycle story of Sir Balin in which her damsel brings a cursed magic sword to Camelot. The tales of the half-fairy Melusine have her grow up in the isle of Avalon.

Morgan also features as an immortal ruler of a fantastic Avalon, sometimes alongside the still-alive Arthur, in some subsequent and otherwise non-Arthurian chivalric romances such as Tirant lo Blanch, as well as the tales of Huon of Bordeaux, where the faery king Oberon is a son of either Morgan by name or "the Lady of the Secret Isle", and the legend of Ogier the Dane, where Avalon can be described as an enchanted fairy castle (chasteu d'Auallon ), as it is also in Floriant et Florete. In his La Faula, Guillem de Torroella claims to have visited the Enchanted Island (Illa Encantada) and met Arthur who has been brought back to life by Morgan and they both of them are now forever young, sustained by the Grail. In the chanson de geste La Bataille Loquifer, Morgan and her sister Marsion bring the hero Renoart to Avalon, where Arthur now prepares his return alongside Morgan, Gawain, Ywain, Perceval and Guinevere. Such stories typically take place centuries after the times of King Arthur.

Escavalon

In his final romance, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, Chrétien de Troyes also featured the sea fortress of Escavalon, ruled by the unspecified King of Escavalon. The name Escavalon might be simply a corruption of the word Avalon that can be literally translated as "Water-Avalon", albeit some scholars proposed various other developments of the name Escavalon from that of Avalon (with Roger Sherman Loomis noting the similarity of the evolution of Geoffrey's Caliburn into the Chrétien's Escalibur in the case of Excalibur ), perhaps in connection with the Old French words for either Slav or Saracen. Chretien's Escavalon was renamed as Askalon in Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who might have been either confused or inspired by the real-life Middle Eastern coastal city of Ascalon.

It is possible that the Chrétien-era Escavalon has turned or split into the Grail realm of Escalot in later prose romances. Nevertheless, the kingdoms of Escalot and Escavalon both appear concurrently in the Vulgate Cycle. There, Escavalon is ruled by King Alain, whose daughter Floree gives birth to Gawain's son Guinglain.

Connection to Glastonbury
Though no longer an island in the 12th century, the high conical bulk of Glastonbury Tor in today's South-West England had been surrounded by marsh before the draining of fenland in the Somerset Levels. In ancient times, Ponter's Ball Dyke would have guarded the only entrance to the island. The Romans eventually built another road to the island. Glastonbury's earliest name in Welsh was the Isle of Glass, which suggests that the location was at one point seen as an island. At the end of the 12th century, Gerald of Wales wrote in De instructione principis:

Around 1190, monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to have discovered the bones of Arthur and his wife Guinevere. The discovery of the burial is described by chroniclers, notably Gerald, as being just after King Henry II's reign when the new abbot of Glastonbury, Henry de Sully, commissioned a search of the abbey grounds. At a depth of 5 m (16 feet), the monks were said to have discovered an unmarked tomb with a massive treetrunk coffin and, also buried, a lead cross bearing the inscription:

Accounts of the exact inscription vary, with five different versions existing. One popular today, made famous by Malory, claims "Here lies Arthur, the king that was and the king that shall be" (Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus ), also known in the now-popular variant "the once and future king" (rex quondam et futurus). The earliest is by Gerald in Liber de Principis instructione c. 1193, who wrote that he viewed the cross in person and traced the lettering. His transcript reads: "Here lies buried the famous Arthurus with Wenneveria his second wife in the isle of Avalon" (Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus cum Wenneveria uxore sua secunda in insula Avallonia ). He wrote that in the coffin were two bodies, whom Giraldus refers to as Arthur and "his queen"; the male body's bones were described as gigantic. The account of the burial by the chronicle of Margam Abbey says three bodies were found, the other being that of Mordred; Richard Barber argues that Mordred's name was airbrushed out of the story once his reputation as a traitor was appreciated.

The story is today seen as an example of pseudoarchaeology. Historians generally dismiss the find's authenticity, attributing it to a publicity stunt performed to raise funds to rebuild the Abbey after it had been destroyed by a 1184 fire. Leslie Alcock in his Arthur's Britain postulated a theory according to which the grave site had been originally discovered in an ancient mausoleum sometime after 945 by Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, who reburied it along with the 10th-century stone cross; it would then become forgotten again until its rediscovery in 1190.

In 1278, the remains were reburied with great ceremony, attended by King Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castile, before the High Altar at Glastonbury Abbey. They were moved again in 1368 when the choir was extended. The site became the focus of pilgrimages until the dissolution of the abbey in 1539. The fact that the search for the body is connected to Henry II and Edward I, both kings who fought major Anglo-Welsh wars, has had scholars suggest that propaganda may have played a part as well. Gerald was a constant supporter of royal authority; in his account of the discovery aims to quash the idea of the possibility of King Arthur's messianic return:

The burial discovery ensured that in later romances, histories based on them and in the popular imagination, Glastonbury became increasingly identified with Avalon, an identification that continues strongly today. The later development of the legends of the Holy Grail and Joseph of Arimathea interconnected these legends with Glastonbury and with Avalon, an identification which also seems to be made in Perlesvaus. The popularity of Arthurian romances has meant this area of the Somerset Levels has today become popularly described as the Vale of Avalon.

Modern era
In more recent times, writers such as Dion Fortune, John Michell, Nicholas Mann and Geoffrey Ashe have formed theories based on perceived links between Glastonbury and Celtic legends of the Otherworld in attempts to link the location firmly with Avalon, drawing on the various legends based on Glastonbury Tor as well as drawing on ideas like Earth mysteries, ley lines and even the myth of Atlantis. Arthurian literature also continues to use Glastonbury as an important location as in The Mists of Avalon, A Glastonbury Romance, and The Bones of Avalon. Even the fact that Somerset has many apple orchards has been drawn in to support the connection. Glastonbury's reputation as the real Avalon has made it a popular site of tourism. Having become one of the major New Age communities in Europe, the area has great religious significance for neo-Pagans and modern Druids, as well as some Christians. Identification of Glastonbury with Avalon within hippie subculture, as seen in the work of Michell and in the Gandalf's Garden community, also helped inspire the annual Glastonbury Festival.

Connection with Sicily

Medieval suggestions for the location of Avalon ranged far beyond Glastonbury. They included paradisal underworld realms equated with the other side of the Earth at the antipodes, as well as Mongibel (Mount Etna) in Sicily and strait of Messina (associated there with the optical mirage phenomenon of Fata Morgana).

Other proposed locations
Pomponius Mela's ancient Roman description of the island of Île de Sein, off the coast of Brittany, was notably one of Geoffrey of Monmouth's original inspirations for his Avalon.

More recently, just as in the quest for Arthur's mythical capital Camelot, a large number of locations across Britain, France and elsewhere have been put forward as being the "real Avalon". They include Greenland or other places in or across the Atlantic, the former Roman fort of Aballava (known as Avalana by the sixth century) in Cumbria, Bardsey Island off the coast of Gwynedd, the isle of Île Aval on the coast of Brittany, and Lady's Island in Ireland's Leinster. In the works of William F. Warren, Avalon was compared to Hyperborea along with the Garden of Eden and theorized to be located in the Arctic. Geoffrey Ashe championed an association of Avalon with the town of Avallon in Burgundy, as part of a theory connecting King Arthur to the Romano-British leader Riothamus who was last seen in that area. Robert Graves identified Avalon with the Spanish island of Majorca (Mallorca), while Laurence Gardner suggested the Isle of Arran off the coast of Scotland. Graham Phillips claimed to have located the grave of the historical Arthur (Owain Ddantgwyn) in the "true site of Avalon" on a former island at Baschurch in Shropshire.

title: Avalon


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Soft gamma repeater

A soft gamma repeater (SGR) is an astronomical object which emits large bursts of gamma-rays and X-rays at irregular intervals. It is conjectured that they are a type of magnetar or, alternatively, neutron stars with fossil disks around them.

History
On March 5, 1979 a powerful gamma-ray burst was noted. As a number of receivers at different locations in the Solar System saw the burst at slightly different times, its direction could be determined, and it was shown to originate from near a supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Over time it became clear that this was not a normal gamma-ray burst. The photons were less energetic in the soft gamma-ray and hard X-ray range, and repeated bursts came from the same region.

Astronomer Chryssa Kouveliotou of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center decided to test the hypothesis that soft gamma repeaters were magnetars. According to the hypothesis, the bursts would cause the object to slow down its rotation. In 1998, she made careful comparisons of the periodicity of soft gamma repeater SGR 1806-20. The period had increased by 0.008 seconds since 1993, and she calculated that this would be explained by a magnetar with a magnetic-field strength of 8×1010 teslas (8×1014 gauss). This was enough to convince the international astronomical community that soft gamma repeaters are indeed magnetars.

An unusually spectacular soft gamma repeater burst was SGR 1900+14 observed on August 27, 1998. Despite the large distance to this SGR, estimated at 20,000 light years, the burst had large effects on the Earth's atmosphere. The atoms in the ionosphere, which are usually ionized by the Sun's radiation by day and recombine to neutral atoms by night, were ionized at nighttime at levels not much lower than the normal daytime level. The Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), an X-ray satellite, received its strongest signal from this burst at this time, even though it was directed at a different part of the sky, and should normally have been shielded from the radiation.

List of SGR
Known soft gamma repeaters include:

The numbers give the position in the sky, for example, SGR 0525-66 has a right ascension of 5h25m and a declination of −66°. The date of discovery sometimes appears in a format such as 1979/1986 to refer to the year the object was discovered, in addition to the year soft gamma repeaters were recognized as a separate class of objects rather than "normal" gamma-ray bursts.

title: Soft gamma repeater


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Detective

A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crimes by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads them to arrest criminals and enable them to be convicted in court. A detective may work for the police or privately.

Overview

Informally, and primarily in fiction, a detective is a licensed or unlicensed person who solves crimes, including historical crimes, by examining and evaluating clues and personal records in order to uncover the identity and/or whereabouts of criminals.

In some police departments, a detective position is obtained by passing a written test after a person completes the requirements for being a police officer. In many other police systems, detectives are college graduates who join directly from civilian life without first serving as uniformed officers. Some argue that detectives do a completely different job and therefore require completely different training, qualifications, qualities, and abilities than uniformed officers. The other side says that a detective who has worked as a uniformed officer will excel as a private detective due to their knowledge about standard police procedures, their contact network and their own experience with typical problems.

Some are not public officials, and may be known as a private investigator, colloquially referred to, especially in fiction, as a "PI" or "private eye", "private ducky" or "shamus".

Organization
The detective branch in most large police agencies is organized into several squads and departments, each of which specializes in investigation into a particular type of crime or a particular type of undercover operation, which may include: homicide, robbery, burglary, auto theft, organized crimes, missing persons, juvenile crime, fraud, narcotics, vice, criminal intelligence, aggravated assault/battery, sexual assault, computer crime, domestic violence, surveillance, and arson, among others.

In police departments of the United States, a regular detective typically holds the rank of "Detective". The rank structure of the officers who supervise them (who may or may not be detectives themselves) varies considerably by department. In some Commonwealth police forces, detectives have equivalent ranks to uniformed officers but with the word "Detective" prepended to it (e.g. "Detective Constable").

Private detectives
In some countries, courts and judicial processes have yet to recognize the practice of private detectives. In Portugal, presented proof loses significance when private detectives collect it. Even under these circumstances, the practice is in demand and governed by a code of conduct.

Citizen detectives
A citizen detective, also known as an amateur detective, is an individual who devotes his or her time and expertise to aid in the solving of crime, without compensation or expectation of reward. Citizen detectives are private citizens that have no real professional relationship with law enforcement and lack any rational-legal authority whatsoever. The reasons why a private citizen might try to solve a crime vary from trying to ensure justice for a friend or relative, a strong dislike for crime and support for law and order, or just recreational enjoyment.

As with other kinds of detectives, citizen detectives try to solve crimes in multiple ways such as searching a crime scene, interviewing and/or interrogating suspects and witnesses, doing surveillance on persons of interest, collecting evidence, acting as sources for local news, giving anonymous tips to the police and at times even making citizens’ arrests while a crime is being committed. Citizen detectives can also help law enforcement by becoming witnesses for prosecutors, participating in local neighborhood watch groups, acting as citizen observers for law enforcement, or even aiding the police in searching for and arresting suspects as a posse. However, there have been cases of citizen detectives unintentionally compromising investigations if they lack real crime solving skills or even committing acts against suspected criminals that could be deemed vigilantism in nature.

History

Before the 19th century, there were few municipal police departments, though the first had been created in Paris as long ago as 1667. As police work went from being done by appointed people with help from volunteers to being done by professionals, the idea of dedicated detectives did not come up right away. The first private detective agency was founded in Paris in 1833 by Eugène François Vidocq, who had headed a police agency in addition to being a criminal himself. Police detective activities were pioneered in England by the Bow Street Runners and later by the Metropolitan Police Service in Greater London. The first police detective unit in the United States was formed in 1846 in Boston.

Street work

Detectives have a wide variety of techniques available in conducting investigations. However, the majority of cases are solved by the interrogation of suspects and the interviewing of witnesses, which takes time. Detectives may also use their network of informants, which they have built up over the years. Informants often have connections with people a detective would not be able to approach formally. Evidence collection and preservation can also help in identifying a potential suspect(s).

Criminal investigation

Investigation of criminal activity is conducted by the police. Criminal activity can relate to road use such as speeding, drunk driving, or to matters such as theft, drug distribution, assault, fraud, etc. When the police have concluded their investigation, a decision on whether to charge somebody with a criminal offence will (depending on legal jurisdiction) often be made by prosecuting counsel having considered the evidence produced by the police.

In criminal investigations, once a detective has suspects in mind, the next step is to produce evidence that will stand up in a court of law. One way is to obtain a confession from the suspect; usually, this is done by developing rapport and, at times, by seeking information in exchange for potential perks available through the attorney's office, such as entering for a lesser sentence in exchange for usable information. In some countries, detectives may lie, mislead and psychologically pressure a suspect into an admission or confession as long as they do this within procedural boundaries and without the threat of violence or promises outside their control. This is not permitted in England and Wales, where interview of suspects and witnesses is governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and its extensive Codes of Practice.

Forensic evidence
Physical forensic evidence in an investigation may provide leads to closing a case. Forensic science (often shortened to forensics) is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or to a civil action. Many major police stations in a city, county, or state, maintain their own forensic laboratories while others contract out the services.

Records investigation
Detectives may use public and private records to provide background information on a subject. Police detectives can search through files of fingerprint records. Police maintain records of people who have committed felonies and some misdemeanors. Detectives may search through records of criminal arrests and convictions, photographs or "mug shots" of persons arrested, hotel registration information, credit reports, answering machine messages, phone conversations, surveillance camera footage, and technology used for communication.

United Kingdom
Before 2017, prospective British police detectives must have completed at least two years as a uniformed officer before applying to join the Criminal Investigation Department. Since 2017, applicants from outside the police force have been able to apply directly for positions as trainee detectives. UK Police must also pass the National Investigators' Examination in order to progress to subsequent stages of the Initial Crime Investigators Development Program in order to qualify as a detective.

United States

Before becoming a police detective, one must attend a law enforcement academy, which provides the officer with a foundation of education with 16 to 24 college units. After graduation from the law enforcement academy, the officer undergoes job training with a field training officer for a period specified by the law enforcement agency and continues to work while on a probationary period, ranging from one to two years.

During the probationary period, the officer is assigned to look for evidence. During this time, the officer is supervised and mentored by a sergeant with years of experience. Some police officers go to a two-year or four-year college or university to get a degree in criminal justice or the management of criminal justice. You can get a concentration or a certificate in a specialized field of criminal investigation at some colleges.

Through years of on-the-job training or college education, officers may participate in a competitive examination, testing their knowledge, skills and abilities regarding criminal investigation, criminal procedure, interview and interrogation, search and seizure, collection and preservation of evidence, investigative report writing, criminal law, court procedure, and providing testimony in court. Competitive examinations are conducted by selected senior law enforcement officials. Following testing, a list of results is provided by the department. At the department's discretion, some or all of the officers on the list are promoted to the rank of detective. Some departments have classes of detectives which increase the detective's rank after successful experience.

Private investigators are licensed by the state in which they work (some states do not require licensing, but most do). In addition to the state examination, applicants testing for a private investigation license must also meet stringent requirements, which include college education, a range of two to four years of full-time investigation experience and the successful adjudication of a criminal and civil background check conducted by state investigators. Private investigators are licensed to conduct civil and criminal investigations in the state in which they are licensed, and are protected by statutes of that state. In states requiring licensing, statutes make it unlawful for any person to conduct a criminal investigation without a license, unless exempted by the statute (i.e., law enforcement officers or agents, attorneys, paralegals, claims adjusters).

title: Detective


text:
Euclidean

Euclidean (or, less commonly, Euclidian) is an adjective derived from the name of Euclid, an ancient Greek mathematician. It is the name of:

Geometry

 * Euclidean space, the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry as well as their higher dimensional generalizations
 * Euclidean geometry, the study of the properties of Euclidean spaces
 * Non-Euclidean geometry, systems of points, lines, and planes analogous to Euclidean geometry but without uniquely determined parallel lines
 * Euclidean distance, the distance between pairs of points in Euclidean spaces
 * Euclidean ball, the set of points within some fixed distance from a center point

Number theory

 * Euclidean division, the division which produces a quotient and a remainder
 * Euclidean algorithm, a method for finding greatest common divisors
 * Extended Euclidean algorithm, a method for solving the Diophantine equation ax + by = d where d is the greatest common divisor of a and b
 * Euclid's lemma: if a prime number divides a product of two numbers, then it divides at least one of those two numbers
 * Euclidean domain, a ring in which Euclidean division may be defined, which allows Euclid's lemma to be true and the Euclidean algorithm and the extended Euclidean algorithm to work

Other

 * Euclidean relation, a property of binary relations related to transitivity
 * Euclidean distance map, a digital image in which each pixel value represents the Euclidean distance to an obstacle
 * Euclidean rhythm, a method of distributing beats across musical steps based on Euclid's algorithm
 * Euclidean zoning, a system of land use management modeled after the zoning code of Euclid, Ohio
 * Euclidean division of the Intermediate Math League of Eastern Massachusetts

title: Euclidean


text:
Rail

Rail or rails may refer to:

Rail transport

 * Rail transport and related matters
 * Railway track or railway lines, the running surface of a railway

Film

 * Rails (film), a 1929 Italian film by Mario Camerini
 * Rail (1967 film), a film by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films
 * Rail (2024 film), a Tamil-language film

Magazines

 * Rail (magazine), a British rail transport periodical
 * Rails (magazine), a former New Zealand based rail transport periodical

Other arts

 * The Rails, a British folk-rock band
 * Rail (theater) or batten, a pipe from which lighting, scenery, or curtains are hung

Technology

 * Rails framework or Ruby on Rails, a web application framework
 * Rail system (firearms), a mounting system for firearm attachments
 * Front engine dragster
 * Runway alignment indicator lights, a configuration of an approach lighting system
 * Rule Augmented Interconnect Layout, a specification for expressing guidelines for printed circuit boards; companion to the Input/output Buffer Information Specification

Other uses

 * Rail (bird), a family of birds
 * Rail (name)
 * Rail, Missouri, a ghost town in the United States
 * Rail drink, an alcoholic beverage ordered with house liquors
 * Rural Appalachian Improvement League, an American non-profit organisation
 * Rail, a line of cocaine

title: Rail