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Oslo Airport, Gardermoen

Oslo Airport (Oslo lufthavn), alternatively referred to as Oslo Gardermoen Airport or simply Gardermoen, is an international airport serving Oslo, the capital and most populous city of Norway. A hub for Scandinavian Airlines and an operating base for Norwegian Air Shuttle and Widerøe, in 2011, it connected to 26 domestic and 158 international destinations.

The airport is located 19 NM northeast of Oslo, at Gardermoen at the border of municipalities Nannestad and Ullensaker, in Akershus county. It has two parallel roughly north–south runways measuring 3600 m and 2950 m and 71 aircraft stands, of which 50 have jet bridges. The airport is connected to the city center by the high-speed railway Gardermoen Line served by mainline trains and Flytoget. The percentage of passengers using public transport to get to and from the airport is one of the highest in the world at nearly 70%. The ground facilities are owned by Oslo Lufthavn AS, a subsidiary of the state-owned Avinor. Also at the premises is Gardermoen Air Station, operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force. An expansion with a new terminal building and a third pier opened in late April 2017.

The airport location was first used by the Norwegian Army from 1940, with the first military airport facilities being built during the 1940s. The airport remained a secondary reserve and airport for chartered flights to Oslo Airport, Fornebu, until 8 October 1998, when the latter was closed, and an all-new Oslo Airport opened at Gardermoen, costing 11.4 billion Norwegian kroner (NOK).

Oslo is additionally served by the much smaller Sandefjord Airport, Torp, in Sandefjord, which is situated 119 km (74 mi) to the south of downtown Oslo and primarily used by leisure and low-cost carriers.

Military and secondary
The Norwegian army started using Gardermoen as a camp in 1740, although it was called Fredericksfeldt until 1788. It was first used by the cavalry, then by the dragoons and in 1789 by the riding marines. The base was also taken into use by the infantry from 1834 and by the artillery from 1860. Tents were solely used until 1860, when the first barracks and stalls were taken into use. Insulated buildings were built around 1900, allowing the camp to be used year-round. By 1925, the base had eleven camps and groups of buildings. The first flight at Gardermoen happened in 1912, and Gardermoen became a station for military flights.

During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, the Luftwaffe took over Gardermoen, and built the first proper airport facilities with hangars and two crossing runways, both 2000 m long. After World War II, the airport was taken over by the Norwegian Air Force and made the main air station. Three fighter and one transport squadron were stationed at Gardermoen.

Braathens SAFE established their technical base at the airport in 1946, but left two years later. Gardermoen also became the reserve airport for Oslo Airport, Fornebu, when the latter was closed due to fog. From 1946 to 1952, when a longer runway was built at Fornebu, all intercontinental traffic was moved to Gardermoen. Gardermoen grew up as a training field for the commercial airlines and as local airport for general aviation. Some commercial traffic returned again in 1960, when SAS received its first Sud Aviation Caravelle jet aircraft, that could not use the runway at Fornebu until it was extended again in 1962. SAS introduced a direct flight to New York in 1962, but it was quickly terminated.

In 1972, capacity restraints forced the authorities to move all charter traffic from Fornebu to Gardermoen. However, SAS and Braathens SAFE were allowed to keep their charter services from Fornebu, so they would not have to operate from two bases. A former hangar was converted to a terminal building and in 1974 passenger numbers were at 269,000 per year. In 1978, SAS started a weekly flight to New York. In 1983, further restrictions were enforced, and also SAS and Braathens SAFE had to move their charter operations to Gardermoen, increasing passenger numbers that year to 750,000. Several expansions of runway were made after the war, and by the 1985-extension the north–south runway was 3050 m.

Localization debate
The first airports to serve Oslo were Kjeller Airport which opened in 1912 and Gressholmen Airport which served seaplanes after its opening in 1926. Norway's first airline, Det Norske Luftfartrederi, was founded in 1918 and the first scheduled flights were operated by Deutsche Luft Hansa to Germany with the opening of Gressholmen. In 1939, a new combined sea and land airport opened at Fornebu. It was gradually expanded, with a runway capable of jet aircraft opening in 1962 and a new terminal building in 1964. But due to its location on a peninsula about 8 km from the city center and close to large residential areas, it would not be possible to expand the airport sufficiently to meet all foreseeable demands in the future. Following the 1972 decision to move charter traffic to Gardermoen, politicians were forced to choose between a "divided solution" that planners stated would eventually force all international traffic to move to Gardermoen, or to build a new airport.

Gardermoen had been proposed as the main airport for Oslo and Eastern Norway as early as 1946, both by the local newspaper Romerikes Blad and by Ludvig G. Braathen, who had just founded Braathens SAFE. In 1970, a government report recommended that a new main airport be built at Hobøl, but stated that the time was still not right. The areas were therefore reserved. During the 1970s, it became a political priority by the socialist and center parties to reduce state investments in Eastern Norway to stimulate growth in rural areas. In 1983, parliament voted to keep the divided solution permanently and expand Fornebu with a larger terminal.

By 1985, traffic had increased so much that it became clear that by 1988 all international traffic would have to move to Gardermoen. The areas at Hobøl had been freed up, and a government report was launched recommending that a new airport be built at Gardermoen, although an airport at Hurum had also been surveyed. However, the report did not look into the need of the Air Force that was stationed at Gardermoen and was therefore rejected by the parliament the following year. In 1988, a majority of the government chose Hurum as their preferred location, and the Minister of Transport Kjell Borgen withdrew from his position. In 1989, new weather surveys from Hurum showed unfavorable conditions. There were large protests from meteorologists and pilots who stated that the surveys were manipulated. Two government committees were appointed, and both concluded that there were no irregularities in the surveys.

Since Hurum could no longer be used, the government again recommended Gardermoen as the location. The Conservative Party instead wanted to build at Hobøl, but chose to support the Labour Party government's proposal to get a new airport as quickly as possible. Parliament passed legislation to build the new main airport at Gardermoen on 8 August 1992. At the same time, it was decided that a high-speed railway was to be built to Gardermoen, so the airport would have a 50% public transport market share.

The choice of Gardermoen has spurred controversy, also after the matter was settled in parliament. In 1994, Engineer Jan Fredrik Wiborg, who claimed that falsified weather reports had been made, died after falling from a hotel window in Copenhagen. Circumstances about his death were never fully cleared up and documents about the weather case disappeared. The Standing Committee on Scrutiny and Constitutional Affairs held a hearing about the planning process trying to identify any irregularities. An official report was released in 2001.

Construction
To minimize the effect of using state grants to invest in Eastern Norway, parliament decided that the construction and operation of the airport was to be done by an independent limited company that would be wholly owned by the Civil Airport Administration (Avinor). This model was chosen to avoid having to deal with public trade unions and to ensure that the construction was not subject to annual grants. This company was founded in 1992 as Oslo Hovedflyplass AS, but changed its name in 1996 to Oslo Lufthavn. From 1 January 1997, it also took over the operation of Oslo Airport, Fornebu. The company was established with NOK 200 million in share capital. The remaining assets were NOK 2 billion from the sale of Fornebu and NOK 900 million in responsible debt. The remaining funding would come from debt from the state. Total investments for the airport, railways and roads were NOK 22 billion, of which Oslo Lufthavn would have a debt of NOK 11 billion after completion. At Gardermoen there was both an air station and about 270 house owners that had their real estate expropriated following parliament's decision. NOK 1.7 billion were used to purchase land, including the Air Force. It was the state that expropriated and bought all the land and remained land owner, while Oslo Lufthavn leases the ground from the state. The first two years were used to demolish and rebuild the air station. This reduced the building area from 120000 to 41000 m2, but gave a more functional design.

Construction of the new main airport started on 13 August 1994. The western runway was already in place, and had been renovated by the Air Force in 1989. A new, eastern runway needed to be built. A hill at the airport was blown away, and the masses used to fill in where needed. The construction of the airport and railway required 13,000 man-years. 220 subcontractors were used, and working accidents were at a third of the national average, without any fatalities. The last flights to Fornebu took place on 7 October 1998. That night, 300 people and 500 truckloads transported equipment from Fornebu to Gardermoen. Oslo Airport was officially opened on 8 October 1998, with the name Gardermoen. Gardermoen is a compound of the farm name Garder and the finite form of mo 'moor; drill ground' (thus 'the moor belonging to the farm Garder'). The farm is first mentioned in 1328 (Garðar), and the name is the plural of Norse garðr 'fence'.

The airlines needed to build their own facilities at Gardermoen. SAS built a complex with 55000 m2, including a technical base, cabin storage, garages and cargo terminals, for NOK 1.398 billion. This included a technical base for their fleet of Douglas DC-9 and McDonnell Douglas MD-80-aircraft for NOK 750 million. The cargo handling facility is 21000 m2 and was built in cooperation with Posten Norge. SAS also built two lounges in the passenger terminal. Since Braathens had its technical base at Stavanger Airport, Sola, it used NOK 200 million to build facilities. This included a 9000 m2 hangar for six aircraft for NOK 100 million. Parliament decided to build a high-speed airport rail link from Oslo to Gardermoen. The 64 km Gardermoen Line connects Oslo Central Station (Oslo) to Gardermoen and onwards to Eidsvoll. This line was constructed for 210 km/h and allows the Flytoget train to operate from Oslo Central station to Gardermoen in nineteen minutes. Just like the airport, the railway was to be financed by the users. The Norwegian State Railways (NSB) established a subsidiary, NSB Gardermobanen, which would build and own the railway line, as well as operate the airport trains. The company would borrow money from the state, and repay with the profits from operation. During construction of the Romerike Tunnel, a leak was made that started draining the water from the lakes above. The time and cost to repair the leaks meant that the whole railway line budget was exceeded, and the tunnel would not be taken into use until 1 August 1999. Since the rest of the railway was finished, two trains (instead of the intended six), operated using more time from the opening of the new airport.

The main road corridor northwards from Oslo to Gardermoen is European Route E6. The E6 was widened to six lanes north to Hvam, and to four lanes north to Gardermoen. The E6 runs about 6 km east of the airport, so 6 km of Norwegian National Road 35 was widened to a four-lane motorway to connect the E6 to the airport. This connection cost NOK 1 billion. After the opening of the airport, National Road 35 was reconstructed west of the airport as a two-lane toll road. Also Norwegian National Road 120 and Norwegian National Road 174 were reconstructed.

Opening and growth
The first new airline to start scheduled flights was Color Air operating Boeing 737-300 jets. The low-cost airline took advantage of the increased capacity that Gardermoen created to start competing with SAS and Braathens on the routes to Bergen, Trondheim and Ålesund. This lasted until October 1999, when Color Air filed for bankruptcy. During this time, all three airlines lost large amounts of money, mainly due to low passenger counts. To win the business market, all three wanted to have the most possible departures per day to other cities, which proved to be a financially poor decision, instead of waiting more days in between flights to increase passenger counts per flight.

Gardermoen has had considerable problems with fog and freezing rain, and has several times had a complete close-down. This was also a problem at Fornebu, and reported to be at Hurum as well. On average, there is super cooled rain three times per month during the winter. The use of deicing fluids is restricted since the area underneath the airport contains the Tandrum Delta, one of the country's largest uncontained quaternary aquifers (underground water systems). On 14 December 1998, a combination of freezing fog and supercooled rain caused glaze at Gardermoen. At least twenty aircraft engines were damaged by ice during take-off, and five aircraft needed to make precautionary landings with only one working engine. On 18 January 2006, an Infratek deicing system was set up, that uses infrared heat in large hangar tents. It was hoped that it could reduce chemical deicers by 90%, but the technique has proved unsuccessful.

In 1999, Northwest Airlines briefly operated a flight between Oslo and Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, United States, for several months, before the flight was cancelled due to poor load factors. Northwest had previously served the airport in 1987 with nonstop flights operated with McDonnell Douglas DC-10-40 wide body jetliners several days a week to New York - JFK with continuing direct service to Memphis International Airport (MEM) and Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP). In October 2001, the only remaining intercontinental flight, to Newark Airport (EWR), with Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) operated Boeing 767–300 aircraft, was discontinued, due to a slump in air travel following the 9/11 attacks. In 2004, Scandinavian Airlines and Continental Airlines (now United Airlines) resumed service on this route using Airbus A330 and Boeing 757-200 respectively. United Airlines suspended winter service on the route in 2015, then discontinued the service completely in 2017. Scandinavian Airlines also started a direct service from Oslo to Miami in 2016.

Also in 1999, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) became the first Asian airline to touchdown in Oslo, commencing its first flights to the city to and from Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The return flights had a stopover at Copenhagen Airport before continuing onward to Pakistan.

Norwegian Air Shuttle launched flights to Bangkok, New York – JFK, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, Oakland (San Francisco), and Orlando with Boeing 787 Dreamliner jetliners and Dubai, Agadir and Marrakech with Boeing 737-800 jets. Three more airlines began service. Thai Airways launched service to Bangkok, Qatar Airways to Doha, and Fly Emirates to Dubai.

In 2012, the airport opened a new 650 m2 VIP terminal exclusively used for the royal family, the prime minister and foreign heads of state and government. According to EUROCONTROL, Gardermoen had the most delays per flight of all airports in Europe in July 2012. As a consequence of the delays, which apparently were caused by a lack of air traffic controllers, several airlines received NOK 100 million in compensation from Avinor.

Facilities
The airport covers an area of 13 km2 and is modeled partially on Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, with two parallel runways and a single terminal with two piers on a single line. Oslo Airport is located 19 NM north-northeast of Oslo city centre.

Terminal
The passenger terminal covers 265000 m2. The airport has 72 gates, of which 44 are bridge-connected and 28 are remote stands.

The original west wing of the terminal contains the domestic A-gates. The west wing also connects to the south pier that contains the eight B-gates, all of which lack jet bridges. This south pier was constructed in 2012 to compensate for the gates lost while the north pier was being built, and was intended for demolition after five years, but in 2018 a moving walkway to the pier was installed and Avinor expressed its intention to make the pier permanent. In 2024, the airport started using the south pier for early morning international Schengen area flights. When configured for international flights, the gates are numbered G1 to G8 and accessed by shuttle bus from the international area of the terminal.

The north pier, containing 11 gates, was opened in 2017. It was also the first terminal in the world to receive an "excellent" BREEAM rating. This terminal uses recycled snow from the runways to recover energy for heating and cooling. Nine of the gates are configurable as either domestic C-gates or international Schengen area D-gates. The two northernmost gates are international D-gates only. Passengers using the north pier are directed to the top floor for domestic flights or the lower floor for international flights.

The east pier of the original terminal is for international flights. The gates for Schengen area flights are E-gates while the F-gates for the non-Schengen area are at the easternmost end of the terminal. An expansion to the non-Schengen end of the east pier was opened during the summer of 2022. Four gates near the end of the east pier are flexigates where doors can be opened or closed to switch between Schengen and non-Schengen flights. EU controllers have been somewhat skeptical of the Schengen/non-Schengen flexigates, and there were a few incidents where the wrong doors were opened so that passengers who should have gone through the border control did not.

A notable feature of the airport is that it is "silent", so announcements for flights are only made in the immediate vicinity of the gate.

Many international passengers connecting to domestic flights have to pick up their luggage, show it to customs and check in the luggage again. Some transit passengers avoid Oslo Airport and look for other routing options because of this. The process of clearing customs before connecting from an international to a domestic flight is not unique for Oslo Airport, as it is the same process used at international airports in the United States and some other countries. Most passengers whose inbound flight is with SAS, Norwegian or Widerøe and who are connecting on a through ticket can instead use the domestic transfer customs process that avoids this, although certain flight origins are excluded.

About half the airport operator's income is from retail revenue. There are 20 restaurants providing food or drink service, stores and other services including banks and a post office. In all, 8000 m2 are used for restaurants, stores and non-aviation services. The departure duty-free shop is 1530 m2 and the largest in Europe. The shop is located in front of the international concourse, taking up a large part of the terminal's width. The airport has attempted to funnel all passengers through the duty-free shop. Signs put up to hinder passengers from walking outside the duty-free were removed after criticism in 2008. Arriving passengers have access to a smaller duty-free shop in the baggage claim area.

In addition to the main terminal, the airport operates a VIP lounge for the Norwegian royal family, members of the Norwegian government and members of foreign royal families and governments. The General aviation terminal, located on the west side of the airport, services GA-aircraft, executive jets and ambulance aircraft. The cargo terminal is located just southwest of the main terminal and has seven gates for cargo aircraft.

Art and architecture
The airport's architects were Aviaplan, a joint venture between the agencies Nordic — Office of Architecture, Niels Torp, Skaarup & Jespersen and Hjellnes Cowi. The main architect was Gudmund Stokke. The terminal building has a light, modern roof that is held up by wooden reefers. The main construction materials are wood, metal and glass. The airlines were required to follow the same design rules for their buildings as the terminal. The new pier is cladded with oak from Scandinavian rainforests, and features low-carbon technologies such as district heating and natural thermal energy to improve sustainability.

The main art on the landside of the airport is Alexis, consisting of six steel sculptures in stainless steel created by Per Inge Bjørlo. On the airside, Carin Wessel used 30000 m of thread to make the impression of clouds and webs, named Ad Astra. Anna Karin Rynander and Per-Olof Sandberg cooperated in making two installations: The Marathon Dancers, located in the baggage claim area, is a set of two electronic boards that show a dancing person. Sound Refreshment Station, of which six are located in the departure areas, are sound "showers" that make refreshing sounds when a person is immediately under them. Sidsel Westbø etched the glass walls. In the check-in area, there are small boxes under the floor with glass ceilings that contain curiosities. As well as the custom-made art, several existing sculptures and paintings were bought. At the National Road 35 and European Route E6 junction, Vebjørn Sand built a 14 m statue named the Kepler Star. It consists of two internally illuminated Kepler–Poinsot polyhedrons, appearing like a giant star in the sky after dark.

Runways and air traffic control
The airport has two parallel runways, aligned 01/19. The west runway 01L/19R is 3600 x, while the east runway 01R/19L is 2950 x. Both have taxiways, allowing 80 air movements per hour. The runways are equipped with CAT IIIA instrument landing system and the airport is supervised by a 91 m tall control tower. Once departing aircraft are 15 km away from the airport, responsibility is taken over by Oslo Air Traffic Control Center, which supervises the airspace with Haukåsen Radar. The airport has two ground radars, on the far sides of each of the runways. Both at the gates and along the taxiways, there is an automatic system of lights that guide the aircraft. On the tarmac, these are steered by the radar, while they are controlled by motion sensors at the gate.

There are three deicing platforms. Both fire stations each have three fire cars, and is part of the municipal fire department. Meteorological services are operated by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, which has 12 weather stations and 16 employees at the airport. This includes Norway's first aeronautic information service and a self-briefing room, in addition to briefings from professionals. Restrictions on air movements apply overnight from 23:00 to 06:00, although landing and taking off on the north side is permitted.

Air station
The Royal Norwegian Air Force has an air base at Gardermoen, located at the north side of the passenger terminal at Oslo Airport. The base dates from 1994 and houses the 335-Squadron that operates three Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport planes. The airbase also handles nearly all military freight going abroad. The Air Force has a compact 41000 m2 building space. The station is built so that it can quickly be expanded if necessary, without having to claim areas used by the civilian section. The military also use the civilian terminals for their passenger transport needs, and send 200,000 people with chartered and scheduled flights from the main terminal each year. The air force station serves as the main entering point for VIPs and officials going to Norway.

Organisation
The airport is owned by Oslo Lufthavn AS, a limited company wholly owned by Avinor, a state-owned company responsible for operating 46 Norwegian airports. In 2010, Oslo Lufthavn had a revenue of NOK 3,693 million, giving an income of NOK 1,124 million before tax. The profit from the airport is largely paid to Avinor, who uses it to cross-subsidise operating deficits from smaller primary and regional airport throughout the country. At the end of 2010, Oslo Lufthavn had 439 employees.

The company has a subsidiary, Oslo Lufthavn Eiendom AS, which is responsible for developing commercial real estate around the airport. It owns one airport hotel run by the Radisson Blu chain, the office building and conference center Flyporten, which along with the hotel features 60 conference rooms, and the employee parking lot. A second hotel, Park Inn, was opened in September 2010.

Passenger
Gardermoen has direct connections to just over 160 destinations. In addition, there are up to several charter destinations, depending on the season. The domestic network is dominated by Norwegian and SAS, which mainly fly commercially on the main airport network. In addition, Widerøe operates tender routes on a contract with the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

The international route network is focused on European destinations. SAS, Norwegian and a number of major European network companies fly with high frequency between Gardermoen and the Nordic capitals, as well as the major cities in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, it flies directly to a larger number of destinations in the Mediterranean countries, although with somewhat lower frequency and variations in the summer months.

Until 2020, Gardermoen had a relatively large increase in the number of long-distance routes. This growth was largely driven by Norwegian's investment in longer routes. When the coronavirus pandemic came to Norway in March 2020, Norwegian had to close down its long-haul fleets after a short time, because there was not a sufficient customer base. However, companies such as Qatar Airways and Emirates also contributed to the long-distance increase. In the spring of 2019, Hainan Airlines opened a direct route between Oslo and Beijing. As of 2019, a number of charter flights were also offered from Gardermoen under the auspices of various travel operators, distributed throughout the year. Among these operators were Ving, Apollo and TUI. During the summer months, destinations around the Mediterranean were best represented until 2020 (especially holiday destinations in Spain, Greece and Turkey), while in the winter, direct flights is offered to intercontinental destinations, for example Cuba, Gambia, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Mexico and Thailand.

Statistics
Oslo Airport has a catchment area of 2.5 million people, including most of Eastern Norway and 0.3 million people in Sweden. In 2017, Oslo Airport served 27,482,315 passengers, 181265 t of cargo and 242,555 aircraft movements. In 2017, Oslo Airport was ranked the 19th busiest airport in Europe. It is the second-busiest Nordic airport after Copenhagen Airport. The busiest route is to Trondheim, with over 2 million passengers. Along with the domestic routes to Bergen and Stavanger, and the international routes to Copenhagen and Stockholm, Oslo Airport serves five of the 25 busiest routes in the EEA, all with more than one million passengers.

Annual traffic
The following is a list of the 20 busiest routes to and from Gardermoen during 2017.

Ground transportation
Situated about 47 km from the city center, Oslo Airport offers extensive public transport services. The airport has one of the world's highest levels of public transport usage, with a share of nearly 70%.

The 64 km Gardermoen Line opened the same day as the airport, and runs in a tunnel below the airport facilities, where Gardermoen Station is located. The Flytoget airport express train operates to Oslo Central Station six times per hour in 19 to 22 minutes, with three services continuing onwards via five intermediate stations to Drammen Station. On Saturdays and Sundays, the trains run three times an hour. The Airport Express Train has a 34% ground transport share.

Vy also operates from the airport, both a commuter train service to Eidsvoll and Kongsberg, and a regional service north to Innlandet and south to Vestfold og Telemark. Both offer services to Oslo, and the latter allows direct service to Sandefjord Airport, Torp. Five daily express trains operated by SJ Norge to Trondheim stop at the airport, including one night train.

The Oslo Airport Express Coach serves the airport, from Oslo, Fredrikstad, Ski and Gjøvik. In addition, most express buses from other parts of Norway stop at the airport. The local transport authority, Ruter, operates a number of services to Oslo Airport from nearby places.

The airport is located 2 km from European Route E16, and 6 km from the European Route E6 and connect to them as a four-lane motorway. The E6 runs south with four lanes to Oslo, and northwards with four lanes towards Oppland, Hedmark and Central Norway. E16 connects with two lanes westward towards Buskerud and eastward towards Sweden. All these directions are toll roads, at least in part. There are 11,400 parking spaces at the airport, as well as taxi stands and rental car facilities.

Taxi

There are several companies providing services at Oslo Airport. In order to check companies, rates and book a taxi, the passenger must go to the information desk at the Arrivals Hall of the airport.

Plans
Oslo Airport has experienced rapid increases in passenger numbers during the last decade, already exceeding its original capacity limit of 17 million passengers. As a result, the Norwegian Air Transport Authority, Avinor, approved plans on 19 January 2011, for an expansion of OSL with Terminal 2 (North Pier). Finished in Spring 2017, the expansion involved construction of a new pier located directly after security checkpoint with eleven new air bridges, six remote stands, a new arrivals- and departure-hall and a new baggage handling system. The expansion doubled the size of the terminal from 148,000 square meters to 265,000 square meters. OSL can now handle 32 million passengers annually, which was 19 million before the expansion. Yet, before the North Pier was finished, OSL have invested further plans to expand the international terminal with six new wide-body airliner gates for more direct flights to destinations outside of Europe. The expansion began in 2017 and was finished in 2022. Once the intercontinental expansion is finished, the airport will be able to accommodate the double-decker Airbus A380. This fixed the major issue where Norwegians were traveling to larger hub airport Europe in order to reach their final destination, because OSL (both the market and airport's size) was to handle a global flight network, so many passengers had to use connecting flights. Another phase will be added later on to bring the total capacity to 35 million passengers annually through the T2-project. If passenger traffic continues to grow and if the capacity will be surpassed beyond the capabilities, OSL and Avinor will call out for a master phase (as situated in the Master Plan 2012–2050), including extension of the North Pier by another 100 meters, adding a third runway with a free-standing pier between it and the existing Eastern runway, as well as a new terminal to the southeast area of the current international terminal (by where Park Inn is located). The Government of Oslo has debated if a third runway in the future will be reliable. If they approve, the runway will not be finished until 2030 at the earliest. Avinor has discovered the existing runway capacity will be saturated by 2030, but critics have pointed out that larger hubs such as Heathrow in London only operate with two runways. However, such airports tend to suffer of major delays and chaos at their schedules. Oslo had 253,542 movements against 474,087 at Heathrow in 2017. Former Minister of Transport, Liv Signe Navarsete (Center), has stated that spreading the traffic between the two airports (RYG is closed on permanent basis) will result in inconvenience for passengers and a massive need for inter-airport ground transportation, but has announced she is opposed to a third runway. Avinor is facing large costs of extending short runways in rural locations or replacing such airports during the 2020s decade, so a third runway at Oslo is less prioritized. However, as of December 2017, construction of a nearby city directly to the east of OSL has been officially approved, nicknamed "the Gate to Europe", in which a third runway and a third terminal are part of the project.

Norwegian CEO Bjørn Kjos has announced that the airline has ambitions to evolve Gardermoen into a major global hub between North America and South Asia. Kjos stated; "We could have received tons of traffic from all around the world. Oslo could have been one of the largest hubs in Europe, and could have competed against the large ones in the Middle East" (DXB and DOH). He guarantees the transatlantic routes will be significantly shorter via Northern Europe, which will lead to increased efficiency and satisfaction for the travelers and for the economy. Norwegian is currently disallowed to fly direct over Russian territory by their Air Traffic Authorities, meaning that negotiation is the only solution.

title: Oslo Airport, Gardermoen


text:
Lists of schools in the United Kingdom

The lists of schools in the United Kingdom are organised by country:
 * Lists of schools in England
 * Lists of schools in Northern Ireland
 * Lists of schools in Scotland
 * Lists of schools in Wales

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

title: Lists of schools in the United Kingdom


text:
SPSS

SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versions of the software released since 2015 have the brand name IBM SPSS Statistics.

The software name originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), reflecting the original market, then later changed to Statistical Product and Service Solutions.

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SPSS is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social science. It is also used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and others. The original SPSS manual (Nie, Bent & Hull, 1970) has been described as one of "sociology's most influential books" for allowing ordinary researchers to do their own statistical analysis. In addition to statistical analysis, data management (case selection, file reshaping and creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored in the datafile) are features of the base software.

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A "macro" language can be used to write command language subroutines. A Python programmability extension can access the information in the data dictionary and data and dynamically build command syntax programs. This extension, introduced in SPSS 14, replaced the less functional SAX Basic "scripts" for most purposes, although SaxBasic remains available. In addition, the Python extension allows SPSS to run any of the statistics in the free software package R. From version 14 onwards, SPSS can be driven externally by a Python or a VB.NET program using supplied "plug-ins". (From version 20 onwards, these two scripting facilities, as well as many scripts, are included on the installation media and are normally installed by default.)

SPSS Statistics places constraints on internal file structure, data types, data processing, and matching files, which together considerably simplify programming. SPSS datasets have a two-dimensional table structure, where the rows typically represent cases (such as individuals or households) and the columns represent measurements (such as age, sex, or household income). Only two data types are defined: numeric and text (or "string"). All data processing occurs sequentially case-by-case through the file (dataset). Files can be matched one-to-one and one-to-many, but not many-to-many. In addition to that cases-by-variables structure and processing, there is a separate Matrix session where one can process data as matrices using matrix and linear algebra operations.

The graphical user interface has two views which can be toggled. The 'Data View' shows a spreadsheet view of the cases (rows) and variables (columns). Unlike spreadsheets, the data cells can only contain numbers or text, and formulas cannot be stored in these cells. The 'Variable View' displays the metadata dictionary, where each row represents a variable and shows the variable name, variable label, value label(s), print width, measurement type, and a variety of other characteristics. Cells in both views can be manually edited, defining the file structure and allowing data entry without using command syntax. This may be sufficient for small datasets. Larger datasets such as statistical surveys are more often created in data entry software, or entered during computer-assisted personal interviewing, by scanning and using optical character recognition and optical mark recognition software, or by direct capture from online questionnaires. These datasets are then read into SPSS.

SPSS Statistics can read and write data from ASCII text files (including hierarchical files), other statistics packages, spreadsheets and databases. It can also read and write to external relational database tables via ODBC and SQL.

Statistical output is to a proprietary file format (*.spv file, supporting pivot tables) for which, in addition to the in-package viewer, a stand-alone reader can be downloaded. The proprietary output can be exported to text or Microsoft Word, PDF, Excel, and other formats. Alternatively, output can be captured as data (using the OMS command), as text, tab-delimited text, PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, SPSS dataset or a variety of graphic image formats (JPEG, PNG, BMP and EMF).

Several variants of SPSS Statistics exist. SPSS Statistics Gradpacks are highly discounted versions sold only to students. SPSS Statistics Server is a version of the software with a client/server architecture. Add-on packages can enhance the base software with additional features (examples include complex samples, which can adjust for clustered and stratified samples, and custom tables, which can create publication-ready tables). SPSS Statistics is available under either an annual or a monthly subscription license.

Version 25 of SPSS Statistics launched on August 8, 2017. This added new and advanced statistics, such as random effects solution results (GENLINMIXED), robust standard errors (GLM/UNIANOVA), and profile plots with error bars within the Advanced Statistics and Custom Tables add-on. V25 also includes new Bayesian statistics capabilities, a method of statistical inference, and publication ready charts, such as powerful new charting capabilities, including new default templates and the ability to share with Microsoft Office applications.

Versions and ownership history

 * SPSS 1 - 1968
 * SPSS 2 - 1983
 * SPSS 5 - 1993
 * SPSS 6.1 - 1995
 * SPSS 7.5 - 1997
 * SPSS 8 - 1998
 * SPSS 9 - 1999
 * SPSS 10 - 1999
 * SPSS 11 - 2002
 * SPSS 12 - 2004
 * SPSS 13 - 2005
 * SPSS 14 - 2006
 * SPSS 15 - 2006
 * SPSS 16 - 2007
 * SPSS 17 - 2008
 * PASW 17 - 2009
 * PASW 18 - 2009
 * SPSS 19 - 2010
 * SPSS 20 - 2011
 * SPSS 21 - 2012
 * SPSS 22 - 2013
 * SPSS 23 - 2015
 * SPSS 24 - 2016, March
 * SPSS 25 - 2017, July
 * SPSS 26 - 2018
 * SPSS 27 - 2019, June (and 27.0.1 in November, 2020 )
 * SPSS 28 - 2021, May
 * SPSS 29 - 2022, Sept

SPSS was released in its first version in 1968 as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) after being developed by Norman H. Nie, Dale H. Bent, and C. Hadlai Hull. Those principals incorporated as SPSS Inc. in 1975. Early versions of SPSS Statistics were written in Fortran and designed for batch processing on mainframes, including for example IBM and ICL versions, originally using punched cards for data and program input. A processing run read a command file of SPSS commands and either a raw input file of fixed-format data with a single record type, or a 'getfile' of data saved by a previous run. To save precious computer time an 'edit' run could be done to check command syntax without analysing the data. From version 10 (SPSS-X) in 1983, data files could contain multiple record types.

Prior to SPSS 16.0, different versions of SPSS were available for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix.

SPSS Statistics version 13.0 for Mac OS X was not compatible with Intel-based Macintosh computers, due to the Rosetta emulation software causing errors in calculations. SPSS Statistics 15.0 for Windows needed a downloadable hotfix to be installed in order to be compatible with Windows Vista.

From version 16.0, the same version runs under Windows, Mac, and Linux. The graphical user interface is written in Java. The Mac OS version is provided as a Universal binary, making it fully compatible with both PowerPC and Intel-based Mac hardware.

SPSS Inc announced on July 28, 2009, that it was being acquired by IBM for US$1.2 billion. Because of a dispute about ownership of the name "SPSS", between 2009 and 2010, the product was referred to as PASW (Predictive Analytics SoftWare). As of January 2010, it became "SPSS: An IBM Company". Complete transfer of business to IBM was done by October 1, 2010. By that date, SPSS: An IBM Company ceased to exist. IBM SPSS is now fully integrated into the IBM Corporation, and is one of the brands under IBM Software Group's Business Analytics Portfolio, together with IBM Algorithmics, IBM Cognos and IBM OpenPages.

Companion software in the "IBM SPSS" family are used for data mining and text analytics (IBM SPSS Modeler), realtime credit scoring services (IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services), and structural equation modeling (IBM SPSS Amos).

SPSS Data Collection and SPSS Dimensions were sold in 2015 to UNICOM Systems, Inc., a division of UNICOM Global, and merged into the integrated software suite UNICOM Intelligence (survey design, survey deployment, data collection, data management and reporting).

(Interactive Data Analysis)
IDA (Interactive Data Analysis) was a software package that originated at what was formerly the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), at the University of Chicago. Initially offered on the HP-2000, somewhat later, under the ownership of SPSS, it was also available on MUSIC/SP. Regression analysis was one of IDA 's strong points.

- Conversational / Columnar SPSS
SCSS was a software product intended for online use of IBM mainframes.

Although the "C" was for "conversational", it also represented a distinction regarding how the data was stored: it used a column-oriented rather than a row-oriented (internal) database.

This gave good interactive response time for the SPSS Conversational Statistical System (SCSS), whose strong point, as with SPSS, was Cross-tabulation.

Project NX
In October, 2020 IBM announced the start of an Early Access Program for the "New SPSS Statistics", codenamed Project NX. It contains "many of your favorite SPSS capabilities presented in a new easy to use interface, with integrated guidance, multiple tabs, improved graphs and much more".

In December, 2021, IBM opened up the Early Access Program for the next generation of SPSS Statistics for more users and shared more visuals about it.

title: SPSS


text:
Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss

Edouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss (Eduard Wilhelm Eugen Reuss; 18 July 1804 – 15 April 1891) was a Protestant theologian from Alsace.

Life
He was born at Strasbourg, where he studied philology (1819–22). He went on to study theology at Göttingen under Johann Gottfried Eichhorn; and Oriental Languages at Halle under Wilhelm Gesenius, and afterwards at Paris under Silvestre de Sacy (1827–28). In 1828 he became Privatdozent at Strasbourg. From 1829 to 1834 he taught Biblical criticism and Oriental languages at the Strasbourg Theological School; he then became assistant, and afterwards, in 1836, regular professor of theology at that university. He became Professor of Old Testament at the same institution in 1864. Reuss was appointed as a regular member of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in May 1846. The sympathies of Reuss were German rather than French, and after the annexation of Alsace to Germany he remained at Strasbourg, and retained his professorship till he retired on a pension in 1888. He died in the same city.

Reuss belonged to the liberals in the Lutheran Protestant Church of Augsburg Confession of Alsace and Lorraine. His critical position was to some extent that of K. H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen: he was in a sense their forerunner, and was actually for a time Graf's teacher. The originator of the new movement, he hesitated to publish the results of his studies.

His son, Ernst Rudolf (1841–1924), was in 1873 appointed city librarian at Strasbourg.

Works
Amongst his earliest works were: De libris veteris Testamenti apocryphis plebi non negandis (1829), Ideen zur Einleitung in das Evangelium Johannis (1840) and Die Johanneische Theologie (1847). In 1852 he published his Histoire de la théologie chrétienne au siècle apostolique, which was followed in 1863 by L'Histoire du canon des saintes écritures dans l'église chrétienne. In 1874 he began to publish his translation of the Bible, La Bible, nouvelle traduction avec commentaire. New Testament criticism and exegesis formed the subject of Reuss's earlier labours—in 1842, he had published in German a history of the books of the New Testament, Geschichte der heiligen Schriften N. Test.; and though his own views were liberal, he opposed those of the Tübingen school. After a time he turned his attention to Old Testament criticism, based on knowledge of Hebrew. In 1881 he published in German his Geschichte der heiligen Schriften A. Test., a history of Israel from its earliest beginning till the taking of Jerusalem by Titus.

For many years Reuss edited with A. H. Cunitz the Beiträge zu den theologischen Wissenschaften. With A. H. Cunitz and J. W. Baum (1809–1878), and after their death alone, he edited the monumental edition of Calvin's works (38 vols., 1863 ff.). His critical edition of the Old Testament appeared a year after his death.

title: Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss


text:
Rat Pack

The Rat Pack was an informal group of singers that, in its second iteration, ultimately made films and appeared together in Las Vegas casino venues. They originated in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a group of A-list show business friends, such as Errol Flynn, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and others who met casually at the Holmby Hills home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In the 1960s, the group featured Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and (before falling out with Sinatra in 1962) Peter Lawford, among others. They appeared together on stage and in films in the 1950s and 1960s, including the films Ocean's 11 and Sergeants 3; after Lawford's expulsion, they filmed Robin and the 7 Hoods with Bing Crosby in what was to have been Lawford's role. Sinatra, Martin, and Davis were regarded as the group's lead members after Bogart's death.

1950s

The name "Rat Pack" was first used to call to a group of friends in New York, and several explanations have been offered for the name. According to one version, Lauren Bacall saw her husband Humphrey Bogart and his friends returning from a night in Las Vegas and said, "You look like a goddamn rat pack." "Rat Pack" may also be a shortened version of "Holmby Hills Rat Pack", a reference to the home of Bogart and Bacall which served as a regular hangout of the same group of friends during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Visiting members included Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, Nat King Cole, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Lena Horne, Jerry Lewis, and Cesar Romero. According to Stephen Bogart, the original members of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack were Frank Sinatra (pack master), Judy Garland (first vice-president), Sid Luft (cage master), Bogart (rat in charge of public relations), Swifty Lazar (recording secretary and treasurer), Nathaniel Benchley (historian), David Niven, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, and Jimmy Van Heusen. The Rat Pack group underwent several transformations. The publicly best-known transformation happened under the leadership of Frank Sinatra.

After Bogart's death in 1957, Frank Sinatra and Lauren Bacall became engaged and planned a marriage while living together in Sinatra's homes. Frank Sinatra became the Rat Pack leader from 1957 on. By the end of the 1950s, the Rat Pack evolved into an informal production group whose members united their star power to support each other's careers. At that time, the Rat Pack activities expanded to Las Vegas where members performed regular gigs and helped each other by making unannounced appearances to impress the audiences. In 1958, three Rat Pack members, Sinatra, Martin, and Shirley MacLaine starred in Some Came Running that was popular with the public. At the same time in 1958, a story about a series of Las Vegas casino robberies circulated among entertainers, so Peter Lawford bought the rights and Frank Sinatra became interested in the idea. Several members of the Rat Pack who were regulars in Vegas, were naturally fit to lead the cast of characters in the upcoming production, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop, and also Angie Dickinson, Cesar Romero, and Shirley MacLaine. A variety of writers worked on the project, titled Ocean's 11, and the production was set to begin in January 1960.

1960s

The film Ocean's 11, made between January and March of 1960, shows several members of the Rat Pack group as they were in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was the second incarnation of the Rat Pack under the leadership of Frank Sinatra.

The early 1960s version of the group included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. This group was originally known as the "Clan", but that name fell out of favor because it was reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, Juliet Prowse, Buddy Greco, and Shirley MacLaine were often referred to as the "Rat Pack Mascots".

Comedian Don Rickles wrote that "I never received an official membership card but Frank made me feel part of the fun."

Peter Lawford was a brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy (dubbed "Brother-in-Lawford" by Sinatra), and Kennedy spent time with Sinatra and the others when he visited Las Vegas, during which members sometimes referred to the group as "the Jack Pack". Rat Pack members played a role in campaigning for Kennedy and the Democrats, appearing at the July 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Lawford asked Sinatra if he would have Kennedy as a guest at his Palm Springs house in March 1962 and Sinatra went to great lengths to accommodate the President, including the construction of a helipad. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy advised his brother to sever ties to Sinatra because of his association with Mafia figures such as Sam Giancana and he canceled the visit. Kennedy instead stayed at Bing Crosby's estate, which further infuriated Sinatra. Lawford was blamed for this and Sinatra "never again had a good word" for him. Lawford's role was written out of the upcoming 4 for Texas, and his part in Robin and the 7 Hoods was given to Bing Crosby.

Revival

Sinatra, Davis, and Martin announced a 29-date tour called Together Again in December 1987. At the press conference to announce the tour, Martin joked about calling it off, and Sinatra rebuked a reporter for using the term "Rat Pack", referring to it as "that stupid phrase".

Dean Martin's son Dean Paul Martin died in a plane crash in March 1987 on the San Gorgonio Mountain in California, the same mountain where Sinatra's mother was killed in a plane crash ten years earlier. Martin had since become increasingly dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. Davis had hip replacement surgery two years previously, and was estranged from Sinatra because of Davis's use of cocaine. Davis was also experiencing severe financial difficulties, and was promised by Sinatra's people that he could earn between six and eight million dollars from the tour.

Martin had not made a film or recorded since 1984 and Sinatra felt that the tour would be good for Martin, telling Davis, "I think it would be great for Dean. Get him out. For that alone it would be worth doing". Sinatra and Davis still performed regularly, yet they had not recorded for several years. Both Sinatra and Martin had made their last film appearances together in 1984's Cannonball Run II, which also starred Davis. This marked the trio's first feature film appearance since 1964's Robin and the 7 Hoods. Martin expressed reservations about the tour, wondering whether they could draw as many people as they had in the past. Sinatra and Davis complained during private rehearsals about the lack of black musicians in the orchestra. The tour began at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena on March 13, 1988, to a sold-out crowd of 14,500.

Davis opened the show, followed by Martin and then Sinatra; after an interval, the three performed a medley of songs. During the show, Martin threw a lit cigarette at the audience. He withdrew from the tour after just five shows, citing a flare-up of a kidney problem. Sinatra and Davis continued the tour under the title "The Ultimate Event" with Liza Minnelli replacing Martin as the third member of the trio.

Davis's associate stated that Sinatra's people were skimming the top of the revenues from the concerts, as well as stuffing envelopes full of cash into suitcases after the performances. In August 1989, Davis was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused his death in May 1990. He was buried with a gold watch that Sinatra had given him at the conclusion of The Ultimate Event Tour.

A 1988 performance of The Ultimate Event in Detroit was recorded and shown on Showtime the following year as a tribute to the recently deceased Davis. A review in The New York Times praised Davis's performance, describing it as "pure, ebullient, unapologetic show business."

Reputation
Concerning the group's reputation for womanizing and heavy drinking, Joey Bishop stated in a 1998 interview: "I never saw Frank, Dean Martin, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag! And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away!"

Films

 * It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) (Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford)
 * Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) (Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. – cameo appearances)
 * Some Came Running (1958) (Sinatra and Dean Martin, co-starring Shirley MacLaine)
 * Never So Few (1959) (Sinatra, Lawford, and initially Davis, who was replaced by Steve McQueen)
 * Ocean's 11 (1960) (Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, Angie Dickinson, Joey Bishop, cameo by MacLaine)
 * Pepe (1960) (Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, and Bishop – all cameos)
 * Sergeants 3 (1962) (Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, and Bishop)
 * The Road to Hong Kong (1962) (Sinatra and Martin – cameos)
 * Come Blow Your Horn (1963) (Sinatra; cameo by Martin)
 * Johnny Cool (1963) (Davis and Bishop; Peter Lawford, executive producer; Henry Silva of Ocean's 11 starred, with Mort Sahl and Jim Backus in supporting roles)
 * 4 for Texas (1963) (Sinatra and Martin)
 * Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) (Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and initially Lawford, who was replaced by Bing Crosby)
 * Marriage on the Rocks (1965) (Sinatra and Martin)
 * The Oscar (1966) (Sinatra uncredited, and Lawford)
 * A Man Called Adam (1966) (Davis and Lawford)
 * Texas Across the River (1966) (Martin and Bishop)
 * Salt and Pepper (1968) (Davis and Lawford)
 * Sweet Charity (1969) (MacLaine and Davis)
 * One More Time (1970) (Davis and Lawford)
 * The Cannonball Run (1981) (Martin and Davis)
 * Cannonball Run II (1984) (Sinatra, Martin and Davis, plus MacLaine and Silva)

Archival footage of Lawford and Sinatra was used in the 1974 compilation film That's Entertainment!.

Shirley MacLaine appeared in the 1958 film Some Came Running, along with Sinatra and Martin. She had a major role (and Sinatra a cameo) in the 1956 Oscar-winning film Around the World in 80 Days. MacLaine played a Hindu princess who is rescued by, and falls in love with, original Rat Pack associate David Niven, and Sinatra had a non-speaking, non-singing role as a piano player in a saloon, whose identity is concealed from the viewer until he turns his face toward the camera during a scene featuring Marlene Dietrich and George Raft. MacLaine appeared alongside Sinatra in Can-Can. She also had an appearance in the 1960 film Ocean's 11 as a drunken woman. The 1984 film Cannonball Run II, with MacLaine, marked the final time members of the Rat Pack shared theatrical screen-time together.

A biopic titled The Rat Pack, made by HBO in 1998, starred Ray Liotta as Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Martin, and Don Cheadle as Davis, dramatizing their private lives and, in particular, their roles in the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy.

Music
Christmas with the Rat Pack, a collection of holiday tunes sung by Sinatra, Martin and Davis, was released in 2001. The Ultimate Rat Pack Collection: Live & Swingin' went on sale in 2003. A concert featuring the three men, Live from the Sands in Las Vegas, is also available on CD.

Stage
The Rat Pack: Live from Las Vegas tribute show originated on stage in London in 2000 and has been running continuously since then throughout Europe and North America.

title: Rat Pack


text:
Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.

History

Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain damage. Aphasiology attempts to correlate structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on language processing. One of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area. Phrenologists had made the claim in the early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions and that language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain, but Broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship, and has been described as "epoch-making" and "pivotal" to the fields of neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks, with Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's area handling auditory speech comprehension. The work of Broca and Wernicke established the field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied through examining physical characteristics of the brain. Early work in aphasiology also benefited from the early twentieth-century work of Korbinian Brodmann, who "mapped" the surface of the brain, dividing it up into numbered areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell structure) and function; these areas, known as Brodmann areas, are still widely used in neuroscience today.

The coining of the term neurolinguistics in the late 1940s and 1950s is attributed to Edith Crowell Trager, Henri Hecaen and Alexandr Luria. Luria's 1976 book "Basic Problems of Neurolinguistics" is likely the first book with "neurolinguistics" in the title. Harry Whitaker popularized neurolinguistics in the United States in the 1970s, founding the journal "Brain and Language" in 1974.

Although aphasiology is the historical core of neurolinguistics, in recent years the field has broadened considerably, thanks in part to the emergence of new brain imaging technologies (such as PET and fMRI) and time-sensitive electrophysiological techniques (EEG and MEG), which can highlight patterns of brain activation as people engage in various language tasks. Electrophysiological techniques, in particular, emerged as a viable method for the study of language in 1980 with the discovery of the N400, a brain response shown to be sensitive to semantic issues in language comprehension. The N400 was the first language-relevant event-related potential to be identified, and since its discovery EEG and MEG have become increasingly widely used for conducting language research.

Interaction with other fields
Neurolinguistics is closely related to the field of psycholinguistics, which seeks to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of language by employing the traditional techniques of experimental psychology. Today, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories often inform one another, and there is much collaboration between the two fields.

Much work in neurolinguistics involves testing and evaluating theories put forth by psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. In general, theoretical linguists propose models to explain the structure of language and how language information is organized, psycholinguists propose models and algorithms to explain how language information is processed in the mind, and neurolinguists analyze brain activity to infer how biological structures (populations and networks of neurons) carry out those psycholinguistic processing algorithms. For example, experiments in sentence processing have used the ELAN, N400, and P600 brain responses to examine how physiological brain responses reflect the different predictions of sentence processing models put forth by psycholinguists, such as Janet Fodor and Lyn Frazier's "serial" model, and Theo Vosse and Gerard Kempen's "unification model". Neurolinguists can also make new predictions about the structure and organization of language based on insights about the physiology of the brain, by "generalizing from the knowledge of neurological structures to language structure".

Neurolinguistics research is carried out in all the major areas of linguistics; the main linguistic subfields, and how neurolinguistics addresses them, are given in the table below.

Topics considered
Neurolinguistics research investigates several topics, including where language information is processed, how language processing unfolds over time, how brain structures are related to language acquisition and learning, and how neurophysiology can contribute to speech and language pathology.

Localizations of language processes
Much work in neurolinguistics has, like Broca's and Wernicke's early studies, investigated the locations of specific language "modules" within the brain. Research questions include what course language information follows through the brain as it is processed, whether or not particular areas specialize in processing particular sorts of information, how different brain regions interact with one another in language processing, and how the locations of brain activation differ when a subject is producing or perceiving a language other than his or her first language.

Time course of language processes
Another area of neurolinguistics literature involves the use of electrophysiological techniques to analyze the rapid processing of language in time. The temporal ordering of specific patterns of brain activity may reflect discrete computational processes that the brain undergoes during language processing; for example, one neurolinguistic theory of sentence parsing proposes that three brain responses (the ELAN, N400, and P600) are products of three different steps in syntactic and semantic processing.

Language acquisition
Another topic is the relationship between brain structures and language acquisition. Research in first language acquisition has already established that infants from all linguistic environments go through similar and predictable stages (such as babbling), and some neurolinguistics research attempts to find correlations between stages of language development and stages of brain development, while other research investigates the physical changes (known as neuroplasticity) that the brain undergoes during second language acquisition, when adults learn a new language. Neuroplasticity is observed when both Second Language acquisition and Language Learning experience are induced, the result of this language exposure concludes that an increase of gray and white matter could be found in children, young adults and the elderly.

Language pathology
Neurolinguistic techniques are also used to study disorders and breakdowns in language, such as aphasia and dyslexia, and how they relate to physical characteristics of the brain.

Technology used
Since one of the focuses of this field is the testing of linguistic and psycholinguistic models, the technology used for experiments is highly relevant to the study of neurolinguistics. Modern brain imaging techniques have contributed greatly to a growing understanding of the anatomical organization of linguistic functions. Brain imaging methods used in neurolinguistics may be classified into hemodynamic methods, electrophysiological methods, and methods that stimulate the cortex directly.

Hemodynamic
Hemodynamic techniques take advantage of the fact that when an area of the brain works at a task, blood is sent to supply that area with oxygen (in what is known as the Blood Oxygen Level-Dependent, or BOLD, response). Such techniques include PET and fMRI. These techniques provide high spatial resolution, allowing researchers to pinpoint the location of activity within the brain; temporal resolution (or information about the timing of brain activity), on the other hand, is poor, since the BOLD response happens much more slowly than language processing. In addition to demonstrating which parts of the brain may subserve specific language tasks or computations, hemodynamic methods have also been used to demonstrate how the structure of the brain's language architecture and the distribution of language-related activation may change over time, as a function of linguistic exposure.

In addition to PET and fMRI, which show which areas of the brain are activated by certain tasks, researchers also use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which shows the neural pathways that connect different brain areas, thus providing insight into how different areas interact. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is another hemodynamic method used in language tasks.

Electrophysiological
Electrophysiological techniques take advantage of the fact that when a group of neurons in the brain fire together, they create an electric dipole or current. The technique of EEG measures this electric current using sensors on the scalp, while MEG measures the magnetic fields that are generated by these currents. In addition to these non-invasive methods, electrocorticography has also been used to study language processing. These techniques are able to measure brain activity from one millisecond to the next, providing excellent temporal resolution, which is important in studying processes that take place as quickly as language comprehension and production. On the other hand, the location of brain activity can be difficult to identify in EEG; consequently, this technique is used primarily to how language processes are carried out, rather than where. Research using EEG and MEG generally focuses on event-related potentials (ERPs), which are distinct brain responses (generally realized as negative or positive peaks on a graph of neural activity) elicited in response to a particular stimulus. Studies using ERP may focus on each ERP's latency (how long after the stimulus the ERP begins or peaks), amplitude (how high or low the peak is), or topography (where on the scalp the ERP response is picked up by sensors). Some important and common ERP components include the N400 (a negativity occurring at a latency of about 400 milliseconds), the mismatch negativity, the early left anterior negativity (a negativity occurring at an early latency and a front-left topography), the P600, and the lateralized readiness potential.

Experimental techniques
Neurolinguists employ a variety of experimental techniques in order to use brain imaging to draw conclusions about how language is represented and processed in the brain. These techniques include the subtraction paradigm, mismatch design, violation-based studies, various forms of priming, and direct stimulation of the brain.

Subtraction
Many language studies, particularly in fMRI, use the subtraction paradigm, in which brain activation in a task thought to involve some aspect of language processing is compared against activation in a baseline task thought to involve similar non-linguistic processes but not to involve the linguistic process. For example, activations while participants read words may be compared to baseline activations while participants read strings of random letters (in attempt to isolate activation related to lexical processing—the processing of real words), or activations while participants read syntactically complex sentences may be compared to baseline activations while participants read simpler sentences.

Mismatch paradigm
The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a rigorously documented ERP component frequently used in neurolinguistic experiments. It is an electrophysiological response that occurs in the brain when a subject hears a "deviant" stimulus in a set of perceptually identical "standards" (as in the sequence s s s s s s s d d s s s s s s d s s s s s d). Since the MMN is elicited only in response to a rare "oddball" stimulus in a set of other stimuli that are perceived to be the same, it has been used to test how speakers perceive sounds and organize stimuli categorically. For example, a landmark study by Colin Phillips and colleagues used the mismatch negativity as evidence that subjects, when presented with a series of speech sounds with acoustic parameters, perceived all the sounds as either /t/ or /d/ in spite of the acoustic variability, suggesting that the human brain has representations of abstract phonemes—in other words, the subjects were "hearing" not the specific acoustic features, but only the abstract phonemes. In addition, the mismatch negativity has been used to study syntactic processing and the recognition of word category.

Violation-based
Many studies in neurolinguistics take advantage of anomalies or violations of syntactic or semantic rules in experimental stimuli, and analyzing the brain responses elicited when a subject encounters these violations. For example, sentences beginning with phrases such as *the garden was on the worked, which violates an English phrase structure rule, often elicit a brain response called the early left anterior negativity (ELAN). Violation techniques have been in use since at least 1980, when Kutas and Hillyard first reported ERP evidence that semantic violations elicited an N400 effect. Using similar methods, in 1992, Lee Osterhout first reported the P600 response to syntactic anomalies. Violation designs have also been used for hemodynamic studies (fMRI and PET): Embick and colleagues, for example, used grammatical and spelling violations to investigate the location of syntactic processing in the brain using fMRI. Another common use of violation designs is to combine two kinds of violations in the same sentence and thus make predictions about how different language processes interact with one another; this type of crossing-violation study has been used extensively to investigate how syntactic and semantic processes interact while people read or hear sentences.

Priming
In psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, priming refers to the phenomenon whereby a subject can recognize a word more quickly if he or she has recently been presented with a word that is similar in meaning or morphological makeup (i.e., composed of similar parts). If a subject is presented with a "prime" word such as doctor and then a "target" word such as nurse, if the subject has a faster-than-usual response time to nurse then the experimenter may assume that word nurse in the brain had already been accessed when the word doctor was accessed. Priming is used to investigate a wide variety of questions about how words are stored and retrieved in the brain and how structurally complex sentences are processed.

Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a new noninvasive technique for studying brain activity, uses powerful magnetic fields that are applied to the brain from outside the head. It is a method of exciting or interrupting brain activity in a specific and controlled location, and thus is able to imitate aphasic symptoms while giving the researcher more control over exactly which parts of the brain will be examined. As such, it is a less invasive alternative to direct cortical stimulation, which can be used for similar types of research but requires that the subject's scalp be removed, and is thus only used on individuals who are already undergoing a major brain operation (such as individuals undergoing surgery for epilepsy). The logic behind TMS and direct cortical stimulation is similar to the logic behind aphasiology: if a particular language function is impaired when a specific region of the brain is knocked out, then that region must be somehow implicated in that language function. Few neurolinguistic studies to date have used TMS; direct cortical stimulation and cortical recording (recording brain activity using electrodes placed directly on the brain) have been used with macaque monkeys to make predictions about the behavior of human brains.

Subject tasks
In many neurolinguistics experiments, subjects do not simply sit and listen to or watch stimuli, but also are instructed to perform some sort of task in response to the stimuli. Subjects perform these tasks while recordings (electrophysiological or hemodynamic) are being taken, usually in order to ensure that they are paying attention to the stimuli. At least one study has suggested that the task the subject does has an effect on the brain responses and the results of the experiment.

Lexical decision
The lexical decision task involves subjects seeing or hearing an isolated word and answering whether or not it is a real word. It is frequently used in priming studies, since subjects are known to make a lexical decision more quickly if a word has been primed by a related word (as in "doctor" priming "nurse").

Grammaticality judgment, acceptability judgment
Many studies, especially violation-based studies, have subjects make a decision about the "acceptability" (usually grammatical acceptability or semantic acceptability) of stimuli. Such a task is often used to "ensure that subjects [are] reading the sentences attentively and that they [distinguish] acceptable from unacceptable sentences in the way the [experimenter] expect[s] them to do."

Experimental evidence has shown that the instructions given to subjects in an acceptability judgment task can influence the subjects' brain responses to stimuli. One experiment showed that when subjects were instructed to judge the "acceptability" of sentences they did not show an N400 brain response (a response commonly associated with semantic processing), but that they did show that response when instructed to ignore grammatical acceptability and only judge whether or not the sentences "made sense".

Probe verification
Some studies use a "probe verification" task rather than an overt acceptability judgment; in this paradigm, each experimental sentence is followed by a "probe word", and subjects must answer whether or not the probe word had appeared in the sentence. This task, like the acceptability judgment task, ensures that subjects are reading or listening attentively, but may avoid some of the additional processing demands of acceptability judgments, and may be used no matter what type of violation is being presented in the study.

Truth-value judgment
Subjects may be instructed not to judge whether or not the sentence is grammatically acceptable or logical, but whether the proposition expressed by the sentence is true or false. This task is commonly used in psycholinguistic studies of child language.

Active distraction and double-task
Some experiments give subjects a "distractor" task to ensure that subjects are not consciously paying attention to the experimental stimuli; this may be done to test whether a certain computation in the brain is carried out automatically, regardless of whether the subject devotes attentional resources to it. For example, one study had subjects listen to non-linguistic tones (long beeps and buzzes) in one ear and speech in the other ear, and instructed subjects to press a button when they perceived a change in the tone; this supposedly caused subjects not to pay explicit attention to grammatical violations in the speech stimuli. The subjects showed a mismatch response (MMN) anyway, suggesting that the processing of the grammatical errors was happening automatically, regardless of attention —or at least that subjects were unable to consciously separate their attention from the speech stimuli.

Another related form of experiment is the double-task experiment, in which a subject must perform an extra task (such as sequential finger-tapping or articulating nonsense syllables) while responding to linguistic stimuli; this kind of experiment has been used to investigate the use of working memory in language processing.

title: Neurolinguistics


text:
Aphasiology

Aphasiology is the study of language impairment usually resulting from brain damage, due to neurovascular accident—hemorrhage, stroke—or associated with a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including different types of dementia. These specific language deficits, termed aphasias, may be defined as impairments of language production or comprehension that cannot be attributed to trivial causes such as deafness or oral paralysis. A number of aphasias have been described, but two are best known: expressive aphasia (Broca's aphasia) and receptive aphasia (Wernicke's or sensory aphasia).

Acute aphasias
Acute aphasias are often the result of tissue damage following a stroke.

Expressive aphasia
First described by the French neurologist Paul Broca in the nineteenth century, expressive aphasia causes the speech of those affected to display a considerable vocabulary but to show grammatical deficits. It is characterized by a halting speech consisting mainly of content words, i.e. nouns and verbs, and, at least in English, distinctly lacking small grammatical function words such as articles and prepositions. This observation gave rise to the terms telegraphic speech and, more recently, agrammatism. The extent to which expressive aphasics retain knowledge of grammar is a matter of considerable controversy. Nonetheless, because their comprehension of spoken language is mostly preserved, and because their speech is usually good enough to get their point across, the agrammatic nature of their speech suggests that the disorder chiefly involves the expressive mechanisms of language that turn thoughts into well-formed sentences.

The view of expressive aphasia as an expressive disorder is supported by its frequent co-occurrence with facial motor difficulties, and its anatomical localization. Although expressive aphasia may be caused by brain damage to many regions, it is most commonly associated with the inferior frontal gyrus, a region that overlaps with motor cortex controlling the mouth and tongue, extending into the periventricular white matter. Not surprisingly, this region has come to be known as "Broca's area". However, an intriguing line of research has demonstrated specific comprehension deficits in expressive aphasics as well. These deficits generally involve sentences that are grammatical, but atypical in their word order. The simplest example is sentences in the passive voice, such as "The boy was chased by the girl." Expressive aphasics may have quite a hard time realizing that the girl is doing the chasing, but they do much better with "The mouse was chased by the cat," where world knowledge constraints contribute to the correct interpretation. However, "The cat was chased by the mouse" would likewise be incomprehensible. This evidence suggests that grammatical competence may be a specific function of Broca's area.

Lesions exclusive to Broca's area (the foot of the inferior frontal gyrus) do not produce Broca's aphasia but instead mild dysprosody and agraphia, sometimes accompanied by word-finding pauses and mild dysarthria. Not much is known about what other areas must be damaged in order to produce Broca's aphasia, but some maintain damage to the inferior pre-Rolandic motor strip (the motor cortex region responsible glossopharyngeal muscle control) is also necessary.

Receptive aphasia
Receptive aphasia was originally described by the German neurologist Karl Wernicke, a contemporary of Broca. Receptive aphasics produce speech that seems fluent and grammatical, but is largely devoid of sensible content. Comprehension is severely impaired, but while patients display a great deal of difficulty comprehending individual words, they can more easily understand words in context. Receptive aphasia is associated with the posterior third of the superior temporal gyrus in the distribution of the inferior division of the middle cerebral artery, known as "Wernicke's area", an area adjacent to the cortex responsible for auditory processing. If the damage extends posteriorly, visual connections are disrupted, and the patient will have difficulty understanding written language. Therefore, the localization of the two best-known aphasias mirrors the grossest dichotomy in brain organization: anterior areas are specialized for motor output, and posterior areas for sensory processing.

A fascinating corollary of this has come from research on aphasias in deaf users of sign language, who show deficits in signing and comprehension analogous to Expressive and Receptive aphasias in hearing populations. These studies demonstrate that the grammatical functions of Broca's area and the semantic functions of Wernicke's area are indeed deep, abstract properties of the language system independent of its modality of expression.

Global aphasia
Another less commonly known aphasia is global aphasia, which generally manifests itself after a stroke affecting an extensive portion of the brain occurs, including infarction of both divisions of the middle cerebral artery and generally both Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Survivors with global aphasia may have great difficulty understanding and forming words and sentences, and generally experience a great deal of difficulty when trying to communicate. With considerable speech therapy rehabilitation, global aphasia may progress into expressive aphasia or receptive aphasia.

Anomic aphasia
A person with anomic aphasia have word-finding difficulties. Anomic aphasia, also known as anomia, is a non-fluent aphasia, which means the person speaks hesitantly because of a difficulty naming words or producing correct syntax. The person struggles to find the right words for speaking and writing. Subjects tend to use circumlocutions, in which they speak around the word they can not find, to make up for their loss. People also with anomic aphasia tend to know how to use an object, but rather can not name the aforementioned object. Any damage in or near the zone of language can result in anomic aphasia. Other forms of aphasia often transition into a syndrome of primarily anomic aphasia in the process of recovery.

Conduction aphasia
Conduction Aphasia is a rare form of aphasia in which fibres in the arcuate fasciculus and superior longitudinal fasciculus are damaged. These fibres are the link between the Wernicke's and Broca's area. Damage to the area connecting comprehension and expression together has the following symptoms: fluent speech, good comprehension, poor oral reading, repetition is poor and transpositions of sounds within words is very common.

Primary progressive aphasias
Primary progressive aphasia is a rare disorder where people slowly lose their ability to talk, read, write, and comprehend what they hear in conversation over a period of time. It was first described as a distinct syndrome by Mesulam in 1982. There are three variants: progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD), and logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA).

History
The nineteenth century marked the most important time in the evolution of aphasiology, beginning with the works of Franz Josef Gall. Gall is the founder of the more modern localization theory and is the origin of the idea of a language center in the brain. However, supporting evidence for the theory that language had its own anatomical representation was not found until the case study of Mr. Leborgne, also known as Tan, by Paul Broca in 1861. The discovery of what is now known as Broca's area was followed years later by Carl Wernicke's famous work, 'The Symptom-Complex of Aphasia: A Psychological Study on an Anatomical Basis' in 1874. This paper is regarded as one of the most influential works in the history of the field of aphasiology. In it, Wernicke described many of the different classifications of aphasia and is the basis for the classical model of aphasia.

title: Aphasiology


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Spent mushroom compost

Spent mushroom compost is the residual compost waste generated by the mushroom production industry.

Background
It is readily available (bagged, at nursery suppliers), and its formulation generally consists of a combination of wheat straw, dried blood, horse manure and ground chalk, composted together. It is an excellent source of humus, although much of its nitrogen content will have been used up by the composting and growing mushrooms. It remains, however, a good source of general nutrients (1-2% N, 0.2% P, 1.3% K plus a full range of trace elements), as well as a useful soil conditioner. However, due to its chalk content, it may be alkaline, and should not be used on acid-loving plants, nor should it be applied too frequently, as it will overly raise the soil's pH levels.

Mushroom compost may also contain pesticide residues, particularly organochlorides used against the fungus gnat. If the compost pile was stored outside, it may contain grubs or other insects attracted to decaying matter. Chemicals may also have been used to treat the straw, and also to sterilize the compost. Therefore, the organic gardener must be careful regarding the sourcing of mushroom compost; if in doubt, samples can be analyzed for contamination – in the UK, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is able to advise regarding this issue.

Commercially available 'spent' mushroom compost is not always truly spent. It is sold by mushroom farms when it is no longer producing commercially viable yields of mushrooms. It can be used to grow further smaller crops of mushrooms before final use on the garden.

title: Spent mushroom compost