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Warrington South (UK Parliament constituency)

Warrington South is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament by Sarah Hall from the Labour Party since 2024. Before then it was held since 2019 by Andy Carter, a Conservative Party politician.

Constituency profile
Warrington South is one of two seats covering the Borough of Warrington, the other being Warrington North. The seat covers the parts of the town lying south of the River Mersey, including Appleton, Grappenhall and Stockton Heath, the town centre and the Penketh and Sankey areas in the west of the town.

Warrington is a historic and industrious town which grew significantly in economy and in population in the 20th century. Workless claimants who were registered jobseekers, were in November 2012 lower than the national average of 3.8%, at 3.3% of the population based on a statistical compilation by The Guardian. This contrasted with Warrington North at 4.3% of its population.

Creation
The constituency was created for the 1983 general election following the major reorganisation of local authorities under the Local Government Act 1972, which came into effect on 1 April 1974. It comprised parts of the abolished constituencies of Newton, Runcorn and Warrington.

Boundaries
1983–1997: The Borough of Warrington wards of Appleton and Stretton, Booths Hill, Grappenhall and Thelwall, Great Sankey North, Great Sankey South, Heatley, Latchford, Lymm, Penketh and Cuerdley, Statham, Stockton Heath, and Walton and Westy, and the Borough of Halton wards of Daresbury and Norton.

''Areas to the south of the Manchester Ship Canal, now part of the newly formed Borough of Warrington (including Lymm) and the Borough of Halton wards were previously part of Runcorn constituency. Great Sankey and Penketh, to the west of the town, were previously part of Newton. Also included a small part of the abolished Warrington constituency.''

1997–2010: The Borough of Warrington wards of Appleton, Stretton and Hatton, Grappenhall and Thelwall, Great Sankey North, Great Sankey South, Howley and Whitecross, Latchford, Lymm, Penketh and Cuerdley, Stockton Heath, and Walton and Westy.

''Under the Fourth Periodic Review of constituencies, the number of constituencies in Cheshire was increased from 10 to 11 and the Borough of Halton wards were now included in the newly created constituency of Weaver Vale. To compensate for this loss, the town centre area was transferred from Warrington North.''

2010–2024: The Borough of Warrington wards of Appleton, Bewsey and Whitecross, Grappenhall and Thelwall, Great Sankey North, Great Sankey South, Hatton, Stretton and Walton, Latchford East, Latchford West, Lymm, Penketh and Cuerdley, Stockton Heath, and Whittle Hall.

The boundaries were introduced at the 2010 general election, following the Fifth Periodic Review. Minor changes due to revision of ward boundaries.

2024-Present:The Borough of Warrington wards of Appleton, Bewsey & Whitecross, Chapelford & Old Hall, Grappenhall, Great Sankey North & Whittle Hall, Great Sankey South, Latchford East, Latchford West, Penketh & Cuerdley, Stockton Heath and Thelwall.

The boundaries were introduced at the 2024 general election, following the 2023 Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies. The constituency was reduced in size to bring the electorate within the permitted range by transferring the village of Lymm (but not Thelwall) to Tatton.

Political history
In 1983, the seat was won for the Conservatives by Mark Carlisle, who before the seat's creation had represented Runcorn. Carlisle served as Secretary of State for Education during part of the Thatcher ministry.

The seat has been relative to others a marginal seat since 2001 as well as a swing seat as its winner's majority has not exceeded 7.5% of the vote since the 16.3% majority won in that year. The seat has changed hands three times since that year.

Warrington South is considered the more volatile of the two Warrington seats. While Warrington North is a safe seat for the Labour Party, Warrington South is often a bellwether and is regarded as a marginal constituency; it has been won by the largest party in each Parliament at every election with the exception of 1992, when it was taken by Labour's Mike Hall with a majority of just 0.3%, and again in 2017. Hall moved to the new Weaver Vale seat in 1997, but the seat was retained for the Labour party by Helen Southworth who represented the seat until her retirement at the 2010 election and successor candidate's defeat.

2010 election
On 15 June 2009, Helen Southworth announced her intention to retire the next year. Largely because of its close result in 2005, the seat was considered to be one of the key seats which the Conservative Party would have to win to become the largest party in Parliament. The BBC ranked Warrington South as the 85th most marginal seat. The new boundaries were considered to be slightly more favourable to the Labour Party according to an academic, non-partisan election analysis.

The Liberal Democrats had also identified Warrington South as a target seat. On election day the Liberal Democrat party held 22 of the 30 Borough Council seats in the wards which made up the constituency. The importance of the Warrington South seat was underlined when Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat party leader, chose to visit the constituency the morning after the first of the televised "leaders' debates", which he had been widely perceived as having won.

While all three parties made strenuous efforts to win the seat, it was the Conservative candidate David Mowat who was elected, although fewer than 5,000 votes separated all three parties.

Subsequent elections
In 2015 and 2017, the seat was considered an important Labour-Conservative marginal, the Liberal Democrats losing substantial ground here in both elections. The 2015 election saw Mowat re-elected with an increased majority; in 2017, it was regained by Labour's Faisal Rashid on a 4.4% swing. It was retaken for the Conservatives in 2019 by Andy Carter. In all three cases, the victory margin between first and second was smaller than overall vote of the third-placed Liberal Democrats, although the latter were a long way behind the top two parties. In 2024, due to boundary changes, the seat was considered a notional Labour seat despite being held by a Conservative MP in Andy Carter. It was taken officially for Labour by Sarah Hall, but records consider it a Labour hold rather than a Labour gain. Reform UK were placed third, bumping the Liberal Democrats down to fourth.


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Canton of Lucerne

The canton of Lucerne (Kanton Luzern ; Chantun Lucerna; Canton de Lucerne; Canton Lucerna) is a canton of Switzerland. It is located in the country's central, German-speaking part. The population of the canton (as of ) is. , the population included 57,268 foreigners, or about 15.8% of the total population. The cantonal capital is the city of Lucerne.

History
The canton of Lucerne comprises territories acquired by its capital Lucerne, either by treaty, armed occupation or purchase. The first town acquired was Weggis (in 1380), Rothenburg, Kriens, Horw, Sempach and Hochdorf (all in 1394), Wolhusen and Entlebuch (1405), the so-called "Habsburger region" to the northeast of the town of Lucerne (1406), Willisau (1407), Sursee and Beromünster (1415), Malters (1477) and Littau (1481), while in 1803, in exchange for Hitzkirch, Merenschwand (held since 1397) was given up.

Prehistory
The oldest traces of humans in the Lucerne area are stone artifacts and cave bear bones found in the Steigelfadbalm cave on Mt. Rigi from the Middle Paleolithic or about 30,000 BC. Other animal bones including mammoth, reindeer and giant deer from the local glacial maximum have also been found in the canton. Around 17,000 BC the glaciers disappeared from the Swiss plateau and recolonization is likely at that time.

The first Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlement discovered in the canton is in the Wauwilermoos, which is now a Swiss heritage site of national significance. A number of other settlements have since been found, mainly on sandy, dry elevations in the immediate vicinity of water. The settlements of Egolzwil 3 in Wauwilermoos in Egolzwil, Seematte at Hitzkirch and Halbinsel in Sursee are part of the Prehistoric Pile dwellings around the Alps a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Wauwilermoos houses had wooden or bark floors and hearths of clay. The villages had ceramic vessels and wood, bone, antler, stone and flint tools as well as textiles. Copper ax blades and knives provide the first evidence of metal use in Switzerland. Imported mollusks show that there were trade connections to the Mediterranean. The bones at Egolzwil 3 are over two thirds from domestic animals with the remainder from wild animals. The main domesticated animals were sheep, goats and pigs with only a few domestic cattle. The animals hunted included deer, roe deer, wild boar and elk.

During the Bronze Age the canton was quite settled. There were a number of settlements on the shores of Lake Sempach and Lake Baldegg along with hilltop settlements, graves and scattered items throughout the area. At Hochdorf-Baldegg a fenced village from the early Bronze Age (2200–1500 BC) was uncovered. The single-story houses all had clay or stone hearths. During the Middle Bronze Age (1550–1350 BC) most of the villages were not located directly on the lake shores. The Late Bronze Age settlement at Sursee-Zellmoos on Lake Sempach featured houses arranged in rows with mortared stone. The walls were timber lined with clay. Another Late Bronze Age settlement near the village of Schötz was densely populated between 1350 and 800 BC.

While numerous individual Iron Age items have been found, almost no settlements have been discovered. From the Hallstatt period (800–480 BC) mainly graves have been discovered. Very little is known about the La Tène period (480–30 BC) in Lucerne. Some iron tools, gold coins, ceramic vessels and a glass bangle as well as a burial ground with at least four graves have been found.

During the Roman era, the canton was once again thickly settled. A number of farms were built in the north–south running valleys (Wigger, Suhre, Wyna and See valleys). During the 1st century AD, the farms provided food for the Legion camp in Vindonissa and for the larger settlements located in the Swiss plateau.

Towards the end of the 1st century there was a vicus at Sursee. The remains of houses show that there were a number of small shops and manufacturing buildings in the town. The west bank of the Suhre was fortified with a stone slip and may have served as a ship or raft berth. Imports from various regions of the Roman Empire (southern Spain, southern Italy, Lipari, southern and eastern Gaul and the Germanic areas) provide evidence of extensive trade relations. Sursee was likely a freight hub for trade with the entire Alpine region.

Early middle ages
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the canton of Lucerne was settled by the Alamanni, who generally settled away from the Roman settlements. Some exceptions include a Roman manor at Büron and the Roman town of Sursee. An Alamannic grave field was found at Aesch with 61 graves with wooden coffins from before the 7th century before. In the women's graves there were necklaces with glass and amber beads, while swords were found in the men's graves. Belt buckles and small iron knives were found in the graves of both sexes. A few items from the southern Alpine region, southern Germany and Burgundy indicate that trade continued.

Two early medieval stone grave vaults, both of which were used for multiple burials, were found in the church of Altishofen. In the treasury of Beromünster Abbey there is a 7th-century ornate reliquary of gilded copper plates, which probably came from northern Italy.

Foundation of Lucerne city
Lucerne grew up around a Benedictine monastery, founded about 750 on the right bank of the Reuss by Murbach Abbey in Alsace, of which it long remained a "cell". It is first mentioned in a charter of 840 under the name of Luciaria, which is probably derived from the patron saint of the monastery, St Leodegar. The name Lucerrun is first mentioned in 1252. At some point, a small village grew up around the monastery. The first signs of a municipal constitution appear in 1252.

With the growing power of the Habsburgs in the area the ties that bound Lucerne to Murbach weakened. In 1291 the Habsburgs finally purchased Lucerne from Murbach. The purchase of Lucerne by the Habsburgs drove the three forest cantons (Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden) to form an Eternal Alliance, an act that is considered to be the foundation of Switzerland. In 1332 Lucerne became the fourth member of the Eidgenossen or Swiss Confederation, and the first town to join the rural forest cantons.

The Battle of Sempach (1386) near Sempach (which while allied wouldn't become part of the canton for 8 more years) drove the Habsburgs out of the region and strengthened the Confederation. That victory led also to the gradual acquisition of territory ruled by and from the town.

Amstalden, a wealthy innkeeper Schüpfheim in the Entlebuch valley of the canton of Lucerne, was the leader of a planned rebellion of the valley against the city of Lucerne. In a plot to limit the power of the city, officials from the neighbouring canton of Obwalden had promised their support. The conspiracy was detected before they could stage the planned coup. On 24 August 1478, Amstalden was arrested, tortured and interrogated, and finally beheaded in November 1478.

The incident furthered the distrust amongst rural and urban cantons in the Old Swiss Confederacy and was one of the reasons for the conclusion of the Stanser Verkommnis (Treaty of Stans) in 1481, an important coalition treaty of the cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy

During the Reformation Lucerne remained attached to Roman Catholicism, of which ever since it has been the great stronghold in Switzerland. The papal nuncio resided here from 1601 to 1873. In the 16th century, during the early modern age, the town government fell into the hands of an aristocratic oligarchy, whose power, though shaken by the Swiss peasant war of 1653 in the Entlebuch, lasted until 1798. Under the French-supported Helvetic republic (1798–1803) Lucerne was the seat of the central government. When the republic collapsed, under the Act of Mediation (1803) it was one of the six "Directorial" cantons and during the Restoration (from 1815 to 1848) it was one of the three ruling cantons.

The patrician government was swept away by the cantonal constitution of 1831. But in 1841 the Conservatives regained power. They quickly recalled the Jesuits, who had been expelled by earlier radical governments, to head the cantonal school system. The riots that followed brought about the Sonderbund War (1847) in which the Conservatives were defeated, the decisive battle taking place at Gisikon, not far from Lucerne.

Geography
The canton of Lucerne is part of Central Switzerland. The lands of the canton lie on the northern foothills of the Swiss Alps (Urner Alps). The highest elevation of the canton of Lucerne is at the Brienzer Rothorn at 2350 m. It borders the cantons of Obwalden and Nidwalden to the south, Schwyz and Zug to the east, Aargau to the north, and Bern to the west. Its territory corresponds to the subject territories acquired by the city of Lucerne during the 14th and 15th centuries, including: Lucerne proper at the outflow of the Reuss river from Lake Lucerne; the stretch of the Reuss river between Lucerne and Honau, along Rooterberg hill (connecting to Lake Zug with the territory of Meierskappel municipality); the Kleine Emme basin (including its tributaries Entle and Rümlig); the tributaries of the Aare between Napf and Lindenberg, including (west to east) Wigger, Suhre (Lake Sempach), Wyna, Aabach (Lake Hallwil, Lake Baldegg); two territories connected only by water, across Lake Lucerne: the northern slope of Bürgenstock (part of Lucerne municipality), and the municipalities of Greppen, Weggis and Vitznau on the western and south-western slopes of Mount Rigi.

The area of the canton is 1493 km2. 817.7 km2, about 55% of the total land area, is used for agriculture. An additional 449.0 km2 (about 30%) of the canton is wooded. The remainder of the canton is either developed, 125.3 km2 (8.4%), or unproductive (lakes, rivers or mountains), 101.5 km2 (6.8%).

Political subdivisions
The Canton is divided into six districts (Wahlkreise): Entlebuch, Hochdorf, Luzern-Land, Luzern-Stadt, Sursee, Willisau.

Before 2007, the districts were called Ämter. There were five districts until 2013, when Luzern District was divided into Luzern-Land and Luzern-Stadt, the latter corresponding to the city of Lucerne proper (including Littau, incorporated into Lucerne in 2010).

There are 83 municipalities in the canton.

Cantonal politics and government
The Constitution of Lucerne of 2007 entered into force on 1 January 2008, replacing the 1875 constitution.

With the new constitution, the legislative body Grosser Rat (Grand Council) was renamed to Kantonsrat (Cantonal Council). It is composed of 120 members elected by proportional representation.

The executive body is the Regierungsrat (Government Council), composed of 5 members.

The Christian Democratic People's Party (CVP) is traditionally the largest party, having won 38 seats in the Cantonal Council as of the 2015 elections, and having two out of five members in the Government Council.

Federal election results

 * FDP before 2009, FDP.The Liberals after 2009
 * "*" indicates that the party was not on the ballot in this canton.
 * Part of a coalition with the FGA
 * Part of a coalition with the Green Party

Demographics
Lucerne has a population of. , 18.1% of the population are resident foreign nationals, of which 15.5% are from Europe, 1.4% from Asia, 0.7% from Africa, and 0.5% from America. Over the last 10 years (2000–2010) the population has changed at a rate of −0.4%. Migration accounted for −1.2%, while births and deaths accounted for 1.3%.

Most of the population speaks German (91%) as their first language, while Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Albanian and English are the second most common languages (3%), followed by Portuguese and French with 2% each, and Spanish with 1%.

Of the population in the canton, 115,233 or about 32.9% were born in Lucerne and lived there in 2000. There were 101,980 or 29.1% who were born in the same canton, while 66,486 or 19.0% were born somewhere else in Switzerland, and 55,314 or 15.8% were born outside of Switzerland. , children and teenagers (0–19 years old) make up 25% of the population, while adults (20–64 years old) make up 58.6% and seniors (over 64 years old) make up 16.4%.

, there were 158,345 people who were single and never married in the canton. There were 159,152 married individuals, 18,853 widows or widowers and 14,154 individuals who are divorced.

, there were 13,430 private households in the canton, and an average of 2.5 persons per household. There were 47,012 households that consist of only one person and 12,952 households with five or more people. , the construction rate of new housing units was 4.7 new units per 1000 residents.

the average price to rent an average apartment in Lucerne city was 1150.31 Swiss francs (CHF) per month (US$920, £520, €740 approx. exchange rate from 2003). The average rate for a one-room apartment was 646.07 CHF (US$520, £290, €410), a two-room apartment was about 879.64 CHF (US$700, £400, €560), a three-room apartment was about 1033.60 CHF (US$830, £470, €660) and a six or more room apartment cost an average of 2032.38 CHF (US$1630, £910, €1300). The average apartment price in Lucerne was 103.1% of the national average of 1116 CHF. The vacancy rate for the canton,, was 0.77%.

The largest population centres are Lucerne, Emmen and Kriens.

Historic population
The historical population is given in the following chart:

Economy
Much of the land in the canton is used for agriculture. Agriculture is the most significant source of income, but industry is also developed. The most important agricultural products are crops, fruit and cattle breeding. Industry concentrates on textiles, machinery, paper, wood, tobacco and metallurgical goods.

Tourism is of great importance. The canton of Lucerne is a gateway to holiday resorts in the nearby Alps, and much of the transit traffic between Germany and Italy crosses the region.

, Luzern had an unemployment rate of 1.4%. , there were 1,764 people employed in the primary economic sector and about 703 businesses involved in this sector. 5,388 people were employed in the secondary sector and there were 324 businesses in this sector. 9,431 people were employed in the tertiary sector, with 1,113 businesses in this sector.

the total number of full-time equivalent jobs was 160,133. The number of jobs in the primary sector was 9,608, of which 9,462 were in agriculture, 119 were in forestry or lumber production and 27 were in fishing or fisheries. The number of jobs in the secondary sector was 48,191 of which 31,698 or (65.8%) were in manufacturing, 142 or (0.3%) were in mining and 14,990 (31.1%) were in construction. The number of jobs in the tertiary sector was 102,334. In the tertiary sector; 25,105 or 24.5% were in the sale or repair of motor vehicles, 8,182 or 8.0% were in the movement and storage of goods, 8,146 or 8.0% were in a hotel or restaurant, 3,835 or 3.7% were in the information industry, 7,000 or 6.8% were the insurance or financial industry, 10,979 or 10.7% were technical professionals or scientists, 8,111 or 7.9% were in education and 15,924 or 15.6% were in health care.

Of the working population, 12.1% used public transportation to get to work, and 48.5% used a private car.

Religion
From the, 248,545 or 70.9% were Roman Catholic, while 39,426 or 11.2% belonged to the Swiss Reformed Church. Of the rest of the population, there were 7,801 members of an Orthodox church (or 2.23% of the population), there were 471 individuals (or 0.13% of the population) who belonged to the Christian Catholic Church, and there were 7,564 individuals (or 2.16% of the population) who belonged to another Christian church. There were 399 individuals (or 0.11% of the population) who were Jewish, and 13,227 (or 3.77% of the population) who were Islamic. There were 875 individuals who were Buddhist, 1,715 individuals who were Hindu and 293 individuals who belonged to another church. 20,681 (or 5.90% of the population) belonged to no church, are agnostic or atheist, and 13,007 individuals (or 3.71% of the population) did not answer the question.

Education
In Luzern about 127,331 or (36.3%) of the population have completed non-mandatory upper secondary education, and 42,391 or (12.1%) have completed additional higher education (either universities or a Fachhochschule). Of the 42,391 who completed tertiary schooling, 65.0% were Swiss men, 23.6% were Swiss women, 7.0% were non-Swiss men and 4.4% were non-Swiss women.

Institutions of higher education include the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences which also has campuses in Lucerne and Horw.

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

title: Canton of Lucerne


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Ralph H. Baer

Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-American inventor, game developer, and engineer.

Baer's family fled Germany just before World War II and Baer served the American war effort, gaining an interest in electronics shortly thereafter. Through several jobs in the electronics industry, he was working as an engineer at Sanders Associates (now BAE Systems) in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he conceived the idea of playing games on a television screen around 1966. With support of his employers, he worked through several prototypes until he arrived at a "Brown Box" that would later become the blueprint for the first home video game console, licensed by Magnavox as the Magnavox Odyssey. Baer continued to design several other consoles and computer game units, including contributing to design of the Simon electronic game. Baer continued to work in electronics until his death in 2014, with over 150 patents to his name.

Baer is considered "the Father of Video Games" due to his many contributions to games and helping to spark the video game industry in the latter half of the 20th century. In February 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms".

Life
Ralph Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Baer, a Jewish family living in Germany, in Pirmasens, and was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 14, he was expelled from school due to anti-Jewish legislation implemented in Nazi Germany and had to go to an all-Jewish school. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Baer's family, fearing increasing persecution, moved from Germany to New York City in 1938, just two months prior to Kristallnacht, while Baer was a teenager. Baer would later become a naturalized United States citizen.

In the United States, he was self-taught and worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars. After seeing an advertisement at a bus station for education in the budding electronics field, he quit his job to study in the field. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II and assigned to military intelligence at the United States Army headquarters in London. On returning from war duty in 1946, he presented a large collection of weaponry he had amassed (about 18 short ton) to museums in Aberdeen, Maryland; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Fort Riley, Kansas. With his secondary education funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering, which was unique at the time, from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949.

In 1949, Baer went to work as chief engineer for a small electro-medical equipment firm called Wappler, Inc. There he designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and low frequency pulse generating muscle-toning equipment. In 1951, Baer went to work as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York, where he designed power line carrier signaling equipment, contracting for IBM. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president.

He started his own company before joining defense contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems Inc.) in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987. Baer's primary responsibility at Sanders was overseeing about 500 engineers in the development of electronic systems being used for military applications. Out of this work came the concept of a home video game console. He would go on to create the first commercial video game consoles, among several other patented advances in video games and electronic toys. As he approached retirement, Baer partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC, and they invented and marketed toy and game ideas from 1983 until Baer's death.

Baer was a Life Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His son, Mark, helped lead the nomination process to elevate him to become an IEEE Life Fellow, the highest level of membership within the organization.

Family and death
Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952; she died in 2006. They had three children during their marriage, and at the time of Baer's death, he had four grandchildren. Baer died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014, according to family and friends close to him.

Inventions

In 1966, while an employee at Sanders Associates, Baer started to explore the possibility of playing games on television screens. He first got the idea while working at Loral in 1951, another electronics company, however, they were uninterested in the project at the time. In a 2007 interview, Baer said that he recognized that the price reduction of owning a television set at the time had opened a large potential market for other applications, considering that various military groups had identified ways of using television for their purposes. Upon coming up with the idea of creating a game using the television screen, he wrote a four-page proposal with which he was able to convince one of his supervisors to allow him to proceed. He was given US$2,500 and the time of two other engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. They developed the "Brown Box" console video game system, so named because of the brown tape in which they wrapped the units to simulate wood veneer. Baer recounted that in an early meeting with a patent examiner and his attorney to patent one of the prototypes, he had set up the prototype on a television in the examiner's office and "within 15 minutes, every examiner on the floor of that building was in that office wanting to play the game". The Brown Box was ultimately patented on April 17, 1973, given U.S. Patent No. 3728480, and became jointly owned by Ralph Baer and BAE Systems.

Baer began seeking a buyer for the system, turning to various television manufacturers many whom showed little interest in the unit. In 1971, the technology was licensed to Magnavox, which completed the design and released it in September 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey.

After the release of Pong, which was partially inspired by the table tennis game, on the Odyssey, a lengthy conflict ensued between Baer and Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell over who was the true "father of video games"; Baer was willing to concede this to Bushnell, though noted that Bushnell "has been telling the same nonsensical stories for 40 years". Ultimately, the industry came to name Baer as the father of the home video game console, while crediting Bushnell with creating the concept of the arcade machine; Upon Baer's death, Bushnell stated that Baer's "contributions to the rise of videogames should not be forgotten".

Baer is also credited with co-developing three popular electronic games. Baer, along with Howard J. Morrison, developed Simon (1978) and its sequel Super Simon (1979) for Milton Bradley, electronic pattern-matching games that were immensely popular through the late 1990s. Simon was assigned Pat No. 4,207,087 in 1980. Baer also developed a similar pattern-matching game "Maniac" for the Ideal Toy Company (1979) on his own, though the game was not as popular as Simon; Baer considered that Maniac was "really hard to play" and thus not as popular as his earlier game.

In 2006, Baer donated hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian Institution. He continued to tinker in until at least 2013. By the time of his death, Baer had over 150 patents in his name. In addition to the patents related to video games, he also held patents for electronic greeting cards and tracking systems for submarines.

Awards and tributes

In addition to being considered "The Father of Video Games", Baer was recognized as a pioneer in the video game field. His accolades include the G-Phoria Legend Award (2005), the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (2008), the Game Developers Conference Developers Choice "Pioneer" award (2008), and the IEEE Edison Medal (2014). Baer was posthumously given the Pioneer Award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. On February 13, 2006, Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush in honor of his "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games". On April 1, 2010, Baer was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the United States Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. While Baer's contributions had generally been overlooked by more recent advances in video game technology development, Baer had stated "In view of the fact that the President of the United States of America hung the National Medal of Technology around my neck in a White House ceremony in 2006, and in view of my having been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, I really don't feel neglected."

In 2006, Baer donated many of his inventions to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Following his death in 2014, his workshop was removed from the basement of his house on Mayflower Drive in Manchester and to the museum, where it is now on permanent display in the museum’s Innovation Wing.

On April 8, 2021, the United States Mint announced that Baer and "Handball" would be honored as part of the American Innovation dollars program.

Baer Square
On May 10, 2019, a statue was placed in Baer’s honor in Arms Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. The area of the park around the memorial was renamed as Baer Square. One of Baer’s sons and several of his grandchildren attended the unveiling. The memorial was funded through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign.

title: Ralph H. Baer


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F4 (mathematics)

In mathematics, F4 is a Lie group and also its Lie algebra f4. It is one of the five exceptional simple Lie groups. F4 has rank 4 and dimension 52. The compact form is simply connected and its outer automorphism group is the trivial group. Its fundamental representation is 26-dimensional.

The compact real form of F4 is the isometry group of a 16-dimensional Riemannian manifold known as the octonionic projective plane OP2. This can be seen systematically using a construction known as the magic square, due to Hans Freudenthal and Jacques Tits.

There are 3 real forms: a compact one, a split one, and a third one. They are the isometry groups of the three real Albert algebras.

The F4 Lie algebra may be constructed by adding 16 generators transforming as a spinor to the 36-dimensional Lie algebra so(9), in analogy with the construction of E8.

In older books and papers, F4 is sometimes denoted by E4.

Dynkin diagram
The Dynkin diagram for F4 is:.

Weyl/Coxeter group
Its Weyl/Coxeter group G = W(F4) is the symmetry group of the 24-cell: it is a solvable group of order 1152. It has minimal faithful degree μ(G) = 24, which is realized by the action on the 24-cell.

Cartan matrix

 * $$\left[ \begin{array}{rrrr}

2&-1&0&0\\ -1&2&-2&0\\ 0&-1&2&-1\\ 0&0&-1&2 \end{array} \right]$$

F4 lattice
The F4 lattice is a four-dimensional body-centered cubic lattice (i.e. the union of two hypercubic lattices, each lying in the center of the other). They form a ring called the Hurwitz quaternion ring. The 24 Hurwitz quaternions of norm 1 form the vertices of a 24-cell centered at the origin.

Roots of F4

The 48 root vectors of F4 can be found as the vertices of the 24-cell in two dual configurations, representing the vertices of a disphenoidal 288-cell if the edge lengths of the 24-cells are equal:

24-cell vertices:
 * 24 roots by (±1, ±1, 0, 0), permuting coordinate positions

Dual 24-cell vertices:
 * 8 roots by (±1, 0, 0, 0), permuting coordinate positions
 * 16 roots by (±1/2, ±1/2, ±1/2, ±1/2).

Simple roots
One choice of simple roots for F4,, is given by the rows of the following matrix:
 * $$\begin{bmatrix}

0&1&-1&0 \\ 0&0&1&-1 \\ 0&0&0&1 \\ \frac{1}{2}&-\frac{1}{2}&-\frac{1}{2}&-\frac{1}{2}\\ \end{bmatrix}$$

The Hasse diagram for the F4 root poset is shown below right.

F4 polynomial invariant
Just as O(n) is the group of automorphisms which keep the quadratic polynomials x2 + y2 + ... invariant, F4 is the group of automorphisms of the following set of 3 polynomials in 27 variables. (The first can easily be substituted into other two making 26 variables).

 * $$C_1 = x+y+z$$
 * $$C_2 = x^2+y^2+z^2+2X\overline{X}+2Y\overline{Y}+2Z\overline{Z} $$
 * $$C_3 = xyz - xX\overline{X} - yY\overline{Y} - zZ\overline{Z} + XYZ + \overline{XYZ} $$

Where x, y, z are real-valued and X, Y, Z are octonion valued. Another way of writing these invariants is as (combinations of) Tr(M), Tr(M2) and Tr(M3) of the hermitian octonion matrix:

 * $$ M = \begin{bmatrix}

x & \overline{Z} & Y \\ Z & y & \overline{X} \\ \overline{Y} & X & z \end{bmatrix} $$

The set of polynomials defines a 24-dimensional compact surface.

Representations
The characters of finite dimensional representations of the real and complex Lie algebras and Lie groups are all given by the Weyl character formula. The dimensions of the smallest irreducible representations are :

 * 1, 26, 52, 273, 324, 1053 (twice), 1274, 2652, 4096, 8424, 10829, 12376, 16302, 17901, 19278, 19448, 29172, 34749, 76076, 81081, 100776, 106496, 107406, 119119, 160056 (twice), 184756, 205751, 212992, 226746, 340119, 342056, 379848, 412776, 420147, 627912...

The 52-dimensional representation is the adjoint representation, and the 26-dimensional one is the trace-free part of the action of F4 on the exceptional Albert algebra of dimension 27.

There are two non-isomorphic irreducible representations of dimensions 1053, 160056, 4313088, etc. The fundamental representations are those with dimensions 52, 1274, 273, 26 (corresponding to the four nodes in the Dynkin diagram in the order such that the double arrow points from the second to the third).

Embeddings of the maximal subgroups of F4 up to dimension 273 with associated projection matrix are shown below.

title: F4 (mathematics)


text:
Computer Space

Computer Space is a space combat arcade video game released in 1971. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in partnership as Syzygy Engineering, it was the first arcade video game as well as the first commercially available video game. Computer Space is a derivative of the 1962 computer game Spacewar!, which is possibly the first video game to spread to multiple computer installations. It features a rocket controlled by the player engaged in a missile battle with a pair of hardware-controlled flying saucers set against a starfield background. The goal is to score more hits than the enemy spaceships within a set time period, which awards a free round of gameplay. The game is enclosed in a custom fiberglass cabinet, which Bushnell designed to look futuristic.

Bushnell and Dabney designed the game in 1970–71 to be a coin-operated version of Spacewar!. After the pair were unable to find a way to economically run the game on a minicomputer such as the Data General Nova, they hit upon the idea of instead replacing the central computer with custom-designed hardware created to run just that game. While they were working on an early proof of concept, Bushnell found a manufacturer for the game in Nutting Associates. Working in partnership with Nutting, the pair completed the game and ran their first location test in August 1971, a few months prior to the display of a similar prototype called Galaxy Game, also based on Spacewar!. It was first shown to industry press and distributors at the annual Music Operators of America (MOA) Expo in October. With encouraging initial interest, though mixed responses from distributors, Nutting ordered an initial production run of 1,500 units, anticipating a hit game.

While the game was successful and validated Syzygy's belief in the future of arcade video games, selling over 1,000 cabinets by mid-1972 and ultimately 1,300–1,500 units, it was not the runaway success that Nutting had hoped for. The game spawned one clone game, Star Trek (1972), and Nutting produced a two-player version of Computer Space in 1973 without involvement from Bushnell and Dabney. The pair left Nutting in June 1972 and incorporated Syzygy as Atari, launching the successful Pong (1972) as their next arcade game. Computer Space's release marked the ending of the early history of video games and the start of the commercial video game industry.

Background
At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. One of these games was Spacewar!, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships while maneuvering on a two-dimensional plane in the gravity well of a star, set against the backdrop of a starfield. The game was copied to several of the early computer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it probably the first video game to be available outside a single research institute. Spacewar! was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of Spacewar! blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 1962 and only 53 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar! or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. The original developers of Spacewar! considered ways to monetize the game, but saw no options given the high price of the computer on which it ran. Computer Space, which would not be released until 1971, was the first commercial video game based on Spacewar!.

Gameplay
In Computer Space, the player controls a rocket as it attempts to shoot a pair of flying saucers while avoiding their fire. The game has the three ships flying on a two-dimensional plane set against the backdrop of a starfield. Missiles are fired one at a time, and there is a cooldown period between launches. The player's rocket remains in motion even when the player is not accelerating, and rotating the ship does not change the direction of its motion, though it can rotate at a constant rate. The flying saucers stay in place or glide in a zig-zag pattern around the screen in tandem, with one staying a constant distance directly below the other. If a ship or missile moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound effect. While the missile is in flight, the player can turn it left or right by turning their rocket.

Player controls are clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, forward thrust, and firing missiles. Whenever the player is hit by a missile or flying saucer, the screen flashes and the player's rocket spins rapidly and disappears before reappearing in the same location. If a flying saucer is hit by a missile, the screen flashes, and the saucer briefly disappears. Counters on the right side of the screen track the number of times both the player's rocket and the saucers have been destroyed, as well as how long that round of gameplay has lasted. A round has a time limit—adjustable by the operator—of 60 to 150 seconds, with a default of 90; when the time limit is reached, the game ends if the player's score is lower than the computer's. If it is higher, the black and white colors invert in a "hyperspace" feature, and another round begins for free; the game continues on to new rounds with the display colors inverting indefinitely if the player continues to win. One round costs a quarter, or two quarters if the machine is adjusted against the instruction manual's recommendations for optimal pricing. The game displays distorted characters if the player or computer scores pass 9, and each score independently resets to 0 for both visual and gameplay purposes if it reaches 16.

In the two-player version of the game, a second game mode is added featuring two player-controlled rockets fighting each other instead of computer-controlled ships. The modified control panel contains two sets of controls, with joysticks replacing the movement buttons on some machines.

Development
While studying at the University of Utah, electrical engineering student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an amusement arcade, where he became familiar with arcade electro-mechanical games such as Chicago Coin's racing game Speedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates. In 1969, after graduating from college, Bushnell worked as an engineer in California for Ampex, an electronics company that worked in audio and video recording technology.

While at a club for playing the board game Go, Bushnell met researcher Jim Stein, who worked for Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Project; Bushnell learned from him that Spacewar! was running on the laboratory's PDP-6, and played the game against him there when visiting. Bushnell had previously worked during the summer at Lagoon Amusement Park in Utah as a manager of the games department overseeing the arcade games, and when he saw Spacewar! he believed that an arcade game version of the game would be very popular. The high price of computers capable of running the game, however, meant that any such arcade game would not be economically feasible. In the spring of 1970, however, he saw an ad for the Data General Nova computer, which cost only US$4,000 1970, and thought again about his Spacewar! arcade game idea. He believed that at that price the game would be economically viable if he were able to connect four monitors and coin slots to allow multiple games to run simultaneously. He showed his office mate and fellow Ampex engineer Ted Dabney Spacewar! at the Stanford laboratory, and the two agreed to work together to try and design a prototype of the game. Bushnell had some experience with computers and digital engineering but not enough to create the game on his own, while the older Dabney was more experienced with analog and hardware engineering, as he had designed video processing and control circuits and power supplies.

After agreeing on an initial idea, Bushnell and Dabney began designing a prototype based on a Data General Nova. Over the summer they made plans for developing the game, and in the early fall they were joined by Larry Bryan, a computer programmer who also worked at Ampex. Bushnell and Dabney put US$100 each into a partnership, named Syzygy by Bryan, in order to purchase components. They soon ran into difficulties with their planned design: the computer was not powerful enough to run multiple simultaneous games and refresh the monitors as fast as was needed to make the games playable. Bryan realized this soon after starting work on the project in August 1970 while trying to design the code needed to run the games, and he left the project before Syzygy was officially formed without ever contributing any money. Bushnell and Dabney continued working on the design for several more months. The pair attempted to reduce the load on the computer by replacing subroutines—such as displaying the background stars—with specialized hardware, but it proved insufficient; even reducing the number of monitors was not enough. By the end of November 1970, Bushnell decided to abandon the project as untenable; Dabney had stopped working on the design a while before. It is unclear if the pair were aware that Data General had demonstrated a more powerful variant of the Nova, sold for US$8,000, running a single game of Spacewar! at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968, though that solution would have been too expensive for an arcade game, which typically cost US$1,000 at the time. Unable to put the game idea out of his mind, however, Bushnell soon thought of a way to manipulate the video signal on the screen with hardware without a computer having to control it, and from there the pair came up with the idea of building hardware components to handle parts of the game on behalf of the computer.

Bushnell and Dabney began to design custom hardware to run the game's functions, and in January 1971 they had a dot moving on a screen. Bushnell drafted a letter dated January 26 to order six Data Nova computers. He did not send the letter, however; near the end of January, he tried to run their program on a local Nova, and found that they had miscalculated the requirements. Even with several of the functions removed from the program, now named Cosmic Combat, the computer still could not run multiple instances at once. Although upset, Bushnell soon realized that it would be possible to entirely replace the Nova with custom hardware, and that the cost to build the whole game's computing systems would be much lower. As a result, they would not need to have multiple instances of the game running on the same machine in order to be profitable. On the other hand, the custom hardware was not as powerful as the more expensive Nova computer, which meant that the pair needed to make gameplay modifications. Spacewar! was a two-player game featuring dogfights around the gravitational field of a central star; neither of these features could be run on the dedicated circuits the pair were making, so the game was cut down to a single-player game wherein the player would fight against two computer-controlled spaceships in open space.

In January 1971, Bushnell and Dabney founded Syzygy Engineering as an official company, now with a cash amount of US$350 each. They approached Ampex and a prior manager of Dabney's with their prototype, but found no interest. The major arcade game manufacturers were based out of Chicago at the time, limiting their ability to demonstrate their idea to an existing firm. During a dentist appointment in early 1971, Bushnell told the dentist about the game and that he was looking for a manufacturer; the dentist in turn referred him to another patient of his, Dave Ralstin, the sales manager for Nutting Associates in Mountain View, California. Nutting had been founded in 1966 on the basis of Computer Quiz, an analog quiz arcade game, and by 1971 was looking for another hit game. After meeting with Bushnell, Nutting felt that his game was the potential success it needed to replace falling sales of Computer Quiz updates, as quiz games were growing less popular and it did not have an engineering team that could design successful new games. Nutting not only agreed to manufacture the game but also hired Bushnell as their chief engineer. Furthermore, Syzygy Engineering retained ownership of the game, even though Nutting agreed to give Syzygy space to build the prototype and to manufacture the game once complete. Syzygy would be paid five percent of each cabinet sold. Bushnell negotiated to work on Cosmic Combat outside of normal working hours until it went into production in order to keep it conceptually separate from his new job at Nutting, so as to prevent Nutting from later claiming ownership due to paying for time or materials spent building the game. Dabney remained at Ampex until the summer, when he resigned to join Bushnell at Nutting, as he was initially unwilling to leave the stable job he had worked at for ten years without more proof that the game could be a success.

Location tests and release
Once he moved to Nutting, Bushnell took over the majority of the engineering work for the game; Dabney has stated that he advised Bushnell on some of the design. After Dabney joined Bushnell at Nutting, he helped with the creation of the cabinet itself, including the coin slot, control panel, and power supply, and designed a sound system that could make a noise like a rocket engine. By August 1971, an initial prototype of the game—now named Computer Space to be similar to Computer Quiz—was complete, and Syzygy moved on to location testing. They installed the game at the Dutch Goose bar near Stanford University, where it met with great success. Nutting was heartened by the response and rushed to make several finished cabinets for the Music Operators of America (MOA) Music & Amusement Machines Exposition in October. Further location tests found a less enthusiastic response from customers confused by the game mechanics and controls, and Syzygy hurriedly adjusted the game's instructions to try to be more understandable to players.

The final Computer Space design uses no microprocessor; the entire computer system is a state machine made of 7400-series integrated circuits, with monochrome graphic elements held in diode arrays. The arrays, which Bushnell designed to let him rotate the rocket in 16 directions with only 4 arrays, are laid out in the shape of the ships, to make it obvious to game operators what would need to be replaced if something broke. These arrays reduced the amount of work that the game had to perform to update the screen: instead of refreshing the entire screen for any change, like Spacewar!, each element could be moved independently of the others. The ships themselves are drawn on the screen as a pattern of dots, rather than connected lines, and were essentially hardwired bitmaps, and are considered an early form of the concept of sprite graphics. The cabinet includes a General Electric 15-inch black and white television screen as the monitor, specially modified for the game. In the rudimentary algorithm constructed by Bushnell, the enemy ships fire towards the quadrant of the screen that the player's rocket is in, rather than directly at the player's rocket.

As Syzygy and Nutting prepared for the MOA show, Bushnell learned that another pair of engineers, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, were also creating an arcade version of Spacewar! In August 1971 Bushnell called Pitts and Tuck, who were operating as Mini-Computer Applications, so that they could meet and discuss their solutions to the problem of running Spacewar! on an inexpensive computer. Pitts and Tuck were developing a prototype machine of Galaxy Game when they met with Bushnell; the game, however, while a faithful recreation of Spacewar!, ran on an externally-connected DEC PDP-11 with a Hewlett-Packard 1300A Electrostatic Display, and the total cost of the prototype unit was US$20,000 1971. The Syzygy duo were relieved, though also somewhat disappointed, to find that Galaxy Game was not using an innovative solution Syzygy had missed to build an economically-competitive arcade game. Pitts and Tuck, conversely, felt that Computer Space was a pale imitation of Spacewar!, while Galaxy Game was a superior adaptation of the game. They eventually produced two game prototypes, both displayed in the Stanford student union building, but never produced the game commercially due to the high cost of the cabinet.

Computer Space debuted at the MOA show on October 15–17, 1971. Dabney's wooden cabinet for the initial prototype was replaced with a curvy, futuristic fiberglass cabinet designed by Bushnell with modelling clay and built by a swimming pool manufacturer. A control panel extended from the main body of the cabinet and contained the four control buttons; Syzygy had hoped to use a joystick to control the rocket's movement, but found that it broke too easily, failing to last a single night in a location test. The Galaxy Game designers had run into the same issue, but had solved it with expensive customized military surplus joysticks. The cabinet displayed the Nutting Associates name and logo, along with the term "Syzygy engineered". Nutting displayed four cabinets at the MOA show, one each in red, blue, white, and yellow, with the implication that the game was already in production, though they were in fact the only four cabinets then produced. These initial cabinets were in solid colors, though later ones would use a sparkle finish. The cabinets were damaged during transport, and one monitor was broken; Syzygy repaired the three working cabinets and opened up the fourth to demonstrate the internals to attendees. The game was popular with viewers, with a crowded display area, and trade magazine Cash Box called it "very promising" and "very glamorous". Game distributors, however, were hesitant about the game, with concerns raised about the game's potential, reliability, and the embedded monitor's attractiveness to thieves; recollections are mixed as to whether Nutting took a handful of orders or none at the show. Nutting ordered a large production run regardless, on the expectation that the distributors would come around with further exposure. The game entered initial production sometime in November or December, and began full production around the end of January 1972.

Reception
Nutting ordered an initial production run of 1,500 units of Computer Space, an optimistic decision given that a hit arcade game at the time would sell around 2,000 units, though a handful had reached 10,000. Reception to the game from distributors was mixed. While some were excited by the game, others felt it confusing and would amount to nothing more than a passing fad at best. By spring 1972 the game had sold over 1,000 units, and according to Bushnell in 1976 ended up selling between 1,300 and 1,500 units. While this was a commercial success, making over US$1,000,000 1972, it was a disappointment to Nutting, which had been hoping for a large-scale success like Computer Quiz. The game's relative lack of success was attributed to the complexity of its controls and a steep learning curve, which pushed away customers used to less complex games. Bushnell noted that the locations in which the game did well, like the Dutch Goose playtest location, were generally located near university campuses; the general market for coin-operated games, however, was in working-class bars, where the patrons were less interested in deciphering a complicated game. In the documentary Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession, Bushnell explained, "Sure, I loved it, and all my friends loved it, but all my friends were engineers. It was a little too complicated for the guy with the beer in the bar." Bushnell has also stated that part of the difficulty lay in the novelty of the game; he said that even a few years later the controls and gameplay would have been more understandable to players who would have seen other video games by then. Conversely, Bushnell and Dabney have said that the game's novelty was also part of its appeal to players—most people had never seen a television screen displaying images being controlled by a person in front of it, rather than displaying a broadcast from a remote television station.

While the game did not meet the high hopes of Nutting, it was successful enough that Nutting produced a two-player version of the game in July 1973 built by Steve Bristow with a green fiberglass cabinet; the design was initially contracted to Bushnell, but his design was either uncompleted or unused. Bushnell and Dabney did not work further on the game, and it was not a large success. Although the biggest successes in arcade games at the time generally spawned a dozen copycat games, only a single Computer Space clone is known, produced in 1972 by For-Play Manufacturers as Star Trek. A custom white Computer Space cabinet appeared in the 1973 film Soylent Green as a futuristic entertainment device, marking the first appearance of a video game in a movie.

In June 1972, Bushnell and Dabney quit Nutting Associates after Bushnell was unable to convince Nutting to give him a 33 percent stake in the company, and moved to incorporate Syzygy Engineering; they instead named it Atari due to another company with a similar name. Bushnell later stated that he was encouraged by the success of Computer Space in regards to future game ideas, as he had never before created something that made so much money, and additionally felt that his time at Nutting gave him confidence in running his own company because he "couldn't screw it up more than they did". Nutting Associates did not make any further Computer Space games before closing in 1976. Bushnell's enthusiasm was soon vindicated, as Atari's first game, Pong, went on to substantially greater success than Computer Space. Although not as influential as Pong, as the first arcade video game, Computer Space had a strong influence on future video game design, such as using terms and designs from prior mechanical arcade games, and providing a template for transforming a medium previously designed and played on research mainframes into a commercial model for general consumers. It directly inspired several video games and game designers, such as Steve Bristow, who came up with the idea for Tank (1974) to correct the perceived shortcomings of the game by having easier-to-control tanks instead, and Jerry Lawson, the designer of the Fairchild Channel F home console (1976). It also influenced Larry Rosenthal, who was partially inspired to make the vector graphics-based Space Wars (1977) by his dislike of Computer Space's simplification of Spacewar!, and Ed Logg, who combined the controls and movement of the game with elements of Space Invaders (1978) to make Asteroids (1979). Computer Space's release marked the ending of the early history of video games and the start of the commercial video game industry.

title: Computer Space


text:
Iraqi Governing Council

The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was the provisional government of Iraq from 13 July 2003 to 1 June 2004. It was established by and served under the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The IGC consisted of various Iraqi political and tribal leaders who were appointed by the CPA to provide advice and leadership of the country until the June 2004 transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim Government (which was replaced in May 2005 by the Iraqi Transitional Government, which was then replaced the following year by the first permanent government).

The Council consisted of 25 members. Its ethnic and religious breakdown included 13 Shias, five Sunnis, five Kurds (also Sunnis), one Turkmen and an Assyrian. Three of its members were women.

In September 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council gained regional recognition from the Arab League, which agreed to seat its representative in Iraq's chair at its meetings. On 1 June 2004, the Council dissolved after choosing member Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer as the president of the new Iraq interim government. Full sovereignty was transferred to the interim government (and the CPA dissolved) on 28 June.

General information
Though subject to the authority of the CPA administrator Paul Bremer, the council had several key powers of its own. Their duties included appointing representatives to the United Nations, appointing interim ministers to Iraq's vacant cabinet positions, and drafting a temporary constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). The TAL spelled out the provisions which were to govern the Iraqi Interim Government, and the timeline for holding elections to a National Assembly, drafting of a permanent constitution to be voted on by the Iraqi people, and elections to a permanent government.

Despite having to answer to the CPA, different factions took on controversial stands. Religious hardliners won a solid victory when Directive 137 was passed on 29 December 2003. Passed by the council in less than 15 minutes, it replaced Iraq's former secular family law code with Shari'a family law. This move met with wide protest among many Iraqi women fearful of how it will affect their freedom to make their own decisions about marriage, alimony, and many other issues where Iraq used to be a leader in the Arab world for women's rights. Other legislation passed by the council included declaring the day that Baghdad fell to be a national holiday, voting to establish a tribunal to try former government leaders, and banning television stations which are deemed to be supportive of the resistance. A new flag chosen by the council for post-Saddam Iraq created much controversy, in part because of the similarity of color and design with the flag of Israel, and the flag was not adopted.

According to the Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period, the interim constitution that the Council approved, the Council would cease to function after 30 June 2004, at which point full sovereignty would return to Iraq, and the government will be handed over to a new, sovereign interim government. Instead, the council chose to dissolve itself prematurely.

Council Members
The Presidency of the council rotated monthly among eleven of its members. A (p) marks those members above.

Cabinet
On 1 September 2003, the council named its first cabinet.
 * Minister of Communications – Haider al-Abadi
 * Minister of Public Works – Nisrin Barwari
 * Minister of Construction and Housing – Baqir Jabr al-Zubeidi
 * Minister of the Environment – Abderrahman Sadik Karim
 * Minister of Trade – Ali Allawi
 * Minister of Planning – Mahdi al-Hafez
 * Minister of Education – Alaa Abdessaheb al-Alwan
 * Minister of Higher Education – Ziad Abderrazzak Mohammad Aswad
 * Minister of Culture – Mufid Mohammad Jawad al-Jazairi
 * Minister of Human Rights – Abdel Basset Turki (resigned April 2004)
 * Minister of Foreign Affairs – Hoshyar Zebari
 * Minister of Interior – Nuri Badran (resigned April 2004 and replaced by Samir Sumaidaie)
 * Minister of Agriculture – Abdel Amir Abbud Rahima
 * Minister of Sport and Youth – Ali Faik al-Ghabban
 * Minister of Health – Dr. Khodayyir Abbas
 * Minister of Industry and Minerals – Mohammad Tofiq Rahim
 * Minister of Justice – Hashim Abderrahman al-Shibli
 * Minister of Science and Technology – Rashad Mandan Omar
 * Minister of Work and Social Affairs – Sami Azara al-Majun
 * Minister of Electricity – Aiham Alsammarae
 * Minister of Finance – Kamel al-Kilani
 * Minister of Immigration and Refugees – Mohammad Jassem Khodayyir
 * Minister of Water Resources – Latif Rashid
 * Minister of Oil – Ibrahim Mohammad Bahr al-Ulloum
 * Minister of Transport – Bahnam Zaya Bulos

The Saddam-era positions of Minister of Defense and Minister of Information were dissolved.

title: Iraqi Governing Council


text:
Quebec Conference, 1864

The Quebec Conference was held from October 10 to 24, 1864, to discuss a proposed Canadian confederation. It was in response to the shift in political ground when the United Kingdom and the United States had come very close to engaging in war with each other. Therefore, the overall goal of the conference was to elaborate on policies surrounding federalism and creating a single state, both of which had been discussed at the Charlottetown Conference around a month earlier. Canada West leader John A. Macdonald requested Governor-General Charles Monck to invite all representatives from the three Maritime provinces and Newfoundland to meet with the candidates who formed the United Canada to Quebec in October 1864. Although Newfoundland sent two observers, it did not participate directly in the proceedings.

The beginnings at Charlottetown
The Charlottetown Conference of September 1864, laid the foundations for the Quebec Conference and was a significant meeting that would determine what would be discussed in the Quebec Conference. During the Conference, the Canadians found support for the confederation, as discussions pointed towards a unified decision to unite the provinces under the name of Canada. The Canada West member, Macdonald, who would be highly prominent in the Quebec Conference, began to find allies that would enable him to have a more dominant and influential role in the Quebec Conference a month later. One key alliance made in the Charlottetown Conference that would transfer over to the Quebec Conference was made between the Maritime delegates and Macdonald as they saw him as less abrasive than the other Canada West official, George Brown. Macdonald appealed to the Maritime populace as he seemed a more friendly and diplomatic alliance than George Brown, and in terms of Canada East politician, George-Étienne Cartier, Macdonald was an anglophone, and although Cartier was prominent at the discussions at Charlottetown, the Maritime politicians were yet to get used to the influence and power of the francophone politicians.

On the fifth and final day of the conference, it was clear that a second part of the confederation deal was on the verge of being consummated and that the Charlottetown Conference had been making a breakthrough on the policy of Confederation. The Maritime politicians, however, struggled to agree and accept the details of the Canadians' proposal. On 10 September 1864, in Halifax three days later, they drew up plans to hold another conference in Quebec to finalize the negotiations made during the last few days. They drew up motions for the Quebec Conference after the conclusion of Charlottetown, where they would focus on the confederation of British North America. They also agreed to invite a delegation from Newfoundland, as they were not involved in negotiations at Charlottetown Therefore, the members of Charlottetown wanted to include all provinces of Canada in the negotiations at the Quebec Conference as the Charlottetown Conference had laid the foundations of discussions at the Quebec Conference. During the period between the two sessions, the members of Charlottetown prepared a list of resolutions that would be passed at the Quebec Conference, which proposed the constitution of a new union. These were going to become the "72 Resolutions."

Conference
The conference involved 33 delegates from various regions of Canada. The meeting included members from Canada East- George-Étienne Cartier, Étienne-Paschal Taché as well as Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Those from Canada West included George Brown and John A. Macdonald. Members in New Brunswick who also featured were John Hamilton Gray and Samuel Leonard Tilley. Nova Scotian delegates featured Adams George Archibald and Charles Tupper. Newfoundland sent two delegates whose mere purpose was to observe proceedings and Prince Edward Island sent George Coles and William Henry Pope. The two Newfoundland delegates were Frederick Carter and Ambrose Shea, who were not government members. Overall Nova Scotia had five members, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island had seven each, and the total made up all the delegates, making up all of the Maritime delegates. There were 32 delegates in total, and were given sets of calling cards, with the names and photo identification so everyone was clear with names and where certain people represented. The Conference lasted 14 days, but to some people, such as Edward Goff Penny, editor of the Montreal Herald, and an eventual senator, complained that this was too little time to conclude proceedings.

The major source of conflict at the conference was between those who favoured a "legislative union" a unitary state, such as John A. Macdonald, and those who favoured stronger provincial rights. The Conference tied in very closely with the discussions of the aforementioned Charlottetown Conference, as the topics being discussed in Quebec centred around whether the country should have a strong and single central government, or a more encompassing federal system. Representatives from the Maritimes and Canada East (now Quebec) tended to argue for provincial rights, fearing they would lose their cultural identity under a centralized unitary state. John A. Macdonald thought the failure of a weak central power was evident in the American Civil War, which was still being fought in the United States as the delegates met in Charlottetown and Quebec. The delegates eventually compromised, dividing powers between a "general" parliament and "local" provincial legislatures. They also decided to have an elected lower house, the House of Commons of Canada, and an appointed upper house, the Senate of Canada, although there was considerable debate about how many senators each province would have. The Prince Edward Island delegation called for a scheme similar to the Triple-E Senate proposal of the 1990s. Eventually, a proposed structure for the government was written out in the form of the seventy-two resolutions at the end of the conference.

Following on from the topic of the proposed division of the central government into the upper house, that would be based on regional representation and the lower house that would represent the population, this was a key topic in both the Charlottetown Conference and the Quebec Conference. This topic was discussed at length during the conference with one examiner outlining that the meeting on October 24, 1864, that the topic was "debated all day with considerable warmth and ability but no agreement come to". He also outlined that "lower Canada complains that in the number proposed for her, 24, she would be unfairly represented (in the upper house), with it being proposed that upper Canada should have the same number." This discussion carried on over into the Quebec Conference in the hope that an agreement could be eventually made considering that it was not concluded at the end of the Charlottetown Conference.

In terms of what the regions as a whole desired, it was quite overtly clear. Delegates from the Maritimes feared that a legislative union which the aforementioned John A. Macdonald was promoting, as they believed it would result in the loss of their identity as other nations would have an overbearing influence. However, the smaller Maritime colonies saw the Senate as a means of strengthening their regional representation to offset their regional weakness in the so-called lower house. Cartier represented the interests of Quebec at the conference. Like the delegates from the Maritimes, he was more invested in the conference although he made it abundantly clear that the province needed a strong provincial government that would be able to protect their language, civil customs and local laws. Although he was not wholeheartedly against such political reform, he believed that Quebec should still maintain its identity.

In terms of priorities at the Conference, there were many differing agendas, especially the Maritime regions that, as mentioned earlier, saw a federalized state as beneficial to their economy and commerce. An example of this was the role of John A. Carter, one of the Newfoundland diplomats invited to the conference, as he outlined the importance of the fisheries to the Newfoundland economy, and that a newly formed federalized state would open up a wide field of enterprise both with internal trade in Canada and within the continent of North America as a whole. However, one concern of the Maritime colonies was that they benefited from free trade and the aforementioned commerce of fishing for their livelihood, Canada was more concerned about industrialization in all the provinces, creating significant improvements to the Canadian economy. Such a concern was raised during the Conference as the Maritime colonies wished to maintain their stable economy. In contrast, some members from Prince Edward Island was highly skeptical of a union as advocated by Macdonald, as they were concerned about the Island's autonomy if there was a confederation. The concept of particularism, with paranoia surrounding an overpowering Canada dictating Maritime policy, was a salient characteristic of political thinking among numerous people in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. That demonstrated that even within the Maritimes, there were varying degrees of skepticism, with some parts more in favour than others highlighting the complexities of the Maritimes. One key figure, Charles Tupper who was a politician from Nova Scotia who formed close alliances with John A. Macdonald, sympathized with the goal of confederation and stated that the Maritimes "could never hope to occupy a position of influence or importance except in connection with their larger sister Canada." That highlighted the varying degrees in which delegates from the Maritimes viewed the idea of confederation.

Result
Overall, the result was a compromise, as each province would have its own legislature and the power of government was divided up between the federal and provincial governments. It was decided that the central administrative area was to be placed in Ottawa, where the central government would reside. Delegates consolidated their previous agreement at the Charlottetown Conference, that the central government would have a lower house based on population and an upper house reflective of regional representation. The three separate regions of Ontario, Quebec, and the three Maritime provinces would all have 24 seats in the appointment chamber. The actual overall result meant that Canada incorporated portions of both the British Unitary system and the American federal system. The "72 Resolutions" were drawn up by the end of the conference, which maintained none of the democratic principles as demonstrated in the United States. The resolutions did not guarantee the protection for the rights of French Canadians and excluded them extensively in other parts of the legislature.

However, the Christian faith was well protected as both Catholics and Protestant minorities were granted Canada’s equality of rights and special privileges in anything involving education. Such resolutions received wide recognition and support from the colonial office. In Lower Canada, Reformers opposed the resolutions but were the only group to do so. In Nova Scotia, pressure was needed to force through legislative approval of the resolutions. Additionally, the federal government was given considerable power over the provinces, as was demonstrated under the power of disallowance, which gave the federal government the ability to reject provincial laws of which they did not approve. Other regions were considered as a result of the conference, including Newfoundland, British Columbia and the “North West Territory", to eventually enter Canada on equal terms later. Although the Quebec Conference changed the political influence in Canada considerably, the British crown would maintain its position as the head of the government and the protector and head of executive authority.

The 72 Resolutions
The Resolutions were highly comprehensive. The first few resolutions outlined that the general government would ensure that the intercolonial railway would be completed from Riviere-du-Loup, through New Brunswick and end up at Truro in Nova Scotia. The delegates from Nova Scotia also admitted that the building of the railway with the full financial backing of the central government was key in swaying the Maritimes decision to back a centralized government. The arrangements proposed by Alexander Galt in terms of finance, predominantly focusing on existing debts of various debts owed by certain colonies should be divided and shared. Some of the final resolutions outline that her the Queen possess considerable power over the course of proceedings as Resolution 71 underlined that the Queen was to be solicited to determine the rank and name of the federated provinces. Resolution 60 outlined that the central government would tackle the debts of all the provinces and aid the payments of all those involved. What was eventually enacted was the policy which resulted in each province being compensated by a federal transfer resulting in 80 cents per head.

The Quebec resolutions received increasing support from the colonial office, with the only opposing group being the Lower Canadian Reformers who had not been drafted into the coalition. In both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, considerable pressure was needed to formulate and pass through legislative approval. Prince Edward Island did not join the newly formed unified Canada until around 1873. The 72 Resolutions significantly influenced the British North America Act, as will be discussed in the next section, and little was altered or changed to the resolutions when enacted in London.

The British North America Act, 1867 and the Quebec Conference's legacy
The British North America Act received royal assent on 28 March 1867 by Queen Victoria, and by 22 May, all three provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada). Upper and Lower Canada were to be split into Ontario (Upper Canada) and Quebec (Lower Canada). All of these provinces were to be unified by 1 July 1867, three years after the agreement was made at the Quebec Conference. In the act, it was clearly stated that 'not being more than six months of passing this act, the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick shall form and be one dominion under the name of Canada.' It went onto outline that 'Canada shall be divided into four provinces, named Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.' However, although Canada was unified under the British North America Act, the act contained no general declaration or recognition of the fact that Canada was a bilingual and bicultural nation. Overall, the British North America Act consolidated the 72 Resolutions as passed by the Quebec Conference.

Canada East

 * George-Étienne Cartier
 * Jean-Charles Chapais
 * Alexander Tilloch Galt
 * Hector-Louis Langevin
 * Thomas D'Arcy McGee
 * Étienne-Paschal Taché

Canada West

 * George Brown
 * Alexander Campbell
 * James Cockburn
 * John A. Macdonald
 * William McDougall
 * Oliver Mowat

New Brunswick

 * Edward Barron Chandler
 * Charles Fisher
 * John Hamilton Gray
 * John Mercer Johnson
 * Peter Mitchell
 * William H. Steeves
 * Samuel Leonard Tilley

Nova Scotia

 * Adams George Archibald
 * Robert B. Dickey
 * William Alexander Henry
 * Jonathan McCully
 * Charles Tupper
 * John William Ritchie
 * Joseph Howe

Prince Edward Island

 * George Coles
 * John Hamilton Gray
 * Thomas Heath Haviland
 * Andrew Archibald Macdonald
 * Edward Palmer
 * William Henry Pope
 * Edward Whelan

Newfoundland (observers)

 * Frederick Carter
 * Ambrose Shea

title: Quebec Conference, 1864


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Modern Greek

Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά, Néa Elliniká, or Κοινή Νεοελληνική Γλώσσα, Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (Ελληνικά, Elliniká), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to as Standard Modern Greek. The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic features of the modern language arose centuries earlier, having begun around the fourth century AD.

During most of the Modern Greek period, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, more archaic written forms, as with the vernacular and learned varieties (Dimotiki and Katharevousa) that co-existed in Greece throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Varieties
Varieties of Modern Greek include Demotic, Katharevousa, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan, Southern Italian, Yevanic, Tsakonian and Greco-Australian.

Demotic
Strictly speaking, Demotic or Dimotiki (Δημοτική), refers to all popular varieties of Modern Greek that followed a common evolutionary path from Koine and have retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility to the present. As shown in Ptochoprodromic and Acritic poems, Demotic Greek was the vernacular already before the 11th century and called the "Roman" language of the Byzantine Greeks, notably in peninsular Greece, the Greek islands, coastal Asia Minor, Constantinople, and Cyprus.

Today, a standardized variety of Demotic Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and is referred to as "Standard Modern Greek", or less strictly simply as "Greek", "Modern Greek", or "Demotic".

Demotic Greek comprises various regional varieties with minor linguistic differences, mainly in phonology and vocabulary. Due to the high degree of mutual intelligibility of these varieties, Greek linguists refer to them as "idioms" of a wider "Demotic dialect", known as "Koine Modern Greek" (Koiní Neoellinikí - 'common Neo-Hellenic'). Most English-speaking linguists however refer to them as "dialects", emphasizing degrees of variation only when necessary. Demotic Greek varieties are divided into two main groups, Northern and Southern.

The main distinguishing feature common to Northern variants is a set of standard phonological shifts in unaccented vowel phonemes: becomes,  becomes , and  and  are dropped. The dropped vowels' existence is implicit, and may affect surrounding phonemes: for example, a dropped palatalizes preceding consonants, just like an  that is pronounced. Southern variants do not exhibit these phonological shifts.

Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian (Constantinople), Epirote, Macedonian, Thessalian, Thracian, Northern Euboean, Sporades, Samos, Smyrna, and Sarakatsanika. The Southern category is divided into groups that include:
 * Old Athenian-Maniot: Megara, Aegina, Athens, Cyme (Old Athenian) and Mani Peninsula (Maniot)
 * Ionian-Peloponnesian: Peloponnese (except Mani), Ionian Islands, Attica, Boeotia, and Southern Euboea
 * Cretan-Cycladian: Cyclades, Crete, and several enclaves in Syria and Lebanon
 * Southeastern: Chios, Ikaria, Dodecanese, and Cyprus.

Demotic Greek has officially been taught in monotonic Greek script since 1982.

Katharevousa
Katharevousa (Καθαρεύουσα) is a sociolect promoted in the 19th century at the foundation of the modern Greek state, as a compromise between Classical Greek and modern Demotic. It was the official language of modern Greece until 1976.

Katharevousa is written in polytonic Greek script. Also, while Demotic Greek contains loanwords from Turkish, Italian, Latin, and other languages, these have for the most part been purged from Katharevousa. See also the Greek language question.

Pontic

Pontic (Ποντιακά) was originally spoken along the mountainous Black Sea coast of Turkey, the so-called Pontus region, until most of its speakers were killed or displaced to modern Greece during the Pontic genocide (1919–1921), followed later by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. (Small numbers of Muslim speakers of Pontic Greek escaped these events and still reside in the Pontic villages of Turkey.) It derives from Hellenistic and Medieval Koine and preserves characteristics of Ionic due to ancient colonizations of the region. Pontic evolved as a separate dialect from Demotic Greek as a result of the region's isolation from the Greek mainstream after the Fourth Crusade fragmented the Byzantine Empire into separate kingdoms (see Empire of Trebizond).

Cappadocian
Cappadocian (Καππαδοκικά) is a Greek dialect of central Turkey of the same fate as Pontic; its speakers settled in mainland Greece after the Greek genocide (1919–1921) and the later Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek dialects earlier, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so developed several radical features, such as the loss of the gender for nouns. Having been isolated from the crusader conquests (Fourth Crusade) and the later Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance ones in Demotic Greek. The poet Rumi, whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek, one of the earliest attestations of the dialect.

Mariupolitan
Ruméika (Ρωμαίικα) or Mariupolitan Greek is a dialect spoken in about 17 villages around the northern coast of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and Russia. Mariupolitan Greek is closely related to Pontic Greek and evolved from the dialect of Greek spoken in Crimea, which was a part of the Byzantine Empire and then the Pontic Empire of Trebizond, until that latter state fell to the Ottomans in 1461. Thereafter, the Crimean Greek state continued to exist as the independent Greek Principality of Theodoro. The Greek-speaking inhabitants of Crimea were deported by Catherine the Great to resettle in the new city of Mariupol after the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) to escape the then Muslim-dominated Crimea. Mariupolitan's main features have certain similarities with both Pontic (e.g. the lack of synizesis of -ía, éa) and the northern varieties of the core dialects (e.g. the northern vocalism).

Southern Italian

Southern Italian or Italiot (Κατωιταλιώτικα) comprises both Calabrian and Griko varieties, spoken by around 15 villages in the regions of Calabria and Apulia. The Southern Italian dialect is the last living trace of Hellenic elements in Southern Italy that once formed Magna Graecia. Its origins can be traced to the Dorian Greek settlers who colonised the area from Sparta and Corinth in 700 BC.

It has received significant Koine Greek influence through Byzantine Greek colonisers who re-introduced Greek language to the region, starting with Justinian's conquest of Italy in late antiquity and continuing through the Middle Ages. Griko and Demotic are mutually intelligible to some extent, but the former shares some common characteristics with Tsakonian.

Yevanic
Yevanic (יעואניקה, Γεβανικά) is an almost extinct language of Romaniote Jews. The language was already in decline for centuries until most of its speakers were killed in the Holocaust. Afterward, the language was mostly kept by remaining Romaniote emigrants to Israel, where it was displaced by modern Hebrew.

Tsakonian
Tsakonian (Τσακωνικά) is spoken in its full form today only in a small number of villages around the town of Leonidio in the region of Arcadia in the Southern Peloponnese, and partially spoken further afield in the area. Tsakonian evolved directly from Laconian (ancient Spartan) and therefore descends from Doric Greek.

It has limited input from Hellenistic Koine and is significantly different from and not mutually intelligible with other Greek varieties (such as Demotic Greek and Pontic Greek). Some linguists consider it a separate language because of this.

Greco-Australian
Greco-Australian is an Australian-based dialect of Greek that is spoken by the Greek diaspora of Australia, including Greek immigrants living in Australia and Australians of Greek descent.

Phonology and orthography

A series of radical sound changes starting in Koine Greek has led to a phonological system in Modern Greek that is significantly different from that of Ancient Greek. Instead of the complex vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a simple system of five vowels. This came about through a series of mergers, especially towards (iotacism).

Modern Greek consonants are plain (voiceless unaspirated) stops, voiced stops, or voiced and unvoiced fricatives. Modern Greek has not preserved length in vowels or consonants.

Modern Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute accent which indicates stress and the diaeresis marking a vowel letter as not being part of a digraph. Greek has a mixed historical and phonemic orthography, where historical spellings are used if their pronunciation matches modern usage. The correspondence between consonant phonemes and graphemes is largely unique, but several of the vowels can be spelt in multiple ways. Thus reading is easy but spelling is difficult.

A number of diacritical signs were used until 1982, when they were officially dropped from Greek spelling as no longer corresponding to the modern pronunciation of the language. Monotonic orthography is today used in official usage, in schools and for most purposes of everyday writing in Greece. Polytonic orthography, besides being used for older varieties of Greek, is still used in book printing, especially for academic and belletristic purposes, and in everyday use by some conservative writers and elderly people. The Greek Orthodox Church continues to use polytonic and the late Christodoulos of Athens and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece have requested the reintroduction of polytonic as the official script.

The Greek vowel letters and digraphs with their pronunciations are: $\langleα\rangle$, $\langleε, αι\rangle$ , $\langleη, ι, υ, ει, οι, υι\rangle$ , $\langleο, ω\rangle$ , and $\langleου\rangle$. The digraphs $\langleαυ\rangle$, $\langleευ\rangle$ and $\langleηυ\rangle$ are pronounced, , and respectively before vowels and voiced consonants, and ,  and  respectively before voiceless consonants.

The Greek letters $\langleφ\rangle$, $\langleβ\rangle$, $\langleθ\rangle$, and $\langleδ\rangle$ are pronounced, , , and respectively. The letters $\langleγ\rangle$ and $\langleχ\rangle$ are pronounced and, respectively. All those letters represent fricatives in Modern Greek, but they were used for occlusives with the same (or with a similar) articulation point in Ancient Greek. Before mid or close front vowels ( and ), $\langleγ\rangle$ and $\langleχ\rangle$ are fronted, becoming and, respectively, which, in some dialects, notably those of Crete and Mani, are further fronted to  or  and  or , respectively. Μoreover, before mid or close back vowels ( and ), $\langleγ\rangle$ tends to be pronounced further back than a prototypical velar, between a velar and an uvular  (transcribed ). The letter $\langleξ\rangle$ stands for the sequence and $\langleψ\rangle$ for.

The digraphs $\langleγγ\rangle$ and $\langleγκ\rangle$ are generally pronounced, but are fronted to before front vowels ( and ) and tend to be pronounced  before the back vowels ( and ). When these digraphs are preceded by a vowel, they are pronounced and  before front vowels ( and ) and  before the back ( and ). The digraph $\langleγγ\rangle$ may be pronounced in some words ( before front vowels and  before back ones). The pronunciation for the digraph $\langleγκ\rangle$ is extremely rare, but could be heard in literary and scholarly words or when reading ancient texts (by a few readers); normally it retains its "original" pronunciation  only in the trigraph $\langleγκτ\rangle$, where $\langleτ\rangle$ prevents the sonorization of $\langleκ\rangle$ by $\langleγ\rangle$ (hence ).

Syntax and morphology

Modern Greek is largely a synthetic language. Modern Greek and Albanian are the only two modern Indo-European languages that retain a synthetic passive (the North Germanic passive is a recent innovation based on a grammaticalized reflexive pronoun).

Differences from Classical Greek
Modern Greek has changed from Classical Greek in morphology and syntax, losing some features and gaining others.

Features lost:

 * dative case
 * optative mood
 * infinitive
 * dual number
 * participles (except the perfect middle-passive participle)
 * third person imperative
 * reduplicative perfect

Features gained:

 * gerund
 * modal particle θα (a contraction of ἐθέλω ἵνα → θέλω να → θε' να → θα), which marks future tense and conditional mood
 * auxiliary verb forms for certain verb forms (in particular the perfect tense)
 * aspectual distinction in future tense between imperfective (present) and perfective (aorist)

Modern Greek has developed a simpler system of grammatical prefixes marking tense and aspect of a verb, such as augmentation and reduplication, and has lost some patterns of noun declension and some distinct forms in the declensions.

Most of these features are shared with other languages spoken in the Balkan peninsula (see Balkan sprachbund), although Greek does not show all typical Balkan areal features, such as the postposed article.

Because of the influence of Katharevousa, however, Demotic is not commonly used in its purest form. Archaisms are still widely used, especially in writing and in more formal speech, as well as in some everyday expressions, such as the dative εντάξει ('okay', literally 'in order') or the third person imperative ζήτω! ('long live!').

Sample text
The following is a sample text in Modern Greek of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):

title: Modern Greek