text:
Zemstvo

A zemstvo (земство,, , zemstva) was an institution of local government set up during the emancipation reform of 1861 carried out in Imperial Russia by Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Nikolay Milyutin elaborated the idea of the zemstvo, and the first zemstvo laws went into effect in 1864. After the October Revolution the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced with a multilevel system of workers' and peasants' councils ("soviets").

The Zemstvo Assembly
The system of elected bodies of local self-government in the Russian Empire was represented at the lowest level by the mir and the volost and was continued, so far as the 34 Guberniyas (governorates) of old Russia were concerned, in the elective district and provincial assemblies (zemstvo). The goal of the zemstvo reform was the creation of local organs of self-government on an elected basis, possessing sufficient authority and independence to resolve local economic problems. Assemblies could appoint deputies to carry out orders and objectives in response to issues the zemstvo considered.

Alexander II instituted these bodies, one for each district and another for each province or government, in 1864. The law creating the zemstvo outlined 14 objectives for each zemstvo to accomplish.

 * 1) Self management of zemstvo property and revenue
 * 2) Self maintenance of zemstvo property
 * 3) Public food security
 * 4) Management of philanthropy, public welfare, and church building maintenance
 * 5) Mutual property insurance
 * 6) Oversee development of trade and industry
 * 7) Economic participation of public education, public health, and prison systems
 * 8) Cooperation on the prevention of bovine disease and crop plagues
 * 9) Fulfillment of civil, military, and postal demands
 * 10) Distribution of state tax funds assigned to the zemstvo
 * 11) Setting, collecting, and allocating local taxes
 * 12) Notify the public of local welfare opportunities and civil rights
 * 13) Hold elections
 * 14) Special charters

Elections
They consisted of a representative council (zemskoye sobranye) and of an executive board (zemskaya uprava) nominated by the former. The board consisted of five classes of members:
 * large landed proprietors (nobles owning 590 acre and over), who sat in person
 * proxies of the small landowners, including the clergy in their capacity of landed proprietors
 * proxies of the wealthier townsmen
 * proxies of the less wealthy urban classes
 * proxies of the peasants, elected by the volosts

The nobles received more weight in voting for a zemstvo even though nobles were a tiny minority of the population. District zemstvos were required to have 40% of their assembly elected by the peasants, but provincial assemblies were elected from the district without such a quota. This resulted in much lower peasant representation at the provincial level.

Persons under 25 years of age, under criminal investigation, convicted criminals, and foreigners were not permitted to be in the zemstvos. Women who owned sufficient property to gain a seat on a zemstvo could appoint a male proxy to vote for them. By 1913, 20-40% of the eligible voters in Tula Oblast were women depending on the election. Women were de facto denied the right to serve as deputies with this confirmed de jure in 1903.

Prior to each election, lists of eligible voters for a given zemstvo were published for public comment. Voters could be stricken by the zemstvo or added to the roster based on public comment. Voters had to be present to vote in person on candidates who were self nominated. The electoral bodies were not allowed to give instructions for how candidates should perform once elected. The governor could object to the proceedings and suspend electoral decisions. Election reform in 1890 resulted in separate electoral bodies for the noble and ignoble voters. At this time, the clergy, jews, and non-landowning peasants were deprived of the right to vote in zemstvo elections. Part of the motivation for the election reform was a decline in land ownership of the nobles which resulted in too few nobles to fill the deputy and assembly roles. These election reforms decreased the size of assemblies and number of deputies 20-30%.

Procedure
Zemstvo assemblies met at least once a year for not more than twenty days. Extraordinary meetings of a zemstvo required permission from the Minister of the Interior and could only consider the specific issues on which the Minister permitted them. Provincial meetings were opened and closed by the local governor while the district meetings were opened and closed by the Marshal of the Nobility. These zemstvo typcially created a small number of delegations for handling decisions the assembly came to. One such typical delegation was an executive board which worked year around. It was not uncommon for one individual to serve as the Marshal of the Nobility and chairman of the executive for a number of years.

Enactments from the zemstvos generally needed approval from the governor or Minister of the Interior. These approvals could be withheld on the grounds that an enactment was either illegal or against state interests. In the case that enactments were not approved, governors were expected to notify the assembly and deliberate on adjustments to the enactment that would allow it to pass. If compromise could not be found, the Senate would hear the case. The governor was expected to act as a plaintiff and prove that the zemstvo's enactment was unjust. The governor could also revoke their approval and begin this process after a enactment had taken effect. After 1890 with expanded oversight powers, the Ministry of Interior began to consistently obstruct the work of provincial zemstvos.

Taxation
The 10th objective, distribution of state funds assigned to zemstvos was one of the main objectives. About 20% of Russia's annual state revenue was assigned to the zemstvos in the early years. Zemstvos were able to draw taxes from a variety of other sources and for a variety of purposes. It is difficult to summarize what a typical zemstvo's taxation looks like. For example, land tax accounted for between 3 and 90 percent of a zemstvo's revenue depending on the zemstvo and year. In many districts, police were supposed to collect harvest taxes on behalf of the zemstvo. However, there was significant difficultly in actually collecting because the zemstvo had no control over the police, and the assemblies were forbidden from awarding police including even thanking them.

In the beginning of the zemstvo system, natural obligations such as road work and like kind taxes such as wheat, were of greater concern to the peasants than monetary taxation. These taxes were unpopular and formed large part of the zemstvo's resources. Overtime, these were mostly converted into monetary taxes. This policy was also not popular as the zemstvos were often seen by contemporary peasants as worthless institutions that raised a lot of taxes.

The Third Element
The zemstvo executive boards were highly involved in the administration of the staff working for the zemstvo. These staff were professional experts from the Intelligentsia known as 'the third element'. Aside from the medical and educational staff the agronomists and statisticians were common third element professions. These professionals profited from the employment, but they also donated their time as civic service. The third element was a source of significant distrust of the zemstvos by the central government. Unlike the zemstvo administrators (first element) and deputies (second element), the third element often came from the peasant class. For this they were suspected of being liberal radicals (and some were) which resulted in persecution of the police.

The term 'third element' was coined by Vice Governor Vladimir Kondoidi in 1900, to refer to radical zemstvo employees in Samara. He charged that the third element had largely taken control of the actual operations of the zemstvo."'The zemstvo board has no choice but to rely exclusively on the third element, since there is no participation in the assembly at all. In this regard, the upcoming session terrifies me.' - Dmitrii Shipov, private letter 1902" The governor of Samara subsequently lead an investigation which discovered that over half of the current zemstvo employees had never been submitted to the governor for approval as required by law.

Education
Literacy rose from 10% to 68% during the existence of the zemstvo system. The zemstvo education system was built on top of the existing peasant and clerical education systems. From 1907 to 1917 the Ministry of Education developed control over the education system.

Beginning in 1886 and continuing throughout the existence of zemstvos, the central bureaucracy sought and found additional control over primary education. This started with special school inspections which could result in the closing of unsatisfactory schools. The Marshall of Nobility was given special privileges such as school inspections, sole authority to open new schools, and chair positions on school boards in the 1874 primary school legislation, but these privileges did not have a large effect on schools because most zemstvos never ceded financial control over the schools to the school boards and many of the supposed inspections simply never occurred. Peasants mostly supported zemstvo schools over existing schools created by the crown or clergy. The number of Synod administrated schools fell from 24,000 in 1886 to 4,000 by 1880.

The zemstvo school system was built from the existing peasant education system. Prior to 1870 peasant communities were required to provide the facilities and the zemstvos did not reliably pay teachers. In the 1870s, zemstvos shifted to reliable salaries and began providing additional materials such as blackboards. The shift from these schools being funded by peasant communities to zemstvo budgets took several decades. The zemstvo did not even reach budget parity with the local peasant communities until 1889. Afterwards zemstvos budgets rapidly expanded and education became the largest share of the budget. In 1893 the total zemstvo expenditure on education was 9 million rubles, by 1913 it was nearly 90 million rubles.

Students of zemstvo schools could be subjected to year-end examinations at the zemstvos discretion. Pass rates for these exams were used to evaluate teacher performance and male students that passed were required to do less military service.

Zemstvo teachers mostly came from the middle class. There was a mix of male and female teachers which leaned towards the females. Teachers were united by low pay, isolation in communities unfamiliar to them, and being unmarried. Only 17% of female teachers were married and 47% of male teachers were married in 1911.

Choir was a popular way to boost scholastic engagement. Nearly every other form of education received criticism, but teaching students to read the lyrics and memorize the tones of church songs was encouraging to all.

In 1907 the Duma created a fund to establish a school for every village in Russia. These funds were dispensed through the zemstvos to existing school or were given to school curators which often resulted in the construction of new schools. Herein arose a new class of "state schools" which were not affiliated with the zemstvos. In 1910 the Ministry of Education created a national pension fund which all teachers could participate in. Additional administrative action in 1913, caused the existing zemstvo schools to become more under the influence of the Ministry of Education than the zemstvos themselves. In 1914, zemstvos lost the power to direct school teachers and the ministry gained the power to fire any school teachers they deemed as unfit.

Medicine
Prior to the zemstvo medical system, Russian peasants mostly relied on faith healers specializing in magical chants and remedies for their medical care. The zemstvos viewed raising support for medical systems as their first most important task. Therefore, the zemstvo medical system became as much a popular movement for supporting an ideal as an actual service. To accomplish this, the zemstvos promoted policies that limited the direct costs of medical care and aimed to compensate providers through tax funds. The medical experts supported by the zemstvos put significant focus on hygiene education and preventative medicine. The zemstvo officials and practitioners appreciated the difficulty of not only making illiterate, god fearing peasants trust a largely secular medical system based on rational analysis, but making them understand this distinction at all.

Growth of the medical system was slow and depended on growth of the third element. The first zemstvo bureaucracies for managing the various salaried positions connected with the zemstvo did not emerge until the 1870s. Growing numbers of salaried workers inevitably lead to growing budgets. At several points in the early zemstvo period budget concerned lead to push back and laying off practitioners. By 1910, nearly all districts had a physician-patient ratio worse than 1 to 10,000.

Practitioners suffered from a lack of trust on the zemstvos' part. Recommendations such as funding for hospital improvements would be weighed against ideas from the assembly. Practitioners made several attempts to form a national organization for the advancement of medicine, but this was delayed until 1885. One of the goals this national system would achieve is uniform medical records to support analyzing cases from other provinces. Practitioners also demanded changing from the circuit system in which they spent most of the their time traveling to each remote village to see patients to a stationary system in which they held regular hours at a medical center. Zemstvos opposed the stationary system throughout the 1870s on the grounds that remote villagers which paid taxes towards the medical service would not receive equal access. In the 1880s the stationary system became more popular as the number of practitioners grew.

As the circuit system faded away, the zemstvos engaged in heated debate over what to do with the feldshers. These positions represented the gap between the ideal medical care the zemstvo system sought and the practical limitations of what could be provided. Restrictions were placed on feldshers such that much of their day to day job became technically illegal, but there was no one else to provide medical care. This was widely known and tolerated by all, but the increasing criminality of the feldsher work symbolized what the zemstvo medical system still needed to achieve. One reason for the zemstvos' opposition to feldshers was they blurred the lines between the traditional spiritual medicine and modern medicine. Rather than fading away, the feldsher practice was opened to women in 1871 to meet growing needs. Alongside growing numbers of feldshers was an increasing professionalism through more formal training as physicians assistants.

Sanitary councils began meeting in the 1870s, but were not effective until after 1879 when zemstvos gained the power to issue sanitary legislation binding on all citizens. Moscow was a particular leader in the development of sanitary councils and then full time bureau of sanitation professionals.

Midwifery was a contemporaneously known issue during the zemstvo period because nearly one in two peasant children did not reach adulthood. This is a notable area in which the zemstvos failed. At the peak of midwifery during the zemstvo system, only 2% of births were attended. The primary cause of this failure was peasant women did not want strangers involved in their labor.

History
Zemstvos were created as part of the larger Great Reforms. In 1864, the first law on Zemstvos was enacted by the Emperor which outlined the powers of the zemstvos. These powers were administrative and focused on local issues which were mostly not addressed by existing institutions. In 1865 zemstvos were opened in nineteen provinces, and between 1866 and 1876 another sixteen were established. Twelve provinces had no zemstvos, the three Baltic provinces and the nine western governments annexed from Poland by Catherine II. Created in 1875 after much consultation with Cossack officials, the zemstvos of the Don Host Oblast collapsed and were abolished after six years of operation.

Zemstvos were originally restricted from making binding rules on every citizen within their jurisdiction. In 1873, zemstvos were permitted to make binding regulation on every citizen strictly for the purpose of preventing fires. These powers were expanded in 1879 to allow regulation to prevent the spread of epidemics and zoological diseases.

From 1864 to 1889, zemstvos elected the justices of the peace. Following this period the zemskii nachalnik position was created. The zemskii nachalnik was appointed by the local nobility but the zemstvo was required to pay his salary. This was unpopular with the zemstvo. The assembly tried to lower the salary which became the subject of several lawsuits in the Senate.

From 1866 to 1905 zemstvo officials were largely prevented from contracting each other on the ground that these were local organizations. Occasional exemptions were made for fire reinsurance contracts or large agricultural machinery sales. In 1902, zemstvo leaders petitioned Nicholas II for the voice of the zemstvo to reach the throne. The Emperor considered this a senseless dream. The Minister of Interior expressly forbade zemstvo officials from Tver from contacting other provinces on any issue of national politics.

In 1866 the Senate ruled that zemstvos were not allowed to tax industrial output.

As time went on additional gubernatorial oversight was placed on zemstvos. In 1867, the zemstvos were prevented from publishing minutes or debates unless given specific permission by the governor. In 1879, the governors were given the power to dismiss any zemstvo employee at their discretion. The largest single change in the zemstvos powers came from Alexander III (law of 25 June 1890). The 1890 law instituted the Bureau of Zemstvo Affairs as additional oversight of the zemstvos. Bureau officials were appointed by the emperor and from local governments officials such as Marshall of the Nobility, district prosecutor, and district courts. Procedures were still led by the governor. The bureau overturned 116 zemstvo enactments during the 1891 to 1892 year with 51 of these enactments from the Vladimir Provincial Assembly alone. This reform also gave zemstvos the power to issue binding regulation on the conduct of all citizens outside of townships in a wide variety of issues. In return, citizens gained the right to appeal the zemstvo's enactments to the Senate. In the 15 years that followed, the Senate heard 226 of these appeals, which primarily involved tax disputes. The reforms changed the legal status of men serving on the zemstvo from private citizen to government official. Zemstvo officials could enforce these regulation by bringing violators before criminal courts. Prior to 1890, zemstvo sessions were often cut short due to assemblies not meeting the quorum. This was in part because officials were not allowed to receive a salary or other compensation for their position.

The 1890 reforms also expanded the nobility's representation in the zemstvos from 55% in 1886 to 72% by 1903. Some historians represent the equality in terms of the amount of land one member of the zemstvo represented. In 1877, each peasant assembly member represented 1.76 times the land a noble member represented. By 1905, each peasant assembly member represented 6.47 times the land a noble member represented.

Zemstvo expenditure grew from 89.1 million rubles in 1900 to 290.5 million rubles in 1913. Of the latter sum, 90.1 million rubles were spent on education, 71.4 million on medical assistance, 22.2 million on improvements in agriculture, and 8 million on veterinary measures. The chief sources of zemstvo revenue were rates on lands, forests, country dwellings, factories, mines and other real-estate.

From 1897 to 1899 the issue of eliminating the district zemstvos and centralizing all functionality within the provincial zemstvo was seriously debated. This debate was especially significant in Moscow where Dmitry Shipov, chairman of the provincial zemstvo, resigned in protest to bring attention to the debate.

The first formal curriculum for zemstvo schooling was created by the Ministry of Education in 1897. This program prescribed a weekly study of six hours in the Word of God, three hours of Slavonic Church, eight hours of Russian Language, two hours of writing, and five hours of arithmetic.

From 1902-1905, there were widespread reports of a total loss of independence of the peasant members of the zemstvos. Authority was ceded to the land captains. During this time period sections of the government more closely connected to the central bureaucracy such as the governors' offices, the ministers of finance, the ministers of interior, and special police investigations became more and more involved in zemstvo affairs. This was unpopular with zemstvo officials many of which were contributing to a liberal constitutionalist political movement. Financial and practical burdens from the Russo-Japanese War contributed to increased tensions on all sides. Rising distrust between the central bureaucracy and the zemstvos was recognized by Tsar Nicholas II in his 1903 manifesto on provincial administration. This manifesto served as public support for the reforms lead by Minister of Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The goal of Plehve's reforms was to bring tighter control of the zemtsvos through gubernatorial oversight. These reforms faced significant opposition from the zemstvos, the ministers of finance, and several governors. In Saint Petersburg, Plehve was able to force the governor to resign over his opposition to the reforms. Plehve worked closely with the Police Department of Russia, which he formerly lead, to oust many zemstvo members. Several prominent zemstvo figures, including Shipov, were formally reprimanded by the Tsar.

The participants of Russian Revolution of 1905 largely overlapped with zemstvo participants. In the 1905-6 year 66 districts boycotted taxes in protest of the taxes being too high. Discontent was most severe where the zemtsvo's tax on land allotted to the peasants was taxed much higher than privately owned land. Notable participants in the 1905 revolution affiliated with the zemstvos include Dmitry Shipov, Dmitry Shakhovskoy, Georgy Lvov, Pavel Dolgorukov, and Fedor Redichev. Several of these men overlap with the members of Beseda: a clandestine organization for liberals to discuss the issues of the zemstvo.

In response to the Russian Peasants' uprising of 1905–1906, the zemstvos turned sharply conservative. Georgy Lvov was voted off the zemstvo for being a 'dangerous liberal'. The zemstvo assemblies, still dominated by nobility, were frightened by the violence of 1905. Many members joined the United Nobility and the zemstvos became more focused on protecting the interests of the nobility than addressing the grievances of 1905.

The rules governing elections to the zemstvos were taken as a model for the electoral law of 1906 and are sufficiently indicated by the account of this given below. The zemstvos were originally given large powers in relation to the incidence of taxation and such questions as education, medical relief, public welfare, food supply, and road maintenance in their localities, but radicals, such as the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the nihilists, met them with hostility, believing that the reforms were too minor. Still, in his 1901 article "What is to be done", Lenin advocated for a short-term alliance with the zemstvos against Tsarist oppression.

In 1906, each zemstvo was able to elect one deputy to represent them in the State Council. Absenteeism increased dramatically during this period and many zemstvos were considered to be in good attendance if half their members showed up to the meetings.

As Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin gave zemstvos the budget and authority needed to carry out many of the projects in his agrarian reforms. His administration expanded the number of the zemstvos from 34 to 43. The new Duma electoral law resulted in 30% of the legislators of the third and fourth Duma coming from zemstvo backgrounds. In the period leading up the 1905 Revolution and throughout Stolypin's governance, the style of debate among zemstvo gentry changed; what began as consensus building and doing favors for friends and family turned into partisan parliamentary politics more typical of 20th century governance.

The All-Russian Zemstvo Union was set up in August 1914 to provide a common voice for all the zemstvos. It was a liberal organisation which after 1915 operated in conjunction with the Union of Cities.

In 1917 rural societies in Stavropol refused to pay taxes and boycotted schools, medical centers, and all other services after the zemstvo was first introduced there. Rising tensions resulted in three protesters being killed by the police and the zemstvo remaining in power. Their governor reported: "The dissatisfaction of the rural population with the introduction of the zemstvo was evident almost everywhere in the province shortly after the distribution of the tax lists. The peasants, being insufficiently informed about the taxes and the sphere of activity of zemtsvo institutions which were only in their first year of existence, noticed the exceptional increase in local taxes."

During the Russian Revolution the zemstvos lost all authority and the only real authority remaining in Russia was the soviets. The zemstvo elections were boycotted because the people considered the soviets as the authority. Much of the third element stopped showing up to their zemstvo appointed positions and worked for the soviets instead.

After the October Revolution, the uniform system of zemstvos broke apart. In some places such as Ukraine the institutions remained and took on more nationalist forms.

title: Zemstvo


text:
Gord the Rogue

Gord the Rogue is the protagonist in a series of fantasy novels and short stories written by Gary Gygax. Gygax originally wrote the novels and short stories to promote his World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. After he left TSR, Gygax continued to write Gord the Rogue novels for several years. In all of these works, the plot revolves around the adventures of a young man named Gord who rises from humble origins in the slums of a large city on the planet Oerth to become a powerful force trying to stave off the takeover of Oerth by demons.

Publication history
One of the factors that contributed to the success of the Dragonlance setting when it was published in 1984 was a popular series of concurrent novels by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Gary Gygax, the developer of the World of Greyhawk campaign setting, realized that novels set in Greyhawk could have a similar benefit for his recently published World of Greyhawk boxed set, so he wrote Saga of Old City, the first in a series of novels that would be published under the banner Greyhawk Adventures. The protagonist was Gord the Rogue, and this first novel told of his rise from the Slum Quarter of the city of Greyhawk to become world traveller and thief extraordinaire. The novel was designed to promote sales of the boxed set by providing colourful details about the social customs and peoples of various cities and countries in a region called the Flanaess.

Shannon Appelcline noted that "Gygax introduced Gord in Dragon #100 (August 1985) in a story called “At Moonset Blackcat Comes.” The first novel, Saga of Old City (1985) appeared a couple of months later." Appelcline also noted that as the final projects initiated by Gary Gygax were published by TSR, "A few more Greyhawk books appeared as well. The first of those was Artifact of Evil (1986), Gygax's second and final Gord the Rogue novel for TSR." Appelcline commented that "After Gygax left TSR in 1985, the Greyhawk setting forked. Gygax himself retained rights to his fictional character, Gord the Rogue — as well as a few characters whose names derived from his, such as Zagyg the Mad Wizard. Over the next several years, Gygax used those rights to publish a series of Gord the Rogue novels ending with Dance of Demons (1988) in which Gygax destroyed Oerth (!) and replaced it with the world of Yarth — which may or may not have been the Aerth of Mythus (1992)."

Appelcline explained that since Gygax retained the rights to Gord when he started New Infinites, "Now, he licensed Greyhawk from TSR and started writing new books. The first was Sea of Death (1987), and it quickly hit bestseller lists. Over the next years, the success of the Gord novels would continue, and they would be the main thing keeping New Infinities in business. As a result, Gygax would spend most of his time at New Infinities working on books rather than RPGs." Appelcline noted that "Gygax's Gord the Rogue appeared a few times after New Infinities disappeared, once in White Wolf 's Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion (1996) and once in Paizo Publishing's Dragon Magazine #344 (2006). Some of his stories were also reprinted by Troll Lord Games and Paizo Publishing." Appelcline also noted that in 2006 "Troll Lord Games revealed that they had licensed Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels, previously published by TSR and New Infinities Productions. The first, Tale of Old City (2008), would unfortunately be one of Troll Lord's final Gygax publications."

Even before Saga of Old City rolled off the presses in November 1985, Gygax wrote a sequel, Artifact of Evil. He also wrote a short story, "At Moonset Blackcat Comes", that appeared in the special 100th issue of Dragon magazine in August 1985. This introduced Gord the Rogue to gamers just before Saga of Old City was scheduled to be released.

However, at the same time, various factions within TSR with different visions of the company's future caused a power struggle, and Gygax was forced out on December 31, 1985. By the terms of his settlement with TSR, Gygax kept the rights to Gord the Rogue as well as all D&D characters whose names were anagrams or plays on his own name (for example, Yrag and Zagyg).

After Gygax left TSR in 1985, he continued to write a few more Gord the Rogue novels, which were published by New Infinities Productions: Sea of Death (1987), Night Arrant (1987), City of Hawks (1987), Come Endless Darkness (1988), and Dance of Demons (1988). In Gygax's absence, however, TSR moved the Greyhawk storyline in new directions that Gygax didn't appreciate, and the line of Greyhawk Adventures novels (without Gord the Rogue) continued to be written by Rose Estes. In a literary declaration that his old world of Oerth was dead, and wanting to make a clean break with all things Greyhawk and D&D, Gygax destroyed his version of Oerth in the final Gord the Rogue novel, Dance of Demons.

Series overview
The series of novels follows the progress of the orphan beggar Gord, from his lowly youth to his ascension as an avatar of Balance. Gord begins his career with less than heroic motives, but early mentors Gellor the bard and druid Curley Greenleaf continually steer him toward honorable ends. Eventually Gord is revealed to have a kinship with an enigmatic deity named the Catlord.

The series, originally designed to provide some social and descriptive details about Gygax's Greyhawk campaign world that he had not been able to fit into the limited space of either the 1980 folio edition or the 1983 boxed set, were written in a pulp swords and sorcery style reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser short stories. Gygax, who believed D&D would always only appeal to a male demographic, wrote the novels for that readership.

Individual novels
Saga of Old City was the first novel in TSR's Greyhawk Adventures series. It starts in Gord's childhood, and ends with his triumphant return to Greyhawk City as a young man and master thief. He learns his trade in the "beggars' guild", and gets involved in the gang war touched off by the beggars encroaching on the official thieves' guild's territory. He travels and has a variety of swashbuckling adventures, ranging from participating in a war to liberating a young noblewoman held hostage.

Artifact of Evil is a continuation of Saga of Old City. This was the final novel under TSR's Greyhawk Adventures banner that was written by Gygax. An ancient artifact is uncovered, whose power could destroy their world. It is up to Gord and his companions to try to stop this artifact of evil from falling into the wrong hands.

Sea of Death, the first of the series published by New Infinities Productions, Inc., has Gord traveling far afield to the Sea of Dust, on a quest for a "Theorpart", hidden in a lost city. He must face rivals sent by demon lords: the psychopathic dwarf Obmi, who serves Zuggtmoy, and the drow priestess Eclavdra, serving Graz'zt. He meets and falls in love with Leda, a clone of Eclavdra. Leda and Gord part at the end of the book as she returns to the Abyss, impersonating Eclavdra in Graz'zt's service for the sake of higher ideals.

Night Arrant is a collection of nine short stories about Gord's adventures, in his early twenties, in the City of Greyhawk.

City of Hawks is a retelling of the events that occurred in Saga of Old City. Gord's rise from simple beggar to master thief are detailed, as is his search for his true heritage.

Come Endless Darkness continues where Sea of Death left off and has Gord continue his quest to stop Tharizdun and Lord Entropy from taking over the Multiverse.

Dance of Demons is the finale, in which Gord and Gellor enter the Abyss on a mission from the world's most powerful forces of Balance, to retrieve the remaining Theorparts. The goal is nothing less than to free Tharizdun, the long-imprisoned god of ultimate evil and entropy, and to finally destroy him. The novel ends with the complete destruction of Oerth, and the unveiling of a new and better world.

Uncollected short stories
"At Moonset Blackcat Comes" is an early tale of Gord and his friend Chert the barbarian, in which Gord accepts a mission for the Catlord.

"Evening Odds" appears as story 14 in Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion, an anthology of fiction inspired by Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion mythos. The story takes place some time after the events of Dance of Demons. Gord has apparently been deposed from his position as the new Catlord and is traveling the alternate realities as a Champion of Balance. In the course of the story he upsets a plot by the archfiend Baphomet on modern Earth.

"The Return of Gord" is a caper story set during Gord's days as a master thief in the City of Greyhawk, and "A Wizard's Thief" is another caper story, involving Gord and Chert, and set in an unnamed city.

Dave Langford, reviewing Artifact of Evil in the April 1986 edition of White Dwarf (Issue 78), was critical of Gygax's writing ability, saying, "At the first glimpse within, my soul was purged by the brutalities visited upon the English language." Langford believed the book was simply "an AD&D campaign write-up" rather than a bona-fide fantasy novel.

Other reviews

 * Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 1986, reviews of Artifact of Evil and The Crimson Sea, p. 169;
 * Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 1988, review of City of Hawks, p. 142.

Description
Gord is described as being small for a human, five and a half feet tall, slender and wiry. His eyes are iron-gray in color. He has black hair and olive-toned skin (which allows him to fit in among the Rhennee).

List of "Gord the Rogue" novels and short stories

 * Gygax, Gary. "At Moonset Blackcat Comes: A Tale of Gord of Greyhawk." Dragon #100 (TSR, 1985)
 * Gygax, Gary. Saga of Old City (TSR, 1985)
 * Gygax, Gary. Artifact of Evil (TSR, 1986)
 * Gygax, Gary. Sea of Death (New Infinities, 1987)
 * Gygax, Gary. Night Arrant (New Infinities, 1987)
 * Gygax, Gary. City of Hawks (New Infinities, 1987)
 * Gygax, Gary. Come Endless Darkness (New Infinities, 1988)
 * Gygax, Gary. Dance of Demons (New Infinities, 1988)
 * Gygax, Gary. "Evening Odds." Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion (White Wolf Publishing, Clarkson, Ga. 1996)
 * Gygax, Gary and Bourgoine, K.R. "The Return of Gord." Dragon #344 (Paizo Publishing, 2006)
 * Gygax, Gary and Bourgoine, K.R. "A Wizard's Thief." Of Dice & Pen (Game Day Fiction, an imprint of Flying Pen Press, Denver, Co. 2008)

Reception
In a 2021 Io9 series revisiting older Dungeons & Dragons novels, Rob Bricken described Gord as "a young street urchin who rises from poverty and imprisonment to become one of the greatest thieves on the planet" and goes on to say that "Gygax also revels in the misery he can inflict upon Gord". He described Gord's adventures as "a series of ho-hum D&D game sessions" with "no overarching plot" or and "no emotional growth". Bricken felt that the novel and its plot were "all terrible, but it might be mitigated if Gord weren't so deeply unlikeable". Bricken commented after reading Artifact of Evil that "even in this mortal realm, where I've devoted my life to watching bad movies and reading bad books, reading more about Gord feels like a zero-sum game to me".

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

title: Gord the Rogue


text:
Helen Dale

Helen Dale (born Helen Darville; 1972) is an Australian writer and lawyer. She is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.

A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner. The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym). The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was subsequently reissued under her legal name, then Helen Darville. It won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

After teaching, Dale returned to university, gaining her law degree in 2002. She later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.

Early life
A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. She had previously claimed that her father was Ukrainian, and her mother was Irish.

The Hand that Signed the Paper: Novel and controversy
While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Contents
The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine. The family comprises the parents, a daughter, and two sons. They suffer abuse by the drunken local commissar and are refused treatment by the village doctor and his wife (a secular Jew). Many Ukrainians hail the German invaders as liberators from Soviet oppression. Many volunteered for the German armed forces—Wehrmacht, SS, and Ordnungspolizei. The novel stresses the arbitrariness of the assignments to military units. A Ukrainian could as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as be in a death squad.

The two young brothers are separated in military assignments: 16-year-old Evheny to Nazi Einsatzgruppen C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 19-year-old Vitaly to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland. Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev, while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka extermination camp as a guard. Evheny is later sent to a front-line Waffen SS formation on the Eastern Front, while Vitaly is posted to northern Italy. He is part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of Italy's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.

Style
The novel is told primarily from the point of view of Kateryna, sister of the two brothers, and Magda, Vitaly's common-law wife from the Polish village near the Treblinka extermination camp. Kateryna has a relationship with a German SS Hauptsturmführer. Magda assists a Jewish prisoner to escape after the Treblinka prisoner revolt in August 1943. The family's story is gradually revealed by Fiona, Evheny's Australian-born daughter, who starts investigating the past after her uncle Vitaly is charged in the early 1990s with war crimes in World War II.

The book is frank about the antisemitism of its major characters (who blame Jews for the excesses of Communism), and Dale represented the lives of Ukrainian military men in a sympathetic manner, rather than featuring their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature. These elements attracted accusations of antisemitism and condemnation of the book by leaders of Australia's Jewish community. There was a perception that the attitudes of the author "Helen Demidenko" may have been informed by her Ukrainian ethnic identity, until her pseudonym was revealed along with her false representation of the book as history.

Controversy
The Hand that Signed the Paper won the Miles Franklin Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Australia. At the time, the media discovered Helen Dale's identity and legal name. This promoted much debate on the nature of identity, ethnicity, and authenticity in Australian literature.

Despite the adverse publicity for the author, the novel won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

When Dale submitted her novel to the University of Queensland Press in 1993, she said it was based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko". After the awards, the Sydney Morning Herald mistakenly reported in 2005 that the novel had been submitted as a non-fiction book. The author's 1993 note accompanying her manuscript had read: "The things narrated in this book really happened, the things they did [are] historical actualities." Then Dale wrote that she was presenting her book as fiction, saying: "But this is also a work of fiction. I have presented it as fiction...."

Books that discuss the scandal
The controversy that surrounded The Hand that Signed the Paper inspired the publication in 1996 of two books that assessed the novel and issues of authenticity: Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust and Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate. Manne is very critical of Dale's book. Riemer is not, believing her approach was consistent with fiction, even if she tried to exaggerate the specific historic basis of her work.

Later work and recent years
In 1995, Dale published a short story, "Pieces of the Puzzle", in the Australian culture journal Meanjin. The byline was 'Demidenko', although the journal noted that the author had "taken back" her legal name of Darville. She has said that she had met Ukrainian witnesses to the war and the Holocaust, and based the story on their accounts. The Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote to her demanding that she identify these possible war criminals.

Dale was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper The Courier-Mail. She was dismissed for accusations of plagiarism after repeating jokes originally from the 'Evil Overlord List' in one of her columns and passing them off as her own. She continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax press. In 2017, an investigation by BuzzFeed revealed that Dale had also plagiarised a number of social media posts in her Twitter and Facebook feeds. BuzzFeed asked Dale why she had been lifting the tweets. She replied over Twitter direct message: "Cos it's amusing and I don't like Twitter. And don't you have more important stuff to be writing about?"

In 2000, Dale was again accused of antisemitism after interviewing David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for Australian Style magazine during his libel trial in London. (It was decided against him). She wrote a post-11 September article in The Sydney Morning Herald.

After working as a secondary teacher for several years in Australia and the UK, Dale returned to the University of Queensland in 2002 to study law. Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005,she commenced work as a judge's associate for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland.

Previously a regular contributor to the libertarian group blog Catallaxy files under the name 'skepticlawyer', Dale now has her own blog in this name.

Since gaining her law degree, Dale has also appeared on the SBS program Insight, and as a guest of the University of Melbourne's Publishing and Communications Program. She is associated with the Australian Skeptics, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant, a conservative journal. In 2007 Dale was reported to be working on a second novel.

Dale completed the Bachelor of Civil Law programme at the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Brasenose College. In 2008 she started reading for an MPhil in Law (Jurisprudence). She completed a Graduate LLB degree at the University of Edinburgh School of Law in 2012. During that time she won the Law Society of Scotland's student essay competition. The topic of her prize-winning essay was same-sex marriage. Dale completed a post-graduate qualification before beginning work in 2013 as a trainee solicitor with the law firm MBM Commercial.

Dale is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer, and physical education teacher.

In 2014, Dale returned to Australia, becoming a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate. She resigned during the election campaign in 2016.

Her most recent work is a two-part novel titled Kingdom of the Wicked. The first book, Rules, came out in 2017 and the second, Order, in 2018. It is a reimagining of the trial of Jesus Christ at the hands of Pontius Pilate in a technologically sophisticated Roman Empire.

title: Helen Dale


text: User talk:68.42.153.245

title: User talk:68.42.153.245


text:
Reboot (fiction)

In serial fiction, the term "reboot" signifies a new start to an established fictional universe, work, or series. A reboot discards continuity to re-create its characters, plotlines and backstory from the beginning. It has been described as a way to "rebrand" or "restart an entertainment universe that has already been established".

Another definition of a reboot is a remake which is part of an established film series or other media franchise. The term has been criticized for being a vague and "confusing" "buzzword", and a neologism for remake, a concept which has been losing popularity since the 2010s. William Proctor proposes that there is a distinction between reboots, remakes and retcons.

Origin
The term is thought to originate from the computing term reboot, meaning to restart a computer system. There is a change in meaning: the computing term refers to restarting the same program unaltered, while the term discussed here refers to revising a narrative from the beginning. The first known use of reboot applied to an entertainment franchise was in a 1994 Usenet posting.

Types
"Say you've had 187 issues of 'The Incredible Hulk' and you decide you're going to introduce a new Issue 1. You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened, and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no one blinks.

One of the reasons they do that is after 10 years of telling the same story, it gets stale and times change. So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it at the beginning, you're instantly distancing yourself from anything that's come before."

Reboots cut out non-essential elements associated with a pre-established franchise and start it anew, distilling it down to the core elements that made the source material popular. For audiences, reboots allow easier entry for newcomers unfamiliar with earlier titles in a series.

Comic books
In comic books, a long-running title may have its continuity erased to start over from the beginning, enabling writers to redefine characters and open up new story opportunities, allowing the title to bring in new readers. Comic books sometimes use an in-universe explanation for a reboot, such as merging parallel worlds and timelines together, or destroying a fictional universe and recreating it from the beginning.

Film
With reboots, filmmakers revamp and reinvigorate a film series to attract new fans and stimulate revenue. A reboot can renew interest in a series that has grown stale. Reboots act as a safe project for a studio, since a reboot with an established fanbase is less risky (in terms of expected profit) than an entirely original work, while at the same time allowing the studio to explore new demographics.

Television
A television series can return to production after cancellation or a long hiatus. Whereas a reboot disregards the previous continuity of a work, the term has also been used as a "catch all" phrase to categorize sequel series or general remakes due to the rise of such productions in the late 2010s.

A related concept is retooling, which is used to substantially change the premise of a series while keeping some of the core characters. Retools are usually part of an effort to forestall cancellation of a still running production.

Video games
Reboots and remakes are common in the video game industry. Remakes in video games are used to refresh the storyline and elements of the game and to take advantage of technology and features not available at the time of earlier entries.

Soft reboot
A soft reboot is a reboot that shares some continuity with the original series, but that changes the style, tone, or intent. It usually serves to allow writers more creative freedom while mostly maintaining the same setting the audience has grown accustomed to.

title: Reboot (fiction)


text:
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST, also FGRST), formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM; formerly GLAST Burst Monitor), is being used to study gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.

Fermi, named for high-energy physics pioneer Enrico Fermi, was launched on 11 June 2008 at 16:05 UTC aboard a Delta II 7920-H rocket. The mission is a joint venture of NASA, the United States Department of Energy, and government agencies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, becoming the most sensitive gamma-ray telescope on orbit, succeeding INTEGRAL. The project is a recognized CERN experiment (RE7).

Overview

Fermi includes two scientific instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM).
 * The LAT is an imaging gamma-ray detector (a pair-conversion instrument) which detects photons with energy from about 20 million to about 300 billion electronvolts (20 MeV to 300 GeV), with a field of view of about 20% of the sky; it may be thought of as a sequel to the EGRET instrument on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
 * The GBM consists of 14 scintillation detectors (twelve sodium iodide crystals for the 8 keV to 1 MeV range and two bismuth germanate crystals with sensitivity from 150 keV to 30 MeV), and can detect gamma-ray bursts in that energy range across the whole of the sky not occluded by the Earth.

General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (formerly Spectrum Astro and now Orbital Sciences) in Gilbert, Arizona, designed and built the spacecraft that carries the instruments. It travels in a low, circular orbit with a period of about 95 minutes. Its normal mode of operation maintains its orientation so that the instruments will look away from the Earth, with a "rocking" motion to equalize the coverage of the sky. The view of the instruments will sweep out across most of the sky about 16 times per day. The spacecraft can also maintain an orientation that points to a chosen target.

Both science instruments underwent environmental testing, including vibration, vacuum, and high and low temperatures to ensure that they can withstand the stresses of launch and continue to operate in space. They were integrated with the spacecraft at the General Dynamics ASCENT facility in Gilbert, Arizona.

Data from the instruments are available to the public through the Fermi Science Support Center web site. Software for analyzing the data is also available.

GLAST renamed Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
NASA's Alan Stern, associate administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters, launched a public competition 7 February 2008, closing 31 March 2008, to rename GLAST in a way that would "capture the excitement of GLAST's mission and call attention to gamma-ray and high-energy astronomy ... something memorable to commemorate this spectacular new astronomy mission ... a name that is catchy, easy to say and will help make the satellite and its mission a topic of dinner table and classroom discussion".

Fermi gained its new name in 2008: On 26 August 2008, GLAST was renamed the "Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope" in honor of Enrico Fermi, a pioneer in high-energy physics.

Mission

NASA designed the mission with a five-year lifetime, with a goal of ten years of operations.

The key scientific objectives of the Fermi mission have been described as:
 * To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in active galactic nuclei (AGN), pulsars, and supernova remnants (SNR).
 * Resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission.
 * Determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients.
 * Probe dark matter (e.g. by looking for an excess of gamma rays from the center of the Milky Way) and early Universe.
 * Search for evaporating primordial micro black holes (MBH) from their presumed gamma burst signatures (Hawking Radiation component).

The National Academies of Sciences ranked this mission as a top priority. Many new possibilities and discoveries are anticipated to emerge from this single mission and greatly expand our view of the Universe.
 * Blazars and active galaxies
 * Study energy spectra and variability of wavelengths of light coming from blazars so as to determine the composition of the black hole jets aimed directly at Earth -- whether they are
 * (a) a combination of electrons and positrons or
 * (b) only protons.

 * Gamma-ray bursts
 * Study gamma-ray bursts with an energy range several times more intense than ever before so that scientists may be able to understand them better.

 * Neutron stars
 * Study younger, more energetic pulsars in the Milky Way than ever before so as to broaden our understanding of stars. Study the pulsed emissions of magnetospheres so as to possibly solve how they are produced. Study how pulsars generate winds of interstellar particles.

 * Milky Way galaxy
 * Provide new data to help improve upon existing theoretical models of our own galaxy.

 * Gamma-ray background radiation
 * Study better than ever before whether ordinary galaxies are responsible for gamma-ray background radiation. The potential for a tremendous discovery awaits if ordinary sources are determined to be irresponsible, in which case the cause may be anything from self-annihilating dark matter to entirely new chain reactions among interstellar particles that have yet to be conceived.

 * The early universe
 * Study better than ever before how concentrations of visible and ultraviolet light change over time. The mission should easily detect regions of spacetime where gamma-rays interacted with visible or UV light to make matter. This can be seen as an example of E=mc2 working in reverse, where energy is converted into mass, in the early universe.

 * Sun
 * Study better than ever before how our own Sun produces gamma rays in solar flares.

 * Dark matter
 * Search for evidence that dark matter is made up of weakly interacting massive particles, complementing similar experiments already planned for the Large Hadron Collider as well as other underground detectors. The potential for a tremendous discovery in this area is possible over the next several years.

 * Fundamental physics
 * Test better than ever before certain established theories of physics, such as whether the speed of light in vacuum remains constant regardless of wavelength. Einstein's general theory of relativity contends that it does, yet some models in quantum mechanics and quantum gravity predict that it may not. Search for gamma rays emanating from former black holes that once exploded, providing yet another potential step toward the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Determine whether photons naturally split into smaller photons, as predicted by quantum mechanics and already achieved under controlled, man-made experimental conditions.

 * Unknown discoveries
 * Scientists estimate a very high possibility for new scientific discoveries, even revolutionary discoveries, emerging from this single mission.

Prelaunch
On 4 March 2008, the spacecraft arrived at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida. On 4 June 2008, after several previous delays, launch status was retargeted for 11 June at the earliest, the last delays resulting from the need to replace the Flight Termination System batteries. The launch window extended from 15:45 to 17:40 UTC daily, until 7 August 2008.

Launch
Launch occurred successfully on 11 June 2008 at 16:05 UTC aboard a Delta 7920H-10C rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 17-B. Spacecraft separation took place about 75 minutes after launch.

Orbit
Fermi resides in a low-Earth circular orbit at an altitude of 550 km, and at an inclination of 28.5 degrees.

Software modifications
GLAST received some minor modifications to its computer software on 23 June 2008.

LAT/GBM computers operational
Computers operating both the LAT and GBM and most of the LAT's components were turned on 24 June 2008. The LAT high voltage was turned on 25 June, and it began detecting high-energy particles from space, but minor adjustments were still needed to calibrate the instrument. The GBM high voltage was also turned on 25 June, but the GBM still required one more week of testing/calibrations before searching for gamma-ray bursts.

Sky survey mode
After presenting an overview of the Fermi instrumentation and goals, Jennifer Carson of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory had concluded that the primary goals were "all achievable with the all-sky scanning mode of observing". Fermi switched to "sky survey mode" on 26 June 2008 so as to begin sweeping its field of view over the entire sky every three hours (every two orbits).

Collision avoided
On 30 April 2013, NASA revealed that the telescope had narrowly avoided a collision a year earlier with a defunct Cold War-era Soviet spy satellite, Kosmos 1805, in April 2012. Orbital predictions several days earlier indicated that the two satellites were expected to occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other. On 3 April, telescope operators decided to stow the satellite's high-gain parabolic antenna, rotate the solar panels out of the way and to fire Fermi's rocket thrusters for one second to move it out of the way. Even though the thrusters had been idle since the telescope had been placed in orbit nearly five years earlier, they worked correctly and potential disaster was thus avoided.

Extended mission 2013–2018
In August 2013 Fermi started its 5-year mission extension.

Pass 8 software upgrade

In June 2015, the Fermi LAT Collaboration released "Pass 8 LAT data". Iterations of the analysis framework used by LAT are called "passes" and at launch Fermi LAT data was analyzed using Pass 6. Significant improvements to Pass 6 were included in Pass 7 which debuted in August 2011.

Every detection by the Fermi LAT since its launch, was reexamined with the latest tools to learn how the LAT detector responded to both each event and to the background. This improved understanding led to two major improvements: gamma-rays that had been missed by previous analysis were detected and the direction they arrived from was determined with greater accuracy. The impact of the latter is to sharpen Fermi LAT's vision as illustrated in the figure on the right. Pass 8 also delivers better energy measurements and a significantly increased effective area. The entire mission dataset was reprocessed.

These improvements have the greatest impact on both the low and high ends of the range of energy Fermi LAT can detect - in effect expanding the energy range within which LAT can make useful observations. The improvement in the performance of Fermi LAT due to Pass 8 is so dramatic that this software update is sometimes called the cheapest satellite upgrade in history. Among numerous advances, it allowed for a better search for Galactic spectral lines from dark matter interactions, analysis of extended supernova remnants, and to search for extended sources in the Galactic plane.

For almost all event classes, Version P8R2 had a residual background that was not fully isotropic. This anisotropy was traced to cosmic-ray electrons leaking through the ribbons of the Anti-Coincidence Detector and a set of cuts allowed rejection of these events while minimally impacting acceptance. This selection was used to create the P8R3 version of LAT data.

Solar array drive failure
On 16 March 2018 one of Fermi's solar arrays quit rotating, prompting a transition to "safe hold" mode and instrument power off. This was the first mechanical failure in nearly 10 years. Fermi's solar arrays rotate to maximize the exposure of the arrays to the Sun. The motor that drives that rotation failed to move as instructed in one direction. On 27 March, the satellite was placed at a fixed angle relative to its orbit to maximize solar power. The next day the GBM instrument was turned back on. On 2 April, operators turned LAT on and it resumed operations on 8 April. Alternative observation strategies are being developed due to power and thermal requirements.

Further extension into 2022
In 2019, a NASA Senior Review concluded that Fermi should continue to be operated into 2022, a decision that was subsequently approved by NASA. Further extensions remain possible.

Pulsar discovery
The first major discovery came when the space telescope detected a pulsar in the CTA 1 supernova remnant that appeared to emit radiation in the gamma ray bands only, a first for its kind. This new pulsar sweeps the Earth every 316.86 milliseconds and is about 4,600 light-years away.

Greatest gamma-ray burst energy release
In September 2008, the gamma-ray burst GRB 080916C in the constellation Carina was recorded by the Fermi telescope. This burst is notable as having "the largest apparent energy release yet measured". The explosion had the power of about 9,000 ordinary supernovae, and the relativistic jet of material ejected in the blast must have moved at a minimum of 99.9999% the speed of light. Overall, GRB 080916C had "the greatest total energy, the fastest motions, and the highest initial-energy emissions" ever seen.

Galactic Center gamma ray excess
In 2009, a surplus of gramma rays from a spherical region around the Galactic Center of the Milky Way was found in data from the Fermi telescope. This is now known as the Galactic Center GeV excess. The source of this surplus is not known. Suggestions include self-annihilation of dark matter or a population of pulsars.

Cosmic rays and supernova remnants
In February 2010, it was announced that Fermi-LAT had determined that supernova remnants act as enormous accelerators for cosmic particles. This determination fulfills one of the stated missions for this project.

Background gamma ray sources
In March 2010 it was announced that active galactic nuclei are not responsible for most gamma-ray background radiation. Though active galactic nuclei do produce some of the gamma-ray radiation detected here on Earth, less than 30% originates from these sources. The search now is to locate the sources for the remaining 70% or so of all gamma-rays detected. Possibilities include star forming galaxies, galactic mergers, and yet-to-be explained dark matter interactions.

Milky Way Gamma- and X-ray emitting Fermi bubbles
In November 2010, it was announced that two gamma-ray and X-ray emitting bubbles were detected around our galaxy, the Milky Way. The bubbles, named Fermi bubbles, extend about 25 thousand light-years distant above and below the galactic center. The galaxy's diffuse gamma-ray fog hampered prior observations, but the discovery team led by D. Finkbeiner, building on research by G. Dobler, worked around this problem.

Highest energy light ever seen from the Sun
In early 2012, Fermi/GLAST observed the highest energy light ever seen in a solar eruption.

"At the flare's peak, the LAT detected gamma rays with two billion times the energy of visible light, or about four billion electron volts (GeV), easily setting a record for the highest-energy light ever detected during or immediately after a solar flare"

- NASA

Terrestrial gamma-ray flash observations
Fermi telescope has observed and detected numerous terrestrial gamma-ray flashes and discovered that such flashes can produce 100 trillion positrons, far more than scientists had previously expected.

GRB 130427A
On 27 April 2013, Fermi detected GRB 130427A, a gamma-ray burst with one of the highest energy outputs yet recorded. This included detection of a gamma-ray over 94 billion electron volts (GeV). This broke Fermi's previous record detection, by over three times the amount.

GRB coincident with gravitational wave event GW150914
Fermi reported that its GBM instrument detected a weak gamma-ray burst above 50 keV, starting 0.4 seconds after the LIGO event and with a positional uncertainty region overlapping that of the LIGO observation. The Fermi team calculated the odds of such an event being the result of a coincidence or noise at 0.22%. However, observations from the INTEGRAL telescope's all-sky SPI-ACS instrument indicated that any energy emission in gamma-rays and hard X-rays from the event was less than one millionth of the energy emitted as gravitational waves, concluding that "this limit excludes the possibility that the event is associated with substantial gamma-ray radiation, directed towards the observer." If the signal observed by the Fermi GBM was associated with GW150914, SPI-ACS would have detected it with a significance of 15 sigma above the background. The AGILE space telescope also did not detect a gamma-ray counterpart of the event. A follow-up analysis of the Fermi report by an independent group, released in June 2016, purported to identify statistical flaws in the initial analysis, concluding that the observation was consistent with a statistical fluctuation or an Earth albedo transient on a 1-second timescale. A rebuttal of this follow-up analysis, however, pointed out that the independent group misrepresented the analysis of the original Fermi GBM Team paper and therefore misconstrued the results of the original analysis. The rebuttal reaffirmed that the false coincidence probability is calculated empirically and is not refuted by the independent analysis.

In October 2018, astronomers reported that GRB 150101B, 1.7 billion light years away from Earth, may be analogous to the historic GW170817. It was detected on 1 January 2015 at 15:23:35 UT by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, along with detections by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on board the Swift Observatory Satellite.

Black hole mergers of the type thought to have produced the gravitational wave event are not expected to produce gamma-ray bursts, as stellar-mass black hole binaries are not expected to have large amounts of orbiting matter. Avi Loeb has theorised that if a massive star is rapidly rotating, the centrifugal force produced during its collapse will lead to the formation of a rotating bar that breaks into two dense clumps of matter with a dumbbell configuration that becomes a black hole binary, and at the end of the star's collapse it triggers a gamma-ray burst. Loeb suggests that the 0.4 second delay is the time it took the gamma-ray burst to cross the star, relative to the gravitational waves.

GRB 170817A signals a multi-messenger transient
On 17 August 2017, Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor software detected, classified, and localized a gamma-ray burst which was later designated as GRB 170817A. Six minutes later, a single detector at Hanford LIGO registered a gravitational-wave candidate which was consistent with a binary neutron star merger, occurring 2 seconds before the GRB 170817A event. This observation was "the first joint detection of gravitational and electromagnetic radiation from a single source".

Gamma-ray Burst Monitor
The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) (formerly GLAST Burst Monitor) detects sudden flares of gamma-rays produced by gamma ray bursts and solar flares. Its scintillators are on the sides of the spacecraft to view all of the sky which is not blocked by the Earth. The design is optimized for good resolution in time and photon energy, and is sensitive from $8 keV$ (a medium X-ray) to $300 GeV$ (a medium-energy gamma-ray).

"Gamma-ray bursts are so bright we can see them from billions of light-years away, which means they occurred billions of years ago, and we see them as they looked then", stated Charles Meegan of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor has detected gamma rays from positrons generated in powerful thunderstorms.

Large Area Telescope
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) detects individual gamma rays using technology similar to that used in terrestrial particle accelerators. Photons hit thin metal sheets, converting to electron-positron pairs, via a process termed pair production. These charged particles pass through interleaved layers of silicon microstrip detectors, causing ionization which produce detectable tiny pulses of electric charge. Researchers can combine information from several layers of this tracker to determine the path of the particles. After passing through the tracker, the particles enter the calorimeter, which consists of a stack of caesium iodide scintillator crystals to measure the total energy of the particles. The LAT's field of view is large, about 20% of the sky. The resolution of its images is modest by astronomical standards, a few arc minutes for the highest-energy photons and about 3 degrees at 100 MeV. It is sensitive from $8 keV$ to $40 MeV$ (from medium up to some very-high-energy gamma rays). The LAT is a bigger and better successor to the EGRET instrument on NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite in the 1990s. Several countries produced the components of the LAT, who then sent the components for assembly at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. SLAC also hosts the LAT Instrument Science Operations Center, which supports the operation of the LAT during the Fermi mission for the LAT scientific collaboration and for NASA.

Education and public outreach
Education and public outreach are important components of the Fermi project. The main Fermi education and public outreach website at http://glast.sonoma.edu offers gateways to resources for students, educators, scientists, and the public. NASA's Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) group operates the Fermi education and outreach resources at Sonoma State University.

Rossi Prize
The 2011 Bruno Rossi Prize was awarded to Bill Atwood, Peter Michelson and the Fermi LAT team "for enabling, through the development of the Large Area Telescope, new insights into neutron stars, supernova remnants, cosmic rays, binary systems, active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts."

In 2013, the prize was awarded to Roger W. Romani of Leland Stanford Junior University and Alice Harding of Goddard Space Flight Center for their work in developing the theoretical framework underpinning the many exciting pulsar results from Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

The 2014 prize went to Tracy Slatyer, Douglas Finkeiner and Meng Su "for their discovery, in gamma rays, of the large unanticipated Galactic structure called the Fermi bubbles."

The 2018 prize was awarded to Colleen Wilson-Hodge and the Fermi GBM team for the detection of GRB 170817A, the first unambiguous and completely independent discovery of an electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave signal (GW170817) that "confirmed that short gamma-ray bursts are produced by binary neutron star mergers and enabled a global multi-wavelength follow-up campaign."

title: Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope


text:
GLAST

GLAST may refer to:

 * Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope
 * GLutamate ASpartate Transporter, a protein in humans
 * GLAST (tokamak), a set of fusion research reactors of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC)

title: GLAST


text:
User:Rebrane

Articles I've created

 * Paul Volcker -- my 7th edit, was mentioned in Accountancy Age magazine in 2005!
 * Cafestol
 * Supreme Court of Chile
 * Manfred Max-Neef
 * Michael D. Brown
 * Joe Allbaugh
 * Thad W. Allen
 * Glenn English
 * Ellen Sauerbrey
 * Paul McNulty

Articles I've contributed to heavily

 * Richard Jewell
 * Kevin Powell
 * Edith Clement
 * Edith Jones
 * Colonia Dignidad

Images I've uploaded
/Images

title: User:Rebrane


text:
Dusky thrush

The dusky thrush (Turdus eunomus) is a member of the thrush family which breeds eastwards from central Siberia to Kamchatka wintering to Japan, South China and Myanmar. It is closely related to the more southerly breeding Naumann's thrush T. naumanni; the two have often been regarded as conspecific. The scientific name comes from Latin Turdus, "thrush" and Ancient Greek eunomos, "orderly".

This species breeds in open woodland areas, but unlike Naumann's thrush, the dusky thrush is more tolerant of mountainous and tundra-edge habitats. This species is strongly migratory, wintering south to southeast Asia, principally in China and neighbouring countries. It is a rare vagrant to western Europe. In December 2016 a sighting of one in the Derbyshire in the United Kingdom brought hundreds of birdwatchers to see it.

It nests in trees, laying 3-5 eggs in an untidy but neatly lined nest. Migrating birds and wintering birds often form small flocks. It is omnivorous, eating a wide range of insects, especially mosquitoes, earthworms and berries.

This is a medium-sized but stocky thrush, reminiscent in structure of a small fieldfare. The underwing is reddish brown, and there is a pale.

Dusky thrush has a dark brown back and rump; the face, breast, and flank spots rump are black and the belly and undertail are white. Naumann's thrush in comparison has a paler brown back and head; the face, breast, flank spots and rump are reddish, and the belly and undertail are white.

The female is fairly similar to the male, but immatures have a weaker patterning.

The male dusky thrush has a simple fluted or whistling song, similar to the redwing. There are suggestions that the songs of dusky and Naumann's thrush differ.

title: Dusky thrush