text:
Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.

Early life and education
Beaton was born on 14 January 1904 in Hampstead, north London, the son of Ernest Walter Hardy Beaton (1867–1936), a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife, Esther "Etty" Sisson (1872–1962). His grandfather, Walter Hardy Beaton (1841–1904), had founded the family business of "Beaton Brothers Timber Merchants and Agents", and his father followed into the business. Ernest Beaton was an amateur actor and met his wife, Cecil's mother Esther ("Etty") when playing the lead in a play. She was the daughter of a Cumbrian blacksmith named Joseph Sisson and had come to London to visit her married sister.

Ernest and Etty Beaton had four children – Cecil; two daughters, Nancy Elizabeth Louise Hardy Beaton (1909–99, who married Sir Hugh Smiley) and Barbara Jessica Hardy Beaton (1912–73, known as Baba, who married Alec Hambro); and son Reginald Ernest Hardy Beaton (1905–33).

Cecil Beaton was educated at Heath Mount School (where he was bullied by Evelyn Waugh) and St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where his artistic talent was quickly recognised. Both Cyril Connolly and Henry Longhurst report in their autobiographies being overwhelmed by the beauty of Beaton's singing at the St Cyprian's school concerts.

When Beaton was growing up, his nanny had a Kodak 3A Camera, a popular model which was renowned for being an ideal piece of equipment to learn on. Beaton's nanny began teaching him the basics of photography and developing film. He would often get his sisters and mother to sit for him. When he was sufficiently proficient, he would send the photos off to London society magazines, often writing under a pen name and "recommending" the work of Beaton.

Beaton attended Harrow School, and then, despite having little or no interest in academia, moved on to St John's College, Cambridge, and studied history, art and architecture. Beaton continued his photography and, through his university contacts, got a portrait depicting the Duchess of Malfi published in Vogue. It was actually George "Dadie" Rylands – "a slightly out-of-focus snapshot of him as Webster's Duchess of Malfi standing in the sub-aqueous light outside the men's lavatory of the ADC Theatre at Cambridge." Beaton left Cambridge without a degree in 1925.

Career
After a short time in the family timber business, he worked with a cement merchant in Holborn. This resulted in "an orgy of photography at weekends" so he decided to strike out on his own. Under the patronage of Osbert Sitwell he put on his first exhibition in the Cooling Gallery, London. It caused quite a stir.

Believing that he would meet with greater success on the other side of the Atlantic, he left for New York and slowly built up a reputation there. By the time he left, he had "a contract with Condé Nast Publications to take photographs exclusively for them for several thousand pounds a year for several years to come."

From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, where he entertained many notable figures.

In 1947, he bought Reddish House, set in 2.5 acres of gardens, approximately 5 mi to the east in Broad Chalke. Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Greta Garbo was a visitor. He remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

Photography
Beaton designed book jackets (see Catherine Ives), and costumes for charity matinees, learning the craft of photography at the studio of Paul Tanqueray, until Vogue took him on regularly in 1927. He set up his own studio, and one of his earliest clients and, later, best friends was Stephen Tennant. Beaton's photographs of Tennant and his circle are considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

Beaton's first camera was a Kodak 3A folding camera. Over the course of his career, he employed both large format cameras, and smaller Rolleiflex cameras. Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer, and instead focused on staging a compelling model or scene and looking for the perfect shutter-release moment.

He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photographer for the French Vogue travelled to England with his new friend Horst. Horst himself would begin to work for French Vogue in November of that year. The exchange and cross pollination of ideas between this collegial circle of artists across the Channel and the Atlantic gave rise to the look of style and sophistication for which the 1930s are known.

Beaton is known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood. In 1938, he inserted some tiny-but-still-legible anti-Semitic phrases (including the word 'kike') into American Vogue at the side of an illustration about New York society. The issue was recalled and reprinted, and Beaton was fired.

Beaton returned to England, where the Queen recommended him to the Ministry of Information (MoI). He became a leading war photographer, best known for his images of the damage done by the German Blitz. His style sharpened and his range broadened, Beaton's career was restored by the war.

Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was his favourite royal sitter, and he once pocketed her scented hankie as a keepsake from a highly successful shoot. Beaton took the famous wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (wearing an haute couture ensemble by the noted American fashion designer Mainbocher). He photographed Princess Margaret in a cream Dior dress for her 21st birthday in 1951, which became one of the most iconic royal portraits of the 20th century.

During the Second World War, Beaton was first posted to the Ministry of Information and given the task of recording images from the home front. During this assignment he captured one of the most enduring images of British suffering during the war, that of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet officially joined the war, but images such as Beaton's helped push the Americans to put pressure on their government to help Britain in its hour of need.

Beaton had a major influence on and relationship with Angus McBean and David Bailey. McBean was a well-known portrait photographer of his era. Later in his career, his work is influenced by Beaton. Bailey was influenced by Beaton when they met while working for British Vogue in the early 1960s. Bailey's use of square format (6x6) images is similar to Beaton's own working patterns.

Stage and film design
After the war, Beaton tackled the Broadway stage, designing sets, costumes, and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere's Fan, in which he also acted.

His costumes for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956) were highly praised. This led to two Lerner and Loewe film musicals, Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), each of which earned Beaton the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. He also designed the period costumes for the 1970 film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

His additional Broadway credits include The Grass Harp (1952), The Chalk Garden (1955), Saratoga (1959), Tenderloin (1960), and Coco (1969). He was the recipient of four Tony Awards.

He designed the sets and costumes for a production of Puccini's last opera Turandot, first used at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and then at Covent Garden.

Beaton designed the academic dress of the University of East Anglia.

Diaries
Cecil Beaton was a published and well-known diarist. In his lifetime, six volumes of diaries were published, spanning the years 1922–1974. Recently some unexpurgated material has been published. "In the published diaries, opinions are softened, celebrated figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, whereas in the originals, Cecil can be as venomous as anyone I have ever read or heard in the most shocking of conversation" wrote their editor, Hugo Vickers.

Last public interview
The last public interview given by Sir Cecil Beaton was in January 1980 for an edition of the BBC's radio programme Desert Island Discs. The interviewer was Roy Plomley. The recording was broadcast on Friday 1 February 1980 following the Beaton family's permission. Owing to Beaton's frailty, the interview was recorded at Beaton's 17th-century home of Reddish House in Broad Chalke in Wiltshire (near Salisbury).

Beaton, though frail, recalled events in his life, particularly from the 1930s and 1940s (the Blitz). Among the recollections were his associations with stars of Hollywood and British Royalty notably The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (whose official wedding photographs Beaton took on 3 June 1937 at relatively short notice); and official portraits of Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother) and Queen Elizabeth II on her Coronation day on 2 June 1953. The interview also alluded to a lifelong passion for performing arts and in particular ballet and operetta.

The Beaton programme is considered to be almost the final words on an era of "Bright Young Things" whose sunset had taken place by the time of the abdication of Edward VIII. Beaton commented specifically on Wallis Simpson (later titled The Duchess of Windsor after her marriage to the former King Edward VIII). The Duchess of Windsor was still alive at the time of the original Beaton interview and broadcast.

Beaton said that the one record that he would retain on the desert island should the others get washed away would be Beethoven's Symphony No 1, and his chosen book was a compendium of photographs he had taken down the years of "...people known and unknown; people known but now forgotten".

Personal life and death
Beaton had relationships with various men and women, including former Olympic fencer and teacher Kinmont Hoitsma (his last lover), actresses Greta Garbo and Coral Browne, dancer Adele Astaire, Greek socialite Madame Jean Ralli (Lilia), and British socialite Doris Castlerosse.

He was knighted in the 1972 New Year Honours.

Two years later, he suffered a stroke that left him permanently paralysed on the right side of his body. Although he learnt to write and draw with his left hand, and had cameras adapted, Beaton became frustrated by the limitations the stroke had put upon his work. As a result of his stroke, Beaton became anxious about financial security for his old age and, in 1976, entered into negotiations with Philippe Garner, expert-in-charge of photographs at Sotheby's.

On behalf of the auction house, Garner acquired Beaton's archive – excluding all portraits of the Royal Family, and the five decades of prints held by Vogue in London, Paris and New York. Garner, who had almost single-handedly invented the photographic auction, oversaw the archive's preservation and partial dispersal, so that Beaton's only tangible assets, and what he considered his life's work, would ensure him an annual income. The first of five auctions was held in 1977, the last in 1980.

By the end of the 1970s, Beaton's health had faded. He died on 18 January 1980 at Reddish House, his home in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, four days after his 76th birthday.

Recognition

 * Tony Award for Best Costume Design for Quadrille (1955)
 * CBE (1956)
 * Tony Award for Best Costume Design for My Fair Lady (1957)
 * Fellow of the Ancient Monuments Society (1957)
 * Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Gigi (1958)
 * Tony Award for Best Costume Design for Saratoga (1960)
 * Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (1960)
 * Academy Award for Best Art Direction for My Fair Lady (1964)
 * Academy Award for Best Costume Design for My Fair Lady (1964)
 * Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain (1965)
 * Tony Award for Best Costume Design for Coco 1970
 * International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame, named 1970.
 * Knighthood (1972)

Exhibitions
Major exhibitions have been held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1968 and in 2004.

The first international exhibition in thirty years, and first exhibition of his works to be held in Australia was held in Bendigo, Victoria from 10 December 2005 to 26 March 2006.

In October 2011, the BBC's Antiques Roadshow featured an oil portrait by Beaton of rock star Mick Jagger, whom Beaton met in the 1960s. The painting, originally sold at the Le Fevre Gallery in 1966, was valued for insurance purposes at £30,000.

The Museum of the City of New York dedicated an exhibition to Cecil Beaton from October 2011 to April 2012.

An exhibition celebrating The Queen's Diamond Jubilee and showing portraits of Her Majesty by Cecil Beaton, opened in October 2011 at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War at the Imperial War Museum, London: major retrospective of Beaton's war photography, held from 6 September 2012 – 1 January 2013.

Cecil Beaton at Home: Ashcombe & Reddish at The Salisbury Museum, Wiltshire, from 23 May- 19 September 2014, a biographical retrospective focussing on Beaton's two Wiltshire houses, brought together for the first time many art works and possessions from both eras of Beaton's life. The exhibition included a full-size reproduction of the murals and four-poster bed from the Circus Bedroom at Ashcombe, as well as a section of the drawing room at Reddish House.

In film and television
In the 1989 Australian film Darlings of the Gods, Beaton was portrayed by Shane Briant. In the 2010 series "Upstairs Downstairs", S1E3, Beaton was portrayed by Christopher Harper. In Netflix's 2016 series The Crown, Beaton was portrayed by Mark Tandy.

Selected works

 * The Book of Beauty (Duckworth, 1930)
 * Cecil Beaton's Scrapbook (Batsford, 1937)
 * Cecil Beaton's New York (Batsford, 1938)
 * My Royal Past (Batsford, 1939)
 * History Under Fire with James Pope-Hennessy (Batsford, 1941)
 * Time Exposure with Peter Quennell (Batsford, 1941)
 * Air of Glory (HMSO, 1941)
 * Winged Squadrons (Hutchinson, 1942)
 * Near East (Batsford, 1943)
 * British Photographers (William Collins, 1944)
 * Far East (Batsford, 1945)
 * Cecil Beaton's Indian Album (Batsford, 1945–6, republished as Indian Diary and Album, OUP, 1991)
 * Cecil Beaton's Chinese Album (Batsford, 1945–6)
 * India (Thacker & Co., 1945)
 * Portrait of New York (Batsford, 1948)
 * Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (Batsford, 1949)
 * Photobiography (Odhams, 1951)
 * Ballet (Allan Wingate, 1951)
 * Persona Grata with Kenneth Tynan (Allan Wingate, 1953)
 * The Glass of Fashion (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954)
 * It Gives Me Great Pleasure (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956)
 * The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1957)
 * Japanese (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959)
 * Quail in Aspic: The Life Story of Count Charles Korsetz (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962)
 * Images with a preface by Edith Sitwell and an introduction by Christopher Isherwood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963)
 * Royal Portraits with an introduction by Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963)
 * Cecil Beaton's 'Fair Lady' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964)
 * The Best of Beaton with an introduction by Truman Capote (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968)
 * My Bolivian Aunt: A Memoir (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971)

Diaries

 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1922–39 The Wandering Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961)
 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1939–44 The Years Between (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965)
 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1944–48 The Happy Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972)
 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1948–55 The Strenuous Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)
 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1955–63 The Restless Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976)
 * Cecil Beaton's Diaries: 1963–74 The Parting Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978)
 * Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton 1926–1974 edited by Richard Buckle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979)
 * The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as they were written with an introduction by Hugo Vickers (Orion, 2003)
 * Beaton in the Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries with an introduction by Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)

Photographs

 * Sir William Walton, 1926
 * Stephen Tennant, 1927
 * Lady Diana Cooper, 1928
 * Charles James (designer), 1929
 * Lillian Gish, 1929
 * Oliver Messel, 1929
 * Lord David Cecil, 1930
 * Lady Georgia Sitwell, 1930
 * Gary Cooper, 1931
 * Molly Fink, 1926
 * Pablo Picasso, 1933
 * Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, 1933
 * Dürrüşehvar Sultan, 1933
 * Marlene Dietrich, 1935
 * Salvador Dalí, 1936
 * Natalie Paley, 1936
 * Aldous Huxley, 1936
 * Daisy Fellowes, 1937
 * Helen of Greece and Denmark, Queen Mother of Romania, 1937
 * Lady Ursula Manners, 1937
 * Queen Sita Devi of Kapurthala, 1940
 * Bomb Victim (Eileen Dunne), 1940
 * Winston Churchill, 1940
 * Graham Sutherland, 1940
 * Charles de Gaulle, 1941
 * Walter Sickert, 1942
 * Maharani Gayatri Devi, Rajmata of Jaipur, 1943
 * John Pope-Hennessy, 1945
 * Isabel Jeans, 1945
 * Greta Garbo, 1946
 * Yul Brynner, 1946
 * Princess Fawzia Fuad of Egypt, Queen of Iran
 * Vivien Leigh, 1947
 * Marlon Brando, 1947
 * Truman Capote, 1948–1949
 * Bobby Henrey, 1948
 * ''Countess Cristiana Brandolini d'Adda, 1951
 * Duchess of Windsor, 1951
 * Vita Sackville-West, 1952
 * C. Z. Guest, 1952
 * Graham Greene, 1953
 * Elizabeth II's Coronation, 1953
 * Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, 1953
 * Elizabeth Taylor, 1954
 * Grace Kelly, 1954
 * Mona von Bismarck, 1955
 * Bernard Berenson, 1955
 * Joan Crawford, 1956
 * Mrs. Charles (Jayne Wrightsman), 1956
 * Maria Callas, 1956
 * Dame Edith Sitwell, 1956
 * Colin Wilson, 1956
 * Marilyn Monroe, 1956
 * Leslie Caron, 1957
 * Dolores Guinness, 1958
 * Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, 1960
 * Albert Finney, 1961
 * Cristóbal Balenciaga, 1962
 * Lee Radziwill, 1962
 * Karen Blixen, 1962
 * Rudolf Nureyev, 1963
 * Audrey Hepburn, 1964
 * Margot Fonteyn, 1965
 * Jacqueline Kennedy, 1965
 * Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, 1965
 * Jamie Wyeth, 1966
 * Georgia O'Keeffe, 1966
 * Andy Warhol, 1967
 * Twiggy, 1967
 * Mick Jagger, 1968
 * Katharine Hepburn, 1969
 * Barbra Streisand, 1969
 * Gloria Guinness, 1970
 * Hubert de Givenchy, 1970
 * Mae West, 1970
 * David Hockney, 1970
 * Jane Birkin, 1971
 * Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, 1971
 * Marisa Berenson as Luisa Casati, 1971
 * Jacqueline de Ribes, 1971
 * Pauline de Rothschild, 1972
 * Tina Chow, 1973
 * Gilbert & George, 1974
 * Inès de La Fressange, 1978
 * Paloma Picasso, 1978
 * Caroline of Monaco, 1978
 * Olimpia de Rothschild, 1978
 * Dayle Haddon, 1979

Archival resources

 * Papers of Sir Cecil Beaton (1922–1980, 38 archival boxes) at St John's College, Cambridge
 * Cecil Beaton Papers (1938–1979, 1 archival box) at Princeton University Library
 * Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's Picture Library
 * W.H. Crain Costume and Scene Design Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

title: Cecil Beaton


text:
Mariachi

Mariachi is an ensemble of musicians that typically play ranchera, the regional Mexican music dating back to at least the 18th century, evolving over time in the countryside of various regions of western Mexico. The usual mariachi group today consists of as many as eight violins, two trumpets and at least one guitar, including a high-pitched vihuela and an acoustic bass guitar called a guitarrón, and all players taking turns singing lead and doing backup vocals.

During the 19th- and 20th-century migrations from rural areas into Guadalajara, along with the Mexican government's promotion of national culture, mariachi came to be recognized as a distinctly Mexican son. Modifications of the music include influences from other music such as polkas and waltzes, the addition of trumpets and the use of charro outfits by mariachi musicians. The musical style began to take on national prominence in the first half of the 20th century, with its promotion at presidential inaugurations and on the radio in the 1920s. In 2011, UNESCO recognized mariachi as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in hopes of being a protected element of heritage; it joins six other entries on the Mexican list of that category.

Song styles performed with mariachi include rancheras, corridos, cumbias, boleros, ballads, sones, huapangos, jarabes, danzones, joropos, pasodobles, marches, polkas, waltzes and chotís. Most song lyrics are about machismo, love, betrayal, death, politics, revolutionary heroes, and country life.

Name
The origin of the word is disputed, but prominent theories attribute it to deep roots. One states that it comes from the name of the wood used to make the dance platform. Another states that mariachi comes from the indigenous name of a tree called pilla or cirimo; yet another states that it came from an image locally called María H (pronounced Mari-Ache).

The most distant reference documented are more than 100 certificates of baptisms, burials and marriages in which the Mariachi ranch appears, between 1832 and 1850. It was located near the river Santiago, in Nayarit.

The word mariachi was once thought to have derived from the French word mariage ("marriage"), dating from the French intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, related to the music's appearance at weddings. This was a common explanation on record jackets and travel brochures but was disproven with the appearance of documents that showed that the word existed before this invasion: in 1981, a letter written by Catholic priest Cosme Santa Ana to the archbishop was discovered in the archives of a church, where he complains about the noise as well as the drinking and gambling antics of the "mariachis" and dated in 1852, long before the French occupation.

Origins

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, indigenous music was played with rattles, drums, flutes, and conch-shell horns as part of religious celebrations. The Spanish introduced violins, guitars, harps, brass instruments, and woodwinds, which mostly replaced the native instruments. The Europeans introduced their instruments to use during Mass, but they were quickly adapted to secular events. Indigenous and mestizo peoples learned to play and make these instruments, often giving them modified shapes and tunings. In addition to instruments, the Spanish introduced the concept of musical groups—which, in the colonial period, generally consisted of two violins, a harp, and various guitars. These groups were based upon mestizaje culture and gave rise to a number of folk musical styles in Mexico.

One of these folk musical styles was the son. This music featured string instruments. Son music divided into various regional varieties; the variety popular in the Jalisco area was called son jalisciense, whose best known song, also referred to as "the mariachi national anthem", is "La Negra". Modern mariachi music developed from this son style, with mariachi as an alternative name for son jalisciense. Early mariachi players did not look like those of today; they played only string instruments such as guitars and harps and dressed in typical peasant clothing: white pants and shirts with huarache sandals. Those who could play the son jalisciense/mariachi music could find work at haciendas at a higher rate than those who could not.

The distinction of mariachi from the older son jalisciense occurred slowly sometime during the 19th century. The music originated in the center-west of Mexico. Most claims for its origin lie in the state of Jalisco but neighboring states of Colima, Nayarit, and Michoacán have also claimed it. However, by the late 19th century, the music was firmly centered in Jalisco. Most legends put the origin of the modern mariachi in the town of Cocula, Jalisco.

The distinction between son and modern mariachi comes from the modification of the music. By the end of the nineteenth century, the European art music tradition was firmly transplanted to Mexico, with opera, salon music, waltzes, and more written and performed both by Europeans and Mexicans in the country. One variety was the salon orchestras called orquestas típicas that performed in more rural settings, notably in traje de charro outfits. This use of the traje de charro outfit was repeated with urban mariachi in the 1920s.

The traje de charro outfit is widely considered to be one of the two major changes that occurred during the Golden Age, the other being the introduction of trumpets. The traje de charro outfit was also used in the national Orquestra Típica Mexicana ("Mexican Typical Orchestra"), organized in 1884 by Carlo Curti, and touring the United States and Mexico as part of a presentation of nationalism for the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz. Curti's Orquestra Típica Mexicana has been called the "predecessor of the mariachi bands". Traje de charro is heavily inspired by cowboys and features very symbolic sombreros, tight fitting pants, ruffled shirts, and jackets with heavy embroidery and embellishments throughout all the pieces.

After the Mexican Revolution, many haciendas had to let workers go, including mariachis. Groups began to wander and play for a fee, which obliged them to incorporate other music into their repertoires, including waltzes and polkas. It also required them to play in public venues. From the late 19th century to the 1930s, mariachi groups were semi-professional.

In the early 20th-century United States, record companies began actively recording rural music in other parts of the world. One of these was a recording called Cuarteto Coculense by Columbia, Edison and Victor in 1908 and 1909, recognized as one of the "first" mariachi recordings. The music also gained attention in Mexico City when a wealthy hacienda family brought an early mariachi from Cocula to play for President Porfirio Díaz in 1905.

Modern development

The common perception of the music and look of mariachi developed in the 20th century, as the music was transformed from a regional rural folk music to an urban phenomenon that came to represent Mexico. The music was first introduced to Mexico City in 1905. During this time, many farm workers moved to the city, including those from Jalisco, which settled around Plaza Garibaldi. These mariachi musicians developed new practices, such as performances in plazas and restaurants. However, it also continued its more traditional venues such as serenades, and performances at major family events.

During this time, the Mexican government was heavily involved in cultural promotion as a way to create a unified Mexican identity after the end of the Mexican Revolution. One of these efforts was the promotion of mariachi as an international symbol of Mexican identity, first with radio and sound recordings and later with films.

Mexico built a nationwide radio broadcasting network in the 1920s such as XEB and XEW, which began broadcasting mariachi music as a media production, rather than as a music for social events. This music was already being modified in part due to the advent of sound recording. For example, most son jaliscense songs were longer than the standard three-and-a-half minutes of the then-standard 78 rpm record, forcing the shortening of tunes. Around the same time, the popularity of jazz and Cuban music introduced the trumpet into mariachi, pushing the violins into second place and in some cases, replacing the harp. The most prized of the mariachis remained those from the state of Jalisco, particularly the areas of Cocula and Tecalitlán. They represented Mexico to the people during the Independence Day celebrations in Mexico City in 1933 as well as during Lázaro Cárdenas' election campaign in 1936.

The charro tradition was strong in Jalisco, especially in a region called Los Altos. After the Revolution, the charreada became a national sport in Mexico and rings were constructed specifically for them, followed by professional charro associations. With the breakup of the large haciendas, charros were no longer economically necessary but were used as a cultural ideal, especially by the film industry in the mid-20th century. The first charro movies date from the 1920s, but the first to sing mariachi was Tito Guízar in Allá en el Rancho Grande in 1936. The character was played by Jorge Negrete in films such as ¡Ay, Jalisco... no te rajes! and ¡Así se quiere en Jalisco! The main characters used his ability to sing mariachi as a way to show strength, virility, and aesthetic beauty. Its use in film also made the music popular and a symbol of ethnic pride for Mexican Americans in the United States.

However, these films also promoted a negative perception of mariachi music. During the early 20th century, mariachi was seen as lower class, and belonging in bars. Films from this period associated the charros and mariachi music with machismo, womanizing and drinking, especially of tequila. This perception would change in the latter half of the 20th century, but the music remains strongly associated with tequila.

Mariachi music and musicians became more professional with more formal training starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s, principally due to the success of a major mariachi by the name of Mariachi Vargas. Their appearance in many films, backing many singing stars, and their hiring of formal musicians prompted other mariachis to do the same. The group also expanded, adding trumpets, violins and even a classical guitar to become a kind of orchestra, keeping the traditional son/mariachi base while integrating new musical ideas and styles. Arrangers like Rubén Fuentes incorporated classical influence. One other innovation, in contrast to the machismo of the style, were the first female mariachi performers, Lola Beltrán and Lucha Villa. One night Mariachi Vargas put Beltrán on stage when she was a teenager. Her versions of "Cucurrucucu Paloma" and "Tres Dias" are now considered classics.

Many of the traditional sounds of Cocula were lost as mariachi groups incorporated other musical styles that were popular on the radio. New influences have come into the tradition from the Mexican American community in the United States. In both countries, however, the learning of traditional pieces and repertory is still stressed to form a base.

The International Mariachi Festival in Guadalajara is an annual ten-day event that attracts more than 500 mariachis, who perform in concert halls and city streets. Past performers include Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, Mariachi los Camperos (led by Nati Cano) and Mariachi América de Jesús Rodríguez de Hijar.

In Mexico City, the center of mariachi music remains Garibaldi Plaza. Mariachi musicians fill the plaza to solicit gigs, from individual songs for passers-by to being hired for events such as weddings and baptisms. They even stand on Eje Central in front of the plaza to flag down passing cars. In 2010, the government renovated the plaza to make it more tourist-friendly, adding new paving, gardens, police, security cameras, painted facades, and a museum dedicated to mariachi and tequila. Although mariachis can be hired in Mexico City over the phone or on the internet, many people still prefer to come to the plaza, hear the musicians and haggle over the price. About 2,500 mariachis hold union cards to work in the plaza, but as many as 4,000 may circulate through on a busy weekend.

Groups
The size of a mariachi group varies depending on the availability of musicians. The usual mariachi group today consists of as many as eight violins, two trumpets and at least one guitar. Traditional mariachi guitars include the vihuela, a high-pitched, round-backed guitar that provides rhythm, and a bass guitar called a guitarrón, which also provides rhythm. Sometimes a Mexican folk harp provides bass and ornaments the melody. All are Mexican variations of European instruments. There is generally no lead singer as in other kinds of groups, with all players singing choruses and taking turns singing the lead. Often the lead singer is assigned to a certain song due to voice qualities. Mariachi vocalization shows influences from a number of styles such as bolero (a romantic style), huapango (using falsetto), son jalisciense (an aggressive style) and more. Voices must be strong to be heard over amplified instruments. Vocal style emphasizes operatic qualities, and instrumental performance demonstrates a level of virtuosity that reflects advanced musical training. Historically, mariachi groups have been made up of men, but there is growing acceptance of female mariachis.

As mariachi groups are expected to play requests, they may need to know hundreds of songs. Most songs are about machismo, love, betrayal, death, politics, revolutionary heroes and even animals and country life from the genre's origins as rural son music. One particularly famous song is "La Cucaracha" ("The Cockroach").

Most mariachi groups are associated with family and religious celebrations along with serenades. A serenade in the Mexican culture is used to profess your love or show admiration for a person. Mariachis are most widely known to serenade during birthday celebrations. One of the most common pieces played by mariachis is "Las Mañanitas", for birthdays and celebrations of patron saints.

In Mexico, mariachi music can also be found as part of Catholic Mass. The Misa panamericana is a mariachi folk mass sung in Spanish with new arrangements of classic hymns such as "Kyrie Eleison". This innovation began in 1966 by Canadian priest Jean Marc Leclerc and it moved from a small church in Cuernacava in the 1960s to the Cuernavaca Cathedral. Mariachi mass grew because it was heavily involved in community, and was spurred onwards by the Chicano movement, spreading from Mexico to the United States and onwards.

Mariachi Vargas
Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán is recognized as the oldest mariachi ensemble, founded by Gaspar Vargas in the late 1890s. They moved from Jalisco to Mexico City and performed for the inauguration of President Lázaro Cárdenas. Mariachi Vargas became famous accompanying singers such as Luis Miguel, Lola Beltrán, and Pedro Infante. Mariachi Vargas's first recording was in 1937, the same year they appeared in Asi es mi Tierra. They appeared in over 200 films in the 20th century. Silvestre Vargas took over Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán from his father in 1958 and soon after hired a trained musician, Ruben Fuentes, as musical director. Fuentes along with Vargas were instrumental in the standardization of much of mariachi music, arranging traditional songs and writing new ones that would be performed by many of the legendary performers of the mid-20th century, such as Pedro Infante, Miguel Aceves Mejía, Lola Beltrán and José Alfredo Jiménez. Mariachi Vargas still remains, tracing its history in terms of generations, starting in the 1890s, with these generations maintaining the group's authenticity as a mariachi while the music has evolved. The last Vargas associated with the group died in 1985. That the group still considers itself the original group comes from the notion of passing on the music by generations of musicians, as the original son jaliscense was learned.

United States and further afield

Regional Mexican radio stations in the United States include mariachi music in their programming. The most popular Latin music format in the US, the music style is well recognized throughout the country. The United States military has an official mariachi band in the New Mexico National Guard, called Mariachi Nuevo México; this pays homage to the state of New Mexico's Hispano and Mexican-American heritage.

The promotion of mariachi as representative of Mexico has led to the formation of mariachi groups in many countries such as Argentina, Aruba, Egypt, Chile, Cuba, Spain, Guatemala, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, with groups from these and other countries participating in Guadalajara's International Mariachi and Charreria Conference.

The music has a strong following in the US, with top groups spending a lot of time on tour. Mariachi Los Camperos received a Grammy nomination for best Mexican-American album. Academic programs allow for instruction by famous mariachi groups and the opportunity to win awards.

The first mariachi groups in the United States were from California. Nati Cano was born in Jalisco in 1939 and moved to Los Angeles in 1959. He played in many mariachi groups backing singers but felt mariachi could stand alone. In 1969 he opened a restaurant called La Fonda in Los Angeles, which featured his group, Los Camperos, as part of a dinner show. The success of this enterprise, and of Los Camperos in general, have inspired many mariachi groups in the United States. In the late 1980s, pop star Linda Ronstadt recorded "Canciones de Mi Padre" and "Más Canciones" with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán and others, which helped promote its popularity among Mexican Americans and to non-Mexican Americans.

Some U.S. public schools offer mariachi as part of classes. The first student mariachi group was begun in 1961 at the University of California, Los Angeles. This prompted the creation of other student organizations in other parts of California and then in Texas, where the first mariachi festival was held in 1979. Since then, a strong synergy between academic programs and mariachi festivals has developed, which feature students and give mariachi classes and workshops. This festival led to excitement in the Texas board of education, and soon Zeke Castro, a many award winning educator, was hired to teach mariachi.

Once school programs were limited to border areas such as San Antonio and Tucson, but they have spread across the southwest and into other parts of the United States, especially since the 1990s. There are at least 500 schools offering classes along with local and state competitions. In some US schools, mariachi ensembles have replaced school bands. Professional groups such as Mariachi Cobre, which regularly performs at Disney World, also spend time teaching in public schools.

In areas with large Mexican-American populations, mariachis are hired for events outside this ethnic group as well. Outside of schools, the most important venue for the music in the United States is mariachi festivals, with the longest-running festivals in Tucson and Fresno. The Tucson International Mariachi Conference began in 1982 and showcases over 500 elementary, middle, and high schools and college mariachi players. The Las Vegas International Mariachi Festival, established in 1991, is televised on Telemundo and PBS and has headlined artists such as Pedro Fernández, Ana Gabriel, American-born mariachi singer Pepe Aguilar and more.

The educational movement is controversial with some trained in the traditional manner, who are skeptical about these programs and their potential to change the tradition. The changes, especially standardization of publishing, are slowly impacting mariachi in Mexico. One difficulty of arranging mariachi pieces is that the son jaliscense that mariachi is based on alternates between and  time. Much of the published mariachi music is meant for people already familiar with the music to serve as guides, not for novices. On the other hand, many schools have problems recruiting mariachi instructors as many of these do not have required teaching credentials. For this reason, schools often hire trained musicians from outside the mariachi tradition. Many traditional mariachis are concerned that standardization will lead to the genre becoming rule-bound and so restrict improvisation.

Other innovations in the United States have been the incorporation of styles of artists such as Elvis Presley, Freddy Fender, Glenn Miller, Marty Robbins, and Johnny Cash, as well as the heavy-metal mariachi band Metalachi. Another is the encouragement of female mariachis, including all-female mariachi groups such as Mariachi Mujer 2000, Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles and Mariachi Divas de Cindy Shea. Mariachi Mujer has performed with Mexican artists such as Vikki Carr, Pablo Montero, Gerardito Fernandez and Nydia Rojas. Mariachi Divas have won two Grammy Awards, have toured extensively in the United States and are the official mariachi of Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. New York's first international all-female mariachi is 2015 Latin Grammy nominated Mariachi Flor de Toloache, who are featured in Dan Auerbach's The Arcs. An all-female mariachi in London, UK, Mariachi Las Adelitas UK, plays traditional Mexican mariachi music as well as some English-language covers in mariachi style.

English singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 2016 album Familia was inspired by a visit to Mexico. She posted a video in which she appears singing one of the songs from the album, "Death of Love", next to a group of mariachis in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco.

Women in mariachi

In the 1940s, the first all-female mariachi band created itself, directed by Carlota Noriega, with many more to follow in their path, primarily from the United States. These women-led mariachis or musicians faced misogyny for taking on a style of music that was considered to be male-dominated space coming from the machismo ideology. To embrace their own machismo form, these female groups would use their femininity and beauty to find success, singing songs about independence, life, heart, and the suffrage movement. These female groups adopted the same traje de charro attire that the men but added long skirts and removed the sombreros.

In 1976, the first United States founded all-women mariachi group was Las Generalas. They made sure to keep their image clean by not drinking or playing late at night in order to make the American public respect mariachi.

Dance
The most common dance technique in mariachi is zapateado, translated to "tap dance" is a kind of footwork adopted from the Spanish Flamenco dance. It is a percussive rhythmic dance that follows a plant of foot followed by a heel tap then another foot plant, and continues on this pattern.

Ballet folklórico is a dance that is not directly linked to mariachi, but they are often performed on stage together. They both involve highly gendered performances, elaborate costumes, and invite audience participation.

Musical forms

 * Show mariachi allows the groups to play a certain set list of songs.
 * Nochistlán (sequential participatory music) allows an interactive music listening experience where audience members can request songs and even participate with karaoke.
 * Meter in [chun-ta]
 * Canción ranchera (a dos tiempos)
 * Corrido (a dos tiempos)
 * "Polka"
 * Pasodoble
 * Marcha

 * Meter in [chun-ta-ta]
 * Canción ranchera (tres tiempos)
 * Corrido (tres tiempos)
 * Valses mexicanos

 * Meter in
 * Bolero ranchero
 * Serenata
 * Danzón
 * Chotís
 * Cumbia
 * Canción rítmica

 * Meter in
 * Son jaliscience
 * Sones regionales mexicanos
 * Jarabe
 * Huapango

 * Meter with
 * Joropo
 * Son jarocho

 * Mixed meter
 * Examples:
 * "Muerte de un gallero" (corrido-son)
 * "El Charro Mexicano" (ranchera-son)

 * Classical music overtures

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

title: Mariachi


text: Talk:William Robert Renshaw

title: Talk:William Robert Renshaw


text:
Talk:George Reginald Starr

Untitled
This page was created using material taken from a web site owned by the contributor, namely http:/www.the-orvieto.co.uk — Preceding unsigned comment added by Petermanchester (talk • contribs) 18:06, 11 November 2003 (UTC)

Ambiguity: accuser or perpetrator?
Under the heading World War II is the sentence: "Starr was accused of the torture and brutal treatment of collaborators and prisoners by one of his couriers Anne-Marie Walters." Are we to understand that courier Anne-Marie Walters was the abuser, or, rather, Starr's accuser? If the latter, possibly to word as follows: "Starr was accused by Anne-Marie Walters, one of his couriers, of the torture and brutal treatment of collaborators and prisoners." If the latter version is consistent with the facts, I suggest its substitution for the former. -- Deborahjay (talk) 12:28, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

title: Talk:George Reginald Starr


text:
Talk:John Renshaw Starr

Self created
This page was created using material taken from a web site owned by the contributor, namely http:/www.the-orvieto.co.uk —Preceding unsigned comment added by Petermanchester (talk • contribs) 18:06, 11 November 2003

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on John Renshaw Starr. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20031215214620/http://www.the-orvieto.co.uk/index.php?page=johnstarr to http://www.the-orvieto.co.uk/index.php?page=johnstarr
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20031202142551/http://www.the-orvieto.co.uk/index.php?page=starrs to http://www.the-orvieto.co.uk/index.php?page=starrs

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 19:37, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:John Renshaw Starr


text:
Talk:Animation in the United States during the silent era

untitled
Neither Winsor McCay nor Fleischer Studios were based in Hollywood, California. Perhaps this page should be moved from "Hollywood Animation: The Silent Period" to something like "United States Animation: The Silent Period"? Or is there some reason to concentrate only on west-coast animation in an era when much of the best work was being done in New York City? ...And I believe Walt Disney was based in Kansas City early on... -- Infrogmation 18:10, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Leaving out McCay's earlier work.
Why is there no mention of McCay's Little Nemo (1911) animation? EvangelionTesttype (talk) 03:09, 16 November 2008 (UTC)


text:
Disloyal statements

Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) also known as the General Article of the UCMJ is an article of military law in the United States that provides for penalties by court-martial various offences that prejudice good order and discipline or bring discredit upon the armed forces, such as for "disloyal" statements made "with the intent to promote disloyalty or disaffection toward the United States by any member of the armed forces or to interfere with or impair the loyalty to the United States or good order and discipline of any member of the armed forces."

Manual for Courts-Martial
"Explanation. Certain disloyal statements by military personnel may not constitute an offense under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2385, 2387, and 2388, but may, under the circumstances, be punishable under this article. Examples include praising the enemy, attacking the war aims of the United States, or denouncing our form of government with the intent to promote disloyalty or disaffection among members of the armed services. A declaration of personal belief can amount to a disloyal statement if it disavows allegiance owed to the United States by the declarant. The disloyalty involved for this offense must be to the United States as a political entity and not merely to a department or other agency that is a part of its administration."

- Manual for Courts-Martial (US Government, 2002), Chapter 4, Paragraph 72

title: Disloyal statements


text:
Talk:Strong pale ale

Does "Strong pale ale" really warrant its own entry? Could it not just be folded into "Pale ale" and/or "India pale ale"? Stewartadcock 18:18, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

 * Probably. The combined text would need to be much larger before there's any benefit to splitting them.  Just keep all the terms mentioned near the beginning to avoid confusion after a redirect.  ( 18:55, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:Strong pale ale


text:
The System of the World (novel)

The System of the World is a novel by Neal Stephenson and the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. The title alludes to the third volume of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which bears the same name.

The System of the World won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Prometheus Award in 2005, as well as a receiving a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the same year.

Solomon's Gold
Daniel Waterhouse returns to England from his "Technologickal College" project in Boston in order to try to resolve the feud between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over who invented calculus. Someone attempts to assassinate him with an "Infernal Device" (a time bomb), and Waterhouse forms a club to find out who did it and prosecute them. It later turns out that the bomb was intended for his friend Isaac Newton.

Jack Shaftoe, under the alias Jack the Coiner, attempts a heist at the Tower of London.

Currency
Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac attempt to track down Jack Shaftoe for his counterfeiting crimes and tampering with the Pyx. Meanwhile Eliza aids Princess Caroline of the Hanovers as her life is threatened amid the scheming over the successor to Queen Anne. Warring militias gather in London and the Whigs and Tories face off.

The System of the World
Newton dies of typhus (then known as gaol fever) immediately prior to the Trial of the Pyx, but is brought back to life with the philosopher's stone. Jack eventually confesses to his counterfeiting crimes and is hanged but the watching crowd intervene and he survives, unknown to Newton. Jack is reunited with his love Eliza, and they live out their days in the court of Louis XIV.

Style
The System of the World emulates many different literary styles. As one reviewer put it: it "is a con-fusion ... of historical novel, roman à thèse, epistolary novel, roman à clef, nouveau roman, satirical novel, roman fleuve, et cetera, et cetera, all bound up in the unlikely guise of epic science-fiction page-turner."

Main characters

 * Eliza
 * Enoch Root
 * Bob Shaftoe, brother of Jack Shaftoe
 * Jack Shaftoe
 * Daniel Waterhouse
 * Isaac Newton
 * Johann von Hacklheber, Eliza's son

Other characters

 * Henry Arlanc, Huguenot, friend of Jack Shaftoe, porter at the Royal Society
 * Mrs. Arlanc, wife of Henry
 * Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, Whig ally of Daniel Waterhouse
 * Will Comstock, Earl of Lostwithiel
 * Édouard de Gex, Jesuit fanatic
 * William Ham, banker, nephew of Daniel Waterhouse
 * Otto van Hoek, Captain of the Minerva
 * Dappa, First mate of the Minerva
 * Mr. Kikin, Russian diplomat in London
 * Norman Orney, London shipbuilder
 * Mr. Threader, Tory money-scrivener
 * Charles White, Tory who bites off people's ears
 * Peter Hoxton (alias Saturn), Horologist, engages in illicit activities

Historical figures who appear as characters in the novel

 * Catherine Barton
 * Caroline of Ansbach
 * John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
 * George I of Great Britain
 * George II of Great Britain
 * Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer
 * Jack Ketch
 * Gottfried Leibniz
 * Thomas Newcomen
 * Isaac Newton
 * Peter the Great
 * Sophia of Hanover
 * Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
 * Christopher Wren

Editions

 * ISBN 0-06-052387-5 : Hardcover edition.
 * ISBN 0-06-075086-3 : Paperback edition.

title: The System of the World (novel)


text:
BLAST (biotechnology)

In bioinformatics, BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) is an algorithm and program for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of proteins or the nucleotides of DNA and/or RNA sequences. A BLAST search enables a researcher to compare a subject protein or nucleotide sequence (called a query) with a library or database of sequences, and identify database sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold. For example, following the discovery of a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically perform a BLAST search of the human genome to see if humans carry a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on similarity of sequence.

Background
BLAST is one of the most widely used bioinformatics programs for sequence searching. It addresses a fundamental problem in bioinformatics research. The heuristic algorithm it uses is much faster than other approaches, such as calculating an optimal alignment. This emphasis on speed is vital to making the algorithm practical on the huge genome databases currently available, although subsequent algorithms can be even faster.

The BLAST program was designed by Eugene Myers, Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, David J. Lipman and Webb Miller at the NIH and was published in J. Mol. Biol. in 1990. BLAST extended the alignment work of a previously developed program for protein and DNA sequence similarity searches, FASTA, by adding a novel stochastic model developed by Samuel Karlin and Stephen Altschul. They proposed "a method for estimating similarities between the known DNA sequence of one organism with that of another", and their work has been described as "the statistical foundation for BLAST." Subsequently, Altschul, Gish, Miller, Myers, and Lipman designed and implemented the BLAST program, which was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1990 and has been cited over 100,000 times since.

While BLAST is faster than any Smith-Waterman implementation for most cases, it cannot "guarantee the optimal alignments of the query and database sequences" as Smith-Waterman algorithm does. The Smith-Waterman algorithm was an extension of a previous optimal method, the Needleman–Wunsch algorithm, which was the first sequence alignment algorithm that was guaranteed to find the best possible alignment. However, the time and space requirements of these optimal algorithms far exceed the requirements of BLAST.

BLAST is more time-efficient than FASTA by searching only for the more significant patterns in the sequences, yet with comparative sensitivity. This could be further realized by understanding the algorithm of BLAST introduced below.

Examples of other questions that researchers use BLAST to answer are: BLAST is also often used as part of other algorithms that require approximate sequence matching.
 * Which bacterial species have a protein that is related in lineage to a certain protein with known amino-acid sequence
 * What other genes encode proteins that exhibit structures or motifs such as ones that have just been determined

BLAST is available on the web on the NCBI website. Different types of BLASTs are available according to the query sequences and the target databases. Alternative implementations include AB-BLAST (formerly known as WU-BLAST), FSA-BLAST (last updated in 2006), and ScalaBLAST.

The original paper by Altschul, et al. was the most highly cited paper published in the 1990s.

Input
Input sequences (in FASTA or Genbank format), database to search and other optional parameters such as scoring matrix.

Output
BLAST output can be delivered in a variety of formats. These formats include HTML, plain text, and XML formatting. For NCBI's webpage, the default format for output is HTML. When performing a BLAST on NCBI, the results are given in a graphical format showing the hits found, a table showing sequence identifiers for the hits with scoring related data, as well as alignments for the sequence of interest and the hits received with corresponding BLAST scores for these. The easiest to read and most informative of these is probably the table.

If one is attempting to search for a proprietary sequence or simply one that is unavailable in databases available to the general public through sources such as NCBI, there is a BLAST program available for download to any computer, at no cost. This can be found at BLAST+ executables. There are also commercial programs available for purchase. Databases can be found on the NCBI site, as well as on the Index of BLAST databases (FTP).

Process
Using a heuristic method, BLAST finds similar sequences, by locating short matches between the two sequences. This process of finding similar sequences is called seeding. It is after this first match that BLAST begins to make local alignments. While attempting to find similarity in sequences, sets of common letters, known as words, are very important. For example, suppose that the sequence contains the following stretch of letters, GLKFA. If a BLAST was being conducted under normal conditions, the word size would be 3 letters. In this case, using the given stretch of letters, the searched words would be GLK, LKF, and KFA. The heuristic algorithm of BLAST locates all common three-letter words between the sequence of interest and the hit sequence or sequences from the database. This result will then be used to build an alignment. After making words for the sequence of interest, the rest of the words are also assembled. These words must satisfy a requirement of having a score of at least the threshold T, when compared by using a scoring matrix.

One commonly used scoring matrix for BLAST searches is BLOSUM62, although the optimal scoring matrix depends on sequence similarity. Once both words and neighborhood words are assembled and compiled, they are compared to the sequences in the database in order to find matches. The threshold score T determines whether or not a particular word will be included in the alignment. Once seeding has been conducted, the alignment which is only 3 residues long, is extended in both directions by the algorithm used by BLAST. Each extension impacts the score of the alignment by either increasing or decreasing it. If this score is higher than a pre-determined T, the alignment will be included in the results given by BLAST. However, if this score is lower than this pre-determined T, the alignment will cease to extend, preventing the areas of poor alignment from being included in the BLAST results. Note that increasing the T score limits the amount of space available to search, decreasing the number of neighborhood words, while at the same time speeding up the process of BLAST

Algorithm
To run the software, BLAST requires a query sequence to search for, and a sequence to search against (also called the target sequence) or a sequence database containing multiple such sequences. BLAST will find sub-sequences in the database which are similar to subsequences in the query. In typical usage, the query sequence is much smaller than the database, e.g., the query may be one thousand nucleotides while the database is several billion nucleotides.

The main idea of BLAST is that there are often High-scoring Segment Pairs (HSP) contained in a statistically significant alignment. BLAST searches for high scoring sequence alignments between the query sequence and the existing sequences in the database using a heuristic approach that approximates the Smith-Waterman algorithm. However, the exhaustive Smith-Waterman approach is too slow for searching large genomic databases such as GenBank. Therefore, the BLAST algorithm uses a heuristic approach that is less accurate than the Smith-Waterman algorithm but over 50 times faster. [8] The speed and relatively good accuracy of BLAST are among the key technical innovations of the BLAST programs.

An overview of the BLAST algorithm (a protein to protein search) is as follows:

 * 1) Remove low-complexity region or sequence repeats in the query sequence.
 * "Low-complexity region" means a region of a sequence composed of few kinds of elements. These regions might give high scores that confuse the program to find the actual significant sequences in the database, so they should be filtered out. The regions will be marked with an X (protein sequences) or N (nucleic acid sequences) and then be ignored by the BLAST program. To filter out the low-complexity regions, the SEG program is used for protein sequences and the program DUST is used for DNA sequences. On the other hand, the program XNU is used to mask off the tandem repeats in protein sequences.
 * 1) Make a k-letter word list of the query sequence.
 * Take k=3 for example, we list the words of length 3 in the query protein sequence (k is usually 11 for a DNA sequence) "sequentially", until the last letter of the query sequence is included. The method is illustrated in figure 1.Query words.svg
 * 1) List the possible matching words.
 * This step is one of the main differences between BLAST and FASTA. FASTA cares about all of the common words in the database and query sequences that are listed in step 2; however, BLAST only cares about the high-scoring words. The scores are created by comparing the word in the list in step 2 with all the 3-letter words. By using the scoring matrix (substitution matrix) to score the comparison of each residue pair, there are 20^3 possible match scores for a 3-letter word. For example, the score obtained by comparing PQG with PEG and PQA is respectively 15 and 12 with the BLOSUM62 weighting scheme. For DNA words, a match is scored as +5 and a mismatch as -4, or as +2 and -3. After that, a neighborhood word score threshold T is used to reduce the number of possible matching words. The words whose scores are greater than the threshold T will remain in the possible matching words list, while those with lower scores will be discarded. For example, PEG is kept, but PQA is abandoned when T is 13.
 * 1) Organize the remaining high-scoring words into an efficient search tree.
 * This allows the program to rapidly compare the high-scoring words to the database sequences.
 * 1) Repeat step 3 to 4 for each k-letter word in the query sequence.
 * 2) Scan the database sequences for exact matches with the remaining high-scoring words.
 * The BLAST program scans the database sequences for the remaining high-scoring word, such as PEG, of each position. If an exact match is found, this match is used to seed a possible un-gapped alignment between the query and database sequences.
 * 1) Extend the exact matches to high-scoring segment pair (HSP).
 * 2) * The original version of BLAST stretches a longer alignment between the query and the database sequence in the left and right directions, from the position where the exact match occurred. The extension does not stop until the accumulated total score of the HSP begins to decrease. A simplified example is presented in figure 2.extension process.jpg neighbor HSP.jpg
 * 3) * To save more time, a newer version of BLAST, called BLAST2 or gapped BLAST, has been developed. BLAST2 adopts a lower neighborhood word score threshold to maintain the same level of sensitivity for detecting sequence similarity. Therefore, the list of possible matching words list in step 3 becomes longer. Next, the exact matched regions, within distance A from each other on the same diagonal in figure 3, will be joined as a longer new region. Finally, the new regions are then extended by the same method as in the original version of BLAST, and the HSPs' (High-scoring segment pair) scores of the extended regions are then created by using a substitution matrix as before.
 * 4) List all of the HSPs in the database whose score is high enough to be considered.
 * We list the HSPs whose scores are greater than the empirically determined cutoff score S. By examining the distribution of the alignment scores modeled by comparing random sequences, a cutoff score S can be determined such that its value is large enough to guarantee the significance of the remaining HSPs.
 * 1) Evaluate the significance of the HSP score.
 * BLAST next assesses the statistical significance of each HSP score by exploiting the Gumbel extreme value distribution (EVD). (It is proved that the distribution of Smith-Waterman local alignment scores between two random sequences follows the Gumbel EVD. For local alignments containing gaps it is not proved.). In accordance with the Gumbel EVD, the probability p of observing a score S equal to or greater than x is given by the equation
 * $$p\left( S\ge x \right) =1-\exp \left( -e^{-\lambda \left( x-\mu \right) } \right) $$
 * where
 * $$\mu = \frac{ \log \left( Km'n' \right) }{\lambda }\;$$
 * The statistical parameters $$\lambda$$ and $$\mathrm{K}$$ are estimated by fitting the distribution of the un-gapped local alignment scores, of the query sequence and a lot of shuffled versions (Global or local shuffling) of a database sequence, to the Gumbel extreme value distribution. Note that $$\lambda$$ and $$\mathrm{K}$$ depend upon the substitution matrix, gap penalties, and sequence composition (the letter frequencies). $$m'$$ and $$n'$$ are the effective lengths of the query and database sequences, respectively. The original sequence length is shortened to the effective length to compensate for the edge effect (an alignment start near the end of one of the query or database sequence is likely not to have enough sequence to build an optimal alignment). They can be calculated as
 * $$m'\approx m-\frac{ \ln Kmn }{H}\;$$
 * $$n'\approx n-\frac{ \ln Kmn }{H}\;$$
 * where $$\mathrm{H}$$ is the average expected score per aligned pair of residues in an alignment of two random sequences. Altschul and Gish gave the typical values, $$\lambda = 0.318$$, $$ \mathrm{K} = 0.13$$, and $$\mathrm{H} = 0.40$$, for un-gapped local alignment using BLOSUM62 as the substitution matrix. Using the typical values for assessing the significance is called the lookup table method; it is not accurate. The expect score E of a database match is the number of times that an unrelated database sequence would obtain a score S higher than x by chance. The expectation E obtained in a search for a database of D sequences is given by
 * $$E\approx 1-e^{-p\left( s>x \right) D}$$
 * Furthermore, when $$p<0.1$$, E could be approximated by the Poisson distribution as
 * $$E\approx pD$$
 * This expectation or expect value "E" (often called an E score or E-value or e-value) assessing the significance of the HSP score for un-gapped local alignment is reported in the BLAST results. The calculation shown here is modified if individual HSPs are combined, such as when producing gapped alignments (described below), due to the variation of the statistical parameters.
 * 1) Make two or more HSP regions into a longer alignment.
 * Sometimes, we find two or more HSP regions in one database sequence that can be made into a longer alignment. This provides additional evidence of the relation between the query and database sequence. There are two methods, the Poisson method and the sum-of-scores method, to compare the significance of the newly combined HSP regions. Suppose that there are two combined HSP regions with the pairs of scores (65, 40) and (52, 45), respectively. The Poisson method gives more significance to the set with the maximal lower score (45>40). However, the sum-of-scores method prefers the first set, because 65+40 (105) is greater than 52+45(97). The original BLAST uses the Poisson method; gapped BLAST and the WU-BLAST uses the sum-of scores method.
 * 1) Show the gapped Smith-Waterman local alignments of the query and each of the matched database sequences.
 * 2) * The original BLAST only generates un-gapped alignments including the initially found HSPs individually, even when there is more than one HSP found in one database sequence.
 * 3) * BLAST2 produces a single alignment with gaps that can include all of the initially found HSP regions. Note that the computation of the score and its corresponding E-value involves use of adequate gap penalties.
 * 4) Report every match whose expect score is lower than a threshold parameter E.

Types of BLAST
BLASTn compares one or more nucleotide sequence to a database or another sequence. This is useful when trying to identify evolutionary relationships between organisms. tBLASTn used to search for proteins in sequences that haven't been translated into proteins yet. It takes a protein sequence and compares it to all possible translations of a DNA sequence. This is useful when looking for similar protein-coding regions in DNA sequences that haven't been fully annotated, like ESTs (short, single-read cDNA sequences) and HTGs (draft genome sequences). Since these sequences don't have known protein translations, we can only search for them using tBLASTn. BLASTx compares a nucleotide query sequence, which can be translated into six different protein sequences, against a database of known protein sequences. This tool is useful when the reading frame of the DNA sequence is uncertain or contains errors that might cause mistakes in protein-coding. BLASTx provides combined statistics for hits across all frames, making it helpful for the initial analysis of new DNA sequences. BLASTp, or Protein BLAST, is used to compare protein sequences. You can input one or more protein sequences that you want to compare against a single protein sequence or a database of protein sequences. This is useful when you're trying to identify a protein by finding similar sequences in existing protein databases.
 * BLASTn (Nucleotide BLAST):
 * tBLASTn:
 * BLASTx:
 * BLASTp:

Parallel BLAST
Parallel BLAST versions of split databases are implemented using MPI and Pthreads, and have been ported to various platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX. Popular approaches to parallelize BLAST include query distribution, hash table segmentation, computation parallelization, and database segmentation (partition). Databases are split into equal sized pieces and stored locally on each node. Each query is run on all nodes in parallel and the resultant BLAST output files from all nodes merged to yield the final output. Specific implementations include MPIblast, ScalaBLAST, DCBLAST and so on.

MPIblast makes use of a database segmentation technique to parallelize the computation process. This allows for significant performance improvements when conducting BLAST searches across a set of nodes in a cluster. In some scenarios a superlinear speedup is achievable. This makes MPIblast suitable for the extensive genomic datasets that are typically used in bioinformatics.

BLAST generally runs at a speed of O(n), where n is the size of the database. The time to complete the search increases linearly as the size of the database increases. MPIblast utilizes parallel processing to speed up the search. The ideal speed for any parallel computation is a complexity of O(n/p), with n being the size of the database and p being the number of processors. This would indicate that the job is evenly distributed among the p number of processors. This is visualized in the included graph. The superlinear speedup that can sometimes occur with MPIblast can have a complexity better than O(n/p). This occurs because the cache memory can be used to decrease the run time.

Alternatives to BLAST
The predecessor to BLAST, FASTA, can also be used for protein and DNA similarity searching. FASTA provides a similar set of programs for comparing proteins to protein and DNA databases, DNA to DNA and protein databases, and includes additional programs for working with unordered short peptides and DNA sequences. In addition, the FASTA package provides SSEARCH, a vectorized implementation of the rigorous Smith-Waterman algorithm. FASTA is slower than BLAST, but provides a much wider range of scoring matrices, making it easier to tailor a search to a specific evolutionary distance.

An extremely fast but considerably less sensitive alternative to BLAST is BLAT (Blast Like Alignment Tool). While BLAST does a linear search, BLAT relies on k-mer indexing the database, and can thus often find seeds faster. Another software alternative similar to BLAT is PatternHunter.

Advances in sequencing technology in the late 2000s has made searching for very similar nucleotide matches an important problem. New alignment programs tailored for this use typically use BWT-indexing of the target database (typically a genome). Input sequences can then be mapped very quickly, and output is typically in the form of a BAM file. Example alignment programs are BWA, SOAP, and Bowtie.

For protein identification, searching for known domains (for instance from Pfam) by matching with Hidden Markov Models is a popular alternative, such as HMMER.

An alternative to BLAST for comparing two banks of sequences is PLAST. PLAST provides a high-performance general purpose bank to bank sequence similarity search tool relying on the PLAST and ORIS algorithms. Results of PLAST are very similar to BLAST, but PLAST is significantly faster and capable of comparing large sets of sequences with a small memory (i.e. RAM) footprint.

For applications in metagenomics, where the task is to compare billions of short DNA reads against tens of millions of protein references, DIAMOND runs at up to 20,000 times as fast as BLASTX, while maintaining a high level of sensitivity.

The open-source software MMseqs is an alternative to BLAST/PSI-BLAST, which improves on current search tools over the full range of speed-sensitivity trade-off, achieving sensitivities better than PSI-BLAST at more than 400 times its speed.

Optical computing approaches have been suggested as promising alternatives to the current electrical implementations. OptCAM is an example of such approaches and is shown to be faster than BLAST.

Comparing BLAST and the Smith-Waterman Process
While both Smith-Waterman and BLAST are used to find homologous sequences by searching and comparing a query sequence with those in the databases, they do have their differences.

Due to the fact that BLAST is based on a heuristic algorithm, the results received through BLAST will not include all the possible hits within the database. BLAST misses hard to find matches.

An alternative in order to find all the possible hits would be to use the Smith-Waterman algorithm. This method varies from the BLAST method in two areas, accuracy and speed. The Smith-Waterman option provides better accuracy, in that it finds matches that BLAST cannot, because it does not exclude any information. Therefore, it is necessary for remote homology. However, when compared to BLAST, it is more time consuming and requires large amounts of computing power and memory. However, advances have been made to speed up the Smith-Waterman search process dramatically. These advances include FPGA chips and SIMD technology.

For more complete results from BLAST, the settings can be changed from their default settings. The optimal settings for a given sequence, however, may vary. The settings one can change are E-Value, gap costs, filters, word size, and substitution matrix.

Note, the algorithm used for BLAST was developed from the algorithm used for Smith-Waterman. BLAST employs an alignment which finds "local alignments between sequences by finding short matches and from these initial matches (local) alignments are created".

BLAST output visualization
To help users interpreting BLAST results, different software is available. According to installation and use, analysis features and technology, here are some available tools:

 * NCBI BLAST service
 * general BLAST output interpreters, GUI-based: JAMBLAST, Blast Viewer, BLASTGrabber
 * integrated BLAST environments: PLAN, BlastStation-Free, SequenceServer
 * BLAST output parsers: MuSeqBox, Zerg, BioParser, BLAST-Explorer, SequenceServer
 * specialized BLAST-related tools: MEGAN, BLAST2GENE, BOV, Circoletto

Example visualizations of BLAST results are shown in Figure 4 and 5.

Uses of BLAST
BLAST can be used for several purposes. These include identifying species, locating domains, establishing phylogeny, DNA mapping, and comparison.

 * Identifying species: With the use of BLAST, you can possibly correctly identify a species or find homologous species. This can be useful, for example, when you are working with a DNA sequence from an unknown species.

 * Locating domains: When working with a protein sequence you can input it into BLAST, to locate known domains within the sequence of interest.

 * Establishing phylogeny: Using the results received through BLAST you can create a phylogenetic tree using the BLAST web-page. Phylogenies based on BLAST alone are less reliable than other purpose-built computational phylogenetic methods, so should only be relied upon for "first pass" phylogenetic analyses.

 * DNA mapping: When working with a known species, and looking to sequence a gene at an unknown location, BLAST can compare the chromosomal position of the sequence of interest, to relevant sequences in the database(s). NCBI has a "Magic-BLAST" tool built around BLAST for this purpose.

 * Comparison: When working with genes, BLAST can locate common genes in two related species, and can be used to map annotations from one organism to another.

 * Classifying taxonomy
 * BLAST can use genetic sequences to compare multiple taxa against known taxonomical data. By doing this, it can provide a picture of the evolutionary relationships between various species (Fig.6). This is a useful way to identify orphan genes, since if the gene shows up in an organism outside of the ancestral lineage, then it wouldn't be classified as an orphan gene.Fig._6.png
 * Although this method is helpful, some more accurate options to find homologs would be through pairwise sequence alignment and multiple sequence alignment.

title: BLAST (biotechnology)


text:
X.400

X.400 is a suite of ITU-T recommendations that define the ITU-T Message Handling System (MHS).

At one time, the designers of X.400 were expecting it to be the predominant form of email, but this role has been taken by the SMTP-based Internet e-mail. Despite this, it has been widely used within organizations and was a core part of Microsoft Exchange Server until 2006; variants continue to be important in military and aviation contexts.

History
Design issues of protocols for computer mail were explored in the early 1980s.

The first X.400 Recommendations were published in 1984 (Red Book), and a substantially revised version was published in 1988 (Blue Book). New features were added in 1992 (White Book) and subsequent updates. Although X.400 was originally designed to run over the OSI transport service, an adaptation to allow operation over TCP/IP, RFC 1006, has become the most popular way to run X.400.

Developed in cooperation with ISO/IEC, the X.400-series recommendations specify OSI standard protocols for exchanging and addressing electronic messages. The companion F.400-series of recommendations define Message Handling Services built on Message Handling Systems (MHS), as well as access to and from the MHS for public services. In the late 1990s, the ITU-T consolidated recommendations F.400 and X.400 and published the ITU-T F.400/X.400 (06/1999) recommendation "Message handling system and service overview".

The X.400-series recommendations define the technical aspects of the MHS: ITU-T Rec. X.402 | (ISO/IEC 10021-2) defines the overall system architecture of an MHS, ITU-T Rec. X.411 | (ISO/IEC 10021-4) defines the Message Transfer Service (MTS) and its functional component the Message Transfer Agent (MTA), and ITU-T Rec. X.413 | (ISO/IEC 10021-5) defines the Message Store. All ITU-T recommendations provide specific terms for descriptions of system entities and procedures. For example, messages (email) exchanged among people is referred to as Interpersonal Messaging (IPM); electronically structured business documents (e.g., invoices, purchase orders, dispatch advice, etc.) exchanged among trading partners’ computers fall under the EDI protocols.

Message handling is a distributed information processing task that integrates two related subtasks: message transfer and message storage. The ITU-T Recommendations define specific protocols for a wide range of communication tasks. For example, the P1 protocol is used explicitly for communication among MTAs, P3 between the user agent and an MTA, and P7 between the user agent and message store.

In the 1994 version, P7 was enhanced to provide folders in the message store, allow storage of submitted messages, and provide many automatic actions such as auto-foldering and correlation of replies, delivery reports and receipt notifications with submitted messages.

X.400 message content standards are defined for communication between user agents. These are modelled as conceptual protocols that treat P1 and P3/P7 as providing an underlying reliable transport of message contents. The message content standard for interpersonal messaging, IPM, defined in ITU-T Rec. X.420 | ISO/IEC 10021-7 was named P2 in the Red Book. The extended version of IPM in the Blue Book was given content-type 22 (for P2 version 2) and is often referred to informally as P22, although that term is not used in the standards. The message content standard for EDI is defined in ITU-T Rec. F.435 | ISO/IEC 10021-8 and ITU-T Rec. X.435 | ISO/IEC 10021-9, and informally referred to as P35. A voice messaging content type is defined in ITU-T Recs. F.440 and X.440.

Exchange Server 2007 does not use the MTA object, and the X.400 connector (which must use the MTA) is gone in Exchange Server 2007. There are no longer any X.400 default proxy e-mail addresses in Exchange Server 2007.

Important features of X.400 include structured addressing, ASN.1 binary code enabling multimedia content (predating and more efficient than MIME), and integrated security capabilities. As X.400 inter-domain relay services were assumed by ITU to be run by PTTs, X.400 incorporated fields for the automated transfer of messages between X.400 and other PTT services, such as Telex, facsimile and physical postal mail. ISO later added open routing standards (ITU-T Rec. X.412 | ISO/IEC 10021-10 and ITU-T Rec. X.404 | ISO/IEC 10021-11), but the initial misconception that X.400 required PTT relay services, coupled with PTT volume-based charges for these, were factors that inhibited the widespread uptake of X.400.

Implementation
From the late 1980s, many major countries committed to the OSI stack, via GOSIP - Government Open Systems Interconnection Profiles. In the United States this was in the form of the 1990 NIST "Federal Information Processing Standard" (FIPS #146). In turn, major computer vendors committed to producing OSI-compliant products, including X.400. Microsoft's Exchange Server was developed in this time period, and internally based on X.400/X.500 - with the initial release "equally happy to dispatch messages via Messaging API (MAPI), X.400, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)". In practice however, most of these were poorly produced, and seldom put into operation.

In North America, many large defense contractors and universities had also already committed to the Internet and TCP/IP standards, including SMTP for email. There, X.400 is still used in some applications, such as the military, intelligence services and aviation, mainly because the X.400 protocol supports encryption, and its functions for integrity and security were developed and deployed much earlier than their SMTP counterparts (S/MIME, PGP and SMTP-TLS). For similar reasons, it is sometimes used for transmission of EDI messages between applications.

In Europe, South America, and Asia, X.400 is quite widely implemented, especially for EDI services.

X.400 has been extended for use in military applications - see Military Message Handling System - and aviation - see Aeronautical Message Handling System. Furthermore, NATO uses STANAG 4406 as a standard for Military Messaging based on X.400.

Addressing
One of the core issues X.400 attempted to address was the failure of an email to be properly delivered when the address was not specified correctly. At the time, addressing formats varied from platform to platform, so it was difficult for users to know how to properly type them in. Any error caused the delivery to fail outright. This was in contrast to the "real" postal service, where even partial addresses would be routed to a dead letter office where they will attempt to deliver it even if some of the information is missing or wrong.

To solve this problem, the X.400 address scheme included several redundant fields that could be used to help deliver the message. For instance, there were separate fields for first and last name, as well as initials. The server was identified with multiple fields, including a company or organization name, as well as the country. The idea was that an address with a misspelt name of the company, for instance, would still contain enough information, the person's name and country, for the message to be properly routed.

At the time, it was believed that email would be provided by large service providers, often the national telephone companies. This meant that as long as the message reached the service provider, indicated by the "Administration Management Domain" (ADMD) portion of the address, the system would likely know of the user in question. As this service provider was likely national in scope, simply providing the right country code could be enough information to route the message properly.

However, this model fails when the email services are provided by the user's company or organization, or when the service provider is not known. In this case, there is no national-scale database of users and an improper organization name is enough to cause it to fail. This is the dominant model today, where companies use an internal server, or even more commonly, use a provider like Microsoft 365, or Gmail, which is invisible outside the organization, and even to the users. In this model, the ADMD is unknown or the same as the organization itself.

This multi-part addressing system also led to the format being complex; users were not sure which fields were important and tended to provide all that they could. This made trivial things, like printing the address on a business card or typing it into the email client more difficult than simpler systems like those found in SMTP. The unwieldiness of this addressing format is believed by many to be one factor in the lack of success of X.400.

An X.400 address is technically referred to as an Originator/Recipient (OR) address. It has two purposes:

 * Mailbox identification – either the originator or recipient.
 * Global domain identification – where a given mailbox is located.
 * 1984 defined an OR address as an X.400 address that identified where the user is located.
 * 1988 defines it as a combination of a directory name (distinguished name) and an X.400 address.

An X.400 address consists of several elements, including: The standards themselves originally did not specify how these email addresses should be written (for instance on a business card) or even whether the field identifiers should be upper or lower case, or what character sets were allowed. RFC 1685 specified one encoding, based on a 1993 draft of ITU-T Recommendation F.401, which looked like:
 * C (Country name)
 * DC (Domain Component)
 * ADMD (Administration Management Domain, short-form A), usually a public mail service provider
 * PRMD (Private Management Domain, short-form P)
 * O (Organization name)
 * OU (Organizational Unit Names), OU is equivalent to OU0, can have OU1, OU2...
 * G (Given name)
 * I (Initials)
 * S (Surname)
 * "G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;PRMD=Uninett;A=;C=no"

1984 had two forms for address formats:
 * Form 1: (with 3x variants) – primarily uses ADMD and a subset of other attributes
 * Form 2: (with no variants) – identifies users by means of telematic terminal (hardware) addresses.

In the 1988 X.400 Recommendations, four forms of addressing were delineated. The 1984 Form 1, Variant 1 format was renamed as the mnemonic O/R address and the 1984 Form 1, Variant 3 and Form 2 format were combined and renamed the terminal O/R address. New forms introduced were the numeric O/R form (a variation of Form 1, Variant 2) and the postal O/R address.

The first large-scale use was conducted in the U.S. under a military communication contract in 1992 to 1997.

X.500 directories
The confusion caused by the X.400 addressing format led to the creation of the X.500 standard for directory services. The idea was to create a hierarchical and standardized email address directory with replication and distribution functionality that allowed multiple organizations to produce a single public directory. For instance, each Administration Management Domain (service provider) could optionally upload their directory to a shared X.500 server, and then allow this database to be searched by the X.400 User Agents during email creation, thereby avoiding needing to know anything about the address other than the recipient's name and some sort of organizational name like a company.

Unfortunately, the X.500 protocol proved to be every bit as complex and unwieldy as X.400, and this led to the creation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, that standardized a simple subset of the X.500 protocols suitable for use by end-user software searching for addresses. LDAP is widely used in directory services like Microsoft's Active Directory.

Additionally, the goal of providing a universal address database was fundamentally flawed by the time it was proposed. In the era of national telecommunications companies like British Telecom or France Télécom, people's names and phone numbers were considered public information and already collected into such directories in the form of the phone book. Extending this to email addresses seemed obvious. However, this was simply not the case in the 1980s; at that time, email was often associated with business or government users, and those organizations treated their member addresses as valuable, or even confidential. There was no incentive for the organizations to share this data with the public. As RFC2693 put it, "imagine the CIA adding its directory of agents to a world-wide X.500 pool".

General references

 * RFC 1615 - Migrating from X.400(84) to X.400(88)
 * RFC 1649 - Operational Requirements for X.400 Management Domains in the GO-MHS Community

ITU-T X.400 Recommendations

 * ITU-T Rec. F.400/X.400 |ISO/IEC 10021-1 Message handling system and service overview
 * ITU-T Rec. X.402 |ISO/IEC 10021-2 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Overall architecture
 * ITU-T Rec. X.411 |ISO/IEC 10021-4 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Message Transfer System: Abstract Service Definition and Procedures
 * ITU-T Rec. X.413 |ISO/IEC 10021-5 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Message store - Abstract service definition
 * ITU-T Rec. X.419 |ISO/IEC 10021-6 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Protocol specifications
 * ITU-T Rec. X.420 |ISO/IEC 10021-7 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Interpersonal Messaging System
 * ITU-T Rec. X.435 |ISO/IEC 10021-9 Message Handling Systems (MHS): Electronic data interchange messaging system
 * ITU-T Rec. X.412 |ISO/IEC 10021-10 Message Handling Systems (MHS): MHS routing
 * ITU-T Rec. X.404 |ISO/IEC 10021-11 Message Handling Systems (MHS): MHS routing - Guide for messaging systems managers

title: X.400


text:
Worldshop

Worldshops, world shops or Fair Trade Shops are specialized retail outlets offering and promoting Fair Trade products. Worldshops also typically organize various educational Fair Trade activities and play an active role in trade justice and other North-South political campaigns.

Worldshops are often not-for-profit organizations and run by locally based volunteer networks.

Although the movement emerged in Europe and a vast majority of worldshops are still based on the continent, worldshops can also be found today in North America, Australia, Israel and New Zealand.

History
The start of the movement is usually attributed to the first worldshop in Europe, which was founded by Oxfam in 1959. The Oxfam shop sold Chinese bric-a-brac that had been sourced from Chinese refugees that had escaped the Communist revolution to Hong Kong. However, some sources credit the first fair trade shop that had been opened in the US in 1958, selling Puerto Rican needlework.

The shops were not called worldshops at that time, however. Alternative trading organisations imported various third world goods, such as cane sugar starting in the 1960s, and still continuing today. These goods were sold in "third world shops" or "developing country shops" (the actual name differing from country to country). The most active organisations were operating in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The term "worldshop" came into existence in the 1990s. In 1994, worldshops organised themselves under the auspices of NEWS, the Network of European Worldshops, who now falls under the World Fair Trade Organization. The Fairtrade label, which is used on fair trade products, has its roots in the 1980s worldshop movement.

Aims
Worldshops' aim is to make trade as direct and fair with the trading partners as possible. Usually, this means a producer in a developing country and consumers in industrialized countries. The worldshops' target is to pay the producers a fair price that guarantees subsistence and positive social development. They often cut out any intermediaries in the import chain.

title: Worldshop


text:
User:Yramesh

Ramesh Yerraballi

title: User:Yramesh