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Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges (born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

He is credited as being the first screenwriter to find success as a director. Prior to Sturges, other Hollywood directors (such as Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts; however, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to establish success as a screenwriter and then move into directing his own scripts. He sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $10 in exchange for directing it. Anthony Lane writes that "To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed 'Written and directed by Preston Sturges,' and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny." For that film, Sturges won the first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Sturges went on to receive Oscar nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). He also wrote and directed The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels (both 1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), each considered classic comedies, appearing on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs.

Per the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, "he opened the gates for generations of future filmmakers by becoming the first screenwriter to establish himself as a film director. In the process, he made himself one of the most celebrated figures of the 1940s. But his star, which had burned so brightly, fell almost as quickly as it had risen. To this day, this man who introduced irony to American screen comedy remains an enigmatic and contradictory personality: a lowbrow aristocrat and a melancholy wiseguy, he reaped the rewards and paid the price for being a brilliant American dreamer."

Early life
Sturges was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Mary Estelle Dempsey (later known as Mary Desti or Mary D'Este) and traveling salesman Edmund C. Biden. His maternal grandparents, Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick d'Este Dempsey, were immigrants from Ireland, and his father was of English descent.

When Sturges was two years old, his mother left America to pursue a singing career in Paris, where she annulled her marriage with Preston's father. Returning to America, Dempsey met her third husband, the wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges, who adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism". This included her close friendship with Isadora Duncan, as the young Sturges would sometimes travel from country to country with Duncan's dance company. Mary also carried on a romantic affair with Aleister Crowley and collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick. As a young man, Sturges bounced back and forth between Europe and the United States. As Sturges spent much of his youth in France, he became fluent in French and a Francophile who always considered France his "second home".

In 1916, he worked as a runner for New York stock brokers, a position he obtained through Solomon Sturges. The next year, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service, and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas without seeing action. While at camp, Sturges wrote an essay, "Three Hundred Words of Humor", which was printed in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work. Returning from camp, in 1919 Sturges picked up a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband. He spent eight years there, until he married Estelle De Wolfe.

Sturges's 1928 turn to playwriting was accidental. While on a date with a young actress of certain renown, she informed Sturges that while she had pretended to find him witty and charming, she actually considered him a bore. "The only reason I'm going out with you, sir, is for the same reason that a scientist embraces a guinea pig; I just like to try my situations out on you to see how they turn out." She claimed that the dramatic research was for a play she was writing. Outraged, Sturges told her that if she could write a play, he could write a play, but that his would be better and run longer. Within two months, he had written his first play, The Guinea Pig, only to find out that she wasn't writing a play at all, and that she was surprised and flattered that he had taken her ravings so seriously.

From Broadway to Hollywood
In 1928, Sturges performed on Broadway in Hotbed, a short-lived play by Paul Osborn, and Sturges's The Guinea Pig opened in Massachusetts. The play was a success and Sturges moved it to Broadway the following year, a turning point in his career. That same year also saw the opening of Sturges's second play, the hit Strictly Dishonorable. Written in just six days, the play ran for sixteen months and earned Sturges over $300,000. It attracted interest from Hollywood, and Sturges was writing for Paramount by the end of the year.

Three other Sturges stage plays were produced from 1930 to 1932, one of them a musical, but none were hits. By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating on short contracts, for Universal, MGM, and Columbia studios. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933) to Fox, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The film told the story of a self-involved financier via a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, and has been seen as a precursor to Citizen Kane (1941). Fox producer Jesse Lasky had been prepared to customarily pass Sturges's screenplay along to other writers for rewriting, but said, "It was the most perfect script I'd ever seen ... Imagine a producer accepting a script from an author and not being able to make one change." Lasky paid Sturges $17,500 plus 7% of the profits above $1 million. It was a then-unprecedented deal for a screenwriter, which instantly elevated Sturges's reputation in Hollywood – although the lucrative deal irritated as many as it impressed. Sturges recalled, "The film made a lot of enemies. Writers at that time worked in teams, like piano movers. And my first solo script was considered a distinct menace to the profession."

For the remainder of the 1930s, Sturges operated under the strict auspices of the studio system, working on a string of scripts, some of which were shelved, sometimes with screen credit and sometimes not. While he was highly paid, earning $2,500 a week, he was unhappy with the way directors were handling his dialogue, and he resolved to take creative control of his own projects. He accomplished this goal in 1939 by trading his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years earlier) to Paramount in exchange for the chance to direct it. Paramount promoted the unusual deal as part of the film's publicity, saying that Sturges had received just ten dollars. Sturges's success quickly paved the way for similar deals for such writer–directors as Billy Wilder and John Huston. Sturges said, "It's taken me eight years to reach what I wanted. But now, if I don't run out of ideas – and I won't – we'll have some fun. There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and God willing, I will make some of them."

Screenwriting heights
Sturges won the first-ever Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for The Great McGinty, at which time he was one of the highest paid men in Hollywood. He also received two screenwriting Academy Award nominations in the same year, for 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, a feat since matched by Frank Butler, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. (In the second Academy Awards, under a different nomination process, eleven screenplays were considered, including two by Bess Meredyth, two by Tom Barry, two by Hanns Kräly and four by Elliott J. Clawson.) F. Scott Fitzgerald, then in Hollywood, wrote that "They let a certain writer here direct his own picture here, and he's made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon."

Though he had a thirty-year Hollywood career, Sturges's greatest comedies were filmed in a furious five-year burst of activity from 1939 to 1944, during which he turned out The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, for each of which he served as both writer and director. Half a century later, four of these – The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek – were chosen by the American Film Institute as being among the 100 funniest American films.

Studio battles
Production on these films did not always go smoothly. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was being written by Sturges at night even as the production was being filmed in the daytime, and Sturges the screenwriter was rarely more than 10 pages ahead of the cast and crew.

Despite box office success of The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, conflict with Paramount's studio bosses increased. In particular, executive producer Buddy DeSylva never really trusted his star writer-director and was wary (and arguably jealous) of the independence Sturges enjoyed on his projects. One of the sources of conflict was that Sturges liked to reuse many of the same character actors in his films, thus creating what amounted to a regular troupe he could call upon within the studio system. Paramount feared that the audience would tire of repeatedly seeing the same faces in Sturges productions. But the director was adamant, stating, "[T]hese little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures." The way Sturges wrote and directed these actors created a succession of what Andrew Sarris later called "self-expressive cameos of aggressive individualism."

Members of the Preston Sturges Unofficial Stock Company Actors included: George Anderson, Al Bridge, Georgia Caine, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Robert Dudley, Byron Foulger, Robert Greig, Harry Hayden, Esther Howard, Arthur Hoyt, J. Farrell MacDonald, George Melford, Torben Meyer, Charles R. Moore, Frank Moran, Jack Norton, Jane Buckingham, Franklin Pangborn, Emory Parnell, Victor Potel, Dewey Robinson, Harry Rosenthal, Julius Tannen, Max Wagner and Robert Warwick. Sturges re-used other actors, such as Sig Arno, Luis Alberni, Eric Blore, Porter Hall and Raymond Walburn, and even stars such as Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee, who both made three films with Sturges, and Eddie Bracken, who did two.

The prolonged clashes between Sturges and Paramount came to a head as the end of his contract approached. He had filmed The Great Moment and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek in 1942 and Hail the Conquering Hero in 1943, but Paramount was suffering from a surfeit of films. Indeed, some of the studio's finished movies were sold off to United Artists, which needed films to distribute. The studio held onto Sturges's three films, since he was their star filmmaker at the time, but did not immediately release them.

Internally, studio heads expressed serious reservations about them, as did the censors at the Breen Office. Sturges managed to get The Miracle of Morgan's Creek released with only minor changes, but The Great Moment and Hail the Conquering Hero were taken out of his control and tinkered with by DeSylva. When the revamped Hail the Conquering Hero had a disastrous preview, Paramount allowed Sturges – who by that time had left the studio – to come back and fix the film. Sturges did some rewriting, shot some new scenes, and re-edited the film back to his original vision, all without pay. He was unable to similarly rescue The Great Moment, however. The historical biography about the dentist who discovered the use of ether for anesthesia ended up being Sturges's only flop during this period. More significantly, it marked the onset of a downturn from which Sturges did not fully recover.

Independence and decline
Preston Sturges was a temperamental talent who fully recognized his own worth. He had invested in entrepreneurial projects, such as an engineering company, and The Players, a popular restaurant and nightclub at 8225 Sunset Boulevard, projects which were both net losses. At one point the third highest paid man in America – for writing, directing, producing, and numerous other Hollywood projects – he was often known to borrow money (from his stepfather and studio, amongst others).

Millionaire Howard Hughes, who had formed a friendship with Sturges, offered to bankroll him as an independent filmmaker. In early 1944, Sturges and Hughes formed a partnership called California Pictures. The deal represented a major pay cut for Sturges, but it established him as a writer-producer-director, the only one in Hollywood besides Charles Chaplin and one of only four in the world, along with England's Noël Coward and France's René Clair. The status led, again, to widespread admiration and envy among his Hollywood peers.

However, this career peak also marked the beginning of Sturges's professional decline as Hughes proved an unstable and mercurial partner. While the startup California Pictures was being created and structured, it was three years until Sturges's next release. That film, a Harold Lloyd vehicle entitled The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), for which Sturges had coaxed the silent film star out of retirement, went over budget and far behind schedule, and was poorly received when released. Hughes, who had promised not to interfere in the film's production, stepped in and pulled the movie from distribution in order to re-edit it, taking almost four years to do so. Released in 1950 by RKO, which was by that time owned by Hughes, the retitled Mad Wednesday was no more successful than Sturges's original version.

In the meantime, California Pictures had put another film into production, Vendetta. At Hughes's behest, Sturges had written the script as a vehicle for Hughes' protégé, Faith Domergue. Max Ophüls was hired to direct, but after only a few days of filming, Hughes demanded that Sturges fire Ophüls and take over the direction himself. Seven weeks later, Sturges himself was fired or quit (accounts differ). The promising partnership between the two iconoclasts was dissolved after just one completed picture. As Sturges later recalled, "When Mr. Hughes made suggestions with which I disagreed, as he had a perfect right to do, I rejected them. When I rejected the last one, he remembered he had an option to take control of the company and he took over. So I left."

Coming on the heels of the failure of The Great Moment, these further flops, disappointments and setbacks served to tarnish the once stellar reputation of the golden boy of Hollywood. Sturges was left professionally adrift. Accepting an offer from Darryl Zanuck, he landed at Fox where he wrote, directed, and produced two films. The first, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), was not initially well received by either reviewers or the public, though its critical reputation has since improved. However, his second Fox film, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), was the first serious flop in star Betty Grable's career, and Sturges was again on his own. He built a theater at his Players restaurant, but the project did not pan out.

Over the next several years, Sturges continued to write, but many of the projects were underfunded or stillborn, and those that emerged did not approach the same success as his earlier triumphs. His 1951 Broadway musical, Make a Wish, underwent extensive rewriting by Abe Burrows and ran for only a few months. His next Broadway project, Carnival in Flanders, a musical which Sturges wrote and directed in 1953, closed after six performances.

Sturges was having no better luck in Hollywood, where his clout was gone. Katharine Hepburn, who had starred in the 1952 Broadway production of the George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess got Sturges to agree to adapt the script and direct. But she could not get a single Hollywood studio to back the project.

A 1953 lien by the Internal Revenue Service, with whom he had been having tax problems, cost Sturges the Players nightclub and other assets. Sturges put a brave public face on the situation, writing, "I had so very much for so very long, it is quite natural for the pendulum to swing the other way for a while, and I really cannot and will not complain." However, his drinking became heavy, and his marriage and many of his relationships continued to deteriorate.

Sturges began spending more time in Europe, as he had as a young man. His last directorial effort took place there when he wrote and directed Les Carnets du Major Thompson, an adaptation of a popular French novel. The film was released in France in 1955 and two years later in the U.S., under the title The French, They Are a Funny Race. It failed to register with critics or audiences.

Sturges made four brief cameo appearances during his career: in his own Christmas in July and Sullivan's Travels; in the Paramount all-star extravaganza Star Spangled Rhythm and, in the years of his decline, in the Bob Hope comedy Paris Holiday, filmed in France and the last film he worked on. Two decades earlier, Sturges had been a writer on one of Hope's earliest film successes, Never Say Die.

In 1959, Sturges summed up his career:

"Between flops, it is true, I have come up with an occasional hit, but compared to a good boxer's record, for instance, my percentage has been lamentable. I fought a draw in my first fight, stupified everyone by winning the championship in my second, got a couple of wins with picture rights, then was knocked out three times in a row. Dragging my weary carcass to Hollywood, I was immediately knocked out again, won a big fight some six months later, then marked time for six years as an ordinary ham-and-beaner, picking up what I could. Suddenly I saw a chance and offered to fight for the world championship for a dollar. To everyone's astonishment, I won that championship and defended it successfully for a number of years, winning nine times by knockout, fighting three draws, losing twice and getting one no-decision in Europe. I have just come over to America for a fight, but it was called off at the last moment, one of the promoters having gone nuts and having to have been locked up. Why I'm not walking on my heels after all this, I don't know. Maybe I am walking on my heels. It would be surprising if I weren't."

Themes
According to Todd McCarthy, "A continuing theme of Preston Sturges is that a good front or guise can easily bamboozle the public." McCarthy cites Sturges's screenplay for Diamond Jim (1935). The critic Ephraim Katz wrote that Sturges's films "... parodied with pungent wit various aspects of American life from politics and advertising to sex and hero worship. They were marked by their verbal wit, opportune comic timing, and eccentric, outrageously funny camo characterizations." Andrew Sarris wrote, "Sturges repeatedly suggested that the lowliest boob could rise to the top with the right degree of luck, bluff, and fraud."

In 1942, in his review of The Palm Beach Story, critic Manny Farber wrote: "He is essentially a satirist without any stable point of view from which to aim his satire. He is apt to turn his back on what he has been sniping at to demolish what he has just been defending. He is contemptuous of everybody except the opportunist and the unscrupulous little woman who, at some point in every picture, labels the hero a poor sap. That the invariable fairy godfather of each picture is not only expressive of his own cold-blooded cynicism but of typical Hollywood fantasy is an example of how this works. Another phase of his attack is shrouding in slapstick the fact that the godfather pays off not for perseverance or honesty or ability but merely from capriciousness."

Anthony Lane writes that "his films are peopled, to an alarming degree, by families that don't add up, and by couples who click together and them come apart like toys. The hero of The Great McGinty marries his secretary (who already has children of her own) purely because, as an aspirant political thug, he needs a mate. Most startling is The Palm Beach Story, in which Claudette Colbert runs out on her husband (Joel McCrea) even though her toes go all funny whenever he kisses her; she simply needs more money in her life, and that means somebody else. The movie starts and ends with the curlicued words 'And they all lived happily ever' after filling the screen, followed at once by the jaunty rider 'Or did they?' At no point in a Sturges comedy does a happy family sit around being a happy family; you could read that as a psychotic reaction to his own precarious parentage, but I prefer to think that Sturges was so taken by the drama of his origins that he chose to milk it dry."

James Agee called Sturges's films "uncontrollably, almost proudly corrupt, vengeful, fearful of intactness and self-commitment ... their mastering object, aside from success, seems to be to sail as deep into the wind as possible without for an instant incurring the disaster of becoming seriously wholly acceptable as art. They seem to be, indeed, in much of their twisting, the elaborately counterpointed image of a neurosis."

Style and influence
Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic, mature, and ahead of its time, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene. Such versatility and dexterity can be seen in The Lady Eve, where a tender love scene takes place between Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, which is enlivened by a horse as it repeatedly pokes its nose into Fonda's head. Critic Andrew Dickos wrote that "the touchstone of Preston Sturges' screenwriting lies in the respect paid to the play and density of verbal language" and "establishes the standard of eloquence as one of poetry, of a cacophony of Euro-American vernacularisms and utterances, peculiarly—and appropriately—spoken with scandalous indifference."

His scripts were almost congenitally unable to deliver a single mood. In Hail the Conquering Hero, the series of lies, crimes, and embarrassments all somehow bolster the film's theme of patriotism and duty. Sometimes this attitude could be conveyed in a single line of dialogue, such as in The Lady Eve when Jean Harrington (Stanwyck) vows revenge on Charles Pike (Fonda), declaring, "I need him like the axe needs the turkey."

In recent years, film scholars such as Alessandro Pirolini have also argued that Sturges's cinema anticipated more experimental narratives by contemporary directors such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Robert Zemeckis and Woody Allen, along with prolific The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder: "Many of [Sturges's] movies and screenplays reveal a restless and impatient attempt to escape codified rules and narrative schemata, and to push the mechanisms and conventions of their genre to the extent of unveiling them to the spectator. See for example the disruption of standardized timelines in films such as The Power and the Glory and The Great McGinty or the way an apparently classical comedy such as Unfaithfully Yours (1948) shifts into the realm of multiple and hypothetical narratives."

Filmmakers who have acknowledged Sturges as an influence include the Coen brothers,  Wes Anderson, James Mangold, John Hughes, Peter Bogdanovich and John Lasseter.

Personal life
Sturges married four times and had three sons:

 * Estelle deWolfe Mudge – married in December 1923, separated in 1927, divorced in 1928
 * Eleanor Close Hutton (a daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post) – eloped on April 12, 1930, marriage annulled on April 12, 1932
 * Louise Sargent Tevis – married on November 7, 1938, in Reno, Nevada, separated in April 1946, divorced in November 1947
 * son Solomon Sturges IV (b. June 25, 1941) – actor
 * Anne Margaret "Sandy" Nagle (a lawyer and former actress) – married on April 15, 1951, marriage ended in 1959 with Sturges's death, mother of his two younger sons
 * Preston Sturges Jr. (b. February 22, 1953) – screenwriter
 * Thomas Preston Sturges (b. June 22, 1956) – music executive

Death
Sturges died of a heart attack at the Algonquin Hotel while writing his autobiography (which, ironically, he had intended to title The Events Leading Up to My Death), and was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. His book, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words, was published in 1990. In 1975, he became the first writer to be given the Screen Writers Guild's Laurel Award posthumously. He has a star dedicated to him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1601 Vine Street.

Other film work

 * The Big Pond (1930; dialogue)
 * Fast and Loose (1930; additional dialogue)
 * The Invisible Man (1933; contributing writer)
 * The Power and the Glory (1933; screenplay, dialogue director)
 * Imitation of Life (1934; contributing writer)
 * We Live Again (1934; co-screen adaptation)
 * Thirty Day Princess (1934; co-screenplay)
 * The Good Fairy (1935; screenplay)
 * Diamond Jim (1935; screenplay)
 * Love Before Breakfast (1936; contributor to treatment)
 * Next Time We Love (1936; contributor to screenplay construction)
 * Easy Living (1937; screenplay)
 * Hotel Haywire (1937; original story, screenplay)
 * If I Were King (1938; screenplay)
 * Port of Seven Seas (1938; screenplay)
 * College Swing (1938; contributing writer)
 * Never Say Die (1939; co-screenplay)
 * Remember the Night (1940; screenplay)
 * I Married a Witch (1942; producer)
 * Vendetta (1950; uncredited director)
 * The Birds and the Bees (1956, co-screenplay)

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Actor

 * Christmas in July (1940) - Man at Shoeshine Stand (uncredited)
 * Sullivan's Travels (1941) - Studio Director (uncredited)
 * Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) - Himself
 * Paris Holiday (1958) - Serge Vitry (final film role)

Adaptations

 * Three of Sturges's films, Christmas in July, The Great McGinty and Remember the Night, were restaged for NBC's Lux Video Theater.
 * The 1956 George Gobel movie The Birds and the Bees was a remake of The Lady Eve. Paul Jones produced both movies.
 * The 1958 Jerry Lewis vehicle Rock-A-Bye Baby was loosely based on Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.
 * The 1984 Dudley Moore feature Unfaithfully Yours was a remake of Sturges's 1948 original.

Published screenplays

 * Five Screenplays (ISBN 0-520-05564-0) collects The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, and Hail the Conquering Hero
 * Four More Screenplays (ISBN 0-520-20365-8) collects The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours, and The Great Moment
 * Three More Screenplays (ISBN 0-520-21004-2) collects The Power and the Glory, Remember the Night, and Easy Living

title: Preston Sturges


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Nmap

Nmap (Network Mapper) is a network scanner created by Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich). Nmap is used to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses.

Nmap provides a number of features for probing computer networks, including host discovery and service and operating system detection. These features are extensible by scripts that provide more advanced service detection, vulnerability detection, and other features. Nmap can adapt to network conditions including latency and congestion during a scan.

Nmap started as a Linux utility and was ported to other systems including Windows, macOS, and BSD. It is most popular on Linux, followed by Windows.

Features
Nmap features include:
 * Fast scan (nmap -F [target]) – Performing a basic port scan for fast result.
 * Host discovery – Identifying hosts on a network. For example, listing the hosts that respond to TCP and/or ICMP requests or have a particular port open.
 * Port scanning – Enumerating the open ports on target hosts.
 * Version detection – Interrogating network services on remote devices to determine application name and version number.
 * Ping Scan – Check host by sending ping requests.
 * TCP/IP stack fingerprinting – Determining the operating system and hardware characteristics of network devices based on observations of network activity of said devices.
 * Scriptable interaction with the target – using Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) and Lua programming language.

Nmap can provide further information on targets, including reverse DNS names, device types, and MAC addresses.

Typical uses of Nmap:
 * Auditing the security of a device or firewall by identifying the network connections which can be made to, or through it.
 * Identifying open ports on a target host in preparation for auditing.
 * Network inventory, network mapping, maintenance and asset management.
 * Auditing the security of a network by identifying new servers.
 * Generating traffic to hosts on a network, response analysis and response time measurement.
 * Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in a network.
 * DNS queries and subdomain search

User interfaces
NmapFE, originally written by Kanchan, was Nmap's official GUI for Nmap versions 2.2 to 4.22. For Nmap 4.50 (originally in the 4.22SOC development series) NmapFE was replaced with Zenmap, a new official graphical user interface based on UMIT, developed by Adriano Monteiro Marques.

Web-based interfaces exist that allow either controlling Nmap or analysing Nmap results from a web browser, such as IVRE.

Output
Four different output formats are offered by Nmap. Everything is saved to a file except the interactive output. Text processing software can be used to modify Nmap output, allowing the user to customize reports.

 * Interactive: presented and updated real time when a user runs Nmap from the command line. Various options can be entered during the scan to facilitate monitoring.
 * XML: a format that can be further processed by XML tools. It can be converted into a HTML report using XSLT.
 * Grepable: output that is tailored to line-oriented processing tools such as grep, sed, or awk.
 * Normal: the output as seen while running Nmap from the command line, but saved to a file.
 * Script kiddie:meant to be an amusing way to format the interactive output replacing letters with their visually alike number representations. For example,  becomes  . This is known as Leet.

History
Nmap was first published in September 1997, as an article in Phrack Magazine with source-code included. With help and contributions of the computer security community, development continued. Enhancements included operating system fingerprinting, service fingerprinting, code rewrites (C to C++), additional scan types, protocol support (e.g. IPv6, SCTP ) and new programs that complement Nmap's core features.

Major releases include:

Legal issues
Nmap is a tool that can be used to discover services running on Internet connected systems. Like any tool, it could potentially be used for black hat hacking, as a precursor to attempts to gain unauthorized access to computer systems. However, Nmap is also used by security and systems administrators to assess their own networks for vulnerabilities (i.e. white hat hacking).

System administrators can use Nmap to search for unauthorized servers, or for computers that do not conform to security standards.

In 2003 Supreme Court of Finland has ruled that port scanning has amounted to an attempted computer break in, which was illegal under Finnish Penal code at the time: "In its ruling the Supreme Court stated that the defendant had systematically carried out port scanning operations to gather information for the purpose of unauthorised break-in to the bank's computer network. This amounted to an attempted computer break in. "

License
Nmap was originally distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In later releases, Nmap's authors added clarifications and specific interpretations to the license where they felt the GPL was unclear or lacking. For instance, Nmap 3.50 specifically revoked the license of SCO Group to distribute Nmap software because of their views on the SCO-Linux controversies.

Starting with version 7.90, Nmap transitions to a new custom license NPSL, dual-licensing versions 7.90, 7.91, and 7.92 under both old and new licenses. Several Linux distributions consider the new license non-free.

In popular culture
In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity is seen using Nmap to access a power plant's computer system, allowing Neo to "physically" break into a building. The appearance of Nmap in the film was widely discussed on Internet forums and hailed as an unusually realistic example of hacking.

Nmap and NmapFE were used in The Listening, a 2006 movie about a former NSA officer who defects and mounts a clandestine counter-listening station high in the Italian alps.

Nmap source code can be seen in the movie Battle Royale, as well as brief views of the command line version of Nmap executing in Live Free or Die Hard and Bourne Ultimatum. In 2013, Nmap continued to make appearances in movies including popular sci-fi movie Elysium.

The film Dredd, a film adaptation of the famous Judge Dredd comics, was released in 2012 and also contains multiple Nmap scenes. Nmap is used for network reconnaissance and exploitation of the slum tower network. It is even seen briefly in the movie's trailer.

The command Nmap is widely used in the video game Hacknet, allowing to probe the network ports of a target system to hack it.

In Snowden, Nmap is used in the aptitude test scene about 14 minutes into the movie.

In academia
Nmap is an integral part of academic activities. It has been used for research involving the TCP/IP protocol suite and networking in general. Besides being a research tool, Nmap has also become a research topic.

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

title: Nmap


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Francesco Cetti

Francesco Cetti (9 August 1726 – 20 November 1778) was an Italian Jesuit priest, zoologist and mathematician.

Biography
Cetti was born in Mannheim in Germany, but his parents were natives of Como. He was educated in Lombardy and at the Jesuit college at Monza. In 1765 he was sent to Sardinia to help improve the standard of education on the island. In 1766 he was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Sassari, holding that position until his death.

Cetti took long excursions in the vicinity of Sassari, collating his discoveries in the Storia Naturale di Sardegna (Natural History of Sardinia) (1774–7). This has three volumes, covering mammals, birds and amphibians with fishes. A supplement on mammals was published in 1777.

Cetti is commemorated in the name of the Cetti's warbler (Cettia cetti), which was collected on Sardinia by Alberto della Marmora.

title: Francesco Cetti


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Tim Fischer

Timothy Andrew Fischer (3 May 1946 – 22 August 2019) was an Australian politician and diplomat who served as leader of the National Party from 1990 to 1999. He was the tenth deputy prime minister in the Howard government from 1996 to 1999.

Fischer was born in Lockhart, New South Wales. He served with the Australian Army in the Vietnam War. On his return he bought a farming property at Boree Creek. He served in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1971 to 1984. Fischer was elected to the House of Representatives at the 1984 election, representing the Division of Farrer until his retirement in 2001. He replaced Charles Blunt as leader of the National Party in 1990, and in the Howard government served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade. After leaving politics, Fischer served as chairman of Tourism Australia from 2004 to 2007, and was later Ambassador to the Holy See from 2009 to 2012.

Early life
Fischer was born on 3 May 1946 in Lockhart, New South Wales. He was the fourth of five children born to Barbara Mary (van Cooth) and Julius Ralph Fischer; he was predeceased by an older brother who died of meningitis as an infant. His parents were "from once wealthy Melbourne families whose businesses had collapsed with the onset of the Great Depression". Fischer's father worked as a jackaroo, settling in Boree Creek, New South Wales, in 1936, where he ran a stock and station agency and later bought a small farm. His paternal grandfather was born in Kleve, Germany, and had his assets frozen due to anti-German sentiment during World War I. His paternal grandmother was the daughter of a French seaman. Fischer's mother worked as a nurse prior to her marriage. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch immigrant who married the daughter of Francis Mason, an Irish immigrant who became speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly.

Fischer grew up on the family property at Boree Creek and attended Boree Creek Public School for six years. From 1958 he boarded at Xavier College in Melbourne. He graduated in 1963 and won a scholarship to attend university, but returned to Boree Creek to assist his family. In 1966 he was conscripted into the Australian Army and commissioned at the Officer Training Unit, Scheyville. Fischer served with the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) between July 1966 and March 1969 as a second lieutenant. With his battalion, he served in the Vietnam War. Fischer was wounded in the Battle of Coral-Balmoral in May–June 1968. 1RAR and the 1st Australian Task Force were awarded Unit Citation for Gallantry for their actions Battle of Coral-Balmoral and Fischer was entitled to wear the citation insignia.

Upon his return from Vietnam, Fischer took over the family property at Boree Creek and became active in the Country Party, as the party was then called.

State politics
Fischer represented Sturt in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1971 to 1980 and Murray from 1980 to 1984. He served on the opposition frontbench from 1978 to 1984.

Federal politics
In 1984, Fischer won the federal seat of Farrer in the New South Wales far west for the National Party of Australia, as the Country Party had been renamed. Within a year he was on the opposition frontbench, and soon became a popular figure in both the party and parliament. His sometimes rustic manner and bumbling English concealed a shrewd political brain. In 1990, when an attempt by Charles Blunt to modernise the Nationals' image ended with him losing his own seat, Fischer succeeded him as leader, defeating the former leader Ian Sinclair.

Fischer was an enthusiastic supporter of the "Fightback" package of economic and tax reforms proposed by the Liberal leader John Hewson in 1991. But he was unsuccessful in persuading the majority of rural voters, particularly in Queensland, that the proposed changes, particularly the goods and services tax, were in their interests, and Labor under Paul Keating won the 1993 election. On 23 March 1993, ten days after the election, Ian Sinclair unsuccessfully challenged Fischer for the leadership.

In January 1994, Fischer suffered head and neck injuries in a car accident 15 km south of his property in Lockhart, New South Wales. His car T-boned a vehicle that had failed to yield to a give-way sign; the driver and passenger in the other vehicle were killed. Fischer was knocked unconscious in the accident and taken to hospital in Wagga Wagga. He took a month off from politics to aid his recovery, with his deputy John Anderson acting as party leader in his absence.

The Liberals finally regained office under John Howard in 1996. Fischer became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade. The Liberals had won a majority in their own right in the 1996 election, leaving the Nationals in a much weaker position compared to previous Coalition governments. Nonetheless, Fischer was fairly active. He supported the government introducing tough gun control measures on automatic and semi-automatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre in April 1996 alongside then-prime minister John Howard, measures which were opposed by much of his party's rural base.

Fischer also had difficulty with the determination of many Liberals, including the Treasurer, Peter Costello, to carry out sweeping free-market reforms, including abolishing tariff protection for rural industries, deregulating petrol prices and implementing other measures which farmers' organisations regarded as harmful to themselves.

In pushing to permanently extinguish native title rights of indigenous Australians following the Mabo and Wik decisions, Fischer attracted much criticism.

Further trouble for Fischer and the Nationals came with the rise of One Nation, a right-wing populist party led by Pauline Hanson, a disendorsed Liberal candidate who was nonetheless elected member for the Queensland seat of Oxley at the 1996 federal election. One Nation had its greatest appeal in country areas of New South Wales and Queensland—the Nationals' traditional heartland. For much of 1997 and 1998, it looked as though One Nation might sweep the Nationals out of existence. In the 1998 election campaign, however, Fischer strongly counter-attacked One Nation, mainly on the grounds of their "flat tax" economic policies, and succeeded in holding the Nationals' losses to one Senate seat in Queensland.

In 2001, shortly before the expiry of his last parliamentary term, Fischer made public his support for an Australian republic in the future.

As an MP, and later as leader of the Nationals, Fischer often had a rather hectic schedule of visits to various rural National branch meetings, and other relevant functions and gatherings. As a result, he earned the affectionate nickname of "Two-Minute Tim" – often he would arrive, speak to the gathering for a few minutes (i.e. the "Two-Minutes"), grab a quick bite to eat while chatting to some of the attendees, then have to head off to the next stop on his schedule.

In 2014 it was revealed on the ABC program A Country Road that sometime before the 1998 federal election, Fischer, then National Party leader, had met with his deputy John Anderson and former minister John Sharp for a luncheon at which they were surprised to learn from each other that they all intended to retire at the forthcoming election. They agreed that it was not a good idea for all of them to retire at the same time, as it could give a negative image to the party which at the time was battling against perceptions that its future was uncertain. In the end, only Sharp retired, with Fischer and Anderson delaying their own retirements and successfully recontesting the election.

In 1999, he surprised his colleagues by resigning as party leader and as a minister, and by announcing that he would retire at the election due in 2001. His decision to quit politics was motivated partly by the demands of his family, in particular that his son Harrison has autism (Fischer himself claimed to have "high functioning" autism, though he was never professionally diagnosed).

Fischer is the only person to have served the entirety of his ministerial career as Deputy Prime Minister.

Post-political career
After his retirement, he returned to farming at Boree Creek, and became involved in charity work, assisting organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Fred Hollows Foundation and Autism New South Wales.

Fischer served as chairman of Tourism Australia from 2004 until 2007. He was made a fellow (FTSE) of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) in 2000. He served as chairman and a patron of the Crawford Fund, an initiative of the ATSE supporting international agricultural research, from 2001 to 2006. He was vice-chair and chair of the Crop Trust (2013–2017) and a "vigorous supporter" of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. He served as national chairman of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He also served as founding Patron of Australia for UNHCR (2001–2006), an Australian charity that raises funds for the UN's refugee agency.

Fischer was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in the 2005 Australia Day Honours' List in recognition of his contributions to Australian politics, trade liberalisation, rail transport development, support of humanitarian aid, and to fostering community acceptance of cultural differences.

On 21 July 2008, Fischer was nominated by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as the first resident Australian Ambassador to the Holy See. Fischer worked closely with the Vatican on all aspects of the canonisation of Australia's first Roman Catholic saint, Mary MacKillop. He retired from the post on 20 January 2012.

In August 2013, following the shooting death of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane in Oklahoma, Fischer called for a tourism boycott of the United States to protest the activities of the National Rifle Association of America and what he felt were overly lax American gun laws.

Personal life
In 1992, Fischer married Judy Brewer. They had two sons.

Fischer was noted as a tireless advocate for rail transport and was probably Australia's best known railfan. He had a childhood hobby of studying rail gauges of the world. After retiring from politics he continued his association with rail as special envoy for the Adelaide to Darwin railway line and travelled on the first freight train and first Ghan passenger train to Darwin in 2004. The V class GT46C locomotive V544, owned and operated by Aurizon, is named after him. In 2007 he led the Rail Freight Network Review into rail freight in Victoria, as commissioned by the Victorian Government.

Between 2008 and 2009, Fischer hosted three series of ABC Local Radio podcasts The Great Train Show, covering a wide range of railway topics from around the world and within Australia.

In October 2018, Fischer was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. He died on 22 August 2019 at the Albury-Wodonga Cancer Centre in East Albury, New South Wales at age 73. Fischer himself attributed the illness to exposure to Agent Orange during his service in Vietnam. Fischer was given a state funeral, which was held in Albury on 29 August 2019.

title: Tim Fischer


text:
User talk:Fuelbottle/archive1

liked == Greetings == Welcome,

You have done a good job so far in Wikipedia (WP). We're very glad that you've joined us. I can see that you're a serious Wikipedian interested in improving our project. If you stay for a while, you'll discovered that collectively, we're a cooperative and friendly community. We are all here to learn, and hopefully can give something back. If you have questions or doubts of any sort, do not hesitate to post them on the Village Pump, somebody will respond ASAP. Other helpful pages include:
 * How does one edit a page
 * Manual of style
 * Naming conventions

Just keep in mind that while relevant discussions and constructive criticisms and are welcome, unproductive and/or destructive insults are not (see Wikiquette & Neutral point of view). If you come into a conflict regarding to an article, sometimes you (and the other party) will need to compromise even if you believe you are 100% right. The Wiki-Way isn't all that alien!

Who knows? Perhaps you'll soon become a Wikipediholic! :-) --Menchi (Talk)ü| â 11:38, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC) p.s. Simply type four tildes ( ~ ), then you can sign you name and date like I just did with mine. And please always do so after your post in Talk/discussion pages and Village Pump.

Miscellaneous
Hi. Please do not create sub-stubs like Corticosterone is currently, with an illustration only and no text. These are likely to be deleted. If it's worth starting an article, please try to have at least a sentence or two of text. Cheers, -- Infrogmation 05:49, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Well, I appreciated your stub with the structure of corticosterone, but when I linked to it discovered the image does not display. If it has been removed, would you be willing to replace it? I'll even add a few sentences to amplify to stub. Thanks. PS, you've got lots of company in resisting the CAM attacks. Alteripse 12:29, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for your edits on Potential difference, a thorn in my side for some time -- i.e., a long term resident on my list of articles to definitely edit when there's nothing demanding immediate attention [wink]. I think your solution is pretty close to what i'd have done; you may even have inspired me to touch it up slightly sometime soon.

You might like to know about the Page-history feature that appears on the menu of nearly every page, by default at the top and in the second block at the left. The history that covers your edits is an example, and the major reason i mention it is to encourage you to use the summary field near the "Save page" button on edit pages. I fumbled around a bit trying to see the form the volt link took in your final version; i thought conflating volt and voltage was a pretty bad idea. I was enormously pleased to see you eventually decided against that too, but it took me a while to see how your final solution worked, perhaps mostly bcz you only attached one summary. Those summary lines, long or short, are pretty valuable, and you can help your colleagues a lot by using them. (I may go overboard the other direction, but even so, you might get some ideas by looking at some of my examples, and those of other colleagues. Sorry so many of mine are dull LoPbN edits this month!)

Just at a glance, BTW, i can't say whether you are overusing Save-page, as many of us do at first. I use Show-preview frequently, i would guess more than 10 times as often as Save-page. One service it can provide is vanity-protection: most of my many [blush] typos, grammar mistakes, and awkward wordings aren't subject to peer review!

Thanks again for being here, and for that particular group of edits. I haven't given your WP oeuvre more than a quick glance at titles yet, but i have no doubt you have something valuable to offer here. --Jerzy(t) 18:13, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

What does do?

--rs2 01:42, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi Fuelbottle,

I want to thank you for your work on the math in Wikipedia. I've had trouble accessing Mathworld, so I've relied heavily on Wikipedia for math lately.

I fear I just figured out what you did. Is a link to a page you wrote manually? I thought those tags were automatically generating it, but it appears that may not be the case. I want to do something similar on WikiBooks, but I'd really like it to be automated. Oh well. Also, did you need special privileges to set up Template:Quantity?

Thanks, -rs2 17:21, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

One more Norwegian?
Hello, I followed a hunch based on some of your contributions, and included you in the list of Wikipedians from Norway. If I am mistaken, feel free to remove yourself from the list, of course. If not, welcome! --Wernher 19:42, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Star Trek episodes
While I can see that some episodes need their own article - until we have more to say about any given one, should they all have stubs? Yours, Mark Richards 23:02, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

 * It's possible. Why not? ;) Mark Richards 23:24, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Organ subsystem boxes
Hi, thanks for your message on my talk page about creating boxes for subsystems. I think it's a great idea, especially considering your blood components example. Off the top of my head, I can imagine that subsystem boxes would be very useful for the nervous system and muscular system as well. Would you like to head up this effort? Keep me posted. --Diberri | Talk 22:04, Apr 16, 2004 (UTC)

 * Now those areas are huge and need a very rigid and hierarchical order, before the amygdala ends up at the same level as the telencephalon (quod non). But it will definitely contribute. Sometimes one wished Wikipedia was more hierarchical in certain sets of articles, and the blue boxes fill a serious void.
 * PS Fuelbottle, in most of your famous boxes the items are Capitalised! I'll change it in <>. Also, I wonder why blood is more part of the cardiovascular system than hematology!
 * JFW | T@lk  12:47, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the nice work on the organ subsystem boxes. Could you please add your additions to MediaWiki custom elements? Thanks! --Diberri | Talk 04:37, Apr 22, 2004 (UTC)

Just FYI, I moved MediaWiki:Endocrinepancreas to Template:Endocrine pancreas to improve the title a bit. I updated all links to MediaWiki:Endocrinepancreas as well. --Diberri | Talk 03:19, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

 * All references to the older pages have been marked for speedy deletion since they're no longer of any use. (This includes the MediaWiki:Pancreas page to which I had originally moved the endocrine pancreas blue box page.) --Diberri | Talk 03:21, May 4, 2004 (UTC)

Molbo
I've listed this page, of which you are the primary author, on VfD. You may defend it at MediaWiki:VfD-Molbo. --Smack 19:17, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

 * The VfD discussion reached consensus to keep the article. An archive can be viewed at Talk:Molbo story/Delete. -- Cyrius|&#9998 07:10, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

Human blood components
Nice work on the numerous style changes to List of human blood components. Please tell me you used a script to do all that work for you! --Diberri | Talk 22:34, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

Join the rest of us so called "vandals"
Hello, I see you're the latest in a long line of people to be called vandal by Mr Natural Health. You may be very interested to learn of this current arbitration process against Mr Natural Health and the evidence. Rest assured you are not alone. --bodnotbod 08:06, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

 * I've added a section on Lifestyle Diseases on the evidence page. If I've left out anything important please add it - particularly if you have suffered personal abuse.  --bodnotbod 09:25, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

 * Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't think it's a good idea to have a huge alternative medicine box in everything from Junk food to Linus Pauling Fuelbottle | Talk 18:11, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 * It's absolutely infuriating. I mean, OK be bold and add your CAM box.  But if it (and its cousins) gets removed twice let alone NINE times.  Sheesh.  Anyway, I think this arbitration is bound to censure MNH for his Boxmania, but I haven't been around long enough to know what sort of punishment he might get.  If he were to get a 24 hour ban that would be little more time than I spent looking at his edits ;o) --bodnotbod 19:37, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

If you are approached by anyone on the matter of your being accused of being a vandal please post a note on my page so I may provide a word of support. Mr-Natural-Health had an extreeme POV on the categorization issues related to alt. med. Steve Kd4ttc 01:51, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 * Ok, thanks :) Fuelbottle | Talk 01:58, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Category:Cocktails with vodka
Ha! Looks like you and I got the same idea to add Category:Cocktails with vodka to some of our favorite drinks. We must be thirsty ;-) --Diberri | Talk 04:15, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)

 * Yes, indeed :) Fuelbottle | Talk 04:23, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Food additives
It was a mistake. I was trying to get rid of both can:bottom and your compromise of cam:tiny and I reverted to the wrong version. MNH types fast and furious and cleaning up after his spamming is bound to to produce errors like this (sigh) but what can you do? theresa knott 07:30, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Categories
Please do not create Category:Animalia, etc. We are discussing whether to and how to best utilize categories for these articles on the project they are managed by: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life. Thanks! - UtherSRG 03:03, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok, I saw there already was some categories there so I just thought i would expand a little...

A request
Hello Fuelbottle! I have just left a request at Translation into English for a translation of a Danish article, but since I see on that page that you are the only Danish speaker listed at present, I thought I would write to you directly. The Danish article is http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandsk_hest and the article here is Icelandic horse. As you can see, we have a very short article here (which I wrote as well as I could), and the Danish article is quite long. Might you have time and interest to handle this? I speak no Danish at all (about 6 words of Swedish thanks to my ancestors from that country), so I will be of no help to you at all. Thank you in advance for any help you can give (or should I say "tak"? :-) Is it the same in Danish as in Swedish?) -- Jwrosenzweig 19:43, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'll do that. Thank you is tak in Danish, takk in Norwegian and tack in Swedish, almost the same :) Fuelbottle | Talk 19:54, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * Great work! :-) Thank you in every language. Jwrosenzweig 22:53, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

minor v major edits
Fuelbottle - thanks for your responses on ToL. I see though that nearly all if not all of your edits are marked "minor" This could bebecause you have it set as the default in your preferences. Generally, only very small changes (like spelling corrections) are the only things that should be marked as minor. Certainly adding a whole sentance to a talk page is not minor! *grins* - UtherSRG 17:46, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok, I have it as default in my preferences and usually don't unmark it unless it's changes larges than a few lines in the main namespace. I often accidentally mark/unmark, as it's close to the savebutton, or forget to mark/unmark though. Is there a policy on this? Fuelbottle | Talk 18:09, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * I hope you don't mind me butting in with my opinion here :-( Generally speaking the minor edit button is for things like formatting changes, correcting spelling errors and rewording of text that doesn't alter the overall meaning. If you add or remove information, or change the overall POV you should not mark it as minor. Lot's of people, especially when they are fairly new think "I've only added a couple of words so It should be marked minor" but if those couple of words add info then you can imagine the situation where a number of minor edits in a row can drastically alter an article. The usual guiding principle is - "If the article is on my watchlist - would I care about this edit and want to take a look?" if the answer to that question is probably "yes" then the minor edit box should not be checked. Unless the vast majority of your edits are typo fixes and the like it's best not to have the box checked by default. There probably is a policy somewhere but i don't know where to find it. theresa knott 19:51, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * I seldom make typo fixes so I guess I'll uncheck it. Fuelbottle | Talk 20:07, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

categorizing Janjaweed
Hi, you have put the Janjaweed under Category:Islamist groups. While most people seem to agree that the Sudanese government (which supports them) can be called islamist, I haven't been able to google more than one reference which labels the Janjaweed islamists, rather than, say, more secular Arab nationalists. You seem to have more information about the group's ideology, why not add it to the article? For now I have removed the category. regards, High on a tree 18:51, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * Well, actually I just used this list of terrorist groups to make the category. Janjaweed was added there by User:Sesel, so I'll forward the message to him Fuelbottle | Talk 01:36, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Talk:Janjaweed

Businessmen
Any reason your being gender specific? --Tagishsimon

 * Businesspeople?
 * I created Category:American oil industrialists instead. -- Fuelbottle | Talk 02:55, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thank you very much for destroying useful information. There are scads of articles about business people who don't fall into any other category; just deleting the category and replacing with the unehelpful "people of the United States" is wrong. Next time try using the category's talk page first, that's why we have them!! Stan 03:50, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 * I'm not going to bother creating any more categories if you're just going to delete them without discussion first, it's just a waste of my time. Stan 04:02, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * I created Category:Businessmen and just after I created it I got the above message from User:Tagishsimon so I removed the article I had added and added to it shortly after, this was before you had put Aaron Montgomery Ward in that category. I have now created Category:Businesspeople, so it can be discussed there. Fuelbottle | Talk 04:11, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It's OK, was just a moment of irritation. Stan 13:15, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Surge/Urge
Nope, never seen it. Fredrik | talk 10:22, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

cAMP-dependent protein kinase
Hi ! You have added the EC number to many enzymes listed in Wikipedia. Would you mind adding one more to cAMP-dependent protein kinase, please ? I can't find the EC number for this enzyme. Thanks. -- PFHLai 00:23, 2004 Jun 26 (UTC)

Thank you for putting in the EC numbers for PKA. You are so quick. :-) I have a question: How come PKA, PKC and MAPK have the same EC number as "2.7.1.37", but not other serine/threonine-kinases ? I am quite confused ..... -- PFHLai 14:10, 2004 Jun 26 (UTC)
 * Most of the serine/threonine-kinases don't yet have their own individual EC number and use EC 2.7.1.37, which is just a general EC number for serine/threonine-kinases. Some, like phosphorylase kinase, have their own number already and I belive the other serine/threonine-kinases will get their own EC numbers too eventually.
 * I see. I was expecting sth like "2.7.1.37.##" ...  No wonder I couldn't find it.  I'll post this info on the relevant Wikipages.
 * Thanks, again. -- PFHLai 17:16, 2004 Jun 26 (UTC)

title: User talk:Fuelbottle/archive1


text:
Photoreceptor cell

A photoreceptor cell is a specialized type of neuroepithelial cell found in the retina that is capable of visual phototransduction. The great biological importance of photoreceptors is that they convert light (visible electromagnetic radiation) into signals that can stimulate biological processes. To be more specific, photoreceptor proteins in the cell absorb photons, triggering a change in the cell's membrane potential.

There are currently three known types of photoreceptor cells in mammalian eyes: rods, cones, and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. The two classic photoreceptor cells are rods and cones, each contributing information used by the visual system to form an image of the environment, sight. Rods primarily mediate scotopic vision (dim conditions) whereas cones primarily mediate photopic vision (bright conditions), but the processes in each that supports phototransduction is similar. The intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells were discovered during the 1990s. These cells are thought not to contribute to sight directly, but have a role in the entrainment of the circadian rhythm and the pupillary reflex.

Photosensitivity
Each photoreceptor absorbs light according to its spectral sensitivity (absorptance), which is determined by the photoreceptor proteins expressed in that cell. Humans have three classes of cones (L, M, S) that each differ in spectral sensitivity and 'prefer' photons of different wavelengths (see graph). For example, the peak wavelength of the S-cone's spectral sensitivity is approximately 420 nm (nanometers, a measure of wavelength), so it is more likely to absorb a photon at 420 nm than at any other wavelength. Light of a longer wavelength can also produce the same response from an S-cone, but it would have to be brighter to do so.

In accordance with the principle of univariance, a photoreceptor's output signal is proportional only to the number of photons absorbed. The photoreceptors can not measure the wavelength of light that it absorbs and therefore does not detect color on its own. Rather, it is the ratios of responses of the three types of cone cells that can estimate wavelength, and therefore enable color vision.

Histology
Rod and cone photoreceptors are found on the outermost layer of the retina; they both have the same basic structure. Closest to the visual field (and farthest from the brain) is the axon terminal, which releases a neurotransmitter called glutamate to bipolar cells. Farther back is the cell body, which contains the cell's organelles. Farther back still is the inner segment, a specialized part of the cell full of mitochondria. The chief function of the inner segment is to provide ATP (energy) for the sodium-potassium pump. Finally, closest to the brain (and farthest from the field of view) is the outer segment, the part of the photoreceptor that absorbs light. Outer segments are actually modified cilia  that contain disks filled with opsin, the molecule that absorbs photons, as well as voltage-gated sodium channels.

The membranous photoreceptor protein opsin contains a pigment molecule called retinal. In rod cells, these together are called rhodopsin. In cone cells, there are different types of opsins that combine with retinal to form pigments called photopsins. Three different classes of photopsins in the cones react to different ranges of light frequency, a selectivity that allows the visual system to transduce color. The function of the photoreceptor cell is to convert the light information of the photon into a form of information communicable to the nervous system and readily usable to the organism: This conversion is called signal transduction.

The opsin found in the intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells of the retina is called melanopsin. These cells are involved in various reflexive responses of the brain and body to the presence of (day)light, such as the regulation of circadian rhythms, pupillary reflex and other non-visual responses to light. Melanopsin functionally resembles invertebrate opsins.

Retinal mosaic

Most vertebrate photoreceptors are located in the retina. The distribution of rods and cones (and classes thereof) in the retina is called the retinal mosaic. Each human retina has approximately 6 million cones and 120 million rods. At the "center" of the retina (the point directly behind the lens) lies the fovea (or fovea centralis), which contains only cone cells; and is the region capable of producing the highest visual acuity or highest resolution. Across the rest of the retina, rods and cones are intermingled. No photoreceptors are found at the blind spot, the area where ganglion cell fibers are collected into the optic nerve and leave the eye. The distribution of cone classes (L, M, S) are also nonhomogenous, with no S-cones in the fovea, and the ratio of L-cones to M-cones differing between individuals.

The number and ratio of rods to cones varies among species, dependent on whether an animal is primarily diurnal or nocturnal. Certain owls, such as the nocturnal tawny owl, have a tremendous number of rods in their retinae. Other vertebrates will also have a different number of cone classes, ranging from monochromats to pentachromats.

Signaling

The path of a visual signal is described by the phototransduction cascade, the mechanism by which the energy of a photon signals a mechanism in the cell that leads to its electrical polarization. This polarization ultimately leads to either the transmittance or inhibition of a neural signal that will be fed to the brain via the optic nerve. The steps that apply to the phototransductuion pathway from vertebrate rod/cone photoreceptors are:

 * 1) The Vertebrate visual opsin in the disc membrane of the outer segment absorbs a photon, changing the configuration of a retinal Schiff base cofactor inside the protein from the cis-form to the trans-form, causing the retinal to change shape.
 * 2) This results in a series of unstable intermediates, the last of which binds stronger to a G protein in the membrane, called transducin, and activates it. This is the first amplification step – each photoactivated opsin triggers activation of about 100 transducins.
 * 3) Each transducin then activates the enzyme cGMP-specific phosphodiesterase (PDE).
 * 4) PDE then catalyzes the hydrolysis of cGMP to 5' GMP. This is the second amplification step, where a single PDE hydrolyses about 1000 cGMP molecules.
 * 5) The net concentration of intracellular cGMP is reduced (due to its conversion to 5' GMP via PDE), resulting in the closure of cyclic nucleotide-gated Na+ ion channels located in the photoreceptor outer segment membrane.
 * 6) As a result, sodium ions can no longer enter the cell, and the photoreceptor outer segment membrane becomes hyperpolarized, due to the charge inside the membrane becoming more negative.
 * 7) This change in the cell's membrane potential causes voltage-gated calcium channels to close. This leads to a decrease in the influx of calcium ions into the cell and thus the intracellular calcium ion concentration falls.
 * 8) A decrease in the intracellular calcium concentration means that less glutamate is released via calcium-induced exocytosis to the bipolar cell (see below). (The decreased calcium level slows the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which excites the postsynaptic bipolar cells and horizontal cells.)
 * 9) ATP provided by the inner segment powers the sodium-potassium pump. This pump is necessary to reset the initial state of the outer segment by taking the sodium ions that are entering the cell and pumping them back out.

Hyperpolarization
Unlike most sensory receptor cells, photoreceptors actually become hyperpolarized when stimulated; and conversely are depolarized when not stimulated. This means that glutamate is released continuously when the cell is unstimulated, and stimulus causes release to stop. In the dark, cells have a relatively high concentration of cyclic guanosine 3'-5' monophosphate (cGMP), which opens cGMP-gated ion channels. These channels are nonspecific, allowing movement of both sodium and calcium ions when open. The movement of these positively charged ions into the cell (driven by their respective electrochemical gradient) depolarizes the membrane, and leads to the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate.

Unstimulated (in the dark), cyclic-nucleotide gated channels in the outer segment are open because cyclic GMP (cGMP) is bound to them. Hence, positively charged ions (namely sodium ions) enter the photoreceptor, depolarizing it to about −40 mV (resting potential in other nerve cells is usually −65 mV). This depolarization current is often known as dark current.

Bipolar cells
The photoreceptors (rods and cones) transmit to the bipolar cells, which transmit then to the retinal ganglion cells. Retinal ganglion cell axons collectively form the optic nerve, via which they project to the brain.

The rod and cone photoreceptors signal their absorption of photons via a decrease in the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate to bipolar cells at its axon terminal. Since the photoreceptor is depolarized in the dark, a high amount of glutamate is being released to bipolar cells in the dark. Absorption of a photon will hyperpolarize the photoreceptor and therefore result in the release of less glutamate at the presynaptic terminal to the bipolar cell.

Every rod or cone photoreceptor releases the same neurotransmitter, glutamate. However, the effect of glutamate differs in the bipolar cells, depending upon the type of receptor imbedded in that cell's membrane. When glutamate binds to an ionotropic receptor, the bipolar cell will depolarize (and therefore will hyperpolarize with light as less glutamate is released). On the other hand, binding of glutamate to a metabotropic receptor results in a hyperpolarization, so this bipolar cell will depolarize to light as less glutamate is released.

In essence, this property allows for one population of bipolar cells that gets excited by light and another population that gets inhibited by it, even though all photoreceptors show the same response to light. This complexity becomes both important and necessary for detecting color, contrast, edges, etc.

Advantages
Phototransduction in rods and cones is somewhat unusual in that the stimulus (in this case, light) reduces the cell's response or firing rate, different from most other sensory systems in which a stimulus increases the cell's response or firing rate. This difference has important functional consequences:
 * 1) the classic (rod or cone) photoreceptor is depolarized in the dark, which means many sodium ions are flowing into the cell. Thus, the random opening or closing of sodium channels will not affect the membrane potential of the cell; only the closing of a large number of channels, through absorption of a photon, will affect it and signal that light is in the visual field. This system may have less noise relative to sensory transduction schema that increase rate of neural firing in response to stimulus, like touch and olfaction.
 * 2) there is a lot of amplification in two stages of classic phototransduction: one pigment will activate many molecules of transducin, and one PDE will cleave many cGMPs. This amplification means that even the absorption of one photon will affect membrane potential and signal to the brain that light is in the visual field. This is the main feature that differentiates rod photoreceptors from cone photoreceptors. Rods are extremely sensitive and have the capacity of registering a single photon of light, unlike cones. On the other hand, cones are known to have very fast kinetics in terms of rate of amplification of phototransduction, unlike rods.

Difference between rods and cones
Comparison of human rod and cone cells, from Eric Kandel et al. in Principles of Neural Science.

Development
The key events mediating rod versus S cone versus M cone differentiation are induced by several transcription factors, including RORbeta, OTX2, NRL, CRX, NR2E3 and TRbeta2. The S cone fate represents the default photoreceptor program; however, differential transcriptional activity can bring about rod or M cone generation. L cones are present in primates, however there is not much known for their developmental program due to use of rodents in research. There are five steps to developing photoreceptors: proliferation of multi-potent retinal progenitor cells (RPCs); restriction of competence of RPCs; cell fate specification; photoreceptor gene expression; and lastly axonal growth, synapse formation and outer segment growth.

Early Notch signaling maintains progenitor cycling. Photoreceptor precursors come about through inhibition of Notch signaling and increased activity of various factors including achaete-scute homologue 1. OTX2 activity commits cells to the photoreceptor fate. CRX further defines the photoreceptor specific panel of genes being expressed. NRL expression leads to the rod fate. NR2E3 further restricts cells to the rod fate by repressing cone genes. RORbeta is needed for both rod and cone development. TRbeta2 mediates the M cone fate. If any of the previously mentioned factors' functions are ablated, the default photoreceptor is a S cone. These events take place at different time periods for different species and include a complex pattern of activities that bring about a spectrum of phenotypes. If these regulatory networks are disrupted, retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration or other visual deficits may result.

Ganglion cell photoreceptors
Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) are a subset (≈1–3%) of retinal ganglion cells, unlike other retinal ganglion cells, are intrinsically photosensitive due to the presence of melanopsin, a light-sensitive protein. Therefore they constitute a third class of photoreceptors, in addition to rod and cone cells.

In humans the ipRGCs contribute to non-image-forming functions like circadian rhythms, behavior and pupillary light reflex. Peak spectral sensitivity of the receptor is between 460 and 482 nm. However, they may also contribute to a rudimentary visual pathway enabling conscious sight and brightness detection. Classic photoreceptors (rods and cones) also feed into the novel visual system, which may constribute to color constancy. ipRGCs could be instrumental in understanding many diseases including major causes of blindness worldwide like glaucoma, a disease that affects ganglion cells, and the study of the receptor offered potential as a new avenue to explore in trying to find treatments for blindness.

ipRGCs were only definitively detected ipRGCs in humans during landmark experiments in 2007 on rodless, coneless humans. As had been found in other mammals, the identity of the non-rod non-cone photoreceptor in humans was found to be a ganglion cell in the inner retina. The researchers had tracked down patients with rare diseases wiping out classic rod and cone photoreceptor function but preserving ganglion cell function. Despite having no rods or cones the patients continued to exhibit circadian photoentrainment, circadian behavioural patterns, melanopsin suppression, and pupil reactions, with peak spectral sensitivities to environmental and experimental light matching that for the melanopsin photopigment. Their brains could also associate vision with light of this frequency.

Non-human photoreceptors
Rod and cone photoreceptors are common to almost all vertebrates. The pineal and parapineal glands are photoreceptive in non-mammalian vertebrates, but not in mammals. Birds have photoactive cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)-contacting neurons within the paraventricular organ that respond to light in the absence of input from the eyes or neurotransmitters. Invertebrate photoreceptors in organisms such as insects and molluscs are different in both their morphological organization and their underlying biochemical pathways. This article describes human photoreceptors.

title: Photoreceptor cell


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Platform-independent model

A platform-independent model (PIM) in software engineering is a model of a software system or business system that is independent of the specific technological platform used to implement it (e.g. a programming language or a database).

The term platform-independent model is most frequently used in the context of the model-driven architecture approach. This model-driven architecture approach corresponds to the Object Management Group vision of model-driven engineering.

The main idea is that it should be possible to use a model transformation language to transform a platform-independent model into a platform-specific model. In order to achieve this transformation, one can use a language compliant to the newly defined QVT standard. Examples of such languages are VIATRA or ATLAS Transformation Language. It means execution of the program is not restricted by the type of operating system used.

title: Platform-independent model


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The Great McGinty

The Great McGinty is a 1940 American political satire comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff and featuring William Demarest and (in her final screen appearance) Muriel Angelus. It was Sturges's first film as a director; he sold the story to Paramount Pictures for just $10 on condition he direct the film. Sturges received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

For the U.K. release, the film was retitled Down Went McGinty, alluding to the 1889 song.

Plot
Dan McGinty, a bartender in a banana republic, recounts his rise and fall to the bar's dancing girl and a suicidal American customer. The customer was a trusted bank employee who can no longer return to the United States and his family because he is wanted by the law after falling to temptation and stealing from the bank. McGinty is in a similar situation, but in his case it is due to "one crazy minute" of honesty rather than one of dishonesty. In a long flashback, he explains.

McGinty's career begins when he is a tramp who, offered $2 to vote under a false name in a rigged mayoral election, does it thirty-seven times at different precincts. This impresses a local political boss, and although they sometimes almost come to blows with each other, McGinty becomes first one of the boss's enforcers and then his political protégé. During a public campaign for political reform, the boss, who controls all the political parties in the city, decides to have McGinty elected mayor as a "reform" candidate. He says a credible candidate must be married - but McGinty has no one he wants to marry. His secretary then proposes a marriage of convenience, which he accepts. Elected mayor, he continues the political corruption established by the boss, rationalizing that the public still benefits from public works no matter who bribes their way into profiting from them. But then he and his more idealistic wife actually fall in love. He begins to take her views on public service seriously, but says he is not powerful enough to act against the boss in any case.

The boss decides McGinty should be governor of the state, and McGinty is duly elected. Now McGinty feels he is powerful enough and on his inauguration day he tells the boss that they're through with each other. The boss says that if he goes down then he'll take McGinty with him by revealing his part in the corruption. He then becomes angry enough to fire a gun at McGinty inside the governor's mansion, ensuring his prompt arrest.

McGinty and the boss find themselves in adjacent jail cells, from which the boss arranges an escape for them both. The flashback ends with McGinty providing for his wife and her children by telling her by phone about money he has hidden. We finally see that the former political boss is still his boss at the bar, and that they are still given to violent disagreements.

Cast
Cast notes:
 * Credited as “McGinty and the Boss”, Donlevy and Tamiroff reprised their roles in Sturges's 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, which takes place during McGinty's term as governor.
 * This was the first film directed by Preston Sturges, and in it he used many of the actors who became part of his unofficial "stock company", a troupe of character actors within the studio system. Appearing in McGinty are: George Anderson, Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Byron Foulger, Harry Hayden, Esther Howard, Arthur Hoyt, George Melford, Charles R. Moore, Frank Moran, Emory Parnell, Victor Potel, Dewey Robinson, Harry Rosenthal and Robert Warwick.
 * This was the third film written by Preston Sturges that William Demarest appeared in, after Diamond Jim (1935) and Easy Living (1937), and he would go on to do seven others (see note).
 * Jo Ann Sayers was originally scheduled to play Catherine McGinty, and was borrowed from MGM, but she was not found to be satisfactory and was replaced.
 * Tamiroff's malaprop-laced performance inspired the cartoon character Boris Badenov, on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Sturges used Tamiroff's character to skewer one of Hollywood's hoariest practices when he repeatedly pleads, "Don't make me say everything twice, will you?"
 * Heydt had starred in the Broadway production of Sturges's first big success, Strictly Dishonorable (1929).

Production
The Great McGinty had numerous working titles: "The Story of a Man", "The Vagrant", "The Mantle of Dignity", "The Biography of a Bum", and "Down Went McGinty", (which was used for the film's release in the U.K). Sturges had written the original story, "The Story of a Man", in 1933 with Spencer Tracy in mind. According to film historian Kevin Brownlow, Sturges was inspired by the career of William Sulzer, who was impeached and removed from office as governor of New York.

After trying to sell the story to Universal in 1935, and the Saturday Evening Post in 1938 under the title Biography of a Bum, Sturges finally sold it to Paramount on August 19, 1939, for $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it. Paramount agreed, and provided Sturges a budget of $350,000, a three-week shooting schedule, and inexpensive stars to work with.

Production on the film was delayed to allow Akim Tamiroff to do The Way of All Flesh, but it began on December 15, 1939. Sturges contracted pneumonia during filming, and required a nurse to attend to him on the set. Production stopped on January 25, 1940, with one day's shooting left to do, which was accomplished on April 15, after the first cut of the film had already been made.

Release
The Great McGinty premiered in New York City on August 15, 1940, and was generally released on August 23. The movie was not a large hit but was profitable.

It was released on video in the U.S. on April 7, 1988, and re-released on June 30, 1993.

Adaptations
Brian Donlevy appeared in a Philip Morris Playhouse radio adaptation January 23, 1942, on the CBS radio network, the August 27, 1945 episode of The Screen Guild Theater and in the April 20, 1946 episode of Academy Award Theater. It was also adapted to the October 12, 1947 episode of the Ford Theatre and a May 11, 1952 Screen Guild Theater starring Broderick Crawford. Donlevy also appeared in a television adaptation on Lux Video Theatre, broadcast on 28 April 1955, with Thomas Gomez and Jesse White. The director was Earl Eby and Preston Sturges' screenplay was adapted by S.H. Barnett.

Paramount considered a remake of the film starring Bing Crosby in 1950, and one in 1954 with Bob Hope, but decided against both.

Awards and honors
Preston Sturges won the 1940 Academy Award for "Best Original Screenplay" for The Great McGinty, which was named as one of the "10 Best Films of 1940" by both The New York Times and Film Daily.

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
 * 2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
 * The Politician: "If it weren't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics." – Nominated

title: The Great McGinty


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Big Boy

Big Boy, Bigboy or Big Boys may refer to:

Food

 * Big Boy Restaurants, the overall restaurant chain and franchises
 * Bob's Big Boy, the original California-based regional restaurant chain
 * Frisch's Big Boy, the Ohio-based regional restaurant chain
 * Big Boy tomato

People

 * Big Boy (nickname), a list of people
 * Bigboy Matlapeng (born 1958), Botswanan long-distance runner
 * Perrance Shiri (Bigboy Samson Chikerema, 1955–2020), Zimbabwean air marshal

Film and theater

 * Big Boy (musical), a 1925 Broadway production starring Al Jolson
 * Big Boy (film), a 1930 musical comedy starring Al Jolson as a jockey riding the horse Big Boy
 * Big Boys (TV series) a British television sitcom.
 * Big Boys (film), a 2023 coming-of-age drama film directed by Corey Sherman.

Artists

 * Big Boys, a band
 * Arthur Crudup (1905–1974), American singer and guitarist
 * Big Boy Goudie (1899–1964), American jazz musician
 * Arthur "Big Boy" Spires (1912–1990), American blues singer and guitarist
 * Big Boy (rapper) (born 1975), Puerto Rican rap and reggaeton songwriter born Gustavo Roy Diaz in 1975

Albums

 * Big Boy (EP), by Charlotte Cardin
 * Big Boy (eLDee album)

Songs

 * "Big Boy" (song), by The Jackson 5
 * "Big Boy", a song by Sparks in the film Rollercoaster
 * "Big Boys", a song by Elvis Costello from Armed Forces (1979)
 * "Big Boys", a song by Chuck Berry from Chuck (2017)
 * "Big Boys", a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring SZA, Keke Palmer, Ego Nwodim, Punkie Johnson and Cecily Strong

Other uses

 * Big Boy Junction, Tennessee, an unincorporated community
 * Big Boy Peak, a mountain in Idaho
 * Union Pacific Big Boy, a class of steam locomotives
 * Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice, a Dick Tracy character
 * Big Boy (radio host) (born 1969), host on Los Angeles station KRRL
 * Henry Big Boy, a rifle by Henry Repeating Arms

title: Big Boy


text:
Checked baggage

Checked baggage is luggage delivered to an airline or train for transportation in the hold of an aircraft, storage on a coach bus or baggage car of a passenger train. Checked baggage is inaccessible to the passenger during the flight or ride, as opposed to carry-on baggage.

This baggage is limited by airlines with regard to size, weight, and number, usually dependent upon the fare paid, or class of ticket. Baggage exceeding the limits is regarded as excess baggage.

Checked baggage policies
Every airline has its own policies with regard to baggage allowance. Often the policy is also dependent on where the flight goes to or comes from. Tickets executed by multiple airlines may have different rules. Usually the exact conditions of a specific booking are mentioned in the ticket information online.

On short-haul internal flights in the US and Canada, with some exceptions, checked baggage is no longer complimentary with most discounted economy tickets, and must be paid for in addition to the ticket price; a passenger generally has to hold a higher or full fare economy ticket, travel in a premium cabin, hold elite status on an airline, or an airline credit card to be afforded complimentary checked baggage. For long-haul and transoceanic flights, checked baggage is included as standard.

Low-cost carriers such as Ryanair in Europe and AirAsia in Asia charge for checked baggage, whilst for full-service airlines the cost is included in the ticket price.

Passenger-baggage reconciliation
According to the rules of most air transportation authorities, such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and European Union's Joint Aviation Authorities, should passengers flying internationally with checked baggage fail to arrive at the departure gate before the flight is closed, that person's baggage must be retrieved from the aircraft hold before the flight is permitted to take off. For Singapore, passengers with prohibited items are required to take it out from the bags retrieved at the check-in counter, failing which the baggage will be flagged with prohibited items and will be dumped away before boarding. In the United States, this does not apply to domestic flights since all bags are required to go through explosive detection machines (EDS) prior to loading. Making sure passengers board flights onto which they have checked baggage is called "passenger-baggage reconciliation" and is accomplished automatically through two commercially available systems. The security presumption of passenger-baggage reconciliation is that terrorists will not want to kill themselves, and will not board an aircraft if they have caused a bomb to be placed in its hold. This presumption does not hold true of suicide bombers.

Unaccompanied suitcases led to the downing of four flights, when a bomb inside the suitcase exploded:
 * 1983: Gulf Air Flight 771
 * 1985: Air India Flight 182
 * 1988: Pan Am Flight 103
 * 1989: UTA Flight 772

Restrictions
Spare lithium-ion batteries, inclusive of battery packs and powerbanks are not allowed on checked-in luggage.

Excess baggage
Excess baggage is the amount of baggage that is in excess of the free allowance in size, number, or weight permitted for the journey. At the carrier's discretion, this may be carried at an extra charge, but no guarantee is made and it may have to be sent as freight instead. Some airlines impose excess baggage embargoes on certain (usually smaller) routes, indicating that they will accept no (or very little) excess baggage.

title: Checked baggage


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Franco Andrea Bonelli

Franco Andrea Bonelli (10 November 1784 – 18 November 1830) was an Italian ornithologist, entomologist and collector.

Life
Very little is known about the early life of Bonelli: he was born in Cuneo. He was interested from an early age in the fauna which surrounded him, making collecting trips, preparing specimens and noting his observations.

He became a member of the Reale Società Agraria di Torino in 1807 when he presented his first studies relating to the Coleoptera of Piedmont. The high quality of these studies attracted the interest of the naturalists of his time.

In April 1810, George Vat was sent to Turin by the French government to reorganize the University of Turin and begin its fusion with the Impériale University founded by Napoleon. Vat was very impressed by Bonelli's knowledge. Vat encouraged him to further his knowledge by coming to follow courses at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Bonelli took this advice so as to obtain a professor's chair in the new university. In September 1810, he arrived in Paris.

In 1811, Bonelli was finally named professor of zoology at the University of Turin and keeper of the Natural History Museum of Zoology. During his time at the university, he formed one of the largest ornithological collections in Europe.

In 1811, Bonelli wrote a Catalogue of the Birds of Piedmont, in which he described 262 species. In 1815, he discovered the bird Bonelli's warbler (Phylloscopus bonelli), named by Louis Vieillot in 1819. In the same year, he discovered Bonelli's eagle (Hieraaetus fasciatus) which was likewise named by Vieillot in 1822.

The successor of Bonelli at the Turin Museum was Carlo Giuseppe Gené. His son was Cesare Bonelli Italian Minister of War from 1878-1880.

Achievements
Bonelli is most notable for his work on birds and on the beetle family Carabidae. Since he was an early worker on Coleoptera many of his genera later became Families, sub families and tribes. Also, many of his genera survive.

Instances are the:

 * Omophroninae; Pseudomorphinae; Brachininae; Trechinae; Harpalinae; Pseudomorphinae; Siagoninae; Pterostichinae and Scaritinae - Subfamilies
 * Dromiidae 1810 Family
 * Pterostichini Tribe

Works

 * Catalogue des Oiseaux du Piemont (1811).
 * Observations Entomologique. Première partie. Mém. Acad. Sci. Turin 18: 21–78, Tabula Synoptica (1810).
 * Observations entomologiques. Deuxieme partie. Mém. Acad. Sci. Turin 20: 433-484 (1813)

The last two are founding works of entomology, introducing many new taxa.

title: Franco Andrea Bonelli


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Mountain finch

The mountain finches are birds in the genus Leucosticte from the true finch family, Fringillidae. This genus also includes the rosy finches, named from their pinkish plumage.

The genus is a sister to the monotypic Procarduelis containing the Asian dark-breasted rosefinch. These birds are native to Asia and North America and are typically found in barren mountainous regions. Many species eat more insect material than other finches.

There are six species in the genus:

title: Mountain finch


text:
Analyze (imaging software)

Analyze is a software package developed by the Biomedical Imaging Resource (BIR) at Mayo Clinic for multi-dimensional display, processing, and measurement of multi-modality biomedical images. It is a commercial program and is used for medical tomographic scans from magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and positron emission tomography.

The Analyze 7.5 file format has been widely used in the functional neuroimaging field, and other programs such as SPM, FreeSurfer, AIR, MRIcro and Mango are able to read and write the format. The files can be used to store voxel-based volumes. One data item consists of two files: One file with the actual data in a binary format with the filename extension  and another file (header with filename extension  ) with information about the data such as voxel size and number of voxels in each dimension. SPM has defined changes to this format, among other things the voxel ordering within the file.

title: Analyze (imaging software)


text:
Explicate

Explicate can refer to:
 * Explication, in analytic philosophy and literary theory, the "unfolding" and "making clear" the meaning of things
 * Explicature, what is explicitly said with an utterance, often supplemented with contextual information
 * Explicate order, a concept in quantum theory

title: Explicate