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South African Air Force

The South African Air Force (SAAF) is the air warfare branch of South African National Defence Force, with its headquarters in Pretoria. The South African Air Force was established on 1 February 1920. The Air Force saw service in World War II and the Korean War. From 1966, the SAAF was involved in providing infantry support in the low-intensity Border War in Angola, South-West Africa and Rhodesia. As the war progressed, the intensity of air operations increased, until in the late 1980s when the SAAF were compelled to fly fighter missions against Angolan aircraft in order to maintain tactical air superiority. On conclusion of the Border War in 1990, aircraft numbers were severely reduced due to economic pressures as well as the cessation of hostilities with neighbouring states.

First World War
After a visit to observe the 1912 military manoeuvres in Europe, Brig. Gen. C.F. Beyers (who was then Commandant-General of the Defence Force) gave an extremely positive report on the future use of aircraft for military purposes to General Smuts. Smuts initiated an arrangement with private fliers in the Cape and established a flying school at Alexandersfontein near Kimberley, known as the Paterson Aviation Syndicate School, to train pilots for the proposed South African Aviation Corps. Flying training commenced in 1913 with students who excelled on the course being sent to the Central Flying School at Upavon in Great Britain for further training. The first South African military pilot qualified on 2 June 1914.

On the outbreak of the First World War, the Union Defence Force had realised the urgent need for air support which brought about the establishment of the South African Aviation Corps (SAAC) on 29 January 1915. Aircraft were purchased from France (Henri Farman F-27) while the building of an airfield at Walvis Bay commenced in earnest in order to support operations against German forces in German South West Africa. By June 1915 the SAAC was deployed to its first operational airfield at Karibib in German South West Africa in support of Gen. Botha's South African ground forces. The SAAC flew reconnaissance and leaflet dropping missions from Karibib and later from Omaruru, where improvised bombing missions were added when pilots started dropping hand grenades and rudimentary bombs by hand. On 9 July 1915, the German forces capitulated and most of the pilots and aircraft of the SAAC were sent to Britain in support of the Imperial war effort.

Although the SAAC remained active, its activities were limited to ground training at the Cape Town Drill Hall, while the pilots who had been detached to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) were grouped to form No. 26 Squadron RFC and later becoming an independent squadron on 8 October 1915. No. 26 Squadron was equipped with Henri Farman F-27's and B.E.2c's and was shipped to Kenya in support of the war effort in German East Africa, landing in Mombasa on 31 January 1916. The squadron flew reconnaissance and observer missions throughout the campaign until February 1918 when the squadron returned to the UK via Cape Town and arrived at Blandford Camp on 8 July 1918 and was disbanded the same day. While the SAAC were engaged in German South West Africa and 26 Sqdn RFC in East Africa, many South Africans traveled to the United Kingdom to enlist with the Royal Flying Corps. The number of South Africans in the RFC eventually reached approximately 3,000 men and suffered 260 active-duty fatalities over the Somme during the war. Forty-six pilots became fighter aces.

Founding and the inter-war period
On conclusion of the First World War, the British Government donated surplus aircraft plus spares and sufficient equipment to provide the nucleus of a fledgling air force to each of its Dominions. As part of this donation, which was to become known as the Imperial Gift, South Africa received a total of 113 aircraft from both the British Government (100 aircraft) as well as from other sources (13 aircraft).

On 1 February 1920 Colonel Pierre van Ryneveld was appointed as the Director Air Service with the task of forming an air force, the date is used to mark the founding of the South African Air Force. In December 1920 the South African National insignia was added to aircraft for the first time. An Orange, Green, Red and Blue roundel was added to an Avro 504K for trial purposes but the colours were found to be unsuitable and were replaced with a Green, Red, Lemon, Yellow and Blue roundel in December 1921. These colours remained until 1927 when they were replaced with the Orange, White and Blue roundels.

The first operational deployment of the newly formed Air Force was to quell internal dissent, when in 1922 a miner's strike on the Johannesburg gold mines turned violent and led to the declaration of martial law. 1 Squadron was called to fly reconnaissance missions and to bombard the strikers' positions. Sorties in support of the police amounted to 127 flight hours between 10 and 15 March and this inauspicious start for the SAAF led to two pilot losses, two wounded and two aircraft lost to ground fire. The SAAF was again deployed to suppress the Bondelzwart Rebellion at Kalkfontein between 29 May and 3 July 1922.

Second World War
At the outbreak of the Second World War, South Africa had no naval vessels and the UDF's first priority was to ensure the safety of the South African coastal waters as well as the strategically important Cape sea-route. For maritime patrol operations, the SAAF took over all 29 passenger aircraft of South African Airways: 18 Junkers Ju 86Z-ls for maritime patrols and eleven Junkers Ju 52s for transport purposes. SAAF maritime patrols commenced on 21 September 1939 with 16 Squadron flying three JU-86Z's from Walvis Bay. had been established, eventually consisting of 6, 10, 22, 23, 25, 27 and 29 Squadrons.

By the end of the Second World War in August 1945, SAAF aircraft (in conjunction with British and Dutch aircraft stationed in South Africa) had intercepted 17 enemy ships, assisted in the rescue of 437 survivors of sunken ships, attacked 26 of the 36 enemy submarines that operated around the South African coast, and flown 15,000 coastal patrol sorties.

East Africa
In December 1939, The Duke of Aosta had sent a report to Mussolini recording the state of chronic unpreparedness of the Allied Forces in East Africa. The collapse of France in 1940 had prompted Mussolini to join the war on the side of the Axis and as a result, air force elements were moved to forward positions in occupied Ethiopia to mount air attacks on Allied forces before they could be re-inforced. These deployments prompted Allied action and on 13 May 1940, 1 Squadron pilots were sent to Cairo to take delivery of 18 Gloster Gladiators and to fly them south to Kenya, for operations in East Africa. 11 Squadron, equipped with Hawker Hartebeests, followed to Nairobi on 19 May 1940 and were joined by the Junkers Ju 86s of 12 Squadron on 22 May 1940.

The Kingdom of Italy declared war on 10 June 1940 and on the following day, the Ju 86s of 12 Squadron led the first air attack by the SAAF in the Second World War. During the campaign, numerous SAAF aircraft were involved in air combat with the Italian Regia Aeronautica and provided air support to South African and Allied forces in the ground war. By December 1940, ten SAAF squadrons plus 34 Flight, with a total of 94 aircraft, were operational in East Africa (1 Squadron, 2 Squadron, 3 Squadron, 11 Squadron, 12 Squadron, 14 Squadron, 40 Squadron, 41 Squadron, 50 Squadron and 60 Squadron). During this campaign, the SAAF formed a Close Support Flight of four Gladiators and four Hartebeests, with an autonomous air force commander operating with the land forces. This was the precursor of the Desert Air Force/Tactical Air Force "cab-rank" technique which were used extensively for close air support during 1943–1945. The last air combat took place on 29 October and the Italian forces surrendered on 27 November 1941. A reduced SAAF presence was maintained in East Africa for coastal patrols until May 1943.

Western Desert and North Africa
SAAF fighter, bomber, and reconnaissance squadrons played a key role in the Western Desert and North African campaigns from 1941 to 1943. One memorable feat was the Boston bombers of 12 and 24 Squadrons dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Axis forces pushing the Eighth Army back towards Egypt during the "Gazala Gallop" in mid-1942. SAAF bombers continually harassed retreating forces towards the Tunisian border after the Second Battle of El Alamein; the South African fighters of No. 223 Wing RAF helped the Desert Air Force gain air superiority over Axis air forces. Between April 1941 and May 1943, the eleven SAAF squadrons flew 33,991 sorties and destroyed 342 enemy aircraft.

Conditions were however not ideal and pilots and crew were required to operate under critical conditions at times. Pilots were frequently sent home to the Union after gaining experience and did not return for many months, after which conditions in the desert had changed significantly and they were required to regain experience on different aircraft, different tactics and operations from different bases. There were cases where experienced fighter pilots were sent back to the Western Desert as bomber pilots for their second tour – compounding the lack of continuity and experience. The South Africans did however command the respect of their German adversaries.

The South Africans had the distinction of dropping the first and last bombs in the African conflict – the first being on 11 June 1940 on Moyale in Ethiopia and the last being on the Italian 1st Army in Tunisia. The SAAF also produced a number of SAAF Second World War air aces in the process, including John Frost and Marmaduke Pattle.

Madagascar
In fear of Japanese occupation and subsequent operations in the Indian Ocean in close proximity to South African sea lanes, Field Marshal Smuts encouraged the preemptive Allied occupation of the island of Madagascar. After much debate and further encouragement by General de Gaulle (who was urging for a Free French operation against Madagascar), Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff agreed to an invasion by means of a strong fleet and adequate air support. In March and April 1942, the SAAF had been conducting reconnaissance flights over Diego-Suarez and 32, 36 and 37 Coastal Flights were withdrawn from South African maritime patrol operations and sent to Lindi on the Indian Ocean coast of Tanzania, with an additional eleven Bristol Beauforts and six Martin Marylands to provide ongoing reconnaissance and close air support for the planned operation – to be known as Operation Ironclad.

During the amphibious / air assault carried out by the Royal Navy and Air Force on 5 May, the Vichy French Air Force consisting mainly of Morane fighters and Potez bombers had attacked the Allied fleet but had been neutralised by the Fleet Air Arm aircraft from the two aircraft carriers. Those remaining aircraft not destroyed were withdrawn by the French and flown south to other airfields on the island. Once the main airfield at Arrachart aerodrome in Diego-Suarez had been secured (13 May 1942), the SAAF Air Component flew from Lindi to Arrachart. The air component consisted of thirty-four aircraft (6 Marylands, 11 Beaufort Bombers, 12 Lockheed Lodestars and 6 Ju 52's transports). By September 1942, the South African ground forces committed to Ironclad had been party to the capturing the southern half of Madagascar as well as the small island of Nossi Be with the SAAF air component supporting these operations. During the campaign which ended with an armistice on 4 November 1942, SAAF aircraft flew a total of 401 sorties with one pilot killed in action, one killed in an accident and one succumbing to disease. Seven aircraft were lost, only one as a result of enemy action.

Sicilian and Italian campaigns
By the end of May 1943, the SAAF had two Wings and sixteen squadrons in the Middle East and North Africa with 8,000 men. With the end of the North African campaign, the SAAF role underwent change – becoming more active in fighter bomber, bomber and PR operations as opposed to the fighter role performed in the desert.

Five SAAF squadrons were designated to support the July 1943 invasion of Sicily – 1 Squadron operated combat air patrols over the beaches for the Operation Husky landings while 2, 4 and 5 Squadrons provided fighter bomber support during the Sicilian campaign. 30 Squadron (flying as No. 223 Squadron RAF during the campaign) provided light bomber support from Malta and 60 Squadron was responsible for photo reconnaissance flights in support of all Allied forces on the island. After successfully invading the island, a further three squadrons were moved to Sicily and the eight squadrons on the island were tasked with supporting the invasion of Italy: 12 and 24 Squadrons were responsible for medium bomber missions to "soften up" the enemy prior to the invasion while 40 Sqn was responsible for tactical photo-reconnaissance. 1 Squadron provided fighter cover for the 3 September 1943 landings while 2 and 4 Squadrons were responsible for bomber escort.

The South African Air Force participated in the Allied campaigns in the following theaters:

 * Italy (1943–45): 2, 3 7 and 8 Wings fought in operations to liberate Italy from German occupation.
 * Yugoslavia (1943–44): 7 Wing and 8 Wing supported partisan operations against German occupation forces.
 * Balkans (1944–45): Some squadrons served with the Balkan Air Force in operations over Hungary, Romania and Albania.
 * Warsaw (1944): 2 Wing air-supplied Warsaw during Warsaw Uprising.
 * Greece (1944): 2 Wing supported British operations to liberate Greece and suppress the communist coup.

Mobile Air Force Depot
The Mobile Air Force Depot (MAFD) was based in Pretoria. Its role during the Second World War was as a location where Air Crew could be stationed, on stand-by, prior to being posted to a more active squadron.

Berlin airlift
Post-war, the SAAF also took part in the Berlin airlift of 1948 with 20 aircrews flying Royal Air Force Dakotas. 4,133 tons of supplies were carried in 1,240 missions flown.

Korean War
At the outbreak of the Korean War, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for the withdrawal of North Korean forces in South Korea. A request was also made to all UN members for assistance. After a special Cabinet meeting on 20 July 1950 the Union Government announced that due to the long distance between South Africa and Korea, direct ground-based military participation in the conflict was impractical and unrealistic but that a SAAF fighter squadron would be made available to the UN effort. The 50 officers and 157 other ranks of 2 Sqn SAAF sailed from Durban on 26 September 1950 – they had been selected from 1,426 members of the Permanent Force who had initially volunteered for service. This initial contingent was commanded by Cmdt S. van Breda Theron DSO, DFC, AFC and included many World War II SAAF veterans. The squadron was moved to Johnson Air Base near Tokyo on 25 September 1950 for conversion training on the F-51D Mustangs supplied by the US Air Force.

On completion of conversion training, the squadron was deployed as one of the four USAF 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing squadrons and on 16 November 1950 an advance detachment consisting of 13 officers and 21 other ranks (including the Squadron Commander and his four Flight Commanders who made the crossing in their own F-51D Mustangs) left Japan for Pusan East (K-9) Air Base within the Pusan Perimeter in Korea to fly with the USAF pilots in order to familiarise themselves with the local operational conditions. On the morning of 19 November 1950, Cmdt Theron and Capt G.B. Lipawsky took off with two USAF pilots to fly the first SAAF combat sorties of the Korean War from K-9 and K-24 airfields at Pyongyang.

On 30 November the squadron was moved further south to K-13 airfield due to North Korean and Chinese advances. It was again moved even further south after the UN forces lost additional ground to the North Koreans to K-10 airfield situated on the coast close to the town of Chinhae. This was to be the squadron's permanent base for the duration of their first Korean deployment. During this period (while equipped with F-51D Mustangs) the squadron flew 10,373 sorties and lost 74 aircraft out of the total 95 allocated. Twelve pilots were killed in action, 30 missing and four wounded.

In January 1953 the squadron returned to Japan for conversion to the USAF F-86F Sabre fighter-bombers. The first Sabre mission was flown on 16 March 1953 from the K-55 airfield in South Korea, being the first SAAF jet mission flown. 2 squadron was led by ace pilot, Major Jean de Wet from AFB Langebaanweg. The squadron was tasked with fighter sweeps along the Yalu and Chong-Chong rivers as well as close air support attack missions. The squadron flew 2,032 sorties in the Sabres losing four out of the 22 aircraft supplied.

The war ended on 27 July 1953, when the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. During the first phase of the war, the main task of the squadron Mustangs was the interdiction of enemy supply routes which not only accounted for approximately 61.45% of SAAF combat sorties, but which reached an early peak from January to May 1951 (78% and 82%). A typical interdiction mission was an armed reconnaissance patrol usually undertaken by flights of two or four aircraft armed with two napalm bombs, 127 mm rockets and 12.7 mm machine guns. Later, after the introduction of the Sabres, the squadron was also called on to provide counter-air missions flying as fighter sweeps and interceptions against MiG-15's, but interdiction and close air support remained the primary mission. Losses were 34 SAAF pilots killed, eight taken prisoner (including the future Chief of the Air Force, General D Earp) with 74 Mustangs and 4 Sabres lost. Pilots and men of the squadron received a total of 797 medals including 2 Silver Stars, the highest US military award given to foreigners, 3 Legions of Merit, 55 Distinguished Flying Crosses and 40 Bronze Stars. In recognition of their association with 2 Squadron, the OC of 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing issued a policy directive "that all retreat ceremonies shall be preceded by the introductory bars of the South African national anthem. All personnel will render the honour to this anthem as our own."

On conclusion of hostilities, the Sabres were returned to the USAF and the squadron returned to South Africa in October 1953. During this period, the Union Defence Forces were reorganised into individual services and the SAAF became an arm of service in its own right, under an Air Chief of Staff (who was renamed "Chief of the Air Force" in 1966). It adopted a blue uniform, to replace the army khaki it had previously worn.

Rhodesian Bush War
The SAAF loaned aircraft and flew occasional covert reconnaissance, transport and combat sorties in support of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force (RRAF; renamed in 1970 as the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF)) and the rest of the Rhodesian Security Forces from 1966 onwards. Notable operations included Operation Uric and Operation Vanity in 1979.

Border War
From 1966 to 1989, the SAAF was committed to the Border War, which was fought in northern South West Africa and surrounding states. At first, it provided limited air support to police operations against the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (the military wing of SWAPO, which was fighting to end South African rule of South West Africa). Operations intensified after the defence force took charge of the war in 1974. In July 1964, South Africa placed a development contract with Thomson-CSF for a mobile, all-weather, low-altitude SAM system after a South African order for the Bloodhound SAM system was refused by the UK government. This became the Crotale, or 'Cactus' in South African service. The South African government paid 85 per cent of the development costs of the system with the balance being paid for by France. The system was in service with 120 Squadron SAAF from 1970 until the late 1980s without any successful combat shootdowns.

The SAAF provided air support to the army during the 1975–76 Angola campaign, and in the many cross-border operations that were carried out against PLAN bases in Angola and Zambia from 1977 onwards.

During the bush war period, South Africa manufactured six air-deliverable tactical nuclear weapons of the "gun-type" design between 1978 and 1993. Each of the devices contained 55 kilograms of HEU with an estimated yield of 10–18 kilotons designed for delivery by Blackburn Buccaneer or English Electric Canberra aircraft. See History of the South African Air Force.

At least two MIG-21s of the Angolan Air Force were shot down by 3 Squadron SAAF Mirage F1s in 1981 and 1982.

From 1980 to 1984, the command structure was reorganised. Instead of units of the separate Strike Command, Transportation Command SAAF, and Maritime Air Command SAAF often being based at the same base but responsible to different chains of command, regional commands were established. Main Threat Air Command (MTAC) was made responsible for the northern half of the country, and Southern Air Command SAAF and Western Air Command SAAF for those areas. MTAC was co-located with the Air Force Command Post at Pretoria, with 20 subordinate squadrons (8 reserve). Southern Air Command at Silvermine was allocated nine squadrons (three reserve), based at AFS Port Elizabeth, Cape Town Airport, and AFB Ysterplaat, including 16 Squadron SAAF (Alouettes), 25 Squadron flying Dakotas from Ysterplaat, 27 Squadron SAAF (Piaggio 166), 35 Squadron SAAF (Avro Shackleton), and 88 Maritime Training School. Western Air Command at Windhoek relied on aircraft temporarily detached from MTAC and SAC. Airspace Control Command, Training Command and Air Logistics Command remained largely unchanged.

The SAAF was also heavily involved in the 1987–88 Angola campaign, before the New York Accords that ended the conflict. The international arms embargo imposed against the then-apartheid government of South Africa, meant that the SAAF was unable to procure modern fighter aircraft to compete with the sophisticated Soviet-supplied air defence network and Cuban Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-23s fielded in the latter part of this conflict. South Africa was able to secure the transfer of technology from Israel through the Israel–South Africa Agreement, thereby allowing the Cheetah derivative of the IAI Kfir to be produced.

From 1990 with the perceived reduction in threat, SAAF operational strength began to be reduced. The first short term steps entailed the withdrawal of several obsolete aircraft types from service, such as the Canberra B(1)12, the Super Frelon and Westland Wasp helicopters, the Kudu light aircraft and the P-166s Albatross coastal patrol aircraft. Other initial measures included the downgrading of Air Force Base Port Elizabeth and the disbanding of 12, 16, 24, 25, and 27 Squadrons. Two Commando squadrons – 103 Squadron SAAF at AFB Bloemspruit and 114 Squadron SAAF at AFB Swartkop – were also disbanded.

Air Defence Artillery Group
The 250 Air Defence Artillery Group, also known as the 250 Air Defence Unit (ADU), was a group of air defence squadrons that operated under the control of the South African Air Force tasked with airbase defence. The group consisted of 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 and 130 Squadrons and had its own active Citizen Force component. These squadrons were equipped with the Tigercat mobile surface-to-air missile system, The Cactus surface-to-air missile system, the ZU-23-2 23mm Anti-Aircraft Gun and the Bofors 40 mm gun.

120 Squadron mainly operated the Cactus missile system operationally in platoons from 1973 until the late 1980s with each platoon consisting of one Acquisition and Co-ordination Unit (ACU) and two or three firing units, with a battery having two platoons. 121 Squadron, 123 Squadron and later 129 Squadron mainly operated the Tigercat mobile surface-to-air missile system. In South African service it was given the name "Hilda". 123 Squadron was deployed for Operation Savannah in 1975 to provide air defence for Air Force Base Grootfontein in South-West Africa. 129 Squadron was deployed to Air Force Base Ondangwa for the remainder of the Border War to provide air defence for the logistics base and airfield there, as it was an important staging area for the South African Defence Force for their operations in neighbouring Angola.

The Air Defence Artillery Group was disbanded in 1992 after the Cactus missile system was retired, with only remnants of 120 Squadron, operating the upgraded Cactus Container system, becoming a part of Air Command Control Unit at Snake Valley opposite Air Force Base Swartkop on the eastern side of the shared runway. 120 Squadron was finally disbanded in 2002 after these systems were retired.

Major operations
During the bush war, the SAAF lost a total of 22 aircraft (1974–1989) to enemy action. A further 11 aircraft were lost in the operational area due to pilot error or malfunction.

Since 1994
After the first South African multi-racial elections in 1994, the SAAF became part of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). The South African Air Force is currently considered to be the most effective air force in sub-Sahara Africa despite the loss of capability as a consequence of defence cuts after the end of the Border War.

These financial cuts have brought about a number of severe operational limitations, compounded by the loss of experienced air-crews. This has placed strain on the bringing new types of aircraft into service, specifically the Gripen, Hawk, Rooivalk, A 109 and Lynx. The cancellation of the SAAF participation and procurement of the A400M in November 2009 has denied the SAAF the strategic airlift capability needed for domestic, regional and continent-wide transport operations. There is no clear indication as yet regarding how the heavy/long-range airlift gap will be addressed.

Current air combat capabilities are limited to the Gripen multi-role fighter and the Rooivalk combat support helicopter although in insufficient number to allow regional deployments while maintaining national air security and current training commitments. To overcome this shortfall, the SAAF has designated the Hawk Mk 120 trainers for additional tactical reconnaissance and weapon delivery platforms for targets designated by the Gripens. Financial constraints have further limited flying hours on the newly acquired aircraft; it was planned to keep Gripen pilots current flying the lower cost Hawk aircraft with "Gripenised" cockpits. It was reported in 2013 that the Gripen fleet wasn't fully manned with some pilots redesignated as reserve pilots and others being assigned instructor roles at Air Force Base Makhado. The SAAF stated that the Gripen fleet is being rotated between short-term storage and active use by the regular active pilots to spread the limited flying hours among the whole fleet. During this same period it was reported that 18 of the SAAF's AgustaWestland AW109 helicopters have been grounded due to an accident involving one of the helicopters several months prior and a lack of funds for regular maintenance, however in November 2013 after five months of not flying, the grounding of the helicopters was lifted after more funds became available. Despite all its setbacks and financial woes, the South African Air Force continues to undertake and complete the tasks and obligations assigned to it. The SAAF still plays a vital role in national security operations, United Nations peacekeeping missions, and other foreign deployments. the Air force has several aircraft, aircrew and ground crew on foreign deployments. Three Rooivalk attack helicopters from 16 Squadron SAAF and five or six 15, 17, 19 and/or 22 Squadron SAAF's Oryx transport helicopters were stationed in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). The Rooivalk and Oryx Helicopters are part of the South African contribution to the 3000-strong United Nations Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) and they have flown several sorties against rebel factions who are operating in North Kivu province, particularly the notorious M23 militia group who were routed from their strongholds after an offensive by the UN Force Intervention Brigade and the Military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Several 28 Squadron SAAF C-130BZ Hercules aircraft also regularly flew to Sudan, DR Congo and Uganda, including Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Goma, Beni, Bunia and Entebbe, as Entebbe is the logistic hub for MONUSCO in the eastern DR Congo. They mainly fly missions ranging from logistic support for SA National Defence Force continental peacekeeping and peace support operations, humanitarian operations, support to the South African Army, and general airlift. A C-47TP Turbo Dakota from 35 Squadron SAAF permanently based in the Mozambican city of Pemba to provide maritime patrol capability for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) counter-piracy mission in the Mozambique Channel, Operation Copper. There is also a Super Lynx from 22 Squadron SAAF operating from the South African Navy frigates whenever they are stationed in the Mozambican channel. The air force also assists Operation Corona from "time to time" by deploying either AgustaWestland AW109 or Atlas Oryx helicopters to its borders.

During the 2010 FIFA World Cup the South African National Defence Force was deployed in order to provide security for the event. The air force deployed armed Gripen Fighter aircraft and Hawk advanced trainer aircraft to conduct air patrols to monitor air traffic. Rooivalk, Atlas Oryx and AgustaWestland AW109 helicopters were also deployed during the event.

It was also reported by the Afrikaans daily newspaper, Beeld, that on 23 March 2013 when the Séléka rebel group attempted to take power in the Central African Republic by invading the capital of Bangui, four armed Gripen Fighter aircraft from 2 Squadron SAAF were sent along with a C-130BZ transport aircraft (reportedly carrying a stock of bombs) in order to provide close air support to the 200-strong South African garrison who were still fighting in the city. The aircraft were, however, recalled shortly after, as the South Africans and the rebels agreed to a ceasefire and rather opted to withdraw peacefully from the country. Several flights made by C-130BZ aircraft evacuated the bodies of the 13 South African soldiers who were killed and the 27 who were wounded during the Séléka offensive and also the remainder of the deployed soldiers and their equipment after the ceasefire was declared. The deployment of the Gripen fighter aircraft indicated that if the situation called for it, the country will deploy its fighter aircraft in order to ensure the protection of its assets.

The air force was also tasked with maintaining national security before and during the funeral procession of former president Nelson Mandela in December 2013. Several SAAF helicopters conducted patrols over Pretoria while the former president's body was lying in state in the days leading up to the funeral. Gripen fighter aircraft, armed with IRIS-T missiles and Digital Joint Reconnaissance Pods, conducted combat air patrols to enforce a no-fly zone for several days over certain areas in Gauteng province and later during the funeral itself over Qunu, in the Eastern Cape. Two Gripens were also tasked with escorting a C-130BZ aircraft, which was carrying President Mandela's body from Air Force Base Waterkloof to the Mthatha Airport. Five Gripens, three Oryx helicopters and the 6 Pilatus PC-7's of the Silver Falcons performed a flypast in a final salute to the late former president.

On 12 September 2014, a church hostel collapsed within the compound of the Synagogue, Church of All Nations in Lagos, Nigeria. More than 100 persons died in the collapse, among them 85 South Africans. President Jacob Zuma ordered the South African Air Force to assist with the repatriation of survivors and victims, and the first 25 survivors were flown to South Africa in a specially adapted SAAF Hercules C-130 on 22 September 2014. Due to a lack of airlift capacity, an Antonov aircraft from Maximus Aero was chartered in order to repatriate the bodies of 74 victims, which arrived on 15 November 2014. The last 11 bodies were finally repatriated using an SAAF C-130 on 6 February 2015. The delay in repatriating the last bodies was due to authorities having to wait for DNA test results in order to positively identify the remaining victims.

In spite of its budget concerns, the air force still continues to participate in and support annual air and defence shows and capability demonstrations such as the Rand show, the Zwartkops airshow and the Africa Aerospace and Defence Expo.

In 2002 Musa Mbhokota became the SAAF's first black jet fighter pilot. In March 2017 Nandi Zama became for first black woman in SAAF history to command and fly a Hercules C-130 cargo plane.

As of 2021, Department of Defence officials informed Parliament that a reduced availability of aircraft was negatively affecting hours flown. Helicopter systems were said to have "a critical spares shortage" with similar problems also confronting the transport and combat aircraft and systems. The parliamentary Defence and Military Veterans (PCDMV) committee was told that "Constrained funding is also affecting the ability to provide enough serviceable aircraft, although serious efforts are being made to ensure availability is increased within the reduced budget". During the first quarter of the 2021/22 financial year, the air force flew 3,560.8 hours, including 2,717 Force Preparation hours, 636.7 Force Employment hours; and 207.1 VIP flying hours. As of late 2021, all the Air Force's Gripen fighter aircraft were grounded. However, in 2022 the Air Force concluded a deal with Saab to return 13 of the aircraft to service over a three-year period.

Rank insignia
In 2002 the Air Force rank insignia were changed from one which was shared with the Army to a new pattern based on stripes. The Air Force stated that this was "in order to bring it more in line with international forms of rank". The General ranks initially had a thick stripe (thicker than the Senior Officer rank stripe) with thin stripes above, but this was changed shortly after implementation to the crossed sword and baton insignia typical of Commonwealth Generals. The reason for the change so soon after implementation of the new insignia was presumed to be confusion in differentiating between Generals and Senior Officers.

 * Officers

Note: The Rank of Master Chief Warrant Officer is only used when the Sergeant Major of the Air Force is also the Sergeant Major of the Defence Force.
 * Warrant officers

 * Other ranks

SAAF medals and decorations
A new set of emblems, medals and decorations were introduced on 29 April 2003, although medals issued by the SADF can still be worn.

Command and control units
The various Forward Air Command Posts and Air Operations Teams were closed on 31 December 2003 and integrated in the new Joint Regional Task Groups under command of Chief of Joint Operations.

Retired
Previous notable aircraft operated by the SAAF include Atlas Cheetah, Mirage F1, Mirage III, C-130F Hercules.

Retired aircraft see: List of aircraft of the South African Air Force.

Weapon systems
For weapon system no longer in use, see List of obsolete weapon systems of the South African Air Force.

Air Force Mobile Deployment Wing
The Air Force Mobile Deployment Wing (AFMDW) provides combat ready, integrated and deployable air support capabilities to the South African National Defence Force. The AFMDW consists of 18 Deployment Support Unit, Mobile Communications Unit, 140 Squadron and 142 Squadron, 500 Squadron and 501 Squadron.

Reserves
The Air Force Conventional Reserves are a pool of reserve posts created to serve the SAAF and augment regular units as and when needed. All trades in the SAAF are represented in the reserves, e.g. pilots, security squadron personnel etc. The Air Force Territorial Reserve currently consists of nine squadrons of privately owned aircraft operated by reserve pilots on behalf of the SAAF who assist in light transport and observation roles.

Air Force Memorial
The South African Air Force Memorial is a memorial to South African Air Force members who have died whilst in service of the South African Air Corps and the South African Air Force from 1915 to the present. The memorial is located at Swartkop outside Pretoria.

Air Force Museum
The South African Air Force Museum houses, exhibits and restores material related to the history of the South African Air Force. It is spread across three locations; AFB Swartkop outside Pretoria, AFB Ysterplaat in Cape Town and at the Port Elizabeth airport. Swartkop is the largest of the three museum locations, occupying at least five hangars and contains a number of Atlas Cheetahs as well as a Cheetah C flight simulator.

Silver Falcons
The Silver Falcons are the aerobatic display team of the South African Air Force and are based at Air Force Base Langebaanweg near Cape Town. The Silver Falcons fly the Pilatus PC-7 Mk II Astra, the basic trainer of the SA Air Force in a 5-ship routine. The main purpose is to enhance the image of the South African Air Force, encourage recruitment and instill national pride through public display.

Radar coverage
The South African Air Force operates several radar systems within the country's borders and can deploy radar systems internationally to support external South African operations such as during UN peacekeeping operations. The Air Force's radar equipment is also supplemented by radar equipment and data from the other branches of the South African National Defence Force, the South African Weather Service and several civilian airport radars who cooperate with the Air Force to monitor air traffic.

Each air force base is equipped with air field radar approach systems (AFRAS) that monitors air traffic within the airfield's operational sector 24 hours per day. These systems include primary approach radars, precision approach radars, and secondary surveillance radar and display systems. These systems have a range of more than 120 km. The AFRAS are maintained by Saab Grintek as well as Tellumat. Air Force Base Overberg in the Western Cape is also equipped with a Doppler tracking radar and is used primarily by the Test Flight and Development Centre SAAF and the Denel Overberg Test Range for aircraft and missile development tests. In the Western Cape there is a radar station at Kapteinskop, jointly used by Air Force Base Langebaanweg and Cape Town International Airport to monitor air traffic. Air Force Base Makhado has another radar station located in the mountains to the north of the main base complex apart from its AFRAS radar (located in the main base itself).

The Air Force maintains six Umlindi (Zulu: "Watchman") AR3D long-range early warning radar systems (British AR3D radar systems extensively upgraded by the South African company, Tellumat) which are operated by 140 Squadron SAAF as part of the South African Air Force Mobile Deployment Wing. There are two static radar stations located in Lephalale (Ellisras) and Mariepskop, near Air Force Base Hoedspruit. The other systems are mobile and can be deployed to any part of the country to support operations with the use of 20-ton 8x8 MAN trucks. Each of these systems has a range of 500 km but can only track aircraft flying above 700 metres. The static radars are usually linked to two Air Force sector control centres (SCC), the Lowveld Airspace Control Sector and the Bushveld Airspace Control Sector, while the mobile radar have their own mobile sector control centres (MSCC).

To mitigate this lack of low-level radar coverage, the Air Force also operates four Plessey Tactical Mobile Radar (TMR) systems (in service with 142 Squadron SAAF). These systems can cover altitudes below 700 metres, but they have a shorter range than the Umlindi systems, at 150 km. The deployment of these systems require the use of a MAN 8×8 truck (one per system), one or two light vehicles for command and control purposes, a water tanker, a diesel bowser and a technical workshop vehicle. These systems can operate 24 hours a day with less than 20 personnel (including personnel from other AFMDW units like the Mobile Communications Unit and 501 Squadron).

The South African Air Force's Saab JAS 39 Gripen fighter aircraft are also equipped with PS-05/A pulse-doppler X-band multi-mode radar, developed by Ericsson and GEC-Marconi. This all-weather radar system is capable of locating and identifying air targets 120 km away and surface targets 70 km away. It is also able to automatically track multiple targets in the upper and lower spheres, on the ground and sea or in the air. It can guide several beyond visual range air-to-air missiles to multiple targets simultaneously (although the Air Force still lacks modern beyond visual range missile capability). When deployed operationally on combat missions and air patrols the aircraft can link their systems to the South African National Defence Force's digital network protocol, Link-ZA, to share data with other radar systems to help create a wider picture as to the situation in the air and on the ground in order to rapidly adapt to a change in short term situations.

Other branches of the South African National Defence Force also operate several radar systems that can assist the South African Air Force. The South African Navy uses four Valour-class frigates, each of which is equipped with the Thales Naval France MRR-3D NG G-band multi-role surveillance/self-defence radar that can detect low and medium-level targets at ranges of up to 140 km and in long-range 3D air surveillance mode targets up to 180 km. In the self-defence mode, it can detect and track any threat within a radius of 60 km. These Frigates can link their data systems to the Link-ZA system to help create a broader picture for the armed forces. The South African Army also operates several Reutech Radar Systems (RRS) ESR220 Thutlhwa (Kameelperd/Giraffe) Mobile Battery Fire Control Post Systems. These NATO D-Band radars have a range of 120 km and can also be linked to Link-ZA to assist air force operations.

Civilian airport radars in all nine provinces as well as the network of South African Weather Service radars can also share their radar data with the South African Air Force. According to the South African Weather Service, the South African Air Force has access to raw data from their ten long range fixed system Doppler (S-Band) and two short range mobile (X-Band) meteorological radars, and the interpreted information can be used for aviation and defence purposes.

Ditholo Training Area
Situated 66 km north of Pretoria, Ditholo Training Area used to house Air Defence Artillery Group until 1992. The 3300 hectare property is used primarily for gravel runway training, radar tracking, and aerial cargo drop exercises such as LAPES. Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System (LAPES) is a tactical military airlift delivery method where a fixed wing cargo aircraft can deposit supplies when landing is not an option in an area that is too small to accurately parachute supplies from a high altitude.

Other training include: Search and rescue exercises, basic training, VIP protection, candidate officer training, task force training and escape and evasion training.

Due to its unique ecology, Ditholo is also a registered nature reserve, being one of the few remaining portions of Kalahari plains thornveld in existence. As of 2013, Ditholo is run jointly with the Gauteng Provincial Government as part of the Dinokeng Biosphere Reserve. As of 24 May 2014 it houses more than 340 species of birds and large mammal species such as giraffe, lion, zebra, tsessebe, blue wildebeest, kudu and waterbuck.

The Roodewal Weapons Range
Situated in the Limpopo Province, roughly halfway between Polokwane (previously Pietersburg) and AFB Makhado, near the town of Louis Trichardt. This property is used for air superiority training. Buffering the range is the Corbadraai Nature Reserve.

Temporary Air Base Upington
Activated only for large scale exercises in the Northern Cape.

Dragons Peak Drakensberg
In 1985 a satellite base at Dragons Peak, in the Drakensberg was established in order to conduct helicopter mountain flying training.

Vastrap
Vastrap (Afrikaans: "stand firm") is a small military airfield situated in the Kalahari Desert north east of Upington inside a 700 square kilometre weapons test range of the same name[1] belonging to the South African National Defence Force. It was constructed to allow the SAAF to practice tactical bombing operations, and for aircraft to service the ARMSCOR's defunct underground nuclear weapon test site.

Environmental Management
The SAAF's training areas and bases are home to many species of fauna and flora as well as, in some instances, buildings and other structures of historical and cultural value. The Environmental Services sub-department in the SANDF Logistics Division has the overall task of ensuring proper environmental practices are in place not only on training grounds but also at bases.

The following specific management is practiced:

 * Integrated Training Area Management (ITAM) aims to enhance long term, effective training by implementing management practices for land and aerial ranges to ensure their continued use and minimised environmental damage.
 * Base Environmental Management (BEM) system proper management of buildings, responsible water and energy use, integrated waste management as well as ensuring cultural and historical resources are properly maintained.
 * Environment for Operations (ECOps) aims to ensure adverse effects of military activities on the general environment are avoided or mitigated throughout any specific operations.

title: South African Air Force


text:
Talk:Charles W. Chesnutt

Facts
Charles Chesnutt was born on June 20, 1858. He died in November 1932. When he was only 13 years old his mom died and had to work to raise money for his family. Both of his parents were mullatoes, which meant that they were of mixed racial ancestry.

Inaccuracies/No sources
There are no sources in the "Life" section, and there are claims made there that I've never heard before, specifically these: "His parents offered to sell him into slavery, but their potential buyer could not come up with more than $23 to pay for him." "It was suspected, however, that he had an affair with Ralph Waldo Emerson, which caused an almost irreversible rift in his marriage, until Susan decided to take him back." Note that Emerson would've been at least 75 years old at this time, and I've never heard such claims about Emerson's sexuality.

These statements about Chesnutt should be removed unless there's a source for them. BillAlbertini (talk) 03:37, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

 * I concur, and have removed it. I suspect it is a cleverer-than-usual prank, particularly since Emerson is the least likely of all contemporary literary figures to have been party to a scandal of any type. Lindmere (talk) 20:07, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Stamp image removal
I have removed the stamp image File:Chesnutt stamp.jpg because it a non-free image of a stamp that fails WP:NFC which clearly states: Stamps and currency: For identification of the stamp or currency, not its subject, which was the use here, so it may not be used in this article. This use is improper and must be removed. If you disagree you may want to familiarise yourself with the following: WP:NFCC, WP:NFCC, WP:NFC, and this FAQ to better understand the issues. Sorry. ww2censor (talk) 04:16, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Fragment
"Because his novels posed a more direct challenge to existing sociopolitical conditions and were not as popular as his stories."

This is not a complete sentence, and seems unrelated to anything preceding or following it. Suggest losing the word "because". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.85.194.13 (talk) 20:35, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The Conjure Woman links
I changed the links to that collection from directing to the movie to directing to TCW (stories)--although eventually the book should take the main namespace and the film should be moved. Right now the book title redirects to this page, so the links are circular, but I hope that someone will create an article for the book soon. Aristophanes 68  (talk)  02:44, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Word Choice
In the "legal and writing career" section, it states that Chesnutt's stories featured "Negro dialect." While this is likely the term Chesnutt would have used in his time, today is outdated and potentially offensive. Since "Negro dialect" already links to the article by the preferred term, "African American Vernacular English," I propose changing "Negro dialect" to "African American Vernacular English." Carlykat (talk) 15:15, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Chesnutt's family
The marriage and family section is quite short. I propose adding more content about his children, especially Helen, who wrote a well-known book about her father in the 1950's (linked in the references). Carlykat (talk) 18:14, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

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Wiki Education assignment: African American Literature I
— Assignment last updated by Callencamp (talk) 19:41, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Move "Legacy and honors" so that it becomes the last section in the article. Liz2077 (talk) 19:29, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Inaccuracy
Under the Race Relations heading it is stated “Chesnutt had little tolerance for the new ideology of race pride.”

This statement is presented as fact with no citation. At the least, the statement is presumptive and this sentence should be omitted entirely. 2601:600:C400:3530:E4BF:C691:908E:7147 (talk) 18:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

 * Removed. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:59, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:Charles W. Chesnutt


text:
Bulgogi

 (American English  ) is a gui (Korean-style grilled or roasted dish) made of thin, marinated slices of meat, most commonly beef, grilled on a barbecue or on a stove-top griddle. It is also often stir-fried in a pan in home cooking. Sirloin and rib eye are frequently used cuts of beef for the dish. Bulgogi is a very popular dish in South Korea, where it can be found anywhere from upscale restaurants to local supermarkets as pan-ready kits.

Etymology
came from the Korean word bul-gogi (불고기), consisting of bul ("fire") and gogi ("meat"). The compound word is derived from the Pyongan dialect, as the dish itself is a delicacy of Pyongan Province, North Korea. The dish became popular in Seoul and other parts of South Korea, introduced by refugees from Pyongan. It was then listed in the 1947 edition of the Dictionary of the Korean Language as meat grilled directly over a charcoal fire.

In the Standard Korean Language Dictionary published by the National Institute of Korean Language, the word is listed as meat, such as beef that is thinly sliced, marinated, and grilled over the fire. The word is also included in English-language dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English. Merriam-Webster dated the word's appearance in the American English lexicon in 1961.

History
is believed to have originated during the Goguryeo (고구려) era (37 BCE–668 CE), when it was originally called maekjeok (맥적, 貊炙), with the beef being grilled on a skewer. It was called neobiani (너비아니), meaning "thinly spread" meat, during the Joseon Dynasty and was traditionally prepared especially for the wealthy and the nobility. In the medieval Korean history book Dongguksesi (동국세시), is recorded under the name yeomjeok (염적), which means "fire meat." It was grilled barbecue-style on a hwaro grill on skewers, in pieces approximately 0.5 cm thick. Although it is no longer cooked skewered, this original type of is today called bulgogi sanjeok (불고기 산적).

Preparation and serving
is made from thin slices of sirloin or other prime cuts of beef. Ribeye is also commonly used due to its tenderness and easily cuttable texture. In addition to beef, chicken and pork are also common ingredients used to prepare the dish. Pork belly, or samgyeopsal in Korean, is a popular cut for pork. Much like the ribeye, it is tender and fatty which can give the meat a better taste. Before cooking, the meat is marinated to enhance its flavor and tenderness with a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, ground black pepper, and other ingredients such as scallions, ginger, onions or mushrooms, especially white button mushrooms or matsutake. In most cases when cooking, these are common ingredients. However, the ingredients used to marinate the meat can vary from chef to chef and even from family to family depending on one's preferences and traditions. Pureed pears, pineapple, kiwi, and onions are often used as tenderizers. Sugar or other types of sweeteners such as corn syrup may sometimes also be used to add a sweeter taste. The length of time in which the meat is left to marinate also varies depending on preferences. Generally, meat is left to marinate for less than an hour. Sometimes, cellophane noodles are added to the dish, which varies by the region and specific recipe.

The most common way of preparing beef produces a dark-looking texture that is well seasoned and flavored. Spicy variations are also common where a spicy paste such as gochujang, made from chili powder, rice, fermented soybeans, barley, and salt, is added to the marinade to make the meat spicy. This is most commonly done with the pork variations.

is traditionally grilled, but pan-cooking has become popular as well. Whole cloves of garlic, sliced onions and chopped green peppers are often grilled or fried with the meat. is often served over or with a side of rice and accompanied by various side dishes such as egg soup and kimchi (fermented cabbage). This dish is sometimes served with a side of lettuce or other leafy vegetable, which is used to wrap a slice of cooked meat, often along with a dab of ssamjang, rice, or other side dishes, and then eaten together.

In many Korean barbecue restaurants, customers are seated at a table that will have a grill installed in the middle. Raw and marinated is one of many popular types that customers can order and cook themselves right on the table. It is common for each person to pick at the meat directly from the grill or serve each other when eating. is eaten any time of the year; however, it is common for people in Korea to enjoy grilling the marinated meat on special occasions or in social settings.

In popular culture
is served in barbecue restaurants in Korea, and there are -flavored fast-food hamburgers sold at many South Korean fast-food restaurants. The hamburger patty is marinated in sauce and served with lettuce, tomato, onion, and sometimes cheese.

Variations

 * Kongnamul-bulgogi
 * Osam-bulgogi
 * Havoc Brasier Bulgogi Blaze Chips

title: Bulgogi


text:
Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems. Collaborative filtering has two senses, a narrow one and a more general one.

In the newer, narrower sense, collaborative filtering is a method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting preferences or taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of the collaborative filtering approach is that if a person A has the same opinion as a person B on an issue, A is more likely to have B's opinion on a different issue than that of a randomly chosen person. For example, a collaborative filtering recommendation system for preferences in television programming could make predictions about which television show a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes). These predictions are specific to the user, but use information gleaned from many users. This differs from the simpler approach of giving an average (non-specific) score for each item of interest, for example based on its number of votes.

In the more general sense, collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets. Collaborative filtering methods have been applied to many different kinds of data including: sensing and monitoring data, such as in mineral exploration, environmental sensing over large areas or multiple sensors; financial data, such as financial service institutions that integrate many financial sources; or in electronic commerce and web applications where the focus is on user data, etc. The remainder of this discussion focuses on collaborative filtering for user data, although some of the methods and approaches may apply to the other major applications as well.

Overview
The growth of the Internet has made it much more difficult to effectively extract useful information from all the available online information. The overwhelming amount of data necessitates mechanisms for efficient information filtering. Collaborative filtering is one of the techniques used for dealing with this problem.

The motivation for collaborative filtering comes from the idea that people often get the best recommendations from someone with tastes similar to themselves. Collaborative filtering encompasses techniques for matching people with similar interests and making recommendations on this basis.

Collaborative filtering algorithms often require (1) users' active participation, (2) an easy way to represent users' interests, and (3) algorithms that are able to match people with similar interests.

Typically, the workflow of a collaborative filtering system is: A key problem of collaborative filtering is how to combine and weight the preferences of user neighbors. Sometimes, users can immediately rate the recommended items. As a result, the system gains an increasingly accurate representation of user preferences over time.
 * 1) A user expresses his or her preferences by rating items (e.g. books, movies, or music recordings) of the system. These ratings can be viewed as an approximate representation of the user's interest in the corresponding domain.
 * 2) The system matches this user's ratings against other users' and finds the people with most "similar" tastes.
 * 3) With similar users, the system recommends items that the similar users have rated highly but not yet being rated by this user (presumably the absence of rating is often considered as the unfamiliarity of an item)

Methodology

Collaborative filtering systems have many forms, but many common systems can be reduced to two steps: This falls under the category of user-based collaborative filtering. A specific application of this is the user-based Nearest Neighbor algorithm.
 * 1) Look for users who share the same rating patterns with the active user (the user whom the prediction is for).
 * 2) Use the ratings from those like-minded users found in step 1 to calculate a prediction for the active user

Alternatively, item-based collaborative filtering (users who bought x also bought y), proceeds in an item-centric manner: See, for example, the Slope One item-based collaborative filtering family.
 * 1) Build an item-item matrix determining relationships between pairs of items
 * 2) Infer the tastes of the current user by examining the matrix and matching that user's data

Another form of collaborative filtering can be based on implicit observations of normal user behavior (as opposed to the artificial behavior imposed by a rating task). These systems observe what a user has done together with what all users have done (what music they have listened to, what items they have bought) and use that data to predict the user's behavior in the future, or to predict how a user might like to behave given the chance. These predictions then have to be filtered through business logic to determine how they might affect the actions of a business system. For example, it is not useful to offer to sell somebody a particular album of music if they already have demonstrated that they own that music.

Relying on a scoring or rating system which is averaged across all users ignores specific demands of a user, and is particularly poor in tasks where there is large variation in interest (as in the recommendation of music). However, there are other methods to combat information explosion, such as web search and data clustering.

Memory-based
The memory-based approach uses user rating data to compute the similarity between users or items. Typical examples of this approach are neighbourhood-based CF and item-based/user-based top-N recommendations. For example, in user based approaches, the value of ratings user u gives to item i is calculated as an aggregation of some similar users' rating of the item:
 * $$r_{u,i} = \operatorname{aggr}_{u^\prime \in U} r_{u^\prime, i}$$

where U denotes the set of top N users that are most similar to user u who rated item i. Some examples of the aggregation function include:
 * $$r_{u,i} = \frac{1}{N}\sum\limits_{u^\prime \in U}r_{u^\prime, i}$$
 * $$r_{u,i} = k\sum\limits_{u^\prime \in U}\operatorname{simil}(u,u^\prime)r_{u^\prime, i}$$

where k is a normalizing factor defined as $$k =1/\sum_{u^\prime \in U}|\operatorname{simil}(u,u^\prime)| $$, and
 * $$r_{u,i} = \bar{r_u} + k\sum\limits_{u^\prime \in U}\operatorname{simil}(u,u^\prime)(r_{u^\prime, i}-\bar{r_{u^\prime}} )$$

where $$\bar{r_u}$$ is the average rating of user u for all the items rated by u.

The neighborhood-based algorithm calculates the similarity between two users or items, and produces a prediction for the user by taking the weighted average of all the ratings. Similarity computation between items or users is an important part of this approach. Multiple measures, such as Pearson correlation and vector cosine based similarity are used for this.

The Pearson correlation similarity of two users x, y is defined as
 * $$ \operatorname{simil}(x,y) = \frac{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{xy}}(r_{x,i}-\bar{r_x})(r_{y,i}-\bar{r_y})}{\sqrt{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{xy}}(r_{x,i}-\bar{r_x})^2}\sqrt{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{xy}}(r_{y,i}-\bar{r_y})^2}} $$

where Ixy is the set of items rated by both user x and user y.

The cosine-based approach defines the cosine-similarity between two users x and y as:
 * $$\operatorname{simil}(x,y) = \cos(\vec x,\vec y) = \frac{\vec x \cdot \vec y}{||\vec x|| \times ||\vec y||} = \frac{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{xy}}r_{x,i}r_{y,i}}{\sqrt{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{x}}r_{x,i}^2}\sqrt{\sum\limits_{i \in I_{y}}r_{y,i}^2}}$$

The user based top-N recommendation algorithm uses a similarity-based vector model to identify the k most similar users to an active user. After the k most similar users are found, their corresponding user-item matrices are aggregated to identify the set of items to be recommended. A popular method to find the similar users is the Locality-sensitive hashing, which implements the nearest neighbor mechanism in linear time.

The advantages with this approach include: the explainability of the results, which is an important aspect of recommendation systems; easy creation and use; easy facilitation of new data; content-independence of the items being recommended; good scaling with co-rated items.

There are also several disadvantages with this approach. Its performance decreases when data gets sparse, which occurs frequently with web-related items. This hinders the scalability of this approach and creates problems with large datasets. Although it can efficiently handle new users because it relies on a data structure, adding new items becomes more complicated since that representation usually relies on a specific vector space. Adding new items requires inclusion of the new item and the re-insertion of all the elements in the structure.

Model-based
In this approach, models are developed using different data mining, machine learning algorithms to predict users' rating of unrated items. There are many model-based CF algorithms. Bayesian networks, clustering models, latent semantic models such as singular value decomposition, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, multiple multiplicative factor, latent Dirichlet allocation and Markov decision process based models.

Through this approach, dimensionality reduction methods are mostly being used as complementary technique to improve robustness and accuracy of memory-based approach. In this sense, methods like singular value decomposition, principal component analysis, known as latent factor models, compress user-item matrix into a low-dimensional representation in terms of latent factors. One advantage of using this approach is that instead of having a high dimensional matrix containing abundant number of missing values we will be dealing with a much smaller matrix in lower-dimensional space. A reduced presentation could be utilized for either user-based or item-based neighborhood algorithms that are presented in the previous section. There are several advantages with this paradigm. It handles the sparsity of the original matrix better than memory based ones. Also comparing similarity on the resulting matrix is much more scalable especially in dealing with large sparse datasets.

Hybrid
A number of applications combine the memory-based and the model-based CF algorithms. These overcome the limitations of native CF approaches and improve prediction performance. Importantly, they overcome the CF problems such as sparsity and loss of information. However, they have increased complexity and are expensive to implement. Usually most commercial recommender systems are hybrid, for example, the Google news recommender system.

Deep-learning
In recent years a number of neural and deep-learning techniques have been proposed. Some generalize traditional matrix factorization algorithms via a non-linear neural architecture, or leverage new model types like Variational Autoencoders. While deep learning has been applied to many different scenarios: context-aware, sequence-aware, social tagging etc. its real effectiveness when used in a simple collaborative recommendation scenario has been put into question. A systematic analysis of publications applying deep learning or neural methods to the top-k recommendation problem, published in top conferences (SIGIR, KDD, WWW, RecSys), has shown that on average less than 40% of articles are reproducible, with as little as 14% in some conferences. Overall the study identifies 18 articles, only 7 of them could be reproduced and 6 of them could be outperformed by much older and simpler properly tuned baselines. The article also highlights a number of potential problems in today's research scholarship and calls for improved scientific practices in that area. Similar issues have been spotted by others and also in sequence-aware recommender systems.

Context-aware collaborative filtering
Many recommender systems simply ignore other contextual information existing alongside user's rating in providing item recommendation. However, by pervasive availability of contextual information such as time, location, social information, and type of the device that user is using, it is becoming more important than ever for a successful recommender system to provide a context-sensitive recommendation. According to Charu Aggrawal, "Context-sensitive recommender systems tailor their recommendations to additional information that defines the specific situation under which recommendations are made. This additional information is referred to as the context."

Taking contextual information into consideration, we will have additional dimension to the existing user-item rating matrix. As an instance, assume a music recommender system which provides different recommendations in corresponding to time of the day. In this case, it is possible a user have different preferences for a music in different time of a day. Thus, instead of using user-item matrix, we may use tensor of order 3 (or higher for considering other contexts) to represent context-sensitive users' preferences.

In order to take advantage of collaborative filtering and particularly neighborhood-based methods, approaches can be extended from a two-dimensional rating matrix into a tensor of higher order. For this purpose, the approach is to find the most similar/like-minded users to a target user; one can extract and compute similarity of slices (e.g. item-time matrix) corresponding to each user. Unlike the context-insensitive case for which similarity of two rating vectors are calculated, in the context-aware approaches, the similarity of rating matrices corresponding to each user is calculated by using Pearson coefficients. After the most like-minded users are found, their corresponding ratings are aggregated to identify the set of items to be recommended to the target user.

The most important disadvantage of taking context into recommendation model is to be able to deal with larger dataset that contains much more missing values in comparison to user-item rating matrix. Therefore, similar to matrix factorization methods, tensor factorization techniques can be used to reduce dimensionality of original data before using any neighborhood-based methods.

Application on social web
Unlike the traditional model of mainstream media, in which there are few editors who set guidelines, collaboratively filtered social media can have a very large number of editors, and content improves as the number of participants increases. Services like Reddit, YouTube, and Last.fm are typical examples of collaborative filtering based media.

One scenario of collaborative filtering application is to recommend interesting or popular information as judged by the community. As a typical example, stories appear in the front page of Reddit as they are "voted up" (rated positively) by the community. As the community becomes larger and more diverse, the promoted stories can better reflect the average interest of the community members.

Wikipedia is another application of collaborative filtering. Volunteers contribute to the encyclopedia by filtering out facts from falsehoods.

Another aspect of collaborative filtering systems is the ability to generate more personalized recommendations by analyzing information from the past activity of a specific user, or the history of other users deemed to be of similar taste to a given user. These resources are used as user profiling and helps the site recommend content on a user-by-user basis. The more a given user makes use of the system, the better the recommendations become, as the system gains data to improve its model of that user.

Problems
A collaborative filtering system does not necessarily succeed in automatically matching content to one's preferences. Unless the platform achieves unusually good diversity and independence of opinions, one point of view will always dominate another in a particular community. As in the personalized recommendation scenario, the introduction of new users or new items can cause the cold start problem, as there will be insufficient data on these new entries for the collaborative filtering to work accurately. In order to make appropriate recommendations for a new user, the system must first learn the user's preferences by analysing past voting or rating activities. The collaborative filtering system requires a substantial number of users to rate a new item before that item can be recommended.

Data sparsity
In practice, many commercial recommender systems are based on large datasets. As a result, the user-item matrix used for collaborative filtering could be extremely large and sparse, which brings about challenges in the performance of the recommendation.

One typical problem caused by the data sparsity is the cold start problem. As collaborative filtering methods recommend items based on users' past preferences, new users will need to rate a sufficient number of items to enable the system to capture their preferences accurately and thus provides reliable recommendations.

Similarly, new items also have the same problem. When new items are added to the system, they need to be rated by a substantial number of users before they could be recommended to users who have similar tastes to the ones who rated them. The new item problem does not affect content-based recommendations, because the recommendation of an item is based on its discrete set of descriptive qualities rather than its ratings.

Scalability
As the numbers of users and items grow, traditional CF algorithms will suffer serious scalability problems. For example, with tens of millions of customers $$O(M)$$ and millions of items $$O(N)$$, a CF algorithm with the complexity of $$n$$ is already too large. As well, many systems need to react immediately to online requirements and make recommendations for all users regardless of their millions of users, with most computations happening in very large memory machines.

Synonyms
Synonyms refers to the tendency of a number of the same or very similar items to have different names or entries. Most recommender systems are unable to discover this latent association and thus treat these products differently.

For example, the seemingly different items "children's movie" and "children's film" are actually referring to the same item. Indeed, the degree of variability in descriptive term usage is greater than commonly suspected. The prevalence of synonyms decreases the recommendation performance of CF systems. Topic Modeling (like the Latent Dirichlet Allocation technique) could solve this by grouping different words belonging to the same topic.

Gray sheep
Gray sheep refers to the users whose opinions do not consistently agree or disagree with any group of people and thus do not benefit from collaborative filtering. Black sheep are a group whose idiosyncratic tastes make recommendations nearly impossible. Although this is a failure of the recommender system, non-electronic recommenders also have great problems in these cases, so having black sheep is an acceptable failure.

Shilling attacks
In a recommendation system where everyone can give the ratings, people may give many positive ratings for their own items and negative ratings for their competitors'. It is often necessary for the collaborative filtering systems to introduce precautions to discourage such manipulations.

Diversity and the long tail
Collaborative filters are expected to increase diversity because they help us discover new products. Some algorithms, however, may unintentionally do the opposite. Because collaborative filters recommend products based on past sales or ratings, they cannot usually recommend products with limited historical data. This can create a rich-get-richer effect for popular products, akin to positive feedback. This bias toward popularity can prevent what are otherwise better consumer-product matches. A Wharton study details this phenomenon along with several ideas that may promote diversity and the "long tail." Several collaborative filtering algorithms have been developed to promote diversity and the "long tail" by recommending novel, unexpected, and serendipitous items.

Innovations

 * New algorithms have been developed for CF as a result of the Netflix prize.
 * Cross-System Collaborative Filtering where user profiles across multiple recommender systems are combined in a multitask manner; this way, preference pattern sharing is achieved across models.
 * Robust collaborative filtering, where recommendation is stable towards efforts of manipulation. This research area is still active and not completely solved.

Auxiliary information
User-item matrix is a basic foundation of traditional collaborative filtering techniques, and it suffers from data sparsity problem (i.e. cold start). As a consequence, except for user-item matrix, researchers are trying to gather more auxiliary information to help boost recommendation performance and develop personalized recommender systems. Generally, there are two popular auxiliary information: attribute information and interaction information. Attribute information describes a user's or an item's properties. For example, user attribute might include general profile (e.g. gender and age) and social contacts (e.g. followers or friends in social networks); Item attribute means properties like category, brand or content. In addition, interaction information refers to the implicit data showing how users interplay with the item. Widely used interaction information contains tags, comments or reviews and browsing history etc. Auxiliary information plays a significant role in a variety of aspects. Explicit social links, as a reliable representative of trust or friendship, is always employed in similarity calculation to find similar persons who share interest with the target user. The interaction-associated information – tags – is taken as a third dimension (in addition to user and item) in advanced collaborative filtering to construct a 3-dimensional tensor structure for exploration of recommendation.

title: Collaborative filtering


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Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.

Early life
Palmer, who was born in Surrey Square off the Old Kent Road in Newington, London (now Walworth), was the son of Samuel Palmer, a bookseller and sometime Baptist minister and Martha (nee Giles), but was raised by a pious nurse, Mary Ward. Palmer painted churches from around age twelve, and first exhibited Turner-inspired works at the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen. He had little formal training, and little formal schooling, although he was educated briefly at Merchant Taylors' School. On the 18th January 1818 Palmer's mother Martha died suddenly, an event that affected they young Palmer for the rest of his life. He wrote "It was like a sharp sword sent through the length of me".

Shoreham
Through John Linnell, he met William Blake in 1824. Blake's influence can be seen in work he produced over the next ten years. The works were landscapes around Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in the west of Kent. He purchased a run-down cottage, nicknamed "Rat Abbey", and lived there from 1826 to 1835, depicting the area as a demi-paradise, mysterious and visionary, often shown in sepia shades under moon and star light. There Palmer associated with a group of Blake-influenced artists known as the Ancients (including George Richmond and Edward Calvert). They were among the few who saw the Shoreham paintings as, resulting from attacks by critics in 1825, he opened his early portfolios only to selected friends.

Palmer's somewhat disreputable father – Samuel Palmer senior – moved to the area, his brother Nathaniel having offered him an allowance that would "make him a gentleman" and restore the good name of the family. Samuel Palmer senior rented half of the Queen Anne-era 'Waterhouse' which still stands by the River Darent at Shoreham and is now known as the 'Water House'. Palmer's nurse, Mary Ward, and his other son William joined him there. The Waterhouse was used to accommodate overflow guests from "Rat Abbey". In 1828 Samuel Palmer left "Rat Abbey" to join his father at Water House and lived there for the rest of his time in Shoreham. While at Shoreham he fell in love with the fourteen-year-old Hannah Linnell, whom he later married.

Maturity
After returning to London in 1835, and using a legacy to purchase a house in Marylebone, Palmer produced less mystical and more conventional work. Part of his reason in returning to London was to sell his work and earn money from private teaching. He had better health on his return to London, and was by then married to Hannah, daughter of the painter John Linnell who he had known since she was a child, and married when she was nineteen and he was thirty-two. He sketched in Devonshire and Wales around this time. His peaceful vision of rural England had been disrupted by the violent rural discontent of the early 1830s. His small financial legacy was running out and he decided to produce work more in line with public taste if he was to earn an income for himself and his wife. He was following the advice of his father-in-law. Linnell, who had earlier shown remarkable understanding of the uniqueness of William Blake's genius, was not as generous with his son-in-law, towards whom his attitude was authoritarian and often harsh.

Palmer turned more to watercolour which was gaining popularity in England. To further a commercial career, the couple embarked on a two-year honeymoon to Italy, made possible by money from Hannah's parents in 1837. In Italy Palmer's palette became brighter, sometimes to the point of garishness, but he made many fine sketches and studies that would later be useful in producing new paintings. On his return to London, Palmer sought patrons with limited success. For more than two decades he was obliged to work as a private drawing master, until he moved from London in 1862. To add to his financial worries, he returned to London to find his dissolute brother William had pawned all his early paintings, and Palmer was obliged to pay a large sum to redeem them. By all accounts Palmer was an excellent teacher, but the work with students reduced the time he could devote to his own art.

Later years
From the early 1860s he gained some measure of critical success for his later landscapes, which had a touch of the early Shoreham work about them – most notable is the etching of The Lonely Tower (1879). He became a full member of the Water Colour Society in 1854, and its annual show gave him a yearly goal to work towards.

His best late works include a series of large watercolours illustrating Milton's poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and his etchings, a medium in which he worked from 1850 onwards, including a set illustrating Virgil.

Palmer's later years were darkened by the death in 1861, at the age of 19, of his elder son Thomas More Palmer – a devastating blow from which he never fully recovered. He lived in various places later in his life, including a small cottage and an unaffordable villa both in Kensington, where he lived at 6 Douro Place, then a cottage at Reigate. But it was only when a small measure of financial security came his way, that was he able to move to Furze Hill House in Redhill, Surrey, from 1862. He could not afford to have a daily newspaper delivered to Redhill, suggesting that his financial circumstances there were still tight.

Palmer died in Redhill, Surrey, and is buried with his wife in St Mary's, Reigate churchyard.

Surge in the 1960s
Palmer was largely forgotten after his death. In 1909, many of his Shoreham works were destroyed by his surviving son Alfred Herbert Palmer, who burnt "a great quantity of father's handiwork ... Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate". The destruction included "sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days". Interest in his work was rekindled in 1926 by a show curated by Martin Hardie at the Victoria & Albert Museum: Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts made by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake. In the ensuing decades, the publication of two important books and the presentation of another London exhibition combined to trigger a surge in his popularity: Geoffrey Grigson's, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (280 pages, with 68 photo illustrations, 1947), the Arts Council of Great Britain’s 1956-57 exhibition: Samuel Palmer and his circle - The Shoreham period, and Grigson's follow-up, Samuel Palmer's Valley of Vision (forty-eight plates, a selection of Palmer's writings, 1960). In the 1930s, the maximum price a Shoreham period drawing brought was around £50. Three sold in the early 1960s — Weald of Kent, The Evening Star, and Cow Lodge with a Mossy Roof — for £6000, £5200, and £7200. Leger Gallery purchased the diminutive watercolour The Golden Valley in 1969 for £14,000. In a 2003 auction at Christie’s, it brought £587,650.

The renewed popularity of his Shoreham work influenced a succession of English artists, notably F. L. Griggs, Robin Tanner, Graham Sutherland, Paul Drury, Joseph Webb, Eric Ravilious, John Minton, the glass engraving of Laurence Whistler, Franklin White and Clifford Harper. He also inspired a resurgence in twentieth-century landscape printmaking, which began amongst students at Goldsmiths' College in the 1920s. (See: Jolyon Drury, 2006)

Controversy in the 1970s
Palmer received a great deal of media attention in the 1970s, following the discovery of a number of fakes of his Shoreham work produced by famous art forger, Tom Keating. In February 1970, Geraldine Norman, Sale Room Correspondent for The Times, published a glowing report on a rare Shoreham Palmer painting, which 'probably dates from 1831', Shepherds with their Flock under a Full Moon, that was purchased by a major Bond Street gallery for £9400. At the top of the page was a four-column-width photo of the picture. A month later, David Gould, an authority on Victorian paintings with a special interest in Palmer, wrote a Letter to the Editor calling it a fake.

In June 1973, Norman reported that a Palmer landscape, The Horse Chestnut Tree, sold at Sotheby’s for £15,000. Shortly thereafter, Gould privately alleged to Norman that it too, was dubious. In 1974 Gould told Norman he had identified six more Palmer fakes, and he believed all were done by the same hand.

In 1976, Norman began researching over a dozen suspect Palmers, and after consulting with recognized Palmer experts from the Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam, Tate, and British Museums, as well as author Geoffrey Grigson, she published an article on 16 July 1976, on page one of The Times, asserting that thirteen Palmer pictures that had appeared on the market over the previous decade were forgeries. Several tips from readers convinced her the master faker she was looking for was Tom Keating, a picture restorer in Dedham, Essex, whom she named in another page one article the following month. A few days later, Keating wrote a Letter to The Times, confessing to ‘flooding the market’ with fakes –– not for material gain, but rather as a protest against greedy art merchants –– adding that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could believe his ‘crude daubs’ were authentic. The lead story in the Daily Express the same day read, ‘I FAKED THE LOT!’

The following week, Mr. Hugh Leggatt, a well-respected art dealer in Westminster, offered to host an exhibition of Keating’s ‘Palmers’ at his gallery in St James's Street. The Cecil Higgins Museum in Bedford had a Palmer called A Barn at Shoreham, purchased in 1965, on advice by Edward Croft Murray, the Keeper of Pictures at the British Museum, that it was authentic. They took it down in August 1976 when it was discovered to be a Keating fake. They rehung it four months later. Museum trustees commented ‘that there seemed to be more public interest in the drawing now it was known to be a fake than there had been in the genuine article.’ A Barn at Shoreham remains on view in the museum's art store. Norman went on to publish a total of eleven articles on the scandal, from July 1976 to February 1977, for which she won the British Press Awards News Reporter of the Year. In June 1977 she published an essay on Art Trading and Art Faking, in Keating’s autobiography, as well as a companion book The Tom Keating Catalogue, with descriptions and photo illustrations of 166 of his known pastiches, including 26 Palmers, which she hoped would provide scholars, collectors, and art dealers with sufficient information to detect his work, and help locate and identify as many of them as possible.

Keating later claimed to have painted upwards of eighty fake Palmers, most of them moonlit scenes in dark sepia wash, heightened with white. Four of them sold for thousands of pounds each, including The Horse Chestnut Tree, which Sotheby’s auctioned in June 1973 for £15,000 — ‘a record price for the artist’. These same four pictures were illustrated in James Sellars’ 1974 monograph, Samuel Palmer, and their sales resulted in Keating being arrested and put on trial for art fraud at the Old Bailey in 1979. He was later released due to failing health, and all charges were dropped. In the May 1977 BBC1 documentary, A Picture of Tom Keating, the master forger, commenting on Palmer’s captivating self portrait (see at top of this page), called him ‘a child genius, who’s eyes stare at me with a majesty and beauty... I look back on them now and say I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done, because his name is now more famous than ever.’

Times journalist David Carritt replied: ‘How insulting Palmer would have found the new stock...his magic vision diluted by a crop of heartless impostures, conceived in spite and peddled for gain’.

21st century retrospectives
On the bicentenary of the artist’s birth, a major retrospective showcasing a hundred and seventy of his watercolours, drawings, etchings and oils from public and private collections around the world, was organized by the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibited first in London from October 2005 to January 2006, then in New York from March to May 2006, Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape, emphasized his early work, but included more naturalistic watercolours, such as Scene from Lee, and A Cascade in Shadow, from his travels in Devon and Wales (1834-1836), as well as Cypresses at the Villa d'Este, and A View of Ancient Rome, from an ill-fated, two-year sojourn to Italy, with his new bride Hannah and his friend, George Richmond, and his wife (1837–38). The show concluded with works done after his return to England in 1840, such as the watercolour, Christian Descending into the Valley of Humiliation and the etchings, The Weary Ploughman, The Bellman, and The Lonely Tower.

In 2012, the Fine Art Society staged Samuel Palmer, His Friends and Followers, a London exhibition of Palmer’s influential visionary landscapes, along with works by Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Griggs, Paul Drury, Graham Sutherland, and Robin Tanner.

Commemorations
There are three commemorative plaques to Palmer. An unofficial blue plaque is located at Palmer's birthplace at Surrey Square. The Grade II listed Waterhouse, in Shoreham, Kent, has a plaque on it commemorating Palmer's residence there from 1827 to 1835. A Greater London Council blue plaque is located at 6 Douro Place, Kensington W8, marking that Palmer lived there from 1851 to 1861. His last home was The Chantry (the former Furze Hill Place), at Cronks Hill, near Redhill, which is Grade II listed for the Palmer connection.

The oldest house in Shoreham, Kent, is called Reed Beds, but is also known as the Samuel Palmer School of Fine Art. The National Portrait Gallery holds an 1829 portrait of Palmer by his friend George Richmond; the NPG's catalogue notes state that Palmer's expression and long hair recall Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait as Christ.

Palmer Close, a cul-de-sac in Redhill (built in the 1960s) was named in his honour.

Writings

 * An address to the Electors of West Kent: Pamphlet, 1832
 * The 1861 Lives Balance Sheet: Epitaph on death of his son Thomas More Palmer
 * On going to Shoreham, Kent to design from Ruth: A prayer, 1826
 * With pipe and rural chaunt along: A poem, Samuel Palmer's Sketchbook 1824, British Museum Facsimile Published by William Blake Trust in 1862

title: Samuel Palmer


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Queen's Medical Centre

The Queen's Medical Centre (popularly known as QMC, Queen's Med or Queen's) is a teaching hospital situated in Nottingham, England. Until February 2012, when it was surpassed by the Royal London Hospital, it was the largest hospital in the United Kingdom, though its remains the largest major trauma centre in England. It is managed by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

History
In 1964 Health Minister Anthony Barber announced in Parliament that Nottingham had been selected for a new teaching hospital and medical school, with 1,200 beds and an annual intake of 100 students. It was designed by the Building Design Partnership. Legal delays with the purchase of the 43-acre site meant that building work did not commence until May 1971. Lack of funding became a serious problem after 1979, and slowed the commissioning of some parts of the hospital. It was well into the 1980s before the project was completed.

The Queen's Medical Centre (QMC) was the first purpose-built teaching hospital in the UK. It was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 July 1977, and admitted its first patient in 1978. On 1 April 2006, the Queen's Medical Centre NHS Trust, that had previously run the hospital, merged with the Nottingham City Hospital NHS Trust to form the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. In April 2012, QMC was designated as the East Midlands Major Trauma Centre.

Facilities
The hospital has more than 1,300 beds and employs more than 6000 people. It has a busy accident and emergency unit, and is the primary destination of the Lincolnshire & Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance, for seriously injured patients. In 2016–17, there were 195,782 emergency attendances. It is the East Midlands' main hospital for acute cases. The QMC site also contains the University of Nottingham Medical and Nursing Schools, Mental Health Wards and the privately run Nottingham Treatment Centre.

The Nottingham Children's Hospital was founded in 1869 in Russell House. Nursing staff were drawn from the Sisters of St Lucy which led to it being given the unofficial name "St Lucy's". In 1899 it moved to larger premises at Forest House, donated by the lace manufacturer Thomas Birkin. In 1978, the occupants became the first in-patients of QMC when they were moved to the hospital's current location in East Block. The hospital cares for about 40,000 children up to 18 years old each year. It has 116 beds. On 17 August 2020 Nottingham Children's Hospital (along with NUH Sexual Health Services) received the American Nursing Credentialing Centre (ANCC) Pathway To Excellence designation in recognition of nursing excellence. It was the first Children's Hospital in Europe to receive this designation.

Transport
The hospital is situated at the junction of the dual-carriageway Nottingham Ring Road (A6514) and the east–west A52 and A6200. There is a Medilink bus service, which connects Queen's Drive (Park and Ride) with Queen's Medical Centre, Wilkinson Street (for park and ride) and Nottingham City Hospital. Trent Barton’s indigo, i4 and Red Arrow and Nottingham City Transport's Grey Line 53, 54 and Orange Line 34, 35 and 36 bus services stop near to QMC.

The Queen's Medical Centre tram stop, on line 1 of the Nottingham Express Transit, is situated between the South Block of the main hospital and the Treatment Centre. The tram connects QMC with Beeston, Nottingham Station, Nottingham City Centre, Basford, Bulwell and Hucknall. Passengers can change to Line 2 of the tram, which connects Phoenix Park (M1 Junction 26) with Clifton, at Nottingham station.

In the media
The hospital is part of the long-running Channel 4 documentary series 24 Hours in A&E.

Video clips

 * Its construction

title: Queen's Medical Centre