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Cultural identity

Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality, gender, or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. In this way, cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also of the culturally identical group of members sharing the same cultural identity or upbringing. Cultural identity is an unfixed process that is continually evolving within the discourses of social, cultural, and historical experiences. Some people undergo more cultural identity changes as opposed to others, those who change less often have a clear cultural identity. This means that they have a dynamic yet stable integration of their culture.

There are three pieces that make up a person's cultural identity: cultural knowledge, category label, and social connections. Cultural knowledge refers to a person's connection to their identity through understanding their culture's core characteristics. Category label refers to a person's connection to their identity through indirect membership of said culture. Social connections refers to a person's connection to their identity through their social relationships. Cultural identity is developed through a series of steps. First, a person comes to understand a culture through being immersed in those values, beliefs, and practices. Second, the person then identifies as a member of that culture dependent on their rank within that community. Third, they develop relationships such as immediate family, close friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

Culture is a term that is highly complex and often contested with academics recording about 160 variations in meaning. Underpinning the notion of culture is that it is dynamic and changes over time and in different contexts resulting in many people today identifying with one or more cultures and many different ways.

It is a defining feature of a person's identity, contributing to how they see themselves and the groups with which they identify. A person's understanding of their own and other's identities develops from birth and is shaped by the values and attitudes prevalent at home and in the surrounding community.

Description
Various modern cultural studies and social theories have investigated cultural identity and understanding. In recent decades, a new form of identification has emerged that breaks down the understanding of the individual as a coherent whole subject into a collection of various cultural identifiers. These cultural identifiers may be the result of various conditions including: location, sex, race, history, nationality, language, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity, aesthetics, and food. As one author writes:

When talking about identity, we generally define this word as the series of physical features that differentiate a person. Thus at birth, our parents declare us and give us a name with which they will identify us based on whether we are a boy or a girl. Identity is not only a right that declares the name, sex, time, and place that one is born; the word identity goes beyond what we define it. Identity is a function of elements that portrays one in a dynamic way, in constant evolution, throughout the stages of life identity develops based on personal experiences, tastes, and choices of a sexual and religious nature, as well as the social environment, these being some of the main parameters that influence and transform the day to day and allow us to discover a new part of ourselves.

"Categorizations about identity, even when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of colonization, state formation, or general modernizing processes, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and positive"

The divisions between cultures can be very fine in some parts of the world, especially in rapidly changing cities where the population is ethnically diverse and social unity is based primarily on locational contiguity.

As a "historical reservoir," culture is an important factor in shaping identity. Since one of the main characteristics of a culture is its "historical reservoir," many if not all groups entertain revisions, either consciously or unconsciously, in their historical record in order to either bolster the strength of their cultural identity or to forge one which gives them precedent for actual reform or change. Some critics of cultural identity argue that the preservation of cultural identity, being based upon difference, is a divisive force in society and that cosmopolitanism gives individuals a greater sense of shared citizenship. When considering practical association in international society, states may share an inherent part of their 'make up' that gives common ground and an alternative means of identifying with each other. Nations provide the framework for cultural identities called external cultural reality, which influences the unique internal cultural realities of the individuals within the nation.

There is a relationship between cultural identity and new media.

Rather than necessarily representing an individual's interaction within a certain group, cultural identity may be defined by the social network of people imitating and following the social norms as presented by the media. Accordingly, instead of learning behavior and knowledge from cultural/religious groups, individuals may be learning these social norms from the media to build on their cultural identity.

A range of cultural complexities structures the way individuals operate with the cultural realities in their lives. Nation is a large factor of the cultural complexity, as it constructs the foundation for an individual's identity, but it may contrast with one's cultural reality. Cultural identities are influenced by several different factors such as ones religion, ancestry, skin color, language, class, education, profession, skill, family and political attitudes. These factors contribute to the development of one's identity.

History
The history of cultural identity develops out of the observations of a number of social scientists. A history of cultural identity is important because it outlines the understanding of how our identities provide a way to see ourselves in relation to the world in which we live. "Cultural identities...are the natural, and most fundamental, constitutive elements of individual and collective identity."

Franz Boas is an important figure in the creation of the idea of cultural identity. Boas is known for challenging ideas about culture. Boas promoted the importance of viewing a culture from within its own perspective and understanding, not from the outsider's view point. This was a somewhat radical perspective at the time. Additionally, Myron Lustig is credited with contributing the concept of cultural identity theory.

A number of contemporary theorists continue to contribute to the concept of cultural identity. For instance, contemporary work completed by Stuart Hall is considered essential to understand cultural identity. According to Hall, identity is defined by at least two specific actions, which are similarity and difference. Specifically, in settings of slavery and colonization, identity provides a connection to the past as well as disintegration from a shared origination.

Theorists' questions about identity include “whether identity is to be understood as something internal that persists through change or as something ascribed from without that changes according to circumstance." Whatever the case may be, Gleason advocates for “sensitivity to the intrinsic complexities of the subject matter with which it deals, and careful attention to the need for precision and consistency in its application. Cultural identity can also become a marker of difference that requires sensitivity.

Kuper presents concepts on cultural identity within the framework of a power dynamic. He writes, "The privileged lie and mislead, but the oppressed come gradually to appreciate their objective circumstances and formulate a new consciousness that will ultimately liberate them." The consciousness is a facet of their identity. Similarly, identity plays a role in mediating between a human being and the environment in which they exist.

The identity of a person is “a result of socialization and customs” that promotes the maintenance of distinct cultural identities from generation to generation. Additionally, identity can be considered that which forms cultures and results in “dictated appropriate behavior." Put another way, identity may dictate behavior that results in the reification of identity with the individual as a “replicate in miniature of the larger social and cultural entity. Another way to consider cultural identity is that it is “the sum of material wealth and spiritual wealth created by human beings in the practice of social history."

Globalization is connected to influences in economics, politics, and society. Accordingly, globalization has an impact on cultural identity. As societies become even more connected, there are concerns that cultural identities will become homogenized through the increased level of connection and communication. However, there are alternative perspectives on this issue. For instance, Wright theorizes that "The spread of global culture and globalised ideas has led to many movements designed to embrace the uniqueness and diversity of an individual’s particular culture."

Cultural arena
It is also noted that an individual's "cultural arena," or place where one lives, impacts the culture that person abides by. The surroundings, environment, and people in these places play a role in how one feels about the culture they wish to adopt. Many immigrants find the need to change their culture in order to fit into the culture of most citizens in the country. This can conflict with an immigrant's current belief in their culture and might pose a problem, as the immigrant feels compelled to choose between the two presenting cultures.

Some might be able to adjust to the various cultures in the world by committing to two or more cultures. It is not required to stick to one culture. Many people socialize and interact with people in one culture in addition to another group of people in another culture. Thus, cultural identity is able to take many forms and can change depending on the cultural area. The impact of the cultural arena has changed with the advent of the Internet, bringing together groups of people with shared cultural interests who before would have been more likely to integrate into their real-world cultural arena. This adaptability is what allows people to feel a part of society and culture wherever they go.

Language
Language allows for people in a group to communicate their values, beliefs, and customs, all of which contribute to creating a cultural identity. It was long time believed, that if children lose their languages, they lose part or all of their cultural identity. When students who are non-native English speakers, go to classes where they are required to speak only English, they feel that their native language has no value. Some studies found, that this leads to loss of their culture and language altogether and this can lead to either a massive change in cultural identity, or they find themselves struggling to understand who they are. Language also includes the way people speak with peers, family members, authority figures, and strangers, including the tone and familiarity that is included in the language. The learning process can also be affected by cultural identity via the understanding of specific words, and the preference for specific words when learning and using a second language. Since many aspects of a person's cultural identity can be changed, such as citizenship or influence from outside cultures, language is a major component of cultural identity. However, more recent research could show, that language may be not a crucial part of a person's identity or cultural identity.

Education
Cultural identity is often not discussed in the classroom or learning environment where an instructor presides over the class. This often happens when the instructor attempts to discuss cultural identity and the issues that come with it in the classroom and is met with disagreement and cannot make forward progress in the conversation. Moreover, not talking about cultural identity can lead to issues such as prohibiting growth of education, development of a sense of self, and social competency. In these environments there are often many different cultures and problems can occur due to different worldviews that prevent others from being able to think outwardly about their peers' values and differing backgrounds. If students are able to think outwardly, then they can not only better connect with their peers, but also further develop their own worldview. In addition to this, instructors should take into account the needs of different students' backgrounds in order to best relay the material in a way that engages the student.

When students learn that knowledge and truth are relevant to each person, that instructors do not know everything, and that their own personal experiences dictate what they believe they can better contextualize new information using their own experiences as well as taking into account the different cultural experiences of others. This in turn increases the ability to critically think and challenge new information which benefits all students learning in a classroom setting. There are two ways instructors can better elicit this response from their students through active communication of cultural identity. The first is by having students engage in class discussion with their peers. Doing so creates community and allows for students to share their knowledge as well as question their peers and instructors, thereby, learning about each other's cultural identity and creating acceptance of differing worldviews in the classroom. The second way is by using active learning methods such as "forming small groups and analyzing case studies". Through engaging in active learning students learn that their cultural identity is welcomed and accepted.

Cultural identity and immigrant experience
Identity development among immigrant groups has been studied across a multi-dimensional view of acculturation. Acculturation is the phenomenon that results when groups or individuals from different cultures come into continuous contact with one another and adopt certain values and practices that were not originally their own. Acculturation is unique from assimilation. Dina Birman and Edison Trickett (2001) conducted a qualitative study through informal interviews with first-generation Soviet Jewish refugee adolescents looking at the process of acculturation through three different dimensions: language competence, behavioral acculturation, and cultural identity. The results indicated that "acculturation appears to occur in a linear pattern over time for most dimensions of acculturation, with acculturation to the American culture increasing and acculturation to the Russian culture decreasing. However, Russian language competence for the parents did not diminish with length of residence in the country" (Birman & Trickett, 2001).

In a similar study, Phinney, Horencyzk, Liebkind, and Vedder (2001) focused on a model, which concentrates on the interaction between immigrant characteristics and the responses of the majority society to understand the psychological effects of immigration. The researchers concluded that most studies find that being bicultural, the combination of a strong ethnic and a strong national identity, yields the best adaptation in the new country of residence. An article by LaFromboise, L. K. Colemna, and Gerton, reviews the literature on the impact of being bicultural. It showed that it is possible to have the ability to obtain competence within two cultures without losing one's sense of identity or having to identity with one culture over the other. (LaFromboise Et Al. 1993) The importance of ethnic and national identity in the educational adaptation of immigrants indicates that a bicultural orientation is advantageous for school performance (Portes & Rumbaut, 1990). Educators can assume their positions of power in beneficially impactful ways for immigrant students, by providing them with access to their native cultural support groups, language classes, after-school activities, and clubs in order to help them feel more connected to both native and national cultures. It is clear that the new country of residence can impact immigrants' identity development across multiple dimensions. Biculturalism can allow for a healthy adaptation to life and school. With many new immigrant youth, a school district in Alberta, Canada, has gone as far as to partner with various agencies and professionals in an effort to aid the cultural adjustment of new Filipino immigrant youths. In the study cited, a combination of family workshops and teacher professional development aimed to improve the language learning and emotional development of these youths and families.

School Transitions
How great is "Achievement Loss Associated with the Transition to Middle School and High School"? John W. Alspaugh's research is in the September/October 1998 Journal of Educational Research (vol. 92, no. 1), 2026. Comparing three groups of 16 school districts, the loss was greater where the transition was from sixth grade than from a K-8 system. It was also greater when students from multiple elementary schools merged into a single middle school. Students from both K-8 and middle schools lost achievement in transition to high school, though this was greater for middle school students, and high school dropout rates were higher for districts with grades 6-8 middle schools than for those with K-8 elementary schools.

The Jean S. Phinney Three-Stage Model of Ethnic Identity Development is a widely accepted view of the formation of cultural identity. In this model cultural Identity is often developed through a three-stage process: unexamined cultural identity, cultural identity search, and cultural identity achievement.

Unexamined cultural identity: "a stage where one's cultural characteristics are taken for granted, and consequently there is little interest in exploring cultural issues." This for example is the stage one is in throughout their childhood when one doesn't distinguish between cultural characteristics of their household and others. Usually, a person in this stage accepts the ideas they find on culture from their parents, the media, community, and others.

An example of thought in this stage: "I don't have a culture I'm just an American." "My parents tell me about where they lived, but what do I care? I've never lived there."

Cultural identity search: "is the process of exploration and questioning about one's culture in order to learn more about it and to understand the implications of membership in that culture." During this stage a person will begin to question why they hold their beliefs and compare it to the beliefs of other cultures. For some this stage may arise from a turning point in their life or from a growing awareness of other cultures. This stage is characterized by growing awareness in social and political forums and a desire to learn more about culture. This can be expressed by asking family members questions about heritage, visiting museums, reading of relevant cultural sources, enrolling in school courses, or attendance at cultural events. This stage might have an emotional component as well.

An example of thought in this stage: "I want to know what we do and how our culture is different from others." "There are a lot of non-Japanese people around me, and it gets pretty confusing to try and decide who I am."

Cultural identity achievement: "is characterized by a clear, confident acceptance of oneself and an internalization of one's cultural identity." In this stage people often allow the acceptance of their cultural identity play a role in their future choices such as how to raise children, how to deal with stereotypes and any discrimination and approach negative perceptions. This usually leads to an increase in self-confidence and positive psychological adjustment

The role of the internet
There is a set of phenomena that occur in conjunction between virtual culture – understood as the modes and norms of behavior associated with the internet and the online world – and youth culture. While we can speak of a duality between the virtual (online) and real sphere (face-to-face relations), for youth, this frontier is implicit and permeable. On occasions – to the annoyance of parents and teachers – these spheres are even superposed, meaning that young people may be in the real world without ceasing to be connected.

In the present techno-cultural context, the relationship between the real world and the virtual world cannot be understood as a link between two independent and separate worlds, possibly coinciding at a point, but as a Moebius strip where there exists no inside and outside and where it is impossible to identify limits between both. For new generations, to an ever-greater extent, digital life merges with their home life as yet another element of nature. In this naturalizing of digital life, the learning processes from that environment are frequently mentioned not just since they are explicitly asked but because the subject of the internet comes up spontaneously among those polled. The ideas of active learning, of googling 'when you don't know', of recourse to tutorials for learning a program or a game, or the expression 'I learnt English better and in a more entertaining way by playing' are examples often cited as to why the internet is the place most frequented by the young people polled.

The internet is becoming an extension of the expressive dimension of the youth condition. There, youth talk about their lives and concerns, design the content that they make available to others and assess others' reactions to it in the form of optimized and electronically mediated social approval. Many of today's youth go through processes of affirmation procedures and is often the case for how youth today grow dependent on peer approval. When connected, youth speak of their daily routines and lives. With each post, image or video they upload, they have the possibility of asking themselves who they are and to try out profiles differing from those they assume in the 'real' world. The connections they feel in more recent times have become much less interactive through personal means compared to past generations. The influx of new technology and access has created new fields of research on effects on teens and young adults. They thus negotiate their identity and create senses of belonging, putting the acceptance and censure of others to the test, an essential mark of the process of identity construction.

Youth ask themselves about what they think of themselves, how they see themselves personally and, especially, how others see them. On the basis of these questions, youth make decisions which, through a long process of trial and error, shape their identity. This experimentation is also a form through which they can think about their insertion, membership and sociability in the 'real' world.

From other perspectives, the question arises on what impact the internet has had on youth through accessing this sort of 'identity laboratory' and what role it plays in the shaping of youth identity. On the one hand, the internet enables young people to explore and perform various roles and personifications while on the other, the virtual forums – some of them highly attractive, vivid and absorbing (e.g. video games or virtual games of personification) – could present a risk to the construction of a stable and viable personal identity.

title: Cultural identity


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Talk:Typex

Weakness of Enigma
"Their inability to use the machine in order to crack Typex messages may have convinced them even more of the security of Engima."

the Abwehr specialists knew of the weakness of enigma. They concluded, however, that no one would be able to orchestrate the effort to actually achieve decyphering.

Reference?
Does any have access to: — Matt 02:27, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Ralph Erskine, "The Development of Typex", The Enigma Bulletin 2 (1997): pp69-86

Removing for now
 [3->5 rotors]...This change alone adds no security, because a rotor only turns after enough key presses have occurred to turn all the rotors to the left of it. In the case of a three-rotor machine that would require 26 × 26 = 676 key-presses before the third rotor would have any effect. In the case of a four-rotor machine the message would have to be 676 × 26 = 17576 letters long — and messages this long simply were not sent. Simply adding extra rotors can add security — the security doesn't just depend on the period of the machine; increasing the number of rotors increases the number of possible keys, and would likely make most attacks more complex. For example, a bombe would have a lot more work to do with five rotors than with three. — Matt 23:06, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Didn't the later German naval version of Enigma (which was harder to crack) use four rotors rather than three? Hugo999 (talk) 20:27, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Replaced book ciphers?

 * In the late 1920s the British were seeking a replacement for their book cipher systems...

Is the author suggesting that book ciphers were used in the British services at this time, or is this a thinko for code books? Securiger 14:00, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Yes, I would think that codebooks is what was intended. — Matt 18:24, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Typex usage

 * By far the greatest difference from Enigma was to simply use Typex as little as possible. Whereas the Germans routinely encrypted almost all of their messages in their various networks using Enigma, only the British Army high command and the RAF, used the Typex regularly. Other branches still performed all of their encryption by hand using older book-based methods. The supply of the Typex machines was kept severely limited, and no field units were ever allowed to have machines.

Some problems; Typex was also used by the Royal Navy (see my ref to 1940 RN circulars in article), although it took them a while to roll it out. There were, according to Ralph Erskine (ref'd in the article) serious problems with manufacturing sufficient numbers of Typex. Erskine attributes some of the security of Typex to the fact that each network used a different set of rotors with their own wiring. Germany used largley the same set of rotors for all its Enigma networks. — Matt Crypto 21:38, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

As I have added to the article, in 1944 the the Admiralty decided to supply 2 CCM Mark III machines (the Typex Mark II with adaptors for the American CCM) for each “major” war vessel down to and including corvettes but not submarines, RNZN vessels were the Achilles, Arabis, Arbutus, Gambia and Matua. so initial restrictions were more a matter of supply. Archives NZ file references:

CCM from the Holden Agreement and 1943 BRUSA Agreement
Does anyone have a source for the statement that "the Americans and the British signed the Holden Agreement and BRUSA to develop a Combined Cipher Machine (CCM)"? — Matt Crypto 09:15, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Strength vs Enigma
My understanding is that the key weakness of Enigma was that a letter was never encoded to itself ("T" never became "T"). This allowed the use of cribs (phrases that were guessed to be in the message) to allow a smaller number of possible mappings to be tested. The Typex machine did not have this weakness being able to encode letters to themselves. While there may be other additional security measures over Enigma this is of particular historical significance as it highlights a key difference in the ability to crack the two systems.

I am curious as to why this is not mentioned in the main page in the section on differences? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.17.110 (talk) 12:56, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

 * You are incorrect. Typex was fundamentally a straight copy of the commercial version of the German Enigma.  The main complications (to the machine itself) were the addition of two extra non driven rotors, and the printer mechanism(s).  A further apparent complication was the presence of an encrypt/decrypt switch, but this only selected which printer printed in 5 character groups and printed 'X's instead of spaces.  It had no effect on the actual encryption or decryption itself.  Because of the presence of a reflector, the result was a machine that, like enigma, never encrypted any letter as itself.  Download the emulator and try it for yourself.

 * The machines were so similar that it was a simple job to remove the extra two rotors and add a plugboard so that Typex machines could be used to decrypt German Enigma messages once the key settings had been found for the day.  31.48.73.38 (talk) 14:44, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Some moron added the following entry Typex did not have the major flaw that Enigma did; it was able to produce the same letter that was being pressed. This is wrong. The person is a moron. Typex was an ENIGMA type device, with a reflector. Report FO 850/171 ‘Preparation of telegrams: use of code words: cypher machines and traffic: teleprinter services: en clair messages' contains a memorandum of May 1945, from the Cypher Policy Board to the Foreign Office, with instructions for use of the Typex. It explains that 'When encyphering on the Typex machine, the encyphered version of a letter can never be the letter itself. This sometimes makes it possible to assign with absolute accuracy even a small number of words known or estimated to be in a message to the actual letters of the cypher version ...', and gives procedures for burying addresses’. I hope someone corrects it.

Please do not be offensive. People can be incorrect but it does not make them a moron. 106.70.3.13 (talk) 06:47, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

How did they actually work?
The Description section mentions rotors and notches and lubrication and coding speeds, but it does not specify how the machine actually worked. Would someone add that information? John Link (talk) 05:15, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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Link error?
Balata links to wrong target, unless it is meant to be a plant. 220.244.153.67 (talk) 12:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:Typex


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Password cracking

In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of guessing passwords protecting a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password. Another type of approach is password spraying, which is often automated and occurs slowly over time in order to remain undetected, using a list of common passwords.

The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password (due to the fact that installing an entirely new password would involve System Administration privileges), to gain unauthorized access to a system, or to act as a preventive measure whereby system administrators check for easily crackable passwords. On a file-by-file basis, password cracking is utilized to gain access to digital evidence to which a judge has allowed access, when a particular file's permissions restricted.

Time needed for password searches
The time to crack a password is related to bit strength, which is a measure of the password's entropy, and the details of how the password is stored. Most methods of password cracking require the computer to produce many candidate passwords, each of which is checked. One example is brute-force cracking, in which a computer tries every possible key or password until it succeeds. With multiple processors, this time can be optimized through searching from the last possible group of symbols and the beginning at the same time, with other processors being placed to search through a designated selection of possible passwords. More common methods of password cracking, such as dictionary attacks, pattern checking, and variations of common words, aim to optimize the number of guesses and are usually attempted before brute-force attacks. Higher password bit strength exponentially increases the number of candidate passwords that must be checked, on average, to recover the password and reduces the likelihood that the password will be found in any cracking dictionary.

The ability to crack passwords using computer programs is also a function of the number of possible passwords per second which can be checked. If a hash of the target password is available to the attacker, this number can be in the billions or trillions per second, since an offline attack is possible. If not, the rate depends on whether the authentication software limits how often a password can be tried, either by time delays, CAPTCHAs, or forced lockouts after some number of failed attempts. Another situation where quick guessing is possible is when the password is used to form a cryptographic key. In such cases, an attacker can quickly check to see if a guessed password successfully decodes encrypted data.

For some kinds of password hash, ordinary desktop computers can test over a hundred million passwords per second using password cracking tools running on a general purpose CPU and billions of passwords per second using GPU-based password cracking tools. The rate of password guessing depends heavily on the cryptographic function used by the system to generate password hashes. A suitable password hashing function, such as bcrypt, is many orders of magnitude better than a naive function like simple MD5 or SHA. A user-selected eight-character password with numbers, mixed case, and symbols, with commonly selected passwords and other dictionary matches filtered out, reaches an estimated 30-bit strength, according to NIST. 230 is only one billion permutations and would be cracked in seconds if the hashing function were naive. When ordinary desktop computers are combined in a cracking effort, as can be done with botnets, the capabilities of password cracking are considerably extended. In 2002, distributed.net successfully found a 64-bit RC5 key in four years, in an effort which included over 300,000 different computers at various times, and which generated an average of over 12 billion keys per second.

Graphics processing units can speed up password cracking by a factor of 50 to 100 over general purpose computers for specific hashing algorithms. As an example, in 2011, available commercial products claimed the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 NTLM passwords a second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor. Such a device can crack a 10-letter single-case password in one day. The work can be distributed over many computers for an additional speedup proportional to the number of available computers with comparable GPUs. However some algorithms run slowly, or even are specifically designed to run slowly, on GPUs. Examples are DES, Triple DES, bcrypt, scrypt, and Argon2.

Hardware acceleration in a GPU has enabled resources to be used to increase the efficiency and speed of a brute force attack for most hashing algorithms. In 2012, Stricture Consulting Group unveiled a 25-GPU cluster that achieved a brute force attack speed of 350 billion guesses of NTLM passwords per second, allowing them to check $95^8$ password combinations in 5.5 hours, enough to crack all 8-character alpha-numeric-special-character passwords commonly used in enterprise settings. Using ocl-Hashcat Plus on a Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, the Linux-based GPU cluster was used to "crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn".

For some specific hashing algorithms, CPUs and GPUs are not a good match. Purpose-made hardware is required to run at high speeds. Custom hardware can be made using FPGA or ASIC technology. Development for both technologies is complex and (very) expensive. In general, FPGAs are favorable in small quantities, ASICs are favorable in (very) large quantities, more energy efficient, and faster. In 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) built a dedicated password cracker using ASICs. Their machine, Deep Crack, broke a DES 56-bit key in 56 hours, testing over 90 billion keys per second. In 2017, leaked documents showed that ASICs were used for a military project that had a potential to code-break many parts of the Internet communications with weaker encryption. Since 2019, John the Ripper supports password cracking for a limited number of hashing algorithms using FPGAs. Commercial companies are now using FPGA-based setups for password cracking.

Easy to remember, hard to guess
Passwords that are difficult to remember will reduce the security of a system because
 * users might need to write down or electronically store the password using an insecure method,
 * users will need frequent password resets, and
 * users are more likely to re-use the same password.

Similarly, the more stringent the requirements for password strength, e.g. "have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and digits" or "change it monthly", the greater the degree to which users will subvert the system.

In "The Memorability and Security of Passwords", Jeff Yan et al. examine the effect of advice given to users about a good choice of password. They found that passwords based on thinking of a phrase and taking the first letter of each word are just as memorable as naively selected passwords, and just as hard to crack as randomly generated passwords. Combining two unrelated words is another good method. Having a personally designed "algorithm" for generating obscure passwords is another good method.

However, asking users to remember a password consisting of a "mix of uppercase and lowercase characters" is similar to asking them to remember a sequence of bits: hard to remember, and only a little bit harder to crack (e.g. only 128 times harder to crack for 7-letter passwords, less if the user simply capitalizes one of the letters). Asking users to use "both letters and digits" will often lead to easy-to-guess substitutions such as 'E' → '3' and 'I' → '1': substitutions which are well known to attackers. Similarly, typing the password one keyboard row higher is a common trick known to attackers.

Research detailed in an April 2015 paper by several professors at Carnegie Mellon University shows that people's choices of password structure often follow several known patterns. For example, when password requirements require a long minimum length such as 16 characters, people tend to repeat characters or even entire words within their passwords. As a result, passwords may be much more easily cracked than their mathematical probabilities would otherwise indicate. Passwords containing one digit, for example, disproportionately include it at the end of the password.

Incidents
On July 16, 1998, CERT reported an incident where an attacker had found 186,126 encrypted passwords. By the time the breach was discovered, 47,642 passwords had already been cracked.

In December 2009, a major password breach of Rockyou.com occurred that led to the release of 32 million passwords. The attacker then leaked the full list of the 32 million passwords (with no other identifiable information) to the internet. Passwords were stored in cleartext in the database and were extracted through an SQL injection vulnerability. The Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) did an analysis on the strength of the passwords. Some of the key findings were:

 * about 30% of users chose passwords whose length was below seven characters,
 * almost 60% of users chose their passwords from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters, and
 * nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words, or trivial passwords that employed weak constructs such as consecutive digits and/or adjacent keyboard keys—case in point, the most common password among RockYou account owners was simply “123456”.

In June 2011, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) suffered a security breach that led to the public release of first and last names, usernames, and passwords of more than 11,000 registered users of their e-bookshop. The data were leaked as part of Operation AntiSec, a movement that includes Anonymous, LulzSec, and other hacking groups and individuals.

On July 11, 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton, a large American consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon, had its servers hacked by Anonymous and leaked the same day. "The leak, dubbed 'Military Meltdown Monday', includes 90,000 logins of military personnel—including personnel from USCENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private-sector contractors." These leaked passwords were found to be hashed with unsalted SHA-1, and were later analyzed by the ADC team at Imperva, revealing that even some military personnel used passwords as weak as "1234".

On July 18, 2011, Microsoft Hotmail banned the password: "123456".

In July 2015, a group calling itself "The Impact Team" stole the user data of Ashley Madison. Many passwords were hashed using both the relatively strong bcrypt algorithm and the weaker MD5 hash. Attacking the latter algorithm allowed some 11 million plaintext passwords to be recovered by password cracking group CynoSure Prime.

Prevention
One method of preventing a password from being cracked is to ensure that attackers cannot get access even to the hashed password. For example, on the Unix operating system, hashed passwords were originally stored in a publicly accessible file. On modern Unix (and similar) systems, on the other hand, they are stored in the shadow password file, which is accessible only to programs running with enhanced privileges (i.e., "system" privileges). This makes it harder for a malicious user to obtain the hashed passwords in the first instance, however many collections of password hashes have been stolen despite such protection. And some common network protocols transmit passwords in cleartext or use weak challenge/response schemes.

The use of salt, a random value unique to each password that is incorporated in the hashing, prevents multiple hashes from being attacked simultaneously and also prevents the creation of pre-computed dictionaries such as rainbow tables.

Another approach is to combine a site-specific secret key with the password hash, which prevents plaintext password recovery even if the hashed values are purloined. However privilege escalation attacks that can steal protected hash files may also expose the site secret. A third approach is to use key derivation functions that reduce the rate at which passwords can be guessed.

Modern Unix Systems have replaced the traditional DES-based password hashing function crypt with stronger methods such as crypt-SHA, bcrypt, and scrypt. Other systems have also begun to adopt these methods. For instance, the Cisco IOS originally used a reversible Vigenère cipher to encrypt passwords, but now uses md5-crypt with a 24-bit salt when the "enable secret" command is used. These newer methods use large salt values which prevent attackers from efficiently mounting offline attacks against multiple user accounts simultaneously. The algorithms are also much slower to execute which drastically increases the time required to mount a successful offline attack.

Many hashes used for storing passwords, such as MD5 and the SHA family, are designed for fast computation with low memory requirements and efficient implementation in hardware. Multiple instances of these algorithms can be run in parallel on graphics processing units (GPUs), speeding cracking. As a result, fast hashes are ineffective in preventing password cracking, even with salt. Some key stretching algorithms, such as PBKDF2 and crypt-SHA iteratively calculate password hashes and can significantly reduce the rate at which passwords can be tested, if the iteration count is high enough. Other algorithms, such as scrypt are memory-hard, meaning they require relatively large amounts of memory in addition to time-consuming computation and are thus more difficult to crack using GPUs and custom integrated circuits.

In 2013 a long-term Password Hashing Competition was announced to choose a new, standard algorithm for password hashing, with Argon2 chosen as the winner in 2015. Another algorithm, Balloon, is recommended by NIST. Both algorithms are memory-hard.

Solutions like a security token give a by constantly shifting password. Those solutions abruptly reduce the timeframe available for brute forcing (the attacker needs to break and use the password within a single shift) and they reduce the value of the stolen passwords because of its short time validity.

Software
There are many password cracking software tools, but the most popular are Aircrack-ng, Cain & Abel, John the Ripper, Hashcat, Hydra, DaveGrohl, and ElcomSoft. Many litigation support software packages also include password cracking functionality. Most of these packages employ a mixture of cracking strategies; algorithms with brute-force and dictionary attacks proving to be the most productive.

The increased availability of computing power and beginner friendly automated password cracking software for a number of protection schemes has allowed the activity to be taken up by script kiddies.

title: Password cracking


text:
User talk:Ketil

Another case like Ryzom
After seeing your posting on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability, I realized that the issues at Ryzom might be somehwat similar or related to issues at Battlezone II: Combat Commander. Maybe that's of interest to you and you could provide some 2nd opinion there. regards, --Kmhkmh (talk) 08:05, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Right, that looks similar. Let's see how things look when the dust settles in WP:V? I'm leaning in the "does not need citations" direction, but we'll see if there is some kind of consensus. Thanks for the pointer! Ketil (talk) 09:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * To me it looks like a problem of properly balancing the blocking fan cruft and overly zealous quality control. Yes we need to block fan cruft, but we don't want (quality control) editors insisting on a mindless formalistic application of rules and as a consequence hackling normal authors and essentially keeping them from writing good and informative articles.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Nomination of Links (programming language) for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Links (programming language) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

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Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Gaijin42 (talk) 18:16, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

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==Krav Maga edits= I would like to request that you slow down your edits on the Krav Maga page. You have made several, extensive edits in a short time and you have, although I believe un intentionally, hijacked the page. The extensiveness of the edits you have purposed should require consensus within the talk page before the edits are applied (please refer to the rules on major editing). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bverji (talk • contribs) 21:20, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

title: User talk:Ketil


text:
User talk:Jcobb

Hi there. Welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for the work you've been doing. When you get a chance, drop us a note at New user log to introduce yourself.

If you need editing help, visit How does one edit a page. For format questions, visit our manual of style

Some time when you're bored, you can read through our policies and guidelines. If you made any edits before you got an account, you might be interested in assigning those to your username.

If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Village pump. You can also drop me a question on my talk page.

Happy editing, Isomorphic 09:07, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hey man, nice work at Spontaneous symmetry breaking, Electroweak force, and Babylonian literature and science. You're adding some of the best content I've seen from a new user. Are you seriously a high school student? I've been majoring in these subjects (although I'll grant that I'm not a brilliant student) and I don't know much that about gauge groups, Lie groups, and some of the other things you're writing on. Isomorphic 11:18, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * The use of words, as opposed to mathematical notation, is the right approach for the M theory simplified article, which I propose to submit to Featured articles, if it is all right with the community. Ancheta Wis 18:46, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC) P.S. I have been a student of physics for decades, even studying with Richard Feynman in the 1970s, so I feel I have some basis for judgement. Keep up the good work.

M-theory
The "simplified" explanation is a lot better than the obfuscated one at M-theory, and does not contain much less information. I would encourage you to beautify M-theory by copying the simplified one over, and possibly keeping some technobabble at the end (although it too could be improved, as you did with the simplified page.) Thanks. Loisel 04:42, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

i need some help
im a high school studen about to go into my sophomore year. i really know pretty much nothing about physics or anything like that. but i really want to learn about the M theory. i think that it is mindboggling. in a good way though. i have tried to find an internet site that didn't confuse me that could help me understand the M theory better. so i was wondering if you would be so kind as to explain it to me in words that i could understand. thanks. also if you have the time could you explain the eleven-dimensional thing. thanks again.

jessi

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Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:12, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Jcobb


text:
Sequence assembly

In bioinformatics, sequence assembly refers to aligning and merging fragments from a longer DNA sequence in order to reconstruct the original sequence. This is needed as DNA sequencing technology might not be able to 'read' whole genomes in one go, but rather reads small pieces of between 20 and 30,000 bases, depending on the technology used. Typically, the short fragments (reads) result from shotgun sequencing genomic DNA, or gene transcript (ESTs).

The problem of sequence assembly can be compared to taking many copies of a book, passing each of them through a shredder with a different cutter, and piecing the text of the book back together just by looking at the shredded pieces. Besides the obvious difficulty of this task, there are some extra practical issues: the original may have many repeated paragraphs, and some shreds may be modified during shredding to have typos. Excerpts from another book may also be added in, and some shreds may be completely unrecognizable.

Types
There are three approaches to assembling sequencing data:

 * 1) De-novo: assembling sequencing reads to create full-length (sometimes novel) sequences, without using a template (see de novo sequence assemblers, de novo transcriptome assembly)
 * 2) Mapping/Aligning: assembling reads by aligning reads against a template (AKA reference). The assembled consensus may not be identical to the template.
 * 3) Reference-guided: grouping of reads by similarity to the most similar region within the reference (step wise mapping). Reads within each group are then shortened down to mimic short reads quality. A typical method to do so is the k-mer approach. Reference-guided assembly is most useful using long-reads.

Referenced-guided assembly is a combination of the other types. This type is applied on long reads to mimic short reads advantages (i.e. call quality). The logic behind it is to group the reads by smaller windows within the reference. Reads in each group will then be reduced in size using the k-mere approach to select the highest quality and most probable contiguous (contig). Contigs will then will be joined together to create a scaffold. The final consense is made by closing any gaps in the scaffold.

Genome
The first sequence assemblers began to appear in the late 1980s and early 1990s as variants of simpler sequence alignment programs to piece together vast quantities of fragments generated by automated sequencing instruments called DNA sequencers. As the sequenced organisms grew in size and complexity (from small viruses over plasmids to bacteria and finally eukaryotes), the assembly programs used in these genome projects needed increasingly sophisticated strategies to handle:

 * terabytes of sequencing data which need processing on computing clusters;
 * identical and nearly identical sequences (known as repeats) which can, in the worst case, increase the time and space complexity of algorithms quadratically;
 * DNA read errors in the fragments from the sequencing instruments, which can confound assembly.

Faced with the challenge of assembling the first larger eukaryotic genomes—the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in 2000 and the human genome just a year later,—scientists developed assemblers like Celera Assembler and Arachne able to handle genomes of 130 million (e.g., the fruit fly D. melanogaster) to 3 billion (e.g., the human genome) base pairs. Subsequent to these efforts, several other groups, mostly at the major genome sequencing centers, built large-scale assemblers, and an open source effort known as AMOS was launched to bring together all the innovations in genome assembly technology under the open source framework.

EST
Expressed sequence tag or EST assembly was an early strategy, dating from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, to assemble individual genes rather than whole genomes. The problem differs from genome assembly in several ways. The input sequences for EST assembly are fragments of the transcribed mRNA of a cell and represent only a subset of the whole genome. A number of algorithmical problems differ between genome and EST assembly. For instance, genomes often have large amounts of repetitive sequences, concentrated in the intergenic regions. Transcribed genes contain many fewer repeats, making assembly somewhat easier. On the other hand, some genes are expressed (transcribed) in very high numbers (e.g., housekeeping genes), which means that unlike whole-genome shotgun sequencing, the reads are not uniformly sampled across the genome.

EST assembly is made much more complicated by features like (cis-) alternative splicing, trans-splicing, single-nucleotide polymorphism, and post-transcriptional modification. Beginning in 2008 when RNA-Seq was invented, EST sequencing was replaced by this far more efficient technology, described under de novo transcriptome assembly.

De-novo vs mapping assembly
In terms of complexity and time requirements, de-novo assemblies are orders of magnitude slower and more memory intensive than mapping assemblies. This is mostly due to the fact that the assembly algorithm needs to compare every read with every other read (an operation that has a naive time complexity of O( n 2)). Current de-novo genome assemblers may use different types of graph-based algorithms, such as the:

 * Overlap/Layout/Consensus (OLC) approach, which was typical of the Sanger-data assemblers and relies on an overlap graph;
 * de Bruijn Graph (DBG) approach, which is most widely applied to the short reads from the Solexa and SOLiD platforms. It relies on K-mer graphs, which performs well with vast quantities of short reads;
 * Greedy graph-based approach, which may also use one of the OLC or DBG approaches. With greedy graph-based algorithms, the contigs, series of reads aligned together, grow by greedy extension, always taking on the read that is found by following the highest-scoring overlap.

Referring to the comparison drawn to shredded books in the introduction: while for mapping assemblies one would have a very similar book as a template (perhaps with the names of the main characters and a few locations changed), de-novo assemblies present a more daunting challenge in that one would not know beforehand whether this would become a science book, a novel, a catalogue, or even several books. Also, every shred would be compared with every other shred.

Handling repeats in de-novo assembly requires the construction of a graph representing neighboring repeats. Such information can be derived from reading a long fragment covering the repeats in full or only its two ends. On the other hand, in a mapping assembly, parts with multiple or no matches are usually left for another assembling technique to look into.

Technological advances
The complexity of sequence assembly is driven by two major factors: the number of fragments and their lengths. While more and longer fragments allow better identification of sequence overlaps, they also pose problems as the underlying algorithms show quadratic or even exponential complexity behaviour to both number of fragments and their length. And while shorter sequences are faster to align, they also complicate the layout phase of an assembly as shorter reads are more difficult to use with repeats or near identical repeats.

In the earliest days of DNA sequencing, scientists could only gain a few sequences of short length (some dozen bases) after weeks of work in laboratories. Hence, these sequences could be aligned in a few minutes by hand.

In 1975, the dideoxy termination method (AKA Sanger sequencing) was invented and until shortly after 2000, the technology was improved up to a point where fully automated machines could churn out sequences in a highly parallelised mode 24 hours a day. Large genome centers around the world housed complete farms of these sequencing machines, which in turn led to the necessity of assemblers to be optimised for sequences from whole-genome shotgun sequencing projects where the reads

 * are about 800–900 bases long
 * contain sequencing artifacts like sequencing and cloning vectors
 * have error rates between 0.5 and 10%

With the Sanger technology, bacterial projects with 20,000 to 200,000 reads could easily be assembled on one computer. Larger projects, like the human genome with approximately 35 million reads, needed large computing farms and distributed computing.

By 2004 / 2005, pyrosequencing had been brought to commercial viability by 454 Life Sciences. This new sequencing method generated reads much shorter than those of Sanger sequencing: initially about 100 bases, now 400-500 bases. Its much higher throughput and lower cost (compared to Sanger sequencing) pushed the adoption of this technology by genome centers, which in turn pushed development of sequence assemblers that could efficiently handle the read sets. The sheer amount of data coupled with technology-specific error patterns in the reads delayed development of assemblers; at the beginning in 2004 only the Newbler assembler from 454 was available. Released in mid-2007, the hybrid version of the MIRA assembler by Chevreux et al. was the first freely available assembler that could assemble 454 reads as well as mixtures of 454 reads and Sanger reads. Assembling sequences from different sequencing technologies was subsequently coined hybrid assembly.

From 2006, the Illumina (previously Solexa) technology has been available and can generate about 100 million reads per run on a single sequencing machine. Compare this to the 35 million reads of the human genome project which needed several years to be produced on hundreds of sequencing machines. Illumina was initially limited to a length of only 36 bases, making it less suitable for de novo assembly (such as de novo transcriptome assembly), but newer iterations of the technology achieve read lengths above 100 bases from both ends of a 3-400bp clone. Announced at the end of 2007, the SHARCGS assembler by Dohm et al. was the first published assembler that was used for an assembly with Solexa reads. It was quickly followed by a number of others.

Later, new technologies like SOLiD from Applied Biosystems, Ion Torrent and SMRT were released and new technologies (e.g. Nanopore sequencing) continue to emerge. Despite the higher error rates of these technologies they are important for assembly because their longer read length helps to address the repeat problem. It is impossible to assemble through a perfect repeat that is longer than the maximum read length; however, as reads become longer the chance of a perfect repeat that large becomes small. This gives longer sequencing reads an advantage in assembling repeats even if they have low accuracy (~85%).

Quality control
Most sequence assemblers have some algorithms built in for quality control, such as Phred. However, such measures do not assess assembly completeness in terms of gene content. Some tools evaluate the quality of an assembly after the fact.

For instance, BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs) is a measure of gene completeness in a genome, gene set, or transcriptome, using the fact that many genes are present only as single-copy genes in most genomes. The initial BUSCO sets represented 3023 genes for vertebrates, 2675 for arthropods, 843 for metazoans, 1438 for fungi and 429 for eukaryotes. This table shows an example for human and fruit fly genomes:

Assembly algorithms
Different organisms have a distinct region of higher complexity within their genome. Hence, the need of different computational approaches is needed. Some of the commonly used algorithms are:

 * Graph Assembly: is based on Graph theory in computer science. The de Bruijn Graph is an example of this approach and utilizes k-mers to assemble a contiguous from reads.
 * Greedy Graph Assembly: this approach score each added read to the assembly and selects the highest possible score from the overlapping region.

Given a set of sequence fragments, the object is to find a longer sequence that contains all the fragments (see figure under Types of Sequence Assembly): The result might not be an optimal solution to the problem.
 * 1) Сalculate pairwise alignments of all fragments.
 * 2) Choose two fragments with the largest overlap.
 * 3) Merge chosen fragments.
 * 4) Repeat step 2 and 3 until only one fragment is left.

Bioinformatics pipeline
In general, there are three steps in assembling sequencing reads into a scaffold:
 * 1) Pre-assembly: This step is essential to ensure the integrity of downstream analysis such as variant calling or final scaffold sequence. This step consists of two chronological workflows:
 * 2) Quality check: Depending on the type of sequencing technology, different errors might arise that would lead to a false base call. For example, sequencing "NAAAAAAAAAAAAN" and "NAAAAAAAAAAAN" which include 12 adenine might be wrongfully called with 11 adenine instead. Sequencing a highly repetitive segment of the target DNA/RNA might result in a call that is one base shorter or one base longer. Read quality is typically measured by Phred which is an encoded score of each nucleotide quality within a read's sequence. Some sequencing technologies such as PacBio do not have a scoring method for their sequenced reads. A common tool used in this step is FastQC.
 * 3) Filtering of reads: Reads that failed to pass the quality check should be removed from the FASTQ file to get the best assembly contigs.
 * 4) Assembly:  During this step, reads alignment will be utilized with different criteria to map each read to the possible location. The predicted position of a read is based on either how much of its sequence aligns with other reads or a reference. Different alignment algorithms are used for reads from different sequencing technologies. Some of the commonly used approaches in the assembly are de Bruijn graph and overlapping. Read length, coverage, quality, and the sequencing technique used plays a major role in choosing the best alignment algorithm in the case of Next Generation Sequencing. On the other hand, algorithms aligning 3rd generation sequencing reads requires advance approaches to account for the high error rate associated with them.
 * 5) Post-assembly: This step is focusing on extracting valuable information from the assembled sequence. Comparative genomics and population analysis are examples of post-assembly analysis.

Programs
For a lists of de-novo assemblers, see De novo sequence assemblers. For a list of mapping aligners, see List of sequence alignment software § Short-read sequence alignment.

Some of the common tools used in different assembly steps are listed in the following table:

title: Sequence assembly


text:
Whipsnade Zoo

Whipsnade Zoo, formerly known as ZSL Whipsnade Zoo and Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, is a zoo and safari park located at Whipsnade, near Dunstable in Bedfordshire, England. It is one of two zoos (the other being London Zoo in Regent's Park, London) that are owned by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats.

Description
The park covers 600 acre, and can be located from miles to the north and from the air because of the Whipsnade White Lion, a large hill figure carved into the side of the Dunstable Downs (part of the Chiltern Hills) below the white rhino enclosure.

Due to its size, inside the park, visitors may walk or drive their own cars between the various animal enclosures, or through an 'Asian' area where some animals are allowed to roam free around the cars. There is also a train service, the narrow gauge Great Whipsnade Railway, also known as the "Jumbo Express."

Whipsnade Zoo is the UK's largest zoo and one of Europe's largest wildlife conservation parks. It is home to 3,626 animals, many of which are endangered in the wild. The majority of the animals are kept within sizeable enclosures; others, such as peafowl, Patagonian maras, and red-necked wallabies, roam freely around the park.

Early years
The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles with the aim of promoting the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. To this end London Zoo in Regents Park, London was established.

Almost 100 years later, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (ZSL Secretary 1903–1935) was inspired by a visit to the Bronx Zoological Park to create a park in Britain as a conservation centre.

Hall Farm, a derelict farm on the Dunstable Downs, 30 mi to the north of London was purchased by the Zoological Society of London in 1926 for £13,480 12s 10d. The site was fenced, roads built and trees planted.

The first animals arrived at the park in 1928, including two Lady Amherst's pheasants, a golden pheasant, and five red junglefowl. Others soon followed including muntjac, llama, wombats and skunks.

Whipsnade Park Zoo opened on Sunday 23 May 1931. It was the first open zoo in Europe to be easily accessible to the visiting public. It was an immediate success and received over 38,000 visitors on the following Monday. The brown bear enclosure is a surviving feature from the earliest days of the zoo.

The collection of animals was boosted in 1932 by the purchase of a collection from a defunct travelling menagerie and some of the larger animals walked to the zoo from Dunstable station.

The distinctive white lion hill figure was completed in 1933 and refreshed in 2018.

World War II
During the Second World War, the zoo acted as a refuge for animals evacuated from the Regents Park London Zoo. The celebrity giant pandas Ming, Sung and Tang were among these animals but were soon returned to London to boost morale in the capital. During 1940, 41 bombs fell on the park with little damage to the zoo structure; some of the ponds in the park are the remains of bomb craters from this period. A spur-winged goose and a 3-year-old giraffe named Boxer, which had been born at the zoo, died as a result of the bombings; the giraffe ran herself to exhaustion in fright at the explosions.

Recent developments
In 1996, a new elephant house and paddock was opened to replace the architecturally outstanding but cramped original elephant house designed by Lubetkin and Tecton in 1935. The old house remains at the zoo as a Grade II* listed building and its associated enclosure contains the zoo's lemurs.

In the early 2000s the zoo added new exhibits including Lions of the Serengeti in 2005, a walk-through lemur enclosure in 2007 (officially opened on 28 March 2007 by Dominic Byrne from The Chris Moyles Show on Radio 1, who is a regular visitor to the park), the Rhinos of Nepal exhibit in February 2007, Cheetah Rock on Easter 2008, a sloth bear exhibit in May 2008, and Wild Wild Whipsnade in May 2009. In July 2008, the Café on the Lake was reopened after remodelling, with its name changed to the Wild Bite Café.

In May 2009, William Windsor (known as Billy), a goat mascot of the British Army's Royal Welsh regiment, retired to the zoo after eight years' distinguished service performing ceremonial duties.

Butterfly House
The Butterfly House opened in 2016, the house is home to various species of butterfly and dwarf crocodiles, it is a walkthrough exhibit so the Butterflies are flying around when people go through the exhibit. This house is also home to one of the largest moths in the world; the atlas moth.

Passage Through Asia
Passage Through Asia is a large paddock with no boundaries between visitors and the animals. Visitors can only access the area by driving through it in their own cars or riding on the Jumbo Express train. The paddock houses herds of Bactrian camels, barasingha, fallow deer, sika deer, Père David's deer and yaks.

Lions of the Serengeti
Opened in 2005, Lions of the Serengeti was home to a pride of 7 African lions. The pride of African lions included two adult females named Mashaka-Lia and Kachanga, three younger males named Neo, Toto and Max, and a younger female named Kia. The four younger lions are the offspring of Spike, the zoo's former male lion and Mashaka-Lia, and were born in April 2006. In October 2021 Toto died at the age of 15 due to ill health. In December 2021 the remaining lions Neo, Kia and Max were euthanized after age related conditions were beginning to cause them pain and discomfort. The Lion habitat is now closed until a suitable breeding group can be sourced.

In early 2022, the zoo temporarily housed 5 lions named Zero, Tor, Jabu, Mo and Kaya from Africa Alive! Suffolk, after their enclosure suffered damage from Storm Eunice.

From May 2022, the zoo housed Khari, a male lion from the Blackpool Zoo. Khari will leave Whipsnade Zoo in 2023 Summer to return to Blackpool Zoo. Whipsnade will continue to search for an appropriate breeding group. Later, two new lionesses from Belgium and a male from Germany will join the zoo's collection.

Sea Lion Splash
Formerly the zoo's Dolphin Pool, Sea Lion Splash was a daily demonstration in which the zoo's three trained California sea lions (two females named Bailey and Lara, and a male named Dom) perform tricks and stunts in their pool (referred to as the 'Splash Zone'). In June 2015, Dom and Bailey gave birth to a male sea lion called Oscar. In February 2021, the zoo's sea lions were transferred to Yorkshire Wildlife Park, in South Yorkshire.

Elephant herd
ZSL Whipsnade Zoo keeps a herd of seven Asian elephants, consisting of cows Kaylee, Lucha, Karishma, Donna, Elizabeth, Nang Phaya and bull elephant Ming Jung. The latter arrived from Antwerp in November 2019 as part of the European Endangered Species Programme.

Their paddock is seven acres, and features three pools, mud wallows and dust baths. One of the female elephants, named Karishma, and her pregnancy with her first calf George, featured heavily in the first series of the ITV documentary programme The Zoo, which follows the daily lives of the staff at both Whipsnade and London Zoo. Another female calf was born during Elizabeth II's 90th birthday celebrations and was named in her honour. The elephant herd moved to a new indoor facility, the £2 million Centre for Elephant Care, which opened in April 2017.

Rhinos of Nepal
Opened in February 2008, Rhinos of Nepal houses a group of four Indian rhinoceros – Hugo, Beluki, Behan and a young male called Bali (born to Behan in September 2015). The building aims to be environmentally friendly, using rain water captured on the roof to fill the pools, heating the pools with solar energy and featuring barriers that are made from recycled wooden railway sleepers instead of metal bars.

Birds of the World
A daily educational show in which keepers present various bird species demonstrating their natural abilities to an audience of visitors.

Cheetah Rock
Opened in 2008, this exhibit is home to a group of cheetahs, and features displays that inform visitors about ZSL's cheetah conservation project in Tanzania. Despite ZSL's conservation project being focused on East Africa, the Cheetahs at Whipsnade are in fact Sudan cheetahs from Northeast Africa. The zoo is now home to three male cheetahs who moved in 2022 from Ireland.

Children's Farm
An area aimed primarily at children and housing domesticated livestock such as turkeys, llamas, alpacas, cows, silkie chickens, horses, donkeys, and goats, most of which are free-roaming. The Children's Farm is also home to a female Bennett's wallaby named Pip, who was abandoned by her mother and hand-reared by keepers.

Wild Wild Whipsnade
Wild Wild Whipsnade was opened in 2010. This exhibit is home to several species of animal that lived in the wild in Britain hundreds of years ago. These include Eurasian brown bears, wolverines, Eurasian lynx, reindeer, wild boar, and European bison.

Other animals
Other species in the zoo's collection that are not part of a themed exhibit include Amur tigers, blesbok, Asian small-clawed otters, red pandas, great white pelicans, gemsbok, sloth bears, meerkats, aardvarks, Cape porcupines, common ostriches, reticulated giraffes, southern white rhinoceroses, Przewalski's wild horses, chimpanzees, American flamingos, northern rockhopper penguins, Grévy's zebra, African wild dogs, bongo, hippopotamus, scimitar-horned oryx, waterbuck, African penguins and ring-tailed lemurs.

Daily shows
The only animal demonstration show is the 'Birds of the World'.

Talks also take place daily throughout the summer season including lemur talks, giraffe browse and penguin feeding.

Funding
The park and ZSL receive no government funding, and rely mainly on entrance fees, memberships, its 'Fellows' and 'Patrons' scheme and various corporate sponsorships. The park takes advantage of the Gift Aid charity donation scheme.

Filming at the zoo
Whipsnade was one of the sets for ITV's Primeval, where a ferocious predator from the future kills a lion and three people. The zoo is one of the locations featured in BBC's Super Vets. It featured in an episode of the CBBC programme Brum in 1991, titled "Safari Park". Jamie Oliver and Sainsbury's have also used the zoo's background for a 2001 television advert. The BBC's Merlin used parts of Whipsnade as a filming location for Season 1, and the famous lion landmark is featured in behind the scenes footage from the DVDs. The zoo also served as one of the tasks for BBC Three's Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum. Tots TV visited Whipsnade.

Criticism
In 2002, a 20-year-old elephant named Anna died three days after giving birth to a stillborn calf. There was an allegation that the elephant suffered painful and unnecessary surgery during the birth. The zoo reported that Anna's death was due to an infection related to the still birth and that she did not "die in agony".

In 2021, two female European brown bears were shot and killed after escaping their enclosure during the night. The zoo was criticized for euthanizing the bears, after they used a fallen tree to escape into an adjacent enclosure where they attacked a wild boar. Sam Threadgill, director of the charity Freedom for Animals said: "It was a tragic incident, but it just highlights again why we shouldn’t be keeping animals in zoos". The zoo's chief curator at the time, Malcolm Fitzpatrick, said in a message to staff, "We must quickly make decisions informed by our experience and expertise to protect our people, guests and our other animals", adding that tranquillizers were not an option as they would have taken 20 minutes to take effect.

Chimpanzee escape
In September 2007, two former 'tea party' chimpanzees named Koko and Jonnie, moved from London Zoo to make way for The Gorilla Kingdom, escaped from their enclosure. Koko followed one of the keepers back to the enclosure but Jonnie started heading towards public grounds. Jonnie was shot dead by the zoo's specially trained firearms squad for fears about public safety. The zoo has said that at no point were any members of the public in danger. When asked why they did not use a tranquilliser instead, ZSL spokeswoman Alice Henchley said "It's just standard procedure, if the animal cannot be quickly and safely recaptured it will be shot. We can't be sure with a tranquillizer".

Popular culture

 * In the 1976 movie Rogue Male, which takes place on the eve of WW2, the central character (who has failed in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler) played by Peter O'Toole jeeringly tells the Nazi (John Standing) who catches him if he would donate his remains to Whipsnade Zoo.
 * Gerald "Gerry" Durrell, British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter also worked here. After the war, Durrell joined Whipsnade Zoo as a junior or student keeper. This move fulfilled a lifelong dream: Durrell claims in The Stationary Ark that the first word that he could enunciate with any clarity was "zoo". Beasts in My Belfry recalls events of this period.

title: Whipsnade Zoo


text:
Ciao

Ciao is an informal salutation in the Italian language that is used for both "hello" and  "goodbye". Originally from the Venetian language, it has entered the vocabulary of English and of many other languages around the world. Its dual meaning of "hello" and "goodbye" makes it similar to shalom in Hebrew, salām in Arabic, annyeong in Korean, aloha in Hawaiian, drud (bedrud) in Persian, and chào in Vietnamese (the latter is a false cognate; the two words are not linguistically related despite sounding similar to each other).

Etymology
The word derives from the Venetian phrase s-ciào vostro or s-ciào su, literally meaning "(I am) your slave". This greeting is analogous to the medieval Latin servus which is still used colloquially in parts of Central/Eastern Europe, or the antiquated English valediction Your Obedient Servant. The expression was not a literal statement of fact, but rather a perfunctory promise of good will among friends (along the lines of "at your service" in English). The Venetian word for "slave", s-ciào or s-ciàvo, derives from Medieval Latin sclavus, a loanword from Medieval Greek Σκλάβος, related to the ethnic "Slavic", since most of the slaves at that time came from the Balkans.

This greeting was eventually shortened to ciào, lost all its servile connotations and came to be used as an informal salutation by speakers of all classes. In modern Italian language, the word is used (in addition to the meaning of salutation) as an exclamation of resignation (also in a positive sense), as in Oh, va be', ciao! ("Oh, well, never mind!"). A Milanese tongue-twister says Se gh'hinn gh'hinn; se gh'hinn nò, s'ciào ("If there is [money], there is; if there isn't, farewell! [there's nothing we can do]").

Spread
The Venetian ciào was adopted by Northern Italian people during the late 19th and early 20th century. Later it became common elsewhere in Italy with the spelling ciao. It has since spread to many countries in Europe, along with other items of the Italian culture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the greeting (spelled chau and only meaning 'bye') spread to the Americas—especially Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil (as tchau), Venezuela, Panama and Argentina – largely by way of Italian immigrants. In today's Cuba, ciao as a closing in letters has largely replaced the more traditional adiós, with its religious implications, for many young people. Ciao has also permeated Australian culture, becoming a popular greeting among descendants of Italian immigrants. It is also common in some varieties of South African English. Ciao has also been used in some parts of Romania as a way to say 'goodbye'.

Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), which is set in northeast Italy during World War I, is credited with bringing the word into the English language.

Usage as greeting
In contemporary Italian usage, ciao is interchangeable for both an informal hello and goodbye, much like aloha in Hawaiian, salām in Arabic, shalom in Hebrew and annyeong in Korean. In Italy, ciao is mainly used in informal contexts, i.e. among family members, relatives, and friends, in other words, with those one would address with the familiar tu (second person singular) as opposed to Lei (courtesy form); in these contexts, ciao can be the norm even as a morning or evening salutation, in lieu of buon giorno or buona sera, deemed too formal among friends, relatives, or the very familiar.

In other languages, ciao has come to have more specific meanings. The following list summarizes the spelling and uses of salutations derived from ciao in various languages and countries.

There's a "false friend" on this. "Siau" is used in catalan, which comes from "Amb Déu siau/Adéu siau" (be with god). The italian borrowing "ciao" is the second acception, mimicking the ci- with an txi- sound.
 * Albanian: çao ("goodbye")
 * Amharic: ቻው, chaw ("goodbye")
 * Bulgarian: чао, chao ("goodbye")
 * Catalan: ciao, txao ("goodbye")

In some languages, such as Latvian, the vernacular version of ciao has become the most common form of informal salutation.
 * Czech: ciao, čau, also čauky, čauves, čauky mňauky ("hello" or "goodbye") and čau čau (goodbye)
 * Dutch: ciao ("goodbye")
 * English: ciao ("goodbye")
 * Esperanto: ĉaŭ ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * Estonian: "tšau", also "tšauki" - sometimes pronounced with "s" ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * Finnish: "tsau", also "tsaukki" ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * French: ciao, tchao, tchô (mostly used to say "goodbye"). "Tchao" is slang in French. In 1983, this word was used in the title of the popular movie Tchao, pantin (So Long, Stooge). The variant tchô was popularised by the comic book Titeuf Tchô, monde cruel.
 * German: ciao, tschau ("goodbye", in Switzerland also "hello")
 * Greek: τσάο, tsao ("goodbye")
 * Hebrew: צ'או chao ("goodbye")
 * Hungarian: csáó or the more informal csá or cső ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * Interlingua: ciao ("goodbye")
 * Italian: ciao ("hello", "hi" or "goodbye") also "ciao ciao" (bye bye).
 * Japanese: チャオ, chao ("hello" or "hi") also チャオチャオ chao chao (bye bye).
 * Latvian: čau ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * Lithuanian: čiau ("goodbye", rarely "hello")
 * Macedonian: чао, čao ("goodbye")
 * Malay: چاو دولو, cau dulu ("goodbye"); used informally in Malaysia by the leaving party. The word "cau" can be used informally as a verb which means "leave"
 * Maltese: ċaw ("goodbye"); also ċaw ċaw ("bye bye")
 * Neapolitan: cià ("hello", "hi" or "goodbye")
 * Polish: ciao (rare)
 * Portuguese: tchau ("goodbye"), tchau tchau ("bye bye"), or tchauzinho ("little bye"); in Portugal xau is also used, without the "t" sound, especially in written informal language such as SMS or web chats
 * Romanian: ciao ("hello" or "goodbye"); it is often written as ceau although this form is not officially in the Romanian vocabulary
 * Russian: чау, чао, chao; ("goodbye"); also jokingly - чао-какао, chao-kakao (from чай — "tea" and какао — "cocoa")
 * Serbo-Croatian: ćao / ћао (informal "hi" or "bye")
 * Sicilian: ciau ("hello", "hi")
 * Slovak: čau (variations: čauko, čaves, čauky, čaf); mostly as "goodbye", but stands in for "hello" primarily in informal written communication (text messages, emails) and phone calls because it is more character-efficient/shorter and more hip than the Slovak "ahoj"
 * Slovene: ciao, čau or čaw ("hello" or "goodbye"); also čaw čaw ("bye bye")
 * Somali: ciao ("goodbye")
 * Spanish: in Argentina and Uruguay the word chau is the most common expression for "goodbye". In Chile, chao is the standard farewell. In Spain, where "adios" (with a religious etymology as "goodbye", the same as Italian "addio" and French "adieu", meaning "to God" in English) is the common expression, people can use chao as an original way of saying goodbye.
 * Swiss-German: ciao/Tschau ("hello" or "goodbye")
 * Tigrinya: ቻው, chaw ("goodbye")
 * Turkish: çav ("goodbye")
 * Venetian: ciào ("hello" or "goodbye")

The Vietnamese chào ("hello" or "goodbye") is phonetically similar but not etymologically related.

Variations
The dominant use in Latin America uses the term solely as farewell rather than as a greeting.

The greeting has several variations and minor uses. In Italian and Portuguese, for example, a doubled ciao ciao/tchau tchau means specifically "goodbye", whilst the tripled or quadrupled word (but said with short breaks between each one) means "Bye, I'm in a hurry!"

Pronounced with a long, it means "Hello, I'm so glad to meet you!" (be it sincere or sarcastic) in Italian, and a sarcastic or humorous use of "bye!" (cf. American English) in Portuguese. It can be used in Italian to express sarcasm at another person's point of view about one topic, especially when that opinion sounds outdated, in which case the meaning is comparable to the English "Yeah, right!"

In all these cases, however, the special meaning is conferred more by the vocal inflection than by the modified use.

title: Ciao


text:
Samotlor Field

Samotlor Field is the largest oil field of Russia and the sixth largest in the world, owned and operated by Rosneft. The field is located at Lake Samotlor in Nizhnevartovsk district, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Tyumen Oblast. It covers 1752 km2.

History
The field was discovered in 1965. Development started in 1967 and first oil was produced in 1969. Discovery of this field had changed Nizhnevartovsk from a small nearby village into a busy oil city as Samotlor used to be the most important oil production base of the Soviet Union. After breakup of the Soviet Union the field was owned by Samotlorneftgaz and TNK-Nizhnevartovsk, which later formed TNK-BP.

Over the all development period a total of 2,086 well clusters (containing more than 17,000 wells) have been built and about 2.6 billion tons of oil has been produced. The peak production occurred in 1980 when Samotlor produced 158.9 million tons of oil (7 Moilbbl/d). The production has been in decline ever since, although according to TNK-BP the field production has stabilized over the past last years after.

Reserves
The in-place oil reserves of the Samotlor field were equal to 55 Goilbbl and as of 2009 estimated at 1 Goilbbl. The proven reserves are approximately 44 Goilbbl. The field is 80% depleted with water-cut up tp 90%.

At the end of the 1990s, production rate dropped to 300000 oilbbl/d. However, through an aggressive exploration program and application of cutting-edge technologies TNK-BP had raised production up to 750000 oilbbl/d. Up to 2012, TNK-BP plans to invest US$1 billion per year for maintaining oil production in it at the level of 30 million tons per year.

In media
The oil processing plant in Nizhnevartovsk is the scene of (but referred to by location rather than directly by name) the beginning of Tom Clancy's 1986 novel Red Storm Rising.

title: Samotlor Field


text:
Bilzingsleben (Paleolithic site)

Bilzingsleben (Fundplatz Bilzingsleben, lit. discovery site Bilzingsleben) is a former stone quarry in Thuringia, Germany, notable for its wealth of palaeolithic human fossils and artifacts.

One of the oldest buildings in the world and one of the oldest pieces of art was found at the site.

Geology
Bilzingsleben is located on the northern border of the Thuringian Basin, a depression made of triassic Keuper. To the North are the Kyffhäuser mountains, Hainleite and Schmücke that contain mainly Bunter sandstone and Muschelkalk deposits. The regions are separated by the local hercynian fault-line (Finne-Störung). The fault-line is the cause for numerous springs in this area. The emerging spring waters in turn have dissolved the local calcareous rocks and formed the interglacial travertine deposits that cover the Bilzingsleben site. The 400.000 year long conservation is attributed to the travertine's remarkable resilience to erosional processes.

The site itself was part of a fluvial terrace in Pleistocene, Central European river basin now situated 1.5 km south of the village of Bilzingsleben, Sömmerda district at 175 m above sea level in an old travertine quarry, called Steinrinne, where travertines have been quarried since early modern times and the material was used in the towns of the region, for example Kindelbrück's city wall.

History of the excavation
Fossilized bones at the site had already been found since the 13th century. In 1710 David Siegmund Büttner published his book "Rudera diluvii testes i.e. Zeichen und Zeugen der Sündfluth" (Signs and witnesses of the flood). In 1818 Freiherr Friedrich von Schlotheim (1765-1832) found a human skull covered by lime concretions. It is lost today. In 1908 geologist Ewald Wüst (1875-1934) of the University of Halle-Wittenberg published his first work on local flint artifacts. Amateur researcher Adolf Spengler took up work at the site in 1922.

In 1969 Dietrich Mania, later professor at the University of Jena, discovered numerous fossils and artifacts during a routine investigation. Under the auspices of the Halle State Museum of Prehistory a systematic excavation was launched in 1971 that lasted until 1992 during which 1600 m2 were documented and several human fossils were unearthed. Consequently administration of the site has been handed to the University of Jena.

Dating
The site belongs to the Reinsdorf interglacial, c. 370,000 BP.

Human remains
In 1974 a piece of a human skull was identified among the finds. To date, 37 human bones and teeth have been found, mainly parts of the skull. They represent the remains of at least three individuals and have been classified as Homo erectus bilzingslebenensis by Emanuel Vlcek (Prague). The remains of the skulls show that they have been intentionally smashed postmortem, maybe as part of a burial rite.

Environment
Both plant impressions in the travertine and pollen remains allow the reconstruction of the local environment. There are two deposition phases. Both are dominated by woodland species. The first phase (limnic chalk mixed with travertine sand) is dominated by hazel (Corylus), ash (Fraxinus) and oak (Quercus). The second phase (pure limnic chalk) is dominated by hornbeam (Carpinus), alder (Alnus) and pine (Pinus).

36 plant species are attested by impressions in the travertine, among them 14 tree and shrub species:
 * Pedunculate oak (Quercus robur)
 * Maple (Acer campestre, Acer pseudoplatanus)
 * Large-leaved linden (Tilia platyphyllos)
 * European ash (Fraxinus excelsior)
 * European cornel (Cornus mas)
 * Common hazel (Corylus avellana)
 * Common aspen (Populus tremula)
 * Downy birch (Betula pubescens)
 * European box (Buxus sempervirens)
 * European barberry (Berberis vulgaris)
 * Hungarian lilac (Syringa josikaea)
 * European nettle tree (Celtis australis)
 * Scarlet firethorn (Pyracantha coccinea)
 * Shrubby cinquefoil (Dasiphora fruticosa).

The woods were mainly made up of oaks and box (Buxo-Quercetum). Herbs like wormwood, sorrel, ferns and grasses attest the presence of open steppes or meadows. Sedges and rushes grew on the lakeshore, waterlilies and Sphagnum moss in the lakes.

The remains of 54 species of animals have been found in Bilzingsleben, 35 species of mammals, six kinds of birds, three reptiles, three amphibians and five kinds of fishes. Among the mammals are:
 * Straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus)
 * Rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis, Stephanorhinus hemitoechus)
 * Aurochs (Bos primigenius)
 * Steppe wisent (Bison priscus)
 * Horse (Equus sp.)
 * Red deer (Cervus elaphus)
 * Fallow deer (Dama dama)
 * Giant deer (Megaloceros sp.)
 * Roe deer (Capreolus suessenbornensis)
 * Bear (Ursus deningeri-spelaeus)
 * Lion (Panthera spelaea)
 * European wildcat (Felis silvestris)
 * Red fox (Vulpes vulpes)
 * Wild boar (Sus scrofa)
 * Wolf (Canis lupus)
 * Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvana)
 * A now extinct beaver (Trogontherium cuvieri).

Woodland animals predominate, but there are some species that prefer more open habitats as well, like rhinoceros, horse and bison. Mollusks attest to a climate that was warmer and wetter than today. The average annual temperature is supposed to have been 9° to 13°C, the annual precipitation 800 mm.

Special finds
The lithic industry is characterized by chopping tools of diminutive sizes. There are no true hand axes. The raw material is mainly flint, although quartzite, quartz and travertine have been used as well. There are numerous bone tools (hoes, scrapers, points and gougers). Some hoes are made of antler or ivory. Even wooden artefacts have been preserved.

One bone fragment, an elephant tibia, has two groups of 7 and 14 incised parallel lines and might represent an early example of art. The regular spacing of the incisions, their subequal lengths and V-like cross-sections suggest they were created at the same time, with a single stone tool. The tibia dates to between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago. The interpretation as an early calendar is a possibility.

Structures
D. Mania found large stones arranged in a circular manner. He thought that it probably was a base for a dwelling. However, ring-center analysis showed that the site was an open air site. C. Gamble proposed that humans congregated at the site around the fire.

title: Bilzingsleben (Paleolithic site)


text:
User:Herdrick

My blog is at herdrick.blogspot.com. My homepage is at www.herdrick.com.

title: User:Herdrick


text:
Talk:Mendelevium

Did You Know Hook
Wiki is way too hard to use. However, here is a great hook for the article:

Did You Know that the element mendelevium is usually synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles?

Really, it's too rich.

Did You Know that the element honouring Dmitri Mendeleev is usually created by bombarding the element honouring Albert Einstein with alpha particles?

Billyshiverstick (talk) 09:59, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
 * This was run as a DYK on 17 September 2014, when the hook was "Did you know ... that the discoverers of mendelevium had to seek the permission of the United States government to propose it be named after Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table?" (see the talk page headers). Double sharp (talk) 15:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Article language
This article should be translated in Bangla Rafsan Zaman Rafi (talk) 14:43, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If you are fluent enough, feel free to translate yourself. If you're interested, this page may be of use to you. ComplexRational (talk) 23:06, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

wi fi — Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.234.13.77 (talk) 19:46, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Mendelevium