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Desperado (Eagles album)

Desperado is the second studio album by the American rock band the Eagles, released on April 17, 1973, by Asylum Records. The album was produced by Glyn Johns and was recorded at Island Studios in London, England. The songs on Desperado are based on the themes of the Old West. The band members are featured on the album's cover dressed like an outlaw gang; Desperado remains the only Eagles album where the band members appear on the front cover.

Although the title track is one of the Eagles' signature songs, it was never released as a single. The song "Desperado" was ranked number 494 on Rolling Stone 2004 list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The album did yield two singles, "Tequila Sunrise" and "Outlaw Man", which reached number 64 and number 59 respectively. The album reached number 41 on the Billboard album chart and was certified gold by the RIAA on September 23, 1974, and double platinum on March 20, 2001. In 2000, Desperado was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Desperado was the last Asylum Records album to be distributed in North America by Atlantic Records (catalog no. SD 5068), prior to Asylum's mid-1973 merger with Elektra Records by Asylum's, Elektra's and Atlantic's parent company, Warner Communications.

Theme
After a commercially successful first album, Frey wanted the second album to be one with which they could be taken seriously as artists, and became interested in making a concept album. The original concept was for songs about anti-heroes; according to Glenn Frey, he was jamming together with Don Henley, Jackson Browne, and J. D. Souther after a Tim Hardin concert when they had the idea of doing an album about anti-heroes. One inspiration was a book on gunfighters of the Wild West given to Browne by Ned Doheny for his 21st birthday, and Browne showed them the book and suggested the theme. The book includes stories about Bill Dalton and Bill Doolin; from this came the song "Doolin-Dalton" about the Doolin-Dalton Gang. However, they ran out of ideas after writing "Doolin-Dalton" and "James Dean" about the eponymous actor. The idea for anti-heroes then became the Western-themed Desperado, and the song "James Dean" would be used for the next album On the Border instead.

Jackson Browne himself credited the song "Desperado" written by Frey and Henley, as the origin of the outlaw theme of the album. Bernie Leadon said that Frey liked the idea of an analogy between outlaw gangs and rock-and-roll: "Glenn sat everybody down and mapped out which characters in the gang could have songs written about them, or encouraged us to write songs about this concept." As Frey said of the album in an interview in 1973: "It has its moments where it definitely draws some parallels between rock-and-roll and being an outlaw. Outside the laws of normality, I guess. I mean, I feel like I'm breaking a law all the time. What we live and what we do is kind of a fantasy." Henley also said that the album was to be their "big artistic commentary on the evils of fame and success, with a cowboy metaphor." However, he admitted: "The metaphor was probably a little bullshit. We were in L.A. staying up all night, smoking dope, living the California life, and I suppose we thought it was as radical as cowboys in the old West. We were really rebelling against the music business, not society." Part of the reasons for their dissatisfaction and cynicism with the music business was due to David Geffen selling his independent Asylum label to Warner Communications which then merged it with Elektra, and the band attributed this as the reason for the lack of interest in promoting the band internationally by EMI.

Compositions
Frey and Henley decided that they should write songs together after they recorded their first album Eagles in London in 1972, and the first songs they wrote together days after they returned to Los Angeles were "Desperado" and "Tequila Sunrise", both written within the first week of their collaboration. The other songs in the album quickly came together after they had decided on the Western theme. While Desperado does not have a specific narrative, and the songs do not all necessarily fit in with the theme explicitly, the album has been described as being "suffused with the atmosphere of the open plains and a tough, peculiarly male kind of loneliness" that can "trick the listener into believing they are" tied to the theme.

This album is the beginning of the songwriting partnership of Frey and Henley; in all Frey and Henley were involved in writing eight of the eleven songs in the album. Henley noted: "That’s when we became a team." The songwriting prowess of Frey and Henley in Desperado also marks the beginning of their dominance in the band. Henley said in retrospect: "That was a real crucial time for us. When we formed the band, it was supposed to be one of those 'everybody's equal' affairs. We'd all sing and all write and so forth. But the fact is people aren't all going to be able to do everything the same. It's just like on a football team . . . . Some people quarterback and some people block. So we went through a lot of hassles for a while."

Leadon wrote two songs – "Twenty-One" and "Bitter Creek" – while Randy Meisner co-wrote "Certain Kind of Fool" and "Saturday Night". "Twenty-One" refers to the age of Emmett Dalton, the youngest of the Dalton gang, when he was shot 23 times but survived during the raid on Coffeyville, Kansas, in October 1892. Meisner came up with the idea for how someone became an outlaw in "Certain Kind of Fool", wrote most of it, and said of his contribution: "I kinda started it. And that's what usually happened – I'd get a verse or two, and I'm done, and they would help fill in the blanks" The only song on the album not written by the band members of Eagles is "Outlaw Man", which was written by David Blue and chosen because it fit the theme.

Recording
The album was recorded at the Island Studios in London, which took four weeks at a cost of £30,000. The producer Glyn Johns wanted to produce the album quickly and economically, each track was therefore limited to four or five takes, and requests to record more were refused. Henley would later state that his greatest regret was that he did not sing as well as he could on the title track "Desperado", and would have liked to redo the song. According to the producer Johns, he and Leadon tried to come up with a few musical links in an attempt to tie up the story for an outlaw concept in the album; however, the concept itself dissipated. The band was very happy with the finished result; after Johns had played the album back to them as an entity for the first time, they carried him on their shoulders out of the control room.

However, the finished recording was received poorly by Jerry Greenberg, the president of Atlantic Records, who said: "Jeez, they've made a fucking cowboy album!"

The film director Sam Peckinpah had planned to use the album as the basis for a film, but the plan did not come to fruition.

Artwork
The artwork for the album was done by artist Gary Burden with photos by Henry Diltz, both of whom were also responsible for Eagles' first album. To illustrate the theme for the music in the album, the original concept was for a gatefold album with the band dressed as outlaws on the front cover with images of gunfight and the Wild West inside. The centerfold idea, however, was scrapped by David Geffen.

On the back of the album is an image of all four members of the band together with Jackson Browne and J. D. Souther lying dead and bound on the ground. A posse stands over them, including the producer Glyn Johns (far right in a white hat), manager John Hartmann, road manager Tommy Nixon, artist Boyd Elder (who would be responsible for the skull artwork of Eagles' later albums), roadies, and Gary Burden (far left). The photo is meant to be a reenactment of the historical image of the capture and death of the Dalton Gang. Jackson Browne said that the image on the back cover with the musicians lying dead is when the "whole thing really comes together".

The photo shoot took place at the Paramount Ranch, an old film set for Western movies in Malibu Canyon. It was, however, an expensive shoot, and to justify the cost a promotional film for the album was also made at the same time. The film was shot on Super-8, then sepia-tinted, and transferred to videotape. In each process a little video quality is lost, which Frey described as a "nice accident" as it made the video appear aged and more realistic. Henley described the promotional film, like the album itself, as "a commentary on [their] loss of innocence with regard to how the music business really worked".

Critical reception
Paul Gambaccini of Rolling Stone gave the album a positive review on its release in 1973. He wrote: "The beautiful thing about it is that although it is a unified set of songs, it is not a rock opera, a concept album, or anything pretending to be much more than a set of good tunes that just happen to fit together." In conclusion, he wrote: "Desperado won't cure your hangover or revalue the dollar, but it will give you many good times. With their second consecutive job well done, the Eagles are on a winning streak." Robert Christgau, however, took the view that "with its barstool-macho equation of gunslinger and guitarschlonger, its on-the-road misogyny, its playing-card metaphors, and its paucity of decent songs, this soundtrack to an imaginary Sam Peckinpah movie is "concept" at its most mindless." AllMusic editor William Ruhlmann praised that Henley had more involvement with the album, but wrote that it "was simultaneously more ambitious and serious-minded than its predecessor and also slighter and less consistent."

The album is now considered by some critics to be one of the significant albums of country rock. Music writer John Einarson argued in his book Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock that despite its weak initial sales, the album "would set the tone for all the later soft country rock sounds, and impact what would become the foundation of 'new country', in both image and music." It was voted number 631 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).

Ultimate Classic Rock critic Sterling Whitaker rated both "Tequila Sunrise" and "Doolin-Dalton" as being among the Eagles' 10 most underrated songs.

Commercial performance
Released in April 1973, the album was not a commercial success initially. It debuted on the US Billboard 200 chart at a lowly number 145 on its week of its release, rising to number 41 in its eighth week on the chart, It remains Eagles' lowest charting album and it produced no hit song, as both singles released from the album, "Tequila Sunrise" and "Outlaw Man", failed to reach top 50 on the main singles chart.

However, the success of their next album release, On the Border, as well as subsequent releases, spurred on the sales of the album. It was certified Gold on September 23, 1974 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) after the release of On the Border, followed by a double platinum certification on March 20, 2001, indicating shipment of 2 million copies in the United States.

Personnel
Eagles
 * Glenn Frey – acoustic and electric guitars, vocals; keyboards, harmonica
 * Don Henley – drums, vocals; acoustic guitar
 * Bernie Leadon – electric and acoustic guitars, vocals; banjo, mandolin, Dobro
 * Randy Meisner – bass guitar, vocals

Production
 * Glyn Johns – producer, engineer
 * Howard Kilgour – assistant engineer
 * Barry Diament – mastering
 * Ted Jensen – remastering
 * Jim Ed Norman – string arrangements, conductor, piano ("Saturday Night"), electric piano ("Outlaw Man")
 * Gary Burden – art direction, design
 * Henry Diltz – lettering, photography

title: Desperado (Eagles album)


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Hilbert's sixth problem

Hilbert's sixth problem is to axiomatize those branches of physics in which mathematics is prevalent. It occurs on the widely cited list of Hilbert's problems in mathematics that he presented in the year 1900. In its common English translation, the explicit statement reads:
 * 6. Mathematical Treatment of the Axioms of Physics. The investigations on the foundations of geometry suggest the problem: To treat in the same manner, by means of axioms, those physical sciences in which already today mathematics plays an important part; in the first rank are the theory of probabilities and mechanics.

Hilbert gave the further explanation of this problem and its possible specific forms:

 * "As to the axioms of the theory of probabilities, it seems to me desirable that their logical investigation should be accompanied by a rigorous and satisfactory development of the method of mean values in mathematical physics, and in particular in the kinetic theory of gases. ... Boltzmann's work on the principles of mechanics suggests the problem of developing mathematically the limiting processes, there merely indicated, which lead from the atomistic view to the laws of motion of continua."

History
David Hilbert himself devoted much of his research to the sixth problem; in particular, he worked in those fields of physics that arose after he stated the problem.

In the 1910s, celestial mechanics evolved into general relativity. Hilbert and Emmy Noether corresponded extensively with Albert Einstein on the formulation of the theory.

In the 1920s, mechanics of microscopic systems evolved into quantum mechanics. Hilbert, with the assistance of John von Neumann, L. Nordheim, and E. P. Wigner, worked on the axiomatic basis of quantum mechanics (see Hilbert space). At the same time, but independently, Dirac formulated quantum mechanics in a way that is close to an axiomatic system, as did Hermann Weyl with the assistance of Erwin Schrödinger.

In the 1930s, probability theory was put on an axiomatic basis by Andrey Kolmogorov, using measure theory.

Since the 1960s, following the work of Arthur Wightman and Rudolf Haag, modern quantum field theory can also be considered close to an axiomatic description.

In the 1990s-2000s the problem of "the limiting processes, there merely indicated, which lead from the atomistic view to the laws of motion of continua" was approached by many groups of mathematicians. Main recent results are summarized by Laure Saint-Raymond, Marshall Slemrod, Alexander N. Gorban and Ilya Karlin.

Status
Hilbert’s sixth problem was a proposal to expand the axiomatic method outside the existing mathematical disciplines, to physics and beyond. This expansion requires development of semantics of physics with formal analysis of the notion of physical reality that should be done. Two fundamental theories capture the majority of the fundamental phenomena of physics: Hilbert considered general relativity as an essential part of the foundation of physics. However, quantum field theory is not logically consistent with general relativity, indicating the need for a still-unknown theory of quantum gravity, where the semantics of physics is expected to play a central role. Hilbert's sixth problem thus remains open, Nevertheless, in recent years it has fostered research regarding the foundations of physics with a particular emphasis on the role of logic and precision of language, leading to some interesting results viz. a direct realization of uncertainty principle from Cauchy's definition of `derivative' and the unravelling of a semantic obstacle in the path of any theory of quantum gravity from the axiomatic perspective, unravelling of a logical tautology in the quantum tests of equivalence principle  and formal unprovability of the first Maxwell's equation.
 * Quantum field theory, which provides the mathematical framework for the Standard Model;
 * General relativity, which describes space-time and gravity at macroscopic scale.

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

title: Hilbert's sixth problem


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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Renault Deguelasse

This is a "joke" page. There was never any prototype Renault with such a name. It would be like coming up with the Ford Vomitmaking-comet or the GM Throwupinducing-buggy. AlainV 03:08, 2004 May 7 (UTC)

 * Delete. Andrewa 03:44, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete. Alcarillo 03:55, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
 * There were other bogus models on the Renault page such as the Durche and the Wilmott, I removed them. 212.219.56.244 09:34, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete. --bodnotbod 15:48, May 7, 2004 (UTC)
 * I just love badly spelled attempts at humor, don't you? Delete as patent nonsense. - Lucky 6.9 23:22, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete. jaredwf 12:39, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep, but only if moved to WP:-) - Fennec 15:02, May 9, 2004 (UTC)
 * You just wanted an excuse to promote the smiley redirect, didn't you? -- Cyrius|&#9998 06:29, May 13, 2004 (UTC)


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User:Jamescat

 * Web developer since 1992;
 * Mac fanatic since 1984;
 * Computer user since first contact with a keyboard;
 * Geek since "birth + 6 weeks" -- thanks to Dad for reading those math magazines by the crib!

Born in Tennessee, and still loving it!

title: User:Jamescat


text:
User talk:Stealth7ss

Hey, this is an article about stealth7ss!

title: User talk:Stealth7ss


text:
User:Pitr

Wikipedian since 2002.

A University of Waterloo Computer Science student

Personal homepage

title: User:Pitr


text:
Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation

The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation constitutes a major development in modern physical cosmology. In 1964, US physicist Arno Allan Penzias and radio-astronomer Robert Woodrow Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB), estimating its temperature as 3.5 K, as they experimented with the Holmdel Horn Antenna. The new measurements were accepted as important evidence for a hot early Universe (big bang theory) and as evidence against the rival steady state theory as theoretical work around 1950 showed the need for a CMB for consistency with the simplest relativistic universe models. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint measurement. There had been a prior measurement of the cosmic background radiation (CMB) by Andrew McKellar in 1941 at an effective temperature of 2.3 K using CN stellar absorption lines observed by W. S. Adams. Although no reference to the CMB is made by McKellar, it was not until much later after the Penzias and Wilson measurements that the significance of this measurement was understood.

History
By the middle of the 20th century, cosmologists had developed two different theories to explain the creation of the universe. Some supported the steady-state theory, which states that the universe has always existed and will continue to survive without noticeable change. Others believed in the Big Bang theory, which states that the universe was created in a massive explosion-like event billions of years ago (later determined to be approximately 13.8 billion years).

In 1941, Andrew McKellar used W. S. Adams' spectroscopic observations of CN absorption lines in the spectrum of a B type star to measure a blackbody background temperature of 2.3 K. McKellar referred to his detection as a "'rotational' temperature of interstellar molecules", without reference to a cosmological interpretation, stating that the temperature "will have its own, perhaps limited, significance".

Over two decades later, working at a Bell Telephone Laboratories facility atop Crawford Hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were experimenting with a supersensitive, 6 meter (20 ft) horn antenna originally built to detect radio waves bounced off Echo balloon satellites. To measure these faint radio waves, they had to eliminate all recognizable interference from their receiver. They removed the effects of radar and radio broadcasting, and suppressed interference from the heat in the receiver itself by cooling it with liquid helium to −269 °C, only 4 K above absolute zero.

When Penzias and Wilson reduced their data, they found a low, steady, mysterious noise that persisted in their receiver. This residual noise was 100 times more intense than they had expected, was evenly spread over the sky, and was present day and night. They were certain that the radiation they detected on a wavelength of 7.35 centimeters did not come from the Earth, the Sun, or our galaxy. After thoroughly checking their equipment, removing some pigeons nesting in the antenna and cleaning out the accumulated droppings, the noise remained. Both concluded that this noise was coming from outside our own galaxy—although they were not aware of any radio source that would account for it.

At that same time, Robert H. Dicke, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson, astrophysicists at Princeton University just 60 km away, were preparing to search for microwave radiation in this region of the spectrum. Dicke and his colleagues reasoned that the Big Bang must have scattered not only the matter that condensed into galaxies, but also must have released a tremendous blast of radiation. With the proper instrumentation, this radiation should be detectable, albeit as microwaves, due to a massive redshift.

When his friend Bernard F. Burke, a professor of physics at MIT, told Penzias about a preprint paper he had seen by Jim Peebles on the possibility of finding radiation left over from an explosion that filled the universe at the beginning of its existence, Penzias and Wilson began to realize the significance of what they believed was a new discovery. The characteristics of the radiation detected by Penzias and Wilson fit exactly the radiation predicted by Robert H. Dicke and his colleagues at Princeton University. Penzias called Dicke at Princeton, who immediately sent him a copy of the still-unpublished Peebles paper. Penzias read the paper and called Dicke again and invited him to Bell Labs to look at the horn antenna and listen to the background noise. Dicke, Peebles, Wilkinson and P. G. Roll interpreted this radiation as a signature of the Big Bang.

To avoid potential conflict, they decided to publish their results jointly. Two notes were rushed to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. In the first, Dicke and his associates outlined the importance of cosmic background radiation as substantiation of the Big Bang Theory. In a second note, jointly signed by Penzias and Wilson titled, "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Megacycles per Second," they reported the existence of a 3.5 K residual background noise, remaining after accounting for a sky absorption component of 2.3 K and a 0.9 K instrumental component, and attributed a "possible explanation" as that given by Dicke in his companion letter.

In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint detection. They shared the prize with Pyotr Kapitsa, who won it for unrelated work. In 2019, Jim Peebles was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”.


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Desperado (film)

Desperado is a 1995 American neo-Western action film written, co-produced, edited and directed by Robert Rodriguez. It is the second part of Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy. It stars Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi who seeks revenge on the drug lord who killed his lover. The film was screened out of competition at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. Desperado grossed $58 million worldwide. It has been cited as Salma Hayek's breakout role.

Plot
At the Tarasco bar in Mexico, an American man named Buscemi tells the story of witnessing a massacre in another bar, committed by a Mexican who had a guitar case full of guns. The bar's patrons are uninterested until Buscemi mentions the name "Bucho". Meanwhile, El Mariachi has a dream of his encounter with Moco, Bucho's underling, who killed his lover and shot his left hand, but Buscemi awakens him and tells him to continue searching for Bucho.

El Mariachi meets a child, whose father allegedly plays guitar for a living. Having been a guitarist himself, he gives the boy some guitar lessons. At the Tarasco bar, El Mariachi engages in a tense standoff with Bucho's henchmen, followed by a massive gunfight. El Mariachi kills everyone in the bar but Tavo, who was in a back room conducting illegal business. Tavo survives and follows El Mariachi outside and wounds him, but is killed by El Mariachi. Carolina, a woman whom El Mariachi shielded from Tavo's bullets, takes him to her bookstore. Bucho arrives at the bar to survey the carnage. Threatened by the situation, Bucho orders his men to hunt down the man "dressed in black".

At her bookstore, Carolina tends to El Mariachi's wounds. While he rests, she discovers the guns in his guitar case and deduces his identity, based on Buscemi's story. El Mariachi asks her to help him locate Bucho. He goes to the town church and talks to Buscemi. Upset by the massacre at the bar, Buscemi convinces El Mariachi to abandon his quest for revenge. Outside the church, they are ambushed by a man armed with throwing knives, who kills Buscemi and severely wounds El Mariachi. Bucho's men arrive at the scene, and mistake the man (who dresses in black) for El Mariachi and kill him. They take the body back to Bucho, who realizes they have killed the wrong person, a hitman named Navajas sent by the Colombians to kill El Mariachi.

As an injured El Mariachi wanders the streets he meets the kid with the guitar, once again. He learns that the kid is being used by his father to mule drugs hidden in his guitar. He angrily confronts the boy, who tells him most people in the town work for Bucho. El Mariachi returns to Carolina and learns that Bucho financed her bookstore as an additional front for his drug dealing. Bucho arrives, unexpectedly, and she hastily hides El Mariachi. She feigns ignorance of the commotion in town, and Bucho leaves. Carolina completes the suturing of El Mariachi's wounds. That evening, she gives El Mariachi a new guitar, which he plays for her before they make passionate love. Meanwhile, Bucho realizes that Carolina lied to him.

In the morning, Bucho's men arrive and attack them and set the bookstore ablaze. The two fight their way out of the burning building and onto a local rooftop, where El Mariachi gets a clear shot at Bucho but inexplicably chooses not to attempt to kill him. The two hide in a hotel room.

Angry about their failure to kill El Mariachi, Bucho gathers his men and says: "You drive around town, you see someone you don't know, you shoot them! How hard is that, huh?" He shoots one man and then fires at the others, as an example.

Realizing that Bucho will never stop hunting him, El Mariachi contacts his friends, Campa and Quino, for assistance. The trio meets up on the edge of town and encounters Bucho's henchmen. A massive gun battle ensues, and most of Bucho's men, along with Campa and Quino, are killed. El Mariachi discovers that the guitar-playing boy has been wounded in the crossfire and rushes him to a hospital.

El Mariachi and Carolina travel to Bucho's compound intending to confront him. It is then revealed that Bucho is El Mariachi's older brother, Cesar. El Mariachi was unaware of "Bucho's" identity, until he saw his brother's face, from the rooftop, and refrained from shooting him. Bucho offers to release El Mariachi if he allows Bucho to kill Carolina. El Mariachi kills his brother, then shoots the remaining henchmen. The two visit the boy in the hospital, and El Mariachi leaves alone. Carolina catches up to him on the road and picks him up, with El Mariachi initially leaving his weapons on the side of the road. The two drive away together, but shortly return and pick up the guitar case, full of guns, just to be safe.

Production
Rodriguez's friend Quentin Tarantino has a cameo as "Pick-up Guy". Carlos Gallardo, who played the title role of El Mariachi, appears in Desperado as Campa, a friend of Banderas' Mariachi. Since Banderas replaced Gallardo as the actor for the main character, the filmmakers re-shot the final showdown from El Mariachi as a flashback sequence for Banderas' character in Desperado.

Raúl Juliá was originally cast as Bucho but died on October 24, 1994, before production began.

Principal photography took place entirely in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, across from Del Rio, Texas.

During the filming of the sex scene, Salma Hayek became uncomfortable and started crying. Hayek has stated that Rodriguez and Banderas “were amazing” and that Rodriguez “never put pressure on me.”

Rating
After it was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America, the film was granted an NC-17 due to graphic violence and it had to be severely cut for an R rating. Among the scenes that were trimmed are the deaths of Tarantino's character and his friend at the bar, as well as Trejo's character. By far the most major excision came at the end of the film, which originally contained a large-scale shootout between El Mariachi, Carolina, Bucho, and his thugs at Bucho's mansion. Owing to the amount of footage the MPAA demanded be removed from the scene, Rodriguez elected to remove the sequence in its entirety, giving the film its current fade-out ending. Two additional scenes were also deleted featuring the codpiece gun (seen in the guitar case). Originally, the gun was used by El Mariachi during the second bar shootout when he uses it to shoot the first thug before whipping out his pistols from his sleeves and finishing him off. In a second deleted scene, the crotch gun was to go off accidentally while Banderas is in bed with Hayek, blowing a hole through the guitar while they were playing it. The gun was eventually used in unrelated Rodriguez's films From Dusk till Dawn and Machete Kills.

Music
The film's score is written and performed by the Los Angeles rock band Los Lobos, performing Chicano rock and traditional ranchera music. Their performance of "Mariachi Suite" won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance at the 1995 Grammy Awards. Other artists on the soundtrack album include Dire Straits, Link Wray, Latin Playboys, and Carlos Santana. Musician Tito Larriva has a small role in the film, and his band, Tito & Tarantula, contributed to the soundtrack as well.

Critical reception
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 70% based on reviews from 53 critics, with an average rating of 6.5/10, The sites consensus reads, "Desperado contains almost too much action and too little of a story to sustain interest, but Antonio Banderas proves a charismatic lead in Robert Rodriguez's inventive extravaganza." On Metacritic it has a score of 55 out of 100, based on reviews from 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that the film "could scarcely be more dazzling on a purely visual level, but it's mortally anemic in the story, character and thematic departments." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly rated the film "B" and praised the action sequences despite the lack of characterization. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired."

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times rated it 2 out of 4 stars and wrote, "What happens looks terrific. Now if he can harness that technical facility to a screenplay that's more story than setup, he might really have something." Desson Howe of The Washington Post wrote, "the commercial transition has been remarkably successful. This is primarily thanks to Rodriguez, who not only retains the original movie's kinetic flair, but takes it further." Bob McCabe of Empire rated it 4 out of 5 stars and wrote, "It's big, it's daft, but Desperado is confident and hugely entertaining filmmaking." Heidi Strom of the Daily Press wrote, "A pure adrenaline rush from start to finish, Desperado will shock, amuse, thrill and disgust – but never disappoint."

Box office
The film grossed $25.4 million in the United States and Canada and $58 million worldwide.

title: Desperado (film)


text: User talk:216.239.88.230

title: User talk:216.239.88.230


text:
Night writing

Night writing is the name given to a form of tactile writing invented by Charles Barbier de la Serre (1767-1841). It is one of a dozen forms of alternative writing presented in a book published in 1815: Essai sur divers procédés d'expéditive française, contenant douze écritures différentes, avec une planche pour chaque procédé (Essay on various processes of French expedition, containing twelve different writings, with a plate for each process). The term (in French: écriture nocturne) does not appear in the book, but was later applied to the method shown on Plate VII of that book. This method of writing with raised dots that could be read by touch was adopted at the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Royal Institution for Blind Youth) in Paris.

A student at the school, Louis Braille, used the tools and Barbier's idea of communicating with raised dots in a form of code, and developed a more compact and flexible system for communications, Braille.

Origin
In 1815, Charles Barbier developed a type of relief writing. This process would be called "night writing".

Function
The principle of night writing is to transcribe using 36 distinct phonetic sounds, each represented by a raised pattern of dots in a 2 x 6 grid.

The 36 sounds are represented in a 6 x 6 table; the 2 x 6 grid of dots designates the coordinates of the desired sound. For example, the sound placed in the first line and the third column of the table is represented by (1, 3). This, in turn, is written with 1 dot in the first column, and 3 dots in the second. The phoneme "t" is represented thus: Charles Barbier also invented the tools to facilitate this form of writing with raised dots: a shelf ruler that had groups of 6 horizontal grooves. To transcribe their message, the writer uses a punch to pierce the paper, guided by the grooves of the ruler. A movable cursor helps guide the punch. The relief writing appears on the back of the paper; the writing is therefore reversed, hence one must write from right to left. By running their fingers across the front, the recipient of the message counts the number of dots in each row and deduces the nature of the corresponding sound.

This was an extraordinary advancement in its time. Previously, the only writing accessible to the blind was one developed by Valentin Haüy, the founder of the Royal Institution for Blind Youth. His system impressed the shapes of typographic characters onto wet paper. However, as the embossed letters had to each be distinct, books using the system were cumbersome and of limited length. Furthermore, students had no means to reproduce the method so as to write themselves.

Barbier's night writing also faced several limitations and imperfections:

 * no combinations of dots existed to represent punctuation marks, numbers, musical notes, mathematical symbols, etc.
 * the height of the grid (2 × 6 points) made it impossible to read in a single go with one finger
 * potential information is wasted: a grid of 12 points would theoretically allow up to 212 (or 4096) symbols to be represented, when Barbier presented only 36 symbols.

Influence on Braille
In 1815, Barbier published a pamphlet titled Essai sur divers procédés d'expéditive française, contenant douze écritures différentes, avec une planche pour chaque procédé (Essay on various processes of French expedition, containing twelve different writings, with a plate for each process). The aim was to present how relief writing, recognisable by touch, could aid the blind.

In 1823, Barbier received a bronze medal at Versailles' industrial exposition for having invented this new form of writing which could be read without seeing. Under the administration of Count Alexis de Noailles, his method was adopted by the Royal Institution for Blind Youth.

In 1829, Louis Braille published Procédé pour écrire les paroles, la musique et le plain-chant au moyen de points, à l’usage des aveugles et disposés pour eux (Process for writing words, music and lyrics by way of dots, for the use of, and arranged for, the blind). This was based on Barbier's invention but greatly improved its legibility, and the publication marked the official birth of the Braille alphabet. Louis Braille revised the publication in 1837, and this second edition contained the system now known by the name Braille.

In 1832, Barbier published a new pamphlet, Émancipation intellectuelle d’expéditive française, which stresses that his writing system, though designed for the blind, could also be of use in the army and in hospitals.

title: Night writing


text:
Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.

Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.

Some of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community.

Background in Austria
Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, on August 28, 1903. When his father died, Bettelheim left his studies at the University of Vienna to look after his family's sawmill. Having discharged his obligations to his family's business, Bettelheim returned as a mature student in his thirties to the University of Vienna. Sources disagree about his education (see Misrepresented credentials section).

Bettelheim's first wife, Gina, took care of a troubled American child, Patsy, who lived in their home in Vienna for seven years, and who may have been on the autism spectrum.

In the Austrian academic culture of Bettelheim's time, one could not study the history of art without mastering aspects of psychology. Candidates for the doctoral dissertation in the History of Art in 1938 at Vienna University had to fulfill prerequisites in the formal study of the role of Jungian archetypes in art, and in art as an expression of the unconscious.

Though Jewish by birth, Bettelheim grew up in a secular family. After the Anschluss (political annexation) of Austria on March 13, 1938, the National Socialist (Nazi) authorities sent Austrian Jews and political opponents to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps where many were brutally treated, and tortured or killed. Bettelheim was arrested some two months later on May 28, 1938, and was imprisoned in both these camps for ten and half months before being released on April 14, 1939. While at the Buchenwald camp, he met and befriended the social psychologist Ernst Federn. As a result of an amnesty declared for Adolf Hitler's birthday (which occurred slightly later on April 20, 1939), Bettelheim and hundreds of other prisoners were released. Bettelheim drew on the experience of the concentration camps for some of his later work.

Life and career in the United States
Bettelheim arrived by ship as a refugee in New York City in late 1939 to join his wife Gina, who had already emigrated. They divorced because she had become involved with someone else during their separation. He soon moved to Chicago, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944, and married an Austrian woman, Gertrude ('Trudi') Weinfeld, also an emigrant from Vienna.

Psychology
The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a wartime project to help resettle European scholars by circulating their resumes to American universities. Through this process, Ralph Tyler hired Bettelheim to be his research assistant at the University of Chicago from 1939 to 1941 with funding from the Progressive Education Association to evaluate how high schools taught art. Once this funding ran out, Bettelheim found a job at Rockford College, Illinois, where he taught from 1942 to 1944.

In 1943, he published the paper "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" about his experiences in the concentration camps, a paper which was highly regarded by Dwight Eisenhower among others. Bettelheim claimed he had interviewed 1,500 fellow prisoners, although this was unlikely. He stated that the Viennese psychoanalyst Richard Sterba had analyzed him, as well as implying in several of his writings that he had written a PhD dissertation in the philosophy of education. His actual PhD was in art history, and he had only taken three introductory courses in psychology.

Through Ralph Tyler's recommendation, the University of Chicago appointed Bettelheim as a professor of psychology, as well as director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children. He held both positions from 1944 until his retirement in 1973. He wrote a number of books on psychology and, for a time, had an international reputation for his work on Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.

At the Orthogenic School, Bettelheim made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some of the emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology, and became a major influence in the field, widely respected during his lifetime. He was noted for his study of feral children, who revert to the animal stage without experiencing the benefits of belonging to a community. He discussed this phenomenon in the book The Informed Heart. Even critics agree that, in his practice, Bettelheim was dedicated to helping these children using methods and practices that would enable them to lead happy lives. It is based on his position that psychotherapy could change humans and that they can adapt to their environment provided they are given proper care and attention.

Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. After retiring in 1973, he and his wife moved to Portola Valley, California, where he continued to write and taught at Stanford University. His wife died in 1984.

The Uses of Enchantment
Bettelheim analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology in The Uses of Enchantment (1976). He discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially evolved stories, children would go through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures. In the United States, Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought.

However, in 1991, well-supported charges of plagiarism were brought against Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, primarily that he had copied from Julian Herscher's 1963 A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (revised ed. 1974).

Death
At the end of his life, Bettelheim had depression. He appeared to have had difficulties with depression for much of his life. In 1990, widowed, in failing physical health, and experiencing the effects of a stroke which impaired his mental abilities and paralyzed part of his body, he took his own life. He died on March 13, 1990, in Maryland.

In popular culture
Bettelheim was a public intellectual, whose writing and many public appearances in popular media paralleled a growing post WWII interest in psychoanalysis. For instance, he appeared multiple times on The Dick Cavett Show in the 70s to discuss theories of autism and psychoanalysis. Richard Pollak's biography of Bettelheim argues that such popular appearances shielded his unethical behavior from scrutiny.

Bettelheim appeared as himself in the 1983 Woody Allen mockumentary Zelig.

A BBC Horizon documentary about Bettelheim was televised in 1987.

Controversies and scientific fraud accusations
Bettelheim's life and work have come under increasing scrutiny since his death, notably in a biography by Richard Pollak (1997).

Misrepresented credentials
Though he spent most of his life working in psychology and psychiatry, Bettelheim's educational background in those fields is murky at best. Sources disagree whether Bettelheim's PhD was in art history or in philosophy (aesthetics). When he was hired at the University of Chicago, Ralph W. Tyler assumed that he had two PhDs, one in art history and the other in psychology. He also believed, falsely, that Bettelheim was certified to conduct psychoanalysis though Bettelheim never received such certification. A posthumous review of his transcript showed that Bettelheim had only taken three introductory classes in psychology. Bertram Cohler and Jacquelyn Sanders at the Orthogenic School believed Bettelheim had a PhD in art history. In some of his own writings, Bettelheim implied that he had written a dissertation on the philosophy of education.

Determining Bettelheim's education is complicated by the fact that he routinely embellished or inflated aspects of his own biography. As an example, Bettelheim's first wife, Gina, took care of a troubled American child, Patsy, who lived in their home in Vienna for seven years. Although Bettelheim later claimed he himself had taken care of the child, there is general agreement that his wife actually provided most of the child care. However sources disagree on whether Patsy was autistic. Bettelheim later claimed that it was Patsy who inspired him to study autism and embellished her into two or even several autistic children in his home.

Additionally, when he applied for a position at Rockford College in Illinois, he claimed in a résumé that he had earned summa cum laude doctorates in philosophy, art history, and psychology, and he made claims that he had run the art department at Lower Austria's library, that he had published two books on art, that he had excavated Roman antiquities, and that he had engaged in music studies with Arnold Schoenberg. When he applied at the University of Chicago for a professorship and as director of the Orthogenic School, he further claimed that he had training in psychology, experience raising autistic children, and personal encouragement from Sigmund Freud. The University of Chicago biographical sketch of Bettelheim listed a single PhD but no subject area. Posthumous biographies of Bettelheim have investigated these claims and have come to no clear conclusions about his credentials. A review in The Independent (UK) of Sutton's book stated that Bettelheim "despite claims to the contrary, possessed no psychology qualifications of any sort". Another review in The New York Times by a different reviewer stated that Bettelheim "began inventing degrees he never earned". A review in the Chicago Tribune stated "as Pollak demonstrates, Bettelheim was a snake-oil salesman of the first magnitude."

In a 1997 Weekly Standard article Peter Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, summarized: "There were snatches of truth in the tall tale, but not many. Bettelheim had earned a non-honors degree in philosophy, he had made acquaintances in the psychoanalytic community, and his first wife had helped raise a troubled child. But, from 1926 to 1938, —the bulk of the '14 years' at university—Bettelheim had worked as a lumber dealer in the family business."

In his 1997 review of Pollak's book in the Baltimore Sun, Paul R. McHugh, then director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins, stated "Bettelheim—with boldness, energy and luck—exploited American deference to Freudo-Nietzschean mind-sets and interpretation, especially when intoned in accents Viennese."

Richard Pollak's 1997 biography of Bettelheim
In the New York Review of Books, Robert Gottlieb describes Pollak as a "relentlessly negative biographer," but Gottlieb still writes: "The accusations against Bettelheim fall into several categories. First, he lied; that is, he both exaggerated his successes at the school and falsified aspects of his background, claiming a more elaborate academic and psychoanalytic history in Vienna than he had actually had. There is conclusive evidence to support both charges." Gottlieb goes on to say that Bettelheim arrived in the United States as a Holocaust survivor and refugee without a job nor even a profession, and writes: "I suspect he said what he thought it was necessary to say, and was then stuck with these claims later on, when he could neither confirm them (since they were false) nor, given his pride, acknowledge that he had lied."

Richard Pollak's biography begins with a personal account, for his brother died in an accident while home from Bettelheim's school on holiday. While playing hide-and-go-seek in a hay loft, the brother fell through a chute covered with hay and hit the concrete floor on the level below. Years later, Pollak hoped to get some information about his brother's life and sought out Bettelheim. As Pollak recounts, "Bettelheim immediately launched into an attack. The boys' father, he said, was a simple-minded 'schlemiel.' Their mother, he insisted, had rejected Stephen at birth forcing him to develop 'pseudo-feeble-mindedness' to cope." He went on to angrily ask: "What is it about these Jewish mothers, Mr. Pollak?" Bettelheim furthermore insisted the brother had committed suicide and made it look like an accident. Pollak did not believe this.

As a review in the Baltimore Sun states, "The stance of infallibility over matters Pollak knew to be untrue prompted him to wonder about the foundation of Bettelheim's commanding reputation."

In a 1997 book review in the New York Times, Sarah Boxer wrote (regarding the plagiarism allegations): "Mr. Pollak gives a damning passage-for-passage comparison of the two [Bettelheim's book and Heuscher's earlier book]."

Richard Pollak's biography, The Creation of Dr. B, portrays Bettelheim as an anti-Semite even though he was raised in a secular Jewish household, and asserts that Bettelheim criticized in others the same cowardice he himself had displayed in the concentration camps.

Pollak's biography also states that two women reported that Bettelheim had fondled their breasts and those of other female students at the school while he was ostensibly apologizing to each for beating her.

A number of reviewers criticized Pollak's writing style, commenting that his book was motivated by "Vengeance, not malice" or that his book was "curiously unnuanced", but they still largely agreed with his conclusions.

Plagiarism in Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment
In 1991, Alan Dundes published an article in the Journal of American Folklore in which he claimed Bettelheim had engaged in plagiarism in his 1976 The Uses of Enchantment. He argued that Bettelheim had copied from a variety of sources, including Dundes' own 1967 paper on Cinderella, but most of all from Julius E. Heuscher's 1963 book A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (revised edition 1974).

On the other hand, Jacquelyn Sanders, who worked with Bettelheim and later became director of the Orthogenic School, stated that she had read Dundes' article but disagreed with its conclusions: "I would not call that plagiarism. I think the article is a reasonable scholarly endeavor, and calling it scholarly etiquette is appropriate. It is appropriate that this man deserved to be acknowledged and Bettelheim didn't… But I would not fail a student for doing that, and I don't know anybody who would".

Abusive treatment of students
Many students and staff at the school have argued that Bettelheim was abusive, violent, and cruel to them and to others. There are multiple newspaper accounts of abuse, in letters,  editorials, articles, and memoirs. A November 1990 Chicago Tribune article states: "Of the 19 alumni of the Orthogenic School interviewed for this story, some are still bitterly angry at Bettelheim, 20 or 30 years after leaving the institution due to the trauma they had suffered under him. Others say their stays did them good, and they express gratitude for having had the opportunity to be at the school. All agree that Bettelheim frequently struck his young and vulnerable patients."

A particularly evocative example came from Alida Jatich, who lived at the school from 1966 to 1972 from ages twelve to eighteen. She wrote an initially anonymous April 1990 letter to the Chicago Reader in which she stated that she "lived in fear of Bettelheim's unpredictable temper tantrums, public beatings, hair pulling, wild accusations and threats and abuse in front of classmates and staff. One minute he could be smiling and joking, the next minute he could be exploding." She added, "In person, he was an evil man who set up his school as a private empire and himself as a demi-god or cultleader." Jatich said Bettelheim had "bullied, awed, and terrorized" the children at his school, their parents, school staff members, his graduate students, and anyone else who came into contact with him.

Jacquelyn Sanders, who later became director of the Orthogenic School, said she thought it was a case of Bettelheim getting too much success too quickly. "Dr. B got worse once he started getting acclaim," she said. "He was less able to have any insight into his effect on these kids."

Conversely, some staff who worked at the Orthogenic School have stated that they saw Bettelheim's behavior as being corporal punishment, in line with the standards of the time, and not abuse. As an example, David Zwerdling, who was a counselor at the school for one year in 1969–70, wrote a Sept. 1990 response to The Washington Post in which he stated, "I witnessed one occasion when an adolescent boy cursed at a female counselor. Incensed upon learning of this, Dr. Bettelheim proceeded to slap the boy two or three times across the face, while telling him sternly never to speak that way to a woman again. This was the only such incident I observed or heard of during my year at the school… until fairly recently, the near-consensus against corporal punishment in schools did not obtain." However, Zwerdling also noted, "He also was a man who, for whatever reasons, was capable of intense anger on occasion."

Published books, memoirs, and biographies of Bettelheim have also taken up the question of his treatment of students.

Institutional and professional non-responses
Perhaps in part because of Bettelheim's professional and public stature, there was little effort during his lifetime to curtail his behavior or intervene on behalf of his victims. His work at the University of Chicago seems to have been given less formal oversight by the university than other research entities under their purview.

A Newsweek article reported that Chicago-area psychiatrists had privately given him the nickname "Brutalheim," but did nothing to intervene effectively on behalf of students at the school.

Professionals in the psychiatric and psychological communities likely knew there were allegations of abuse and maltreatment at the Orthogenic School. Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote that many professionals knew of Bettelheim's behavior but did not confront him for various reasons ranging from "fear about Bettelheim's legendary capacity for retribution to the solidarity needed among the guild of healers to a feeling that, on balance, Bettelheim's positive attributes predominated and an unmasking would fuel more malevolent forces."

Autism controversy
Behavioral psychology and conditions in children and adolescents was little understood in the mid-twentieth century. The concept of "autism" was first used as a term for schizophrenia. In the 1950s into the 1960s what may be understood as autism in children was regularly also referred to as "childhood psychosis and childhood schizophrenia". "Psychogenesis", the theory that childhood disorders had origins in early childhood events or trauma acting on the child from the outside was a prominent theory, and Bettelheim was a prominent proponent of a psychogenic basis for autism. For Bettelheim, the idea that outside forces cause individual behavior issues can be traced back to his earliest prominent article on the psychology of imprisoned persons. Beginning in the 1960s and into the 1970s, "biogenesis", the idea that such conditions had an inner-organic or biological basis overtook psychogenesis.

Currently, many of Bettelheim's theories in which he attributes autism spectrum conditions to parenting style are considered to be discredited, aside from the controversies relating to his academic and professional qualifications.

Autism spectrum conditions are currently regarded as perhaps having multiple forms with a variety of genetic, epigenetic, and brain development causes influenced by such environmental factors as complications during pregnancy, viral infections, and perhaps even air pollution.

The two biographies by Sutton (1995) and Pollak (1997) awakened interest and focus on Bettelheim's actual methods as distinct from his public persona. Bettelheim's theories on the causes of autism have been largely discredited, and his reporting rates of cure have been questioned, with critics stating that his patients were not actually autistic. In a favorable review of Pollak's biography, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times wrote, "What scanty evidence remains suggests that his patients were not even autistic in the first place."

In 1997 the psychiatrist Peter Kramer wrote, "The Ford Foundation was willing to underwrite innovative treatments for autistic children, so Bettelheim labeled his children autistic. Few actually met the definition of the newly minted syndrome."

Bettelheim believed that autism did not have an organic basis, but resulted when mothers withheld appropriate affection from their children and failed to make a good connection with them. Bettelheim also blamed absent or weak fathers. One of his most famous books, The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms. These views were disputed at the time by mothers of autistic children and by researchers. He derived his thinking from the qualitative investigation of clinical cases. He also related the world of autistic children to conditions in concentration camps.

It appears that Leo Kanner first came up with the term "refrigerator mother," although Bettelheim did a lot to popularize the term. "Although it now seems beyond comprehension that anyone would believe that autism is caused by deep-seated issues arising in early childhood relationships, virtually every psychiatric condition was attributed to parent-child relationships in the 1940s and 1950s, when Freudian psychoanalytic theory was in its heyday."

In A Good Enough Parent, published in 1987, he had come to the view that children had considerable resilience and that most parents could be "good enough" to help their children make a good start.

Prior to this, Bettelheim subscribed to and became an early prominent proponent of the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism: the theory that autistic behaviors stem from the emotional frigidity of the children's mothers. He adapted and transformed the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago as a residential treatment milieu for such children, who he felt would benefit from a "parentectomy". This marked the apex of autism viewed as a disorder of parenting.

A 2002 book on autism spectrum stated, "At the time, few people knew that Bettelheim had faked his credentials and was using fictional data to support his research." Michael Rutter has observed, "Many people made a mistake in going from a statement which is undoubtedly true—that there is no evidence that autism has been caused by poor parenting—to the statement that it has been disproven. It has not actually been disproven. It has faded away simply because, on the one hand, of a lack of convincing evidence and on the other hand, an awareness that autism was a neurodevelopmental disorder of some kind."

In a 1997 review of two books on Bettelheim, Molly Finn wrote "I am the mother of an autistic daughter, and have considered Bettelheim a charlatan since The Empty Fortress, his celebrated study of autism, came out in 1967. I have nothing personal against Bettelheim, if it is not personal to resent being compared to a devouring witch, an infanticidal king, and an SS guard in a concentration camp, or to wonder what could be the basis of Bettelheim's statement that 'the precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent's wish that his child should not exist.'"

Although Bettelheim foreshadowed the modern interest in the causal influence of genetics in the section Parental Background, he consistently emphasised nurture over nature. For example: "When at last the once totally frozen affects begin to emerge, and a much richer human personality to evolve, then convictions about the psychogenic nature of the disturbance become stronger still."; On Treatability, p. 412. The rates of recovery claimed for the Orthogenic School are set out in Follow-up Data, with a recovery good enough to be considered a 'cure' of 43%, pp. 414–15.

Subsequently, medical research has provided greater understanding of the biological basis of autism and other illnesses. Scientists such as Bernard Rimland challenged Bettelheim's view of autism by arguing that autism is a neurodevelopmental issue. As late as 2009, the "refrigerator mother" theory retained some prominent supporters, including the prominent Irish psychologist Tony Humphreys. His theory still enjoys widespread support in France.

In his book Unstrange Minds (2007), Roy Richard Grinker wrote: "Two other books on autism, published at about the same time [as Bettelheim's Empty Fortress (1967)], got little mention in the press: Bernard Rimland's Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior (1964), which outlined the biological and neurological aspects of autism, and Clara Clairborne Park's The Siege (1967), a beautifully written memoir of raising an autistic child. Though they were more accurate depictions of autism, they couldn't compete with Bettelheim. He was simply too good a writer, and with his Viennese accent—the sign of an authentic expert in psychology—too good a self promoter."

Jordynn Jack writes that Bettelheim's ideas gained currency and became popular in large part because society already tended to blame a mother first and foremost for her child's difficulties.

Remarks about Jews and the Holocaust
Bettelheim's experiences during the Holocaust shaped his personal and professional life for years after. His first publication was "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" derived from his experiences at Dachau and Buchenwald. His later work frequently compared emotionally disturbed childhood to prison or confinement, and according to Sutton, his professional work attempted to operationalize the lessons about human nature he learned during his confinement.

Bettelheim became one of the most prominent defenders of Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem. He wrote a positive review for The New Republic. This review prompted a letter from a writer, Harry Golden, who alleged that both Bettelheim and Arendt suffered from "an essentially Jewish phenomenon… self-hatred".

Bettelheim would later speak critically of Jewish people who were killed during the Holocaust. He has been criticized for promoting the myth that Jews went "like sheep to the slaughter" and for blaming Anne Frank and her family for their own deaths due to not owning firearms, fleeing, or hiding more effectively. In an introduction he wrote to an account by Miklos Nyiszli, Bettelheim stated, discussing Frank, that "Everybody who recognized the obvious knew that the hardest way to go underground was to do it as a family; that to hide as a family made detection by the SS most likely. The Franks, with their excellent connections among gentile Dutch families should have had an easy time hiding out singly, each with a different family. But instead of planning for this, the main principle of their planning was to continue as much as possible with the kind of family life they were accustomed to."

Major works by Bettelheim

 * 1943 "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417–452.
 * 1950 Bettleheim, Bruno and Janowitz, Morris, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological & Sociological Study of Veterans, Harper & Bros.
 * 1950 Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
 * 1954 Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
 * 1955 Truants From Life: The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
 * 1959 "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'", Scientific American, 200, March 1959: 117–126. (About a boy who believes himself to be a robot.)
 * 1960 The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
 * 1962 Dialogues with Mothers, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
 * 1967 The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, The Free Press, New York
 * 1969 The Children of the Dream, Macmillan, London & New York (About the raising of children in a kibbutz environment.)
 * 1974 A Home for the Heart, Knopf, New York. (About Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago for schizophrenic and autistic children.)
 * 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York. ISBN 0-394-49771-6
 * 1979 Surviving and Other Essays, Knopf, New York (Includes the essay "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank".)
 * 1982 On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning (with Karen Zelan), Knopf, New York
 * 1982 Freud and Man's Soul, Knopf, 1983, ISBN 0-394-52481-0
 * 1987 A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, Knopf, New York
 * 1990 Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, Knopf, New York
 * 1993, Bettelheim, Bruno and Rosenfeld, Alvin A, "The Art of the Obvious" Knopf.
 * 1994 Bettelheim, Bruno & Ekstein, Rudolf: "Grenzgänge zwischen den Kulturen. Das letzte Gespräch zwischen Bruno Bettelheim und ". In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1994): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz (Grünewald): 49–60.

Critical reviews of Bettelheim (works and person)

 * Angres, Ronald: "Who, Really, Was Bruno Bettelheim?", personal essay, Commentary, 90, (4), October 1990: 26–30.
 * Bernstein, Richard: "Accusations of Abuse Haunt the Legacy of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim", The New York Times, November 4, 1990: "The Week in Review" section.
 * Dundes, Alan: "Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment and Abuses of Scholarship". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 104, N0. 411. (Winter, 1991): 74–83.
 * Ekstein, Rudolf (1994): "Mein Freund Bruno (1903–1990). Wie ich mich an ihn erinnere". In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1994): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz (Grünewald), S. 87–94.
 * Eliot, Stephen: Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, St. Martin's Press, 2003.
 * Federn, Ernst (1994): "Bruno Bettelheim und das Überleben im Konzentrationslager". In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1999): Ernst Federn: Versuche zur Psychologie des Terrors. Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag): 105–108.
 * Fisher, David James: Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen. Essays über Bruno Bettelheim (co-editor: Roland Kaufhold), Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag)
 * Fisher, David James: Bettelheim: Living and Dying, Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, Amsterdam, New York: Brill/Rodopi, 2008.
 * Frattaroli, Elio: "Bruno Bettelheim's Unrecognized Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought", Psychoanalytic Review, 81:379–409, 1994.
 * Heisig, James W.: "Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tales", Children's Literature, 6, 1977: 93–115.
 * Kaufhold, Roland (ed.): Pioniere der psychoanalytischen Pädagogik: Bruno Bettelheim, Rudolf Ekstein, Ernst Federn und Siegfried Bernfeld, psychosozial Nr. 53 (1/1993)
 * Kaufhold, Roland (Ed.): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz, 1994 (Grünewald)
 * Kaufhold, Roland (1999): "Falsche Fabeln vom Guru?" Der "Spiegel" und sein Märchen vom bösen Juden Bruno Bettelheim", Behindertenpädagogik, 38. Jhg., Heft 2/1999, S. 160–187.
 * Kaufhold, Roland: Bettelheim, Ekstein, Federn: Impulse für die psychoanalytisch-pädagogische Bewegung. Gießen, 2001 (Psychosozial-Verlag).
 * Kaufhold, Roland/Löffelholz, Michael (Ed.) (2003): "'So können sie nicht leben' – Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990)". Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie 1-3/2003.
 * Lyons, Tom W. (1983), The Pelican and After: A Novel about Emotional Disturbance, Richmond, Virginia: Prescott, Durrell, and Company. This is a roman à clef novel in which the author lived at the Orthogenic School for almost twelve years.  The novel's head of the institution is a "Dr. V."
 * Marcus, Paul: Autonomy in the Extreme Situation. Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Mass Society, Praeger, Westport, Conn., 1999.
 * Pollak, Richard: The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.
 * Redford, Roberta Carly (2010) Crazy: My Seven Years At Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, Trafford Publishing, 364 pages.
 * Sutton, Nina: Bruno Bettelheim: The Other Side of Madness, Duckworth Press, London, 1995. (Translated from the French by David Sharp in collaboration with the author. Subsequently, published with the title Bruno Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy.)
 * Zipes, Jack: "On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim's Moralistic Magic Wand", in Zipes, Jack: Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979.
 * Redford, Roberta Carly (2010) Crazy: My Seven Years At Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, Trafford Publishing, 364 pages.
 * Sutton, Nina: Bruno Bettelheim: The Other Side of Madness, Duckworth Press, London, 1995. (Translated from the French by David Sharp in collaboration with the author. Subsequently, published with the title Bruno Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy.)
 * Zipes, Jack: "On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim's Moralistic Magic Wand", in Zipes, Jack: Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979.

title: Bruno Bettelheim


text:
Elín Ortiz

Elín Ortiz (December 14, 1934 – June 12, 2016) was a Puerto Rican actor, comedian and producer. He died on June 12, 2016, primarily due to Alzheimer's Disease.

Early years
Elín Ortiz graduated from Ponce High School at the age of 16.

Career
Ortiz began his career as a radio and stage actor while still studying at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, sharing credits with Luis Antonio Rivera (Yoyo Boing), Walter Mercado, Adela Villamil, Jacobo Morales and many others. Since the beginning of TV in 1954 he participated in local soap operas (telenovelas), comedy programs and televised stage plays, as well as cultural programming on WIPR, the government-operated radio and television stations, where he also worked as writer and director.

On stage, Ortiz was considered among the most versatile actors of his generation, due to his talent for both, drama and comedy. With Morales, Myrna Vázquez, Marcos Betancourt and Alicia Moreda, Ortiz was a founder of El Cemi Theater Company.

In the 1960s Ortiz was a star in many of the programs produced for Telemundo by Paquito Cordero on a weekly basis, especially 'La Taberna India', in which he played Reliquia, an ancient (although Ortiz was in his 20s) small-town smart aleck lawyer who victimized the everyday countryman (jibaro) played by Adalberto Rodriguez (Machuchal) through money-making schemes created by Reliquia's corrupt mind. The show was a very popular one for more than a decade.

In the early 1970s, Ortiz started the production of his own TV shows at Telemundo, among them the first Astrology-related program starring Walter Mercado and segments designed to showcase the talents of dancing/singing bombshell Iris Chacon, who later became his second wife. Years later, after marrying Charytin Goyco, he produced and co-starred with her in 'Mi Dulce Charytin' a weekly long running variety show which combined music and comedy, produced at WAPA-TV. Ortiz was always the writer, director and visionary mastermind of his productions.date=July 2020

One of Ortiz's works, Las Rosas Blancas, a made-for-TV film fantasy/drama musical, starring Charytin, Luis Antonio Cosme, Miguel Angel Alvarez and Ortiz himself, received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in 1975, after being selected along with 26 other radio and/or TV productions from more than 1,000 entries.date=July 2020

In 1985, he returned to WAPA-TV as a comedian in a show sponsored by Budweiser, known as La Taverna Budweiser, alongside Machuchal, reprising the same type of program they made two decades before in Telemundo. During that time Ortiz developed programs of political satire such as Qué Pueblito, El Pueblito Nius, Ay Bendito, que Pueblito ! and El Pueblito Contra Ataca in which he played another old man character, Cheito Boogaloo, who denounced corruption while making fun of political matters. He also produced the very popular Barrio 4 Calles starring Leopoldo 'Pucho' Fernandez and Miguel Angel Alvarez, as well as the children's comedy series Que Angelitos, starring his son Shalim.

Personal life
Ortiz's first marriage was to Rosalinda Alonso, a lady not related to the artistic world with whom he had two daughters. Unfortunately, while Alonso was pregnant with their second daughter, Ortiz contracted measles which in turn he gave to his wife and unborn child. His second daughter lived to her teens. His first daughter died in her 20s due to complications following treatment for lupus. Following a divorce he was briefly married to dancer/singer Iris Chacón during the early 1970s. In 1978, he married singer/composer Charytín, a Dominican Republic native who had lived in Puerto Rico for many years. In 1979, they had their first son, Shalim. They relocated in Miami, Florida during the late 1980s and in 1990 their twins, Sharinna and Alexander were born. Ortiz withdrew from acting to manage his wife's career and later retired completely to spend more time with his family. His son Shalim has gone on to become an international singing star and a spokesman for the American Diabetes Association. Ortiz suffered from Diabetes during his last years.

Honors
On December 12, 2013, Ortiz was honored with a ceremony and added to the list of illustrious Ponce citizens at the Park of the Illustrious Ponce Citizens in Ponce's Tricentennial Park.

Health and Death
It was announced in 2015 that Ortiz was suffering Alzheimer's disease. On June 13, 2016, son Shalim announced through the web that his father had died the day before. He was 81.

title: Elín Ortiz


text:
Computer Modern

Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use of mathematical notation.

Design
Computer Modern is a "Didone", or modern serif font, a genre that emerged in the late 18th century as a contrast to the more organic designs that preceded them. Didone fonts have high contrast between thick and thin elements, and their axis of "stress" or thickening is perfectly vertical. Computer Modern was specifically based on the 10 point size of the American Lanston Monotype Company's Modern Extended 8A, part of a family Monotype originally released in 1896. This was one of many modern faces issued by typefounders and Monotype around this period, and the standard style for body text printing in the late nineteenth century.

In creating the TeX publishing system, Knuth was influenced by the history of mathematics and a desire to achieve the "classic style" of books printed in metal type. Modern faces were used extensively for printing mathematics, especially before Times New Roman became popular for mathematics printing from the 1950s.

The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with Knuth's Metafont system, one of the few typefaces developed in this way. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence of serifs or old-style numerals, whether dots such as the dot on the "i" are square or rounded, and the degree of "superness" in the bowls of lowercase letters such as "g" and "o". This allows Metafont designs to be processed in unusual ways; Knuth has shown effects such as morphing in demonstrations, where one font slowly transitions into another over the course of a text. While it attracted attention for the concept, Metafont has been used by few other font designers; by 1996 Knuth commented "asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much" while digital-period font designer Jonathan Hoefler commented in 2015 that "Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is flawed".

Derived versions
Knuth produced his original Computer Modern fonts using Metafont, a program that reads stroke-based definitions of glyphs and outputs ready-to-use fonts as bitmap image files. He mostly left the font, as with other components of TeX (with the exception of the TeX and Metafont names themselves, a stipulation Knuth made to maintain quality control), in the public domain.

The advance of publishing technology (PostScript, PDF, laser printers) has reduced the need for bitmap fonts. The preferred formats are now outline fonts such as Type 1, TrueType, or OpenType, which can be rendered efficiently at arbitrary resolution and using sophisticated anti-aliasing techniques by printer firmware or on-screen document viewers. Therefore, several other projects have ported the Computer Modern fonts into such formats. Some of these projects have also complemented Computer Modern with

 * additional characters (euro, accented characters, Cyrillic and Greek script coverage)
 * different font encodings (to overcome problems with Knuth's original 8-bit character sets)
 * additional font style variants

Several such derivatives are now also widely used and included in TeX Live, a modern TeX distribution.

CMU
A current extended release of the Computer Modern family in the general-purpose OpenType format is the CMU distribution (for Computer Modern Unicode):

 * CMU Serif, the main Computer Modern font family. This includes the four traditional styles of font (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), and also:
 * CMU Serif upright italic, an upright italic style similar to cursive upright handwriting
 * CMU Serif bold non-extended, a bold weight duplexed to have the same width as the regular style
 * CMU Serif roman and bold slanted, two oblique styles
 * CMU Classical Serif, an italic design with slightly simpler serif designs
 * Concrete Roman, a slab serif font in the four standard styles
 * CMU Typewriter, a typewriter-style slab serif font
 * CMU Sans Serif, a complementary sans-serif font, and CMU Bright, a lighter style of the same design
 * CMU Sans demi-condensed, a condensed style of the same design

CMU is released under the SIL Open Font License.

BlueSky
Computer Modern was first transformed to a PostScript Type 3 font format by BlueSky, Inc. in 1988, and then to Type 1 in 1992 to include font hinting. The Type 1 version has since then been donated to the American Mathematical Society (AMS) which distributes them freely under the Open Font License. It is found in most standard TeX distributions.

Latin Modern
The Latin Modern implementation, maintained by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki of TeX User Group Poland (GUST), is now standard in the TeX community and was made through a Metafont/MetaPost derivative called METATYPE1. It was derived from the BlueSky Type 1 fonts, which were converted back into outline-based METATYPE1 programs, from which then the extended Type 1 and OpenType Latin Modern fonts were developed. ConTeXt uses Latin Modern as default font, instead of Computer Modern.

The Type 1 to METATYPE1 to Type 1 round-trip conversion process involved in the production of the Latin Modern fonts tried to preserve the hinting information of the BlueSky fonts; however, it introduced rounding errors that affect the quality of the hinting at low pixel sizes. As a result, on-screen display of the Latin Modern fonts can result in a less even display of kerning and character heights than with the BlueSky fonts.

The same process was later extended to some free PostScript font clones under the umbrella project TeX Gyre.

The Latin Modern font has also gained an OpenType math table. Unlike Computer Modern Math, Latin Modern Math has no pairwise kerning information: OpenType math rendering does not make use of this type of kerning, making such information useless.

New Computer Modern
The New Computer Modern font family is a large extension in terms of the number of additional glyphs of the Latin Modern fonts which adds support for several more languages such as Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Cherokee and Coptic. This font family comes in two weights, "Regular" and "Book". The book weight is supposed to look slightly heavier compared to the "Regular". Both the weights include support for typesetting mathematics; complete coverage of unicode math blocks is provided, along with some more glyphs needed for mathematics.

MLModern
MLModern is based on the Latin Modern font. It avoids the spindliness of most other Type 1 versions of Computer Modern and hence looks thicker in comparison to Latin Modern or Computer Modern.

A visual comparison of Computer Modern, Latin Modern, New Computer Modern Book and MLModern is shown here.

Others

 * EC fonts – look much like Computer Modern, but have slightly different metrics. These were the first TeX fonts to use the "Cork encoding" (in LaTeX also known as T1 encoding) that provides precomposed glyphs for West-European languages. The original EC fonts were only available as Metafont generated bitmaps.
 * TC fonts – the TeX Companion fonts provide a number of additional symbols commonly used in text.
 * BaKoMa fonts – another automatically generated Type1 version of Computer Modern by Basil K. Malyshev, dating to 1994. The fonts remain available for download after Malyshev's 2019 death.
 * CM-super – a very large extension of Computer Modern, available in a variety of encodings. These fonts were automatically vectorized from Computer Modern or EC font bitmaps and therefore lack the hinting information in the BlueSky fonts.
 * CM-LGC – a Latin, Greek, Cyrillic extension.

title: Computer Modern


text:
Woolly mouse opossum

The woolly mouse opossum or long-furred woolly mouse opossum (Marmosa demerarae), known locally as the cuíca, is a South American marsupial of the family Didelphidae. Its range includes central Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, eastern Peru, northern Bolivia, and northern Brazil. It was formerly assigned to the genus Micoureus, which was made a subgenus of Marmosa in 2009.

It generally lives in tropical, humid forest below 1,200 meter elevation as in the Andes and surrounding lowlands. It is often found on plantations or other disturbed areas as well as evergreen forests.

title: Woolly mouse opossum


text:
Kennan

Kennan may refer to:

Places

 * United States
 * Kennan, Wisconsin, a village
 * Kennan (town), Wisconsin, a town

Other uses

 * Kennan (name)
 * KH-11 Kennan, a type of American reconnaissance satellite

title: Kennan


text:
Ross Dowson

Ross Jewitt Dowson (September 4, 1917 – February 17, 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure and perennial candidate.

Early life
Dowson was born on September 4, 1917, the third of what was eventually a family of seven children in a working-class family in Weston, Ontario, then a suburb of Toronto. His father was a printer, an atheist and an anarchist sympathizer and his mother was a stenographer.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Dowson's older brother, Murray, joined the Workers' Party of Canada, a Trotskyist organization, while a student at York Memorial Collegiate Institute and brought Ross along to meetings. The pair set up the York Memorial High School Spartacus Club. The younger Dowson joined the party and declared to his mother at the age of 17 that he intended to spend his life as a professional revolutionary. Harry Kopyto, a long-time friend and follower of Dowson, told the Globe and Mail that Dowson "got his politics from the hungry thirties, seeing working-class people share what they had while the upper class kept what they had to themselves... "He believed in the social ownership and democratic control of the wealth of society."

As an entryist, Dowson joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Youth Movement (CCYM), the youth wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in 1938 and but was expelled due to his political activities.

The Canadian Trotskyist movement collapsed at the beginning of World War II. Leaders such as Jack MacDonald and Maurice Spector had already left due to factional disputes and disagreements and the leader at the time the war broke out, Earle Birney, dropped out to focus on being a poet and because he disagreed with the Trotskyist position on the war. The movement suffered a further blow when the Socialist Workers League (as the Workers party was now called) was declared illegal under the Defence of Canada Regulations.

Ross and Murray Dowson remained with the group as it went underground. Dowson joined the Canadian Army in 1942 and rose to the rank of second lieutenant. He recruited two other soldiers to the Trotskyist movement and organized a successful strike for better pay by soldiers who had been assigned to lay and tamp train tracks in southern Ontario. Dowson was discharged from the army in December 1944.

Dowson was elected secretary of the Socialist Workers League in October 1944, and reorganized the movement, founding the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP) with Dowson as national secretary and editor of its newspaper Labour Challenge.

Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto nine times in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He campaigned openly as a Trotskyist under the slogan “Vote Dowson, Vote for a Labor Mayor, Vote for the Trotskyist Candidate” and garnered 11% of the vote  in the 1948 mayoral election and over 20% of the vote in 1949.

Cold War
The RWP declined however due to the pressures of the Cold War and ended its activities. Its members joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as an entrist faction known internally as "The Club" but continued to operate the Toronto Labor Bookstore on Yonge Street, run by Dowson, where they would also hold meetings and organize their activities. In order to save money, Dowson lived in the bookstore and lived a spartan lifestyle.

A split in the Fourth International in 1953 had ramifications in the RWP and in Dowson's own family. Ross Dowson and the majority of the group sided with the faction led by James P. Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party (United States), this faction formed the International Committee of the Fourth International. His brother Murray and brother-in-law Joe Rosenthal formed a pro-Michel Pablo minority, and split from the RWP in 1954 to form a Trotskyist tendency within the CCF. It disappeared by the end of the decade.

Federal politics
Ross Dowson ran for the House of Commons of Canada on two occasions. He was a candidate in a 1957 by-election in the rural riding of Hastings—Frontenac, in which the CCF decided not to run a candidate. After Dowson said that he would be willing to join the CCF caucus should he be elected, CCF leader Major James Coldwell rejected the offer saying, "In the unlikely event of Mr. Dowson winning the by-election he would certainly find no welcome from the CCF and no opportunity of aligning himself with us." Running under the "Labour" label, Dowson received only 266 votes in a two-way race against External Affairs minister Sidney Earle Smith.

In the 1958 general election, Dowson was again a candidate in the Toronto riding of Broadview. He placed fourth with 477 votes. This time he ran as a "Socialist" candidate, despite the fact that the democratic socialist CCF also stood a candidate.

Dowson also filed his nomination papers as a "Labour" candidate against new Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield in the 1967 Colchester—Hants by-election but withdrew when Elwood Smith entered the race as an independent candidate with informal NDP backing.

1960s
By 1961, Dowson and his Trotskyist group had returned to an entrism policy towards social democracy and joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) at its founding. In that year, the Trotskyist movement relaunched itself as the "League for Socialist Action" (LSA), with branches in Toronto and Vancouver and Dowson as national secretary.

Dowson was also editor of the LSA's newspaper, which was first called Vanguard and later Labour Challenge. The LSA grew during the student radicalization of the late 1960s, bringing youth into the movement. He helped shape the national movement in Canada against the Vietnam War, devising the slogan "End Canada's Complicity in the War in Vietnam".

In 1963, Dowson played a role in the reunification of the Fourth International when he was sent to Europe with Joseph Hansen to help negotiate a settlement between the American and Canadian groups on one side and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International led by Ernest Mandel following the ouster of Pablo earlier in the decade.

In 1964, the LSA developed a Quebec counterpart, the Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere (Workers' Socialist League).

In the late 1960s, Canadian Marxist academics, under the influence of the then-predominant dependency theory, tended to view Canada as an economic colony of the United States. Dowson was influenced by this analysis, which also influenced the Waffle movement in the NDP. Dowson moved towards a position that held that Canadian nationalism was progressive against American imperialism, a view that put him in the minority in the LSA.

Split from the LSA
Dowson's faction was defeated at the LSA's 1973 convention and, in early 1974, he and about 20 supporters left the LSA and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International to form the Socialist League. This group came to be known as the "Forward Group" after the name of its newspaper. The group grew initially, but soon declined. By 1989, it had been reduced to a small group of friends around Dowson when he suffered a devastating stroke that left him unable to speak or write for the rest of his life.

Dowson v RCMP
Dowson and his organization became a target for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which labelled Dowson a "subversive" and monitored and attempted to interfere with his activities. As part of a 1972 action code named "Operation Checkmate", the RCMP engaged in an attempt to disrupt and break-up the LSA and destroy the credibility of Dowson and another LSA leader, John Riddell. The LSA split the following year.

An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police determined that RCMP officers engaged in what the Toronto Star called a "secret war" against Dowson and the LSA since 1960 and that these actions involved what the OPP described as "at least the apparent commission of crime ... by the RCMP security service."

Dowson and his followers subsequently spent 13 years attempting to prosecute the RCMP. In 1980, Attorney-General of Ontario Roy McMurtry intervened to quash attempts by Dowson and Riddell to lay charges against the RCMP on the basis that such a prosecution was not in the public interest and had no chance of success. The Supreme Court of Canada overturned McMurtry's decision in 1983 allowing Dowson to commence a private prosecution but in 1985, the charges were dismissed by lower courts.

However, Dowson testified and provided evidence before two royal commissions investigating RCMP wrongdoings, including the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, that were instrumental in the eventual replacement of the RCMP's security service with a new agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Personal life
Professionally, Dowson was a machinist as a youth and later a lithographer and printer by training, but spent almost his entire working life as a full-time paid staffer (at times the only one) for the organization, for many years living in the organization's bookstore. For the new generation of recruits in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was the major link to the older generation of class-struggle militants and Marxists who had built the labour and socialist movements in previous decades. He suffered a stroke in 1989 which left him paralyzed and almost unable to communicate for the rest of his life.

Dowson was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal and not accepted socially and concealed his sexual orientation through a celibate lifestyle.

Dowson's brothers Hugh, Murray and his sisters Joyce (Dowson) Rosenthal and Lois (Dowson) Bédard were also active in the Trotskyist movement.

Dowson's niece, Anne Lagacé Dowson, is a broadcaster and politician who was the New Democratic Party's candidate in Westmount—Ville-Marie in the 2008 federal election.

title: Ross Dowson


text:
Bare-tailed woolly mouse opossum

The bare-tailed woolly mouse opossum (Marmosa regina) or short-furred woolly mouse opossum is a South American marsupial of the family Didelphidae. Its range includes Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. It is found in tropical rainforest in the westernmost portion of the Amazon Basin and the eastern foothills of the Andes, at elevations up to 1634 m. It was formerly assigned to the genus Micoureus, which was made a subgenus of Marmosa in 2009.

title: Bare-tailed woolly mouse opossum