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Functional electrical stimulation

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a technique that uses low-energy electrical pulses to artificially generate body movements in individuals who have been paralyzed due to injury to the central nervous system. More specifically, FES can be used to generate muscle contraction in otherwise paralyzed limbs to produce functions such as grasping, walking, bladder voiding and standing. This technology was originally used to develop neuroprostheses that were implemented to permanently substitute impaired functions in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), head injury, stroke and other neurological disorders. In other words, a person would use the device each time he or she wanted to generate a desired function. FES is sometimes also referred to as neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES).

FES technology has been used to deliver therapies to retrain voluntary motor functions such as grasping, reaching and walking. In this embodiment, FES is used as a short-term therapy, the objective of which is restoration of voluntary function and not lifelong dependence on the FES device, hence the name functional electrical stimulation therapy, FES therapy (FET or FEST). In other words, the FEST is used as a short-term intervention to help an individual's central nervous system re-learn how to execute impaired functions, instead of making them dependent on neuroprostheses for the rest of their life. Initial Phase II clinical trials conducted with FEST for reaching and grasping, and walking were carried out at KITE, the research arm of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.

Principles
Neurons are electrically active cells. In neurons, information is coded and transmitted as a series of electrical impulses called action potentials, which represent a brief change in cell electric potential of approximately 80–90 mV. Nerve signals are frequency modulated; i.e. the number of action potentials that occur in a unit of time is proportional to the intensity of the transmitted signal. Typical action potential frequency is between 4 and 12 Hz. An electrical stimulation can artificially elicit this action potential by changing the electric potential across a nerve cell membrane (this also includes the nerve axon) by inducing electrical charge in the immediate vicinity of the outer membrane of the cell.

FES devices take advantage of this property to electrically activate nerve cells, which then may go on to activate muscles or other nerves. However, special care must be taken in designing safe FES devices, as electric current through tissue can lead to adverse effects such as decrease in excitability or cell death. This may be due to thermal damage, electroporation of the cell membrane, toxic products from electrochemical reactions at the electrode surface, or over-excitation of the targeted neurons or muscles. Typically FES is concerned with stimulation of neurons and nerves. In some applications, FES can be used to directly stimulate muscles, if their peripheral nerves have been severed or damaged (i.e., denervated muscles). However, the majority of the FES systems used today stimulate the nerves or the points where the junction occurs between the nerve and the muscle. The stimulated nerve bundle includes motor nerves (efferent nerves—descending nerves from the central nervous system to muscles) and sensory nerves (afferent nerves—ascending nerves from sensory organs to the central nervous system).

The electrical charge can stimulate both motor and sensory nerves. In some applications, the nerves are stimulated to generate localized muscle activity, i.e., the stimulation is aimed at generating direct muscle contraction. In other applications, stimulation is used to activate simple or complex reflexes. In other words, the afferent nerves are stimulated to evoke a reflex, which is typically expressed as a coordinated contraction of one or more muscles in response to the sensory nerve stimulation.

When a nerve is stimulated, i.e., when sufficient electrical charge is provided to a nerve cell, a localized depolarization of the cell wall occurs resulting in an action potential that propagates toward both ends of the axon. Typically, one "wave" of action potentials will propagate along the axon towards the muscle (orthodromic propagation) and concurrently, as the other "wave" of action potentials will propagate towards the cell body in the central nervous system (antidromic propagation). While the direction of propagation in case of the antidromic stimulation and the sensory nerve stimulation is the same, i.e., towards the central nervous system, their end effects are very different. The antidromic stimulus has been considered an irrelevant side effect of FES. However, in recent years a hypothesis has been presented suggesting the potential role of the antidromic stimulation in neurorehabilitation. Typically, FES is concerned with orthodromic stimulation and uses it to generate coordinated muscle contractions.

In the case where sensory nerves are stimulated, the reflex arcs are triggered by the stimulation on sensory nerve axons at specific peripheral sites. One example of such a reflex is the flexor withdrawal reflex. The flexor withdrawal reflex occurs naturally when a sudden, painful sensation is applied to the sole of the foot. It results in flexion of the hip, knee and ankle of the affected leg, and extension of the contralateral leg in order to get the foot away from the painful stimulus as quickly as possible. The sensory nerve stimulation can be used to generate desired motor tasks, such as evoking flexor withdrawal reflex to facilitate walking in individuals following stroke, or they can be used to alter reflexes or the function of the central nervous system. In the later case, the electrical stimulation is commonly described by the term neuromodulation.

Nerves can be stimulated using either surface (transcutaneous) or subcutaneous (percutaneous or implanted) electrodes. The surface electrodes are placed on the skin surface above the nerve or muscle that needs to be "activated". They are noninvasive, easy to apply, and generally inexpensive. Until recently the common belief in the FES field has been that due to the electrode-skin contact impedance, skin and tissue impedance, and current dispersion during stimulation, much higher-intensity pulses are required to stimulate nerves using surface stimulation electrodes as compared to the subcutaneous electrodes.

(This statement is correct for all commercially available stimulators except MyndMove stimulator (developed my Milos R. Popovic), which has implemented a new stimulation pulse that allows the stimulator to generate muscle contractions without causing discomfort during stimulation, which is a common problem with commercially available transcutaneous electrical stimulation systems, based on US Patents 8,880,178 (2014), 9,440,077 (2016), and 9,592,380 (2016) and related foreign patents.)

A major limitation of the transcutaneous electrical stimulation is that some nerves, for example those innervating the hip flexors, are too profound to be stimulated using surface electrodes. This limitation can be partly addressed by using arrays of electrodes, which can use several electrical contacts to increase selectivity.

Subcutaneous electrodes can be divided into percutaneous and implanted electrodes. The percutaneous electrodes consist of thin wires inserted through the skin and into muscular tissue close to the targeted nerve. These electrodes typically remain in place for a short period of time and are only considered for short-term FES interventions. However, it is worth mentioning that some groups, such as Cleveland FES Center, have been able to safely use percutaneous electrodes with individual patients for months and years at a time. One of the drawbacks of using the percutaneous electrodes is that they are prone to infection and special care has to be taken to prevent such events.

The other class of subcutaneous electrodes is implanted electrodes. These are permanently implanted in the consumer's body and remain in the body for the remainder of the consumer's life. Compared to surface stimulation electrodes, implanted and percutaneous electrodes potentially have higher stimulation selectivity, which is a desired characteristics of FES systems. To achieve higher selectivity while applying lower stimulation amplitudes, it is recommended that both cathode and anode are in the vicinity of the nerve that is stimulated. The drawbacks of the implanted electrodes are they require an invasive surgical procedure to install, and, as is the case with every surgical intervention, there exists a possibility of infection following implantation.

Typical stimulation protocols used in clinical FES involves trains of electric pulses. Biphasic, charged balanced pulses are employed as they improve the safety of electrical stimulation and minimize some of the adverse effects. Pulse duration, pulse amplitude and pulse frequency are the key parameters that are regulated by the FES devices. The FES devices can be current or voltage regulated. Current regulated FES systems always deliver the same charge to the tissue regardless of the skin/tissue resistance. Because of that, the current regulated FES systems do not require frequent adjustments of the stimulation intensity. The voltage regulated devices may require more frequent adjustments of the stimulation intensity as the charge that they deliver changes as the skin/tissue resistance changes. The properties of the stimulation pulse trains and how many channels are used during stimulation define how complex and sophisticated FES-induced function is. The system can be as simple such as FES systems for muscle strengthening or they can be complex such as FES systems used to deliver simultaneous reaching and grasping, or bipedal locomotion.

''Note: This paragraph was developed in part using material from the following reference. For more information on FES please consult that and other references provided in the paragraph.''

History
Electrical stimulation had been utilized as far back as ancient Egypt, when it was believed that placing torpedo fish in a pool of water with a human was therapeutic. FES – which involves stimulating the target organ during a functional movement (e.g., walking, reaching for an item) – was initially referred to as functional electrotherapy by Liberson. It was not until 1967 that the term functional electrical stimulation was coined by Moe and Post, and used in a patent entitled, "Electrical stimulation of muscle deprived of nervous control with a view of providing muscular contraction and producing a functionally useful moment". Offner's patent described a system used to treat foot drop.

The first commercially available FES devices treated foot drop by stimulating the peroneal nerve during gait. In this case, a switch, located in the heel end of a user's shoe, would activate a stimulator worn by the user.

Spinal cord injury
Injuries to the spinal cord interfere with electrical signals between the brain and the muscles, resulting in paralysis below the level of injury. Restoration of limb function as well as regulation of organ function are the main application of FES, although FES is also used for treatment of pain, pressure, sore prevention, etc. Some examples of FES applications involve the use of neuroprostheses that allow the people with paraplegia to walk, stand, restore hand grasp function in people with quadriplegia, or restore bowel and bladder function. High intensity FES of the quadriceps muscles allows patients with complete lower motor neuron lesion to increase their muscle mass, muscle fiber diameter, improve ultrastructural organization of contractile material, increase of force output during electrical stimulation and perform FES assisted stand-up exercises. Regeneration associated genes (RAG) expression, responsible for axonal outgrowth and survival, is promoted with administration of FES.

Walking in spinal cord injury
Kralj and his colleagues described a technique for paraplegic gait using surface stimulation, which remains the most popular method in use today. Electrodes are placed over the quadriceps muscles and peroneal nerves bilaterally. The user controls the neuroprosthesis with two pushbuttons attached to the left and right handles of a walking frame, or on canes or crutches. When the neuroprosthesis is turned on, both quadriceps muscles are stimulated to provide a standing posture.

Kralj's approach was extended by Graupe et al. into a digital FES system that employs the power of digital signal processing to result in the Parastep FES system, based on US Patents 5,014,705 (1991), 5,016,636 (1991), 5,070,873 (1991), 5,081,989 (1992), 5,092,329 (1992) and related foreign patents. The Parastep system became the first FES system for standing and walking to receive the US FDA approval (FDA, PMA P900038, 1994) and become commercially available.

The Parastep's digital design allows a considerable reduction in rate of patient-fatigue by drastically reducing of stimulation pulse-width (100–140 microseconds) and pulse-rate (12–24 per sec.), to result, in walking times of 20–60 minutes and average walking distances of 450 meters per walk, for adequately trained thoracic-level complete paraplegics patients who complete training that includes daily treadmill sessions, with some patients exceeding one mile per walk. Also, Parestep-based walking was reported to result in several medical and psychological benefits, including restoration of near-normal blood flow to lower extremities and holding of bone density decline.

Walking performance with the Parastep system greatly depends on rigorous upper body conditioning-training and on a completing 3–5 months of a daily one–two-hour training program which includes 30 of more minutes of treadmill training.

An alternative approach to the above techniques is the FES system for walking developed using the Compex Motion neuroprosthesis, by Popovic et al. The Compex Motion neuroprosthesis for walking is an eight to sixteen channel surface FES system used to restore voluntary walking in stroke and spinal cord injury individuals. This system does not apply peroneal nerve stimulation to enable locomotion. Instead, it activates all relevant lower limb muscles in a sequence similar to the one that brain uses to enable locomotion. The hybrid assistive systems (HAS) and the RGO walking neuroprostheses are devices that also apply active and passive braces, respectively. The braces were introduced to provide additional stability during standing and walking. A major limitation of neuroprostheses for walking that are based on surface stimulation is that the hip flexors cannot be stimulated directly. Therefore, hip flexion during walking must come from voluntary effort, which is often absent in paraplegia, or from the flexor withdrawal reflex. Implanted systems have the advantage of being able to stimulate the hip flexors, and therefore, to provide better muscle selectivity and potentially better gait patterns. Hybrid systems with exoskeleton have been also proposed to solve this problem. These technologies have been found to be successful and promising, but at the present time these FES systems are mostly used for exercise purposes and seldom as an alternative to wheelchair mobility.

Stroke and upper limb recovery
Peripheral nerves have a regeneration rate of ~1mm per day. With nerve injury often requiring a large distance of restoration, down-regulation of regenerative mechanisms over time limits nerve proliferation. In the acute stage of stroke recovery, the use of cyclic electrical stimulation has been seen to increase the isometric strength of wrist extensors. In order to increase strength of wrist extensors, there must be a degree of motor function at the wrist spared following the stroke and have significant hemiplegia. Patients who will elicit benefits of cyclic electrical stimulation of the wrist extensors must be highly motivated to follow through with treatment. After 8 weeks of electrical stimulation, an increase in grip strength can be apparent. Many scales, which assess the level of disability of the upper extremities following a stroke, use grip strength as a common item. Therefore, increasing strength of wrist extensors will decrease the level of upper extremity disability.

Patients with hemiplegia following a stroke commonly experience shoulder pain and subluxation; both of which will interfere with the rehabilitation process. Functional electrical stimulation has been found to be effective for the management of pain and reduction of shoulder subluxation, as well as accelerating the degree and rate of motor recovery. Furthermore, the benefits of FES are maintained over time; research has demonstrated that the benefits are maintained for at least 24 months.

A systematic review was done to assess three types of functional electronic stimulation (FES) used in post stroke upper limb rehab and compare them to patients that did not use any FES. The types focused on were manual FES, BCI-FES, and EMG-FES. Studies showed that when comparing clinical scores in post stroke patients who used FES versus patients that did not, the patients that used FES had more functional benefits. The scores suggested that FES decreases spasticity of wrist flexors as compared to non-FES and motor outcomes showed improved recovery in upper extremities, specifically when using the BCI-FES system. In the end the study showed that it is difficult to say which specific FES system is best. Many research studies showed that closed-loop FES, or BCI/EMG, are more beneficial than open-loop FES, or manual, for motor recovery. Among closed-loop FES, which system is more effective (either BCI-FES or EMG-FES) remains unspecified, because as of right now no randomized controlled clinical trial has been conducted to directly compare the two and their benefits when in the context of neurorehabilitation. An open-loop FES has been widely used clinically for many years when treating post stroke patients, whereas closed-loop FES is typically applied in the laboratory setting as a research protocol (especially BCI-FES).

Drop foot
Drop foot is a common symptom in hemiplegia, characterized by a lack of dorsiflexion during the swing phase of gait, resulting in short, shuffling strides. It has been shown that FES can be used to effectively compensate for the drop foot during the swing phase of the gait. At the moment just before the heel off phase of gait occurs, the stimulator delivers a stimulus to the common peroneal nerve, which results in contraction of the muscles responsible for dorsiflexion. There are currently a number of drop foot stimulators that use surface and implanted FES technologies. Drop foot stimulators have been used successfully with various patient populations, such as stroke, spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis.

The term "orthotic effect" can be used to describe the immediate improvement in function observed when the individual switches on their FES device compared to unassisted walking. This improvement disappears as soon as the person switches off their FES device. In contrast, a "training" or "therapeutic effect" is used to describe a long term improvement or restoration of function following a period of using the device which is still present even when the device is switched off. A further complication to measuring an orthotic effect and any long term training or therapeutic effects is the presence of a so-called "temporary carry over effect". Liberson et al., 1961 was the first to observe that some stroke patients appeared to benefit from a temporary improvement in function and were able to dorsiflex their foot for up to an hour after the electrical stimulation had been turned off. It has been hypothesised that this temporary improvement in function may be linked to a long term training or therapeutic effect.

Stroke
Hemiparetic stroke patients, who are impacted by the denervation, muscular atrophy, and spasticity, typically experience an abnormal gait pattern due to muscular weakness and the incapacity to voluntary contract certain ankle and hip muscles at the appropriate walking phase. Liberson et al. (1961) were the first to pioneer FES in stroke patients. More recently, there have been a number of studies that have been conducted in this area. A systematic review conducted in 2012 on the use of FES in chronic stroke included seven randomized controlled trials with a total of 231 participants. The review found a small treatment effect for using FES for the 6-minute walking test.

Multiple sclerosis
FES has also been found to be useful for treating foot drop in people with multiple sclerosis. The first use was reported in 1977 by Carnstam et al., who found that it was possible to generate strength increases through using peroneal stimulation. A more recent study examined the use of FES compared to an exercise group and found that although there was an orthotic effect for the FES group, no training effect in walking speed was found. Further qualitative analysis including all participants from the same study found improvements in activities of daily living and a reduced number of falls for those using FES compared with exercise. A further small scale (n=32) longitudinal observational study has found evidence for a significant training effect through using FES. With NMES treatment there were measurable gains in ambulatory function.

However, a further large observational study (n=187) was supportive of previous findings and found a significant improvement in orthotic effect for walking speed.

Cerebral palsy
FES has been found to be useful for treating the symptoms of cerebral palsy. A recent randomised controlled trial (n=32) found significant orthotic and training effects for children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy. Improvements were found in gastrocnemius spasticity, community mobility and balance skills. A recent comprehensive literature review of the area of using electrical stimulation and FES to treat children with disabilities mostly included studies on children with cerebral palsy. The reviewers summarised the evidence as the treatment having the potential to improve a number of different areas including muscle mass and strength, spasticity, passive range of motion, upper extremity function, walking speed, positioning of the foot and ankle kinematics. The review further concludes that adverse events were rare and the technology is safe and well tolerated by this population. The applications of FES for children with cerebral palsy are similar to those for adults. Some common applications of FES devices include stimulation of muscles whilst mobilizing to strengthen muscle activity, to reduce muscle spasticity, to facilitate initiation of muscle activity, or to provide a memory of movement.

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Guidelines (NICE) (UK)
NICE have issued full guidelines on the treatment of drop foot of central neurological origin (IPG278). NICE have stated that "current evidence on the safety and efficacy (in terms of improving gait) of functional electrical stimulation (FES) for drop foot of central neurological origin appears adequate to support the use of this procedure provided that normal arrangements are in place for clinical governance, consent and audit".

In popular culture

 * Mark Coggins' novel No Hard Feelings (2015) features a female protagonist with a spinal cord injury who regains mobility via advanced FES technology developed by a fictional biomedical startup.

title: Functional electrical stimulation


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TIBCO Rendezvous

TIBCO Rendezvous is a software product that provides a message bus for enterprise application integration (EAI).

Details
TIBCO provides messaging APIs in C, C++, Java, Visual Basic, Perl and .NET to provide messaging between two or more services.

The basic message passing is conceptually simple:
 * A message has a single subject composed of elements separated by periods. A message is sent to a single Rendezvous Daemon (though it may end up being broadcast onto Daemons).
 * A listener announces its subjects of interest to a Daemon (with a basic wildcard facility) and messages with matching subjects are delivered to it if the two daemons are 'connected' to each other (or indeed the same daemon).

Considerable "Enterprise" functionality is layered onto this if desired with Fault Tolerance/Reliable or Certified options possible, all implemented through the underlying basic messages.

The messages themselves can be viewed as typed name-value fields and/or number-value fields (the two identification mechanisms within a message can mix and match with certain restrictions). A message can itself contain sub-messages which themselves may contain sub-messages, and so on.

The quality of the respective API implementations varies considerably. The C++ library is simply a wrapper providing an OO view over the C implementation. Likewise the Java and .NET implementations wrap the C++ implementation. This has led to memory management issues with the .NET implementation (though not with the COM Interop version which is considerably more cumbersome).

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

title: TIBCO Rendezvous


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CEPT Recommendation T/CD 06-01

CEPT Recommendation T/CD 06-01 was a standard set in 1981 by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) for the display of Videotex; specifically, for the Videotex Presentation Layer Data Syntax. It was revised a number of times in the 1980s, and also later redesignated as recommendation T/TE 06-01.

The standard aimed to bring a degree of harmonisation between Europe's emerging videotext systems, which had been diverging along national lines. It recognised four baseline profiles (with conformance criteria set out in Annex C) based on existing videotext services:

 * CEPT1: BTX (Germany)
 * CEPT2: Teletel (France)
 * CEPT3: Prestel (UK)
 * CEPT4: Prestel Plus (Sweden)

and defined criteria for a "harmonised enhanced" service.

National videotex services were encouraged to either follow one of the existing four basic profiles; or if they extended them, to do so in ways compatible with the harmonised enhanced specification.

Responsibility for the standard was passed to the new European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in 1988. The ETSI version of the standard is designated ETS 300 072.

title: CEPT Recommendation T/CD 06-01


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Stibb Cross

Stibb Cross is a small village in north Devon, England. It is included in the civil parish of Langtree and is located about one mile from that village. Its population in 2001 was 677.

The word stibb is derived from Old English styb, which referred to a weapon made of wood.

Stibb Cross is also known for the successful YouTube channel Jay Sadd Truckspotting.

title: Stibb Cross


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Adrien-Henri de Jussieu

Adrien-Henri de Jussieu (23 December 1797 – 29 June 1853) was a French botanist.

Born in Paris as the son of botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1824 with a treatise of the plant family Euphorbiaceae. When his father retired in 1826, he succeeded him at the Jardin des Plantes; in 1845 he became professor of organography of plants. He was also president of the French Academy of Sciences. De Jussieu was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1850.

His main publications were the Cours élémentaire de botanique (Paris) and the Géographie botanique (Paris, 1846), as well as several monographs, most notably the one on the family Malpighiaceae. In botanical references, he is usually abbreviated as '''Adr. Juss., also sometimes as A. Juss., as his father already has the abbreviation Juss.'''

The asteroid 9470 Jussieu was named in honor of the de Jussieu family.

In 1825, the French botanist Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré published Adriana, a genus of Australian shrubs in the family Euphorbiaceae named in honour of Jussieu.

title: Adrien-Henri de Jussieu


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Llanfynydd

Llanfynydd is a village, parish and community in Carmarthenshire, Wales. The community population at the 2011 census was 499. It lies some 10 miles (16 km) north-east of the county town, Carmarthen. Bordering it are the communities of Llansawel, Talley, Manordeilo and Salem, Llangathen, Llanegwad and Llanfihangel Rhos-y-Corn, all in Carmarthenshire.

Heritage
The Church in Wales parish church is a Grade II* listed building dedicated to St Egwad, a 7th-century bishop in Wales. The tower, probably the earliest part, dates from about 1400. The north aisle was added in the 16th century. The building was restored in 1861, when further windows were added. The only indication of a previous church further up the valley is in the name of a farm: Bryn-Yr-Eglwys ("Hill of the Church").

In 1844 Llanfynydd was a parish of 11,000 acres and 1,358 inhabitants in Cathinog Hundred. By 1929 the population was down to 581.

Worship
Parish registers exist from 1692. The parish also has several chapels.

Education
D. Jones, a local clergyman, established a day school in Llanfynydd in 1738, for 20 children.

The number of pupils at the school had fallen to 11 by September 2013, with a deficit of £50,000, and Carmarthenshire County Council warned that the school would close if numbers fell below 10.

However, in December 2014 the BBC reported that though the school had no pupils, it could not be closed until the county council had held a consultation and a vote on the issue.

Public protest
In July 2004, in protest over plans to erect a wind farm nearby, the residents of Llanfynydd renamed their village Llanhyfryddawellehynafolybarcudprindanfygythiadtrienusyllafnauole ("lovely silent church, ancient place of the rare kite under wretched threat from misplaced blades") for the space of one week.

The name was chosen to reflect villagers' concern that the wind farm would threaten three endangered species of bird (the red kite, the curlew, and the skylark) and to generate publicity for their cause by being longer than the previously longest place name in the UK: that of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Anglesey.

The protest went ahead despite assurances from the local council and from the Spanish-owned developers Gamesa Energy UK (part of Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica) that the single wind turbine planned was intended merely as a test to see how suitable the area might be for wind turbines in the future.

Notable people

 * John Dyer (1699–1757), a painter and Welsh poet who became a priest in the Church of England
 * Thomas Rees (1815–1885), Congregational minister and historian of nonconformity, was born at Pen Pontbren, Llanfynydd; twice elected to chair the Union of Welsh Independents.

title: Llanfynydd


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User:ATZ

Aaron Thomas Zertes (Born July 16, 1978) in Clark, New Jersey, I still live Clark and Attend a Local University. I have learned a lot in my short life but there is one thing that have learned: This Country is an EVIL Imperialist empire that calls itself a democracy!

title: User:ATZ


text:
User:Camila

Hi, my name is Camila, I am a 23 years old Computer Science student and I live in São Paulo, Brazil.

My husband is Reinaldo and he lives in São Paulo, Brazil.

Interests
My main current areas of study are Linux, Open Source and computer programming.

Other info
I am not a native english speaker. My primary language is portuguese.

User contributions: list.

title: User:Camila


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Leka, Prince of Albania

Leka, Prince of Albania (Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, born 26 March 1982) is the current head of the House of Zogu, the former royal family of Albania.

At the time of his birth on 26 March 1982, the South African government, by order of Prime Minister P. W. Botha, declared his maternity ward extraterritorial land, to ensure that Leka was born on Albanian soil. Leka is the only child of Leka, Crown Prince of Albania and his wife Susan, Crown Princess of Albania. He is the only grandchild of King Zog I of the Albanians, succeeding as head of the royal house upon the death of his father in 2011. He has worked as an official at the country's interior and foreign ministries. He also served as a political advisor to the Albanian President from 2012 to 2013.

In May 2010, Leka became engaged to Elia Zaharia, an Albanian actress and singer. They married on 8 October 2016 in Tirana. In January 2024, they revealed they were getting a divorce.

Early life
Leka is the son of the pretender to the defunct throne of Albania, Crown Prince Leka, and his Australian wife Crown Princess Susan.

He was named in honour of Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat, his grandfather King Zog I, Emperor Mohammed Reza of Iran, and Baudouin I, King of the Belgians. Msiziwe is a Zulu term meaning 'the one who was assisted'. Leka is a member of the House of Zogu.

Education and activities
Leka was educated in South Africa at St Peter's College, Johannesburg, and in the United Kingdom at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he was named Best Foreign Student of the Academy, being congratulated by the Albanian Minister of Defence. He was also educated at the Skanderbeg Military Academy in Albania, at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, where he studied the Italian language, and in Kosovo, where he studied international relations.

Leka resides in Tirana. He speaks Albanian, English, some Zulu, and Italian. He owns boxer dogs, and his interests include martial arts, volleyball, and swimming. He is fond of wildlife and has taken part in mountain climbing, abseiling, and target shooting.

On 5 April 2004, Leka accepted the Mother Teresa Medal on behalf of his late grandmother, Queen Géraldine, for her humanitarian efforts.

Leka is known to have worked with youth organizations, like MJAFT!, and supported a wide range of humanitarian efforts in Albania, but he maintains that he only supports self-help projects to stimulate Albanian and Kosovar economic growth, Gazeta Sot.

Leka is known as a supporter of Kosovar independence from Serbia and has close ties to the Kosovar leadership in Pristina.

Leka founded the youth leadership of the Movement for National Development, which was a movement created by his father in 2005 to change the political face of Albania.

On 24 June 2010, Prince Leka unveiled a blue plaque at Parmoor House in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom, which was the home of King Zog during his wartime exile.

Public service
On 21 August 2007, Foreign Minister Lulzim Basha announced that Leka had been appointed to his office. The prince intended to pursue a career in diplomacy. After three years he was transferred to the office of the Minister of Interior. After the election of Bujar Nishani as president in 2012, Leka was appointed as political adviser to the President.

Leka was considered as a candidate in the 2022 Albanian presidential election, though the position ultimately went to Bajram Begaj.

Personal life
Leka met Elia Zaharia in Paris, and in May 2010 they were engaged. Since then she has accompanied him on most of his visits and meetings with members of royal families. She is also head of the Queen Geraldine Foundation, which is a humanitarian, charitable and non-profit organisation, created by the Royal Court. The foundation aims to be close to Albanian families who need help and to children who need care. It has reconstructed numerous schools and kindergartens in northern Albania, especially in the Mat District, from where the Zogu Family comes.

On 27 March 2016 it was announced by Skënder Zogu (born 1933), a member of the Zogu family, that the couple would be married on 8 October 2016 in the Royal Palace in Tirana.

It was announced on their Instagram page on 15 January 2024 that Prince Leka and Elia would be getting a mutual divorce as their marriage was no longer functioning. Leka confirmed plans for the divorce two days prior on his personal Instagram page as well.

They divorced on 25 April 2024.

Wedding
Leka was married on Saturday 8 October 2016 in Tirana. The ceremony was a semi-official ceremony, held in Tirana in the Royal Palace, with many guests including members of other noble and royal families. The event was a civil wedding officiated by the Mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj. A blessing was given by the five religious leaders of Albania representing the faiths of Sunni Islam, Bektashi, and the Christian traditions of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. This tradition of the Albanian royal family is part of the tradition of religious tolerance in Albania.

Wedding guests included friends and relatives from around the world including relatives of his mother from Australia. Guests also included members of other royal families from neighbouring countries and further afield. These included Queen Sofía of Spain and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Prince Michael of Kent is a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and his wife Princess Michael of Kent is related to Prince Leka through her mother, Countess Marianne Szapáry, who was a 5th cousin of Queen Géraldine and had been a bridesmaid at her wedding to King Zog in 1938. Other royal guests included Empress Farah of Iran, Crown Prince Alexander and Crown Princess Katherine of Yugoslavia, Crown Princess Margareta of Romania, Custodian of the Crown and Prince Radu of Romania, Nicholas, Prince of Montenegro, Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg together with Princess Sibilla, Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, Princess Léa of Belgium and other members from the royal families of Russia, Liechtenstein, Romania, Greece, Georgia, Morocco and members of other noble families. Heads of state of Albania also attended the ceremony.

Children
Elia gave birth to a daughter on 22 October 2020 at Queen Geraldine Maternity Hospital in Tirana, on the 18th anniversary of Leka's grandmother Queen Geraldine's death. Their daughter was named Geraldine in her honour. On 28 January 2023, on the day of her baptism, her full name is Geraldine Sibilla Francesca Susan Marie, and her godparents are Princess Sibilla of Luxembourg and Thomas Frashëri, a family friend.

National dynastic honours

 * House of Zogu: Sovereign Knight with Collar of the Royal Order of Albania
 * House of Zogu: Sovereign Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Fidelity
 * House of Zogu: Sovereign Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Skanderbeg
 * Albanian Royal Family: Sovereign of the Military Order and Medal of Bravery

Foreign honours

 * Italian Royal Family: Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus
 * Two Sicilian Royal Family: Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I
 * Russian Imperial Family: Knight Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of Saint Andrew
 * New_Ghassanid_Banner.png Royal House of Ghassan: Knight Grand Collar of the Equestrian Order of Michael Archangel
 * Sovereign Military Order of Malta: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit

Awards

 * 🇦🇱 Albania – Honored Citizen of the City of Burrel (2012)
 * 🇦🇱 Albania – Honored Citizen of the Commune of Bërdicë (2012)
 * 🇺🇸 USA – Key to City of New Orleans (2011)
 * 🇺🇸 USA – Honorary Mayor of the City of Baton Rouge

title: Leka, Prince of Albania


text:
Enterprise application integration

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the use of software and computer systems' architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

Overview
Enterprise application integration is an integration framework composed of a collection of technologies and services which form a middleware or "middleware framework" to enable integration of systems and applications across an enterprise.

Many types of business software such as supply chain management applications, ERP systems, CRM applications for managing customers, business intelligence applications, payroll, and human resources systems typically cannot communicate with one another in order to share data or business rules. For this reason, such applications are sometimes referred to as islands of automation or information silos. This lack of communication leads to inefficiencies, wherein identical data are stored in multiple locations, or straightforward processes are unable to be automated.

Enterprise application integration is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures. Applications can be linked either at the back-end via APIs or (seldom) the front-end (GUI).

In the words of research firm Gartner: "[EAI is] the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise."

The various systems that need to be linked together may reside on different operating systems, use different database solutions or computer languages, or different date and time formats, or could be legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor who originally created them. In some cases, such systems are dubbed "stovepipe systems" because they consist of components that have been jammed together in a way that makes it very hard to modify them in any way.

Improving connectivity
If integration is applied without following a structured EAI approach, point-to-point connections grow across an organization. Dependencies are added on an impromptu basis, resulting in a complex structure that is difficult to maintain. This is commonly referred to as spaghetti, an allusion to the programming equivalent of spaghetti code.

For example, the number of connections needed to have fully meshed point-to-point connections, with $n$ points, is given by $$\tbinom n 2 = \tfrac{n(n-1)}{2}$$ (see binomial coefficient). Thus, for ten applications to be fully integrated point-to-point, $$\tfrac{10\times9}{2} = 45$$ point-to-point connections are needed, following a quadratic growth pattern.

However, the number of connections within organizations does not necessarily grow according to the square of the number of points. In general, the number of connections to any point is only limited by the number of other points in an organization, but can be significantly smaller in principle. EAI can also increase coupling between systems and therefore increase management overhead and costs.

EAI is not just about sharing data between applications but also focuses on sharing both business data and business processes. A middleware analyst attending to EAI will often look at the system of systems.

Purposes
EAI can be used for different purposes:

 * Data integration: Ensures that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as enterprise information integration (EII).
 * Vendor independence: Extracts business policies or rules from applications and implements them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.
 * Common facade: An EAI system can front-end a cluster of applications, providing a single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to use different software packages.

Patterns
This section describes common design patterns for implementing EAI, including integration, access and lifetime patterns. These are abstract patterns and can be implemented in many different ways. There are many other patterns commonly used in the industry, ranging from high-level abstract design patterns to highly specific implementation patterns.

Integration patterns
EAI systems implement two patterns:

 * Mediation (intra-communication):Here, the EAI system acts as the go-between or broker between multiple applications. Whenever an interesting event occurs in an application (for instance, new information is created or a new transaction completed) an integration module in the EAI system is notified. The module then propagates the changes to other relevant applications.
 * Federation (inter-communication):In this case, the EAI system acts as the overarching facade across multiple applications. All event calls from the 'outside world' to any of the applications are front-ended by the EAI system. The EAI system is configured to expose only the relevant information and interfaces of the underlying applications to the outside world, and performs all interactions with the underlying applications on behalf of the requester.

Both patterns are often used concurrently. The same EAI system could be keeping multiple applications in sync (mediation), while servicing requests from external users against these applications (federation).

Access patterns
EAI supports both asynchronous (fire and forget) and synchronous access patterns, the former being typical in the mediation case and the latter in the federation case.

Lifetime patterns
An integration operation could be short-lived (e.g., keeping data in sync across two applications could be completed within a second) or long-lived (e.g., one of the steps could involve the EAI system interacting with a human work flow application for approval of a loan that takes hours or days to complete).

Topologies
There are two major topologies: hub-and-spoke, and bus. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. In the hub-and-spoke model, the EAI system is at the center (the hub), and interacts with the applications via the spokes. In the bus model, the EAI system is the bus (or is implemented as a resident module in an already existing message bus or message-oriented middleware).

Most large enterprises use zoned networks to create a layered defense against network oriented threats. For example, an enterprise typically has a credit card processing (PCI-compliant) zone, a non-PCI zone, a data zone, a DMZ zone to proxy external user access, and an IWZ zone to proxy internal user access. Applications need to integrate across multiple zones. The Hub and spoke model would work better in this case.

Technologies
Multiple technologies are used in implementing each of the components of the EAI system:
 * Bus/hub: This is usually implemented by enhancing standard middleware products (application server, message bus) or implemented as a stand-alone program (i. e., does not use any middleware), acting as its own middleware.
 * Application connectivity: The bus/hub connects to applications through a set of adapters (also referred to as connectors). These are programs that know how to interact with an underlying business application. The adapter performs one-way communication(unidirectional), performing requests from the hub against the application, and notifying the hub when an event of interest occurs in the application (a new record inserted, a transaction completed, etc.). Adapters can be specific to an application (e. g., built against the application vendor's client libraries) or specific to a class of applications (e. g., can interact with any application through a standard communication protocol, such as SOAP, SMTP or Action Message Format (AMF)). The adapter could reside in the same process space as the bus/hub or execute in a remote location and interact with the hub/bus through industry-standard protocols such as message queues, web services, or even use a proprietary protocol. In the Java world, standards such as JCA allow adapters to be created in a vendor-neutral manner.
 * Data format and transformation: To avoid every adapter having to convert data to/from every other application's formats, EAI systems usually stipulate an application-independent (or common) data format. The EAI system usually provides a data transformation service as well to help convert between application-specific and common formats. This is done in two steps: the adapter converts information from the application's format to the bus's common format. Then, semantic transformations are applied to this (converting zip codes to city names, splitting/merging objects from one application into objects in the other applications, and so on).
 * Integration modules: An EAI system could be participating in multiple concurrent integration operations at any given time, each type of integration being processed by a different integration module. Integration modules subscribe to events of specific types and process notifications that they receive when these events occur. These modules could be implemented in different ways: on Java-based EAI systems, these could be web applications or EJBs or even POJOs that conform to the EAI system's specifications.
 * Support for transactions: When used for process integration, the EAI system also provides transactional consistency across applications by executing all integration operations across all applications in a single overarching distributed transaction (using two-phase commit protocols or compensating transactions).

Communication architectures
Currently, there are many variations of thought on what constitutes the best infrastructure, component model, and standards structure for Enterprise Application Integration. There seems to be a consensus that four components are essential for a modern enterprise application integration architecture:
 * 1) A centralized broker that handles security, access, and communication. This can be accomplished through integration servers (like the School Interoperability Framework (SIF) Zone Integration Servers) or through similar software like the enterprise service bus (ESB) model that acts as a services manager.
 * 2) An independent data model based on a standard data structure, also known as a canonical data model. It appears that XML and the use of XML style sheets have become the de facto and in some cases de jure standard for this uniform business language.
 * 3) A connector, or agent model where each vendor, application, or interface can build a single component that can speak natively to that application and communicate with the centralized broker.
 * 4) A system model that defines the APIs, data flow and rules of engagement to the system such that components can be built to interface with it in a standardized way.

Although other approaches like connecting at the database or user-interface level have been explored, they have not been found to scale or be able to adjust. Individual applications can publish messages to the centralized broker and subscribe to receive certain messages from that broker. Each application only requires one connection to the broker. This central control approach can be extremely scalable and highly evolvable.

Enterprise Application Integration is related to middleware technologies such as message-oriented middleware (MOM), and data representation technologies such as XML or JSON. Other EAI technologies involve using web services as part of service-oriented architecture as a means of integration. Enterprise Application Integration tends to be data centric. In the near future, it will come to include content integration and business processes.

Implementation pitfalls
In 2003 it was reported that 70% of all EAI projects fail. Most of these failures are not due to the software itself or technical difficulties, but due to management issues. Integration Consortium European Chairman Steve Craggs has outlined the seven main pitfalls undertaken by companies using EAI systems and explains solutions to these problems.

 * 1) Constant change: The very nature of EAI is dynamic and requires dynamic project managers to manage their implementation.
 * 2) Shortage of EAI experts: EAI requires knowledge of many issues and technical aspects.
 * 3) Competing standards: Within the EAI field, the paradox is that EAI standards themselves are not universal.
 * 4) EAI is a tool paradigm: EAI is not a tool, but rather a system and should be implemented as such.
 * 5) Building interfaces is an art: Engineering the solution is not sufficient. Solutions need to be negotiated with user departments to reach a common consensus on the final outcome. A lack of consensus on interface designs leads to excessive effort to map between various systems' data requirements.
 * 6) Loss of detail: Information that seemed unimportant at an earlier stage may become crucial later.
 * 7) Accountability: Since so many departments have many conflicting requirements, there should be clear accountability for the system's final structure.

Other potential problems may arise in these areas:
 * Lack of centralized co-ordination of EAI work.
 * Emerging Requirements: EAI implementations should be extensible and modular to allow for future changes.
 * Protectionism: The applications whose data is being integrated often belong to different departments that have technical, cultural, and political reasons for not wanting to share their data with other departments

Initiatives and organizations

 * Health Level 7
 * Open Knowledge Initiative
 * OSS through Java
 * Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF)

title: Enterprise application integration


text:
Wulf and Eadwacer

"Wulf and Eadwacer" (, approximately ) is an Old English poem in alliterative verse of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and (in speculation on the poem's pre-history) as a song or ballad with refrain. The poem is narrated in the first person, most likely with a woman's voice. Because the audience is given so little information about her situation, some scholars argue the story was well-known, and that the unnamed speaker corresponds to named figures from other stories, for example, to Signý or that the characters Wulf and Eadwacer correspond to Theoderic the Great and his rival Odoacer. The poem's only extant text is found at folios 100v-101r in the tenth-century Exeter Book, alongside other texts to which it possesses qualitative similarities.

Synopsis
The speaker of the poem is arguably separated from her lover and/or husband, Wulf, both symbolically and materially ('Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre' [Wulf is on an island, I on another]), and this separation is seemingly maintained by threat of violence ('willað hy hine aþecgan' [they will want to ?seize him]), possibly by her own people ('Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife' [it is to my people as though someone will give him/them a gift/sacrifice]). Crying out in her sorrow for her lover, she longs for him to take her in his arms ('þonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde' [then/when the battle-bold one laid his arms around me]). She finds comfort in his coming, but it is also bittersweet ('wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað' [there was joy to me in that; it was also hateful to me]). She then addresses 'Eadwacer', who may be her husband or her captor, and she appears to identify their 'whelp' ('Uncerne earne hwelp' [our wretched whelp]), generally understood to metaphorically imply 'child' and possibly a reference to the child's being the 'whelp' of a man named 'Wulf'. She describes this child as being taken off 'to the woods' (to wuda).

Text and translation
In Wulf and Eadwacer there is a significant number of words which are obscure in meaning (e.g. aþecgan, dogode, and þreat). The rest of its vocabulary, while appearing straightforward, may be unclear as to precise meaning, or even deliberately ambiguous. This provides a problem for translators. The following translation is by Elaine Treharne:

Another scholarly translation by Ian Shiels tries to indicate most of the ambiguities in the text is the following: 'For my people it is as if someone is giving them/him a gift/favour/sacrifice/battle. They wish to receive/consume him if he comes in force/in need/threateningly/into a band. It is not the same for us/We are not alike. Wulf is on an isle, I on another. That island is secure, surrounded by fen/marsh. The men on that isle are bloodthirsty. They wish to receive/consume him if he comes in force/in need/threateningly/into a band. It is not the same for us/We are not alike. I followed my Wulf's tracks in hope. Then it was rainy weather (or a rainstorm) and I sat sobbing/wailing when the battle-brave one wrapped his arms around me. There was joy for me in that, there was, however, also loathing. Wulf, my Wulf, my expectation of you made me sick, your seldom coming (rare visits?), a mourning heart – not desire for food at all. Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf/Wulf takes our wretched/cowardly whelp to the wood. One easily cuts apart that which was never joined together (or composed) – our song/passion together.'

Characters
The most conventional interpretation of the poem is as a lament spoken in the first person by an unnamed woman who is or has in the past been involved with two men whose names are Wulf and Eadwacer respectively. Both of these are attested Anglo-Saxon names, and this interpretation is the basis for the common titling of the poem (which is not based on any other manuscript evidence). However, even this point proves controversial. Some interpretations favour a single male character, and virtually all commentaries acknowledge the possibility, though this is the less orthodox of the two views. In recognition of this fact, for example, preeminent Old English scholar Michael Alexander has chosen the title "Wulf" for his own reproduction of it in The Earliest English Poems (Penguin, 1973). It has also been known to be titled simply as Eadwacer. The title Wulf and Eadwacer, however, though editorial, has gained such widespread acceptance over time that in the majority of texts it is accepted regardless of the treatment of the titular name(s) and character(s).

Genre
For lack of any historical evidence or attestation outside the Exeter Book's text, historical criticism is limited to study of the Exeter Book itself and, particularly, to comparative study of its various contained works. Though it is generally held that the poem's composition occurred at a date significantly earlier than the date of the Exeter Book's own compilation, the degree of the poem's age relative to the codex is difficult if not impossible to ascertain. The dating of the poem in criticism is thus generally limited to what can be ascertained from the known history of the Exeter Book, for which suggested dates of compilation range from 960CE to 990CE. Though the folios on which the poem is recorded are not subject to any significant damage necessitating reconstruction, its textual problems and, particularly, the grammatical confusion of the first lines of the text, have resulted in widespread postulation that the initial lines of the poem may have been lost prior to its inclusion in the Exeter Book but subsequent to an earlier transcription. However, there is no manuscript evidence to directly support this theory. The characterization of the poem as a riddle is the oldest of its various treatments, the argument for which characterization is based largely upon the obscurity of its subject and the placement of the poem within the Exeter Book, where it was included as Riddle I in Benjamin Thorpe's 1842 translation of the Exeter Book. Additionally, Thorpe left Wulf and Eadwacer untranslated, and he notes "Of this, I can make no sense, nor am I able to arrange the verses". However, its length and its various textual problems not characteristic of the riddles have led few scholars to pursue a simple riddle interpretation in modern textual study, and few such explanations have garnered serious attention in the recent history of its scholarship. Rather, the thematic similarity of the poem to The Wife's Lament, also found in the Exeter Book, has caused most modern scholars to place it, along with the Wife's Lament, solidly within the genre of the Frauenlied, or woman's song and, more broadly, in that of the Old English elegy. These two poems are also used as examples of the female voice in broadening early feminist literary history. However, Wulf and Eadwacer's adjacency to the riddles has continued to inform commentary and interpretation.

Manuscript evidence
Proposals regarding its heritage prior to inscription in the Exeter codex are consequently many and various. The inclusion of a refrain in the text of the poem may support an originally non-English origin, as the refrain is not conventional to the Old English elegy or to any other known Old English poetical form. Among proposed explanations for this anomaly, a Scandinavian inspiration for the Anglo-Saxon text offers one possible solution to this problem, and has similarly been considered as an explanation for its difficult language, but this theory, as with most others on the poem's prehistory, can only be regarded as hypothetical given lack of substantive corroborating evidence. The suggestion is that the poem derives from some interpretation of the Wayland story; that the woman is Beadohilde, Wulf is Wayland, and Eadwacer her angry father. This episode is also discussed in the poem Deor.

Differing interpretations
Even though the poem is a mere nineteen lines there are many differing interpretations, not least because the poem contains several obscure words and some ambiguous grammar. One interpreter considers that the word Eadwacer in the poem is not a proper noun, but a simple common noun which means "property watcher". This brings the characters in the poem from three to two, the speaker and her lover, Wulf. If one adopts this interpretation then her exclamation ("Do you hear me, Eadwacer?") could be meant to be sarcastic or a calling out of his manhood. She is saying that his long absences have made him anything but a protector to her and their child whom she worries about. Using this interpretation, the speaker's use of irony when speaking of her lover makes the last two lines make sense. The speaker may be saying that Wulf has been her lover and her child's father, but has never treated her as or actually been her husband. Therefore, the complications of their relationship is easily unbound. However, this seems to be more easily done by Wulf than the speaker herself (Adams).

While debatable among scholars, some argue the character of Wulf is the speaker's child and not her lover. In this instance, she could be lamenting after her son, hoping that he was safe, or mourning his death. One scholar says:"In Wulf and Eadwacer a woman finds herself in a situation typical of Old English poetry, torn between conflicting loyalties. Many commentators see this particular situation as a sexual triangle, with Wulf the woman’s lover and Eadwacer her husband. If so, then Wulf and Eadwacer is not typical, because most Old English loyalty crises occur within the family group…It is…true that romantic or sexual love was not the literary commonplace before the twelfth century it has been since; other loves took precedence…The situation in Wulf and Eadwacer is far more typically Anglo-Saxon than as usually interpreted, if the speaker is understood to be the mother of the person she addresses as Wulf, as well as of the 'whelp' of line 16."His argument that Wulf is actually the narrator’s son gives a different depth to the elegy—it becomes a poem of mourning for her son that seems to be exiled or dead.

Verse translations and adaptations

 * 'Wulf', by Kevin Crossley-Holland, published in The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems (1965).
 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer', by Michael Alexander, published in The Earliest English Poems (1966).
 * Craig Raine, in Rich (London: Faber, 1984), p. 27.
 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer', by Fiona Sampson, published in Folding the Real (2001).
 * 'Love's Medium', by Bernard O'Donoghue, published in Outliving (2003) to celebrate the marriage of two of his ex-students, Elanor Dymott and Simon Marshall.
 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer', by Paul Muldoon, published in The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (2010).
 * 'Four Departures from Wulf and Eadwacer', by Vahni Capildeo, first published in Utter (2013).
 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer/Daylight is Our Evidence', by Kerry Carnahan, published in the Boston Review (2017). Carnahan uses the poem to explore the terror of white nationalism and violence against women.
 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer', by Miller Wolf Oberman, published in The Unstill Ones (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 6-8 and 57 ISBN 9781400888771.
 * 'From WULF', by Rowan Evans, published in Reliquiæ (2017).
 * M. L. Martin, W & E (Action Books, forthcoming), with excerpts published in several journals, including Waxwing (2018), Brooklyn Rail : In Translation (August 2018), and Columbia Journal (2019).

Novels and short stories

 * Wulf by Hamish Clayton, published by Penguin New Zealand (2011). Wulf tells the story of 'Wulf and Eadwacer' interwoven with that of Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha.
 * The poem is featured heavily in After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry (2014), reflecting the book’s themes of impenetrability, loneliness and love.

Music

 * 'Wulf and Eadwacer' by American neofolk band Blood Axis, released on their album Born Again (2010).

title: Wulf and Eadwacer


text:
Titan IIIB

Titan IIIB was the collective name for a number of derivatives of the Titan II ICBM and Titan III launch vehicle, modified by the addition of an Agena upper stage. It consisted of four separate rockets. The Titan 23B was a basic Titan II with an Agena upper stage, and the Titan 24B was the same concept, but using the slightly enlarged Titan IIIM rocket as the base. The Titan 33B was a Titan 23B with the Agena (which had a smaller diameter than the Titan) enclosed in an enlarged fairing, in order to allow larger payloads to be launched. The final member of the Titan IIIB family was the Titan 34B which was a Titan 24B with the larger fairing used on the Titan 33B.

Features
Part of the Titan rocket family, the Titan 23B space launch vehicle was a three-stage liquid fueled booster, designed to provide a small-to-medium weight class capability. It was able to lift approximately 3,000 kg into a polar low-Earth circular orbit. The first stage consisted of a ground ignited Aerojet LR-87 liquid propellant rocket, while the second stage consisted of an LR91 liquid propellant rocket. The third stage was an Agena D XLR81-BA-9 liquid propellant rocket.

Various models of this Titan/Agena D rocket were called, "Titan 23B", "Titan 24B", "Titan 33B" and "Titan 34B".

Background
The Titan rocket family was established in October 1955, when the Air Force awarded The Martin Company a contract to build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It became known as the Titan I, the nation's first two-stage ICBM and first underground silo-based ICBM. More than 140 Titan II ICBMs, once the vanguard of America's strategic deterrent force, were built. Titan IIs also were flown in NASA's Gemini crewed space program in the mid-1960s. The Titan 23B is a derivative of the Titan II vehicle with an Agena D upper stage added.

The Titan IIIB family emerged when the new KH-8 (Gambit Mark 3) photo reconnaissance satellite was being developed as the successor to the KH-7 Gambit Mark 1/2 which began flying in 1963. It was decided to switch to the Titan family over the Atlas used for KH-7 because it had substantially more lift capability and also its conventional two-stage design and hypergolic propellants made for a simpler and more reliable launch vehicle than the quirky Atlas. The KH-8 was double the size of its predecessor but still well below the Titan's lift capability.

While the KH-8 was the original raison d'être for the Titan IIIB's existence, as well as its primary payload, the booster was also used for Jumpseat SIGINT satellites and military comsats. It also lived up to its promise of greater reliability than the Thor and Atlas, with only a few failures over its run.

Primary function: Launch vehicle used to lift medium class satellites into space:
 * Builder: The Martin Company
 * Launch site: Vandenberg AFB, Calif.
 * First stage: Length: 70 ft
 * Diameter: 10 feet (3.05 m)
 * Engine thrust: 474,000 lbf vacuum
 * Weight: 258,000 lb Fueled
 * Empty weight: 10,500 lb
 * Second stage: Length: 24 ft
 * Diameter: 10 ft
 * Engine Thrust: 100,000 lbf vacuum
 * Weight: 64,000 lb Fueled
 * Empty weight: 6,100 lb
 * Third stage: Length:  24.8 ft
 * Diameter: 5 ft
 * Engine thrust: 16,000 lbf vacuum
 * Weight: 7160 kg – fueled
 * Empty Weight: 2300 lb
 * Guidance: Radio
 * Subcontractor: GE
 * Payload fairing: Diameter: 5 ft
 * Length: 20 to 25 ft
 * Skin and Stringer Construction – Tri-Sector Design
 * Subcontractor: Boeing
 * Date deployed: July 1966

Titan 23B
Titan 23B used the basic Titan 3A core (including its Transtage) with an Agena D upper stage, though without the all-inertial guidance system, malfunction detection equipment, and redundant systems required for man-rating the 3A. The Titan 23B was launched from SLC-4W at Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Its main payload was the GAMBIT (KH-8 reconnaissance) satellites, in 9 flights from 1969 through 1971.

Titan 24B
The Titan 24B differed from the Titan 23B in that the Titan IIIM core with extended propellant tanks was used in place of the original Titan II core. The payload remained attached to the Agena stage. 23 flights took place from 1971 to 1984, with two failures.

Titan 33B
The Titan 33B was a Titan 23B with the entire Agena and payload completely enclosed in a shroud. It flew only three times (1971–73) with one failure and was used to launch Jumpseat satellites.

Titan 34B
The Titan 34B was a Titan 24B, modified by the addition of the larger fairing used on the Titan 33B. 23 were launched in 1971–87 with two failures. All launches consisted of KH-8 satellites.

Failures
Titan IIIB rockets suffered four outright failures, and two partial failures. The first failure occurred on 26 April 1967 during the launch of a Gambit 3 satellite when the second stage suffered a sudden thrust decay which left it unable to achieve orbital velocity, sending the Agena and GAMBIT into the Pacific Ocean some 400 miles (644 km) downrange. It was not possible to determine the cause of the malfunction with certainty, but a fuel line obstruction was believed to be the most likely explanation. Martin-Marietta had no answers except to suggest implementing better quality control measures during assembly of the Titan vehicles. The next launch, on 20 June 1967 was a partial failure; due to a problem with the protective skirt on the second stage, a lower-than-planned orbit was achieved. On 24 October 1969 OPS 8455 was placed into a higher-than-planned orbit by another 23B due to an engine failing to cut off after completing its planned burn, however the payload was able to correct its own orbit.

On 16 February 1972, a Titan 33B failed to achieve orbit carrying a Jumpseat satellite. Another failure occurred later the same year, when on 20 May a Titan 24B malfunctioned during the launch of KH-8 #35. The Agena suffered a failure of a pneumatic regulator during ascent and reentered the atmosphere. Although it had been assumed debris would land near South Africa, pieces turned up in faraway Great Britain a few months later. The launch of KH-8 #39 on 26 June 1973 also failed to orbit when the Agena had a fuel valve failure, preventing engine start. A launch of a Jumpseat satellite on 24 April 1981 was a partial failure when the Agena failed to separate.

title: Titan IIIB


text:
Auxiliary Division

The Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), generally known as the Auxiliaries or Auxies, was a paramilitary unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the Irish War of Independence. It was founded in July 1920 by Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor and made up of former British Army officers, most of whom came from Great Britain and had fought in the First World War. Almost 2,300 served in the unit during the conflict. Its role was to conduct counter-insurgency operations against the Irish Republican Army (IRA), acting mainly as a mobile striking and raiding force. It operated semi-independently of the RIC and was mainly deployed to southern and western regions where fighting was heaviest.

The Auxiliaries became infamous for reprisal attacks on civilians and civilian property in revenge for IRA actions, including extrajudicial killings and arson; most notably the burning of Cork city in December 1920.

The Auxiliaries were distinct from the so-called Black and Tans. These were also former British soldiers who were recruited into the RIC, but served as regular constables. Both groups wore a mixed uniform of British Army khaki and RIC dark green, although the Auxiliaries had their own insignia and typically wore Balmoral caps. The Auxiliaries and the RIC as a whole were disbanded in early 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Recruitment and organisation
In September 1919, the Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, Sir Frederick Shaw suggested that the police force in Ireland be expanded via the recruitment of a special force of volunteer British ex-servicemen. During a Cabinet meeting on 11 May 1920, the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, suggested the formation of a "Special Emergency Gendarmerie, which would become a branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary". Churchill's proposal was referred to a committee chaired by General Sir Nevil Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland. Macready's committee rejected Churchill's proposal, but it was revived two months later, in July, by the Police Adviser to the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland, Major-General H H Tudor. In a memo dated 6 July 1920, Tudor justified the scheme on the grounds that it would take too long to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) with ordinary recruits. Tudor's new "Auxiliary Force" would be strictly temporary: its members would enlist for a year: their pay would be £7 per week (twice what a constable was paid), plus a sergeant's allowances, and would be known as "Temporary Cadets". At that time, one of high unemployment, a London advertisement for ex-officers to manage coffee stalls at two pounds ten shillings a week received five thousand applicants.

The ADRIC was recruited in Great Britain from among ex-officers who had served in World War I, especially those who had served in the British Army (including the Royal Flying Corps). Most recruits were from Britain, although some were from Ireland, and others came from other parts of the British Empire. Many had been highly decorated in the war and three, James Leach, James Johnson, and George Onions, had been awarded the Victoria Cross. Their decorations make it clear that many had been promoted from the ranks: some men, for example, had been awarded the common soldier's Military Medal instead of (or in addition to) the officer's Military Cross. Enlisted men who had been commissioned as officers during the war often found it difficult to adjust to their loss of status and pay in civilian life, and some historians have concluded that the Auxiliary Division recruited large numbers of these "temporary gentlemen".

Piaras Beaslaí, a former senior member of the IRA who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, while paying tribute to the bravery of the Auxiliaries, noted that the force was not composed exclusively of ex-officers but contained "criminal elements", some of whom robbed people (including a number of Unionists) on the streets of Dublin and in their homes.

Recruiting began in July 1920, and by November 1921, the division was 1,900 strong. The Auxiliaries were nominally part of the RIC, but actually operated more or less independently in rural areas. Divided into companies (eventually fifteen of them), each about one hundred strong, heavily armed and highly mobile, they operated in ten counties, mostly in the south and west, where Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity was greatest. They wore either RIC uniforms or their old army uniforms with appropriate police badges, along with distinctive Tam o' Shanter caps. They were commanded by Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier.

Counterinsurgency
The elite ex-officer division proved to be much more effective than the Black and Tans especially in the key area of gathering intelligence. Auxiliary companies were intended as mobile striking and raiding forces, and they scored some notable successes against the IRA. On 20 November, the night before Bloody Sunday, they captured Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, the commandant and vice-commandant of the IRA's Dublin Brigade, and murdered them in Dublin Castle. That same night, they caught William Pilkington, commandant of the Sligo IRA, in a separate raid. A month later, in December, they caught Ernie O'Malley completely by surprise in County Kilkenny: the IRA officer was reading in his room when a Temporary Cadet opened the door and walked in; "He was as unexpected as death," said O'Malley. In his memoirs, the commandant of the Clare IRA, Michael Brennan, describes how the Auxiliaries nearly captured him three nights in a row.

IRA commanders became concerned about the morale of their units as to many Volunteers the Auxiliaries seemed to be 'super fighters and all but invincible'. Those victories which were won over the Auxiliaries are among the most celebrated in the Irish War of Independence. On 28 November 1920, for example, a platoon of Auxiliaries was ambushed and wiped out in the Kilmichael Ambush by Tom Barry and the 3rd Cork Brigade. A little more than two months later, on 2 February 1921, another platoon of Auxiliaries was ambushed by Seán MacEoin and the Longford IRA in the Clonfin Ambush. On 19 March 1921, the 3rd Cork Brigade of the IRA defeated a large scale attempt by the British Army & Auxiliary Division to encircle and trap them at Crossbarry. On 15 April 1921, Captain Roy Mackinnon, commanding officer of H Company ADRIC, was assassinated by the Kerry IRA.

Successes required reliable intelligence and raids often brought no result—or sometimes worse. In one case, they arrested a Castle official, Law Adviser W. E. Wylie, by mistake. In another, more notorious case, on 19 April 1921 they raided the Shannon Hotel in Castleconnell, County Limerick on a tip that there were suspicious characters drinking therein. The "suspicious characters" turned out to be three off-duty members of the RIC: both sides mistook the other for insurgents and opened fire; three people, an RIC man, an Auxiliary Cadet and a civilian, were killed in the shootout that followed.

Controversy
Many of the Division's Temporary Cadets did not cope well with the frustrations of counterinsurgency: hurriedly recruited, poorly trained, and with an ill-defined role, they soon gained a reputation for drunkenness, lack of discipline, and brutality worse than that of the Black and Tans. They were disliked by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who considered them "rough." They seem to have been unpopular with the British Army as well. One British officer, who served as adjutant for the 2nd Battalion, Cameron Highlanders, wrote in his memoirs that the Auxiliaries "were totally undisciplined by our regimental standards". Macready wrote in his own memoirs that "those companies that had the good fortune to have good commanders, generally ex-Regular officers, who could control their men, performed useful work, but the exploits of certain other companies under weak or inefficient commanders went a long way to discredit the whole force".

Like the ordinary police, the Auxiliaries sometimes took reprisals in the wake of attacks by the IRA. On the evening of Bloody Sunday, for example, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy were killed by their Auxiliary captors under very suspicious circumstances: the official explanation, that the two insurgents tried to escape, is widely disbelieved. Perhaps the most notorious reprisal involving the Auxiliary Division was the burning of Cork on 11 December 1920. At 7:30 p.m. that evening, a truckload of Auxiliaries from newly formed K Company was ambushed at Dillons Cross: a grenade was thrown onto their truck, wounding ten Auxiliaries and killing one, Temporary Cadet Spencer Chapman. Later that night, police and Auxiliaries took revenge by setting fire to the city's commercial centre, preventing the fire service from attending the blaze, and shooting seven people (see Burning of Cork).

Two IRA men, Cornelius and Jerimiah Delaney, were killed in their beds at home in Dublin Hill (though Con Delaney survived to December 18). Five civilians were shot on the streets. Damage amounting to $20 million was inflicted. The Cork Fire Brigade did not have the resources to deal with the fires: law and order, it seemed, had completely broken down. The British Government at first claimed the citizens were responsible for the arson, but a military court of inquiry known as the Strickland Report later found that the fires had been started by the Auxiliaries. Its findings were suppressed by the government, but K Company was disbanded. Allegedly, some Auxiliaries took to wearing pieces of burnt cork on their caps afterwards, to celebrate the occasion.

A few days later, near Dunmanway, an Auxiliary called Vernon Hart killed a young man and a seventy-year-old priest, whom the Auxiliary patrol met on the road. A third civilian, a local magistrate, escaped by approaching the other Auxiliaries before fleeing across nearby fields. Hart was arrested and court-martialled. At his trial, it was revealed that he had been a "particular friend" of Chapman, and had been drinking heavily since 11 December. Concerned that parallels would be made between this case and the killing of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the British Cabinet directed that Hart should be examined by at least two medical experts, a highly unusual intervention. These medical witnesses testified that Hart was insane at the time of the murders and the court-martial concluded that he "was guilty of the offenses with which he was charged, but was insane at the time of their commission". Although Hamar Greenwood announced to the House of Commons that he would be detained at His Majesty's pleasure, Hart was briefly held at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum before release the following year.

While Hart spent some time in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum, other Auxiliaries got away with murder. On 9 February 1921, James Murphy and Patrick Kennedy were arrested by Auxiliaries in Dublin. Two hours later, constables of the Dublin Metropolitan Police found the two men lying shot in Drumcondra: Kennedy was dead, and Murphy was dying. Murphy died in the Mater Hospital, Dublin on 11 February, but before the end, he declared that he and Kennedy had been shot by their Auxiliary captors. A military court of inquiry was held, and Captain W. L. King, commanding officer of F Company ADRIC, was arrested for the killings. King was court-martialled on 13–15 February, but acquitted, after Murphy's dying declaration was ruled inadmissible, and two officers from F Company provided perjured alibis for Captain King at the time of the shootings. Just short of two weeks later at the Clonmult Ambush in county Cork, an Auxiliary company were accused of killing seven IRA men after they had surrendered.

However, while the authorities often turned a blind eye to reprisals, they were less tolerant of crimes against "civilians" - loyal and non-political people. A number of Auxiliaries were dismissed and prosecuted for theft, including a one-armed former Temporary Cadet, Major Ewen Cameron Bruce, who was imprisoned for robbing a creamery, after being dismissed from the Division for striking a civilian without cause. On 19 February 1921, Commandant Crozier resigned after a dispute over discipline with the Police Adviser. Crozier had dismissed 21 Temporary Cadets accused of looting a licensed grocery store belonging to Protestants in County Meath. When General Tudor reinstated these men pending an official inquiry, Crozier left the Force. He was replaced by his assistant, Brigadier-General Edward Allan Wood, who commanded the Division until it was demobilised.

Disbandment
The Auxiliary Division was disbanded along with the RIC in 1922. Although the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty required the Irish Free State to assume responsibility for the pensions of RIC members, the Auxiliaries were explicitly excluded from this provision. Following their disbandment, many of its former personnel joined the Palestine Police Force in the British-controlled territory.

Historical legacy
The anti-insurgency activities of the Auxiliaries Division have become interchangeable with those conducted by the Black and Tans leading to many atrocities committed by them being attributed to the Black and Tans. Nevertheless, both British units remain equally reviled in Ireland.

The Auxiliaries have featured in historical drama films like Michael Collins, The Last September, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

title: Auxiliary Division