text:
Convention of 1800

The Convention of 1800, also known as the Treaty of Mortefontaine, was signed on September 30, 1800, by the United States and France. The difference in name was due to Congressional sensitivity at entering into treaties, due to disputes over the 1778 treaties of Alliance and Commerce between France and the U.S.

The Convention terminated the 1778 agreements, confirmed the principle of 'free trade, free goods' between the two countries and ended the 1798–1800 Quasi-War, an undeclared naval war waged primarily in the Caribbean. However, it failed to address the issue of compensation demanded by American ship owners for losses suffered before and during the Quasi-War, and as a result was not approved by Congress until December 1801.

By removing areas of friction between the two countries, it re-established Franco-American relations, and ultimately facilitated the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Background
Under the Treaty of Alliance, in return for support in the American Revolutionary War, the United States agreed to defend French interests in the Caribbean. As the treaty had no termination date, this included protecting them from Great Britain and the Dutch Republic during the 1792–1797 War of the First Coalition. Despite popular enthusiasm for the French Revolution, there was little support for this in Congress; neutrality allowed Northern shipowners to earn huge profits evading the British blockade, and Southern plantation-owners feared the example set by France's abolition of slavery in 1794.

Arguing the 1793 execution of King Louis XVI voided existing agreements, the Neutrality Act of 1794 unilaterally cancelled the military obligations of the 1778 treaty. France accepted, on the basis of "benevolent neutrality"; this meant allowing French privateers access to US ports, and the right to sell captured British ships in American prize courts, but not vice versa.

It was soon apparent the U.S. interpreted "neutrality" differently, while the 1794 Jay Treaty with Britain directly contradicted the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. When France retaliated by seizing American ships trading with the British, an effective response was hampered by Jeffersonian resistance to a permanent military force. Instead, the U.S. suspended repayment of loans made by France during the Revolutionary War; efforts to resolve this through diplomacy ended in the 1797 dispute known as the XYZ Affair, which worsened the situation.

The U.S. was also concerned by French ambitions in North America, especially in its former territory of Louisiana, acquired by Spain in 1762. For decades, American settlers had been moving into this area, despite diplomatic efforts to manage it, including the 1795 Pinckney's Treaty. By 1800, nearly 400,000 or 7.3% of Americans lived in trans-Appalachian territories, including the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Western economic development required access to the Mississippi River, particularly the vital port of New Orleans, and the U.S. much preferred a weak Spain to an aggressive and powerful France on their western and southern borders. The discovery that French agents were conducting military surveys to determine how best to defend Louisiana led to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts.

With most of their fleet confined to port by the Royal Navy, the French relied on privateers operating off the U.S. coastline, and in the Caribbean. On July 7, 1798, Congress cancelled the 1778 Treaties and authorised attacks on French warships in American waters, resulting in the Quasi-War of 1798–1800. By arming 200 merchant ships, expanding the Navy, and informal co-operation with the British, the U.S. re-established control over its home waters.

However, President John Adams remained keen to reach a diplomatic solution, and in early 1799, a diplomatic commission was approved, consisting of William Vans Murray, Oliver Ellsworth, and William Richardson Davie. Their objectives were to formally terminate the 1778 treaties, confirm American neutrality, agree compensation for shipping losses and end the Quasi-War, although they did not arrive in Paris until early 1800.

During this delay, the French Directory was overthrown in November 1799, and replaced by the Consulate, headed by Napoleon. He was also keen on ending hostilities, since an important part of his support came from wealthy merchants, who wanted to re-establish their control over sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. These were extremely profitable; prior to the abolition of slavery in 1793, the colony of Saint-Domingue produced more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies combined.

Negotiations
Formal discussions with the recently re-appointed Foreign Minister Talleyrand did not begin until April and proceeded slowly. The main problem was the U.S. demand for $20 million compensation for shipping losses, which the Commissioners had been instructed to resolve before discussing revised treaties. As the French pointed out, measures taken by the Directory against American commerce had been annulled by the new government, while those imposed by the U.S. had just been renewed. They argued compensation only applied only if the 1778 treaties remained in force; either the U.S. confirmed the existing treaties and received compensation, or insisted on new ones and received none.

However, Talleyrand accepted the treaties could not be enforced, and preferred to reach an amicable agreement with the U.S., rather than drive it into a relationship with Britain, which was one impact of the Quasi-War. American neutrality was essential for French plans for North America; under the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso of October 1800, Spain agreed to transfer Louisiana to France in return for territories in Italy.

In July 1800, Russia, with informal French support, established the Second League of Armed Neutrality, whose signatories agreed to resist the British policy of searching neutral ships for contraband. This allowed Talleyrand to concede the principle of "free trade, free goods, freedom of convoy" demanded by the Americans, while victories at Marengo in June, and Hohenlinden in December forced Emperor Francis II to make peace. In the February 1801 Treaty of Lunéville, he ceded Austrian territories in Italy demanded by Spain in the Treaty of San Ildefonso.

Terms
Talleyrand now had all the pieces in place to re-establish a French presence in North America; although the American commissioners did not have details of the Louisiana agreement, they were aware of the strength of his position and anxious to make a deal. The Convention signed on 30 September contained 27 clauses, the majority of which related to commercial affairs; these protected each other's merchants from having their goods confiscated, and guaranteed both sides most favoured nation trading status.

The most important and controversial was Clause II, which agreed to 'postpone' discussions on compensation, and suspended the 1778 treaties until this was resolved. Although the convention was dated September 30, 1800, arguments over the inclusion of Clause II meant Congress did not ratify the agreement until December 21, 1801. In the end, the U.S. government agreed to compensate its citizens for the claimed damages of $20 million, although it was only in 1915 the heirs finally received $3.9 million in settlement.

Aftermath
At the time, the convention was generally viewed unfavorably in the U.S., as it failed to agree compensation, or address concerns over French objectives in North America. Modern historians argue by ending the dispute with France, it ultimately facilitated the Louisiana Purchase, while reaching agreement on commercial terms was essential, since the U.S. was not strong enough to enforce them on its own.

Negotiations between France and Britain to end the War of the Second Coalition resulted in the March 1802 Treaty of Amiens; although widely viewed as a short-lived truce, it gave Napoleon an opportunity to activate his plans for North America. In December 1801, 30,000 veteran French troops landed on Saint-Domingue, and soon after, Spain confirmed the transfer of Louisiana to France.

This caused great concern in Congress, but by October 1802, it was clear the expedition was a catastrophic failure; its leader, General Charles Leclerc died of yellow fever, along with an estimated 22,000 of his men. Without Saint-Domingue, Napoleon concluded Louisiana was irrelevant, and with France and Britain once again on the verge of hostilities, he decided to sell the territory to prevent it from being annexed by British forces garrisoned in nearby Canada. In April 1803, the U.S. purchased the territory for $15 million, or 80 million francs.

title: Convention of 1800


text:
Talk:Southbridge (computing)

It would be interesting to hear the originas of the terminology "Northbridge" and "Southbridge". I tried googling around for this info ans so far didn't find anything.

Bridges in computing connect different systems at a low level. North and south probably comes from their relative position in the systems hierarchy.

Another question: What kind of bus connects the north and south bridge commonly? Are there proprietary interconnects or just a PCI bus, thus limiting everything behind the northbridge to 133MB/s?

 * That's dependent on which chipset you're talking about. Some chipsets did use the standard PCI bus which allowed for some interesting mix-n-match motherboards. But that created a bottle neck on the already saturated PCI bus, AFAIK all modern chipsets are paired due to the proprietary interconnects.

 * see also [Direct Media Interface] (10Gb/s) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.26.167.6 (talk) 17:42, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

It would be nice to have a diagram here and on the Northbridge article to illustrate the relationships between Northbridge, Southbridge, CPU, memory, devices, etc.

Chipsetfunctions.png
The first figure of this article (Chipsetfunctions.png) does not make a lot of sense and is confusing. The legend does not adequately describe the relationships illustrated by the various arrows. Do the arrows indicate buses? wires? What is a "General linkage/interaction"? What is the meaning of the dashed black arrow? Why is there an arrow connecting the CPU directly to RAM? Why are there two arrows (a red one and a black one) from the NB to the RAM? Also, there are so many gray arrows that the entire figure almost becomes meaningless. 131.179.116.150 (talk) 00:51, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

 * I have removed the diagram. It is confusing. Rilak (talk) 04:27, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

USB Southbridge
Does this mean that the USB in southbridge is faster than the USB in PCI because the bus that the USB in the southbridge uses the 'proprietary bus' and not the PCI bus?

This is faster... USB --> Southbridge --> Proprietary Bus --> Northbridge --> CPU

than this USB --> PCI --> Southbridge --> Proprietary Bus --> Northbridge --> CPU

 * Don't cite me as an expert on this one, but I think it's entirely dependent on how the Southbridge implements the USB controller.

From what I remember, there was actually a specific chipset for a specific set of processors that were code-named "Northbridge" and "Southbridge". The usage then simply got generalized, and everyone started to think that it had always been called thus. Unfortunately, I can't give any reference for this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.199.5.251 (talk) 08:37, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

why is this being removed?
"With Intel's Sandy Bridge processor, the northbridge is shifted onto the CPU die itself, thus the southbridge is now directly connected to the CPU through a DMI connection." 175.156.199.147 (talk) 14:54, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Because it's too manufacturer/model-specific ? AFAIR Intel has done similar thing with the latest Atom, AMD with their Fusion APUs. --Denniss (talk) 16:34, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I believe AMD with Ryzen did the same thing and talks about CPU and Chipset connected with a PCIe bus? not sure there Theking2 (talk) 18:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Past tense
Northbridge already refers to these technologies in the past tense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eigengrau82 (talk • contribs) 12:23, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Sorry, this sounds confusing; any chances for a clarification, please? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:35, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:Southbridge (computing)


text: Category:Lombardy

title: Category:Lombardy


text: Category:Polish oceanographers

title: Category:Polish oceanographers


text:
Vaux

Vaux may refer to:

People

 * Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux (1743–1828), French chemist and pharmacist
 * Bernard Carra de Vaux (1867–1953), French orientalist who published accounts of his travels in the Middle East
 * Clotilde de Vaux (1815–1846), French writer and poet
 * Louis-François Bertin de Vaux (1771–1842), French journalist
 * Noël Jourda de Vaux (1705–1788), comte de Vaux, seigneur d'Artiac
 * Roland de Vaux (1903–1971), French Dominican priest and archeologist
 * Peter of Vaux de Cernay (floruit c.1215), Cistercian monk of Vaux de Cernay Abbey, in what is now Yvelines, northern France
 * James Hardy Vaux (born 1782, date of death unknown), English-born convict transported to Australia on three separate occasions
 * Bert Vaux (born 1968), American teacher of phonology and morphology at the University of Cambridge
 * Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), British-born American architect and landscape designer
 * Cydra Vaux (1962–2013), American sculptor
 * David Vaux, award-winning scientist at WEHI, Melbourne, Australia
 * Ernest Vaux (1865–1925), British Army officer
 * John Vaux, Deputy Governor of Bombay in 1689
 * Laurence Vaux (Vose) (1519–1585), an English canon regular and a Catholic martyr
 * Marc Vaux (born 1932), British artist who rose to prominence in the 1960s
 * Mary Vaux Walcott (1860–1940). American artist and naturalist known for her watercolor paintings of wildflowers
 * Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), African-American artist, notable as the first to make art celebrating Afrocentric themes
 * Nick Vaux, retired Royal Marine officer, and former commander of 42 Commando during the Falklands War
 * Richard Vaux (1816–1895), American politician, mayor of Philadelphia, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania
 * Roberts Vaux (1786–1836), lawyer, jurist, abolitionist, and philanthropist from Philadelphia
 * William Sandys Wright Vaux (1818–1885), British antiquary of the 19th century
 * William Sansom Vaux (1811-1882), American mineralogist from Philadelphia
 * Baron Brougham and Vaux, a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
 * Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868), British statesman
 * William Brougham, 2nd Baron Brougham and Vaux (1795-1886), also known as William Brougham, British barrister and Whig politician
 * Henry Brougham, 3rd Baron Brougham and Vaux (1836-1927), British aristocrat and civil servant
 * Victor Brougham, 4th Baron Brougham and Vaux (1909–1967), British peer and politician
 * Michael Brougham, 5th Baron Brougham and Vaux (born 1938), British peer and a member of the House of Lords
 * Baron Vaux of Harrowden, a title in the Peerage of England
 * Nicholas Vaux, 1st Baron Vaux of Harrowden (c. 1460–1523), soldier and courtier in England and an early member of the House of Lords
 * Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron Vaux of Harrowden (1509–1556), English poet, the eldest son of Nicholas Vaux, 1st Baron Vaux of Harrowden
 * William Vaux, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden (c. 1535–1595), English peer
 * Anne Vaux (c. 1562 – in or after 1637), a wealthy Catholic recusant, the third daughter of William Vaux, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden
 * Henry Vaux, English recusant, priest smuggler, and poet during the reign of Elizabeth I, eldest child of William Vaux, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden
 * Edward Vaux, 4th Baron Vaux of Harrowden (1588–1661), English peer, son of George Vaux

Groups and companies

 * Vaux (band), American alternative rock band
 * Vaux Breweries, a major brewer based in Sunderland, United Kingdom

Places in Belgium

 * , a village in the commune of Bastogne, Belgian Luxembourg
 * , a hamlet in the commune of Gouvy, Belgian Luxembourg
 * , a section of the Belgian municipality of Villers-le-Bouillet located in the Walloon region in the province of Liège
 * Vaux-sur-Sûre (Walloon: Li Vå-so-Seure), a Walloon municipality of Belgium located in the province of Luxembourg
 * List of protected heritage sites in Vaux-sur-Sûre, the protected heritage sites in the Walloon town Vaux-sur-Sûre
 * , a section of the municipality of Vaux-sur-Sûre

Communes in France (Ardennes department)

 * Vaux-Champagne, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-en-Dieulet, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-lès-Mouron, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-lès-Mouzon, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-lès-Rubigny, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-Montreuil, in the Ardennes department in northern France
 * Vaux-Villaine, in the Ardennes department in northern France

Other communes in France

 * Béthancourt-en-Vaux, in the department of Aisne in Picardy in northern France
 * Burey-en-Vaux, in the Meuse department in Lorraine in northeastern France
 * Éclusier-Vaux, in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France
 * Le Frestoy-Vaux, in the Oise department in northern France
 * Hermival-les-Vaux, in the Calvados department in the Basse-Normandie region in northwestern France
 * Jours-en-Vaux, in the Côte-d'Or department in eastern France
 * Mercin-et-Vaux, in the Aisne department in Picardy in northern France
 * Neurey-en-Vaux, in the Haute-Saône department in the region of Franche-Comté in eastern France
 * Parigny-les-Vaux, in the Nièvre department in central France
 * Pont-de-Vaux, in the Ain department in eastern France
 * Rambluzin-et-Benoite-Vaux, in the Meuse department in Lorraine in north-eastern France
 * Saint-Denis-de-Vaux, in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France
 * Saint-Gérand-de-Vaux, in the Allier department in Auvergne in central France
 * Saint-Germain-des-Vaux, in the Manche department in Normandy in north-western France
 * Saint-Jean-de-Vaux, in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France
 * Saint-Laurent-de-Vaux, in the Rhône department in eastern France
 * Saint-Mard-de-Vaux, in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France
 * Saint-Pierre-en-Vaux, in the Côte-d'Or department in eastern France
 * Sainte-Marie-de-Vaux (Senta Marí de Vaus), in the Haute-Vienne department in the Limousin region in west-central France
 * Sury-en-Vaux, in the Cher department in the Centre region of France
 * Vaux, Allier (Vaus), in the Allier department in Auvergne in central France
 * Vaux, Haute-Garonne, in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern France
 * Vaux, Moselle, in the Moselle department in Lorraine in north-eastern France
 * Vaux, Vienne (or Vaux-en-Couhé), in the Vienne department in the Poitou-Charentes region in western France
 * Vaux-Andigny, in the Aisne department in Picardy in northern France
 * Vaux-devant-Damloup, in the Meuse department in Lorraine in north-eastern France
 * Vaux-en-Amiénois, in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France
 * Vaux-en-Beaujolais, in the Rhône department in eastern France
 * Vaux-en-Bugey, in the Ain department in eastern France
 * Vaux-en-Pré, in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France
 * Vaux-en-Vermandois, in the Aisne department in Picardy in northern France
 * Vaux-et-Chantegrue, in the Doubs department in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France
 * Vaux-Lavalette, in the Charente department in southwestern France
 * Vaux-le-Moncelot, in the Haute-Saône department in the region of Franche-Comté in eastern France
 * Vaux-le-Pénil, in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France
 * Vaux-lès-Palameix, in the Meuse department in Lorraine in north-eastern France
 * Vaux-les-Prés, in the Doubs department in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France
 * Vaux-lès-Saint-Claude, in the Jura department in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France
 * Vaux-Marquenneville, in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France
 * Vaux-Rouillac, in the Charente department in southwestern France
 * Vaux-Saules, in the Côte-d'Or department in eastern France
 * Vaux-sous-Aubigny, in the Haute-Marne department in north-eastern France
 * Vaux-sur-Aure, in the Calvados department in the Basse-Normandie region in northwestern France
 * Vaux-sur-Blaise, in the Haute-Marne department in north-eastern France
 * Vaux-sur-Eure, in the Eure department in Haute-Normandie in northern France
 * Vaux-sur-Lunain, in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France
 * Vaux-sur-Mer, in the Charente-Maritime department in southwestern France
 * Vaux-sur-Poligny, in the Jura department in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France
 * Vaux-sur-Saint-Urbain, in the Haute-Marne department in north-eastern France
 * Vaux-sur-Seine, in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France
 * Vaux-sur-Seulles, in the Calvados department in the Basse-Normandie region in northwestern France
 * Vaux-sur-Somme, in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France
 * Vaux-sur-Vienne, in the Vienne department in the Poitou-Charentes region in western France

Other places

 * Canal de Pont-de-Vaux, a canal in eastern France connecting the Saône at Fleurville to Pont-de-Vaux
 * Canton of Pont-de-Vaux, an administrative division in eastern France
 * Étangs de Vaux et de Baye, a group of lakes in Nièvre, Burgundy, France
 * Fort Vaux, a fortress in Vaux-devant-Damloup, Meuse, France
 * Lac des Vaux, a lake above Verbier in the canton of Valais, Switzerland
 * Notre-Dame-en-Vaux, a church at Châlons-en-Champagne, France
 * Roberts Vaux Junior High School, a historic high school building located in the North Central neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
 * Vaux Moysi, also li Vaux Moysi, Old French name of Wu'ayra Castle; Crusader ruin near Petra, Jordan
 * Vaux-de-Cernay Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in northern France (Ile-de-France), situated in Cernay-la-Ville, in the Diocese of Versailles, Yvelines
 * Vaux-le-Vicomte, a baroque château in Maincy, France
 * Vaux-sur-Morges, a municipality in the Swiss canton of Vaud, located in the district of Morges
 * Vaux (crater), on Mars

Other

 * De Vaux, an automobile produced by the De Vaux-Hall Motors Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan and Oakland, California
 * De Vaux Continental, an automobile produced by the Continental-De Vaux Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan
 * USS Richard Vaux (1864), a 120-ton canal boat, purchased by the Union Navy at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
 * Vaux's swift (Chaetura vauxi), a small swift native to North America and northern South America

title: Vaux


text:
User talk:Kennywi

Welcome to the Wikipedia
Here are some links I thought useful:

 * Tutorial
 * Help desk
 * Foundation issues
 * Policy Library
 * Utilities
 * Cite your sources
 * Verifiability
 * Wikiquette
 * Civility
 * Conflict resolution
 * Neutral point of view
 * Pages needing attention
 * Peer review
 * Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
 * Brilliant prose
 * List of images
 * Boilerplate text
 * Current polls
 * Mailing lists
 * IRC channel

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. The Village pump is also a good place to go for quick answers to general questions. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~.

Be Bold!

Sam [Spade] 13:58, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

title: User talk:Kennywi


text:
Vaux-sur-Aure

Vaux-sur-Aure (, literally Vaux on Aure) is a commune in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France.

The Barons de Gratot (Argouges) resided at the Château de Gratot in Vaux-sur-Aure. According to the French Wikipedia a legend is that a Lord of Argouges met a Fairy woman who agreed to be his wife provided he never spoke the word "Mort" [death] which was considered profane language; however he spoke it and the Fairy vanished; this legend is associated with both Château de Gratot and the Château de Argouges at Argouges.

International relations
Vaux-sur-Aure has international relations with the city of Nagasaki, Japan, since 2005. It was a sister city of Sotome, now a subdivision of Nagasaki, since 1978.

title: Vaux-sur-Aure


text:
User:Zengzhao

（1982-）Born in Changsha, a central southern china in China. He received his college education in Wuhan University, Wuhan, a city about 380 km north from Changsha.

title: User:Zengzhao


text:
Vaulx

Vaulx may refer to the following places:

France

 * Vaulx, Pas-de-Calais
 * Vaulx, Haute-Savoie
 * Vaulx-en-Velin, in the Rhône département
 * Vaulx-Milieu, in the Isère département
 * Vaulx-Vraucourt, in the Pas-de-Calais département

Belgium

 * Vaulx, a district of the municipality of Chimay, Wallonia
 * Vaulx, a district of the municipality of Tournai, Wallonia

title: Vaulx


text:
Qandala

Qandala (also known as Candala, Andala, Bender Chor, Bandar Kor, Bender Kor or Taba Tege ) is an ancient port town in the northeastern Bari province of Somalia.

Overview
Qandala sits on a wadi estuary, which forms a natural protective harbor for vessels on the Gulf of Aden. It lies 75 kilometres (47 mi) east of Bosaso, 549 kilometres (341 mi) south of Aden, and 475 kilometres (295 mi) west of Socotra.

The city is located in the autonomous Puntland region of Somalia. It is the capital of the Qandala District.

In antiquity, Qandala was an active trading center for merchants from the interior of the Horn of Africa, who transported goods such as incense, gum and aromatic woods to and from the port. Its nickname Gacanka Hodonka ("Gulf of Prosperity") is a relic from this era.

Additionally, Qandala is coextensive with the ancient town of Botiala. The latter settlement features an old fortress complex, which overlooks and controls the mouth of the wadi leading inland.

2016 ISIL capture
On 26 October 2016, a militant group linked to ISIL captured Qandala with 50 armed fighters after a brief firefight with local security forces, thus becoming the first town to be seized by Islamic State affiliated militants in Somalia. BBC News reported that ISIL militants had withdrawn from the town for unclear reasons. However, the report was denied by other media outlets claimed that it was false. On 7 December 2016, a Somali official said Puntland security forces had recaptured the port from ISIL-linked fighters, killing 30 militants. Another four soldiers were also killed during the operation.

Demographics
Qandala has a population of around 19,300 inhabitants.

Education
Qandala has a number of academic institutions. According to the Puntland Ministry of Education, there are 15 primary schools in the Qandala District. Among these are Xamure, Dhadar, Turmasale and Gurur.

Transportation
Qandala has a small seaport. Air transportation in the city is served by the Candala Airport.

title: Qandala


text:
Vaux-sur-Seulles

Vaux-sur-Seulles is a commune in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France.

Geography
Vaux-sur-Seulles is located 6 kilometers from Bayeux, in the Bessin region. The town is crossed by the Seulles river.

title: Vaux-sur-Seulles


text:
Bec de corbin

A bec de corbin (Bec de corbeau, ) is a type of polearm and war hammer that was popular in late medieval Europe. The name is Old French for "raven's beak". Similar to the Lucerne hammer, it consists of a modified hammer's head and spike mounted atop a long pole. Unlike the Lucerne hammer, the bec de corbin was used primarily with the "beak" or fluke to attack instead of the hammer head. The hammer face balancing the beak was often blunt instead of the multi-pronged Lucerne, and the beak tended to be stouter; better designed for tearing into plate armor, mail, or gambeson. Nonetheless, some becs-de-corbin also had a multi-pronged hammer. The spike mounted on the top of the head was also not nearly as long and thin as on the Lucerne. Bec de corbin is sometimes used as a general term to describe several types of war hammer, such as mauls and horseman's picks. A similar name, bec de faucon (meaning "falcon's beak"), refers to a related weapon called a poleaxe or, more specifically, to the hook on its reverse side.

title: Bec de corbin


text:
Irena Szewińska

Irena Szewińska (née Kirszenstein; Polish pronunciation: ; 24 May 1946 – 29 June 2018) was a Polish sprinter who was one of the world's foremost track athletes for nearly two decades, in multiple events. She is the only athlete in history, male or female, to have held the world record in the 100 m, the 200 m and the 400 m.

Personal life
Irena Kirszenstein was born in Leningrad to a Jewish-Polish family. Her father came from Warsaw and mother from Kiev. They met in Samarkand where they studied at the time, and in 1947 moved to Warsaw.

In 1967, she married her coach, Janusz Szewiński, who also competed in hurdles at the national level and later worked as a sports photographer. They have two sons, Andrzej Szewiński (born 1970), who played volleyball for the Poland men's national volleyball team and later became a senator, and Jarosław (born 1981).

In 1970, Szewińska graduated from the University of Warsaw with an MSc degree in economics.

On 29 June 2018, her death was announced by her husband Janusz Szewiński. She died of cancer aged 72 in Warsaw at the Military Institute of Medicine on Szaserów Street. Irena Szewińska was buried as a Catholic at the "Avenue of the Meritorious" in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.

In 2020, she was posthumously honoured with a World Athletics Heritage Plaque, one of the first ever awarded, during a ceremony before the Szewinska Memorial meeting in Bydgoszcz. In 2021 she was voted Polish Sportsperson of the Century by the readers of the Przegląd Sportowy magazine. During her career, she had been elected as Polish Sports Personality of the Year four times by the same magazine.

Career
Between 1964 and 1980 she participated in five Olympic Games, winning seven medals, three of them gold. She also broke six world records and is the only athlete (male or female) to have held a world record in the 100 m, 200 m and the 400 m events. She also won 10 medals in European Championships. Between 1965 and 1979 she gathered 26 national titles and set 38 records in the 100–400 m sprint and long jump.

At her first Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, she took a silver medal in the long jump and 200 metres, and ran the second leg of the gold medal-winning 4 × 100 metres relay team.

She was a double sprint winner at the World Student Games in Budapest in 1965. In the same year she set her first world record, breaking Wyomia Tyus' 11.2 s from the previous year with an 11.1 s clocking in Prague, Czechoslovakia, July 9, 1965.

In 1966, at the European Athletics Championships she won Gold in the long jump, 200 metres and 4 × 100 metres relay; and took a silver in the 100 metre sprint.

At her second Olympics in Mexico, She won a bronze in the 100 metres, but failed to qualify for the Long Jump final. She recovered from that disappointment, to win the gold medal in the 200 metres in a new world-record time. In the sprint relay the Polish team dropped the baton on the final exchange in the semi-final and finished last.

After giving birth to her son, in 1971, she managed a bronze medal in the long jump at the European Championships in Helsinki. She would compete in the three events at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the two sprints and the long jump. She would come away with a bronze medal in the 200 metres.

In the 1974 season, she became the first woman to break the 50-second barrier for 400 metres, and she set a new world record of 22.21 s for 200 metres. At the European Championships in the Rome she won the sprint double of 100 metres and 200 metres, beating the favoured GDR sprinter Renate Stecher; and ran the anchor leg on the 4 × 100 metres relay team which took the bronze. She was ranked number 1 in the world in the 100, 200 and 400 m events in 1974.

She would win her final Olympic medal in Montreal in 1976, by winning the gold in the 400 metres in a world record time of 49.28. At the inaugural World Cup of Track and Field in 1977, she would win both 200 metres and 400 metres; beating both favoured East German runners Bärbel Wöckel and Marita Koch respectively. She would be ranked number 1 in the world for 200 m and 400 m in 1976 and 1977.

In her final appearance at the European Championships at 32 year of age, she managed to win a bronze in the 400 metres and the 4 × 400 metres relay.

She was ranked number 1 in the world 7 times in the 200 metres; 4 times in the 400 metres, and 2 times in the 100 metres; as well as 3 times in the long jump. Over-all, she was ranked 15 years in the top ten at 200 metres, also 4 times number 2, twice at number 3, which just leaves 2 years outside the top 3; (from 1964 to 1977 she was ranked in the top 3 – 200 metre runners in the world) a remarkable achievement. She was ranked 12 times in the 100 metres, 8 times in the long jump and 6 times in the 400 metres (which she took up in 1974).

She obtained United Press International Athlete of the Year Award, Female 1974. She won the European Sportsperson of the Year presented by the Polish Press Agency twice in 1966 and 1974.

In 1998, Szewińska became a member of the International Olympic Committee. She was the president of the Polish Athletic Association 1997–2009.

On 3 August 2005, she was elected as the third woman to the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) Council during the first session of the 45th IAAF Congress in Helsinki.

She was a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the IAAF Hall of Fame.

International competitions
1Representing Europe

title: Irena Szewińska


text:
The Last Don

The Last Don is a 1996 novel by American author Mario Puzo, best known as the author of the 1969 novel The Godfather. The story follows an aging Mafia Don and his family as they try to retain power.

The story alternates between the film industry and the Las Vegas Strip casinos, and how the American Mafia is linked to both.

The Last Don was adapted into a television miniseries of the same name, which aired in 1997. A sequel to the miniseries, The Last Don II, aired in 1998. This novel also effectively became the last release during Puzo's lifetime, before his death in 1999, although he still released two another novels, which both were released after his death.

Plot
The last plan of Don Domenico Clericuzio, an aging Mafia boss, is to eventually have his family enter the legitimate world and assimilate into American society. Twenty-five years later, his grandson Dante and grandnephew Crocifisso "Cross" De Lena make their way through life, and the eighty-year-old Don is semi-retired. Cross, who holds a majority share in a Las Vegas casino, is supposed to become the strong arm of the family. However, when he refuses to take part in the murder of an old friend, Dante is left to be the sole tough guy. Dante's greed for power and blood lead him to plan the elimination of his relatives, who are an obstacle to the desire to become as powerful as the old Don himself. When Dante arranges a hit on Cross's father, strongman Pippi De Lena—who, in a subplot, once commanded the elimination of the rival Santadio Family whose scion, Jimmy, married Don Clericuzio's daughter Rose Marie and fathered Dante before his family's assassination, driving Dante's mother to insanity—Cross, who is aware of being on the blacklist, catches Dante in a trap. Having acted against the family, he waits for the Don's vendetta, but, to his own surprise, his life is spared and he is only condemned to exile. Cross then resumes his romance with actress Athena Aquitane. The story ends with the revelation that Don Clericuzio planned this outcome, even anticipating his grandson's death, all along, for the long-term survival of his family.

Miniseries
The Last Don was the basis for the 1997 CBS television miniseries of the same name written by Joyce Eliason and starring Joe Mantegna, Danny Aiello, and Daryl Hannah. In 1998, this was followed by The Last Don II, in which Cross is restored from exile to take reluctant command of the Clericuzio Family upon the Don's death.

title: The Last Don


text:
Sergey Lebedev (scientist)

Sergey Alekseyevich Lebedev (Серге́й Алексе́евич Ле́бедев; 2 November, 1902 – 3 July, 1974) was a Soviet scientist in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science, and designer of the first Soviet computers.

Biography
Lebedev was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire. He graduated from Moscow Highest Technical School in 1928. From then until 1946 he worked at All-Union Electrotechnical Institute (formerly a division of MSTU) in Moscow and Kyiv. In 1939 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Sciences for the development of the theory of "artificial stability" of electrical systems.

During World War II, Lebedev worked in the field of control automation of complex systems. His group designed a weapon-aiming stabilization system for tanks and an automatic guidance system for airborne missiles. To perform these tasks Lebedev developed an analog computer system to solve ordinary differential equations.

From 1946 to 1951 he headed the Kiev Electrotechnical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, working on improving the stability of electrical systems. For this work he received the Stalin (State) prize in 1950.

In 1948 Lebedev learned from foreign magazines that scientists in western countries were working on the design of electronic computers, although the details were secret. In the autumn of the same year he decided to focus the work of his laboratory on computer design. Lebedev's first computer, MESM, was fully completed by the end of 1951. In April 1953 the State commission accepted the BESM-1 as operational, but it did not go into series production because of opposition from the Ministry of Machine and Instrument Building, which had developed its own weaker and less reliable machine.

Lebedev then began development of a new, more powerful computer, the M-20, the number denoting its expected processing speed of twenty thousand operations per second. In 1958 the machine was accepted as operational and put into series production. Simultaneously the BESM-2, a development of the BESM-1, went into series production. Though the BESM-2 was slower than the M-20, it was more reliable. It was used to calculate satellite orbits and the trajectory of the first rocket to reach the surface of the Moon. Lebedev and his team developed several more computers, notably the BESM-6, which was in production for 17 years.

In 1952, Lebedev became a professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. From 1953 until his death he was the director of what is now called the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering.

Lebedev died in Moscow and is interred at Novodevichy Cemetery.

In 1996 the IEEE Computer Society recognized Sergey Lebedev with a Computer Pioneer Award for his work in the field of computer design and his founding of the Soviet computer industry.

title: Sergey Lebedev (scientist)


text:
Tampines

Tampines is the regional centre of the East Region of Singapore. With a population of 274,360 living across its five subzones as of 2023, it is the second-most populous planning area in Singapore. It is home to approximately 5% of Singapore's population. Tampines is bordered to the west by Bedok and Paya Lebar, to the north by Pasir Ris, to the east by Changi, and to the south by the Straits of Singapore. Situated in the historical region of Tanah Merah, its present-day terrain is particularly flat due to the large-scale sand quarrying in the 1960s.

Tampines is composed of five subzones — Tampines North, Tampines East, Tampines West, Simei and Xilin. These subzones were created in the early 1990s predominantly for urban planning purposes and have no relation to the three political constituencies in Tampines. Four of its subzones are largely residential with the exception of Xilin, which has a fair mix of commercial, industrial and recreational facilities. Xilin is home to Singapore Expo, the largest convention center in Singapore, and features the largest agglomeration of golf courses in Singapore.

As the first regional centre in Singapore, Tampines has progressed from a remote neighbourhood in the 1980s to a vibrant commercial hub. It is one of three regional centres in the city-state, serving to decentralise economic activity from the Central Business District to other parts of the island, an idea first proposed in the 1991 Concept Plan. Several large insurance companies, real estate corporations and financial institutions, such as OCBC and UOB, have shifted their back-end operations to the regional centre. According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority, it now has 200,000 m2 of office space and 112,000 m2 of retail space. Tampines is also home to Changi Business Park, Singapore’s largest integrated business park. It is a 71,000 m2 project that houses many multinational corporations, including J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, IBM and Standard Chartered. As of 2016, it has 152,400 resident working persons, the second-highest in Singapore, according to the Department of Statistics.

Tampines New Town in the north is a densely-populated residential town, and regarded as the core of the planning area. Its boundaries, as delineated by the Housing Development Board, exclude Xilin and the private housing estates of Simei. It spans 1200 hectares, of which 549 hectares is residential area, the largest of any town in Singapore. It is currently the third-most populous town in Singapore, with 232,700 residents (as of 2018). Amidst rapid ongoing development in Tampines North and with a projected ultimate of 110,000 dwelling units, Tampines is expected to become the most populous town in Singapore in the near future. Regarded as a mature estate by the Government, it is the first estate in Singapore to employ its own municipal services office, given the variety of municipal issues it has to handle. Enforcement of certain minor infractions has also been delegated to Tampines Municipal Services through its enforcement officers.

Etymology
The name Tampines goes back to the Franklin and Jackson map of 1828. It is named after Sungei Tampines, which in turn got its name from the tempinis trees (Malay for Streblus elongatus) which were said to be growing by it.

History
In the past, Tampines was covered by forests, swamps, and sand quarries. Ironwood trees, or tempinis in Malay, grew abundantly. The area was part of a military training area until about 1987.

The oldest street in the area, Tampines Road, dates to 1864 when it was a cart track. At the turn of the 20th century, Tampines was a rubber plantation. Tampines was also home to the sand quarry for a long time. Among the plantations were Teo Tek Ho and Hun Yeang estates.

Development boom in the 1980s
The new town started in 1978. Construction began for Neighbourhoods 1 and 2 and was completed between 1983 and 1987, although they were given priority. Neighbourhoods 8 and 9 began in 1985–1989, followed by Neighbourhood 5, which was completed in 1989 with the Tampines Town Centre. Neighbourhood 4 was completed with the new Tampines North Division between 1986 and 1988. Tampines Town was at the fast-paced expansion that breaks it into Tampines East, Tampines West, Tampines North, and Tampines Changkat divisions.

For the Singapore MRT plans, they showed "Tampines North" and "Tampines South" since the planning stages, which is due to the similar townships from 1979 to 1982, before they were renamed respectively in 1985 to Tampines and Simei.

New construction methods expedited the development of the town's infrastructure. More attractive designs, colours, and finishings were incorporated into Tampines than earlier public housing, which consisted of uniform slabs of concrete laid out row after row with more thought given to function than form. The Town Centre was planned as an hourglass shape to create a unique urban design form. The Housing and Development Board (HDB) managed the construction of the town until 1991, when it handed the reins over to the Tampines Town Council. The Town Council is run by grassroot leaders and the residents themselves.

The Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) of the United Nations awarded the World Habitat Award to Tampines, which was selected as a representative of Singapore's new towns, on 5 October 1992. The award was given to recognise an outstanding contribution towards human settlement and development.

Neighbourhoods 3 and 7 were only fully completed in 1997, and the constituencies had been reformed to include the new Tampines Central division.

Residential expansion in the 2010s
Construction was paused until the developments of Tampines Central were started in 2010, which consists of The Premiere @ Tampines, Tampines GreenLeaf, Centrale 8, Tampines Trilliant, and Citylife @ Tampines, including some of the other leftover pockets of residential developments such as Tampines GreenTerrace, Arc @ Tampines, Q Bay Residences and The Santorini.

Neighbourhood 6, which is also known as Tampines North New Town, has started construction with the first Build-To-Order (BTO) flats Tampines GreenRidges being announced at the end of November 2014. Tampines GreenRidges is also part of the first phase of the Tampines North New Town's Park West District, which is the first district to be constructed in the Tampines North New Town development.

Tampines Court, had been en-bloc since July 2017 and all residents vacated their premises by 12 December 2018. It is a former HUDC flat that was privatised in 2002. The upcoming condominium is Treasure at Tampines.

Demographics
The 2023 DOS Population Trends showed Tampines' population to be 274,360, an increase of 5.6% from the 2020 census. Tampines East is the most populous subzone in Singapore, with 126,460 residents.

Age profile
The population distribution of Tampines in 2023 demonstrates a balanced age structure. There is a higher population concentration among younger and middle-aged groups, with males and females both peaking around the 25 to 30 age range. Specifically, the male and female population peaks at age 30, with a percentage of 4.66 and 3.85 respectively.

The population decreasing progressively among older age groups, reflecting typical aging patterns. However, the elderly population in Tampines remains sizeable, and numerous senior care centres have been built to provide senior support services.

Household
The population distribution in Tampines, as detailed in the 2023 census report, reveals that 86.8% reside in HDB flats (238,080). This is reflective of the general trend in Singapore, where the majority live in public housing apartments.

Among these, 105,600 live in 4-room flats, making it the most common type of dwelling. Condominiums and other apartments house 30,310 individuals, while landed properties accommodate 4,470 residents.

The average household size in Tampines is 3.34. The three most common household sizes are two, three, and four persons. There are 17,995 households with two persons, 18,183 households with three persons, and 17,600 households with four persons. Overall, there are 83,681 households in Tampines.

Ethnicity
Tampines is one of the most ethnically diverse planning areas in Singapore. According to the Census of Population 2020 (Table 89), Tampines has the fourth lowest proportion of Chinese people residents among all planning areas in Singapore, accounting for 66.82% of its population.

Tampines ranks second, after Woodlands, in terms of the largest Malay population among planning areas, with 56,570 people making up 21.77% of its residents. Indians constitute 8.35% of the population, while the remaining 3.07% are classified under 'Others' in the census data.

Religion
Religion in Tampines reflects a diverse and vibrant community. Buddhism is the largest religion, with 64,965 people, or 28.62% of the population, practicing it. Islam is also prominent in Tampines, with 59,177 Muslims, making it the second-largest Muslim population in Singapore after Woodlands. Christianity is practiced by 38,372 residents, with 13,594 or 10.92% identifying as Catholics. Other religious affiliations in Tampines include Taoism (7.97%), Hinduism (3.68%), and Sikhism (0.31%). A notable portion of the population, 16.23%, identifies as having no religion.

Language
English is the most spoken language in Tampines, as is the case in the rest of Singapore. Of the resident population aged 5 years and over, 110,367 frequently speak English at home, either solely or with another language. There are 63,129 frequent speakers of Mandarin, 12,843 of which solely speak the language. 19,234 frequently speak Chinese dialects, 38,464 speak Malay, 5,159 speak Tamil, while 998 residents speak other languages at home.

97.5% of the population is literate. 157,045 residents are bilingual, with the most common language pair being English and Chinese (i.e. Mandarin and dialects). 12,846 residents in Tampines are literate in three or more languages.

Education
58,090 residents in Tampines have attained a university qualification, the third highest of all planning areas in Singapore. However, by proportion, Tampines ranks 27th, with only 28.11%.

This is because a large proportion of the population is still studying. Tampines ranks 11th in Singapore, by proportion of residents enrolled in a university in 2020, with 6,906 students accounting for 15.96% of the population.

Employment and income
In Tampines, 144,548 residents aged 15 years and over are employed, out of the 153,785 in its labour force. This equates to an employment rate of 94.0%, on par with the national employment rate of 94.2%. The remaining 73,197 residents aged above 15 in Tampines are outside the labour force.

Most residents in Tampines aged 15 years and over earn between S$3,000 and S$3,999, with 19,714 being in that gross monthly income category. 46,817 earn less than S$3,000 per month, while 16,078 earn between S$4,000 and S$4,999. At the higher income range, 7,842 residents earn above S$15,000 per month.

According to the 2020 Census of Population, there are 9,644 resident households with a monthly income of S$20,000 and above. The second highest category for monthly household income is S$7,000-$7,999, encompassing 4,646 households.

Crime
In 2016, Tampines had the second highest number of snatch thefts (6), the third highest number of robberies (7), and the third highest number of unlicensed moneylending harassment cases (186) in Singapore. Additionally, Tampines averaged the third highest number of car thefts, with an annual increase of 17.8 cases from 2012 to 2016. However, these figures are largely attributed to the large population in Tampines. The crime rate in Tampines is not noticeably higher than the overall rate in Singapore, which remains among the lowest in the world.

In 2023, Tampines ranks 7th (tied with five others) among neighbourhoods in Singapore by number of housebreaking crimes, with five cases. This was down from 27 in 2011. Tampines NPC also had 42 cases of outrage of modesty in 2023, the 13th highest in Singapore. This number has remained relatively constant over the past decade.

Tampines NPC had only one recorded snatch theft case in 2023, a significant drop from 13 a decade ago. The number of robbery cases dropped from 17 in 2011 to only one in 2023. Similarly, the number of motor vehicle thefts dropped from 31 in 2011 to five in 2023. This is reflective of the overall trend in Singapore.

Changi NPC, which has the southern subzones of Tampines under its jurisdiction, saw one housebreaking, one motor vehicle theft and one snatch theft case in 2023. There were no robbery cases in its records for 2023.

Housing
In the first quarter of 2024, Tampines had the highest median rent for executive apartments in Singapore, at S$4,000. It had the seventh highest rent for 5-room HDB flats, at S$3,600.

Food
Tampines is the 12th most expensive planning area for food, according to the 2016 Makan Index by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP). Over the years, the cost of living in Tampines has risen significantly.

In 2023, the Makan Index revealed that Tampines had the highest price among 26 residential neighbourhoods for a lunch or dinner at a kopitiam, food court or hawker centre. It cost S$14.90 for a plate of chicken briyani with iced Milo. It also had the highest average price for a breakfast set in the East Region at S$3.39. As for beverages, Tampines had the highest average price for kopi at S$1.24 and for lime juice at S$1.81. Its kopitiams also sold iced Milo at an average price of S$1.92, the highest in the country.

These high food prices can be attributed to the high rents in Tampines. In 2024, a kopitiam in Tampines broke the record for the highest tendered rent, since the HDB's Price-Quality Method (PQM) for tenders began in 2016. There were 20 participating tenders in that particular exercise, with the successful tenderer setting the rent at $88,889.00. Four of the six most expensive coffeeshops under this tender method are in Tampines. In 2022, Tampines also set the record for the most expensive coffee shop by resale price in Singapore, at $41.68 million.

Industries
Together with the adjacent planning areas, Tampines contributes to the economy of the East Region of Singapore, which had a nominal GDP of US$50.246 million in 2023.

The 71-hectare Changi Business Park is home to logistics enterprises and leading technology corporations, like AMD. It is also home to numerous finance institutions, like DBS, Citibank, and JP Morgan.

The manufacturing industries are located in Tampines South and Changi South. Tampines Central is a hub for various financial institutions, ranging from banks to insurance companies, like OCBC, UOB, Income and AIA.

Electoral boundaries
Originally, Tampines was under the Tampines Single Member Constituency, when it was still under development. Its population grew quickly and, in 1988, its electoral boundaries were redrawn to form the Tampines Group Representation Constituency (GRC) and Eunos GRC.

Eunos GRC was eventually dissolved in 1997. The ward of Tampines North was split and absorbed into Pasir Ris GRC and Tampines GRC. The rest of the former was absorbed back into Tampines GRC. Pasir Ris GRC then dissolved in 2001, after just one election.

Since 2001, Tampines has been divided into three GRCs, namely the namesake Tampines (for Tampines North, Tampines East and Tampines West), Aljunied (for the area around Temasek Polytechnic) and East Coast (for Xilin and Simei). Minor changes have been made to its electoral boundaries in some elections.

Contesting parties
The Workers' Party (WP) had contested parts of the town in Tampines North, under the now-defunct Eunos GRC, in 1988 and 1991. In both general elections, WP lost with 49.11% and 47.62% of the votes respectively.

The National Solidarity Party had contested in the town in all the general elections, except in 1997, when the party was disqualified. It contested under the Singapore Democratic Alliance in the 2001 and 2006 elections.

Most of Tampines has been led by the People's Action Party (PAP) since the independence of Singapore. The only exception (as of 2020) is the southwestern parts of Tampines West, which is under the Aljunied GRC and has been led by WP since 2010.

Members of Parliament
MPs in Tampines also serve as the grassroots leaders in their respective GRCs, as is the case in the rest of Singapore.

Former minister Mah Bow Tan had contested in and led the constituency from 1988 until his retirement from politics in 2015. Between 2011 and 2020, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Heng Swee Keat headed the PAP team, before he was transferred to East Coast GRC. As of 2020, Tampines GRC has been led by Minister of the Environment and Water Resources and Muslim Affairs Masagos Zulkifli, who has been contesting since the 2006 general election.

BG Tampines Rovers F.C.
The town has a professional football club, BG Tampines Rovers Football Club. It competes in the Singapore Premier League, the top tier of the Singapore football league system. It is sometimes referred to by its official nickname, The Stags.

Founded in 1945, the club has won five league titles, four Singapore Cups, a record five Community Shield and one ASEAN Club Championship. This makes it one of the most decorated football clubs in Singapore.

The club used to play at the old Tampines Stadium until its demolition in 2013. After the completion of Our Tampines Hub on the same site, the club now plays its home fixtures at the 5,000-seat football stadium located within the integrated complex.

Education
The eleven primary schools, nine secondary schools, three tertiary institutions, and two international schools to provide education for Tampines residents and those living in the region. There are plans to add new schools in Tampines due to a high demand in the East Region of the city-state of Singapore.

Primary schools

 * Angsana Primary School
 * Changkat Primary School
 * Chongzheng Primary School
 * East Spring Primary School
 * Gongshang Primary School
 * Junyuan Primary School
 * Saint Hilda's Primary School
 * Tampines North Primary School
 * Tampines Primary School
 * Yumin Primary School
 * Poi Ching School

Secondary schools

 * Changkat Changi Secondary School
 * Dunman Secondary School
 * East Spring Secondary School
 * Junyuan Secondary School
 * Ngee Ann Secondary School
 * Pasir Ris Secondary School
 * Springfield Secondary School
 * Saint Hilda's Secondary School
 * Tampines Secondary School

Tertiary institutions
List

ITE College East

Singapore University of Technology and Design

Temasek Junior College (temporarily located in Tampines East from Jan 2024 to Dec 2027, during which the Bedok South campus is reconstructed)

Temasek Polytechnic

Temasek Polytechnic is a post-secondary academic institution in Tampines West. Established in April 1990, it is the third polytechnic in Singapore. Since its inception, it has grown to become a significant educational institution in the East Region, with 13,000 students enrolled. Temasek Polytechnic's extensive 36-hectare campus houses six different schools. It offers 37 full-time and more than 40 part-time diploma courses that cater to different industries, from aerospace engineering to accountancy and cybersecurity.

In 1998, Institute of Technical Education (ITE) established a small campus in Tampines Changkat, as part of a five-million dollar ITE 2000 plan to improve itself. ITE provides vocational and technical education to students, preparing them for careers in various industries. In 2005, ITE College East opened its doors in Simei. The 10.7-hectare campus offers a diverse range of courses that cater to the evolving needs of the workforce. In an effort to consolidate the older satellite campuses into this new campus, ITE College Tampines closed in 2010. ITE College East now comprises four schools, of which the School of Health Sciences is exclusive to the East campus. Its student population has grown steadily to 9,000 in 2023.

The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), established in 2012, moved to its permanent campus in Xilin in 2015. As the fourth public university in Singapore, SUTD specialises in design and technology education, and offers full-time undergraduate courses in five majors. It also offers seven Master programmes and three PhD programmes, and houses several research centres, including the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovation Cities. The university ranks 128th in the 2023 QS Asian University Rankings.

The former Tampines Junior College was located in Tampines East, and provided pre-university education for GCE A-Level graduates. It merged with Meridian Junior College in 2020 to form Tampines Meridian Junior College, and moved into its sister campus in Pasir Ris.

Specialised institutions
List

Pathlight School (Tampines)

Metta School

Pathlight School will be opening a permanent campus in Tampines West in 2025. Together with the other existing campus in Ang Mo Kio, Pathlight School provides specialised educational programmes to the needs of students with autism and other developmental challenges. Built on the site former occupied by East View Primary School, the Tampines campus will take in 500 pupils with special educational needs (SEN).

Metta School, located in Simei, is a specialised institution catering to students aged 7 to 21 with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) and autism (ASD). Formed as an offshoot of Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (MINDS), the school provides both certification and non-certification vocational training programmes tailored to meet the diverse learning needs of its students.

International schools
List

UWCSEA East

Middleton International School

United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA) established its East Campus in Tampines in 2008. UWCSEA East provides a learning environment for 2,500 local and international students of ages 4 to 18.

Middleton International School is the second international school in Tampines, located on the site of the previous ITE College Tampines.

Amenities
Tampines, which includes Tampines North and Simei is home to over 237,800 residents living in 152,000 HDB flats spread out over 20.89 square kilometres:

 * Tampines North
 * Tampines East
 * Tampines Changkat
 * Tampines Central
 * Tampines West
 * Simei
 * Others (mainly commercial and industrial parks, with no nearby residential areas)
 * Tampines Retail Park
 * Tampines Industrial Park A
 * Tampines LogisPark
 * Tampines Wafer Fab Park
 * Tampines Hi-Tech Park
 * Tampines Advance Display Park

Tampines Regional Centre
The urban planning policy of Singapore is to create partially self-sufficient towns, in terms of commercial needs, to relieve strain on traffic drawn to the city centre. Thus, an array of facilities are provided primarily for residents in the new towns. Tampines is one of Singapore's four regional centres (along with Woodlands, Jurong East and future Seletar), under the plan of the Urban Redevelopment Authority. As a result, the Tampines Regional Centre serves the Tampines residents and the entire East Region.

Commercial services
There are three hotels in Tampines — Dusit Thani Laguna Singapore, Park Avenue Changi and capri by Fraser. Catered to business travellers, they are all located in and around Changi Business Park.

Retail shopping in the Tampines Regional Centre is done at four main shopping malls — Tampines Mall, Century Square, Tampines 1 and Our Tampines Hub. Commercial tenants of the shopping centres include restaurants, supermarkets, department stores, cinemas, bookstores, international money remittance and gift shops.

There are other malls outside the New Town as well, namely Eastpoint Mall, Singapore Expo, and Changi City Point.

On 30 November 2006, IKEA opened its second outlet and first megastore in Singapore at Tampines Retail Park, adjacent to Courts and Giant, together, these three are the first to have retail warehouse stores in Singapore. On 9 April 2009, UNIQLO opened its first outlet in Southeast Asia at Tampines 1.

Community services
Tampines Regional Library, the first regional public library in Singapore, was initially located along Tampines Avenue 7 and officially opened on 3 December 1994. It served as a "prototype library" to test new services and features before their implementation at other branch libraries. In 2017, the library relocated to Our Tampines Hub, an integrated community and lifestyle hub. This new location continues to serve the eastern part of Singapore, offering expanded facilities and services. The library's initial concept was to be a "library of the future," aligning with the Library 2000 Review Committee's vision.

Tampines has six community clubs, which are managed by the People's Association and provide a wide range of services. Among them, Tampines Central Community Club is housed within Our Tampines Hub. These community clubs are common spaces for residents to come together, and they occasionally provide information from the government on national policies through events and booths.

Healthcare
Changi General Hospital (CGH) is a major restructured hospital operated by SingHealth in Simei, one of the subzones in the Tampines. It is the fourth largest healthcare facility in Singapore, with a capacity of 1,000 beds. As Singapore's first purpose-built general hospital, it caters to communities in the East Region of Singapore. The hospital houses six specialist centres and encompass a wide range of disciplines, such as cardiology, orthopaedic surgery, and sports medicine. In Newsweek's World's Best Specialized Hospitals 2024 ranking, CGH ranks 48th in pulmonology, 69th in neurosurgery, 113rd in orthopedics, and 164th in oncology.

Other healthcare facilities include two polyclinics, with one in Tampines East and the other in Tampines North. These polyclinics offer a wide array of health services for residents, from management of chronic diseases to treatment of acute medical conditions. Besides the polyclinics, Tampines has several nursing homes and elderly day care centres to support its ageing population.

Neighbourhood centres
List

N1: Tampines Street 11 Neighbourhood Centre

N2: Tampines N2 Shopping Street

N3: Tampines Mart

N4: N4 Neighbourhood Centre

N5: Tampines Central Shopping Street

N6: Tampines Avenue 11 mixed-use site (working name; under construction)

N8: ShopTWest

N9: Tampines Street 94 mixed-use site (working name; tender in progress)

As of 2024, there are six neighbourhood centres in Tampines, as gazetted in the URA Master Plan. They are located in neighbourhoods 1 to 5 and 8.

Tampines Street 11 Neighbourhood Centre is the first in the planning area. Developments in the neighbourhood centre include the Tampines Town Council and Tampines Round Market & Food Centre, which opened in 1983 as the first hawker centre in Tampines.

Tampines N2 Shopping Street has Singapore's most expensive coffee shop, which was sold for a record $41.68 million. The 604-square-metre establishment, known as 21 Street Eating House, features 18 stalls. This purchase price translates to approximately $6,411 per square foot, nearly matching the average rate for ground-level retail units in Far East Plaza and Lucky Plaza along Orchard Road.

Tampines Central Shopping Street and ShopTWest see a comparatively high footfall, due to their proximity to Tampines MRT Station and Temasek Polytechnic respectively.

Two additional neighbourhood centres are planned. One of them will be located on a mixed-use site in Tampines North, sharing the land plot with the Tampines North Integrated Transport Hub. In 2022, a consortium comprising UOL Group, Singapore Land, and CapitaLand Development submitted the highest bid of S$1.206 billion to develop the site. The other future neighbourhood centre will be constructed in the Tampines South estate, as part of a proposed mixed-use development. On 27 June 2024, the HDB launched the sale of the site via public tender. This site has the potential to accommodate 585 residential units and will feature a gross floor area of 61,837 square metres. The development will include an early childhood development centre (ECDC), a supermarket, a food court, and a community plaza, with an underpass connection to Tampines West MRT station.

Our Tampines Hub

Our Tampines Hub is a new development in Tampines. Construction began in June 2013 and it opened on 9 November 2016. It is located at the site of the former Tampines Stadium along Avenue 4 and 5, together with the swimming pool.

It is built for the residents of Tampines and provides a community space where residents can gather, interact, and bond with others from the community. Facilities available include a community centre, sports and recreation centres, swimming pools, bowling alleys, karaoke facilities, information centres, and several offices. The Tampines Regional Library was also relocated here.

Large parks

There are three main parks in Tampines New Town. Sun Plaza Park, located at Tampines Avenue 7 and 9, is one of the first parks in Tampines and previously featured a crocodile-shaped playground in the 1990s. Tampines Eco Green, one of NPark's few nature parks, is 36.5 hectares and located northeast of Sun Plaza Park. Home to over 75 species of birds, Tampines Eco Green remains largely preserved in its existing ecological state, with marshlands, secondary forests and freshwater ponds. Tampines Boulevard Park stretches from Tampines Avenue 9 to the future Tampines North MRT station, and forms the spine of Tampines North. These three parks are adjacent to each other and interconnected by footpaths and cycling paths.

The former Tampines Bike Park, was located west of Tampines Avenue 12, at the current site of Tampines Boulevard Park. Managed by Sport Singapore, it had the only BMX track in Singapore and a 13km-long mountain bike trail. An estimated 2,600 riders visited the park each month. In 2010, Tampines Bike Park hosted BMW events during the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics. It officially closed on 17 September 2014, to make way for housing and future developments in Tampines North.

There are other parks in Tampines outside the New Town. Changi Business Park Garden is one of them, serving employees in the area. It runs through the centre of the business park, with The Signature building to its south. There are two large ponds and an amphitheatre in the garden.

Zone H of East Coast Park features the only beach in Tampines. Located just south of the National Service Resort & Country Club (NSRCC), the beach in this zone can extend up to 100 metres out to sea during extreme low tides. East Coast Park offers residents an uninterrupted cycling path to the Central Business District (CBD). It also connects to Changi Airport to its northeast.

Community parks and nature ways

The other parks in Tampines New Town are mainly community parks — Tampines North Park, Tampines Leisure Park, Tampines Central Park, Tampines Park, Festival Park, Tampines Green, Tampines Tree Garden, and some neighbourhood parks. These small parks serve as outdoor spaces for residents to engage in exercise activities near their homes. Occasionally, community-related events are held at Festival Park. They also serve as nodes of the Tampines Nature Way.

Tampines Nature Way, characterised by its lush vegetation of trees and shrubs, is designed to mimic natural forest ecosystems. One of many nature ways in Singapore, it serves as a vital corridor for wildlife, like including birds and butterflies, to move between green spaces. Tampines Nature Way connects Tampines Eco Green, Bedok Reservoir and Pasir Ris Park, which have rich biodiversity, to the urban areas in Tampines. This also fosters a deeper appreciation of Singapore's City in Nature initiative.

Simei Nature Way serves a similar purpose, connecting green spaces in adjacent neighbourhoods. It also connects the extensive Tampines Nature Way to the Upper Changi Nature Way.

In the future, more green spaces will be added in Tampines. According to the URA Masterplan 2019, a plot of land beside the future Tampines GreenQuartz neighbourhood in Tampines West has been earmarked for a future community park.

Park connector
Tampines Park Connector is one of many under the Park Connector Network (PCN) in Singapore that aims to promote cycling and connect parks together with shared-use paths. With a combined length of 7 kilometres, the Tampines Park Connector provides residents with an alternative means of traversing the town and visiting other parks in Singapore.

The northeastern section of Tampines Park Connector runs along Sungei Tampines. Between 2018 and 2022, the concrete canal was rebuilt into a naturalised waterway under a contract by PUB, marking the third project of its kind in Singapore. The project, which cost S$48.827 million, features lookout decks on both sides, allowing visitors to experience the waterway up close.

Undesignated park
On the outskirts of Tampines lies an undesignated park, Tampines Quarry Park. It used to be a sand quarry in the early to mid-1900s, to support the development boom in the 20th century. Rainwater has since filled the quarry. It is not equipped with any facilities, but this park still remains popular among nearby residents and off-road cycling enthusiasts. As it is hidden behind lush greenery, there are no signs or entrances to the park, though there are hidden pathways to enter.

Road network
A network of expressways, namely the Pan-Island Expressway, East Coast Parkway and Tampines Expressway, and arterial roads allow easy movement within the town and link it to other parts of the island. Tampines Avenue 10, an arterial street, forms the start/end of the Outer Ring Road System, a semi-expressway.

Mass rapid transit
There are currently 6 MRT stations that serve the planning area across 2 lines, the East West line and Downtown line. Both lines have two interchange stations at Tampines MRT station and Expo MRT station on the Changi Airport Branch line. The stations of the Downtown line were opened on 21 October 2017 as part of DTL3. The 6 stations are:

 * Tampines
 * Simei
 * Tampines West
 * Tampines East
 * Upper Changi
 * Expo
 * Xilin (future)
 * Tampines North (future)

Xilin MRT station is a future underground station as part of the DTL3 extension, which will be completed in 2026, in tandem with Stage 5 of the Thomson–East Coast line.

Tampines North MRT station is another station under construction in Tampines, and will be located in the Tampines North Integrated Transport Hub. It is part of the 29-kilometre Phase 1 of the Cross Island line, which will be operational from 2030.

Bus
There are three bus interchanges — Tampines Bus Interchange, Tampines North Bus Interchange and Tampines Concourse Bus Interchange. All of them are located in Tampines New Town.

Tampines Bus Interchange is the primary bus interchange serving Tampines New Town in Singapore, operated by SBS Transit Ltd and owned by the Land Transport Authority. It complements the high-capacity rail network and supports the hub-and-spoke transport model. Tampines Bus Interchange hosts 23 bus services that cater to approximately 325,000 passengers daily, making it the fourth busiest bus interchange in Singapore. The interchange has evolved from the original Tampines Bus Terminal established in 1983, which was later replaced by a larger temporary terminal to accommodate the increasing population and transport demand.

The current Tampines Bus Interchange, located in Tampines Central, began operations in phases starting in November 1987. Built at a cost of S$5 million, it features 85 bus bays and a comprehensive set of trunk and feeder services linking Tampines to the rest of Singapore. The interchange underwent refurbishments in 2008 to become barrier-free, and again in 2017 to add new alighting berths to prevent bus bunching.

Tampines Concourse Bus Interchange opened on 18 December 2016, to manage peak-hour demand and passenger load at the adjacent Tampines Bus Interchange. It was designated for new services with lower demand.

Tampines North Bus Interchange opened on 27 November 2022 to serve new residents in Tampines North. It will be redeveloped to be part of the Tampines North Integrated Transport Hub (ITH).

Changi Business Park Bus Terminal is a bus terminal in the northern part of Changi Business Park. The terminal, which opened on December 20, 2015, introduced two new Bus Services Enhancement Programme (BSEP) bus services to enhance transportation options around the Changi Business Park.

Transportation depot

The East Coast Integrated Depot (ECID) in Xilin, currently under construction and expected to be completed in 2026, will serve three MRT lines: the East–West Line, the Downtown Line, and the Thomson–East Coast Line. Located beside the soon-to-be-demolished Changi Depot, it will be Singapore's first MRT depot to support three MRT lines and the third to integrate a bus depot. This integrated model is expected to save 44 hectares of land. It will accommodate over 200 trains of various sizes and lengths, along with more than 550 buses.

District cooling system
Tampines is set to become the first town centre in Singapore to implement a district cooling system, a significant milestone announced on April 18. This innovative Distributed District Cooling (DDC) network will connect seven commercial buildings in Tampines Central. Scheduled to be operational by the first half of 2025, the DDC will utilise the existing cooling systems of these buildings to produce and distribute chilled water through interconnected pipes, thereby providing efficient cooling across the network.

The implementation of the DDC network in Tampines is expected to significantly reduce carbon emissions and achieve substantial energy savings. SP Group and Temasek project that the network will lower carbon emissions by 1,359 tonnes annually, equivalent to removing 1,236 cars from Singapore's roads, and save over 2.8 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy each year, enough to power more than 905 three-room HDB households. By optimising the existing chiller plants and using injection nodes at Century Square, Our Tampines Hub, and Tampines One, the system will enhance cooling efficiency and reduce equipment costs for building owners. This project not only demonstrates the potential for integrating sustainable solutions into existing urban infrastructures but also aligns with Singapore’s broader climate ambitions, contributing to a low-carbon future.

Emergency services
The 2nd SCDF Division Headquarters, located on the western border of Tampines, has been operational since January 26, 2006. It features an underground command post, which enhances its command and control capabilities during emergencies. A public education centre was also set up to promoting community preparedness. The Tampines Fire Station, co-located with the Division Headquarters, occupies the first two levels of the seven-story building. Staffed by 140 personnel, the fire station's location along the Tampines Avenue 10 thoroughfare allows for rapid response to emergencies in the residential areas of Tampines and Pasir Ris, as well as high-risk premises in the nearby industrial parks.

Tampines Neighbourhood Police Centre (NPC) is a mid-sized police station in Tampines West. It is under the regional command of the Bedok Police Division. Tampines NPC was one of the first NPCs to adopt the new Community Policing System (COPS), which aims to improve the way NPCs work with the community. Tampines East Neighbourhood Police Post (NPP) and Tampines North NPP were also established for residents to access police services with ease, such as submitting police reports and applying for various permits.

Cycling town
Tampines is Singapore's pioneering cycling town. It established its first dedicated cycling paths as early as 2010. These paths link residential areas in Tampines, with key amenities such as MRT stations and community centres. In 2017, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) recently announced plans to triple the existing 6.9km cycling path network to about 21km, exceeding the cycling infrastructure in other new towns. Enhancements include widening existing paths, improving bicycle crossings with additional signage, and establishing trunk routes connecting Tampines to neighbouring towns and key employment hubs such as Changi Business Park.

This cycling town project aims to promote cycling as a sustainable mode of transport, and enhance the overall liveability and accessibility of Tampines.

In Tampines, there is a wide availability of shared bicycles provided by two operators, HelloRide and Anywheel. These services offer convenient access to bicycles for both residents and visitors, facilitating short trips around the town at low cost.

title: Tampines


text:
The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village, which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy, which we may regard today to refer to the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.

McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls the Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.

Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:

"the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

The format of the book—a mosaic
The book is unusual in its design. McLuhan described it as one which "develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems". The mosaic image to be constructed from data and quotations would then reveal "causal operations in history".

The book consists of five parts:

 * Prologue
 * The Gutenberg Galaxy
 * The Galaxy Reconfigured
 * Bibliographic Index
 * Index of Chapter Glosses

The main body of the book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", consists of 107 short "chapters".

Apparently, McLuhan also had some ideas about how to browse a book. Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book." Such apparent arbitrariness fits with picking a particular piece (or part) of a mosaic and deciding if you like it. Certainly the McLuhan test can be applied to the Gutenberg Galaxy itself. Doing so will reveal a further insight into the purpose of his own book.

Prologue
McLuhan declares his book to be "complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord." The latter work follows on from the Homeric studies of Milman Parry who turned to "the study of the Yugoslave epics" to prove that the poems of Homer were oral compositions.

Four epochs of history
The book may also be regarded as a way of describing four epochs of history:

Oral tribe culture Manuscript culture  Gutenberg galaxy Electronic age

"For the break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible, the hand-writing terminates the oral phase, the printing and the electricity revolutionizes afterwards culture and society."

Given the clue of "hand-writing" that terminates the "oral phase" one expects "printing" to terminate the manuscript phase and the "electrifying" to bring an end to the Gutenberg era. The strangeness of the use of "electrifying" is entirely appropriate in the McLuhan context of 1962. The Internet did not exist then.

McLuhan himself suggests that the last section of his book might play the major role of being the first section: The last section of the book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," deals with the clash of electric and mechanical, or print, technologies, and the reader may find it the best prologue.

Oral tribe culture
The oral tradition is not dead. In schools or at home or in the street, where children are taught to learn by heart, to memorize, nursery rhymes or poems or songs, then they can be said to participate in the oral tradition. The same is often true of the children belonging to religious groups who are taught to learn to say their prayers. In other words, childhood is one of the ages of man (in Shakespeare's sense) and is essentially an oral tribal culture. The transition from this oral culture takes place when the child is taught to read and write. Then the child enters the world of the manuscript culture.

McLuhan identifies James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a key that unlocks something of the nature of the oral culture. "

Of particular importance to the Oral Culture is the Art of memory.

The village
In commenting on the then Soviet Union, McLuhan puts "the advertising and PR community" on a par with them in so far that both "are concerned about access to the media and about results." More remarkably he asserts that "Soviet concern with media results is natural to any oral society where interdependence is the result of instant interplay of cause and effect in the total structure. Such is the character of a village, or since electric media, such is also the character of global village."

Manuscript culture
The culture of the manuscript (literally hand-writing) is often referred to by McLuhan as scribal culture. Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of the art of memory, central to scribal culture.

Associated with this epoch is the Art of memory (in Latin Ars Memoriae).

Gutenberg galaxy
Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Finnegans Wake (like Shakespeare's King Lear) is one of the texts which McLuhan frequently uses throughout the book to weave together the various strands of his argument. Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Movable type
His episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks: "In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, 'formal' causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook."

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The global village
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media would replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan himself was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments: "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture."

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization: "Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. 'But', someone says, 'we didn't know it would happen.' Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality."

The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Later, Bill Stewart's 2007 "Living Internet" website describes how McLuhan's "insights made the concept of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened."

McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America. However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.

title: The Gutenberg Galaxy