text:
L'Étranger (band)

L'Étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider) was a Canadian punk rock band based in Toronto, Ontario. Named for the novel L'Étranger by Albert Camus, the band played a politically minded brand of punk music that drew on both Clash influences and the band members' social justice-oriented Roman Catholic faith. The band was best known for their anti-apartheid single "One People", one of the first independent videos ever to gain airplay on the then-new MuchMusic.

History
L'Étranger was founded in 1980 in Toronto, Ontario. by childhood friends, singer/songwriter and guitarist Andrew Cash and bassist Charlie Angus, along with drummer Peter Duffin. That lineup released one six-song EP, Innocent Hands in 1982. The songs were composed by Cash and Angus, and some had political themes; some critics referred to the band as "Gang of Four with a sense of humour".

At that time the band was playing in various clubs and music venues in Toronto, performing regularly at the Cabana Room in the Spadina Hotel. Bruce Meikle, under the stage name "Bruce P.M.", was added to the line-up in time for the second EP, 1984's Running Out of Funtown. The band was by then performing more widely around Ontario, managed by James Booth.

Angus left the band to form Grievous Angels, and was replaced by Tim Vesely for the band's final EP, Sticks and Stones in 1986. Liner notes for the EP mention him as a group member who was not involved in the recording.

L'Étranger disbanded later in 1986, and Cash began performing as a solo artist. His first solo release was a reissue of Sticks and Stones. He went on to record several albums as a solo singer-songwriter and as a member of The Cash Brothers, and also worked as a freelance journalist. Duffin later co-founded the acoustic pop band Barnhouse Static with Canadian songwriter Kathy Evans.

As of 2011, Angus and Cash were both in politics, sitting in the House of Commons of Canada as members of the New Democratic Party caucus. Cash lost a re-election bid in 2015, although Angus remains a Member of Parliament as of 2023. Angus ran as a candidate for the leadership of the New Democratic Party in 2017 and came in second place.

Discography

 * 1982: Innocent Hands
 * 1983: Running Out of Funtown
 * 1986: Sticks and Stones

title: L'Étranger (band)


text:
Category:DOS on IBM PC compatibles

The category DOS on IBM PC compatibles contains articles related to MS-DOS, IBM PC DOS, and third-party clones and variants of those disk operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers.

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

title: Category:DOS on IBM PC compatibles


text:
New Zealand Post Office

The New Zealand Post Office (NZPO) was a government department of New Zealand until 1987. It was previously (from 1881 to 1959) named the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department (NZ P&T).

As a government department, the New Zealand Post Office had as its political head the Postmaster General, who was a member of Cabinet, and, when it was a separate department, the Minister of Telegraphs.

The NZPO was similar to the British Post Office or GPO, and so was similar to European PTT or postal, telegraph and telephone services, which were government monopolies.

19th century
Official postal services started in New Zealand after Captain William Hobson arrived in the Bay of Islands and took up his role as Lieutenant-Governor. Hobson appointed William Clayton Hayes as Clerk to the Bench of Magistrates and Postmaster and the first official post office was opened at Kororareka, now called Russell. Hayes holds the distinction of being New Zealand's first civil servant to be dismissed as he neglected his duty and was continually inebriated. By 1845 post offices had also been opened at Rawene, Auckland, New Plymouth, Whanganui, Wellington, Nelson and Akaroa.

The establishment of settlements across the North and South Islands meant the need for an internal postal service was becoming more and more important, but New Zealand's geography, ongoing wars between Māori and Europeans and intertribal fighting hindered communication. At the time, shipping mail coast-to-coast, although inefficient, was the most reliable means of transporting mail around the country. A monthly shipping service to Sydney, where mail was exchanged with outbound and inbound London ships, saw the first regular overseas mail service established.

The Local Posts Act of 1856 gave provincial councils the authority to create their own mail services and local post offices, while the Government continued to maintain the overland trunk postal routes and the head post office in each province. The Post Office Act of 1858 repealed the Local Posts Act, establishing the Post Office Department as a government department, reporting to the Postmaster General, and providing for its administration. By 1880 there were 856 post offices.

The Post Office Department was merged with the Electric Telegraph Department in 1881 to create the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department.

20th century
By the beginning of the 20th century, the New Zealand Post Office had over 1,700 branches and continued to grow rapidly throughout the century. As well as postal services it ran a savings bank and was responsible for telephone services. The rapid increase in private telephones in people's homes, and the introduction of internal and international airmail services in the 1930s, contributed to its growth.

The New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department was renamed the New Zealand Post Office in 1959. As well as traditional communication services, the Post Office provided community services including registering births, marriages, deaths and cars, accepting television and fishing licence fees, enrolling people to vote, and collecting pensions. Post Offices also provided daily weather and temperature checks for the Meteorological Office, and postmasters were able to perform marriage ceremonies. Throughout the 20th century, the Post Office was New Zealand's biggest employer.

In the 1960s and 70s steps were taken towards better managing the ever-increasing volumes of national and international mail: the installation of New Zealand's first mechanical mail sorting machine in the Auckland parcel depot, and the introduction of address postal codes to simplify bulk mail sorting. However, increasingly the tension between political and commercial pressures meant the business was not operating efficiently.

By the 1980s, the variety of roles, the sometimes-conflicting needs of three different businesses, and political considerations were major constraints on the Post Office. It was increasingly unable to meet growing consumer demands and the postal side alone was losing over $20 million a year, with expectations that this would balloon in the future.

In 1985, Jonathan Hunt, Postmaster General, ordered a review of the organisational and management structure of the Post Office. The subsequent Mason-Morris report of 1986 called for sweeping changes, separating the three core businesses to operate as independent State-owned corporations.

Abolition
On 1 April 1987, the department was abolished under the Postal Services Act 1987, and three state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were formed, responsible to the Minister of State Owned Enterprises, initially from 14 August 1989 Stan Rodger.
 * New Zealand Post Limited
 * Post Office Bank Limited
 * Telecom Corporation of New Zealand Limited
 * Telecom was subsequently split into (as a condition of participating in Ultra-Fast Broadband):
 * Chorus Limited (a regulated monopoly (wholesale only) provider of fibre broadband service, and:
 * Spark New Zealand (a retailer and mobile phone service provider. )

Of these, due to privatisation, only New Zealand Post remains as an SOE. Telecom was sold to two United States Baby Bells, and PostBank was sold to the Pacific banking conglomerate Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ). The Postbank brand was phased out by the late-1990s. Telecom was floated on the New Zealand Stock Exchange in the early 1990s, per the conditions of its privatisation, and was rebranded in August 2014 as Spark.

In 2001, Kiwibank, a new government-owned bank, was established as a subsidiary of NZ Post.

title: New Zealand Post Office


title: Template:Db-g3


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mystery fiction

Mystery fiction was proposed for deletion. This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was keep.

Mystery fiction
This page is a duplicate, in essence, of Whodunit (or at least it is in the view of one user, who had requested previously for a speedy deletion, but I felt that VfD was more appropriate for this article). ugen64 03:51, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

 * Redundant page, no explanation why this is not just another name for Detective Fiction, should be merged there or removed completely. (Note there is a distinction at the page Detective fiction but the distinction is very trifling.) Note: I don't agree should be merged with Whodunnit, which is a subgenre of detective fiction, but with Detective fiction. 68.1.181.54 03:53, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Keep and list both/all on Duplicate articles - so they can be merged properly. D AVODD  [[User_talk:Davodd|« TALK »]] 04:11, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)
 * Agree with D AVODD . utcursch 07:32, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)
 * Agree with above — siro  χ  o  00:54, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep and disagree with merging. Whodunnit is about murder mystery, mystery fiction incorporates books like Hardy Boys. They aren't necessarily the same. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:02, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * The distinction you make isn't at all clear to me. Whodunnits aren't necessarily about murders.  Besides, I said this page should be merged with detective fiction not whodunnit.  There is no appreciable disctinction between mystery and detective fiction -- they are synonymous.68.1.174.46 22:35, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep - --Cyprus2k1 09:40, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep: reasonably distinct from Whodunnit or Detective fiction Florescentbulb 00:53, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like other '/delete' pages is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion or on the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.


text:
Marcasite

The mineral marcasite, sometimes called "white iron pyrite", is iron sulfide (FeS2) with orthorhombic crystal structure. It is physically and crystallographically distinct from pyrite, which is iron sulfide with cubic crystal structure. Both structures contain the disulfide S22− ion, having a short bonding distance between the sulfur atoms. The structures differ in how these di-anions are arranged around the Fe2+ cations. Marcasite is lighter and more brittle than pyrite. Specimens of marcasite often crumble and break up due to the unstable crystal structure.

On fresh surfaces, it is pale yellow to almost white and has a bright metallic luster. It tarnishes to a yellowish or brownish color and gives a black streak. It is a brittle material that cannot be scratched with a knife. The thin, flat, tabular crystals, when joined in groups, are called "cockscombs".

In marcasite jewellery, pyrite used as a gemstone is called "marcasite" – that is, marcasite jewellery is made from pyrite, not from the mineral marcasite. Marcasite in the scientific sense is not used as a gem due to its brittleness. In the late medieval and early modern eras, the word "marcasite" meant all iron sulfides in general, including both pyrite and the mineral marcasite. The narrower, modern scientific definition for marcasite as orthorhombic iron sulfide dates from 1845. The jewelers' sense for the word "marcasite" pre-dates this 1845 scientific redefinition.

Occurrence
Marcasite can be formed as both a primary or a secondary mineral. It typically forms under low-temperature, highly acidic conditions. It occurs in sedimentary rocks (shales, limestones and low grade coals) as well as in low temperature hydrothermal veins. Commonly associated minerals include pyrite, pyrrhotite, galena, sphalerite, fluorite, dolomite, and calcite.

As a primary mineral marcasite forms nodules, concretions, and crystals in a variety of sedimentary rock, such as in the chalk layers found on both sides of the English Channel at Dover, Kent, England, and at Cap Blanc-Nez, Pas de Calais, France, where it forms as sharp individual crystals and crystal groups, and nodules (similar to those shown here). Marcasite is also found in complex sulphide deposits. In the Reocín mine, Cantabria, Spain, appears as crystals grouped in the form of cockscombs. As a secondary mineral, it forms by chemical alteration of a primary mineral, such as pyrrhotite or chalcopyrite.

Sedimentary marcasite and low pH
In laboratory experiments, marcasite forms preferentially to pyrite at a pH of less than about 5. Ab initio calculations suggest that this is due to pyrite having a higher surface energy (thus being less thermodynamically stable) than marcasite at low pH.

Due to the association of marcasite with low pH, the occurrence of marcasite in sedimentary rocks in the geologic record implies the presence of highly acidic conditions during the formation and early diagenesis of those rocks. However, sedimentary pore waters below the modern ocean are typically buffered at near-neutral to slightly alkaline pH by dissolved carbonate species. This raises the question of how sedimentary pore waters became sufficiently acidic to promote marcasite formation in the past.

Several theories have been proposed for the formation of early diagenetic marcasite, including: partial oxidation of primary pyrite by molecular oxygen infiltrating from the overlying water column, and rapid anoxic organic matter decomposition and organic acid generation by fermentation and methanogenesis.

Varieties and blends
Blueite (S.H.Emmons): Nickel variety of marcasite, found in Denison Drury and Townships, Sudbury District, Ontario, Canada.

Lonchidite (August Breithaupt): Arsenic variety of marcasite, found at Churprinz Friedrich August Erbstolln Mine (Kurprinz Mine), Großschirma Freiberg, Ore Mountains, Saxony, Germany; ideal formula Fe(S, As)2.

Synonyms for this variety:
 * kausimkies,
 * kyrosite,
 * lonchandite,
 * metalonchidite (Sandberger) described at Bernhard Mine near Hausach (Baden), Germany.

Sperkise: designates a marcasite having twin spearhead crystal on {101}. Sperkise derives from the German Speerkies (Speer meaning spear and Kies gravel or stone). This twin is very common in the marcasite of a chalky origin, particularly those from the Cap Blanc-Nez.

Decay
Marcasite reacts more readily than pyrite under conditions of high humidity. The product of this disintegration is iron(II) sulfate and sulfuric acid. The hydrous iron sulfate forms a white powder consisting of the mineral melanterite, FeSO4·7H2O.

This disintegration of marcasite in mineral collections is known as "pyrite decay". When a specimen goes through pyrite decay, the marcasite reacts with moisture and oxygen in the air, the sulfur oxidizing and combining with water to produce sulfuric acid that attacks other sulfide minerals and mineral labels. Low humidity (less than 60%) storage conditions prevents or slows the reaction.

title: Marcasite


text:
John Kotter

John Paul Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, an author, and the founder of Kotter International, a management consulting firm based in Seattle and Boston. He is a thought leader in business, leadership, and change.

Career
John Kotter is an emeritus from Harvard Business School where he started teaching in 1972. He is the founder of Kotter International, and started his business in 2010 with locations in Cambridge Massachusetts and Seattle Washington. He currently serves as Chairman of Kotter International alongside CEO, Rick Western, Chief Commercial Officer, Kathy Gersch, Chief Financial Officer, Tanya Kruger and many more.

Kotter is also an author, speaker, and entrepreneur in the lines of business and leadership.

Personal life
Kotter lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, Nancy Dearman. They have two children, Caroline and Jonathan.

Written work
Kotter is the author of 21 books, as listed below. 12 of these have been business bestsellers and two of which are overall New York Times bestsellers.

Successful change
In Leading Change (1996), and subsequently in The Heart of Change (2002), Kotter describes an eight stage model of successful change in which he seeks to support managers to lead change and to understand how people accept, engage with and maintain successful organisational change. The eight stages or steps include the creation of "a sense of urgency" and the use of "short-term wins".

Short-term wins, within a 6–18 month window, are considered necessary because "[an] organization has to realize some benefits from [a] change effort to maintain stakeholder commitment". Kotter asserts that to be useful or influential, short-term wins need to be "visible and unambiguous" as well as "closely related to the change effort". Arguing against a belief that there is a "trade-off" between wins in the short-term and wins in the long-term, Kotter argues from experience that both are achievable.

title: John Kotter


text:
User:Geni/I won this debate

I won this debate

1inC's Rules for debate on JREF forums:
1.) Logic and reason are the creations of Satan, so neither are allowed in the debate

7.) The last person to say "I won the debate" wins the debate if he or she names the argument used, and that argument is not logical

22.) The first person to say "I won the debate" wins the debate if he or she names the argument used, and that argument is not logical

6.) It is not even necessary to use your argument as long as you identify it

5X + 21Y/G^X.) Jay's Law: Ignoring the arguments of others guarantees an automatic win if you complain that there are no arguments, miscount the number of times you repeated yourself, and lie about what arguments you actually made

title: User:Geni/I won this debate


text:
Giant Rat of Sumatra

The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a fictional giant rat, first mentioned by Arthur Conan Doyle in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". As part of the tale, the protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, declares that there is a "story" connected with this rat, presumably a detective case he has handled. The name of the rat and its implied unpublished history were later used in works by many other writers.

Original reference
In "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire", first published in the January 1924 issues of The Strand Magazine in London and Hearst's International Magazine in New York, Doyle has Sherlock Holmes declare, as an aside, to Dr. Watson:

 * Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson, ... It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

How the ship, the mammal, and the Indonesian island are associated is not specified. Rats commonly colonize ships, and so there is an obvious line of speculation.

Another train of thought follows the reasoning that Matilda Briggs actually was the name of a young woman as well as a fictional ship – for the famous "mystery ship", the Mary Celeste, which was found abandoned at sea in 1872, had sailed under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs, whose daughter, Sophia Matilda Briggs, was a passenger on the doomed merchant brigantine. Doyle was certainly familiar with the Briggs family, for in the January 1884 issue of the Cornhill Magazine, when he was but a 25-year-old ship's surgeon, he had published a short story about the mysteriously abandoned Mary Celeste titled "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement". As it was a work of fiction, Doyle did not adhere strictly to the facts; he renamed the ship Marie Celeste, the captain's name was given as "J.W. Tibbs", and the fatal voyage was said to have taken place in 1873 – but his story proved so popular and influential that many people to this day still refer to the vessel as the Marie Celeste, rather than the Mary Celeste.

Giant Indonesian rats
A number of species of large rats have existed and, in some cases, still live on Sumatra, Papua, East Timor, and other Indonesian islands:

 * In 1983, the Mountain Giant Sunda Rat (Sundamys infraluteus), which is only somewhat larger than a Norway rat, averaging around 0.3 kilograms in weight, was actually referred to as the "giant rat of Sumatra" in an article in The New York Times.
 * In a lecture delivered in 1994 and published online in 2014, Holmesian Alan Saunders argued that a giant Sumatran rat species was being used by the villain Culverton Smith as the carrier of the disease known as Tapanuli Fever, a feature of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective". (Tapanuli is an administrative district of North West Sumatra; the highly lethal infectious disease is also known as Melioidosis; it is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei.) Saunders identified the rat as the Large Sumatran Bamboo Rat (Rhizomys sumatrensis); this species can reach lengths of nearly 50 cm with a 20 cm tail, and weigh up to 4 kilos (8.8 lbs); it is in real life a carrier of the disease-causing mold, Talaromyces marneffei, which can also be lethal.
 * A new species in the Woolly Rat (Mallomys) genus was discovered in 2007 in the Foja Mountains of Papua; it weighs 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb) and has been compared to Holmes's animal.
 * In 2015, the discovery of fossils of "seven new species of giant rat", including the "largest rat ever" on the island of East Timor was announced. The biggest of these Coryphomys rats was described as weighing "5 kilos (11 pounds), the size of a small dog," and was referred to as the "Giant Rat" in news stories.

In Sherlockiana
A number of authors of Sherlockiana have endeavoured to supply the missing adventure of the giant rat of Sumatra, either in non-canonical Holmesian fiction, or as references to the tale in other fictional settings:

 * In "The Giant Rat of Sumatra," an episode of the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes written by Edith Meiser, and first broadcast on 1 March 1942, Professor Moriarty arranges for the titular rodent, infected with bubonic plague, to be transported to England on board the Matilda Briggs. This episode is apparently lost, but is described in some detail by Jim Harmon in his book The Great Radio Heroes.
 * In The Spider Woman (1944), Nigel Bruce's Watson briefly reflects on the Giant Rat of Sumatra when looking through a scrapbook of old cases.
 * In Pursuit to Algiers (1945), a Holmes film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Watson tells the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra to an audience on board a ship.
 * The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, a 1974 comedy album by the Firesign Theatre (LP Columbia KC32730) is a pun-filled pastiche featuring the protagonists Hemlock Stones, the 'Great Defective', and his biographer and companion, Dr. John Flotsom, O. D. Part of the narrative takes place aboard the Matilda Briggs and the name of this ship induces the group to perform the song "Frigate Matilda" (to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda"), which has become something of a cult standard.
 * The 1975 novel Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds is a sequel to H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, written by Manly Wade Wellman and his son Wade Wellman as a pastiche crossover which combines H. G. Wells' extraterrestrial invasion story with Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger stories. During the course of the narrative, Holmes mentions that Professor Challenger helped solve the case of the giant rat, although the actual name of the case is not stated.
 * The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a 1976 novel by Rick Boyer which features the return of The Hound of the Baskervilles villain Stapleton. In this novel, the "giant rat" turns out to be a vicious Malayan tapir.  (ISBN 0-586-20087-8)
 * In The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a 1977 Doctor Who TV serial set in Victorian London, the hero (dressed in deerstalker and accompanied by a medical doctor with a housekeeper known as Mrs. Hudson) confronts a giant rat in the sewers of London.
 * The Holmes-Dracula File is a 1978 novel by Fred Saberhagen in which Holmes and Dracula (who turns out to be related to Holmes) uncover a plot to destroy London with plague-bearing rats, the Giant Rat being a living plague vector.
 * All-Consuming Fire is a 1994 Doctor Who novel by Andy Lane, part of the New Adventures series; in this story, the Doctor joins forces with Holmes and Watson to confront Azathoth, an entity from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The giant rat is portrayed as an alien monster. (ISBN 0-426-20415-8)
 * "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" is the title of a 1996 short story by Paula Volsky, included in Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture. (ISBN 978-0-9655901-7-4)
 * The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a 1997 title in the Hardy Boys juvenile mystery series, written by Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe Hardy investigate the sabotage of a new musical play based on the Sherlock Holmes story.
 * The Giant Rat of Sumatra (1998) is the second novel in the Baker Street Mysteries juvenile series written by Jake and Luke Thoene.
 * The Shadow of the Rat is a 1999 novel by David Stuart Davies that deals with the rat, a breed from Sumatra, as part of a biological warfare plot against London, England using the bubonic plague; the Matilda Briggs is the ship that brings the rats to London. The story line echoes the plot of Edith Meiser's radio play mentioned above.
 * The 2000 - 2001 television drama series Murder Rooms (featuring the adventures of a young Arthur Conan Doyle and his mentor) includes an episode wherein a circus manager mentions having featured the 'Giant Rat of Sumatra' in his freak show. He confesses that the animal was actually a terrier dog with no fur.
 * Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra is a 2002 novel by Alan Vanneman. A cousin of Dr. Watson's late wife travels to Baker Street from Singapore to consult Sherlock Holmes regarding her husband's mysterious suicide; the 'Matilda Briggs' does not appear in this book. (Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0-7867-0956-1)
 * In Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra, a 2010 novel by Paul D. Gilbert, Holmes investigates the mysterious reappearance of the long-overdue clipper 'Matilda Briggs.'
 * In 2014, the first episode of the third series of BBC's Sherlock, "The Empty Hearse", features a "giant rat of Sumatra Road", the code name for a villainous politician, Lord Moran, who is acting as a mole for North Korea and plans to detonate a bomb at an abandoned London Underground station called Sumatra Road.
 * A chapter in the 2003 book The Oriental Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes by Ted Riccardi relates the story of an Indonesian tribe that worships the still extant giant rat of Sumatra.

Other references

 * The giant Sumatran rat is mentioned in the 1972 novel Watership Down in one of the rabbits' allegorical tales.
 * In "A Father's Tale", a 1974 novelet by Sterling E. Lanier, the narrator, Brigadier Ffellowes, recounts his father's story of an encounter in the East Indies with a mysterious man calling himself "Verner", and a race of large, intelligent rats.
 * The entry for giant rats in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual had the header of "Rat, giant (Sumatran)".
 * Braindead, a 1992 film by Peter Jackson, features a Sumatran Rat-monkey, a hybrid that "according to legend" resulted from the rape of tree monkeys by plague rats on Skull Island.
 * The Giant Rat of Sumatra: or Pirates Galore is a 2005 children's novel by Sid Fleischman. It is not a Sherlock Holmes story; the Giant Rat of the title is a pirate ship anchored off the coast of California in 1846.
 * In his 2011 bestseller, The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson tells the story of a book project where prominent academics across the globe are being sent a mysterious self-referential book, Being or Nothingness, commonly referred to as "The Giant Rat of Sumatra".
 * The final issue of the Marvel Comic Before The Fantastic Four: Reed Richards features the title character promising to tell his son Franklin about how he met "The Giant Rat of Sumatra".
 * In The Adventures of Tintin movie, when Captain Haddock first gets woken up by Tintin and Snowy, he yells, “A giant rat of Sumatra!”

title: Giant Rat of Sumatra


text:
Talk:Running with Scissors ("Weird Al" Yankovic album)

Untitled
I noticed what may be an error. It says that Star Wars: Episode 1 was released just two weeks before this album, then it says that the album was released July 29, 1999. Episode 1 was released sometime in May. theres something wrong with this. SECProto 15:43, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

there is also a gaming company that made Go Postal and Go Postal II (with Gary Coleman I believe) called "Running with Scissors".

Page move
This page was moved from "Running With Scissors (album)" to "Running with Scissors (album)" as per the naming convention set out at Naming conventions – Ianblair23 (talk) 02:54, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

 * Every source I find that lists the name of this album has "With" capitalized. Does the wikipedia naming convention trump how the artist has decided to set the capitalization for his work?  I would like to suggest changing the name of this article back to include the capitalized "With".

 * References
 * amazon.com's product page
 * allmusic's entry
 * caption on picture from Yankovic's photo gallery

 * -- Bull  Wiki  Winkle  21:00, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

 * Since no one has responded, I'm going to be bold and just do it. --  Bull  Wiki  Winkle  18:13, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

 * I was unable to complete the move because there is already a (redirect) page at the new location. -- Bull  Wiki  Winkle  18:27, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Johnny Cash
Is "Truck Drivin' Song" really a style parody of Johnny Cash in particular? It seems like it could be seen as a parody of many country artists. Anyone have a source for this? Catamorphism 20:33, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Truck Drivin' Song is very clearly a rough parody of Junior Brown's "Semi-Crazy". He sounds JUST like him while singing this song. Anyone who has heard both will understand.PiccoloNamek 05:09, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

 * I agree.. I just listened to Truck Drivin' Song.. The vocals are almost identical to any Junior Brown song and the song sounds simliar to him.. --Drowse 21:38, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

On Al's website, in the "Ask Al" archives, he sayeth thusly: I got several compilation CDs of Truck Driving Songs when I was doing research for “Truck Drivin’ Song,” and C.W. McCall was definitely one of the people I listened to for inspiration. On the otherhand, I found no references alluding this song to "The Lumberjack Song" as alleged here on the wiki. Once again, a source needs to be cited.--Woerkilt (talk) 05:53, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Negative Horoscope?
Personally, I don't think that the horoscope for Leo in "Your Horoscope For Today" is negative. The horoscope is: "Now is not a good time to photocopy your butt and staple it to your boss's face oh no, eat a bucket of tuna flavored pudding and wash it down with a gallon of strawberry Quick" What's so bad about that? Starhood` 23:59, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Microsoft Connection
I don't know, something about that line screams WP:OR to me. Anyone have a comment? GIGGAS2 | Talk 19:54, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Album Cover
I get the fact that on the cover, Al is "running with scissors", but whats with the right side of the cover? I don't exactly get it.... A Jorb Well Done 00:51, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The album cover is actaully two seperate pictures. The one with Al "running with scissors", is pasted over a close up of a track. It kinda confused me too.--Gen. Quon 17:21, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Germs
I'm nor pretty sure that this is based in I'm afraid of americans by david bowie, i'm sure it's terrible lie by Nine Inch Nails 201.244.228.214 16:54, 10 June 2007 (UTC) "Germs" sounds like 10% NIN and 90% generic 90's pop song. I've been listening to Nails for 15 years and I would have guessed Bowie or Gravity Kills or even Stabbing Westward before "Terrible Lie". Let's see a citation for that Yankovic statement. But even if he did specify a NIN parody, "Germs" sounds too typical to be pinned to Trent Reznor. Style parodies have to include signatures of the source, and Al usually puts those eyebrows on his renditions. But there really isn't anything in Germs that sounds "industrial", let alone NIN. I'd call it a style parody of late nineties emo pop --Woerkilt (talk) 05:53, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yankovic has stated that it is a 100% Nine Inch Nails style-parody. I don't know where "I'm Afraid of Americans" by David Bowie fits into this? I'm changing it.--Gen. Quon 17:20, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I found a quote on Al's "Ask Al" archives in his website, in which he mentions that "Germs" is supposed to be a NIN parody: Yes, "Mr. Popeil" is meant to sound like the B52's. A lot of my originals are intentionally derivative of other groups (although not enough to infringe on their copyright!) Some other very obvious style parodies would be "Dare To Be Stupid" (DEVO), "Dog Eat Dog" (Talking Heads), "You Make Me" (Oingo Boingo), "Everything You Know Is Wrong" (They Might Be Giants) and "Germs" (Nine Inch Nails).

But man, I'm just not hearing it. I find that annoying--Woerkilt (talk) 05:48, 18 March 2009 (UTC).

So this is definitely a parody of "I'm Afraid of Americans". I'm not sure how someone can NOT hear that. Go take a listen if you don't believe me. Yes, the song is by David Bowie, but it features Reznor, hence the fact that Weird Al says it's a NIN tune. ElectroSpecter (talk) 20:38, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid that getting people to listen to it is not sufficient. What Wikipedia needs is verification of this information at a reliable source, otherwise it is counted as original research which isn't allowed. What you need to do is to find somewhere where Al said or wrote that, at a reliable source (a newspaper, magazine, his website, liner notes etc). --  Phantom Steve .alt/ talk \[alternative account of Phantomsteve] 09:46, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Why change it back to "Closer" then? Al never said anything about that. It would at least be less wrong if that were to be taken out. ElectroSpecter (talk) 10:01, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I just reverted it to how it was before your edit. I noticed that the "Closer" bit had been added about 4 weeks ago. However, looking into it, I think you're right to change it to 'style parody' as that seems to be the consensus. If I get a chance, I'll look for a suitable citation for it. --  Phantom Steve .alt/ talk \[alternative account of Phantomsteve] 16:15, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Weirdal scissors.jpg
Image:Weirdal scissors.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 04:41, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Truck Drivin' Song
For the Truck Drivin' Song, it says that he's cross-dressing. But is there any proof of that? It doesn't say so in the lyrics. It could just be a woman with a really manly voice. 76.174.239.95 (talk) 05:11, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Bosstones?
Is there any reference that says "Horoscope" is a direct style parody of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (or any other individual band) as opposed to just a style parody of the third wave ska genre as a whole? Skibz777 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

This appears has sections that appear to be close to original research…
I'm especially thinking about the comments column for the track listing. Surely there are citations that can be made to "Ask Al" and the like? I'm a big fan of Al, and like this album a lot - but this article needs work, with regard to citations. Work and family commitments ( I do 12-hour days plus travelling for work, and have 3 young children!) means that I don't get much time to look up stuff like this, but if I get a chance then I'll do it, but if one of you have an opportunity, this would improve this article immensely!

Regards, --  Phantom Steve .alt/ talk \[alternative account of Phantomsteve] 19:53, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 1 one external link on Running with Scissors ("Weird Al" Yankovic album). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/515506/06251999/yankovic_weird_al.jhtml

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 03:57, 2 April 2016 (UTC)


text:
Substation

Substation can refer to:

 * Electrical substation
 * Traction substation
 * Police substation, a mini police station with limited services
 * The Substation, a Singaporean contemporary arts centre
 * SubStation Alpha, a subtitle file format
 * Substation (video game), a 1995 first-person shooter for the Atari STe

title: Substation


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xin Wang

Xin Wang
Xin Wang was proposed for deletion. This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was a consensus to delete the article.

This page is obvious vanity but is not deletable under current Speedy Deletion guidelines. Delete. ugen64 03:56, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC) This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like other '/delete' pages is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion or on the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.
 * Delete, obviously. Andre ( talk )A| 04:02, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)
 * Looks like it already got deleted. :) Krupo 04:28, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)
 * It was deleted by User:Chuq with the reason given as "vanity." Since that isn't one of the reasons given in Candidates for Speedy Deletion, I've restored it. Now everyone will be able to see why Chuq deleted it. It was almost a speedy under points 2, Test pages and 4, Very short articles with little or no context, but... not really. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 22:33, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * You can delete it again now. :) Chris 01:52, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * It's a shame that proposed criteria #3 for speedy delete isn't an accepted reason yet. Delete. Krupo 17:13, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete, vanity. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 22:23, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Hey. Could be one of the kid's who used to hang around the Chatswood station bus terminal. I saw them there all the time. Non-notable Australian school student. Delete! - Ta bu shi da yu 08:04, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)


text:
Furcula

The furcula (Latin for "little fork"; : furculae) or wishbone is a forked bone found in most birds and some species of non-avian dinosaurs, and is formed by the fusion of the two clavicles. In birds, its primary function is in the strengthening of the thoracic skeleton to withstand the rigors of flight.

In birds
The furcula works as a strut between a bird's shoulders, and articulates to each of the bird's scapulae. In conjunction with the coracoid and the scapula, it forms a unique structure called the triosseal canal, which houses a strong tendon that connects the supracoracoideus muscles to the humerus. This system is responsible for lifting the wings during the recovery stroke.

As the thorax is compressed by the flight muscles during downstroke, the upper ends of the furcula spread apart, expanding by as much as 50% of its resting width, and then contracts. X-ray films of starlings in flight have shown that in addition to strengthening the thorax, the furcula acts like a spring in the pectoral girdle during flight. It expands when the wings are pulled downward and snaps back as they are raised. In this action, the furcula is able to store some of the energy generated by contraction in the breast muscles, expanding the shoulders laterally, and then releasing the energy during upstroke as the furcula snaps back to the normal position. This, in turn, draws the shoulders toward the midline of the body. While the starling has a moderately large and strong furcula for a bird of its size, there are many species where the furcula is completely absent, for instance scrubbirds, some toucans and New World barbets, some owls, some parrots, turacos, and mesites. These birds are still fully capable of flying. They also have close relatives where the furcula is vestigial, reduced to a thin strap of ossified ligament, seemingly purposeless. Other species have evolved the furcula in the opposite direction, so that it has increased in size and become too stiff or massive to act as a spring. In strong flyers like cranes and falcons, the arms of the furcula are large, hollow and quite rigid.

In birds, the furcula also may aid in respiration by helping to pump air through the air sacs.

In other animals
Several groups of theropod dinosaurs have also been found with furculae, including dromaeosaurids, oviraptorids, tyrannosaurids, troodontids, coelophysids and allosauroids.

Seeing the occurrence in diplodocid dinosaurs of interclavicles, Tschopp and Mateus (2013) proposed that the furcula is a transformed and divided interclavicle, rather than a fused clavicle.

In folklore
Superstitions surrounding divination by means of a goose's wishbone go back to at least the Late Medieval Period. Johannes Hartlieb in 1455 recorded the divination of weather by means of a goose's wishbone, "When the goose has been eaten on St. Martin's Day or Night, the oldest and most sagacious keeps the breast-bone and allowing it to dry until the morning examines it all around, in front, behind and in the middle. Thereby they divine whether the winter will be severe or mild, dry or wet, and are so confident in their prediction that they will wager their goods and chattels on its accuracy.", and of a military officer: "This valiant man, this Christian Captain drew forth out of his doublet that heretical object of superstition, the goose-bone, and showed me that after Candlemas an exceeding severe frost should occur, and could not fail." The Captain also said, "Teutonic knights in Prussia waged all their wars by the goose-bone; and as the goose-bone predicted so did they order their two campaigns, one in summer and one in winter."

The custom of two persons pulling on the bone with the one receiving the larger part making a wish developed in the early 17th century. In some family traditions, the one receiving the smaller part made the wish. At that time, the name of the bone was a merrythought. The name wishbone in reference to this custom is recorded from 1860.

title: Furcula


text:
Ursula Franklin

Ursula Martius Franklin (16 September 1921 – 22 July 2016) was a Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. In 2012, she was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, as well as Ursula Franklin Street on the University of Toronto campus, have been named in her honor.

For Franklin, technology was much more than machines, gadgets or electronic transmitters. It was a comprehensive system that includes methods, procedures, organization, "and most of all, a mindset". She distinguished between holistic technologies used by craft workers or artisans and prescriptive ones associated with a division of labour in large-scale production. Holistic technologies allow artisans to control their own work from start to finish. Prescriptive technologies organize work as a sequence of steps requiring supervision by bosses or managers. Franklin argued that the dominance of prescriptive technologies in modern society discourages critical thinking and promotes "a culture of compliance".

For some, Franklin belongs in the intellectual tradition of Harold Innis and Jacques Ellul who warn about technology's tendency to suppress freedom and endanger civilization. Franklin herself acknowledged her debt to Ellul as well as to several other thinkers including Lewis Mumford, C. B. Macpherson, E. F. Schumacher, and Vandana Shiva. She recognized that this list had few women. In addition to the philosophy of technology, she believed that science was "severely impoverished because women are discouraged from taking part in the exploration of knowledge".

Early life
Ursula Maria Martius was born in Munich, Germany on 16 September 1921. Her mother Ilse Maria Martius (née Sperling) was Jewish and an art historian and her father, Albrecht Martius, an ethnographer, came from an old German Protestant family. Franklin once stated that her father was an "Africanist." Because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, her parents tried to send their only child to school in Britain when World War II broke out, but the British refused to issue a student visa to anyone under 18. Ursula studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis. Her parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings. The family survived The Holocaust and was reunited in Berlin after the war.

Academic career
Franklin decided to study science because she went to school during a time when the teaching of history was censored. "I remember a real subversive pleasure," she told an interviewer many years later, "that there was no word of authority that could change either the laws of physics or the conduct of mathematics." In 1948, Franklin received her PhD in experimental physics at the Technical University of Berlin. She began to look for opportunities to leave Germany after realizing there was no place there for someone fundamentally opposed to militarism and oppression. Franklin moved to Canada after being offered the Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1949. She then worked for 15 years (from 1952 to 1967) as first a research fellow and then as a senior research scientist at the Ontario Research Foundation. In 1967, Franklin became a researcher and associate professor at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science University of Toronto's Faculty of Engineering where she was an expert in metallurgy and materials science. She was promoted to full professor in 1973 and was given the designation of University Professor in 1984, becoming the first female professor to receive the university's highest honour. She was appointed professor emerita in 1987, a title she retained until her death. She served as director of the university's Museum Studies Program from 1987 to 1989, was named a Fellow of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1988, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989.

Scientific research
Franklin was a pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to archaeology. She worked for example, on the dating of prehistoric bronze, copper and ceramic artifacts. One small example of her work in this field regards what was a standing question on the nature of shiny black Chinese mirrors found in high quantities in ancient tombs. Franklin's use of microscopic, etching, electron microprobe and x-ray fluorescence analyses produced evidence that what was thought by some to be a corrosive effect was in fact present in these ancient mirrors (and weapons) at their inception, in dark iron oxides intentionally added near the objects' surfaces. Franklin additionally pulled from historic and literary accounts of black mirrors in Chinese literature to support these findings. Franklin's expertise was also instrumental to dating glass; she guided a study on the remains of blue glass beads in North America remaining from early trade relationships between American Indian tribes and Europe.

In the early 1960s Franklin was one of a number of scientists who participated in the Baby Tooth Survey, a project founded by Eric and Louise Reiss along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, which investigated levels of strontium-90—a radioactive isotope in fallout from nuclear weapons testing—in children's teeth. This research contributed to the cessation of atmospheric weapons testing. Franklin published more than a hundred scientific papers and contributions to books on the structure and properties of metals and alloys as well as on the history and social effects of technology.

As a member of the Science Council of Canada during the 1970s, Franklin chaired an influential study on conserving resources and protecting nature. The study's 1977 report, Canada as a Conserver Society, recommended a wide range of steps aimed at reducing wasteful consumption and the environmental degradation that goes with it. The work on that study helped shape Franklin's ideas about the complexities of modern technological society.

Activism
Franklin was also active in the Voice of Women (VOW), now the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, one of Canada's leading social advocacy organizations. In 1968, she and VOW national president Muriel Duckworth presented a brief to a House of Commons committee asserting that Canada and the United States had entered into military trade agreements without adequate public debate. They argued that these commercial arrangements made it difficult for Canada to adopt independent foreign policy positions such as calling for an immediate U.S. military withdrawal from South Vietnam. In 1969, Franklin and Duckworth called on a committee of the Canadian Senate to recommend that Canada discontinue its chemical and biological weapons research and spend money instead on environmental research and preventive medicine. Franklin was also part of a 1969 VOW delegation that urged the federal government to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and establish a special agency to oversee Canadian disarmament.

In the 1980s, Franklin participated in an organized campaign to win the right for conscientious objectors to redirect part of their income taxes from military uses to peaceful purposes. Her 1987 paper, written to support the campaign, argued that the well-recognized right to refuse military service on grounds of conscience should be extended to include the right to refuse to pay taxes for war preparations. Franklin asserted that the freedom of conscience provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed this form of conscientious objection. Her paper was to be part of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The lower courts had convicted those withholding part of their taxes of violating the Income Tax Act. In 1990 however, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

Following Franklin's retirement, Franklin worked with Phyllis Grosskurth, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cicely Watson, and their lawyer Mary Eberts to file a class action lawsuit against the University of Toronto claiming it had been unjustly enriched by paying women faculty less than comparably qualified men. In 2002, the lawsuit was settled when the university acknowledged that many of its female professors had suffered from gender barriers and pay discrimination during their careers. As a result, about 60 retired women faculty received a pay equity settlement intended to compensate them for the lower salaries and pensions they had received.

Franklin continued to have a strong association with the University of Toronto's Massey College as a continuing senior fellow and senior resident. Her many activities include encouraging young women to pursue careers in science, promoting peace and social justice, and speaking and writing about the social effects of science and technology. Many of her articles and speeches on pacifism, feminism, technology and teaching are collected in The Ursula Franklin Reader published in 2006. Franklin is also the author of The Real World of Technology which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures broadcast on CBC Radio.

In a piece of writing entitled "Letter to a Graduate Student," Franklin encouraged the physics career of a student "Marcia," who is devoted to feminism yet interested in physics and unsure of how to integrate the two. In the letter Franklin extolls the merits of colleague Maggie Benston, whose contributions to feminist thought and pedagogy, Franklin stated, issued from her integrated way of being and philosophical foundation in science. She cites as an example Benston's point that the negative side effects of contraceptive pills are considered tolerable according to present medical practices that are permeated by the patriarchal bias of reductionism. New methodologies are radically needed, she stressed, in concord with Benston's writings. Franklin's trust in relying on scientific principles to navigate even daily struggles such as an environment "surrounded by jerks" characterizes the letter's cheerful closing, in which she recommends "taking field notes" and imagining oneself as an "explorer come upon a strange tribe." In the letter Franklin mentions as an interested aside the extremely early state of research in solid organic matter, compared to the very well studied condition of solid state physics. She speculates that the neglect of this research area could have a political component, given its benefits to humans rather than to the military.

Pacifism, feminism and war
Ursula Franklin explains in a prelude to her 2006 collection of papers, interviews and talks that her lifelong interest in structures, in what she terms "the arrangement and interplay of the parts within a whole," has been at the root of most of her activities. Looking back after almost 40 years, she adds, "I can see how I have tried to wrestle with just one fundamental question: 'How can one live and work as a pacifist in the here and now and help to structure a society in which oppression, violence, and wars would diminish and co-operation, equality, and justice would rise?'" As part of the answer, Franklin turns to the metaphor of mapmaking to explain her intellectual journey. "Increasingly I found the maps of conventional wisdom inadequate for my travels," she writes. "I became unwilling and unable to orient my life according to national maps depicting the realms of 'them' and 'us,' of good guys and bad guys, of winning, defeating, and being defeated; in short, all those maps drawn up for travel towards private gain and personal advancement." Franklin concludes that she has been guided in understanding what she calls "the real world" by "the maps of pacifism and feminism".

For her, feminism meant a completely new point of view: "Feminism isn't an employment agency for women; it's an alternative way of ordering the social space, in which women are the prototype rather than men. It is based on collaboration rather than competition. As a youngster, I still remember my feeling of joy that one could look at the earth differently. That's feminism; everything is differently oriented. Seeing the same world with different eyes."

Pacifism and conscience
Central to Franklin's pacifism and her view of life is what she calls "the Quaker vision of the world". Individual conscience is at the heart of that vision. So too, is the need to discern appropriate ways of working for peace in each time and place "rather than relying on a dogma of unvarying rules of conduct". She notes that for more than 300 years, Quakers have opposed war and violence and have objected to military service and conscription. They have worked on reconciliation, peace research and disarmament and in many countries have won the right for conscientious objectors to perform alternative service instead of taking part in war. Franklin remarks that Quaker principles have not changed, but technology has changed the nature of war. In a modern technological society she argues, there is no longer a clear boundary between war and peace. War planning is constant during peacetime and when wars are fought, women and children become targets. Nations no longer depend primarily on conscripting military recruits, but rely on advanced weapons systems that are costly to build or acquire. She writes that the arms race is driven by a "technological imperative" which requires the creation of an enemy as a permanent social institution:

"Modern weapons technologies, including the required research and development, are particularly capital-intensive and costly. The time between initial research and the deployment of weapon systems can be as long as a decade, during which the government must provide financial security and political justification for the project. In other words, the state not only provides the funding but also identifies a credible external enemy who warrants such expenditure."

Franklin points out that the technological nature of war requires states to conscript the resources needed to pay for hi-tech devices designed for destruction. Thus, people opposed to war are forced—through taxation—to pay for war preparations even if it violates their individual conscience.

Peace and social justice
In her 1987 paper, Reflections on Theology and Peace, Ursula Franklin contends that "peace is not the absence of war—peace is the absence of fear." She asserts however, that fear of war and violence is not the only kind of fear that destroys peace. She includes fears arising for example, from economic insecurity, unemployment and the lack of adequate shelter. Franklin points to what she calls "the threat system" which manages people by instilling fear and uncertainty at all levels of society.

For her, social justice is the essential element needed to banish fear and bring peace. Justice means freedom from oppression, but it also implies equality for all. "In God's eyes," she writes, "all creatures have value and are subjects of equal care and love; similarly, in a society of justice and peace, all people matter equally." Franklin suggests that in consumer-oriented societies, war and violence are the inevitable result of an acquisitive lifestyle that rejects caring and social justice. She quotes historian Lewis Mumford's observation that during the rise of capitalism, the sins of greed, gluttony, avarice, envy and luxury became cardinal virtues. Mumford goes on to argue that the "moral change that took place under capitalism can be summed up in the fact that human purposes, human needs, and human limits no longer exercised a directing and restraining influence upon industry: people worked, not to maintain life, but to increase money and power and to minister to the ego that found satisfaction in vast accumulations of money and power." Franklin extends Mumford's argument by pointing to new global realities such as militarized economies dependent on weapons production and national borders increasingly closed to refugees. "Any modern theology of peace," she writes, "must, I think, take into account the worldwide drift towards 'techno-fascism,' the anti-people, anti-justice form of global management and power sharing that is developing around the world."

Globalization as warfare
Franklin argues that the end of the Cold War brought two main changes. First, the threat of war between the United States and Soviet Union was replaced by regional wars among smaller states. Second, war was transposed to what Franklin calls "another key"—the struggle for global commercial and economic dominance. She asserts that this new form of war is now called globalization and its battlefields are global stock and currency markets. This economic warfare defines the enemy as all those who care about the values of community. "Whatever cannot be merely bought and sold," Franklin writes, "whatever cannot be expressed in terms of money and gain-loss transactions stands in the way of the 'market' as enemy territory to be occupied, transformed and conquered." A main strategy in this kind of warfare is the privatization of formerly public domains such as culture, health care, prisons and education to generate private profit. Franklin contends that the new economic warlords or "marketeers" aim, for example, to transform "the ill health or misery of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of capitalism." She argues that marketeers have become occupying forces served by "puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupiers." Franklin has also noted that in democratic politics, the economy is all that seems to matter. "Canada has almost no foreign policy," she says, "but rather is part of an elaborate network of trade agreements."

Franklin recommends that resistance take the form of refusing to speak the language of the occupiers. This language includes such terms as stakeholders, users, health-care providers and consumers of education to refer to teachers and students, doctors, nurses, patients and communities. Franklin also calls for resistance through court challenges and "the creative use of electronic media to bypass the occupation forces' control of information." Finally, Franklin is a strong supporter of citizen politics, a civic movement which focuses on practical solutions to common problems—everything from the absence of peace to homelessness and local traffic congestion. Borrowing a Quaker term, Franklin calls on citizens to engage in scrupling, the process of sitting down together to discuss and clarify common moral and political concerns. She writes that citizen politics does not seek to overthrow existing governments but to improve them "whether those in power like it or not." The movement also tries to defend communities against those intent, in Franklin's words, on "turning the globe into one giant commercial resource base, while denying a decent and appropriate habitat to many of the world's citizens."

War, failure and 9/11
Again and again in her writings, speeches and interviews, Franklin insists that war and its violence are not only morally wrong, but also ineffective, impractical, and costly. During a radio interview broadcast two days after the September 11 attacks in the U.S., Franklin argued that violence nowadays is always unsuccessful even for the powerful who try to use it. "Nothing has been resolved by violence over the past fifty years," Franklin said. "The rational thinking that force does not work, even for the enforcer, is staring us in the face." In a newspaper article published just before the first anniversary of 9/11, Franklin wrote, "It is crucial to recognize that war and war measures are fundamentally dysfunctional instruments of problem-solving. Violence begets more violence, war begets further wars, more enemies and more suffering."

Franklin suggested that it would have been more effective if, instead of launching a War on Terrorism, the U.S. had interpreted the attacks as a political earthquake instead of an act of war. She argued that social and political structures are as inherently unstable as geological ones. "Geological fissures and human terrorists are created in a context of forces that can be understood and—at times—mitigated. Neither can be eliminated by bombing."

Franklin asserts that militarism is the ultimate development of hierarchical social structures and threat-based systems. "They all work under the implicit assumption that some people matter much less than others, and that all people are of interest only as long as they are needed to support the system or to justify it." She notes that many prominent advocates for women's rights such as Jane Addams and Sylvia Pankhurst were pacifists. "To me, the struggle for women's rights and the opposition to militarism in all its forms are two sides of the same coin."

When a CBC Radio interviewer suggested to Franklin that her ideas about peace and justice were not connected with what was actually happening in the aftermath of 9/11, she readily agreed. "Yes, you are quite right. They are totally unconnected. I have spent the best part of my life trying to put these thoughts into the stream that makes decisions, and I've been spectacularly unsuccessful. That, I think, is a reflection on my ability in the climate of the time, not on the value of the thoughts."

Technological society
For Franklin, technology is a set of practices in the "here and now" rather than an array of machines or gadgets. It is also a comprehensive system. "Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset." Her definition is similar to the French thinker Jacques Ellul's concept of technique. Like Ellul, Franklin asserts that technological methods dominate the modern world. "Technology has built the house in which we all live," she writes, "today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house." As such, technology is a central element of the here and now. "In the broadest sense of the term, the here and now is our environment, that is, all that is around us—the ever-changing overlay of nature, the built environment, the institutional and social structures within which human activities take place, as well as the activities themselves—'the way things are done around here.'" Franklin sees her studies of technology as an attempt to understand how technological practices affect the advancement of justice and peace.

Holistic and prescriptive technologies
According to Franklin, technology is not a set of neutral tools, methods or practices. She asserts that various categories of technology have markedly different social and political effects. She distinguishes for example, between work-related and control-related technologies. Work-related technologies, such as electric typewriters, are designed to make tasks easier. Computerized word processing makes typing easier still. But when computers are linked into work stations—part of a system—word processing becomes a control-related technology. "Now workers can be timed," Franklin writes, "assignments can be broken up, and the interaction between the operators can be monitored."

Franklin extends the distinction between work and control-related technologies to the larger concept of holistic and prescriptive ones. This enables her to consider the social implications of how work is performed. She writes that holistic technologies are usually associated with craft work. "Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish." Artisans may specialize in a particular kind of product, but they are always in total control of the process of production and each thing they make or create is unique. Prescriptive technologies, on the other hand, break work down into a series of discrete, standardized steps. "Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group of workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step."

Although the division of labour inherent in prescriptive technologies is usually associated with the industrial revolution, Franklin points out that such production methods have been used since ancient times. Chinese bronze casting before 1200 BC for example, required a tightly controlled and closely supervised production process as well as a strict division of labour. Franklin writes that when she studied Chinese bronze casting as a metallurgist, "the extraordinary social meaning of prescriptive technologies dawned on me. I began to understand what they meant, not just in terms of casting bronze but in terms of discipline and planning, of organization and command."

Technology's culture of compliance
Franklin argues that in modern society, control-related and prescriptive technologies are dominant. "When work is organized as a sequence of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves to the organizer, the boss or manager," she writes. "In political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance." For Franklin, workers accustomed to following prescriptive rules become used to seeing external control and internal compliance as normal and necessary. They also come to believe that there is only one prescribed way of performing a wide variety of tasks. "While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing 'it'."

Franklin points out that prescriptive technologies have moved beyond materials production to the realms of administration, government and social services. She argues that tasks that require nurturing or caring for people, in health and education, for example, are best done holistically. Yet such tasks are increasingly coming under the sway of prescriptive technologies based on what Franklin calls a production model. Professor Heather Menzies, an admirer of Franklin, describes for example, how nursing tasks are performed in keeping with preset, computerized checklists which leave little discretionary time for dealing with the unexpected or talking with patients who are lonely or distressed. Franklin herself notes that schools and universities test and promote students based on strict production schedules yet "if there ever was a holistic process, a process that cannot be divided into rigid predetermined steps, it is education."

Technology and power

Franklin rejects the idea that powerful technologies automatically determine the ways in which people live and work. She maintains that the uses of technology are not preordained, but are the result of conscious choices. The dominant prescriptive technologies establish structures of power and control that follow what Franklin sees as male patterns of hierarchy, authoritarianism, competition and exclusion. Female workers are often victims of these patterns. Mechanical sewing machines were introduced in 1851 with the promise that they would liberate women from household drudgery. But when the machines ended up in factory sweatshops to produce cheap clothing, the new technology was used to exploit female workers. "A strictly prescriptive technology with the classic division of labour arose from the introduction of new, supposedly liberating 'domestic' machines," Franklin notes. "In the subsequent evolution of the garment industry, much of the designing, cutting, and assembling began to be automated, often to the complete exclusion of workers." She points to similar examples in other industries. Female operators helped introduce the telephone only to be replaced by automated switchboards after the technology had been successfully established while secretaries struggled to make the early mechanical typewriters function properly, but ended up performing fragmented and increasingly meaningless tasks.

"Many technological systems, when examined for context and overall design, are basically anti-people," Franklin writes. "People are seen as sources of problems while technology is seen as a source of solutions." As a result, people live and work under conditions structured for the well-being of technology even though manufacturers and promoters always present new technologies as liberating. "The dreams of flight, of fast private transportation, of instant communication across continents, and of helpful machines, all stress liberation from hard physical labour at work or drudgery at home." But once technologies are accepted and standardized, they often enslave or displace their users. Franklin argues that work could be made less prescriptive in workplaces that are less rigidly hierarchical if we adopted more holistic practices based on the way women traditionally work in running households for example, or in caring for children.

Communications technologies
Franklin asserts that powerful communications technologies have reshaped political and social realities distancing people from each other and their immediate environments. Radio and television for example, transmit messages instantaneously from afar—messages that are separated from people's experiences in the vicinities where they live and work. Franklin calls such messages pseudorealities. She writes they are based on images that are constructed, staged and selected to create emotional effects and the illusion of "being there" as a participant, not just as an observer. She asserts however, that one-way communications technologies reduce or eliminate reciprocity, the normal give and take of face-to-face communication.

According to Franklin, the selective fragments or pseudorealities that become news stories are produced to attract and hold people's attention by focusing on the unusual over the usual. She acknowledges that no one is forced to watch television or listen to radio; people can explore other channels of communication. But the pseudorealities created by the media are still there "and the world is structured to believe in them." She argues that images from afar have taken over much of our everyday reality like an immensely powerful occupation force. "And somewhere, someone will have to ask, 'How come the right to change our mental environment—to change the constructs of our minds and the sounds around us—seems to have been given away without anybody's consent?'"

Silence and the commons
"Silence," Franklin writes, "possesses striking similarities [to] aspects of life and community, such as unpolluted water, air, or soil, that were once taken as normal and given, but have become special and precious in technologically mediated environments." She argues that the technological ability to separate recorded sound from its source makes the sound as permanent as the Muzak that plays endlessly in public places without anyone's consent. For Franklin, such canned music is a manipulative technology programmed to generate predictable emotional responses and to increase private profit. She compares this destruction of silence to the British enclosure laws which fenced off the commons for private farming.

Franklin maintains that the core of the strength of silence is its openness to unplanned events. Quakers, she writes, worship God in collective silence. "I think that if any one of you attended a Quaker meeting, particularly on a regular basis," she told a 1993 conference on acoustic ecology, "you would find that suddenly, out of the silence, someone will speak about something that had just entered your mind. It's an uncanny thing, but the strength of collective silence is probably one of the most powerful spiritual forces." Franklin advocates defending the human right to public silence—negotiating one music-free elevator for example, or lobbying for quiet rooms in public buildings. She also recommends starting and ending meetings with a few minutes of silence.

Personal life
In 1952, Ursula Franklin married Fred Franklin (1921-2016 ), an engineer of German Jewish ancestry who had been exposed to Quakerism while living in England, where he had been sent to boarding school to escape the Nazis in 1936 and remained until emigrating to Canada in 1948. They had no family in Canada and, after their two children were born, they searched for a spiritual home and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1964. "We were pacifists before we were Quakers," Franklin says, "but it was a very easy transition to Quakerism for us, and it has been a very good home and an extended family for us and our children." Franklin spent her last years in a nursing home with Fred, who survived her. She died on 22 July 2016 at the age of 94.

Donation to Seneca College
In April 2013, Franklin donated her extensive collection of writings devoted to Chinese culture and history to the Confucius Institute at Seneca College in Toronto. The collection included more than 220 texts, books, publications, and journals interpreting Chinese culture and history from the perspective of Western scholars. It also contained some of Franklin's own working papers and files. The collection is stewarded by Seneca Archives and Special Collections, a service of Seneca Libraries.

Donation of personal archive to University of Toronto
Franklin donated records documenting her personal, professional, and public life to the University of Toronto. The collection includes correspondence with colleagues, family, friends and activists as well as copies of over 575 pages of surveillance of Franklin by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She donated her collection of feminist and women's studies books to the UTM library.

Awards and honours
Franklin received numerous awards and honours during her long career. In 1984, she became the first woman at the University of Toronto to be named University Professor, a special title which is the highest honour given by the university. She was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and a Companion of the Order in 1992. She was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 1990. In 1982, she was given the award of merit for the City of Toronto, mainly for her work in neighbourhood planning. She received an honorary membership in the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for women educators in 1985. Two years later, she was given the Elsie Gregory McGill memorial award for her contributions to education, science and technology. In 1989, she received the Wiegand Award which recognizes Canadians who have made significant contributions to the understanding of the human dimensions of science and technology. In 1991, she received a Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Person's Case for advancing the equality of girls and women in Canada. The same year, she received the Sir John William Dawson Medal. She received the 2001 Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in human rights. She has a Toronto high school named after her, Ursula Franklin Academy. In 2004, Franklin was awarded one of Massey College's first Adrienne Clarkson Laureateships, honoring outstanding achievement in public service. She was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 2012. She received honorary degrees from more than a dozen Canadian universities including a Doctor of Science from Queen's University and a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Saint Vincent University, both awarded in 1985.

In March 2020, the Toronto East York Community Council voted unanimously to have Russell Street renamed Ursula Franklin Street.

title: Ursula Franklin


text: Talk:Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses


text:
Lacunar amnesia

Lacunar amnesia is the loss of memory about a specific event. This specific form of amnesia is caused by brain damage in the limbic system which is responsible for our memories and emotions. When the damage occurs it leaves a lacuna, or a gap, in the record of memory within the cortex region of the brain. There is a general belief that certain emotions from the lost memory may be triggered without the recollection of the event.

Characteristics
Daniel Goleman, in his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, defines a lacuna as:

"...the sort of mental apparatus that diversionary schemas represent. A lacuna is, then, the attentional mechanism that creates a defensive gap in awareness. Lacunas, in short, create blind spots."

Lacunar amnesia has also been known to be attributed to alcoholism, drug treatment, and withdrawal in some cases. After using these substances a person may experience a loss of memory of a specific event temporarily or even permanently.

Steven Johnson, (the author of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life) also states that:

"Scientists believe memories are captured and stored by two separate parts of the brain, the hippocampus, the normal seat of memory, and the amygdala, one of the brain's emotional centers. People who, due to hippocampus damage, are incapable of forming long-term memories can still form subconscious memories of traumatic events if their amygdala is intact."This may be related to erasure or reconsolidation of memories. Attempts have been made to remember memories that have been consolidated and reconsolidate them under desired conditions.

According to Alex Chadwick speaking on NPR: "'Some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they're activated. Studies on rats suggest that if you block a crucial chemical process during the execution of a learned behavior - pushing a lever to get food, for instance - the learned behavior disappears. The rat stops remembering. Theoretically, if you could block that chemical reaction in a human brain while triggering a specific memory, you could make a targeted erasure. Think of a dreadful fight with your girlfriend while blocking that chemical reaction, and zap! The memory's gone.'"

This idea of the reconsolidation of memories has also been used in cases of PTSD to lessen or alleviate some of the symptoms associated with the illness.

Criminal cases
This condition is often claimed in the instance of criminal cases. The victim or assailant will insist that they have lost their memory about the event in question, but the remainder of their memory, both anterograde and retrograde, remain intact. There is only one specific memory or recollection of an event that is impaired. This is normally paired or in conjunction with the claim of insanity.

In popular culture
This type of amnesia is used as a plot element in movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento. Both of the amnesiac conditions in these movies represent gaps in the memory instead of long-term or short-term loss. The Caretaker's 2008 album Persistent Repetition of Phrases has the name "Lacunar amnesia" as the title of its opening track.

title: Lacunar amnesia


text:
Decoy (TV series)

Decoy (also titled Policewoman Decoy) is an American crime drama television series created for syndication and initially broadcast from October 14, 1957, to July 7, 1958, with 39 black-and-white 30-minute episodes. The series was the first American police series with a female protagonist. Many Decoy episodes are in the public domain.

Synopsis
The series featured Beverly Garland as Patricia "Casey" Jones, a female undercover police officer in New York City. The undercover nature of Jones's work had her impersonating women in a variety of roles, including gangster's molls, prostitutes, nurses, and singers. Jones did not have a partner for her police work, and episodes revealed little about her personal life, with occasional exceptions of references to a love affair with a police officer who died on duty.

Popularity
Decoy was ranked among the top-10 syndicated programs, not only during its initial release, but also "long after production closed down".

Production
Stuart Rosenberg and Don Medford were directors of Decoy, and Steve Gardner was a writer. The show was filmed by Pyramid Productions, partially on location in New York City. Locations included Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Randalls Island, and the South Bronx. Studio scenes were filmed in the former Biograph Studios in the Bronx.

Production of the show's pilot began on March 28, 1957, taking seven days for completion. In August 1957, trade publication Billboard reported, "the first-run series is off to one of the fastest sales starts in years, particularly with major station purchases." That sales success included a $600,000 prerelease order from five Westinghouse-owned TV stations and four independent stations.

Production of the series ended on May 29, 1958, because producers lacked the funds to continue. Reruns were broadcast for seven years using the title Police Woman.

Guest stars

 * Mason Adams
 * Edward Asner
 * Martin Balsam
 * Barbara Barrie
 * Frank Campanella
 * Joseph Campanella
 * Lonny Chapman
 * Albert Dekker
 * Peter Falk
 * Colleen Dewhurst
 * Betty Garde
 * Vincent Gardenia
 * Bruce Gordon
 * Larry Hagman
 * Don Hastings
 * William Hickey
 * Betty Lou Holland
 * Arch Johnson
 * Diane Ladd
 * Zohra Lampert
 * Al Lewis
 * Joanne Linville
 * Ruth McDevitt
 * Kay Medford
 * Lois Nettleton
 * Phyllis Newman
 * Simon Oakland
 * Tom Pedi
 * Leo Penn
 * Suzanne Pleshette
 * Joanna Roos
 * Norman Rose
 * Stefan Schnabel
 * Frank Silvera
 * Frank Sutton
 * Michael Tolan
 * Betty Walker

DVD releases
In 2017, Film Chest Media Group released a DVD set containing all 39 episodes.

title: Decoy (TV series)


text:
Talk:Tonal language

Sources?
Having gone through the article, which is pretty well written, my only complaint is that there are no sources cited. I'm not questioning the accuracy of the contents, but some citations would be nice. Tom e rtalk 01:51, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

 * I've just added a source - a paper explaining the connection between microcephalin and tonal languages.

--Dugouha 15:30, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Tone (linguistics)
How is this article different from tone (linguistics)? DHN 19:27, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Please see Talk:Tone (linguistics). Tonal languages are a completely different subject from the concept of "phonemic" tone in linguistics, and should be treated separately.  Tom e rtalk  23:16, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
 * If this is so, then this very article states the contrary in its very first sentence: "A tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words". I support a merger of the two articles. LjL (talk) 01:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

tonal vs pitch accented
i thought languages like japanese were pitch accented and not tonal? i thought these were two different things.

 * Yes, they are different things, and the article completely fails to appreciate that. Sanskrit, Lithuanian and Serbocroatian are pitch-accent languages, too.
 * David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 12:38 CET | 2006/3/19

 * I think It´s very strange to list japanese as a tonal language!... May I remove that? -- NIC1138 03:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

 * Hyman (2008) argues, rather convincingly, that there is no real prototype for what "pitch-accent" refers to. Such languages tend to have a rather restricted distribution of tone (occurring in only certain parts of speech or in certain positions), have only one real contrast (H versus unmarked), and occur within langauge families where many other languages are non-tonal. Regardless of whether one thinks of it as "weird" that Japanese is a tone language, evidence shows that it is. Lingboy (talk) 16:40, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

 * That's on my 'to do' list. It's good to know you're on board in case I get an argument about it (as I have at pitch accent). kwami (talk) 19:39, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Limburgs
This article states "the" tonal languages of Europe, but Limburgs is missing here. Which is ironic, because that page links to this one, and tonality is very prevalent in Limburgs. Since I'm not the linguistics expert (just a native speaker of Limburgs) I'd like to leave it up to the main author or others to amend this. SeverityOne 21:54, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Tonal patterns
Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In English, one or more syllables are given an accent, which can consist of a loud stress, a lengthened vowel, and a high pitch, or any combination of these. In tonal languages, the pitch accent must be present, but the others are optional. For example, in Czech and Hungarian, the first syllable of each word is stressed, but any syllable may be lengthened, and pitch is not used. In French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final syllable has high pitch. Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. There is much discussion about how much prominence pitch must have in order to label a language tonal This paragraph doesn't make any sense to me in this context. None of the languages mentioned in it are tonal. It seems to me that the paragraph describes how stress is expressed, as opposed to tone. I suggest to remove it entirely.

 * It doesn't make any sense to me too. Stress is not tone, and if you want to talk about tones in other languages, you should know that pitch is risen at end of question sentence. (I'm not sure, but I bet it is the same in French)

Hausa
In the "Geography of Tonality" section, it says "Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the Semitic languages, which are not, so it apparently acquired it during its history." I would like to point out that it is impossible to have not acquired tonality in its history. A rewording would be appropriate. Zendik 20:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Scottish Gaelic
If this is indeed a tonal language, can someone mention this on the Scottish Gaelic page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Wednesday Island (talk • contribs) 12:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

 * It's not. kwami (talk) 19:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Yucatec?
I'm pretty certain the statements about Yucatec Mayan being a 5-tone language (with contour tones, etc.) are wrong. --Lavintzin 23:54, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
 * It is. Yucatec has high and low tone only.·Maunus· · ƛ · 16:21, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Most tones
Which language is known or believed to possess the most number of tones? Cantonese has nine, and I know there is some tribal language in SW China with 12, but I don't know the name. Besides that, is there a language with more tones? Le Anh-Huy 13:17, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

 * Cantonese has 6 tones. (The 入聲 are not tones, they're checked syllables.) It's not known which language has the most tones, but the main contenders are some of the Kradai languages of China and the Kru languages of Liberia. kwami (talk) 19:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

serious issues with this article
This article has almost too many issues to fix.
 * 1) Confuses tone with pitch accent throughout.
 * 2) Probably because of this, misidentifies a number of languages as tonal which are not (Scottish Gaelic, Lithuanian, others which have been discussed).
 * 3) Lacks citations, quite egregious in a scientific article.
 * 4) Editorializes excessively ("However, the undermarking of tonality is just part of the inadequacy of all spelling systems","The tones of Lithuanian are believed to be especially authentic...", etc.)
 * 5) Makes unencyclopedic claims, like the rather pedagogical section "Pronouncing tonality"
 * 6) Much of what is found in this article actually belongs in Tone (linguistics), but much of what one would expect to find in an article entitled Tonal language, such as a list of Tonal language or a broad discussion of the synchronic and diachronic categories of tonal languages is absent or given short shrift.

I'll try to fix a lot of these, but don't have time now. Derek Balsam(talk) 02:09, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
 * By the way, I'm well aware that (for example) Norwegian may be regarded as either pitch-accented or tonal or both depending on one's point of view. But I'm being generous about this; Norwegian can be considered tonal, while Scottish Gaelic isn't since it doesn't have contrastive tone.Derek Balsam(talk) 02:16, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

 * I agree that this article is very unencyclopedic, i'll also point out that it has confused me throughly and seems to include alot of speculation. any help you can give this article would be appreciated. Chris June 11 2007 3:30 (EST)

 * Pitch accent has been argued to be nothing more than a simple or limited tone system, per Lingboy's comments above. kwami (talk) 19:44, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Genes and Tonality
Flagged "More recently, a statistical analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh highlighted a correlation between the genes that cause microcephaly and the tonality of language" with a fact check. Probably means a correlation with the named gene and being a member of an ethnic group whose language is tonal. Probably specious in any case. Lycurgus 05:00, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

 * Yes, specious. kwami (talk) 19:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

English examples?
Surely somewhere in our vast and complex languange there must be some examples of something like this in english? I still don't understand what this is all about. —Preceding unsigned comment added by IceDragon64 (talk • contribs) 15:54, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

... In New Zealand, a rising inflection, or making the last syllable in a sentance a high pitch, makes the sentance a question. (I'm using informal langugage, and stereotyping, but I'm a native kiwi so I know this well). For instance with "We're going to the city", if you made "ty" stressed and in a high pitch, that would be assumed a question ("[are] we going to the city?". If you didn't have a typical New Zealand accent, however, the usage of a high pitch would be confusing, however. ) ~SigurdMagnusson

 * Sometimes acronyms are given a high pitch to distinguish them from homophonous words. That might be argued to be contrastive intonation, though. kwami (talk) 19:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

two diverse tone languages
There should be something that is not uniform about tone languages. Take, for example, Chenese and Hausa (Hausa is an African language). When I heard Hausa, I did not recognize it as a tone language, but I could recognize Chinese as a tone language very very easily. What makes these two tone languages? I'm not disputing it; I'm just saying that there must be something uniform that makes it possible for a person to distinguish tone languages from nontone languages. learnportuguese (talk) 21:45, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Some tone languages (like Hausa) have few tones and when the tones are few it becomes difficult for speakers of non-tonal languages to distinguish them from normal pitch changes in a non-tonal language. Tone languages with many tones like chinese get a much more vivid speech melody which I is easilier recognizable as being dude to phonological tonality. That is my understanding anyway. ·Maunus· · ƛ · 22:01, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

French, a tonal language?
The article mentions that, to some extent, French "possesses elements of tonality". Er... where do you see/hear that? Transcendency (talk) 00:03, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

 * It doesn't. kwami (talk) 19:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

title: Talk:Tonal language


text:
Tokugawa Tadanaga

Tokugawa Tadanaga (徳川 忠長) was a Japanese daimyō of the early Edo period. The son of the second shōgun Tokugawa Hidetada, his elder brother was the third shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu.

Life
Often called Suruga Dainagon (the major counsellor of Suruga), Tadanaga was born in 1606. His birth name was Kunichiyo (国千代). The date of his birth is uncertain, and is variously given as May 7, June 1, and December 3. Blessed with military and intellectual prowess and a generosity of spirit, he received support from his mother, Oeyo (or Sūgen'in), who favored him over her other son Takechiyo (the future Iemitsu) to become the third shogun. Just after the death of their father shogun Hidetada, Iemitsu accused his brother, already under house arrest in Kōfu, of insanity, stripped him of all possessions and offices, leaving him to commit seppuku.

It is also said that Tadanaga's face was similar to that of his cousin Toyotomi Hideyori and for that reason Ieyasu hated and feared Tadanaga.

He married Masako (1614–90) later Shōkō-in, the daughter of Oda Nobuyoshi (1584–1626), who was the grandson of Oda Nobunaga through Oda Nobukatsu.

Events

 * 1606: Born to Hidetada and Sūgen'in
 * 1624: Appointed daimyō of Suruga, Tōtōmi, and Kai Provinces, with a rating of 550,000 koku (see Kōfu Domain)
 * 1626: Kills a retainer and commits other acts of violence
 * 1631: Placed under house arrest in Kōfu
 * 1632: Stripped of office
 * 1634: Commits seppuku under arrest in Takasaki

title: Tokugawa Tadanaga


text:
Category:Crockett County, Tennessee

Crockett County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. Its county seat is Alamo

title: Category:Crockett County, Tennessee


text: User talk:67.70.82.113

title: User talk:67.70.82.113