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Tsuyoshi Kikuchi

Tsuyoshi Kikuchi (菊地 毅) (born November 21, 1964) is a Japanese retired professional wrestler. He is best known for All Japan Pro Wrestling and Pro Wrestling NOAH. Kikuchi idolized and patterned his style after the Dynamite Kid.

All Japan Pro Wrestling (1988–2000)
Kikuchi turned pro on February 26, 1988, his debut was against veteran wrestler Mitsuo Momota. Like many, Kikuchi spent his early years wrestling in opening and low midcard matches, paying his dues. By late 1990, Kikuchi began moving up the card and before long was becoming a Jr. Title contender. His first title shot was on July 12, 1990, when he challenged Masanobu Fuchi for the World Junior Heavyweight Championship but he came up short. He challenged for the title four more times between January 26, 1991, to February 28, 1993, coming up short each time. By 1991, Kikuchi also began teaming with future legend: Kenta Kobashi. The two first received a shot at the vacated All Asia Tag Team Championship on April 6, 1991, against The British Bruisers but lost. A few months later on June 1, 1991, they received another shot against then-champions Doug Furnas and Dan Kroffat but failed to win the titles. Kikuchi and Kobashi also entered the 1991 World's Strongest Tag Determination League but finished 11th place with 4 points.

On May 25, 1992, Kikuchi and Kobashi again challenge Furnas and Kroffat for the All Asia Tag Team Titles and this time was victorious as Kikuchi won his first title. Along with the title win, the match won numerous honors as the Wrestling Observer Newsletter gave it 5 Stars and named it the 1992 Match of the Year. During the title reign, Kikuchi also enjoyed success in the Junior Division by winning the yearly January 3 Junior Heavyweight Korakuen Hall Battle Royal on January 3, 1993 and also won a Junior Heavyweight Tournament on January 31, 1993. After a year as champions, Kikuchi and Kobashi lost the titles on June 2, 1993, to The Patriot and The Eagle. Following the title loss, Kikuchi and Kobashi broke up with Kobashi forming a successful team with Mitsuharu Misawa while Kikuchi remained in the midcard.

From 1993 to 1996, Kikuchi largely remained in the midcard with little to no direction, and continued to receive shots at the Jr. title and All Asia Tag titles but continually failed to win either. On July 24, 1996, Kikuchi defeated Fuchi to finally win the World Junior Heavyweight Championship. He went on to make two successful title defenses and hold the title throughout the remainder of 1996 before eventually losing the title to Yoshinari Ogawa on January 15, 1997.

After losing the title, Kikuchi's spent the remainder of his All Japan tenure wrestling in opening and low card matches as he wrestled young up and comers or aging legends. Also with the exception of a failed Jr. Heavyweight title shot on January 22, 2000, he, for the most part, was out of the title loop. In June 2000, Kikuchi left All Japan with the majority of the native roster and joined Misawa's new promotion:Pro Wrestling NOAH.

Pro Wrestling Noah (2000–2010)
Kikuchi debuted for Noah at their first show on August 5, 2000. For the most part, his time in NOAH was like the end of his All Japan tenure as he spent it in opening matches and in the low midcard. Despite this, Kikuchi did occasionally receive title shots as he entered a tournament to crown the first GHC Junior Heavyweight Champion in 2001 making all the way to the semi-finals before losing to eventual winner: Yoshinobu Kanemaru. In 2002, Kikuchi began teaming with Kanemaru as the two invaded New Japan Pro-Wrestling and defeated Jyushin Thunder Liger and Minoru Tanaka to win the IWGP Junior Tag Team Championship. The two held onto the title for four months and made four successful title defenses before eventually losing the title to Liger and Koji Kanemoto on January 26, 2003.

After losing the titles, Kikuchi once again returned to opening matches, over the next few years, he occasionally got title shots at the GHC Jr. Title, the GHC Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship and GHC Openweight Hardcore Championship but came up short each time. In 2010, Kikuchi along with a few others were released from Noah.

Freelance (2010–2021)
After leaving Noah, Kikuchi became a freelancer doing shows for All Japan and Dragon Gate. On September 20, 2010, Kikuchi challenged Kaz Hayashi for the World Junior Heavyweight Championship but lost. In November, Kikuchi returned to All Japan to participate in the 2010 World's Strongest Tag Determination League teaming up with Tamon Honda. On January 3, 2011, Kikuchi and Honda challenged Seiya Sanada and Manabu Soya for the All Asia Tag Team Championship but lost. In January 2011, Kikuchi also debuted in DDT. In the spring, Kikuchi returned to New Japan for their NEVER brand by taking part in the Road to the Super Juniors tournament where the two winners qualified for the 2011 Best of the Super Juniors. On April 7, Kikuchi defeated Ken Ohka in the first round. Then on April 8, he defeated Kazuhiro Tamura in the semifinals, but lost in the finals later that night to Daisuke Sasaki. In April, Kikuchi returned to All Japan to take part in the 2011 Jr. Tag League teaming with Masanobu Fuchi.

He defeated Craig Classic for the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship on January 1, 2012, at the Korakuen Hall in a Zero1 show. On February 1, 2012, he became a double champion, teaming with Takuya Sugawara, and defeating Ikuto Hidaka and Takafumi Ito to win the NWA International Lightweight Tag Team Championship. However, Kikuchi lost the title to his tag-team partner Sugawara on March 2 at 11th Anniversary show. Shortly thereafter, Kikuchi and Sugawara were stripped of the NWA International Lightweight Tag Team titles.

On August 11, 2017, Kikuchi took part in a mini-tournament for the new WEW Junior Heavyweight Championship for Pro Wrestling A-Team. He defeated Takumi Sakurai to qualify for the four-way elimination-style tournament final, in which he defeated Nobutaka Moribe, Masamune, and HASEGAWA, to win the tournament and title, to become the inaugural champion.

Kikuchi had his retirement on May 3, 2021, losing to Koji Kanemoto.

Championships and accomplishments

 * All Japan Pro Wrestling
 * All Asia Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Kenta Kobashi
 * World Junior Heavyweight Championship (1 time)
 * Junior Heavyweight Tournament (1993)
 * January 3 Korakuen Hall Junior Heavyweight Battle Royal (1993)
 * World's Strongest Tag Determination League Fresh Award (1991) – with Kenta Kobashi

 * Apache Army
 * Apache Opendivision Championship (1 time)

 * Dramatic Dream Team
 * Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship (2 times)

 * New Japan Pro-Wrestling
 * IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Yoshinobu Kanemaru

 * Pro Wrestling A-Team
 * WEW Junior Heavyweight Championship (1 time)

 * Pro Wrestling Zero1
 * NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship (Zero1 version) (1 time)
 * NWA International Lightweight Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Takuya Sugawara

 * Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards
 * Match of the Year (1992) with Kenta Kobashi vs. Doug Furnas and Dan Kroffat, Sendai, May 25

Personal
Kikuchi owns "Kotetsu", a restaurant in Tomiya, Miyagi. It is frequented by wrestlers when in the area and the walls are adorned with wrestler photographs and autographs, pictures from Kikuchi's career, and posters for his upcoming appearances.

title: Tsuyoshi Kikuchi


text:
IBM Deep Thunder

Deep Thunder is a research project by IBM that aims to improve short-term local weather forecasting through the use of high-performance computing. It is part of IBM's Deep Computing initiative that also produced the Deep Blue chess computer.

Deep Thunder is intended to provide local, high-resolution weather predictions customized to weather-sensitive specific business operations. For example, it could be used to predict the wind velocity at an Olympic diving platform, destructive thunderstorms, and combined with other physical models to predict where there will be flooding, damaged power lines and algal blooms. The project is now headquartered at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

History
The Deep Thunder project is headed by Lloyd Treinish, who joined IBM in 1990, after working for 12 years at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The project began in 1995 as an outgrowth of a project designed to help provide accurate weather forecasts for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. In collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, IBM scientists built one of the first parallel processing supercomputers to be used for weather modeling, based on the IBM RS/6000 SP. It was installed at the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Georgia, in 1996, where it ran for several months and produced multiple forecasts daily. After a few years of development, the team set up an implementation in New York City in 2001 to test the project. The group is currently working on establishing the Rio de Janeiro operations center.

The name Deep Thunder arose after the IBM Deep Blue system played and defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May, 1997. In the following November, a journalist used the name Deep Thunder in an article, which stuck with the developers. Current members of Deep Thunder are Lloyd Treinish, Anthony Praino, Campbell Watson and Mukul Tewari.

Technology
Deep Thunder uses a 3D telescoping grid where data from one model feeds into another and is verified with historical data. For example, they start with a global model from NOAA, and as they zoom in the resolution decreases exponentially, down to models with resolutions of 1 kilometer, and sometimes as small as 1 meter. Using this method, IBM can cut down on the amount of processing required. IBM uses many sources of data to feed Deep Thunder, including public satellite sources, and many other private sources, as well as whatever local sensors and data a location, may have.

The Watson computer system will be used to generate the Deep Thunder weather forecasts. Input data will be collected from over 200,000 Weather Underground personal weather stations, weather satellite data, smartphone barometer and data from other sources.

Utility Companies
IBM worked with a North American utility company that has over 90,000 poles, wires, and transformers to develop a prediction service that can pinpoint where incoming storms will bring down trees and power lines. The service can be used to call in the needed number of repair crews and station them near where the damage will occur, drastically decreasing downtime.

Agriculture
Deep Thunder could be used to determine optimal times to plant, irrigate, and harvest crops, based on the dynamic environmental conditions of individual farm locations. Precision agriculture using Deep Thunder could lead to better price points for crops by saving water, allocating labor more effectively, and improving supply chain efficiency. Using these methods of predictive weather farming, crop losses from the weather can be cut by over 25%. The island nation of Brunei is working with Deep Thunder to develop precision weather forecast models to increase rice production.

In The Olympics
Deep Thunder was used during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games to accurately predict that there would be no rain during the closing ceremony.

The Jefferson Project
The Jefferson Project at Lake George (New York) is a global example of sustained protection of freshwater ecosystems. The project uses Deep Thunder to predict the weather at an unprecedented 333 m resolution, simulating complex airflow patterns over the lake that are crucial to lake currents and nutrient cycling.

New York
New York City was the first city to test a full-scale implementation of Deep Thunder. IBM is experimenting with using a mobile app to distribute location-specific predictions and issue alerts. Data from the app can be used by maintenance crews to determine if wind levels are too high to work, or it could be used to get a weather forecast at a certain address.

Rio de Janeiro
IBM is currently expanding the project to Rio de Janeiro to predict floods, and anticipate where storms might trigger mudslides. The city is collaborating with IBM on a multimillion-dollar plan to improve emergency responsiveness, by providing comprehensive information about rainfall estimates, wind speed and direction, probabilities of landslides and floods to responders. It is expected to be utilized during the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

Dublin, Ireland
The Dublin City Council is working with IBM to help make Dublin, Ireland, the third city in the world to implement the Deep Thunder forecasting model in an attempt to predict and issue warnings about incoming flash floods that are impacting businesses and homeowners.

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

title: IBM Deep Thunder


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Muiris Ó Fithcheallaigh

Muiris Ó Fithcheallaigh, or Maurice O'Fihely, in Latin Mauritius de Portu Hibernicus or Mauritius Hibernicus; c. 1460 – 25 March 1513) was an Irish Franciscan theologian and Archbishop of Tuam.

Life
According to James Lynch, Fihely was a native of Clonfert in Galway, but according to James Ware and Anthony à Wood he was a native of Baltimore, County Cork.

Part of his education was received at the University of Oxford, where he joined the Franciscans. Later he studied at the University of Padua, where he obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity. After his ordination he was appointed professor of philosophy at Padua.

O'Fihely acted for some time as corrector of proofs to two well-known publishers at Venice, Scott and Locatelli — in the early days of printing a task usually entrusted to very learned men— and he was one of the first Irishmen to engage with the new technology of the printing press. O'Fihely was acknowledged as one of the most learned men of his time. In 1506, he was appointed as Archbishop of Tuam and was consecrated at Rome by Pope Julius II.

In 1513, he received a Scholastic Accolade from the Church, styled as Doctor Flos Mundi, and has been the only Irish person to receive one so far.

He did not return to Ireland till 1513, in the meantime attending as Archbishop of Tuam the first two sessions of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512). On leaving for Ireland to take formal possession of his see, O'Fihely procured from the pope an indulgence for all those who would be present at his first Mass in Tuam. However, he was destined not to reach Tuam, for he fell ill in Galway and died there in the Franciscan convent.

Works
He was a student of the works of Duns Scotus and wrote a commentary on them which was printed at Venice about 1514.

title: Muiris Ó Fithcheallaigh


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Gerald Gazdar

Gerald James Michael Gazdar, FBA (born 24 February 1950) is a British linguist and computer scientist.

Education
He was educated at Heath Mount School, Bradfield College, the University of East Anglia (BA, 1970) and the University of Reading (MA, PhD).

Career and research
Gazdar was appointed a lecturer at the University of Sussex in 1975, and became Professor of Computational Linguistics there in 1985. He retired in 2002.

Gazdar defined Linear Indexed Grammars and pioneered, along with his colleagues Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum and Ivan Sag, the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammars.

title: Gerald Gazdar


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text:
Symphony No. 2 (Brahms)

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was composed by Johannes Brahms in the summer of 1877, during a visit to Pörtschach am Wörthersee, a town in the Austrian province of Carinthia. Its composition was brief in comparison with the 21 years it took him to complete his First Symphony.

The cheery and almost pastoral mood of the symphony often invites comparison with Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, but, perhaps mischievously, Brahms wrote to his publisher on 22 November 1877 that the symphony "is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad, and the score must come out in mourning."

The premiere was given in Vienna on 30 December 1877 by the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Hans Richter; Walter Frisch notes that it had originally been scheduled for 9 December, but "in one of those little ironies of music history, it had to be postponed [because] the players were so preoccupied with learning Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner." A typical performance lasts between 40 and 50 minutes.

Instrumentation
The symphony is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

Movements
In the Second Symphony, Brahms preserved the structural principles of the classical symphony, in which two lively outer movements frame a slow second movement followed by a short scherzo:

1. Allegro non troppo (D major)

2. Adagio non troppo (B major)

3. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino) (G major)

4. Allegro con spirito (D major)

I. Allegro non troppo

The cellos and double-basses start the first-movement sonata form in a tranquil mood by introducing the first phrase of the principal theme, which is continued by the horns. The woodwinds develop the section and other instruments join in gradually progressing to a full-bodied forte (at bar 58). At bar 82, the violas and cellos introduce the movement's second "Lullaby" theme in F-sharp minor, which eventually moves to A major. After a development section based mostly on motives of the principal theme group, the recapitulation begins at bar 302, with the second theme returning at bar 350. Towards the conclusion of the movement, Brahms marked bar 497 as in tempo, sempre tranquillo, and it is this mood which pervades the remainder of the movement as it closes in the home key of D major.

The second theme's opening bars are recognizable for their passing resemblance to Wiegenlied, Op. 49, the tune commonly referred to as "Brahms's Lullaby". It is introduced at bar 82 and is continually brought back, reshaped and changed both rhythmically and harmonically.

II. Adagio non troppo

This movement is characterised by the use of developing variation. A brooding theme introduced by the cellos from bars 1 to 12, with a counter-melody in the bassoons, begins the second movement. A second theme, marked L'istesso tempo, ma grazioso, appears in bar 33. After a brief development section, the recapitulation of the first theme (the second theme is absent) is highly modified. The movement then finishes with a coda-like section in which the main theme is reintroduced in the end.

III. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino)

The third movement minuet opens with pizzicato cellos accompanying a lilting oboe melody in G major. A contrasting section in time marked Presto ma non assai begins in the strings, and this theme is soon taken over by the full orchestra (minus trumpets). Bar 107 returns to the main tempo and gentle mood, but the idyll setting is again disrupted in bar 126 when the earlier Presto marking makes a re-entry, this time in a variation. Brahms yet again diverts the movement back into its principal tempo (bar 194) and thereafter to its peaceful close.

The third movement contains very light articulated sections, very similar in character to the Slavonic Dances of Brahms' contemporary, Dvořák. This lighter element provides a contrast to the previous two movements.

IV. Allegro con spirito

Mysterious sotto voce strings open the final Allegro con spirito, again in sonata form. The full orchestra suddenly announces the arrival of the main theme, unveiling "...the blazing sunrise of the most athletic and ebulliently festive movement Brahms ever wrote". As the initial excitement fades, violins introduce a new subject in A major marked largamente (to be played broadly). The wind instruments repeat this until it develops into a climax. Bar 155 of the movement repeats the symphony's first subject again, but instead of the joyful outburst heard earlier, Brahms introduces the movement's development section. A mid-movement tranquillo section (bar 206, and reappearing in the coda) elaborates earlier material and slows down the movement to allow a buildup of energy into the recapitulation. The first theme comes in again (bar 244) and the familiar orchestral forte is played. The second theme also reappears in the tonic key. Towards the end of the symphony, descending chords and a mazy run of notes by various instruments of the orchestra (bars 395 to 412) sound out the second theme again but this time drowned out in a blaze of brass instruments as the symphony ends in a triumphant mood.

title: Symphony No. 2 (Brahms)


text:
Gilberto Simoni

Gilberto Simoni (born 25 August 1971 in Palù di Giovo, Trentino) is an Italian former professional road bicycle racer, most recently for. Simoni won the Giro d'Italia cycling race twice: once in 2001 and again in 2003. In 2002 he tested positive for cocaine and was withdrawn from the race by his Saeco team; he was later cleared of any doping violation by the Italian Cycling Federation. Aside from his withdrawal in 2002, he finished on the podium in every other Giro between 1999 and 2006.

Simoni is a native of Palu di Giovo, and was considered a climbing specialist. His final race as a professional road cyclist was the 2010 Giro d'Italia, which he finished in 69th place overall, 2:40:14 behind other two-time winner, Ivan Basso.

Early career
Simoni was born in Palù di Giovo, in Trentino, and began competing as an amateur with the goal of someday winning the Giro d'Italia. Simoni confirmed his potential in 1993, when he won both the amateur version of the Giro d'Italia (known as the Baby Giro) and the Italian Road Cycling Championship. Prior to his retirement in 2010, Simoni would reveal to the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport that the Giro was the one race that attracted him to cycling and which motivated him as a professional. "It was the Giro that brought me to cycling when I was a child", he said. "It triggered my dreams."

Simoni turned professional in 1994 with the team, but suffered through an inauspicious rookie season, having to cope with the deaths of both his father and older brother. It was only three years later in 1997 that Simoni won his first professional race, a stage of the Giro del Trentino, while riding for the team of sports director Giancarlo Ferretti.

1998 was another disappointing season for Simoni, and his results sheet was barren after a year spent with the team. He briefly quit cycling and worked as a bicycle mechanic for 1984 Giro d'Italia winner Francesco Moser. However, a resurgent Simoni joined the team in 1999 and finished a surprising third on the general classification of that year's Giro d'Italia. In a race that saw another mercurial Italian climber thrown off the Giro for doping (Marco Pantani), Simoni was criticized in some sectors of the press for claiming a podium finish without having earned the placing. But he proved his critics wrong by winning a stage in the Tour de Suisse and again finishing on the final podium.

First Giro d'Italia victory, 2001
The 2000 season started well for Simoni: he'd transferred to the top-ranked  team of two-time Giro d'Italia winner Giuseppe Saronni and went on to again finish on the podium of the Giro d'Italia. Simoni cemented his reputation as a climbing specialist by winning the dramatic Alto de El Angliru stage of that year's Vuelta a España.

Simoni started the 2001 Giro d'Italia as Lampre's undisputed leader and hope for the general classification, which he won with a comfortable margin.

Second Giro d'Italia victory, 2003
Following his Giro victory Simoni moved to the team with the goal of repeating his Giro success of the previous year. However, traces of cocaine were found in his blood and he was disqualified despite his protestations of innocence. It was later determined that the cocaine in his blood came from candies that his aunt had bought for him from Peru.

In 2003, the Saeco team came to the Giro d'Italia with the sole purpose of supporting Simoni. After competing with a resurgent Stefano Garzelli, Yaroslav Popovych and Marco Pantani in the high mountains in a hailstorm, Simoni achieved his second Giro d'Italia victory. His pursuit was documented in the film The Quest.

Following his successful performance in the Giro, he set his aims on the Tour de France and in several interviews challenged the incumbent Lance Armstrong to a battle in the mountains. His performance was lacking, although he was able to gain a stage win.

Later career
Simoni failed to defend his title in the 2004 Giro d'Italia with the emergence of his teammate Damiano Cunego. After some public dispute, Simoni reconciled with Cunego and agreed to continue on the same team, which became. In the 2005 Giro d'Italia the team took advantage of the publicity and played up the rivalry between Simoni and Cunego, boasting their strength for the Giro. The early part of the Giro saw Cunego lose significant time in the early mountain stages – he was later diagnosed with Epstein-Barr viral infection – firmly establishing Simoni as the team leader for the Giro. However, Simoni failed to dislodge Paolo Savoldelli in the last mountain stage, even with an epic performance which saw him and Danilo Di Luca work together to gain time on Savoldelli. Suffering from cramps, he also failed to win that stage.

Simoni was slated to join Giancarlo Ferretti's Sony-Ericsson team, which was supposed to be the continuation of the Fassa Bortolo team. However, it later turned out that Ferretti had fallen victim to a fraud, and the team did not in fact exist. After a strong performance in which he finished second in the Giro di Lombardia (which was won by Cunego in the previous edition), Simoni signed a contract to join.

On the urging of his frame sponsor, Scott USA, Simoni began competing in mountain bike marathon events during the 2006 off-season for road bicycle racing. He quickly garnered impressive results by winning the Italian National Championship for Mountain Bike Marathon.

Simoni was embroiled in public row with fellow Italian Ivan Basso of. Simoni alleged that Basso offered him a stage win in the 2006 Giro d'Italia into Aprica five kilometers from the finish after the two cyclists had broken away from the main field. Basso has denied any such offer, and went on to win the stage by 77 seconds. Simoni retracted his accusations several days later.

In dramatic fashion, with Leonardo Piepoli's support he won the epic stage 17 to Monte Zoncolan in the 2007 Giro d'Italia.

After a lengthy search for a team for 2010, that included negotiations with his previous team as well as with  and, Simoni re-joined  his former Lampre squadra, rechristened as. The 2010 Giro d'Italia was the final race of his career. He finished 69th overall, 2:40:14 behind two-time winner and compatriot Ivan Basso. Simoni was characteristically frank about his last bid for glory, which poignantly saw him beaten in the sprint for the Cima Coppi KOM prize by the Swiss Johann Tschopp, at the summit of the Passo di Gavia in the penultimate Giro stage. Mobbed at the finish line by Italian media looking for one final quote from a rider who rarely hesitated to speak his mind, Simoni mused:

"Perhaps if I'd played more of a bluffing game, I might have had something left for the finish but never mind. That's bike racing. I'm just glad the Giro is over. I've had enough now."

The Trentinese explained that his curtain call did not go as planned, though he still claimed to have enjoyed closing-out his storied career by finishing a three-week Grand Tour, one of the most challenging events for an endurance road cyclist:

"I've known it was time to retire for awhile [sic] It's been on my mind for the last two years. I knew this Giro was my last race. I've been a professional for 17 years, and it really is time to quit. I honestly thought I'd go better than I did in this Giro. I knew I couldn't win it like in 2003 or 2007 (Monte Zoncolan stage), but I didn't expect to suffer so much and for so long during the three weeks. It's been a strange goodbye. I've ridden the Giro almost as an outsider, without the pressure to win and do well. It's hurt but I've been able to enjoy it. Before the finish today, the whole thing flashed before my eyes."

Retirement
Cycling columnist Samuel Abt of the International Herald Tribune described Simoni as "an inspiration to all retirees who wonder what they will do now with so much time on their hands." He pointed out that "instead of taking up golf or lurking at home and watching television", the first thing Simoni did "after saying goodbye to the workplace [was] rejoin it."

But after finally calling it quits on a professional career that included nearly 600 classified results in UCI-sanctioned events, Simoni was vague concerning his plans for his life after cycling, though he hinted at not being in a rush or under any economic or psychological pressure to immediately engage in a new venture. Prior to the 2010 Giro's final stage, Simoni declared his intention to slow down the pace of decision-making in his life: "I don't want to think about my future just yet," he said. "I won't need to rush things anymore. I won't need to race against time. I can take my time and enjoy the rest of my life."

Major results

 * 1989
 * 1st Giro della Lunigiana

 * 1991
 * 1st Giro della Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia
 * 1st Trofeo Alcide Degasperi
 * 3rd Gran Premio Palio del Recioto

 * 1992
 * 2nd Piccolo Giro di Lombardia

 * 1993
 * 1st Jersey pink.svg Overall Girobio
 * 1st Giro della Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia

 * 1994
 * 10th Subida a Urkiola

 * 1995
 * 4th Subida a Urkiola

 * 1997
 * 7th Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 1st Stage 1
 * 8th Overall Tour de Romandie

 * 1998
 * 6th Giro di Lombardia

 * 1999
 * 2nd Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 3rd Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 3rd Overall Tour de Suisse
 * 1st Stage 4
 * 6th Giro di Toscana
 * 6th Coppa Placci

 * 2000
 * 1st Giro dell'Emilia
 * 1st Stage 16 Vuelta a España
 * 2nd Road race, National Road Championships
 * 2nd Polynormande
 * 3rd Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stage 14
 * 6th Overall Tour de Suisse
 * 7th Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 9th Gran Premio Industria e Commercio di Prato

 * 2001
 * 1st Jersey pink.svg Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stage 20
 * 1st Japan Cup
 * 1st Stage 20 Vuelta a España
 * 2nd Overall Tour de Suisse
 * 4th Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 5th Overall Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Stage 4
 * 9th EnBW Grand Prix (with Oscar Camenzind)

 * 2002
 * 1st Stage 11 Giro d'Italia
 * 3rd Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 3rd Giro del Friuli
 * 3rd Gran Premio de Llodio
 * 10th Overall Vuelta a España
 * 10th Overall Vuelta a Burgos
 * 10th Trofeo Melinda

 * 2003
 * 1st Jersey pink.svg Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Jersey violet.svg Points classification
 * 1st Azzurri d'Italia classification
 * 1st Stages 12, 14 & 19
 * 1st Jersey violet.svg Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 1st Stage 2
 * 1st Giro dell'Appennino
 * 1st Stage 14 Tour de France
 * 2nd Overall Vuelta a Aragón

 * 2004
 * 1st Giro del Veneto
 * 2nd Giro del Lazio
 * 3rd Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stage 3
 * 3rd Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 5th Giro dell'Appennino
 * 7th Klasika Primavera

 * 2005
 * 1st Giro dell'Emilia
 * 1st Giro dell'Appennino
 * 1st Memorial Marco Pantani
 * 1st Stage 5 Paris–Nice
 * 2nd Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 2nd Giro di Lombardia

 * 2006
 * 1st MaillotItalia.svg National MTB Marathon Championships
 * 3rd Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 8th Overall Giro del Trentino

 * 2007
 * 4th Overall Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stage 17
 * 6th Trofeo Melinda

 * 2008
 * 10th Overall Giro d'Italia

 * 2009
 * 1st Stage 3 Vuelta Mexico Telmex
 * 6th Overall Giro del Trentino
 * 10th Overall Vuelta a Andalucía

title: Gilberto Simoni


text:
Louis Hjelmslev

Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (3 October 1899 – 30 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris (with Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes, among others). In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semantic characteristics of language in separation from sociology, psychology or neurobiology, and has a high degree of logical rigour. Hjelmslev regarded linguistics – or glossematics – as a formal science. He was the inventor of formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.

Life
Hjelmslev was born in 1899 in Copenhagen. He enrolled into the University of Copenhagen in 1917 to study Romance and later comparative philology, where he studied with Holger Pedersen among others. His MA thesis on Lithuanian phonetics was finished in 1923 based on fieldwork in Lithuania in 1921. He received a doctorate in comparative Indo-European philology for his Études baltiques from 1932, and later took over Holger Pedersen's chair in Copenhagen after having been in Aarhus from 1934 to 1937.

He was married to Vibeke Mackeprang.

The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen
The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen was founded by Hjelmslev and a group of Danish colleagues on 24 September 1931. Their main inspiration was the Prague Linguistic Circle, which had been founded in 1926. It was, in the first place, a forum for discussion of theoretical and methodological problems in linguistics. Initially, their interest lay mainly in developing an alternative concept of the phoneme, but it later developed into a complete theory which was coined glossematics, and was notably influenced by structuralism. Membership of the group grew rapidly and a significant list of publications resulted, including an irregular series of larger works under the name Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. A Bulletin was produced, followed by an international journal for structuralistic research in language, Acta Linguistica (later called Acta Linguistica Hafniensia ), which was founded with the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. It was, at that time, the sole journal explicitly dedicated to structuralism. With one short break from 1934 to 1937, while he lectured at the Aarhus University, Hjelmslev acted as chairman of the Circle until shortly before his death in 1965. The Linguist Circle of Copenhagen still exists today and arranges seminars, publishes Acta Linguistica Hafniensia and runs subcommittees.

Theoretical work
Hjelmslev published his first paper at the age of 25. His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses. It is important to read Hjelmslev's work as a continuous evolving theory on the epistemology of linguistics. He made his first academic journey at 1921 to Lithuania to study Lithuanian, an experience which can be traced throughout his works.

His most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, or in English translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not systematising. He proposed a linguistic theory intended to form the basis of a more rational linguistics and a contribution to general epistemology. Like Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), he accepted language as a system of signs, from the point of view of language use. He argued that a theory of semiotics should be consistent within itself, comprehensive, and as simple as possible.

Hjelmslev's sign model
Hjelmslev's sign model is a development of Saussure's bilateral sign model. Saussure considered a sign as having two sides, signifier and signified. Hjelmslev famously renamed signifier and signified as respectively expression plane and content plane, and also distinguished between form and substance. The combinations of the four would distinguish between form of content, form of expression, substance of content, and substance of expression. In Hjelmslev's analysis, a sign is a function between two forms, the content form and the expression form, and this is the starting point of linguistic analysis. However, every sign function is also manifested by two substances: the content substance and the expression substance. The content substance is the physical and conceptual manifestation of the sign. The expression substance is the physical substance wherein a sign is manifested. This substance can be sound, as is the case for most known languages, but it can be any material support whatsoever, for instance, hand movements, as is the case for sign languages, or distinctive marks on a suitable medium as in the many different writing systems of the world.

In short, Hjelmslev was proposing an open-ended, scientific method of analysis as a new semiotics. In proposing this, he was reacting against the conventional view in phonetics that sounds should be the focus of enquiry. Some have interpreted his work as if Hjelmslev argued that no sign can be interpreted unless it is contextualised – treating his functives, expression and content as the general connotative mechanisms (for instance by Algirdas Julius Greimas) – for Hjelmslev the point of view of the linguist on meaning is that of the form of content. Even if the content substance is important, one has to analyse it from the point of view of the form. Not only do pictures and literature manifest the same organising principles, but, more broadly, seeing and hearing, though certainly not identical, interact in surprisingly complex ways at deeper levels of the sign hierarchy which Hjelmslev sought to understand.

Assessment
Hjelmslev made a bold proposal to transform technical analysis into a broad enquiry, emphasising that the true focus of linguistics should be the language and the human culture that continually reinvents it, and all society's memory of its accumulated knowledge preserved through language. This was a challenging but constructive argument at the time, and remains one that still has relevance today. Most conspicuously, Hjelmslev's lines of inquiry have been taken up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (see the "Postulates of Linguistics" and "Geology of Morals" chapters of A Thousand Plateaus), and subsequently their followers.

Terminology
Hjelmslev introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodeme and plereme as linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme, etc.

Also, his most famous work, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, is mostly concerned with the formal definition of a terminology for the analysis of any level of a system of signs, and as such there exists an exclusively Hjelmslevian terminology for that.

Selected publications

 * Hjelmslev, Louis (1928). Principes de grammaire générale. Copenhague: Bianco Lundo.
 * Hjelmslev, Louis (1935/37). Catégorie des cas (2 volumes). Acta Jutlandica VII, IX.
 * Hjelmslev, Louis (1953[1943]). Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Baltimore: Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics (IJAL Memoir, 7) (2nd OD (slightly rev.): Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961. Dt.: Hjelmslev 1974.
 * Hjelmslev, Louis (1956). Sur l'indépendance de l'épithète. Copenhague: Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser udgivet af Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, i kommission hos Ejnar Munksgaard.
 * Hjelmslev, Louis (1975). Résumé of a Theory of Language. Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague, vol. XVI. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag.

title: Louis Hjelmslev


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Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.

A three–day conference was held at UC Berkeley in celebration of his 80th birthday in 2009. Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He died in 2014.

Early years
Fillmore spent three years in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, where he intercepted coded Russian conversations on short-wave radio and taught himself Japanese. Following his discharge, he taught English at a Buddhist girls' school while also taking classes at Kyoto University.

He returned to the US, receiving his doctorate at the University of Michigan and then teaching at The Ohio State University in Columbus. At the time, he was still a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. In 1963, his seminal article The position of embedding transformations in a Grammar introduced the transformational cycle. The central idea is to first apply rules to the smallest applicable unit, then to the smallest unit containing that one, and so on. This principle has been a foundational insight for theories of syntax since that time.

Cognitive linguistics
By 1965, Fillmore had come to acknowledge that semantics plays a crucial role in grammar.

In 1968, he published his theory of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), which highlighted the fact that syntactic structure can be predicted by semantic participants. An action can have an agent, a patient, purposes, locations, and so on. These participants were called "cases" in his original paper, but later came to be known as semantic roles or thematic relations, which are similar to theta roles in generative grammar.

Following his move to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, this theory eventually evolved into a broader cognitive linguistic theory called Frame Semantics (1976). A commercial event, for instance, crucially involves elements such as a seller, a buyer, some good, and some money. In language, such an event can be expressed in a variety of different ways, e.g. using the verb 'to sell' or the verb 'to buy'. According to frame semantics, meaning is best studied in terms of the mental concepts and participants in the minds of the speaker and addressee.

Around the same time, Fillmore's Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, delivered in 1971 and published in 1975, contributed to establishing the field of linguistic pragmatics, which studies the relationship between linguistic form and the context of utterance.

In all of this research, he illuminated the fundamental importance of semantics, and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena. His collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff was generalized into the theory of Construction Grammar. This work aimed at developing a complete theory of grammar that would fully acknowledge the role of semantics right from the start, while simultaneously adopting constraint-based formalisms as popular in computer science and natural language processing. This theory built on the notion of construction from traditional and pedagogical grammars rather than the rule-based formalisms that dominate most of generative grammar. One of Fillmore's most widely noticed works of the time (with Paul Kay and Cathy O'Connor) appeared in 'Language' in 1988 as "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone". Their paper highlighted the merits of such a theory of by focusing on the 'let alone' construction. Over time, construction grammar developed into a research area of its own, and a number of variants have been proposed over the years by different researchers.

Fillmore is now widely recognized as one of the founders of cognitive linguistics. The first chapter of “Cognitive Linguistics” by Cruse and Croft (2004), for instance, begins with a summary of Fillmore's work. Fillmore served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1991 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000.

His legacy continues with his many notable students, including Adele Goldberg, Laura Michaelis, Christopher Johnson, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Len Talmy, and Eve Sweetser.

FrameNet
In 1988, Fillmore taught classes in computational lexicography at a summer school at the University of Pisa, where he met Sue Atkins, who was conducting frame-semantic analyses from a lexicographic perspective. In their subsequent discussions and collaborations, Fillmore came to acknowledge the importance of considering corpus data. They discussed the "dictionary of the future", in which every word would be linked to example sentences from corpora.

After 23 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Fillmore retired in 1994 and joined Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. There, he started a project called FrameNet, an on-line structured description of the English lexicon implementing much of what he had earlier proposed more theoretically in his theory of Frame semantics, while implementing the idea of emphasizing example sentences from corpora. In FrameNet, words are described in terms of the frames they evoke. Data is gathered from the British National Corpus, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by both lexical units and Frames.

FrameNet has inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Due to the project's influence, issue 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to FrameNet. The project has been highly influential in computational linguistics and natural language processing as well. FrameNet led to the establishment of the task of shallow semantic parsing or automatic semantic role labelling (SRL). The first automatic SRL system was developed by Berkeley graduate student Daniel Gildea. Semantic Role Labelling has since become one of the standard NLP tasks. In recognition of his contributions to computational linguistics, Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Together with Collin F. Baker, he also received the 2012 Antonio Zampolli Prize, awarded by the European Language Resources Association.

Publications
His seminal publications include:

 * "The Position of Embedding Transformations in a Grammar" (1963). In Word 19:208-231.
 * "The Case for Case" (1968). In Bach and Harms (Ed.): Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1-88.
 * "Frame semantics and the nature of language" (1976): . In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech. Volume 280: 20-32.
 * "Frame semantics" (1982). In Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul, Hanshin Publishing Co., 111-137.
 * (with Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O'Connor) "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone" (1988). Language. Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), 501-538
 * (with Sue Atkins) "Starting where the dictionaries stop: The challenge for computational lexicography". (1994). In Atkins, B. T. S. and A. Zampolli (Eds.) Computational Approaches to the Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 349-393.
 * (with Paul Kay) "Construction Grammar" (1995). Stanford: CSLI
 * Lectures on Deixis (1997). Stanford: CSLI Publications. (originally distributed as Fillmore (1975/1971) Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis by the Indiana University Linguistics Club)

Personal life
Fillmore was married to Lily Wong Fillmore, a linguist and professor emeritus at Berkeley.

title: Charles J. Fillmore


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Otokichi

Otokichi (音吉 or 乙吉), also known as Yamamoto Otokichi and later known as John Matthew Ottoson (1818 – January 1867), was a Japanese castaway originally from the area of Onoura near modern-day Mihama, on the west coast of the Chita Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture.

Biography
Otokichi was from Mihama, Aichi Prefecture. In 1832, at age 14, he served as a crew member on a rice transport ship bound for Edo, the Hojunmaru (宝順丸), 15 m in length with a cargo of 150 tons and a crew of 14. The ship left on October 11, 1832, but was caught in a storm and blown off-course far out in the Pacific Ocean.

Drift to America
The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo. Several crew members died of scurvy; only three survived by the time they arrived at Cape Alava, the westernmost point of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in 1834. The three survivors were Iwakichi, 29; Kyukichi, 16; and Otokichi, then 15.

The three castaways were looked after and briefly enslaved by the Makah Indian tribe. They were later handed over to John McLoughlin, the Chief Factor (agent) for the Columbia District at the Hudson's Bay Company.

Travel to Europe
McLoughlin, envisioning an opportunity to use the castaways to open trade with Japan, sent the trio to London on the Eagle to try to convince the Crown of his plan. They reached London in 1835, probably the first Japanese to do so since Christopher and Cosmas in the 16th century.

The British Government ultimately declined interest in the enterprise, and the castaways were instead dispatched to Macau on board the General Palmer, so that they could be returned to their home country.

Macau and attempt to return to Japan
Once in Macau, Otokichi, Kyukichi and Iwakichi were welcomed by Karl Gutzlaff, a German missionary and Chinese translator for the British Government. Gutzlaff, who had views on evangelizing Japan, enthusiastically learned the Japanese language from the trio, and with their help managed to make a translation of the Gospel of John into Japanese. The trio was joined in Macau by four more castaways from Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyūshū, who had been shipwrecked on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

An opportunity to return them to Japan appeared, when the American trader Charles W. King offered to take them back to Japan, again with the hope of establishing trade relations with the country. In July 1837, the seven castaways left with Charles W. King on board the Morrison to Uraga at the entrance of Edo Bay. There the ship was fired on repeatedly, and King was not able to accomplish his objective to establish diplomatic contact. He then went to Kagoshima, but again met with cannon fire, and finally decided to abandon his efforts and go back to Canton. The castaways resigned themselves to a life in exile. Returning to Japan was problematic, for this was during Japan's period of isolation where leaving the country was an offense that was punishable by death.

New life abroad
Unable to return to Japan, the castaways started a new life in Macau. They seem to have worked as translators for the British trade legation and British missionaries.

Otokichi is next recorded as working for the British trading company Dent & Co. in Shanghai in 1843. He apparently also worked as a crewman on American ships, and worked at helping Japanese castaways to return to Japan on board Chinese or Dutch ships, the only ones allowed to visit the country. He also engaged in business on his own behalf.

Otokichi married a Scotswoman in Macao who later died of illness. His second wife, Louisa Belder, was half-German and half-Malay, living in Singapore, with whom he had a son and three daughters. He became a naturalized British subject, taking the name John Matthew Ottoson. "Ottoson" is said to have been a transliteration of "Oto-san" (literally "Mr. Oto"), a respectful nickname used by his Japanese friends.

Return to Japan
Otokichi is known to have returned to Japan twice, first as a translator on board HMS Mariner, which entered Uraga Port in 1849 to conduct a topographical survey. To avoid problems with Japanese authorities, he disguised himself as Chinese, and said that he had learned Japanese from his father, allegedly a businessman who had worked in relation with Nagasaki.

The second time, Otokichi went to Japan under his British name "Ottoson", in September 1854. He was a member of the British fleet under Admiral James Stirling. The fleet docked at Nagasaki and negotiated and signed the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty on October 14. On that occasion, Otokichi met with many Japanese, including Fukuzawa Yukichi. He was apparently offered permission to live in Japan, but he chose to return to his family in Shanghai.

Toward the end of his life, Otokichi moved from Shanghai to Singapore, his wife's native island, where he became the first known Japanese resident of Singapore. The British had compensated him generously for his contribution to the treaty with Japan, and he had done well in business deals in Shanghai. He apparently rented a luxurious colonial house on Orchard Road, which is where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 49, in 1867. Otokichi was buried at the Japanese Cemetery of Singapore. Half of his remains were returned to his hometown of Mihama in Japan on February 20, 2005.

In popular culture
The story of the Hojunmaru castaways was adapted as the feature film Kairei in 1983. Despite starring country singer Johnny Cash as John McLoughlin, and having a reported budget of US$4,000,000, the film was not a commercial success.

title: Otokichi


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Boston University Academy

Boston University Academy (BUA) is a private high school operated by Boston University. Founded in 1993 and located on the Boston University campus, the academy is geared toward college preparatory work. As part of its integration with the university, students are able to take college courses for credit their junior and senior years. Students are guaranteed acceptance to Boston University if they maintained a 3.0 grade point average in Boston University courses and have no history of major disciplinary actions.

BUA's student body is drawn from 55 communities: 52% come from public schools, 39% from independent schools, 7% from parochial schools and 2% are from home-school or international schools; 57% are students of color and 47% of students come from multilingual households (representing 26 languages). BUA provides need-based tuition assistance to approximately 31% of the students as of the 2019–2020 academic year.

Accreditation
The academy is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and is a member of both the Secondary School Admission Test Board and the Association of Independent Schools of New England.

History
Boston University Academy was proposed and founded in 1993 by Peter Schweich, then the vice president of Boston University, and authorized by John Silber, then the president of Boston University. Peter Schweich was its first headmaster, and served in that role until 1999, when he was succeeded by interim head of school Dr. Jennifer Bond Hickman. Dr. James Tracy replaced Hickman and served until the spring of 2006, when he was replaced by Dr. James Berkman. On August 21, 2014, Berkman announced that he would retire after the 2014–2015 academic year. On November 14, 2014, Provost Jean Morrison announced the appointment of Dr. Ari Betof to replace Berkman effective July 1, 2015. In July 2018, Boston University announced the removal of Dr. Betof following an allegation of sexual misconduct involving a Boston University undergraduate student. Following his departure, Dr. Rosemary White was appointed interim head of school. Dr. White served as interim head of school until Christos J. Kolovos began his tenure in the summer of 2020.

When Boston University Academy was founded, it covered grades 9–12; an 8th grade of approximately 20 students was added in 1999. The 8th grade was dropped in 2005.

On October 26, 2021, teacher Jennifer Formichelli was struck by a bus and killed.

Notable faculty

 * Philip Gambone, a published author, primarily taught freshman English during his 13-year tenure from 2004 until his retirement in 2017. Gambone returned for the 2018–2019 academic year after which time he again retired.
 * Brett Abigaña, a noted composer and co-founder and associate director of the Boston Composers' Coalition.

title: Boston University Academy


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Dialectology

Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. In the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.

Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical, lexical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually deal not only with populations that have lived in certain areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see language contact).

Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include the problem of mutual intelligibility in defining languages and dialects; situations of diglossia, where two dialects are used for different functions; dialect continua including a number of dialects of varying intelligibility; and pluricentrism, where a single language has two or more standard varieties.

Hans Kurath and William Labov are among the most prominent researchers in this field.

Dialects of English
In London, there were comments on the different dialects recorded in 12th-century sources, and a large number of dialect glossaries (focussing on vocabulary) were published in the 19th century. Philologists would also study dialects, as they preserved earlier forms of words.

In Britain, the philologist Alexander John Ellis described the pronunciation of English dialects in an early phonetic system in volume 5 of his series On Early English Pronunciation. The English Dialect Society was later set up by Joseph Wright to record dialect words in the British Isles. This culminated in the production of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary in 1905. The English Dialect Society was then disbanded, as its work was considered complete, although some regional branches (e.g. the Yorkshire Dialect Society) still operate today. Traditional studies in dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, in which lines were drawn on a map to indicate boundaries between different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study, however, caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists, therefore, began to study social, as well as regional variation. The Linguistic Atlas of the United States (the 1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.

Under the leadership of Harold Orton, the University of Leeds became a centre for the study of English dialect and set up an Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies. In the 1950s, the university undertook the Survey of English Dialects, which covered all of England, some bordering areas of Wales, and the Isle of Man. In addition, the university produced more than 100 monographs on dialect before the death of Harold Orton in 1975. The Institute closed in September 1983 to accommodate budget cuts at the University, but its dialectological studies are now part of a special collection, the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture, in the university's Brotherton Library.

This shift in interest consequently saw the birth of sociolinguistics, which is a mixture of dialectology and social sciences. However, Graham Shorrocks has argued that there was always a sociological element to dialectology and that many of the conclusions of sociolinguists (e.g. the relationships with gender, class and age) can be found in earlier work by traditional dialectologists.

In the US, Hans Kurath began the Linguistic Atlas of the United States project in the 1930s, intended to consist of a series of in-depth dialectological studies of regions of the country. The first of these, the Linguistic Atlas of New England, was published in 1939. Later works in the same project were published or planned for the Middle Atlantic and South Atlantic states, for the North Central States, for the Upper Midwest, for the Rocky Mountain States, for the Pacific Coast and for the Gulf States, though in a lesser degree of detail owing to the huge amount of work that would be necessary to fully process the data.

Later large-scale and influential studies of American dialectology have included the Dictionary of American Regional English, based on data collected in the 1960s and published between 1985 and 2013, focusing on lexicon; and the Atlas of North American English, based on data collected in the 1990s and published in 2006, focusing on pronunciation.

Dialects of French
Jules Gillieron published a linguistic atlas of 25 French-speaking locations in Switzerland in 1880. In 1888, Gillieron responded to a call from Gaston Paris for a survey of the dialects of French, likely to be superseded by Standard French in the near future, by proposing the Atlas Linguistique de la France. The principal fieldworker for the atlas, Edmond Edmont, surveyed 639 rural locations in French-speaking areas of France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. The questionnaire initially included 1400 items, but this was later increased to over 1900. The atlas was published in 13 volumes between 1902 and 1910.

Dialects of German
The first comparative dialect study in Germany was The Dialects of Bavaria in 1821 by Johann Andreas Schmeller, which included a linguistic atlas.

In 1873, a parson named L. Liebich surveyed the German-speaking areas of Alsace by a postal questionnaire that covered phonology and grammar. He never published any of his findings.

In 1876, Eduard Sievers published Elements of Phonetics and a group of scholars formed the Neogrammarian school. This work in linguistics covered dialectology in German-speaking countries. In the same year, Jost Winteler published a monograph on the dialect of Kerenzen in the Canton of Glarus in Switzerland, which became a model for monographs on particular dialects.

Also in 1876, Georg Wenker, a young school librarian from Düsseldorf based in Marburg, sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. He later expanded his work to cover the entire German Empire, including dialects in the east that have become extinct since the territory was lost to Germany. Wenker's work later became the Deutscher Sprachatlas at the University of Marburg. After Wenker's death in 1911, work continued under Ferdinand Wrede and later questionnaires covered Austria as well as Germany.

Dialects of Italian and Corsican
The first treatment of Italian dialects is provided by Dante Alighieri in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia in the early fourteenth century.

The founder of scientific dialectology in Italy was Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who, in 1873, founded the journal Archivio glottologico italiano, still active today together with L'Italia dialettale, which was founded by Clemente Merlo in 1924.

After completing his work in France, Edmond Edmont surveyed 44 locations in Corsica for the Atlas Linguistique de la Corse.

Two students from the French atlas named Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud surveyed Italian dialects in Italy and southern Switzerland in the Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz. This survey influenced the work of Hans Kurath in the USA.

Dialects of Scots and Gaelic
The Linguistic Survey of Scotland began in 1949 at the University of Edinburgh.

The first part of the survey researched dialects of Scots in the Scottish Lowlands, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, Northern Ireland, and the two northernmost counties of England: Cumberland (since merged into Cumbria) and Northumberland. Three volumes of results were published between 1975 and 1985.

The second part studied dialects of Gaelic, including mixed use of Gaelic and English, in the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles. Results were published under the name of Cathair Ó Dochartaigh in five volumes between 1994 and 1997.

Methods of data collection
A variety of methods are used to collect data on regional dialects and to choose informants from whom to collect it. Early dialect research, focused on documenting the most conservative forms of regional dialects, least contaminated by ongoing change or contact with other dialects, focused primarily on collecting data from older informants in rural areas. More recently, under the umbrella of sociolinguistics, dialectology has developed greater interest in the ongoing linguistic innovations that differentiate regions from each other, devoting more attention to the speech of younger speakers in urban centers.

Some of the earliest dialectology collected data by use of written questionnaires asking informants to report on features of their dialect. This methodology has seen a comeback in recent decades, especially with the availability of online questionnaires that can be used to collect data from a huge number of informants at little expense to the researcher.

Dialect research in the 20th century predominantly used face-to-face interview questionnaires to gather data. There are two main types of questionnaires: direct and indirect. Researchers using the direct method for their face-to-face interviews will present the informant with a set of questions that demand a specific answer and are designed to gather lexical and/or phonological information. For example, the linguist may ask the subject the name for various items, or ask him or her to repeat certain words.

Indirect questionnaires are typically more open-ended and take longer to complete than direct questionnaires. A researcher using this method will sit down with a subject and begin a conversation on a specific topic. For example, he may question the subject about farm work, food and cooking, or some other subject, and gather lexical and phonological information from the information provided by the subject. The researcher may also begin a sentence, but allow the subject to finish it for him, or ask a question that does not demand a specific answer, such as "What are the most common plants and trees around here?" The sociolinguistic interview may be used for dialectological purposes as well, in which informants are engaged in a long-form open-ended conversation intended to allow them to produce a large volume of speech in a vernacular style.

Whereas lexical, phonological and inflectional variations can be easily discerned, information related to larger forms of syntactic variation is much more difficult to gather. Another problem is that informants may feel inhibited and refrain from using dialectal features.

Researchers may collect relevant excerpts from books that are entirely or partially written in a dialect. The major drawback is the authenticity of the material, which may be difficult to verify. Since the advent of social media, it has become possible for researchers to collect large volumes of geotagged posts from platforms such as Twitter, in order to document regional differences in the way language is used in such posts.

Mutual intelligibility
Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that dialects of the same language are understandable to each other's speakers. This simple criterion is demonstrated to be untenable, for example by the case of Italian and Spanish cited below. While native speakers of the two may enjoy mutual understanding ranging from limited to considerable depending on the topic of discussion and speakers' experience with linguistic variety, few people would want to classify Italian and Spanish as dialects of the same language in any sense other than historical. Spanish and Italian are similar and to varying extents mutually comprehensible, but phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicon are sufficiently distinct that the two cannot be considered dialects of the same language (but rather developed from their common ancestor Latin).

Diglossia
Another feature is diglossia: this is a situation in which, in a given society, there are two closely related languages, one of high prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. An example of this is Sanskrit, which was considered the proper way to speak in northern India but was accessible only by the upper class, and Prakrit which was the common (and informal or vernacular) speech at the time.

Varying degrees of diglossia are still common in many societies around the world.

Dialect continuum
A dialect continuum is a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent dialects are mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as distance between the dialects increases. An example is the Dutch-German dialect continuum, a large network of dialects with two recognized literary standards. Although mutual intelligibility between standard Dutch and standard German is fairly limited, a chain of dialects connects them. Due to several centuries of influence by standard languages (especially in Northern Germany, where even today the original dialects struggle to survive) there are now many breaks in complete intelligibility between geographically adjacent dialects along the continuum, but in the past these breaks were virtually nonexistent.

The Romance languages—Galician/Portuguese, Spanish, Sicilian, Catalan, Occitan/Provençal, French, Sardinian, Romanian, Romansh, Friulan, other Italian, French, and Ibero-Romance dialects, and others—form another well-known continuum, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

In both areas—the Germanic and Romance linguistic continuums—the relational notion of the term dialect is often vastly misunderstood, and today gives rise to considerable difficulties in implementation of European Union directives regarding support of minority languages. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Italy, where still today some of the population use their local language (dialetto 'dialect') as the primary means of communication at home and, to varying lesser extent, the workplace. Difficulties arise due to terminological confusion. The languages conventionally referred to as Italian dialects can be regarded as Romance sister languages of Italian, not variants of Italian, which are commonly and properly called italiano regionale ('regional Italian'). The label "Italian dialect" as conventionally used is more geopolitical in aptness of meaning rather than linguistic: Bolognese and Neapolitan, for example, are termed Italian dialects, yet resemble each other less than do Italian and Spanish. Misunderstandings ensue if "Italian dialect" is taken to mean 'dialect of Italian' rather than 'minority language spoken on Italian soil', i.e. part of the network of the Romance linguistic continuum. The indigenous Romance language of Venice, for example, is cognate with Italian, but quite distinct from the national language in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, and in no way a derivative or a variety of the national language. Venetian can be said to be an Italian dialect both geographically and typologically, but it is not a dialect of Italian.

Pluricentrism
A pluricentric language is a language that has two or more standard forms. An example is Hindustani, which encompasses two standard varieties, Urdu and Hindi. Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects. Both are recognized as official languages in Norway.

In a sense, the set of dialects can be understood as being part of a single diasystem, an abstraction that each dialect is part of. In generative phonology, the differences can be acquired through rules. An example can be taken with Occitan (a cover term for a set of related varieties spoken in Southern France) where 'cavaL' (from late Latin caballus, "horse") is the diasystemic form for the following realizations:
 * Languedocien dialect: caval (L >, sometimes velar, used concurrently with French borrowed forms chival or chivau);
 * Limousin dialect: chavau (ca > cha and -L > -u);
 * Provençal dialect: cavau (-L > -u, used concurrently with French borrowed forms chival or chivau);
 * Gascon dialect: cavath (final -L >, sometimes palatalized, and used concurrently with French borrowed form chibau)
 * Auvergnat and Vivaro-alpine dialects: chaval (same treatment of ca cluster as in Limousin dialect)

The pluricentric approach may be used in practical situations. For instance when such a diasystem is identified, it can be used construct a diaphonemic orthography that emphasizes the commonalities between the varieties. Such a goal may or may not fit with sociopolitical preferences. Conversely, dialectological field-internal traditions may or may not delay the diversification of a given language into multiple standards (see Luxembourgish for an example of the latter, and the One Standard German Axiom for the former).

The abstand and ausbau languages framework
One analytical paradigm developed by Heinz Kloss is known as the abstand and ausbau languages framework. It has proven popular among linguists in Continental Europe, but is not so well known in English-speaking countries, especially among people who are not trained linguists. Although only one of many possible paradigms, it has the advantage of being constructed by trained linguists for the particular purpose of analyzing and categorizing varieties of speech, and has the additional merit of replacing such loaded words as "language" and "dialect" with the German terms of ausbau language and abstand language, words that are not (yet) loaded with political, cultural, or emotional connotations.

title: Dialectology


text: File:The Dublin Martyrs.jpg

title: File:The Dublin Martyrs.jpg


text:
Saucy Monky

Saucy Monky are an indie pop band based in Los Angeles, California.

The band is fronted by Dublin-born singer and guitarist Annmarie Cullen (who formerly performed under the pseudonym Ann Marie Montade) and East Coast singer Cynthia Catania. Their rhythm section is Steve Giles (bass) and Megan Jane (drums).

The group was formed in 2001. Catania, explaining the origin of the band's name, said, "We were looking around for a name and I had this book by Tina Brown and I think the title was Life as a Party and there was a phrase in it that had something to do with being a saucy monkey and in reference to life in U.K.."

Their debut album Celebrity Trash was released in 2003 and spawned two hit radio singles in Ireland — "Flicker" and "Don't Wanna Know Your Name". In the summer of 2004 they released a remaking of the Divinyls song "I Touch Myself", which became another hit at Irish radio. The single was followed by their first full-length album, Turbulence, in September by 429 Records.

In 2005, they signed a major distribution deal with the Savoy Label Group and re-released Turbulence in June 2005 across the United States. The first single to be released is "Disco Ball (Boulevard Remix)", a re-working of an older track from their first album. Disco Ball (Boulevard Remix) became a top 40 AAA radio hit.

In September 2005, the band signed a deal with Measured Records in the United Kingdom which saw the release of the single "Good Day Down" and the Turbulence album.

In February 2006, they released "I Touch Myself" as a single; the song was later used on an episode of the TV series Veronica Mars. Other songs by the band have been featured on episodes of Nickelodeon series Drake & Josh, Zoey 101 and iCarly.

In 2008, the band released the EP Between the Bars. Notable tracks are "All The Things Ya Know", "Acrobat" and a cover of the Carpenters classic "Superstar". Recent placements include 4 songs on the independent soundtrack for And Then Came Lola (Wolfe Video), Blue Bloods (CBS) and Alcatraz (Fox). Catania and Cullen penned the theme song for 2011's Food for Thought with Claire Thomas on the ABC network.

The band ended a 10-year hiatus in 2017 with the release of a new single and an Irish reunion tour where they were joined on stage by Naimee Coleman and Sylvie Lewis. Their song "F’n Love” was featured in the 2021 movie The Breakdown.

Discography

 * 8 Song Sampler (2002)
 * Celebrity Trash (2003)
 * Turbulence (2004)
 * Between The Bars (2008)
 * Trophy Girl (Parts 1 & 2) (2012)

title: Saucy Monky


text:
Talk:Rhabdomyosarcoma

Though
Though it provides good information, much of the article doesn't refer to rhabdomyosarcoma. Also, it doesn't have information that you would expect from an article this long, such as treatment (if any) and survival rate. A lot of it seems to be general information about cancer - with large portions dedicated to categorizing cancers and diagnosis at the cellular level. It could probably use some more links for some of the uncommon terms, too.

 * Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the  link at the top. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to…) The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. JFW |  T@lk  10:03, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Deleted material
I deleted most of this article, which contains a lot of information about cellular differentiation and pathology but had nothing to do with rhabdomyosarcoma. Since somebody may find this information useful (although not for this article), you can retrieve it here. Pretty much this article needs to start over from scratch. —Brim 05:11, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

add alternate names
I heard an alternate name: something that ended in -oides... it was in a lecture relating to bleeding from the vagina in peds patients. Thanks.
 * I think it was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcoma_botryoides —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.43.192.141 (talk) 19:22, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

things seem wrong
Not an expert but some of the descriptions just sound wrong like if the cancer has metastisized the odds of survival are good...my guess is they are not good...it also sounded similarly weird about the deep things being easy to cut out...not sure but its either written weirdly or just wrong —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.36.159.189 (talk) 06:13, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Undue section in lead
Removed Accurate and quick diagnosis is often difficult due to the heterogeneity of RMS tumors and a lack of strong genetic markers of the disease, although recent research by UVA Health researchers discovered "multiple lines of evidence supporting [the gene] AVIL is powerful driver for both major types of rhabdomyosarcoma," according to researcher Hui Li of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Department of Pathology and UVA Cancer Center. Malfunctions in AVIL, Li and his team found, play an essential role in the development of the two main subtypes of rhabdomyosarcoma. In a scientific paper outlining the findings, he and his colleagues describe rhabdomyosarcoma as "addicted" to the gene's excess activity. They ultimately label AVIL a "bona fide oncogene" for rhabdomyosarcoma. as it seems to be a bit too specific for the lead section. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:59, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Rhabdomyosarcoma


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alex alexander

 This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. 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 article was SPEEDY DELETED. JeremyA 22:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Alex alexander
Alex Alexander is looking for employment, and is under the impression that WP will host an advertisement with a link to his website. Delete as advertising or vanity or both. -- Hoary 09:48, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)
 * Deleted after listing on WP:CP--Duk 14:21, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

 * Delete. Lacks encyclopedic quality and person is not notable. Oneliner 10:23, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Strong delete. Ugh, do I even have to say? jglc | t | c 15:57, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Strong delete. Good grief.  Ridethefire3211 18:20, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Stop for a second. It's clear this page is vanity and advertisment, which in itself warrants deletion.  However, the subject of the article has a pretty impressive legit resume, and gets more than 5000 google hits with "Alex Alexander" + drum . There are three times as much without "drum," however it is clear that not all of them are the subject (but also of note, the search with "drum" omits Alexander's own website, so a real number is hard to pin down).  This should be userfied if possible with instructions as to why, or it should be cleaned up, expanded, and de-spammed.  For now, I abstain.  --Jeffrey O. Gustafson 19:11, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete: An article might be possible with proper capitalization, etc., but this is a CV, so we might as well clear the brush away to allow the strong plant to grow (if it can be planted by a 3rd party). Geogre 19:21, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, advertisement. --Carnildo 21:27, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * This is a copyvio of his webpage and has been reported as such. There may be a case for him to have an article as he is a member of Dido's band and performed music for a film called Whatever Happened to One-eyed Jimmy starring Steve Buscemi, John Turturro and Samuel L. Jackson. However, it would be best to start afresh if someone was inclined to do so. Capitalistroadster 01:44, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. Has now been marked as copyvio. — Phil Welch 01:56, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete advertising and copyvio. JamesBurns 02:09, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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


text:
Systemic functional linguistics

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system.

It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his teacher (Halliday, 1961). Firth proposed that systems refer to possibilities subordinated to structure; Halliday "liberated" choice from structure and made it the central organising dimension of SFL. In more technical terms, while many approaches to linguistic description place structure and the syntagmatic axis foremost, SFL adopts the paradigmatic axis as its point of departure. Systemic foregrounds Saussure's "paradigmatic axis" in understanding how language works. For Halliday, a central theoretical principle is then that any act of communication involves choices. Language is above all a system; SFL maps the choices available in any language variety using its representation tool of a "system network".

Functional signifies the proposition that language evolved under pressure of the functions that the language system must serve. Functions are taken to have left their mark on the structure and organisation of language at all levels, which is achieved via metafunctions. Metafunction is uniquely defined in SFL as the "organisation of the functional framework around systems", i.e., choices. This is a significant difference from other "functional" approaches, such as Dik's functional grammar (FG, or as now often termed, functional discourse grammar) and role and reference grammar. To avoid confusion, the full designation—systemic functional linguistics—is typically used, rather than functional grammar or functional linguistics.

For Halliday, all languages involve three simultaneously generated metafunctions: one construes experience of our outer and inner reality as well as logical relations between phenomena (ideational); another enacts social relations (interpersonal relations); and a third weaves together these two functions to create text (textual—the wording).

Multidimensional semiotic system
The point of departure for Halliday's work in linguistics has been the simple question: "how does language work?". Across his career he has probed the nature of language as a social semiotic system; that is, as a resource for meaning across the many and constantly changing contexts of human interaction. In 2003, he published a paper setting out the accumulated principles of his theory, which arose as he engaged with many different language-related problems. These principles, he wrote, "emerged as the by-product of those engagements as I struggled with particular problems", as various as literary analysis and machine translation. Halliday has tried, then, to develop a linguistic theory and description that is applicable to any context of human language. His theory and descriptions are based on these principles, on the basis that they are required to explain the complexity of human language. There are five principles:
 * Paradigmatic dimension: Meaning is choice, i.e. users select from "options that arise in the environment of other options", and that "the power of language resides in its organisation as a huge network of interrelated choices" (see Linguistic system)
 * Stratification dimension. In the evolution of language from primary to higher-order semiotic, "a space was created in which meanings could be organized in their own terms, as a purely abstract network of interrelations". Between the content of form-pairing of simple semiotic systems emerged the "organizational space" referred to as lexicogrammar. This development put language on the road to becoming an apparently infinite meaning-making system.
 * Metafunctional dimension. Language displays "functional complementarity". In other words, it has evolved under the human need to make meanings about the world around and inside us, at the same time that it is the means for creating and maintaining our interpersonal relations. These motifs are two modes of meaning in discourse—what Halliday terms the "ideational" and the "interpersonal" metafunctions. They are organised via a third mode of meaning, the textual metafunction, which acts on the other two modes to create a coherent flow of discourse.
 * Syntagmatic dimension. Language unfolds syntagmatically, as structure laid down in time (spoken) or space (written). This structure involves units on different ranks within each stratum of the language system. Within the lexicogrammar, for example, the largest is the clause, and the smallest the morpheme; intermediate between these ranks are the ranks of group/phrase and of word.
 * Instantiation dimension. All of these resources are, in turn, "predicated on the vector of instantiation", defined as "the relation between an instance and the system that lies behind it". Instantiation is a formal relationship between potential and actual. Systemic functional theory assumes a very intimate relationship of continual feedback between instance and system: thus using the system may change that system.

The notion of system in linguistics
As the name suggests, the notion of system is a defining aspect of systemic functional linguistics. In linguistics, the term "system" can be traced back to Ferdinand de Saussure, who noticed the roughly corresponding paradigms between signifying forms and signified values. The paradigmatic principle of organization was established in semiotics by Saussure, whose concept of value (viz. "valeur") and of signs as terms in a system "showed up paradigmatic organization as the most abstract dimension of meaning". However, Halliday points out that system in the sense J.R. Firth and he himself used it was different from Saussure's. In their case, system does not stand for a list of signifying forms corresponding to a list of signified values. Instead, Firth and Halliday described systems as contrasting options in value realised by contrasting options in form where the options are not the entire form and the entire value but features thereof. In this sense, linguistic systems are a background for formal features, i.e. features of structure. Here, the most general linguistic system is human adult language itself since it is a system of options whereby humans choose whether to speak in English, in Chinese, in Spanish or in another variety of language. In this sense, language is a system ("the system of language") not only as proposed by Hjelmslev., but also as a system of options. In this context, Jay Lemke describes human language as an open, dynamic system, which evolves together with the human species.

In this use of system, grammatical or other features of language are best understood when described as sets of options. According to Halliday, "The most abstract categories of the grammatical description are the systems together with their options (systemic features). A systemic grammar differs from other functional grammars (and from all formal grammars) in that it is paradigmatic: a system is a paradigmatic set of alternative features, of which one must be chosen if the entry condition is satisfied."

System was a feature of Halliday's early theoretical work on language. He considered it one of four fundamental categories for the theory of grammar—the others being unit, structure, and class. The category of system was invoked to account for "the occurrence of one rather than another from among a number of like events". At that time, Halliday defined grammar as "that level of linguistic form at which operate closed systems".

In adopting a system perspective on language, systemic functional linguistics have been part of a more general 20th- and 21st-century reaction against atomistic approaches to science, in which an essence is sought within smaller and smaller components of the phenomenon under study. In systems thinking, any delineated object of study is defined by its relations to other units postulated by the theory. In systemic functional linguistics, this has been described as the trinocular perspective. Thus a descriptive category must be defended from three perspectives: from above ("what does it construe?" "what effect does it have in a context of use?"), below ("how is this function realised?") and round about ("what else is in the neighbourhood?" "what other things does this thing have to interact with?"). This gives systemic functional linguistics an affinity with studies of complex systems.

System network in systemic linguistics
The label systemic is related to the system networks used in the description of human languages. System networks capture the dimension of choice at each stratum of the linguistic system to which they are applied. The system networks of the lexicogrammar make up systemic functional grammar. A system network is a theoretical tool to describe the sets of options available in a language variety; it represents abstract choice and does not correspond to a notion of actual choice or make psychological claims. Formally system networks correspond to type lattices in formal lattice theory, although they are occasionally erroneously mistaken for flowcharts or directed decision trees. Such directionality is always only a property of particular implementations of the general notion and may be made for performance reasons in, for example, computational modelling. System networks commonly employ multiple inheritance and "simultaneous" systems, or choices, which therefore combine to generate very large descriptive spaces...

title: Systemic functional linguistics


text:
Larry Christiansen

Larry Mark Christiansen (born June 27, 1956) is an American chess player of Danish ancestry. He was awarded the title Grandmaster by FIDE in 1977. Christiansen was the U.S. champion in 1980, 1983, and 2002. He competed in the FIDE World Championship in 1998 and 2002, and in the FIDE World Cup in 2013.

Biography
Christiansen grew up in Riverside, California, United States. In 1971, he became the first junior high-school student to win the National High School Championship. He went on to win three invitational U.S. Junior Championships in 1973, 1974, and 1975. In 1977, at age 21, he became a grandmaster without first having been an international master. Christiansen tied for first place with Anatoly Karpov at Linares 1981. He won the 2001 Canadian Open Chess Championship. He also won Curaçao 2008 and the Bermuda Open 2011.

Christiansen played on the United States teams in the Chess Olympiad in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996 and 2002. He won the team silver medal in 1990 and the team bronze in 1982, 1984, 1986 and 1996.

Christiansen describes his playing style as "aggressive-tactical", and he lists his favorite opening as the Sämisch King's Indian.

Notable games

 * Larry Christiansen vs. Chessmaster 9000 (September 2002), annotated at GameKnot:
 * Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, Game 4

Books

 * Christiansen, Larry (2000). Storming the Barricades. Gambit Publications. ISBN 978-1-901983-25-8.
 * Christiansen, Larry (2004). Rocking the Ramparts. Batsford. ISBN 0-7134-8776-3

title: Larry Christiansen


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eric Jacobson

 This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. 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 DELETE. Golbez 07:36, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

Eric Jacobson
Vanity/self-promotion, created by User:Lostprophyt (no other edits). Allmusic.com entries are empty. No amazon.com or LOC entries for his fan fiction. "Unlikely Romance" purportedly read by thousands wordwide records only 36 Google hits. JamesBurns 09:52, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Vanity. I've picked some random facts and found out the only online verification is the person's blog. That is simply inadequate. Oneliner 10:36, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. For the last time, folks: Unless you're Wil Wheaton or a close approximation thereof, your blog is not noteworthy. jglc | t | c 15:52, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete: Wil Wheaton himself doesn't campaign for publicity, so that's another distinction between these authors and him. Wikipedia is not a web guide or the Mirror of Erised. Geogre 19:22, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages.  Please do not edit this page .