text:
Outeniqua

Outeniqua may refer to:

 * Outeniqua Mountains, a mountain range that runs a parallel to the southern coast of South Africa
 * SAS Outeniqua, a sealift and replenishment ship operated by the South African Navy
 * 1396 Outeniqua, an asteroid of the Main Belt

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

title: Outeniqua


text:
User talk:Lonejack

Welcome!
Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * Tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

As to the Mark Sanders vote for deletion, it is my opinion that the vast majority of people listed on the tracker page are not sufficiently notable/verifiable for Wikipedia. That's just my opinion, and others may disagree, but I'm afraid I'm going to keep my vote the way it is.--Scimitar parley 14:35, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Lonejack


text:
Roseira

Roseira is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. It is part of the Metropolitan Region of Vale do Paraíba e Litoral Norte. The population is 10,801 (2020 est.) in an area of 130.65 km2. The elevation is 551 m.

Media
In telecommunications, the city was served by Companhia Telefônica Brasileira until 1973, when it began to be served by Telecomunicações de São Paulo. In July 1998, this company was acquired by Telefónica, which adopted the Vivo brand in 2012.

The company is currently an operator of cell phones, fixed lines, internet (fiber optics/4G) and television (satellite and cable).

title: Roseira


text:
British United Airways

British United Airways (BUA) was a private, independent airline in the United Kingdom formed as a result of the merger of Airwork Services and Hunting-Clan Air Transport in July 1960, making it the largest wholly private airline based in the United Kingdom at the time. British and Commonwealth Shipping (B&C) was the new airline's main shareholder.

At its inception, BUA assumed the aircraft and operations of its predecessors. These included a fleet of 90 assorted fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters that continued to operate mainly non-scheduled services. Gatwick became BUA's main operating base while Stansted was the main base for trooping flights until 1964.

An order for ten BAC One-Eleven jet aircraft in May 1961 launched BUA's fleet re-equipment programme in support of its long-term policy to develop primarily as a scheduled airline. This was also the first time a private British airline had placed a launch order for a new jet. In January 1962, BUA absorbed British Aviation Services, the holding company of rival British independent airlines Britavia and Silver City Airways. This made BUA the largest unsubsidised airline outside the United States. Silver City's pre-merger status as the main independent provider of air ferry services in the UK also gave BUA a monopoly among UK-based air ferry operators. The subsequent takeover of Jersey Airlines in May 1962 resulted in further growth, giving BUA a fleet of more than 100 aircraft and 6,000 staff.

A city centre check-in facility for BUA's scheduled passengers opened in London Victoria station in late-April 1962.

A combined rail-air service linking the city centres of London and Paris that enabled BUA to circumvent regulatory restrictions preventing it from flying London—Paris direct began on 26 May 1963. This was marketed as a cheaper alternative to existing direct air services. The introduction into service of the Vickers VC10 on 1 October 1964 made BUA the first private UK carrier to begin sustained jet operations. BUA's takeover of the South American services of British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) to Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay on 5 November 1964 marked a major expansion of its long-haul scheduled network.

On 9 April 1965, a BUA BAC One-Eleven became the type's first example to enter commercial service.

The simultaneous launch of daily One-Eleven jet services from Gatwick to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast on 4 January 1966 made BUA the first scheduled all-jet operator on UK domestic trunk routes.

In 1968, the BUA group of companies underwent a major reorganisation to improve its financial performance. This included adoption of a new strategy for BUA that aimed to replace the dwindling number of unprofitable trooping flights with growing engagement in the more rewarding European inclusive tour (IT) and transatlantic affinity group charter markets. It also resulted in relocation of the head office and concentration of engineering activities at Gatwick. Successful implementation of these organisational and strategic changes enabled BUA to make the loss-making South American routes profitable by late-1968 and to become the UK's only profitable mainline scheduled domestic operator by 1969.

By the end of the 1960s, BUA had become the UK's leading private scheduled airline with a 44000 mi network spanning three continents — Europe, Africa and South America.

In November 1970, B&C sold BUA to the Scottish charter airline Caledonian Airways for £12 million (£ million today). At that stage, it operated an all-jet fleet of 20 aircraft and employed a staff of 3,000.

Antecedents and inception
Airwork was formed in 1928. During the 1930s, it helped establish the predecessors of the post-World War II national airlines of India, Egypt and Rhodesia.

By the time Airwork merged with Hunting-Clan to form BUA, the former's air transport subsidiaries already included Airwork Helicopters, Air Charter, Bristow Helicopters, Channel Air Bridge, Transair and Morton Air Services. Hunting-Clan was originally known as Hunting Air Travel. It had become Hunting Air Transport and then changed to Hunting-Clan when it was taken over by the Scottish Clan Line shipping company, a B&C subsidiary.

Airwork changed its name to British United Airways on 19 May 1960, which preceded BUA's official formation on 1 July of that year. The origins of the new name went back to United Airways, one of the three predecessors of the pre-World War II British Airways. The [re-]use of the United Airways name together with the prefix British had been agreed with shareholder Whitehall Securities, the controlling shareholder of both United Airways and Spartan Air Lines before these airlines' merger with Hillman's Airways to form the pre-war British Airways.

Following BUA's creation, Blue Star Line, Furness Withy and B&C owned 72% of the new airline's share capital. The remaining 28% was shared among the Clan Line (8%), Loel Guinness (10%) and Whitehall Securities (10%). This ownership structure made the Cayzer family the dominant shareholders. Sir Nicholas Cayzer, the Hon. Anthony Cayzer and Clive Hunting, at the time the Hunting Group's chairman, were appointed to the main board of directors that controlled the BUA group of companies.

In November 1961, the BUA group's shareholders created Air Holdings as a new holding company for the entire group.

In January 1962, British Aviation Services joined the merged entity. Britavia and Silver City Airways were its airline subsidiaries. P&O was the largest shareholder with a 70% stake, while Eagle Star and Cable & Wireless were minority shareholders that owned 20% and 10% respectively of its share capital.

BUA began operations from its new base at Gatwick Airport with a mixed fleet of 43 airliners and 47 helicopters. The former included Douglas DC-3 Dakota/C-47 Skytrain, DC-4/C-54 Skymaster and DC-6 piston airliners as well as more modern Bristol Britannia and Vickers Viscount turboprops. These continued serving the all-economy Safari and colonial coach class (British residents only) routes to East, Central, Southern and West Africa pioneered by both Airwork and Hunting-Clan,  as well as operating trooping flights from Stansted under contract to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and assorted passenger and freight charter flights these airlines and their associates had provided. During its first year of operation, the BUA group's 90-strong fleet flew 17.8 million revenue miles (28.6 million revenue kilometres), carrying 631,030 passengers, 143 million pounds (lb) (64,867 [metric] tonnes (t)) of freight and 25,749 cars (carried by Channel Air Bridge).

In addition to the Safari routes to Africa, BUA also established a network of scheduled services to mainly secondary destinations in Continental Europe, including Barcelona, Gibraltar, Ibiza, Málaga, Le Touquet, Lourdes, Palma, Perpignan, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Channel Islands. BUA furthermore continued Hunting-Clan's Africargo scheduled freight operation. This had given it access to Heathrow, Hunting's old base, for a limited number of all-cargo services to Africa. Moreover, BUA acted as Sudan Airways's technical advisers and operated that airline's Blue Nile Viscount services between Khartoum and London Gatwick.

BUA was a full member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) since its inception as a result of inheriting Hunting-Clan's membership. This included membership of IATA's trade association as well as participation in tariff co-ordination with other member airlines in the organisation's annual traffic conferences. BUA also continued Airwork's and Hunting-Clan's participation in various pool agreements with foreign national airlines. On the East African routes, for example, BUA participated in a tripartite pool agreement with BOAC and East African Airways. Participating in revenue-sharing agreements with its foreign counterparts was a prerequisite for securing overseas traffic rights, especially in Africa.

Freddie Laker, BUA's first managing director (MD), used his contacts to British Rail (BR) to create a £100,000 city centre check-in facility in London's West End in a disused part of Victoria Station, which opened in late-April 1962. This enabled BUA's scheduled passengers to complete all check-in formalities, including dropping off their hold luggage, before boarding their train to Gatwick.

Expansion and fleet rationalisation
At its inception, Bristol Britannias operated most of BUA's long-distance charter flights. A large number of these were trooping flights.

Developing BUA primarily as a scheduled airline was one of the first major policy decisions the BUA group's main board took in the early 1960s. The Civil Aviation (Licensing) Act of 1960, which abolished the statutory monopoly British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA) had enjoyed on principal domestic and international scheduled routes since the beginning of the post-war era and – theoretically – gave independent airlines equal opportunities to develop scheduled routes in their own right, formed the basis of this decision.

In early 1961, BUA applied to the Air Transport Licensing Board (ATLB),  a predecessor of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), for a large number of domestic and international short-, medium- and long-haul scheduled route licences to give its scheduled network the critical mass to become financially viable by 1965, and to provide sufficient work for a planned £20 million fleet of new jets comprising four long-haul Vickers VC10s and five short-/medium-haul DH 121 Tridents. BUA's applications included a request for twice-weekly all-economy/colonial coach class flights linking Gatwick with Istanbul, Teheran, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangkok and Singapore, with a weekly extension to Hong Kong and Tokyo, respectively. BUA intended to inaugurate its first-ever scheduled services to Asia with DC-6Cs or Britannias, which were to be replaced with the new VC10s at a later stage. The airline planned to charge standard IATA fares on all sectors. In addition, it proposed to offer British residents flying to Singapore and Hong Kong in Skycoach an 18% discount on the equivalent economy class fares. In May of that year, BUA became the first independent airline in the UK to launch a brand-new jet aircraft, when it placed an order for ten short-/medium-haul BAC One-Eleven 200 series. The same month, the airline placed an order for four Vickers VC10 long-haul jets costing £2.8 million apiece. Laker personally negotiated these orders with both manufacturers. The combined order value was £20 million. At that time, the ATLB conducted a hearing into BUA's applications for over 20 scheduled route licences to enable it to expand the European network to include a number of major trunk routes from its Gatwick base, such as Gatwick to Paris, Milan, Zürich, Amsterdam and Athens, in competition with existing services of BEA from Heathrow. Although the ATLB granted BUA the requested licences for 12 of these routes, the airline was unable to use them without actual traffic rights. These needed to be negotiated on its behalf between the UK Government and its overseas counterparts. Following the ATLB's decision, BUA commenced scheduled services between Gatwick and Tenerife in October 1961 using Viscounts. The same month, the airline started Viscount trooping flights from Gatwick to Germany under contract to the MoD.

At the start of the 1961–62 winter timetable in November 1961, BUA's fixed-wing fleet numbered 43 aircraft comprising Bristol Britannia and Vickers Viscount turboprops, as well as Douglas DC-6 and Bristol 170 Freighter piston airliners. Britannias and DC-6s operated to East, Central and Southern Africa, including non-stop Gatwick—Entebbe Britannia services, while Viscounts plied the multistop West African coastal route. Viscounts also served the airline's scheduled routes to the Canary Islands and Continental Europe.

In 1962, Jersey Airlines, a former "BEA associate", and Silver City Airways joined the BUA group of companies. The operations of these airlines were reorganised into British United (C.I.) Airways (BUA (C.I.)), British United (Manx) Airways and British United Air Ferries.

In May 1962, BUA revised the order it had placed a year earlier for four long-haul VC10s to two firm orders and two options; the options were not taken up following BUA's failure to obtain licences from the ATLB to operate scheduled services to Asia

From 20 July 1962, a Vickers-Armstrong VA-3 hovercraft was operated by BUA and ran from Leasowe embankment on the Wirral Peninsula to Rhyl in North Wales. However, due to varying reasons, including bad weather and technical difficulties, the service was cancelled after its final journey on 14 September 1962.

During the spring of 1963, BUA commenced additional scheduled services linking Gatwick with Lourdes/Tarbes, Barcelona, Palma and Genoa. At that time, the BUA group operated a fleet of 94 aircraft, which carried 1.8 million passengers, close to 200 million lb (90,000 t) of freight and 130,000 cars on an annualised basis.

On 26 May 1963, BUA began a twice-daily rail-air-rail service between the city centres of London and Paris. The service, which was marketed as Silver Arrow in the UK and as Flèche d'argent in France, was a joint operation between British Rail (BR), BUA and Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer français (SNCF). At London's Victoria Station, where BUA check-in facilities were available, Paris-bound passengers boarded a BR train to Gatwick Airport railway station. At Gatwick they transferred to a BUA Viscount, which flew them to Le Touquet Airport. At Le Touquet Airport an SNCF train was waiting to take them to Paris's Gare du Nord station. The entire journey took five hours and the minimum return fare was £10 9s. This compared with Skyways Coach-Air's London Victoria Coach Station — Lympne Airport — Beauvais Airport — Paris République Coach Station £11 return coach-air-coach fare. BUA's Silver Arrow service was an example of Laker turning an adversity into an opportunity. BUA's lack of traffic rights prevented it from running non-stop Gatwick—Paris scheduled flights although it held a licence for that route, which the ATLB had awarded it in late 1961. Faced with this restriction, Laker hit upon the idea to offer an indirect travel option between the city centres of London and Paris by combining the existing Victoria—Gatwick rail link with BUA's Gatwick – Le Touquet traffic rights. At the time, Le Touquet Airport was not linked to the French railway network. As a result, the surface journey between the airport and Paris was difficult and time-consuming as this involved an intermodal change between coach and train at Étaples. To overcome this drawback, Laker persuaded the French authorities to build a spur line into Le Touquet Airport so that BUA passengers could be met on arrival by a dedicated SNCF train that took them direct to Gare du Nord train station in the centre of Paris. BUA's new London—Paris rail-air-rail service via Gatwick replaced a coach-air-coach/rail service it had operated on this route via Lydd. BUA Silver Arrow fares were less than what BEA and Air France charged their passengers to fly non-stop between Heathrow and Paris to compensate for the longer travelling times (5 hr vs. 2 hr 45 min.).

The first of the two VC10s on firm order was handed over to BUA on 11 September 1964. Two days later, the aircraft was displayed at the Farnborough Airshow, where it replaced the larger Super VC10 prototype on the last day of the show. After being ferried to Gatwick the same evening, it began an eight-day series of proving and demonstration flights in East and Central Africa. The payload included Laker and his 1964 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

Commercial VC10 operations commenced on 1 October 1964 with a trooping flight from Gatwick to Aden. This made BUA the first British independent airline to commence uninterrupted jet operations.

While negotiations with relevant authorities in the UK and destination countries for the grant of interim operating permits to enable the transfer of BOAC's loss-making routes to South America and to ensure continuity of service were still in progress, BUA's first proving flight to that continent took place on 12 October 1964. It was operated with one of the brand-new VC10s, which carried a small load of VIPs comprising BUA MD Laker and a high-ranking British trade delegation.

On 2 November 1964, the first scheduled passenger service with the type departed Gatwick for Freetown in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

VC10s also replaced Britannias and DC-6s on BUA's routes to East and Southern Africa, where the newly delivered jets took over from the piston/turboprop types on scheduled services from Gatwick to Entebbe, Nairobi, Ndola, Lusaka and Salisbury.

Contemporary bilateral transport arrangements prevented BUA from offering a first class on its East African routes. To compensate for this loss of competitiveness, Freddie Laker came up with the novel idea of designing a cargo door to be installed on the left-hand side of the forward fuselage of the airline's VC10s, where the first class cabin was normally located. This modification permitted the carriage of additional freight instead of first class passengers on the East African routes. BUA's VC10s also had extended wingtips that were slightly bent downwards to reduce the aircraft's cruise drag and to help it overcome the instability encountered when entering a stall, as well as an intermediate, 14-degree flap setting to enable all-year round, nonstop flights from the then relatively short runway at Nairobi's hot-and-high Embakasi Airport to Gatwick with a full payload and reserves.

On 5 November 1964, BUA inaugurated regular scheduled services from Gatwick to Rio, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Santiago. BUA's new South American flights initially operated twice-weekly with alternate stops in Madrid and Lisbon, and a refuelling stop in Las Palmas. São Paulo and a third weekly frequency, which routed through Freetown to/from Buenos Aires, were added subsequently. The third frequency permitted BUA to alter its South American route pattern. As a result, one flight terminated in Brazil and end-to-end travelling times on the new Gatwick – Freetown – Buenos Aires – Santiago service reduced by over two hours compared with the previous routeing. The consequent overall capacity increase, including a greater choice of flights and shorter journey times between the UK, Argentina and Chile, made BUA's schedules more competitive with rivals.

In late 1964, Air Ferry joined the BUA group of companies as a consequence of Air Holdings' acquisition of Leroy Tours, Air Ferry's owners, thereby restoring the cross-Channel vehicle ferry services monopoly of British United Air Ferries.

In early April 1965, BUA received the first of the short-haul BAC One-Elevens, for which it had placed the launch order back in 1961, into its fleet. BUA operated the world's first commercial One-Eleven flight on 9 April 1965 from London Gatwick to Genoa. The expansion of BUA's long-haul flying programme – both scheduled and non-scheduled – resulted in an order for a third VC10 in early May 1965. Technically, BUA took over an order Ghana Airways had cancelled. Practically, this meant that the aircraft was built to BUA's specifications featuring the same cargo door on the left side of the forward fuselage as its sister aircraft, thereby ensuring fleet interchangeability. This aircraft was delivered on 31 July 1965. It entered service in a single-class configuration featuring 127, rear-facing seats to be primarily used for long-haul trooping flights.

On 4 January 1966, BUA commenced domestic scheduled services with the new One-Elevens from Gatwick to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast. These services were branded as InterJet. This made BUA the first UK domestic operator plying trunk routes exclusively with jet equipment. BUA also became the only airline in the world to operate One-Elevens on an intercontinental, long-haul scheduled route, when it introduced the 200 series on its multi-stop West African service linking Gatwick with Lagos via Lisbon, Las Palmas, Bathurst, Freetown and Accra.

During August 1966, BUA also introduced a new two-tone, sandstone and blue colour scheme. VC10 G-ASIX was first to appear in the new livery. This was sometimes unofficially referred to as the "hockey stick" livery.

BUA followed up its initial order for ten 200 series One-Elevens with an additional order for five stretched One-Eleven 500s. These were larger capacity aircraft with a higher takeoff weight that were primarily intended for use on the airline's European IT routes. These aircraft joined BUA's fleet from May 1969.

Reorganisation
At the end of 1965, Laker decided to relinquish his post as managing director and leave the company to set up his own airline.

Following Laker's departure from BUA, Max Stuart-Shaw was appointed as BUA's new MD. Stuart-Shaw was a former senior manager at Central African Airways. His brief was to oversee the successful implementation of the board's original policy decision taken in the early 1960s to transform BUA into a scheduled airline. Although Laker had largely succeeded in welding the various constituent airlines that made up BUA into a single, integrated enterprise towards the end of his tenure while ensuring the business remained profitable, it lacked the quality of a frontline scheduled carrier. Despite the growth in scheduled activities during that period, the airline was still perceived as mainly a charter and freight operator. When Stuart-Shaw took over from Laker, he strengthened BUA's management organisation by developing the personnel department, expanding the planning unit, as well as reorganising operations and engineering. He also improved the quality of the airline's marketing. As a result, BUA witnessed a major improvement in the quality of its promotional material and in the number of flights departing on time, making its punctuality record one of the UK airline industry's best.

Alan Bristow, the founder of Bristow Helicopters, succeeded Stuart-Shaw as BUA MD in December 1967 following the latter's decision to relinquish the chief executive role only two years after his appointment. By the time Bristow took over, BUA was losing money.

BUA had recorded its first-ever loss in 1965, mainly as a result of the high depreciation charges its newly acquired jet fleet incurred and substantial losses the ex-BOAC South American routes generated. Over the following two years, the airline's financial situation rapidly deteriorated. In 1966, the loss amounted to £250,000. The following year it almost doubled. Preliminary loss projections released during summer 1967 had shown that a continuation of this trend would produce a negative result of more than £1 million in 1968 and an even higher deficit the year after. This scenario undermined the board's case for additional shareholder funds to finance the purchase of new long-haul jet equipment to replace the remaining Britannias and caused growing anxiety among shareholders, who threatened to withdraw their support unless there was a marked improvement in the airline's long-term prospects.

A detailed analysis of BUA's financial results had shown that raising the airline's profile and quality during Max Stuart-Shaw's tenure meant that costs were growing faster than revenues. Other factors contributing to BUA's rapid cost escalation included high launch costs of several, initially unprofitable scheduled services, as well as an unexpected falloff in traffic as a result of a credit squeeze combined with new overseas travel restrictions due to a tightening of existing exchange controls. This was further compounded by the large number of overheads resulting from the group's complex organisation in which many functions were duplicated and the limited opportunities for independent airlines to operate scheduled services on domestic and international trunk routes in competition with the corporations.

BUA had built up the high cost base of a major scheduled airline while low-yield charter traffic, a substantial amount of which was fluctuating, low-margin short-haul trooping between the UK and Germany, constituted a large part of its business. On the other hand, scheduled services generated inadequate revenues, which were insufficient to support the airline. Simultaneous development of new scheduled services and integration of existing regional operations in the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man with the vehicle ferry network proved a costly distraction for overburdened senior sales and commercial managers, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Although revenues and the workforce had doubled between 1962 and 1968, total output had risen by less than half over the same period. This translated into a substantial fall in output per employee within that time span and resulted in a weak trading position.

To return BUA to profitability and to secure its long-term future as a viable business, Bristow simplified the unwieldy organisational structure of the BUA group of companies and implemented a new growth strategy.

This entailed splitting Air Holdings into two organisationally independent entities under the control of B&C.

BUA (Holdings) became the new holding company for BUA and British United Island Airways (BUIA), which combined the "second-level" scheduled operations of BUA (C.I.) and British United (Manx) Airways under the new name of Channel Islands and Manx Air Services (CIMAS) and "third-level" charter activities of Morton Air Services, as well as the BUA group's stakes in Bristow Helicopters, Gambia Airways, Sierra Leone Airways and Uganda Aviation Services.

Air Holdings, the old parent company of the unreconstructed BUA group, became a separate holding company for British Air Ferries (BAF) and Aviation Traders, Freddie Laker's old company. It also assumed ownership of Air Ferry, Airwork Services, the BUA group's tour operators and the new L-1011 franchise for sales outside the US.

B&C reportedly paid Air Holdings £6 million for the transfer of BUA's ownership to BUA (Holdings).

The BUA group's reorganisation also entailed B&C buying out all of BUA's co-owners other than Eagle Star for £17 million in May 1968. This gave it a 90.8% stake and left Eagle Star with the remaining 9.2%.

Specific steps Alan Bristow took to reorganise and revitalise the BUA group included

 * appointment of four special (executive) directors from BUA to strengthen the BUA (Holdings) board
 * formation of a top management team comprising Bristow and the four newly appointed directors
 * reorganisation into four main divisions, each headed by one of the four new directors
 * closure of expensive Central London offices and Southend engineering base to concentrate all head office and as many engineering functions as possible at, or near, Gatwick
 * putting in place concrete, long-term development plans for BUA's Gatwick base
 * expansion of non-scheduled operations by concentrating on lucrative European IT and transatlantic closed group charters at the expense of low-margin trooping
 * introduction of incentive schemes to help achieve above-target sales and reward cost-cutting ideas
 * implementation of urgent economies in all non-essential areas.
 * holding regular staff meetings and making senior managers more accessible to improve internal communications.

These measures were primarily intended to help BUA break even in 1968 and return to profit by 1969. To meet the longer term objective of transforming BUA into a viable business with a stable future, the airline's top management team got several, more forward-looking developments started. These focused on giving planning and a newly created special projects department direct access to the chief executive and putting greater emphasis on fleet modernisation to enhance BUA's competitiveness, including an urgent re-evaluation of the airline's future long-haul requirements.

An order for five 500 series One-Elevens to meet the airline's future short-/medium haul requirements started the fleet modernisation process. It was followed by the retirement of the remaining turboprops in BUA's mainline fleet and an evaluation of the Boeing 707 and Super VC10 for its future long-haul requirements, as well as the HS 125 and HP Jetstream as potential replacements for its "third-level" fleet. An important factor in each case was the airline's new strategy to capture a greater share of the non-scheduled market. Using a more logical approach to regroup the wide spread of airline activities into four discrete units concluded the BUA group's reorganisation and revitalisation. As a result, BUA became the group's frontline all-jet operator based at Gatwick; BUIA's CIMAS division provided all "second-level" scheduled services from several regional bases and standardised its fleet on the Herald turboprop, while its Morton Air Services division offered "third-level" air taxi, charter and feeder services; and Bristow Helicopters assumed sole responsibility for all helicopter operations.

A concept called the "two-market philosophy" was the centrepiece of all these developments. This was based on the idea that BUA could only become economically viable and realise its full potential if it took maximum advantage of opportunities to develop its business profitably in both the scheduled and non-scheduled markets. Practically, this entailed increasing frequencies on existing scheduled services with particular emphasis on South American and UK domestic trunk routes, starting up scheduled routes to new destinations, securing a bigger share of the fast-growing short-/medium-haul IT market, establishing a presence in the long-haul closed group charter business and doing more contract work for overseas airlines.

These organisational changes led to a series of strikes. Despite its troubled industrial relations, BUA's financial performance gradually improved and it became profitable again. The improved financial performance was reflected in BUA's ability to turn BOAC's annual £1¼ million loss on the South American routes into a profit by the end of its fourth year of operation and to run the UK's only genuinely profitable domestic scheduled services.

In 1969, BUA purchased the VC10 prototype from Laker Airways. The acquisition of the VC10 prototype increased BUA's long-haul fleet to four aircraft.

By the end of the decade, BUA voluntarily withdrew from its two-year MoD contract for trooping flights between Britain and Germany, marking the end of the airline's trooping activities. By that time, BUA's fleet consisted of 21 aircraft, 18 of which were state-of-the art jet aircraft (four VC10s and 14 One-Elevens) as well as three Viscount 800 turboprops. Scheduled services accounted for 42% of its business, IT charters for 56% and trooping flights for the remaining 2%.

At the beginning of the new decade, BUA had an all-jet fleet, which gave it a competitive edge over its contemporary independent rivals.

"Second Force"
In the late 1960s, a parliamentary committee of inquiry headed by Sir Ronald Edwards, at the time the chairman of the Electricity Council and Professor at the London School of Economics, inquired into the UK's air transport industry and its prospects in the coming decade. At the conclusion of its inquiry, the Edwards committee published a 394-page report on 2 May 1969 entitled British Air Transport in the Seventies.

Concept
One of the Edwards report's recommendations was the creation of a financially and managerially sound, so-called Second Force private sector airline  to operate a viable network of short- and long-haul scheduled and non-scheduled services. This "Second Force" airline was to be licensed to complement or compete with state-owned BEA and BOAC on selected short-/long-haul routes, in accordance with the relevant bilateral air transport agreements. Wherever bilateral agreements permitted a second British carrier, the "Second Force" was to assume this role. The "Second Force" was to be assisted in attaining critical mass by way of a limited route transfer from the corporations,  both of which accounted for more than 90% of all UK scheduled air transport capacity in the late 1960s. In return, the "National Air Holdings Board" that was to assume control of the corporations was to be given a minority stake in the "Second Force" and at least one seat on its board. To enable the "Second Force" to become viable by 1980, its minimum size was to be at least 4 billion long-haul scheduled service seat miles (6.4 billion seat kilometres) per annum by 1975, and its fleet was to consist of at least 14 state-of-the-art long-haul aircraft, including three supersonic transports (SSTs), three wide-bodied trijets and eight conventional narrow-bodied jets.

The Edwards committee considered BUA and Caledonian the two main constituents of the envisaged "Second Force" among Britain's numerous contemporary independent airlines.

Creation
Following publication of the Edwards report, BUA pitched for the role of the "Second Force" airline. Its bid centred on a six-year expansion plan for the period 1970–1975 that envisaged the progressive transfer of all of BOAC's African routes to itself to complement its existing African services from Gatwick, and unlimited frequencies between Gatwick and New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. This route transfer was to be accomplished by 1975; the East African routes in 1971, to be followed by Central, West and South African routes in 1972, 73 and 75 respectively while widebodied services to New York were to begin in 1974 by which time BUA expected to be able to launch commercially viable transatlantic scheduled services with Lockheed L-1011 Tristars, McDonnell-Douglas DC-10s or an aircraft based on a late-1960s "sub-jumbo" design proposal Boeing had jointly developed with Aeritalia under the working title "Boeing 767". The plan also hinted at a subsequent transfer of the corporation's Caribbean and South American routes to strengthen BUA's role as the new British North-South long-haul airline while leaving BOAC to concentrate on becoming the UK's East-West long-haul carrier. BUA reckoned that this would give it the critical mass and rational route network to meet the Edwards' committee estimate of 4 billion annual scheduled long-haul seat miles (6.4 billion seat kilometres) that would be minimum for economically viable Second Force.

BUA estimated that it needed to invest £60 million in new aircraft, including the then latest generation widebody and supersonic aircraft, and £25 million for the associated ground facilities and working capital.

BUA's advocacy of large-scale route transfers from the corporations had not been envisaged by the committee and was opposed by the corporations and trade unions. It was also opposed by Caledonian; rather than creating spheres of influence between the corporations and the independents, that airline advocated organic development through new licensing opportunities that would permit it to compete with the corporations on an equal footing, especially on North Atlantic routes, and security of tenure upon which to build a sound economic future.

Meanwhile, BUA became a growing burden on the Cayzers' as a result of its disappointing financial performance, a situation made worse by the unexpected loss of one of its most important IT customers to the newly formed BEA Airtours. This led to an approach to both corporations, with the intention of selling BUA to one of them. BEA, which was approached first, refused because it considered the price Sir Nicholas was asking for BUA — £9 million – too high. A subsequent approach to BOAC proved to be more successful. Sir Keith Granville, BOAC's then MD, agreed to purchase BUA from B&C for £7.9 million. Roy Mason, the President of the Board of Trade, gave the Government's preliminary approval to BOAC's proposed takeover of BUA,  on the understanding that there were no realistic prospects of a merger with another independent airline as recommended in the Edwards report.

When the details of this supposedly confidential agreement were leaked to the press, Caledonian, which had expressed its interest in acquiring BUA itself and had already begun negotiations with BUA's senior management to make an offer to take over the airline, immediately applied to the ATLB for the revocation of all of BUA's scheduled route licences, requesting them to be transferred to itself. It also leaked its own version of this story to The Observer. Following this revelation, Roy Mason made a statement to the House of Commons that B&C had misled him about the prospects of forming a "Second Force" airline through a merger with another independent, and that he was therefore going to withhold his final approval of the BOAC-BUA merger "until the situation has been clarified". This opened the way for several parties – including Caledonian – to make a counter bid for BUA. As well as BOAC and Caledonian, Laker Airways and a consortium led by Alan Bristow expressed interest by the end of April. Bidders were required to withdraw any application for BUA routes and undertake not to make any such application for a year.

The new Conservative government endorsed the principle of the second force but contrary to its predecessor was prepared to transfer up to 3% of state route revenue to independents.

On 30 November 1970, Caledonian Airways acquired BUA together with three new BAC One-Eleven 500 series aircraft the latter had leased from B&C for £12 million, thereby enabling it to transform itself into a scheduled airline. The merged entity would be known for an interim period as Caledonian/BUA before eventually adopting the British Caledonian name.

Fleet
BUA and its associates operated the following aircraft types during BUA's ten-year history:

 * Aviation Traders Carvair
 * BAC One-Eleven 200/400/500 series
 * Beechcraft Twin Bonanza
 * Bristol Freighter Mark 31
 * Bristol Superfreighter Mark 32
 * Bristol Britannia 300 series
 * Cessna 310
 * Cessna 320A Skyknight
 * de Havilland Dragon Rapide
 * de Havilland Dove
 * de Havilland Heron
 * de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver
 * Douglas DC-3 Dakota/Douglas C-47 Skytrain
 * Douglas DC-4/Douglas C-54 Skymaster
 * Douglas DC-6
 * Handley Page HPR 7 Dart Herald
 * Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer
 * Vickers VC10 series 1103/1109
 * Vickers Viscount 700/800 series

In addition to the fixed-wing aircraft types listed above, BUA group companies also operated various helicopter types.

Fleet in 1961
In April 1961, the combined fleet of all BUA group companies comprised 109 aircraft, 57 of which were fixed-wing aircraft. Various helicopter types accounted for the balance.

Fleet in 1965
In April 1965, the BUA mainline fleet comprised 21 aircraft (2 jets, 16 turboprops, 3 piston airliners).

The first of ten new BAC One-Eleven 201ACs that were on order was handed over to the airline on 4 April 1965.

BUA (mainline) employed 2,000 people at this time.

Fleet in 1969
In April 1969, the BUA mainline fleet comprised 16 aircraft (13 jets and 3 turboprops).

The first of 8 new BAC One-Eleven 500s that were on order was handed over to the airline later that year.

BUA (mainline) employed 3,200 people at this time.

Accidents and incidents
During its ten-year existence, BUA suffered one fatal accident and two non-fatal incidents.

The fatal accident was the crash of Flight 1030X on 14 April 1965. BUA (Channel Islands) Douglas C-47B-20-DK (registration: G-ANTB) was operating a scheduled international passenger flight from Paris Orly to Jersey. Despite the deteriorating weather conditions at Jersey's States Airport, the crew decided to continue its approach to runway 27. This approach was abandoned because runway visual range fell below minima. When the aircraft made a second approach, it struck the outermost pole of the approach light system at a height of 58 ft, 3000 ft short of the runway threshold. This caused the aircraft to crash into the approach lights and catch fire, which killed 26 of the 27 occupants (three out of four crew members and all 23 passengers).

The first non-fatal incident was on 30 October 1961. It involved a BUA mainline Vickers Viscount 736 (registration: G-AODH operating an internal German charter flight under contract to BEA from Berlin Tempelhof Airport to Frankfurt Rhein-Main Airport. While executing a missed approach during an instrument approach to Rhein-Main Airport in poor visibility, the aircraft crash-landed. It struck the ground alongside Rhein-Main's runway 25 and rolled to a stop. There aircraft was damaged beyond repair, but there were no fatalities among the 16 occupants (four crew and 12 passengers) although a flight attendant and a passenger sustained injuries. Accident investigators concluded that the crash-landing was caused by the captain flying below the critical height in inadequate surface visibility. They furthermore concluded that the assistance the captain received from his co-pilot at the critical moment was erroneous and misleading, and therefore constituted an important contributing factor.

The second non-fatal incident occurred on 14 January 1969. It involved a BUA mainline BAC One-Eleven 201AC (registration: G-ASJJ) operating a scheduled international passenger flight from Milan's Linate Airport to London Gatwick. This was the same aircraft BUA had used to operate the One-Eleven's inaugural revenue service. On the day of the accident, the aircraft had been diverted to Linate on the outbound flight because of fog at Genoa's Cristoforo Colombo Airport. A normal take-off run was followed by a bang immediately after the aircraft had become airborne. The captain in the jumpseat who was supervising the co-pilot at the time thought that there was a problem with the no. 1 engine. He advised the pilot in command to close the throttle a short while later. The pilot in command followed this advice and lowered the nose pitch from 12 to six degrees. The engine shutdown was accompanied by a decrease in airspeed from 140 knots (161 mph/ 259 km/h to 115 kn (132 mph / 212 km/h). Although the aircraft was damaged beyond repair in the resulting forced landing on snow-covered sand about two miles from the end of runway 18, there were no fatalities among the 33 occupants (seven crew and 26 passengers) though there were two serious injuries. The accident investigators concluded that this crash was caused by the crew failing to recognise their mistake, which had resulted in shutting down the wrong engine (no. 1) in error following a compressor bang/surge in the no. 2 engine. In addition, the crew did not notice that an inadvertent movement of the relevant throttle lever had partially reduced the no. 2 engine's thrust.

Notes and citations

 * Notes

 * Citations

title: British United Airways


text:
Multi-armed bandit

In probability theory and machine learning, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K- or N-armed bandit problem ) is a problem in which a decision maker iteratively selects one of multiple fixed choices (i.e., arms or actions) when the properties of each choice are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes. A fundamental aspect of bandit problems is that choosing an arm does not affect the properties of the arm or other arms.

Instances of the multi-armed bandit problem include the task of iteratively allocating a fixed, limited set of resources between competing (alternative) choices in a way that minimizes the regret. A notable alternative setup for the multi-armed bandit problem include the "best arm identification" problem where the goal is instead to identify the best choice by the end of a finite number of rounds.

The multi-armed bandit problem is a classic reinforcement learning problem that exemplifies the exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma. In contrast to general RL, the selected actions in bandit problems do not affect the reward distribution of the arms. The name comes from imagining a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as "one-armed bandits"), who has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them, and whether to continue with the current machine or try a different machine. The multi-armed bandit problem also falls into the broad category of stochastic scheduling.

In the problem, each machine provides a random reward from a probability distribution specific to that machine, that is not known a priori. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls. The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the machine that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other machines. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is also faced in machine learning. In practice, multi-armed bandits have been used to model problems such as managing research projects in a large organization, like a science foundation or a pharmaceutical company. In early versions of the problem, the gambler begins with no initial knowledge about the machines.

Herbert Robbins in 1952, realizing the importance of the problem, constructed convergent population selection strategies in "some aspects of the sequential design of experiments". A theorem, the Gittins index, first published by John C. Gittins, gives an optimal policy for maximizing the expected discounted reward.

Empirical motivation
The multi-armed bandit problem models an agent that simultaneously attempts to acquire new knowledge (called "exploration") and optimize their decisions based on existing knowledge (called "exploitation"). The agent attempts to balance these competing tasks in order to maximize their total value over the period of time considered. There are many practical applications of the bandit model, for example:

 * clinical trials investigating the effects of different experimental treatments while minimizing patient losses,
 * adaptive routing efforts for minimizing delays in a network,
 * financial portfolio design

In these practical examples, the problem requires balancing reward maximization based on the knowledge already acquired with attempting new actions to further increase knowledge. This is known as the exploitation vs. exploration tradeoff in machine learning.

The model has also been used to control dynamic allocation of resources to different projects, answering the question of which project to work on, given uncertainty about the difficulty and payoff of each possibility.

Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.

The version of the problem now commonly analyzed was formulated by Herbert Robbins in 1952.

The multi-armed bandit model
The multi-armed bandit (short: bandit or MAB) can be seen as a set of real distributions $$B = \{R_1, \dots ,R_K\}$$, each distribution being associated with the rewards delivered by one of the $$K \in \mathbb{N}^+$$ levers. Let $$\mu_1, \dots, \mu_K$$ be the mean values associated with these reward distributions. The gambler iteratively plays one lever per round and observes the associated reward. The objective is to maximize the sum of the collected rewards. The horizon $$H$$ is the number of rounds that remain to be played. The bandit problem is formally equivalent to a one-state Markov decision process. The regret $$\rho$$ after $$T$$ rounds is defined as the expected difference between the reward sum associated with an optimal strategy and the sum of the collected rewards:

$$\rho = T \mu^* - \sum_{t=1}^T \widehat{r}_t$$,

where $$\mu^*$$ is the maximal reward mean, $$\mu^* = \max_k \{ \mu_k \}$$, and $$\widehat{r}_t$$ is the reward in round t.

A zero-regret strategy is a strategy whose average regret per round $$\rho / T$$ tends to zero with probability 1 when the number of played rounds tends to infinity. Intuitively, zero-regret strategies are guaranteed to converge to a (not necessarily unique) optimal strategy if enough rounds are played.

Variations
A common formulation is the Binary multi-armed bandit or Bernoulli multi-armed bandit, which issues a reward of one with probability $$p$$, and otherwise a reward of zero.

Another formulation of the multi-armed bandit has each arm representing an independent Markov machine. Each time a particular arm is played, the state of that machine advances to a new one, chosen according to the Markov state evolution probabilities. There is a reward depending on the current state of the machine. In a generalization called the "restless bandit problem", the states of non-played arms can also evolve over time. There has also been discussion of systems where the number of choices (about which arm to play) increases over time.

Computer science researchers have studied multi-armed bandits under worst-case assumptions, obtaining algorithms to minimize regret in both finite and infinite (asymptotic) time horizons for both stochastic and non-stochastic arm payoffs.

Best Arm Identification
An important variation of the classical regret minimization problem in multi-armed bandits is the one of Best Arm Identification (BAI), also known as pure exploration. This problem is crucial in various applications, including clinical trials, adaptive routing, recommendation systems, and A/B testing.

In BAI, the objective is to identify the arm having the highest expected reward. An algorithm in this setting is characterized by a sampling rule, a decision rule, and a stopping rule, described as follows:

 * 1) Sampling rule : $$(a_t)_{t\ge 1}$$ is a sequence of actions at each time step
 * 2) Stopping rule : $$\tau$$ is a (random) stopping time which suggests when to stop collecting samples
 * 3) Decision rule : $$\hat{a}_\tau$$ is a guess on the best arm based on the data collected up to time $$\tau$$

There are two predominant settings in BAI:

Fixed confidence setting: Given a confidence level $$\delta \in (0,1)$$, the objective is to identify the arm with the highest expected reward $$a^\star \in \arg\max_{k} \mu_k$$ with the least possible amount of trials and with probability of error $$\mathbb{P}(\hat{a}_\tau \neq a^\star) \le \delta$$.

Fixed budget setting: Given a time horizon $$T\ge 1$$, the objective is to identify the arm with the highest expected reward $$a^\star \in \arg\max_{k} \mu_k$$ minimizing probability of error $$\delta$$.

Bandit strategies
A major breakthrough was the construction of optimal population selection strategies, or policies (that possess uniformly maximum convergence rate to the population with highest mean) in the work described below.

Optimal solutions
In the paper "Asymptotically efficient adaptive allocation rules", Lai and Robbins (following papers of Robbins and his co-workers going back to Robbins in the year 1952) constructed convergent population selection policies that possess the fastest rate of convergence (to the population with highest mean) for the case that the population reward distributions are the one-parameter exponential family. Then, in Katehakis and Robbins simplifications of the policy and the main proof were given for the case of normal populations with known variances. The next notable progress was obtained by Burnetas and Katehakis in the paper "Optimal adaptive policies for sequential allocation problems", where index based policies with uniformly maximum convergence rate were constructed, under more general conditions that include the case in which the distributions of outcomes from each population depend on a vector of unknown parameters. Burnetas and Katehakis (1996) also provided an explicit solution for the important case in which the distributions of outcomes follow arbitrary (i.e., non-parametric) discrete, univariate distributions.

Later in "Optimal adaptive policies for Markov decision processes" Burnetas and Katehakis studied the much larger model of Markov Decision Processes under partial information, where the transition law and/or the expected one period rewards may depend on unknown parameters. In this work, the authors constructed an explicit form for a class of adaptive policies with uniformly maximum convergence rate properties for the total expected finite horizon reward under sufficient assumptions of finite state-action spaces and irreducibility of the transition law. A main feature of these policies is that the choice of actions, at each state and time period, is based on indices that are inflations of the right-hand side of the estimated average reward optimality equations. These inflations have recently been called the optimistic approach in the work of Tewari and Bartlett, Ortner Filippi, Cappé, and Garivier, and Honda and Takemura.

For Bernoulli multi-armed bandits, Pilarski et al. studied computation methods of deriving fully optimal solutions (not just asymptotically) using dynamic programming in the paper "Optimal Policy for Bernoulli Bandits: Computation and Algorithm Gauge." Via indexing schemes, lookup tables, and other techniques, this work provided practically applicable optimal solutions for Bernoulli bandits provided that time horizons and numbers of arms did not become excessively large. Pilarski et al. later extended this work in "Delayed Reward Bernoulli Bandits: Optimal Policy and Predictive Meta-Algorithm PARDI" to create a method of determining the optimal policy for Bernoulli bandits when rewards may not be immediately revealed following a decision and may be delayed. This method relies upon calculating expected values of reward outcomes which have not yet been revealed and updating posterior probabilities when rewards are revealed.

When optimal solutions to multi-arm bandit tasks are used to derive the value of animals' choices, the activity of neurons in the amygdala and ventral striatum encodes the values derived from these policies, and can be used to decode when the animals make exploratory versus exploitative choices. Moreover, optimal policies better predict animals' choice behavior than alternative strategies (described below). This suggests that the optimal solutions to multi-arm bandit problems are biologically plausible, despite being computationally demanding.

Approximate solutions
Many strategies exist which provide an approximate solution to the bandit problem, and can be put into the four broad categories detailed below.

Semi-uniform strategies
Semi-uniform strategies were the earliest (and simplest) strategies discovered to approximately solve the bandit problem. All those strategies have in common a greedy behavior where the best lever (based on previous observations) is always pulled except when a (uniformly) random action is taken.

 * Epsilon-greedy strategy: The best lever is selected for a proportion $$1 - \epsilon$$ of the trials, and a lever is selected at random (with uniform probability) for a proportion $$\epsilon$$. A typical parameter value might be $$\epsilon = 0.1$$, but this can vary widely depending on circumstances and predilections.
 * Epsilon-first strategy: A pure exploration phase is followed by a pure exploitation phase. For $$N$$ trials in total, the exploration phase occupies $$\epsilon N$$ trials and the exploitation phase $$(1 - \epsilon) N$$ trials. During the exploration phase, a lever is randomly selected (with uniform probability); during the exploitation phase, the best lever is always selected.
 * Epsilon-decreasing strategy: Similar to the epsilon-greedy strategy, except that the value of $$\epsilon$$ decreases as the experiment progresses, resulting in highly explorative behaviour at the start and highly exploitative behaviour at the finish.
 * Adaptive epsilon-greedy strategy based on value differences (VDBE): Similar to the epsilon-decreasing strategy, except that epsilon is reduced on basis of the learning progress instead of manual tuning (Tokic, 2010). High fluctuations in the value estimates lead to a high epsilon (high exploration, low exploitation); low fluctuations to a low epsilon (low exploration, high exploitation). Further improvements can be achieved by a softmax-weighted action selection in case of exploratory actions (Tokic & Palm, 2011).
 * Adaptive epsilon-greedy strategy based on Bayesian ensembles (Epsilon-BMC): An adaptive epsilon adaptation strategy for reinforcement learning similar to VBDE, with monotone convergence guarantees. In this framework, the epsilon parameter is viewed as the expectation of a posterior distribution weighting a greedy agent (that fully trusts the learned reward) and uniform learning agent (that distrusts the learned reward). This posterior is approximated using a suitable Beta distribution under the assumption of normality of observed rewards. In order to address the possible risk of decreasing epsilon too quickly, uncertainty in the variance of the learned reward is also modeled and updated using a normal-gamma model. (Gimelfarb et al., 2019).

Probability matching strategies
Probability matching strategies reflect the idea that the number of pulls for a given lever should match its actual probability of being the optimal lever. Probability matching strategies are also known as Thompson sampling or Bayesian Bandits, and are surprisingly easy to implement if you can sample from the posterior for the mean value of each alternative.

Probability matching strategies also admit solutions to so-called contextual bandit problems.

Pricing strategies
Pricing strategies establish a price for each lever. For example, as illustrated with the POKER algorithm, the price can be the sum of the expected reward plus an estimation of extra future rewards that will gain through the additional knowledge. The lever of highest price is always pulled.

Contextual bandit
A useful generalization of the multi-armed bandit is the contextual multi-armed bandit. At each iteration an agent still has to choose between arms, but they also see a d-dimensional feature vector, the context vector they can use together with the rewards of the arms played in the past to make the choice of the arm to play. Over time, the learner's aim is to collect enough information about how the context vectors and rewards relate to each other, so that it can predict the next best arm to play by looking at the feature vectors.

Approximate solutions for contextual bandit
Many strategies exist that provide an approximate solution to the contextual bandit problem, and can be put into two broad categories detailed below.

Online linear bandits

 * LinUCB (Upper Confidence Bound) algorithm: the authors assume a linear dependency between the expected reward of an action and its context and model the representation space using a set of linear predictors.
 * LinRel (Linear Associative Reinforcement Learning) algorithm: Similar to LinUCB, but utilizes Singular-value decomposition rather than Ridge regression to obtain an estimate of confidence.

Online non-linear bandits

 * UCBogram algorithm: The nonlinear reward functions are estimated using a piecewise constant estimator called a regressogram in nonparametric regression. Then, UCB is employed on each constant piece. Successive refinements of the partition of the context space are scheduled or chosen adaptively.
 * Generalized linear algorithms: The reward distribution follows a generalized linear model, an extension to linear bandits.
 * KernelUCB algorithm: a kernelized non-linear version of linearUCB, with efficient implementation and finite-time analysis.
 * Bandit Forest algorithm: a random forest is built and analyzed w.r.t the random forest built knowing the joint distribution of contexts and rewards.
 * Oracle-based algorithm: The algorithm reduces the contextual bandit problem into a series of supervised learning problem, and does not rely on typical realizability assumption on the reward function.

Constrained contextual bandit
In practice, there is usually a cost associated with the resource consumed by each action and the total cost is limited by a budget in many applications such as crowdsourcing and clinical trials. Constrained contextual bandit (CCB) is such a model that considers both the time and budget constraints in a multi-armed bandit setting. A. Badanidiyuru et al. first studied contextual bandits with budget constraints, also referred to as Resourceful Contextual Bandits, and show that a $$O(\sqrt{T})$$ regret is achievable. However, their work focuses on a finite set of policies, and the algorithm is computationally inefficient.

A simple algorithm with logarithmic regret is proposed in:
 * UCB-ALP algorithm: The framework of UCB-ALP is shown in the right figure. UCB-ALP is a simple algorithm that combines the UCB method with an Adaptive Linear Programming (ALP) algorithm, and can be easily deployed in practical systems. It is the first work that show how to achieve logarithmic regret in constrained contextual bandits. Although is devoted to a special case with single budget constraint and fixed cost, the results shed light on the design and analysis of algorithms for more general CCB problems.

Adversarial bandit
Another variant of the multi-armed bandit problem is called the adversarial bandit, first introduced by Auer and Cesa-Bianchi (1998). In this variant, at each iteration, an agent chooses an arm and an adversary simultaneously chooses the payoff structure for each arm. This is one of the strongest generalizations of the bandit problem as it removes all assumptions of the distribution and a solution to the adversarial bandit problem is a generalized solution to the more specific bandit problems.

Example: Iterated prisoner's dilemma
An example often considered for adversarial bandits is the iterated prisoner's dilemma. In this example, each adversary has two arms to pull. They can either Deny or Confess. Standard stochastic bandit algorithms don't work very well with these iterations. For example, if the opponent cooperates in the first 100 rounds, defects for the next 200, then cooperate in the following 300, etc. then algorithms such as UCB won't be able to react very quickly to these changes. This is because after a certain point sub-optimal arms are rarely pulled to limit exploration and focus on exploitation. When the environment changes the algorithm is unable to adapt or may not even detect the change.

Approximate solutions
====Exp3 ====

EXP3 is a popular algorithm for adversarial multiarmed bandits, suggested and analyzed in this setting by Auer et al. [2002b]. Recently there was an increased interest in the performance of this algorithm in the stochastic setting, due to its new applications to stochastic multi-armed bandits with side information [Seldin et al., 2011] and to multi-armed bandits in the mixed stochastic-adversarial setting [Bubeck and Slivkins, 2012]. The paper presented an empirical evaluation and improved analysis of the performance of the EXP3 algorithm in the stochastic setting, as well as a modification of the EXP3 algorithm capable of achieving “logarithmic” regret in stochastic environment

Algorithm
Parameters: Real $$\gamma \in (0,1] $$ Initialisation: $$\omega_i(1) = 1$$ for $$i = 1,...,K$$  For each t = 1, 2, ..., T   1. Set $$p_i(t) = (1 - \gamma)\frac{\omega_i(t)}{\sum_{j=1}^{K}\omega_j(t)} + \frac{\gamma}{K}$$       $$i = 1,...,K$$   2. Draw $$i_t$$ randomly according to the probabilities $$p_1(t),...,p_K(t)$$   3. Receive reward $$x_{i_t}(t) \in [0,1]$$   4. For $$j = 1,...,K$$ set:       $$\hat{x}_j(t) = \begin{cases}x_j(t)/p_j(t) & \text{if }j = i_t \\0, & \text{otherwise}\end{cases}$$       $$\omega_j(t+1) = \omega_j(t) \exp(\gamma\hat{x}_j(t)/K)$$

Explanation
Exp3 chooses an arm at random with probability $$(1 - \gamma)$$ it prefers arms with higher weights (exploit), it chooses with probability $$\gamma$$ to uniformly randomly explore. After receiving the rewards the weights are updated. The exponential growth significantly increases the weight of good arms.

Regret analysis
The (external) regret of the Exp3 algorithm is at most $$O(\sqrt{KTlog(K)})$$

Algorithm
Parameters: Real $$\eta$$ Initialisation: $$\forall i: R_i(1) = 0$$ For each t = 1,2,...,T 1. For each arm generate a random noise from an exponential distribution $$\forall i : Z_i(t) \sim Exp(\eta)$$ 2. Pull arm $$I(t)$$: $$I(t)=arg\max_i\{R_i(t) + Z_i(t)\}$$ Add noise to each arm and pull the one with the highest value 3. Update value: $$R_{I(t)}(t+1) = R_{I(t)}(t) + x_{I(t)}(t)$$ The rest remains the same

Explanation
We follow the arm that we think has the best performance so far adding exponential noise to it to provide exploration.

Infinite-armed bandit
In the original specification and in the above variants, the bandit problem is specified with a discrete and finite number of arms, often indicated by the variable $$K$$. In the infinite armed case, introduced by Agrawal (1995), the "arms" are a continuous variable in $$K$$ dimensions.

Non-stationary bandit
This framework refers to the multi-armed bandit problem in a non-stationary setting (i.e., in presence of concept drift). In the non-stationary setting, it is assumed that the expected reward for an arm $$k$$ can change at every time step $$t \in \mathcal{T}$$: $$\mu_{t-1}^k \neq \mu_t^k$$. Thus, $$\mu_t^k$$ no longer represents the whole sequence of expected (stationary) rewards for arm $$k$$. Instead, $$\mu^k$$ denotes the sequence of expected rewards for arm $$k$$, defined as $$\mu^k = \{\mu_t^k\}_{t=1}^T$$.

A dynamic oracle represents the optimal policy to be compared with other policies in the non-stationary setting. The dynamic oracle optimises the expected reward at each step $$t \in \mathcal{T}$$ by always selecting the best arm, with expected reward of $$\mu_t^*$$. Thus, the cumulative expected reward $$\mathcal{D}(T)$$ for the dynamic oracle at final time step $$T$$ is defined as:

$$\mathcal{D}(T) = \sum_{t=1}^T{\mu_t^*}$$

Hence, the regret $$\rho^\pi(T)$$ for policy $$\pi$$ is computed as the difference between $$\mathcal{D}(T)$$ and the cumulative expected reward at step $$T$$ for policy $$\pi$$:

$$   \rho^\pi(T) = \sum_{t=1}^T{\mu_t^*} - \mathbb{E}_\pi^\mu \left[ \sum_{t=1}^T{r_t} \right] = \mathcal{D}(T) - \mathbb{E}_\pi^\mu \left[ \sum_{t=1}^T{r_t} \right] $$

Garivier and Moulines derive some of the first results with respect to bandit problems where the underlying model can change during play. A number of algorithms were presented to deal with this case, including Discounted UCB and Sliding-Window UCB. A similar approach based on Thompson Sampling algorithm is the f-Discounted-Sliding-Window Thompson Sampling (f-dsw TS) proposed by Cavenaghi et al. The f-dsw TS algorithm exploits a discount factor on the reward history and an arm-related sliding window to contrast concept drift in non-stationary environments. Another work by Burtini et al. introduces a weighted least squares Thompson sampling approach (WLS-TS), which proves beneficial in both the known and unknown non-stationary cases.

Other variants
Many variants of the problem have been proposed in recent years.

Dueling bandit
The dueling bandit variant was introduced by Yue et al. (2012) to model the exploration-versus-exploitation tradeoff for relative feedback. In this variant the gambler is allowed to pull two levers at the same time, but they only get a binary feedback telling which lever provided the best reward. The difficulty of this problem stems from the fact that the gambler has no way of directly observing the reward of their actions. The earliest algorithms for this problem are InterleaveFiltering, Beat-The-Mean. The relative feedback of dueling bandits can also lead to voting paradoxes. A solution is to take the Condorcet winner as a reference.

More recently, researchers have generalized algorithms from traditional MAB to dueling bandits: Relative Upper Confidence Bounds (RUCB), Relative EXponential weighing (REX3), Copeland Confidence Bounds (CCB), Relative Minimum Empirical Divergence (RMED), and Double Thompson Sampling (DTS).

Collaborative bandit
Approaches using multiple bandits that cooperate sharing knowledge in order to better optimize their performance started in 2013 with "A Gang of Bandits", an algorithm relying on a similarity graph between the different bandit problems to share knowledge. The need of a similarity graph was removed in 2014 by the work on the CLUB algorithm. Following this work, several other researchers created algorithms to learn multiple models at the same time under bandit feedback. For example, COFIBA was introduced by Li and Karatzoglou and Gentile (SIGIR 2016), where the classical collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering methods try to learn a static recommendation model given training data.

Combinatorial bandit
The Combinatorial Multiarmed Bandit (CMAB) problem  arises when instead of a single discrete variable to choose from, an agent needs to choose values for a set of variables. Assuming each variable is discrete, the number of possible choices per iteration is exponential in the number of variables. Several CMAB settings have been studied in the literature, from settings where the variables are binary to more general setting where each variable can take an arbitrary set of values.

title: Multi-armed bandit


text: User talk:69.234.229.229

title: User talk:69.234.229.229


text:
Onibaba (film)

Onibaba (鬼婆), also titled The Hole, is a 1964 Japanese historical drama and horror film written and directed by Kaneto Shindō. The film is set during a civil war in medieval Japan. Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura play two women who kill infighting soldiers to steal their armor and possessions for survival, while Kei Satō plays the man who ultimately comes between them.

Plot
The film is set somewhere in Japan near Kyoto, in the mid-14th century, at the beginning of the Nanboku-chō period, shortly after the Battle of Minatogawa. Two fleeing soldiers are ambushed in a large field of tall, thick reeds and murdered by an older woman and her young daughter-in-law. The two women loot the dead soldiers, strip them of their armour and weapons, and drop the bodies in a deep pit hidden in the field. The next day, they take the armor and weapons to a merchant named Ushi and trade them for food. The merchant tells them news of the war, which is driving people across the country to desperation. As they leave, Ushi makes a sexual proposition to the older woman, who rebuffs him. A neighbor named Hachi, who has been at war, returns. The two women ask about Kishi, who was both the older woman's son and younger woman's husband, and was drafted along with Hachi. Hachi tells them that they deserted the war and that Kishi was later killed when they were caught stealing food from farmers. The older woman warns the younger woman to stay away from Hachi, whom she blames for her son's death.

Hachi begins to show interest in the younger woman and, despite being warned to stay away from Hachi, she is seduced by him. She begins to sneak out every night to run to his hut and have sex. The older woman learns of the relationship and is both angry and jealous. She tries to seduce Hachi herself, but is coldly rebuffed. She then pleads with him to not take her daughter-in-law away, since she cannot kill and rob passing soldiers without her help.

One night, while Hachi and the younger woman are together, a lost samurai wearing a Hannya mask forces the older woman to guide him out of the field. He claims to wear the mask to protect his incredibly handsome face from harm. She tricks him into plunging to his death in the pit where the women dispose of their victims. She climbs down and steals the samurai's possessions and, with great difficulty, his mask, revealing the samurai's horribly disfigured face.

At night, as the younger woman goes to see Hachi, the older woman blocks her path, wearing the samurai's robes and hannya mask, frightening the girl into running home. During the day, the older woman further convinces the younger woman that the "demon" was real, as punishment for her affair with Hachi. The younger woman avoids Hachi during the day, but continues to try and see him at night. During a storm, the older woman again terrifies the younger woman with the mask, but Hachi, tired of being ignored, finds the younger woman and has sex with her in the grass as her mother-in-law watches. The older woman realizes that despite all her warnings, her daughter-in-law wants to be with Hachi. Hachi returns to his hut, where he discovers another deserter stealing his food; the deserter abruptly grabs his spear and stabs Hachi, killing him.

The older woman discovers that, after getting wet in the rain, the mask is impossible to remove. She reveals her scheme to her daughter-in-law and pleads for her to help take off the mask. The younger woman agrees to remove the mask after the older woman promises not to interfere with her relationship with Hachi. After failing to pull it off, the young woman breaks off the mask with a mallet. Under the mask, the older woman's face is now disfigured, as the deceased Samurai had been. It is implied that the previously removable mask was accursed by supernatural means, binding itself permanently to its wearer's face by the power of rain (a metaphysical symbol of Buddhist punishment), but the truth behind the implied origin is never fully revealed. The younger woman, now believing her mother-in-law has turned into an actual demon, flees; the older woman runs after her, crying out that she is a human being, not a demon. The young woman leaps over the pit, and as the older woman leaps after her, the film ends.

Cast

 * Nobuko Otowa as Older Woman
 * Jitsuko Yoshimura as Younger Woman
 * Kei Satō as Hachi
 * Taiji Tonoyama as Ushi
 * Jūkichi Uno as The masked Samurai warrior

Production
Onibaba was inspired by the Shin Buddhist parable of yome-odoshi-no men (嫁おどしの面) or niku-zuki-no-men (肉付きの面), in which a mother used a mask to scare her daughter from going to the temple. She was punished by the mask sticking to her face, and when she begged to be allowed to remove it, she was able to take it off, but it took the flesh of her face with it.

Kaneto Shindo wanted to film Onibaba in a field of susuki grass. He sent out assistant directors to find suitable locations. Once a location was found near a river bank at Inba Swamp in Chiba Prefecture, they put up prefabricated buildings to live in. Filming started on June 30, 1964, and continued for three months. Shindo built things such as a makeshift turtle water slide to entertain the crew and keep things cool during harsh conditions of filming out in the fields of nowhere. The crew members were doing laundry and living in the fabricated buildings during the filming. The crew members grouping and eating together things like onigiri and soba noodles was caught on camera.

Most of the cast consisted of members of Shindo's regular group of performers, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Satō, Taiji Tonoyama, and Jūkichi Uno. This was Jitsuko Yoshimura's only appearance in a Shindo film. The two women do not have names even in the script, but are merely described as "middle-aged woman" and "young woman".

They had a rule that if somebody left they would not get any pay, to keep the crew motivated to continue. Shindo included dramatized scenes of the dissatisfaction on the set as part of the 2000 film By Player.

To film night scenes inside the huts, they would put up screens to block the sun, and changing the shot would require setting the screens in a completely different spot.

Kaneto Shindo said that the effects of the mask on those who wear it are symbolic of the disfigurement of the victims of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film reflecting the traumatic effect of this visitation on post-war Japanese society.

A makeshift tower where crew members could climb to look down and film using crane shots was built. The tower was tall enough to get a look around the entire field.

The film contains some sequences filmed in slow motion.

The scenes of the older woman descending in to the hole had to be shot using an artificial "hole" built above ground with scaffolding, since holes dug in the ground at the location site would immediately fill with water.

Score
Onibaba score is by Shindo's long-term collaborator Hikaru Hayashi. The background and title music consists of Taiko drumming combined with jazz.

Release
Onibaba was released in Japan on November 21, 1964, where it was distributed by Toho. The film was released in the United States by Toho International with English subtitles on February 4, 1965. An English-dubbed version was produced by Toho, but any actual release of it is undetermined. On the film's initial theatrical release in the United Kingdom, the film was first rejected by the BBFC on its first submission, and then released in a heavily edited form after its second submission."

Home media
It was released as a Region 1 DVD on March 16, 2004, in the Criterion Collection. On October 5, 2021, Criterion released a Blu-ray version using the same master as the DVD. A Region 2 DVD was released in 2005 as part of the Masters of Cinema series, with a Blu-ray release in 2013.

Reception
From contemporary reviews, the Monthly Film Bulletin observed that "Shindo obviously likes to milk his situations for all they are worth—and then some," noting that "Onibaba has the same striking surface as [Ningen and The Naked Island]," and that the film "has the same tendency to fall apart if examined too closely." The review praised Kuroda's "fine photography" but said that nothing else "in the film quite matches this opening among the reeds, or its aftermath in the ruthless stripping of the victims and disposal of their corpses, except perhaps the encounter between the old woman and the General." Variety noted that Otowa "is superb as the older woman, while Jitsuko Yoshimura contribs an excellent characterization as the daughter-in-law, especially in the ‘romantic’ sequences." The review declared it "sometimes high adventure and exciting, at other times dull in its so-called symbolism. Too often, this turns out to be a potpourri of ravenous eating and blatant sex." A. H. Weiler of The New York Times described the film's raw qualities as "neither new nor especially inventive to achieve his stark, occasionally shocking effects. Although his artistic integrity remains untarnished, his driven rustic principals are exotic, sometimes grotesque figures out of medieval Japan, to whom a Westerner finds it hard to relate." The review noted that Shindo's "symbolism, which undoubtedly is more of a treat to the Oriental than the Occidental eye and ear, may be oblique, but his approach to amour is direct... the tale is abetted by Hiyomi Kuroda's cloudy, low-key photography and Hikaru Kuroda's properly weird background musical score. But despite Mr. Shindo's obvious striving for elemental, timeless drama, it is simply sex that is the most impressive of the hungers depicted here."

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, writing in 2010, commented: "Onibaba is a chilling movie, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome, and filmed in a colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness." Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader described it as "creepy, interesting, and visually striking."

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Onibaba received an approval rating of 90% based on 18 modern reviews, and an average rating of 7.20 out of 10.

Themes
While Onibaba is said to gain its inspiration from the Shin Buddhist parable by Kaneto Shizawa's discretion, onibaba also refers to traditional tall tales and ghost stories throughout Japan of vicious and monstrous elderly demon women said to stalk about various areas and wilderness to hunt for human victims to take back to their lairs and feast on them. This can be seen through how both the mother and daughter in law lurk about their home territory of the fen which they live in, awaiting stragglers and lost soldiers of war before killing them for their valuables in order to purchase and gather food in their desperate times. It is of some consideration that such tales of evildoings of men in such times may be the inspiration for how such tales may have been started in the first place, as such atrociousness would in turn not be accepted by any normal human being as possible by men. In terms of Japanese spirituality and Shinto, there are also themes of how gross vice and evil can eventually turn one into demons and monsters themselves in time, which is catalyzed by the mother wearing the cursed mask, which itself may be cursed or afflicted with a severe infectious disease, transforming her into a literal onibaba.

With the outbreak of the Onin War, Onibaba also portrays an almost post-apocalyptic level of societal breakdown and moral degeneracy; as Kyoto was valued as Japan's capital long before the rise of the city of Edo and the reestablishment of the Shogunate's power by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the violence and warfare of the Onin War eventually spread throughout Kyoto itself, completely causing chaos and throwing Japan into turmoil because of its abandonment and desolation as Japan's center of politics, religion, and economics into the twilight of the Nanbokucho era. Its reach of anarchy can be felt into the rural lives of the mother and daughter-in-law and their neighbors, lacking community to ensure moral guidance and direction, delving into wanton abandon as their lives become more of a struggle to survive and desolate of human interaction, and pushing them to go as far as to commit what would be heinous crimes and atrocities in more peaceful times, but has now been necessitated to be essential to surviving their meager and bleak times.

With origins from Buddhist themes, the film is evocative of the Third Age of Buddhism (Japanese: Mappo) which in Heian Era depictions, spoke of how demons from Hell sent forth by the infernal King Enma to be unleashed upon the earth, and hunt eagerly for sinners, degenerates, and non—believers to throw into eternal damnation.

Genre classification
Many critics have been divided on the genre of the film. While Onibaba is regarded a "period drama" by David Robinson, or "stage drama" by Japanese film scholar Keiko I. McDonald, Phil Hardy included it in his genre compendium as a horror film, and Chuck Stephens describes it as an erotic-horror classic. Writing for Sight & Sound, Michael Brooke noted that "Onibaba lasting greatness and undimmed potency lie in the fact that it works both as an unnervingly blunt horror film (and how!) and as a far more nuanced but nonetheless universal social critique that can easily be applied to an parallel situation".

Keiko I. McDonald stated that the film contained elements of the Noh theatre. She notes that the han'nya mask "is used to demonize the sinful emotions of jealousy and its associative emotions" in Noh plays, and that the differing camera angles at which the mask is filmed in Onibaba are similar to the way in which a Noh performer uses the angle of the mask to indicate emotions. Other reviewers also speculate about Noh influences on the film.

Legacy
Onibaba was screened at a 2012 retrospective on Shindō and Kōzaburō Yoshimura in London, organised by the British Film Institute and the Japan Foundation.

Willem Dafoe, a professed admirer of the film, has stated that he wanted to remake Onibaba, and indeed acquired the rights for a time, but ultimately felt that any contemporary spin he might put on it would "ruin" the source material.

title: Onibaba (film)


text:
Category:Northern Ireland national football team managers

Managers of the Northern Ireland national football team.


text:
User talk:Chris Conway

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! --216.191.200.1 14:41, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * Tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

Hey there! Thought you'd like a nice warm welcome to Wikipedia. There are a nice set of links above for you to use, and if you ever need to contact me, just click on my blue link to the right --> 216.191.200.1 14:41, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

One little thing you should be aware of...I noticed that you've uploaded a new image to Wikipedia. Do you think you could tag it with a suitable copyright status? If we use it on Wikipedia, it has to be compatible with the GFDL. Otherwise, after a while, the image will be deleted, and I wouldn't want to see all your good efforts gone to waste because of a missing tag. See ya! --216.191.200.1 14:41, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Cilfone
Hi. Are you familiar with Jonathan Bishop, Vanessa DiMauro, Howard Rheingold and Sherry Turkle? I don't know who Cilfone is or what he did that he could be called among "Virtual Community Pioneers and Experts". I'm just curious: Do you have sources, or is it just your opinion? --Perfecto 03:50, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Mandarin Tiger
Removing AfD notices from articles is vandalism and may lead to a blocking. Do not remove it again. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 19:04, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Could you provide a source for Image:Gw looshulluchline 01.jpg
I've no doubt that it was published in 1916 - but a source is still required. Thanks Megapixie 04:33, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

File source problem with File:Gw looshulluchline 01.jpg
Thank you for uploading File:Gw looshulluchline 01.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, please add a link to the website from which it was taken, together with a brief restatement of that website's terms of use of its content. However, if the copyright holder is a party unaffiliated from the website's publisher, that copyright should also be acknowledged.

If you have uploaded other files, consider verifying that you have specified sources for those files as well. You can find a list of files you have created [ in your upload log]. Unsourced and untagged images may be deleted one week after they have been tagged per Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion, F4. If the image is copyrighted and non-free, the image will be deleted 48 hours after 23:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC) per speedy deletion criterion F7. If you have any questions or are in need of assistance please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Magog the Ogre (talk) 23:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:Chris Conway


text: Category:Argentine comedians

title: Category:Argentine comedians


text: User talk:86.120.203.47

title: User talk:86.120.203.47


text:
Renée Montagne

Renée Montagne is an American radio journalist and was the co-host (with Steve Inskeep and David Greene) of National Public Radio's weekday morning news program, Morning Edition, from May 2004 to November 11, 2016. Montagne and Inskeep succeeded longtime host Bob Edwards, initially as interim replacements, and Greene joined the team in 2012. Montagne had served as a correspondent and occasional host since 1989. She usually broadcasts from NPR West in Culver City, California, a Los Angeles suburb.

Early life
Montagne was born in December 1948 in Oceanside, California, into a Marine Corps family. As is common in the lives of children of career military families, she moved often while growing up, including living in Hawaii and various places on the West Coast. An alumna of Cupertino High School, she was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2012. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973 with a degree in English.

Career
Montagne got her start in radio as news director for KPOO community radio in San Francisco while attending UC–Berkeley. She also worked for Pacific News Service in San Francisco.

From 1980 through 1986, she worked in New York City as a freelance reporter and producer for both NPR and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. During this period, she covered the arts and science for NPR. From 1987 to 1989, she was co-host with Robert Siegel of NPR's evening news magazine, All Things Considered.

In 1990, Montagne covered the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa. She remained in South Africa for three years focusing on the area, where she won, along with the NPR reporting team, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for their coverage of South Africa's first fully democratic elections.

In May 2004, Montagne and Steve Inskeep became interim co-hosts for NPR's Morning Edition, replacing long-time host Bob Edwards who was reassigned as a senior correspondent. They became permanent co-hosts in December 2004.

The following year, Montagne went to Rome to cover the funeral of Pope John Paul II for NPR's Morning Edition. She also has traveled frequently to Afghanistan to report on the war that began in 2001. She has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club for her work from Afghanistan.

In 2011, Montagne was among the news anchors who attended the traditional off-the-record luncheon with the U.S. president (in this case, Barack Obama) in advance of his State of the Union Address.

The announcement went public on July 18, 2016, that Montagne would be leaving NPR's Morning Edition after co-hosting it with Steve Inskeep for 12 years.

Her final Morning Edition as co-host was November 11, 2016. A month later, as Special Correspondent/Occasional Host for NPR News, Montagne embarked on a new project: an NPR/collaboration called Lost Mothers.

Montagne, along with ProPublica reporting partner Nina Martin, spent the next year investigating why women are far more likely to die due to giving birth in the U.S. than all other developed nations.

Their investigation focused on why the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is going up while it's going down in nearly every other nation; why African-American women are 3-to-4 times more likely to die than white women; and what's being done to reverse these dire statistics. The series set off a national conversation at a time when few Americans knew that, in the U.S., even a healthy woman with a perfect pregnancy and good health care risks dying, or nearly dying, in childbirth.

The stories, aired and published from 2017 through mid-2018, has been credited with inspiring laws in several states, as well as bills at the federal level aimed at protecting birthing mothers. In a 2018 Forbes op-ed arguing for a federal law to end America's “maternal death epidemic,” Senator Tammy Duckworth cited the NPR/ProPublica investigation Lost Mothers. Duckworth also linked directly to Montagne's NPR story on how California succeeded in cutting in half its maternal mortality rate. On 12/21/2018 HR 1318 “Preventing Maternal Deaths Act” was signed into law – a law that incorporated the Senate bill Duckworth had championed in the op-ed.

Awards and recognition

 * 1995 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of South African elections
 * Overseas Press Club recognition for coverage of the Afghanistan war
 * National Association of Black Journalists recognition for a reporting series on Black musicians who fought in wars during the 20th Century
 * Harvard Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting - 2018
 * George Polk Award - 2017
 * Peabody Award - 2017
 * New York Academy of Medicine Health Equity Journalism Prize - 2018
 * National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Communication Award (category "Online") - 2018
 * Sigma Delta Chi Award Society of Professional Journalists ("Online Reporting" in category "Public Service") - 2017
 * National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award (category "Digital Media") - 2018
 * Pulitzer Prize Finalist (“Explanatory Reporting” category) - 2018
 * Edward R. Murrow Award (category "Digital Media") - 2018
 * American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Awards Finalist (“Public Interest” category) - 2018
 * Columbia University Press "The 2018 Best American Magazine Writing" collection
 * "The 100 Most Engaging Stories of 2017", Chartbeat
 * Gracie Award/”Alliance for Women in Media” 2015 for "Outstanding Individual Achievement - Afghanistan Coverage" and “Outstanding Anchor/News Magazine” (NPR's Morning Edition)
 * Global Women's Rights Award 2011 "Feminist Majority Foundation" Cited coverage of women in Afghanistan
 * University of Denver Anvil of Freedom Award – 2008

title: Renée Montagne


text:
Dolfin Dolfin

Dolfin Dolfin or Delfino Delfin, was a Venetian nobleman who served during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Origin and career
Dolfin Dolfin, was born into the powerful Dolfin family of Venice, one of the oldest and most recognized noble families of the Serenissima. From a young age, he followed the "cursus honorum" of young Venetian noblemen, training in the army, the naval fleet, the law, and affairs of State.

When the time came, Dolfin began to serve the Venetian navy, which had the most powerful fleet of its day. His family had a long tradition in the Navy, reaching special notoriety when Giovanni Dolfin broke the Hungarian siege of Treviso in order to be crowned as Doge in 1356.

In the 15th century, Venice controlled most of the Mediterranean, and had important interests in the rump Byzantine Empire. Therefore, when the Ottomans began their siege of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, the Venetian fleet was immediately involved in its defence. During the siege, Dolfin was commanded to defend the north gate of the city walls, which he managed with great success. When Giacomo Coco, admiral of the Christian fleet died while trying to burn the Turkish fleet, Dolfin was put in charge of it. Dolfin Dolfin survived the fall of the city.

title: Dolfin Dolfin