sophiekain: August 2007

Norwegian (norsk) is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. Norwegian is closely related to and generally mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish. Together with these, as well as Faroese, Icelandic and a number of extinct languages, Norwegian belongs to the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages). Due to isolation, Faroese and Icelandic are no longer mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form, because mainland Scandinavian has diverged from them.
Spoken Norwegian forms a continuum of local and regional variants that are all mutually intelligible. There is no officially sanctioned standard of spoken Norwegian, but there is a de facto spoken standard of Bokmål known as Standard Østnorsk (Standard East Norwegian), spoken mainly by the urban upper and middle class in East Norway. Standard Østnorsk is the form generally taught to foreign students.

History
The languages now spoken in Scandinavia developed from the Old Norse language, which did not differ greatly between what are now Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish areas. In fact, Viking traders spread the language across Europe and into Russia, making Old Norse one of the most widespread languages for a time. According to tradition, King Harald Fairhair united Norway in 872. Around this time, a runic alphabet was used. According to writings found on stone tablets from this period of history, the language showed remarkably little deviation between different regions. Runes had been in limited use since at least the 3rd century. Around 1030, Christianity came to Norway, bringing with it the Latin alphabet. Norwegian manuscripts in the new alphabet began to appear about a century later. The Norwegian language began to deviate from its neighbors around this time as well.
Viking explorers had begun to settle Iceland in the 9th century, carrying with them the Old Norse language. Over time, Old Norse developed into "Western" and "Eastern" variants. Western Norse covered Norway (including its overseas settlements in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Shetland Islands), while Eastern Norse developed in Denmark and south-central Sweden. The languages of Iceland and Norway remained very similar until about the year 1300, when they became what are now known as Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian.
In the period traditionally dated to 1350–1525, Norwegian went through a Middle Norwegian transition toward Modern Norwegian. The major changes were simplification of the morphology, a more fixed syntax, and a considerable adoption of Middle Low German vocabulary. Similar development happened in Swedish and Danish, keeping the dialect continuum in continental Scandinavia intact. This did however not happen in Faroese and Icelandic so these languages lost mutual intelligibility with continental Scandinavia.

From Old Norse to distinct Scandinavian languages
In 1397, the Kalmar Union unified Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and from 1536 Norway was subordinated under the Kingdom of Denmark–Norway. Danish became the commonly written language among Norway's literate class. Spoken Danish was gradually adopted by the urban elite, first at formal occasions, and gradually a more relaxed variety was adopted in everyday speech. The everyday speech went through a koinéization process, involving grammatical simplification and Norwegianized pronunciation. When the union ended in 1814 the Dano-Norwegian koiné had become the mother tongue of a substantial part of the Norwegian élite, but the more Danish-sounding solemn variety was still used on formal occasions.
Norway was forced to enter a new personal union with Sweden, shortly after the end of the former one with Denmark. However, Norwegians began to push for true independence by embracing democracy and attempting to enforce the constitutional declaration of being a sovereign state. Part of this nationalist movement was directed to the development of an independent Norwegian language. Three major paths were available: do nothing (Norwegian written language, i.e. Danish, was already different from Swedish), Norwegianize the Danish language, or build a new national language based on Modern Norwegian dialects. All three approaches were attempted.

Under Danish and Swedish rule

Main article: Norwegian language struggle Phonology

Consonants

Vowels
Norwegian is a pitch accent language with two distinct pitch patterns. They are used to differentiate two-syllable words with otherwise identical pronunciation. For example in many East Norwegian dialects, the word "bønder" (farmers) is pronounced using tone 1, while "bønner" (beans or prayers) uses tone 2, just like in Danish. Though the difference in spelling occasionally allow the words to be distinguished in written language, in most cases the minimal pairs are written alike, since written Norwegian has no explicit accent marks. In most eastern low-tone dialects, accent 1 uses a low flat pitch in the first syllable, while accent 2 uses a high, sharply falling pitch in the first syllable and a low pitch in the beginning of the second syllable. In both accents, these pitch movements are followed by a rise of intonational nature (phrase accent), the size (and presence) of which signals emphasis/focus and which corresponds in function to the normal accent in languages that lack lexical tone, such as English. That rise culminates in the final syllable of an accentual phrase, while the utterance-final fall that is so common in most languages is either very small or absent.
There are significant variations in pitch accent between dialects. Thus, in most of western and northern Norway (the so-called high-pitch dialects) accent 1 is falling, while accent 2 is rising in the first syllable and falling in the second syllable or somewhere around the syllable boundary. The pitch accents (as well as the peculiar phrase accent in the low-tone dialects) give the Norwegian language a "singing" quality which makes it fairly easy to distinguish from other languages. Interestingly, accent 1 generally occurs in words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, and accent 2 in words that were polysyllabic.

Accent

Written language
The Norwegian alphabet is as follows:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Æ Ø Å (29 letters)
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z æ ø å
The letters c, q, w, x and z are only used in loanwords. Some also spell their otherwise Norwegian family names using these letters.
Some letters may be modified by diacritics: é, è, ê, ó, ò, â, and ô. In Nynorsk, ì and ù and ỳ are occasionally seen as well. The diacritics are not compulsory, but may in a few cases distinguish between different meanings of the word, e.g.: for (for/to), fór (went), fòr (furrow) and fôr (fodder). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably ü, á and à.

The alphabet

Main articles: Bokmål and Nynorsk Bokmål and Nynorsk

Main article: Riksmål Riksmål

Main article: Høgnorsk Høgnorsk
About 86.2% of the pupils in the primary and lower secondary schools in Norway receive education in Bokmål, while about 13.8% receive education in Nynorsk. From the eighth grade onwards pupils are required to learn both. Out of the 433 municipalities in Norway, 161 have declared that they wish to communicate with the central authorities in Bokmål, 116 (representing 12% of the population) in Nynorsk, while 156 are neutral. Of 4,549 state publications in 2000 8% were in Nynorsk, and 92% in Bokmål. The large national newspapers (Aftenposten, Dagbladet and VG) are published in Bokmål. Some major regional newspapers (including Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad), many political journals, and many local newspapers use both Bokmål and Nynorsk.

Current usage

Main article: Norwegian dialects Dialects
Below are a few sentences giving an indication of the differences between Bokmål and Nynorsk, compared to the conservative (nearer to Danish) form Riksmål, Danish, as well as Old Norse, Swedish and Icelandic, the living language closest to Old Norse:
Bokmål/Riksmål/Danish: Jeg kommer fra Norge Nynorsk/Høgnorsk: Eg kjem frå Noreg. Old Norse: Ek kem frá Noregi. Icelandic: Ég kem frá Noregi. Swedish: Jag kommer från Norge. English: I come from Norway. Norwegian language

Faroese: Eg komi frá Noregi. German: Ich komme aus Norwegen.
Bokmål/Riksmål: Hva heter han? Danish: Hvad hedder han? Nynorsk/Høgnorsk: Kva heiter han? Old Norse: Hvat heitir hann? Icelandic: Hvað heitir hann? Swedish: Vad heter han? English: What is his name? Faroese: Hvat eitur hann? German: Wie heißt er?
Bokmål/Riksmål/Danish: Dette er en hest. Nynorsk/Høgnorsk: Dette er ein hest. Old Norse: Þetta er hross/Þetta er hestr. Icelandic: Þetta er hross/hestur. Swedish: Detta är en häst. English: This is a horse. Faroese: Hetta er eitt ross/ein hestur. German: Das ist ein Roß/ Pferd.
Bokmål: Regnbuen har mange farger. Riksmål/Danish: Regnbuen har mange farver. Nynorsk: Regnbogen har mange fargar. Høgnorsk: Regnbogen hev mange fargar. (Or better: Regnbogen er manglìta). Old Norse: Regnboginn er marglitr. Icelandic: Regnboginn er marglitur. Swedish: Regnbågen har många färger. English: The rainbow has many colours. Faroese: Ælabogin er litríkur/ er marglitur. German: Der Regenbogen hat eine Menge Farben.

Examples

Morphology
Norwegian nouns are inflected or declined in definiteness (indefinite/definite) and number (singular/plural). In some dialects, definite nouns are furthermore declined in case (nominative/dative).
As in most Indo-European languages (English language being one of a few exceptions), nouns are classified by gender, which has consequences for the declension of agreeing adjectives and determiners. Norwegian dialects have three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, except the Bergen dialect which has only two genders: common and neuter. Bokmål and Standard Østnorsk traditionally have two genders like Danish (and the Bergen dialect), but so called radical varieties have three genders. The two-gender form is now mostly replaced by the three-gender form in spoken Standard Østnorsk, but it is sometimes used in conservative Bokmål.
The declension of regular nouns depends on gender. Some dialects and variants of Nynorsk furthermore have different declension of weak and strong feminines and neuters.
As of July 1st 2005, all feminine nouns can be written as masculine nouns.

Nouns
Norwegian adjectives have two inflectional paradigms. The weak inflection is applicable when the argument is definite, the strong inflection is used when the argument is indefinite. In both paradigms the adjective is declined in comparison (positive/comparative/superlative). Strong, positive adjectives are furthermore declined in gender and number in agreement with their argument. In some southwestern dialects, the weak positive is also declined in gender and number, with one form for feminine and plural, and one form for masculine and neuter.

Adjectives
Norwegian finite verbs are inflected or conjugated in mood: indicative/imperative/optative. The optative mood is constrained to a handful of verbs. The indicative verbs are conjugated in tense, present / past. In Bokmål and Standard Østnorsk, the present tense also has a passive form. In some dialects, indicative verbs are also conjugated in number. Conjugation in gender is lost in Norwegian.
There are four non-finite verb forms: infinitive, passive infinitive, and the two participles perfective/past participle and imperfective/present participle.
The participles are verbal adjectives. The imperfective participle has no further declension, but the perfective participle is declined in gender (not in Bokmål and Standard Østnorsk) and number like strong, positive adjectives. The definite form of the participle is identical to the plural form.
As with other Germanic languages, Norwegian verbs can be either weak or strong.

Verbs
Norwegian personal pronouns are declined in case, nominative / accusative. Some of the dialects that have preserved the dative in nouns, also have a dative case instead of the accusative case in personal pronouns, while others have accusative in pronouns and dative in nouns, effectively giving these dialects three distinct cases.
In the most comprehensive Norwegian grammar, Norsk referansegrammatikk, the categorization of personal pronouns by person, gender, and number is not regarded as inflection. As with nouns, adjectives must agree with the gender and number of pronoun arguments.
Other pronouns have no inflection.
The so called possessive, demonstrative and relative pronouns are no longer regarded to be pronouns.
Pronouns are a closed class.
Bokmål, like English, has two sets of 3rd person pronouns. Han and hun refer to male and female individuals respectively, den and det refer to impersonal or inanimate nouns, of masculine/feminine or neutral gender respectively. In contrast, Nynorsk and most dialects use the same set of pronouns (han (m.), ho (f.) and det (n.)) for both personal and impersonal references. Det also has expletive and cataphoric uses like in the English examples it rains and it was known by everyone (that) he had travelled the world.

Pronouns
The closed class of Norwegian determiners are declined in gender and number in agreement with their argument. Not all determiners are inflected.

Determiners
Norwegian has five closed classes without inflection, i.e. lexical categories with grammatical function and a finite number of members that may not be distinguished by morphological criteria. These are interjections, conjunctions, subjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs. The inclusion of adverbs here, requires that traditional adverbs that are inflected in comparison are classified as adjectives, as is sometimes done.

Particle classes
In Norwegian compound words, the head, i.e. the part determining the compound's class, is the last part. Only the first part has primary stress. For instance, the compund tenketank (think tank) has primary stress on the first syllable and is a noun (some sort of tank).
Compound words are written together in Norwegian, which can cause words to become very long; for example sannsynlighetsmaksimeringsestimator (maximum likelihood estimator) and menneskerettighetsorganisasjoner (human rights organisations). Another example is the title høyesterettsjustitiarius (originally a combination of supreme court and the actual title, justiciar). Note also the translation En midtsommernattsdrøm (A Midsummer Night's Dream).
If they are not written together, each part will naturally be read with primary stress, and the meaning of the compound is lost. This is sometimes forgotten, occasionally with humorous results. Instead of writing, for example, lammekoteletter (lamb chops), people make the mistake of writing lamme koteletter (paralyzed, or lame, chops). The original message can even be reversed, as when røykfritt (no smoking, i.e. "free from smoking") becomes røyk fritt (smoke freely).
Other examples include:
These misunderstandings occur because most nouns can be interpreted as verbs or other types of words. Similar misunderstandings can be achieved in English too. The following are examples of phrases that both in Norwegian and English mean one thing as a compound word, and something different when regarded as separate words:

Terrasse dør ("Terrace dies") instead of Terrassedør ("Terrace door")
Tunfisk biter ("Tuna bites", verb) instead of Tunfiskbiter ("Tuna bits", noun)
Smult ringer ("Lard rings", verb) instead of Smultringer ("Doughnuts")
Tyveri sikret ("Theft guaranteed") instead of Tyverisikret ("Theft proof")
Stekt kylling lever ("Fried chicken lives", verb) instead of Stekt kyllinglever ("Fried chicken liver", noun)
Pult ost ("Fucked cheese") instead of Pultost ("Soft cheese")
stavekontroll (spellchecker) or stave kontroll (spell "checker")
kokebok (cookbook) or koke bok (boiling a book)
ekte håndlagde vafler (real handmade waffles) or Ekte hånd lagde vafler. (a real hand made some waffles.) Compound words
By far the largest part of the modern vocabulary of Norwegian dates back to Old Norse. The largest source of loanwords is Middle Low German, which had a huge influence on Norwegian vocabulary from the late Middle Ages onwards partially even influencing grammatical structures, such as genitive constructions. At present, the main source of new loanwords is English e.g. rapper, e-mail, catering, juice, bag (originally a loan word to English from Old Norse). Some loanwords have their spelling changed to reflect Norwegian pronunciation rules, but in general Norwegianised spellings of these words tend to take a long time to sink in: e.g. sjåfør (from French chauffeur) and revansj (from French revanche) are now the common Norwegian spellings, but juice is more often used than the Norwegianised form jus, catering more often than keitering, service more often than sørvis, etc.

See also

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Ransomware may mean:

Adware • Beerware • Careware • Crippleware • Demoware • Donationware • Donateware • Foistware • Freely redistributable software • Free software • Freeware • Greenware • Nagware • Open source • Otherware • Postcardware • Proprietary software • Ransomware • Registerware • Shareware
Ransomware (software distribution method), software offered as open source in exchange for payment.
Ransomware (malware), malware used for an extortion crime

Monday, August 27, 2007

Early life and naval career
Then, in October 1786, Phillip was appointed captain of HMS Sirius and appointed Governor-designate of New South Wales, the proposed British penal colony on the east coast of Australia, by Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary. His choice may have been strongly influenced by George Rose, Under-Secretary of the Treasury and a neighbour of Phillip in Hampshire who would have known of Phillip's farming experience.
Phillip had a very difficult time assembling the fleet which was to make the eight-month sea voyage to Australia. Everything a new colony might need had to be taken, since Phillip had no real idea of what he might find when he got there. There were few funds available for equipping the expedition. His suggestion that people with experience in farming, building and crafts be included was rejected. Most of the 1778 convicts were petty thieves from the London slums. Phillip was accompanied by a contingent of marines and a handful of other officers who were to administer the colony.
The First Fleet, of 11 ships, set sail on 13 May 1787. The leading ship reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. Phillip soon decided that this site, chosen on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied James Cook in 1770, was not suitable, since it offered no secure anchorage and had no reliable water source. After some exploration Phillip decided to go on to Port Jackson, and on 26 January the marines and convicts were landed at Sydney Cove, which Phillip named after Lord Sydney.
Shortly after establishing the settlement at Port Jackson, on the 15th February 1788, Phillip sent Lieutenant Philip Gidley King with 8 free men and a number of convicts to establish the second British colony in the Pacific at Norfolk Island. This was partly in response to a perceived threat of losing Norfolk Island to the French and partly to establish an alternative food source for the new colony.
The early days of the settlement were chaotic and difficult. With limited supplies, the cultivation of food was imperative, but the soils around Sydney were poor, the climate was unfamiliar, and moreover very few of the convicts had any knowledge of agriculture. Farming tools were scarce and the convicts were unwilling farm labourers. The colony was on the verge of outright starvation for an extended period. The marines, poorly disciplined themselves in many cases, were not interested in convict discipline. Almost at once, therefore, Phillip had to appoint overseers from among the ranks of the convicts to get the others working. This was the beginning of the process of convict emancipation which was to culminate in the reforms of Lachlan Macquarie after 1811.
Phillip showed in other ways that he recognised that New South Wales could not be run simply as a prison camp. Lord Sydney, often criticised as an ineffectual incompetent, had made one fundamental decision about the settlement that was to influence it from the start. Instead of just establishing it as a military prison, he provided for a civil administration, with courts of law. Two convicts, Henry and Susannah Kable, sought to sue Duncan Sinclair, the captain of Alexander, for stealing their possessions during the voyage. Convicts in Britain had no right to sue, and Sinclair had boasted that he could not be sued by them. Someone in Government obviously had a quiet word in Kable's ear, as when the court met and Sinclair challenged the prosecution on the ground that the Kables were felons, the court required him to prove it. As all the convict records had been left behind in England, he could not do so, and the court ordered the captain to make restitution. Phillip had said before leaving England: "In a new country there will be no slavery and hence no slaves," and he meant what he said. Nevertheless, Phillip believed in discipline, and floggings and hangings were commonplace, although Philip commuted many death sentences.
Phillip also had to adopt a policy towards the Eora Aboriginal people, who lived around the waters of Sydney Harbour. Phillip ordered that they must be well-treated, and that anyone killing Aboriginal people would be hanged. Phillip befriended an Eora man called Bennelong, and later took him to England. On the beach at Manly, a misunderstanding arose and Phillip was speared in the shoulder: but he ordered his men not to retaliate. Phillip went some way towards winning the trust of the Eora, although the settlers were at all times treated extremely warily. Soon, smallpox and other European-introduced epidemics ravaged the Eora population.
The Governor's main problem was with his own military officers, who wanted large grants of land, which Phillip had not been authorised to grant. The officers were expected to grow food, but they considered this beneath them. As a result scurvy broke out, and in October 1788 Phillip had to send Sirius to Cape Town for supplies, and strict rationing was introduced, with thefts of food punished by hanging.

Governor of New South Wales
By 1790 the situation had stabilised. The population of about 2,000 was adequately housed and fresh food was being grown. Phillip assigned a convict, James Ruse, land at Rose Hill (now Parramatta) to establish proper farming, and when Ruse succeeded he received the first land grant in the colony. Other convicts followed his example. Sirius was wrecked in March 1790 at the satellite settlement of Norfolk Island, depriving Phillip of vital supplies. In June 1790 the Second Fleet arrived with hundreds more convicts, most of them too sick to work.
By December 1790 Phillip was ready to return to England, but the colony had largely been forgotten in London and no instructions reached him, so he carried on. In 1791 he was advised that the government would send out two convoys of convicts annually, plus adequate supplies. But July, when the vessels of the Third Fleet began to arrive, with 2,000 more convicts, food again ran short, and he had to send a ship to Calcutta for supplies.
By 1792 the colony was well-established, though Sydney remained an unplanned huddle of wooden huts and tents. The whaling industry was established, ships were visiting Sydney to trade, and convicts whose sentences had expired were taking up farming. John Macarthur and other officers were importing sheep and beginning to grow wool. The colony was still very short of skilled farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen, and the convicts continued to work as little as possible, even though they were working mainly to grow their own food.
In late 1792 Phillip, whose health was suffering from the poor diet, at last received permission to leave, and on 11 December 1792 he sailed in the ship Atlantic, taking with him Bennelong and many specimens of plants and animals. The European population of New South Wales at his departure was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts. The early years of the colony had been years of struggle and hardship, but the worst was over, and there were no further famines in New South Wales. Phillip arrived in London in May 1793. He tendered his formal resignation and was granted a pension of £500 a year.

Stabilising the colony
Phillip's wife, Margaret, had died in 1792. In 1794 he married Isabella Whitehead, and lived for a time at Bath. His health gradually recovered and in 1796 he went back to sea, holding a series of commands and responsible posts in the wars against the French. In January 1799 he became a Rear-Admiral. In 1805, aged 67, he retired from the Navy with the rank of Admiral of the Blue, and spent most of the rest of his life at Bath. He continued to correspond with friends in New South Wales and to promote the colony's interests with government officials. He died in Bath in 1814.
Phillip was buried in St Nicholas's Church, Bathampton. Forgotten for many years, the grave was discovered in 1897 and the Premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, had it restored. A monument to Phillip in Bath Abbey Church was unveiled in 1937. Another was unveiled at St Mildred's Church, Bread St, London, in 1932; that church was destroyed in the London Blitz in 1940, but the principal elements of the monument were re-erected at the west end of Watling Street, near Saint Paul's Cathedral, in 1968. There is a statue of him in the Botanic Gardens, Sydney. There is an excellent portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London. His name is commemorated in Australia by Port Phillip, Phillip Island (Victoria), Phillip Island (Norfolk Island) and many streets, parks and schools.
Percival Alan Serle wrote of Phillip in the Dictionary of Australian Biography: "Steadfast in mind, modest, without self seeking, Phillip had imagination enough to conceive what the settlement might become, and the common sense to realize what at the moment was possible and expedient. When almost everyone was complaining he never himself complained, when all feared disaster he could still hopefully go on with his work. He was sent out to found a convict settlement, he laid the foundations of a great dominion."

Later life
In 2007, Geoffrey Robertson QC revealed that Phillip's remains are no longer in in St Nicholas Church, Bathampton and have been lost: "...Captain Arthur Phillip is not where the ledger stone says he is: it may be that he is buried somewhere outside, it may simply be that he is simply lost. But he is not where Australians have been led to believe that he now lies." Robertson also believes it was a "disgraceful slur" on Phillip's legacy that he wasn't buried in one of England's great cathedrals and was relegated to a small village church. Robertson is campaigning for a rigorous search for the remains, which he believes should be re-interred in Australia.
"The moral of this story is that we can't trust the English, the Church of England, the British, to look after our national treasures. If we're going to treasure them and remember them properly, we have to do it ourselves."

Arthur Phillip

Further reading

Dangar Island
Hawkesbury River
Spectacle Island
Milson Island
Peat Island
Lion Island

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Alluvium (from the Latin, alluvius, from alluere, "to wash against") is soil or sediments deposited by a river or other running water. Alluvium is typically made up of a variety of materials, including fine particles of silt and clay and larger particles of sand and gravel.
Flowing water associated with glaciers may also deposit alluvium, but deposits directly from ice are not alluvium (see glacial till).
A river is continually picking up and dropping solid particles of rock and soil from its bed throughout its length. Where the river flow is fast, more particles are picked up than dropped. Where the river flow is slow, more particles are dropped than picked up. Areas where more particles are dropped are called alluvial or flood plains, and the dropped particles are called alluvium.
Even small streams make alluvial deposits, but it is in the flood plains and deltas of large rivers that large, geologically-significant alluvial deposits are found.
The amount of solid matter carried by a large river is enormous. The names of many rivers derive from the color that the transported matter gives the water. For example, the Huang He in China is literally translated "Yellow River", and the Missouri River in the United States is also called Big Muddy. It has been estimated that the Mississippi River annually carries 406 million tons of sediment to the sea, the Huang He 796 million tons, and the Po River in Italy 67 million tons.
Alluvium often contain valuable ores such as gold and platinum and a wide variety of gemstones. Such concentrations of valuable ores is termed a placer deposit.
Throughout history, many shallow lakes have been filled in with alluvium to leave fertile plains (alluvial soils are often very fertile). The alluvial mud annually deposited by the Nile has enabled the Egyptians to grow crops since at least the 4th millennium BC without artificial fertilization.
Since the construction of the Aswan Dam on The Nile in Egypt, 95% of the alluvium deposits at the mouth of the Nubia-Nasser Lake are gone, thus depriving the Nile delta of its fertility. Since 1964, 3.8 billion cubic meters of sediments have deposited in this man made lake. Proposals have been made to dredge this alluvium and pump in slurry pipelines to shore where it can be used to fertilize the desert.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Wrestling is the act of physical engagement between two competitors competing for a physical advantage. Physical techniques which embody the style of wrestling are clinching, holding, locking and leverage. Avoiding potentially lethal techniques, wrestling has aspects of ritual fighting, but its basic principles are closely related to those of military hand-to-hand combat or self-defence systems.
Wrestling's popularity has grown so much that market demands for staged wrestling have caused the development of professional wrestling.

History
The term wrestling is an Old English word that originated some time before 1100 A.D. It is perhaps the oldest word still in use in the English language to describe hand-to-hand combat.

Etymology
Today, wrestling disciplines are broken down into two categories; International wrestling disciplines and folk wrestling disciplines. According to the International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles, there are five current International wrestling disciplines acknowledged throughout the world. They are Greco-Roman Wrestling, freestyle wrestling, Sambo, Grappling, Beach Wrestling and Judo.

International disciplines (Non-Folk Styles)

Main article: Greco-Roman wrestling Greco-Roman

Main article: Freestyle wrestling Freestyle

Main articles: Submission Wrestling and Grappling Grappling
Apparently in a bid to give wrestling greater appeal to television audiences, FILA adopted beach wrestling as an official discipline during 2004-2005. Beach wrestling is standing wrestling done by wrestlers, male or female, inside a sand-filled circle measuring 6 meters in diameter. There are only two weight categories, heavy and light. The objective is to throw your opponent or take your opponent to his or her back. The wrestlers wear swimsuits rather than special wrestling uniforms. Wrestlers may also wear spandex or athletic shorts.

Beach wrestling

Main article: Judo Judo

Main article: folk wrestling As a martial art

Arm wrestling
Grappling
Judo
List of famous amateur wrestlers
List of professional wrestlers
Mixed martial arts
Pankration

Friday, August 24, 2007

"FTS" redirects here. For Fox-owned stations, see Fox Television Stations.
In text retrieval, full text search (also called free search text
The most common approach to full text search is to generate a complete index or concordance for all of the searchable documents. For each word (excepting stop words which are too common to be useful) an entry is made which lists the exact position of every occurrence of it within the database of documents. From such a list it is relatively simple to retrieve all the documents that match a query, without having to scan each document. Although for very small document collections full-text searching can be done by serial scanning, indexing is the preferred method for almost all full-text searching.

The precision vs. recall tradeoff
The deficiencies of free text searching have been addressed in two ways: By providing users with tools that enable them to express their search questions more precisely, and by developing new search algorithms that improve retrieval precision.

Improving the performance of full text searching

Keywords. Document creators (or trained indexers) are asked to supply a list of words that describe the subject of the text, including synonyms of words that describe this subject. Keywords improve recall, particularly if the keyword list includes a search word that is not in the document text.
Field-restricted search. Some search engines enable users to limit free text searches to a particular field within a stored data record, such as "Title" or "Author."
Boolean queries. Searches that use Boolean operators (for example, "encyclopedia" AND "online" NOT "Encarta") can dramatically increase the precision of a free text search. The AND operator says, in effect, "Do not retrieve any document unless it contains both of these terms." The NOT operator says, in effect, "Do not retrieve any document that contains this word." If the retrieval list retrieves too few documents, the OR operator can be used to increase recall; consider, for example, "encyclopedia" AND "online" OR "Internet" NOT "Encarta". This search will retrieve documents about online encyclopedias that use the term "Internet" instead of "online." This increase in precision is very commonly counter-productive since it usually comes with a dramatic loss of recall.
Phrase search. A phrase search matches only those documents that contain a specified phrase, such as "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
Concordance search. A concordance search produces an alphabetical list of all principal words that occur in a text with their immediate context.
Proximity search. A phrase search matches only those documents that contain two or more words that are separated by a specified number of words; a search for "Wikipedia" WITHIN2 "free" would retrieve only those documents in which the words "Wikipedia" and "free" occur within two words of each other.
Regular expression. A regular expression employs a complex but powerful querying syntax that can be used to specify retrieval conditions with precision.
Wildcard search. A search that substitutes one or more characters in a search query for a wildcard character such as an asterisk. For example, in the search function in Microsoft Word, using the asterisk in the search query "s*n" will find "sin", "son", "sun", etc. in a text. Full text search

Improved querying tools
Technological advances have greatly improved the performance of free text searching. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm gives more prominence to documents to which other Web pages have linked. This algorithm dramatically improves users' perception of search precision, a fact that explains its popularity among Internet users. See search engine for additional examples.

Text retrieval software

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Lexical grammar
A token is a categorized block of text, usually consisting of indivisible characters known as lexemes. A lexical analyser processes lexemes to categorize them according to function, giving them meaning. This assignment of meaning is known as tokenization. A token can look like anything: English, gibberish symbols, anything; it just needs to be a useful part of the structured text.
Consider this line in the C programming language: sum=3+2; Tokenized in the following table:
Tokens are frequently defined by regular expressions, which are understood by a lexical analyzer such as lex. The lexical analyser reads in a stream of lexemes and categorises them into tokens. This is called "tokenizing." If the lexer finds an invalid token, it will report an error.
Following tokenizing is parsing. From there, the interpreted data may be loaded into data structures, for general use, interpretation, or compiling.
Consider a text describing a calculation: "46 - number_of(cows); ". The lexemes here might be: "46", "-", "number_of", "(", "cows", ")" and ";". The lexical analyser will denote lexemes "46" as 'number', "-" as 'character' and "number_of" as a separate token. Even the lexeme ";" in some languages (such as C) has some special meaning.
A token doesn't need to be valid in order to be recognized as a token. In this example "cows" or "number_of" may be nonsense to the language, but are tokens nonetheless.

Token
The first stage, the scanner, is usually based on a finite state machine. It has encoded within it information on the possible sequences of characters that can be contained within any of the tokens it handles (individual instances of these character sequences are known as lexemes). For instance, an integer token may contain any sequence of numerical digit characters. In many cases the first non-whitespace character can be used to deduce the kind of token that follows, the input characters are then processed one at a time until reaching a character that is not in the set of characters acceptable for that token (this is known as the maximal munch rule). In some languages the lexeme creation rules are more complicated and may involve backtracking over previously read characters.

Scanner
Tokenization is the process of demarcating and possibly classifying sections of a string of input characters. The resulting tokens are then passed on to some other form of processing. The process can be considered a sub-task of parsing input.
Take, for example, the following string. Unlike humans, a computer cannot intuitively 'see' that there are 9 words. To a computer this is only a series of 43 characters.
A process of tokenization could be used to split the sentence into word tokens. Although the following example is given as XML there are many ways to store tokenized input:
A lexeme, however, is only a string of characters known to be of a certain kind (eg, a string literal, a sequence of letters). In order to construct a token, the lexical analyzer needs a second stage, the evaluator, which goes over the characters of the lexeme to produce a value. The lexeme's type combined with its value is what properly constitutes a token, which can be given to a parser. (Some tokens such as parentheses do not really have values, and so the evaluator function for these can return nothing. The evaluators for integers, identifiers, and strings can be considerably more complex. Sometimes evaluators can suppress a lexeme entirely, concealing it from the parser, which is useful for whitespace and comments.)
For example, in the source code of a computer program the string
might be converted (with whitespace suppressed) into the lexical token stream:
Though it is possible and sometimes necessary to write a lexer by hand, lexers are often generated by automated tools. These tools generally accept regular expressions that describe the tokens allowed in the input stream. Each regular expression is associated with a production in the lexical grammar of the programming language that evaluates the lexemes matching the regular expression. These tools may generate source code that can be compiled and executed or construct a state table for a finite state machine (which is plugged into template code for compilation and execution).
Regular expressions compactly represent patterns that the characters in lexemes might follow. For example, for an English-based language, a NAME token might be any English alphabetical character or an underscore, followed by any number of instances of any ASCII alphanumeric character or an underscore. This could be represented compactly by the string [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z_0-9]*. This means "any character a-z, A-Z or _, followed by 0 or more of a-z, A-Z, _ or 0-9".
Regular expressions and the finite state machines they generate are not powerful enough to handle recursive patterns, such as "n opening parentheses, followed by a statement, followed by n closing parentheses." They are not capable of keeping count, and verifying that n is the same on both sides — unless you have a finite set of permissible values for n. It takes a full-fledged parser to recognize such patterns in their full generality. A parser can push parentheses on a stack and then try to pop them off and see if the stack is empty at the end.
The Lex programming tool and its compiler is designed to generate code for fast lexical analysers based on a formal description of the lexical syntax. It is not generally considered sufficient for applications with a complicated set of lexical rules and severe performance requirements; for instance, the GNU Compiler Collection uses hand-written lexers.

Lexical analysis

Lexer generator

CS 164: Programming Languages and Compilers (Class Notes #2: Lexical)
Compiling with C# and Java, Pat Terry, 2005, ISBN 0-321-26360-X 624
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, Niklaus Wirth, 1975, ISBN 0-13-022418-9
Compiler Construction, Niklaus Wirth, 1996, ISBN 0-201-40353-6
Sebesta, R. W. (2006). Concepts of programming languages (Seventh edition) pp.177. Boston: Pearson/Addison-Wesley.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

A treaty is an agreement under international law entered into by actors in international law, namely states and international organizations. A Treaty may also be known as: (international) agreement, protocol, covenant, convention,exchange of letters, exchange of notes, memorandum of understanding, etc. Regardless of the terminology, all of these international agreements under international law are equally treaties and the rules are the same.
However, in United States constitutional law, only a treaty that has achieved advice and consent of two-thirds of the United States Senate present is properly designated as a "treaty". If, instead, the President presents a negotiated instrument to the whole Congress for majority approval, the agreement is typically called a "congressional-executive agreement". For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and most other U.S. trade agreements are executive agreements.
Treaties can be loosely compared to contracts: both are means of willing parties assuming obligations among themselves, and a party to either that fails to live up to their obligations can be held liable under international law for that breach. The central principle of treaty law is expressed in the maxim pacta sunt servanda — "pacts must be respected". However, in the United States, treaties are equal in stature to legislation. Because of this rule, treaties and statutes can override each other—whichever is latest in time is controlling.

Bilateral and multilateral treaties

Adding and amendment treaty obligations

Main article: Reservation (law) Reservations
There are three ways an existing treaty can be amended. First, formal amendment requires States parties to the treaty to go through the ratification process all over again. The re-negotiation of treaty provisions can be long and protracted, and often some parties to the original treaty will not become parties to the amended treaty. When determining the legal obligations of states, one party to the original treaty and one a party to the amended treaty, the states will only be bound by the terms they both agreed upon. Treaties can also be amended informally by the treaty executive council when the changes are only procedural, technical, or administrative (not principled changes). Finally, a change in customary international law (state behavior) can also amend a treaty, where state behavior evinces a new interpretation of the legal obligations under the treaty.

Amendments
In international law and international relations, a protocol is generally a treaty or international agreement that supplements a previous treaty or international agreement. A protocol can amend the previous treaty, or add additional provisions. Parties to the earlier agreement are not required to adopt the protocol; sometimes this is made clearer by calling it an "optional protocol", especially where many parties to the first agreement do not support the protocol.
Some examples: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established a framework for the development of binding greenhouse gas emission limits, while the Kyoto Protocol contained the specific provisions and regulations later agreed upon.

Protocols
Treaties may be seen as 'self-executing', in that merely becoming a party puts the treaty and all of its obligations in action. Other treaties may be non-self-executing and require 'implementing legislation'—a change in the domestic law of a state party that will direct or enable it to fulfill treaty obligations. An example of a treaty requiring such legislation would be one mandating local prosecution by a party for particular crimes.
The division between the two is often not clear and is often politicized in disagreements within a government over a treaty, as a non-self-executing treaty cannot be acted upon without the proper change in domestic law. If a treaty requires implementing legislation, a state may be in default of its obligations by the failure of its legislature to pass the necessary domestic laws.

Execution and implementation
The language of treaties, like that of any law or contract, must be interpreted when the wording does not seem clear or it is not immediately apparent how it should be applied in a perhaps unforeseen circumstance. The Vienna Convention states that treaties are to be interpreted "in good faith" according to the "ordinary meaning given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose." International legal experts also often invoke the 'principle of maximum effectiveness,' which interprets treaty language as having the fullest force and effect possible to establish obligations between the parties.
No one party to a treaty can impose its particular interpretation of the treaty upon the other parties. Consent may be implied, however, if the other parties fail to explicitly disavow that initially unilateral interpretation, particularly if that state has acted upon its view of the treaty without complaint. Consent by all parties to the treaty to a particular interpretation has the legal effect of adding an additional clause to the treaty - this is commonly called an 'authentic interpretation'.
International tribunals and arbiters are often called upon to resolve substantial disputes over treaty interpretations. To establish the meaning in context, these judicial bodies may review the preparatory work from the negotiation and drafting of the treaty as well as the final, signed treaty itself.

Interpretation
One significant part of treaty making is that signing a treaty implies recognition that the other side is a sovereign state and that the agreement being considered is enforceable under international law. Hence, nations can be very careful about terming an agreement to be a treaty. For example, within the United States agreements between states are compacts and agreements between states and the federal government or between agencies of the government are memoranda of understanding.
Another situation can occur when one party wishes to create an obligation under international law, but the other party does not. This factor has been at work with respect to discussions between North Korea and the United States over security guarantees and nuclear proliferation.
The terminology can also be confusing because a treaty may and usually is named something other than a treaty, such as a convention, protocol, or simply agreement. Conversely some legal documents such as the Treaty of Waitangi are internationally considered to be documents under domestic law.

Consequences of terminology
See also: Denunciation

International treaty

Ending treaty obligations
Treaties are not necessarily permanently binding upon the signatory parties. As obligations in international law are traditionally viewed as arising only from the consent of states, many treaties expressly allow a state to withdraw as long as it follows certain procedures of notification. Many treaties expressly forbid withdrawal. Other treaties are silent on the issue, and so if a state attempts withdrawal through its own unilateral denunciation of the treaty, a determination must be made regarding whether permitting withdrawal is contrary to the original intent of the parties or to the nature of the treaty. Human rights treaties, for example, are generally interpreted to exclude the possibility of withdrawal, because of the importance and permanence of the obligations.
If a state party's withdrawal is successful, its obligations under that treaty are considered terminated, and withdrawal by one party from a bilateral treaty of course terminates the treaty. When a state withdraws from a multi-lateral treaty, that treaty will still otherwise remain in force between the other parties, unless, of course, otherwise should or could be interpreted as agreed upon between the remaining states parties to the treaty.

Withdrawal
If a party has materially violated, or breached, its treaty obligations, the other parties may invoke this breach as grounds for temporarily suspending their obligations to that party under the treaty. A material breach may also be invoked as grounds for permanently terminating the treaty itself.
A treaty breach does not automatically suspend or terminate treaty relations, however. The issue must be presented to an international tribunal or arbiter (usually specified in the treaty itself) to legally establish that a sufficiently serious breach has in fact occurred. Otherwise, a party that prematurely and perhaps wrongfully suspends or terminates its own obligations due to an alleged breach itself runs the risk of being held liable for breach. Additionally, parties may choose to overlook treaty breaches while still maintaining their own obligations towards the party in breach.
Treaties sometimes include provisions for self-termination, meaning that the treaty is automatically terminated if certain defined conditions are met. Some treaties are intended by the parties to be only temporarily binding and are set to expire on a given date. Other treaties may self-terminate if the treaty is meant to exist only under certain conditions.
A party may claim that a treaty should be terminated, even absent an express provision, if there has been a fundamental change in circumstances. Such a change is sufficient if unforeseen, if it undermined the "essential basis" of consent by a party, if it radically transforms the extent of obligations between the parties, and if the obligations are still to be performed. A party cannot base this claim on change brought about by its own breach of the treaty. This claim also cannot be used to invalidate treaties that established or redrew political boundaries.

Invalid treaties
A party's consent to a treaty is invalid if it had been given by an agent or body without power to do so under that state's domestic law. States are reluctant to inquire into the internal affairs and processes of other states, and so a "manifest" violation is required such that it would be "objectively evident to any State dealing with the matter". A strong presumption exists internationally that a head of state has acted within his proper authority. It seems that no treaty has ever actually been invalidated on this provision.
Consent is also invalid if it is given by a representative who ignored restrictions he is subject to by his sovereign during the negotiations, if the other parties to the treaty were notified of those restrictions prior to his signing.

Ultra vires treaties
Articles 46-53 of the Vienna Convention set out the only ways that treaties can be invalidated--considered unenforceable and void under international law. A treaty will be invalidated due to either the circumstances by which a state party joined the treaty, or due to the content of the treaty itself. Invalidation is separate from withdrawal, suspension, or termination (addressed below), which all involve an alteration in the consent of the parties of a previously valid treaty rather than the invalidation of that consent in the first place.
A state's consent may be invalidated if there was an erroneous understanding of a fact or situation at the time of conclusion, which formed the "essential basis" of the state's consent. Consent will not be invalidated if the misunderstanding was due to the state's own conduct, or if the truth should have been evident.
Consent will also be invalidated if it was induced by the fraudulent conduct of another party, or by the direct or indirect "corruption" of its representative by another party to the treaty. Coercion of either a representative, or the state itself through the threat or use of force, if used to obtain the consent of that state to a treaty, will invalidate that consent.

Misunderstanding, fraud, corruption, coercion
A treaty is null and void if it is in violation of a peremptory norm. These norms, unlike other principles of customary law, are recognized as permitting no violations and so cannot be altered through treaty obligations. These are limited to such universally accepted prohibitions as those against genocide, slavery, torture, and piracy, meaning that no state can legally assume an obligation to commit or permit such acts.

Peremptory norms
The United Nations Charter states that treaties must be registered with the UN to be invoked before it or enforced in its judiciary organ, the International Court of Justice. This was done to prevent the proliferation of secret treaties that occurred in the 19th and 20th century. The Charter also states that its members' obligations under it outweigh any competing obligations under other treaties.
In function and effectiveness, the UN has been compared to the pre-Constitutional United States Federal government by some, giving a comparison between modern treaty law and the historical Articles of Confederation.

Role of the United Nations

Main article: Foreign policy law of the United States United States law
Article 84 of the Brazilian federal constitution sets out, in its clause VIII, that the president is the only one capable of signing international treaties; its internal implementation, however, demands the approval of the Congress (Chamber of Deputies, together with the Senate), according to Article 49, paragraph I of the constitution.

Brazilian law
Treaties formed an important part of European colonization and, in many parts of the world, Europeans attempted to legitimize their sovereignty by signing treaties with indigenous peoples. In most cases these treaties were in extremely disadvantageous terms to the native people, who often did not appreciate the implications of what they were signing.
In some rare cases, such as with Ethiopia and Qing Dynasty China, the local governments were able to use the treaties to at least mitigate the impact of European colonization. This involved learning the intricacies of European diplomatic customs and then using the treaties to prevent a power from overstepping their agreement or by playing different powers against each other.
In other cases, such as New Zealand and Canada, treaties allowed native peoples to maintain a minimum amount of autonomy. In the case of indigenous Australians, unlike with the Māori of New Zealand, no treaty was ever entered into with the indigenous peoples entitling the Europeans to land ownership. Such treaties between colonizers and indigenous peoples are an important part of political discourse in the late 20th and early 21st century, the treaties being discussed have international standing as has been stated in a treaty study by the UN.

Notes

List of treaties
International law
List of special entities recognized by international treaty or agreement

sophiekain

Friday, August 31, 2007

Thursday, August 30, 2007