title: JW GROM

text: Candidates applying to serve in JW GROM have to pass psychological and durability tests, along with the so-called truth test, a physically and psychologically exhausting field test designed to filter out the weaker applicants.


title: JW GROM

text: The training of GROM soldiers includes a variety of disciplines. All of them undergo the same specialized training in anti-terrorism and special operations, as well as frogman, sniping, and parachuting. In four-man teams, each soldier must be prepared to assume the respective responsibilities of his colleagues, should it become necessary. JW GROM receives basic special operations training from the Swedish Navy's Special Command for Tactical Operations based in Karlskrona, Sweden's primary Naval Base. Approximately 75% of GROM personnel are trained as medics or paramedics. In addition, each group is supported by several professional physicians. GROM soldiers are trained in capture or kill methods.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Homestar Runner is an American Flash animated comedy web series and website created by Mike and Matt Chapman, known collectively as The Brothers Chaps. The series centers on the adventures of a large and diverse cast of characters, headed by the lovable yet dense athlete Homestar Runner. It uses a blend of surreal humour, self-parody, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Homestar Runner originated in 1996 as a parody children's book by Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel. Whilst learning Macromedia Flash, Mike and his brother Matt expanded the concept into a website, which was launched on New Year's Day 2000. While the site originally centered on the title character, the "Strong Bad Email" cartoon skits quickly became the site's most popular and prominent feature, with Strong Bad, initially the series' main antagonist, becoming a breakout character. Since 2000, the site has grown to encompass a variety of cartoons and web games featuring Homestar, Strong Bad, and numerous other characters.


title: Homestar Runner

text: At the peak of its popularity, the site was one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the web, spreading via word of mouth. The site sustains itself through merchandise sales and has never featured advertisements. The Brothers Chaps have turned down offers to make a television series.


title: Homestar Runner

text: After a four-year hiatus beginning in 2010, Homestar Runner returned with a new Holiday Toon on April 1, 2014, for April Fools' Day. Afterwards, co-creator Matt Chapman announced plans to give the site semi-regular updates starting in fall 2014, due to the positive reception given to the April Fools' Day cartoon. Since global support for Flash ended on December 31, 2020, homestarrunner.com has maintained a fully functional website through the Flash emulator Ruffle. More cartoons have since been released on the website on an occasional basis, usually to celebrate holidays.


title: Homestar Runner

text: "Homestar Runner" was created in Atlanta in 1996 by University of Georgia students Mike Chapman and friend Craig Zobel, who wrote the original picture book, "The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest", while working summer jobs surrounding the 1996 Summer Olympics.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Matt described the origin of the name "Homestar Runner" as a in-joke between themselves and James Huggins, a childhood friend of the Chapman brothers while growing up in Dunwoody, Georgia.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The idea to use Homestar Runner for a children's book came while Mike and Craig were in a bookstore, and commented on how "terrible" the children's books were, prompting the idea to create their own. They spent around two hours designing the look of Homestar Runner, Pom Pom, Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and completed the book within a day. They only printed about five to ten copies to share with friends, and had no intention to publish it. However, they had no idea that their father had sent out the book as a manuscript for submission to about 80 different publishers, but they only got rejection letters back, if anything. The pair began to work on a sequel, "Homestar Runner Goes for the Gold", which would have introduced Strong Bad's brothers, Strong Mad and Strong Sad, but was eventually abandoned. They later used the Super NES video game "Mario Paint" to create the first cartoon featuring the characters.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Around 1999, Mike recognized how popular Flash animation was taking off, and he and his younger brother Matt Chapman started to learn Flash on their own. Looking for something on which to practice, they found inspiration in the old "children's" book. Their initial cartoons were launched on their dedicated website, homestarrunner.com, by 2000. Mike animated the cartoons, Matt provided the voices of the male characters, and Mike's girlfriend (now wife) Missy Palmer provided the voice of Marzipan.


title: Homestar Runner

text: They initially started off with shorts that featured competitions between Homestar Runner as a heroic character and Strong Bad as the villain, but these did not really capture viewers. Mike and Matt came up with the idea of animating the scenes between competitions; Matt stated "that was the stuff that was funnier, the stuff happening between the plot points, which is hilarious because we hadn't even established a routine of making cartoons about competitions, we'd made like one". From May 2000 to February 2001, the website and cartoons started out with different art styles. In February 2001, it gained a new look, which has largely remained consistent to the present with minor changes.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The site grew slowly at first and primarily through word-of-mouth. They were able to sell a "few dozen" T-shirts by 2001. Mike moved back to New York in mid-2001 and he and Matt started crafting the first Strong Bad Email "some kinda robot", intending this to be a weekly feature. The Strong Bad Email series proved very popular, generating significant interest in the site; when the brothers were late in publishing a new Strong Bad Email, they received angry emails asking where the new short was, which Matt said was "a cool feeling to know you're as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks". Their father suggested Matt quit his full-time job to devote time to creating more Homestar Runner shorts. With the number of visitors to the site growing, by January 2003 the site had outgrown its original web host, Yahoo!. Merchandise sales paid for all of the costs of running the website as well as living costs of the creators, whose retired parents managed many of the business aspects.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The brothers considered the period between 2002–2005 to be their most creative and successful, exploring various different media for the shorts and having a large quantity of merchandise. Matt considered a day in February 2004 to be the highlight of the series, having received a demo tape from They Might Be Giants for a song to use in a Strong Bad Email short and a life-sized replica of Tom Servo from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" producer Jim Mallon on the same day. They also reflected on how Homestar Runner had been a common point of reference over which newly formed couples bonded and how Joss Whedon incorporated references to Homestar Runner into his television shows "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" as further signs of success.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Through 2010, Homestar Runner remained financially viable for the brothers through sales of related merchandise. Both brothers were married by 2010 and had their children to care for, and they recognized that they would need to find other jobs to support their respective families. When Matt had a second daughter, the two agreed to put the series on hiatus, knowing they would want to come back to it but could not guarantee a time frame. Mike also noted that they had spent nearly ten years delivering a weekly cartoon, and believed that, creatively, they needed a break. The success of Homestar Runner led to Matt and Mike getting writing jobs for television animated series "Yo Gabba Gabba!", "Gravity Falls", "The Aquabats! Super Show!", and "Wander Over Yonder".


title: Homestar Runner

text: During this hiatus, the brothers released a small number of Homestar Runner cartoons, including ones for 2010's April Fools' Day and Decemberween holidays. They also made a special video featuring Homestar and Strong Bad for the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con to introduce a panel regarding the history of W00tstock.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Matt, after completing work on "Gravity Falls", moved back to Atlanta in 2014 where Mike was living, and the two agreed that they now had the opportunity to return to "Homestar Runner" on a semi-regular basis. Their first short in nearly four years, posted on April 1, 2014, poked fun at how they had not updated the site in years. Matt confirmed their commitment to continue the series in July 2014. Since then, the site has featured occasional updates, usually for holidays. Until 2017, this was mostly due to the brothers' involvement in developing the Disney XD animated show "Two More Eggs".


title: Homestar Runner

text: With the discontinuation of Adobe Flash by the end of 2020, most new "Homestar Runner" content was released directly as videos to YouTube; they also worked to re-record the older Flash content into video format for archival purposes. One exception was the release of the last update to the Flash game "Stinkoman 20X6" on December 20, 2020, which included the promised final level after fifteen years.


title: Homestar Runner

text: On December 31, 2020, the website was updated to use the Ruffle Flash emulator, ensuring its content will remain accessible after the discontinuation of Flash Player the same day. However, some of the newer Flash material made right before the 2020 updates have some issues with some Flash files when running on the site, due to Ruffle still being in its early stages. But over time it is stated that those files progressively get to its normal state in the future.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Homestar Runner cartoons typically center on Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, and the other nine main characters of Marzipan, Coach Z, Bubs C. Stand, Strong Sad, Strong Mad, Pom Pom, the King of Town, the Poopsmith, and Homsar. They've been described as "weird animal characters" by the Brothers Chaps. Many alternate variations of these character also exist such as "Old-Timey" and "20X6" versions of each character. The Main Characters have many roles throughout the Homestar Runner universe.


title: Homestar Runner

text: "Homestar Runner" features several spin-off series from the main "shorts" and "big toons", including the most well-known, Strong Bad Email.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Strong Bad Emails (also known as "sbemails") are arguably the most popular and prolific series, featuring Strong Bad answering emails from fans. Since starting in August 2001, the initially brief episodes have grown in length and scope, introducing numerous spin-offs, characters, and inside jokes, such as Homsar, Trogdor, Senor Cardgage, 20X6, the Teen Girl Squad shorts, and Homestar Runner Emails (also known as "hremails"). The format, however, has remained largely unchanged. Each episode typically begins with Strong Bad singing a short song to himself while booting up his computer to check fan emails. Starting a reply, he typically mocks the sender's name, spelling, and grammar, and rarely answers questions directly. While early episodes focused mostly on Strong Bad sitting at the computer with occasional cutaways, the cutaways would become more elaborate over time, allowing for more complex story lines to develop, growing tangentially from the initial email. Each episode closes with Strong Bad finishing his reply, closing the episode with a link to email Strong Bad appearing via "The Paper", a dot matrix printer at the top of the screen. In later episodes, it is replaced with the "New Paper", an inkjet printer, then with the "Compé-per", a pop-up balloon, and finally with a CGI version of the original Paper, which instead promotes Strong Bad's Twitter account.


title: Homestar Runner

text: As of April 1, 2022, 209 Strong Bad Emails have been released on the website (with another six exclusive to DVD releases), separable into distinct eras by Strong Bad's different computers; the Tandy 400, the Compy 386, the Lappy 486, the Compé, and his current computer, the Lappier.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Prior to the 2010 hiatus, holiday specials were a regular feature of the site, released to coincide with popular holidays, specifically Halloween and Decemberween (a fictional holiday similar to Christmas also celebrated on December 25). Halloween shorts typically feature the main characters celebrating a traditional aspect of the holiday (such as ghost stories, trick-or-treating or pumpkin carving) in costume, often making obscure pop culture references. The site also usually releases a separate Halloween video where Strong Bad views a slideshow and mocks and/or appraises photos sent in by real life fans of their Halloween costumes and props modeled after "Homestar Runner" characters and other elements. Similarly, Decemberween cartoons typically satirize Christmas traditions such as gift-giving and carol-singing. The fact that it takes place on the same day as Christmas has been presented as just a coincidence, having been stated that Decemberween takes place "55 days after Halloween". April Fools' Day features various gags, such as turning the site into a paid subscription service, or turning it upside down.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Other holidays celebrated include New Year's Day, "The Big Game" (around the time of the Super Bowl), St. Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, "Senorial Day" (a parody of Memorial Day featuring the character Senor Cardgage), Flag Day, Independence Day, Labor Day (occasionally referred to as "Labor Dabor"), Thanksgiving, and Easter.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Teen Girl Squad is a crudely drawn comic strip narrated by Strong Bad, using a falsetto voice. The series was a spin off of Strong Bad Email #53, "comic", in which Strong Bad is asked to make a comic strip of a girl and her friends. The comic features four archetypal teenage girls, "Cheerleader", "So and So", "What's Her Face" and "The Ugly One", and satirizes high school life, teen movies, and television. Each episode follows the girls in typical high school situations, often leading to their gruesome deaths. A spinoff of this series is "4 Gregs", which follows four of the squad's nerdy classmates, all named Greg.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Marzipan's Answering Machine is a series of cartoons with almost no animation. It features messages from the other characters, being played on the answering machine belonging to the character Marzipan. In early episodes, the episode number ended in .0 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 5.0), but since Marzipan changed to a new answering machine, the number ends in .2 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 15.2). In every episode, Strong Bad prank calls Marzipan, badly pretending to be someone else, such as "Detective Everybody", "Safety Dan", and sometimes other characters. Although the animation is usually just a picture of the answering machine, sometimes there are short animated segments featuring the characters. As of April 1, 2016, there are 17 Marzipan's Answering Machines.


title: Homestar Runner

text: These are live action shorts in which the regular characters are depicted by puppets. These may be skits, or musical performances with They Might Be Giants. Many Puppet Stuff videos feature the characters interacting with children, often related to The Brothers Chaps. One spin-off series, "Biz Cas Fri", depicts Homestar and Strong Bad's interactions from his office cubicle at work. The first Biz Cas Fri video arguably first coined the term "Doge".


title: Homestar Runner

text: These are a parody of poorly animated internet cartoons and are made by The Cheat. He has done work for Strong Bad, Coach Z, and Peacey P. He even filled in for Strong Bad on an email one week. The other characters have given mixed opinions on his work.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Over time, many alternate versions of the Homestar Runner world and characters would appear, parodying other cartoons and animation styles. Many of these feature in their own cartoons. The many alternate universes would later cross over in some cartoons, such as the 150th Strong Bad Email, "alternate universe".


title: Homestar Runner

text: Old-Timey cartoons take place in an old-time setting, with most of the characters being Old-Timey counterparts of the "Homestar Runner" characters. These cartoons are in black and white with a film grain effect and scratchy audio quality. They parody the distinctive style of animated cartoons during the 1920s and 1930s (à la Steamboat Willie), and can be seen as perhaps deliberately unfunny, to make a slanted joke about such old-style cartoons.


title: Homestar Runner

text: "20X6" (pronounced "twenty exty-six"), a parody of the Mega Man and EarthBound games' "year 200X", originated from Strong Bad Email #57, "japanese cartoon", an email asking Strong Bad what he would look like if he were in a Japanese anime. The main character, Stinkoman, is an anime version of Strong Bad with blue hair, a shiny body and robot boots. He is always looking for a fight, asking various characters he interacts with to engage him in a "challenge" ("Are you asking for a challenge?"). There is also a game, "Stinkoman 20X6", which is heavily based on the Mega Man series.


title: Homestar Runner

text: "Cheat Commandos" is a parody of "G.I. Joe" that features a cast of characters that are the same species as The Cheat. Most are based on G.I. Joe characters, or characters from other 1980s cartoons. The cartoon is constantly advertising its products in the cartoons by such methods as referring to the areas they are in as "playsets", a convoy truck as an "action figure storage vehicle", and by ending each cartoon with the phrase "Buy all our playsets and toys!", sung in a patriotic way. It also parodies the G.I. Joe cartoons' use of public service announcements, referring to nonsensical things like "peer-2-teen choice behaviors". Some cartoons feature the character Crack Stuntman, the fictional voice actor for the Cheat Commandos character Gunhaver.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The Homestar Runner site frequently features songs and videos within their animated shorts or as stand-alone entities. These are primarily sung and performed either by the characters or by fictitious artists serving as parodies of various genres. Real-life musicians They Might Be Giants have also appeared occasionally, performing with a Homestar puppet, or with the characters in the video to their song Experimental Film. They have also collaborated on several other shorts, including Strong Bad Email #200, "email thunder".


title: Homestar Runner

text: In Strong Bad Email #58, "dragon", Strong Bad is asked to draw a dragon, creating TROGDOR, THE BURNiNATOR, and performing his heavy metal theme song. Trogdor's popularity saw the character appear on merchandise such as T-shirts, hoodies, and posters, with an extended version of the song appearing on the CD "Strong Bad Sings".


title: Homestar Runner

text: In 2002, a faux hair metal band, Limozeen, was introduced as a parody of 1980s hair metal bands like Skid Row, White Lion and Poison; with songs including "Because, It's Midnite" and "Nite Mamas". On March 17, 2008, "Limozeen" (actually the Atlanta indie band Y-O-U along with Matt Chapman on vocals) performed a live show in Atlanta, Georgia, and again on November 8, 2008, opening for indie pop band of Montreal. A college rock band called Sloshy (with the logo stylized in lower case and rotated 180 degrees, with the "o" being a different color, as "ʎɥsoןs") was introduced in 2007. Sloshy features songs in the musical vein of Pavement such as "We Don't Really Even Care About You" and "The B-est of B-Sides". Other fictitious artists include Scandinavian death metal parody Taranchula (although performing more in a thrash metal/sludge metal style); rapper Peacey P, with a singing style resembling that of Snoop Dogg; and the self-absorbed R&B artist Tenerence Love, a parody of Barry White and such artists.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Beyond cartoons, "Homestar Runner" offers a variety of online games. Early games such as the Homestar Soundboard, "Homestar Talker", and Lite-Brite emulator "Astro-Lite 2600" are basic web toys featuring the characters, and can now be found on the "Old Games" section of the site. Over time, more recent games have diversified and become more complex, with many being released as products of "Videlectrix", a game company within the world of Homestar Runner and a side project of The Brothers Chaps, spoofing games of the 1980s. Often the games would originate as video games played by the characters in the cartoon, such as "Secret Collect", "StrongBadZone", and "Strong Bad's RhinoFeeder", all parodies of early Atari and arcade games, originating in the Strong Bad Email "video games".


title: Homestar Runner

text: "TROGDOR!" which previously appeared in the "Arcade Game" short, features the titular dragon Trogdor the Burninator attempting to burn all the cottages on each stage without being slain by knights. A spin-off of "TROGDOR!", called "Peasant's Quest", is an adventure game featuring Rather Dashing, a young peasant in short pants. After he finds his cottage burned to the ground, he vows to kill the destroyer of his cottage, Trogdor. The game uses a system that is a near-replica of Sierra Entertainment's Adventure Game Interpreter, used in "King's Quest", "Space Quest" and several other early Sierra titles. This system is something like text adventure games yet it has simple visuals. "Stinkoman 20X6" is a Mega Man-style platform game featuring the characters and world of anime parody 20X6. Nine levels were added to the game over the course of 2005, while the tenth and final level was not released until December 2020, days before Flash would no longer be supported by browsers.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The "Thy Dungeonman" series are parodies of text adventure games originating from Strong Bad Email #94, "video games". In each game, your goal is to "get ye flask". Though the game purports to be set in the medieval era, the text is actually rendered in mock Early Modern English, in the style of William Shakespeare. "Thy Dungeonman" has two sequels: "Thy Dungeonman II", which expands on the features of the original game and can only be found on the Videlectrix site, and "Thy Dungeonman III" which adds basic graphics and can be found on the Homestar Runner site. "Ye Flask" and "You can't get ye flask" have become catch-phrases in the Homestar Runner universe, eventually spawning a T-shirt in the Homestar Runner store.


title: Homestar Runner

text: In 2007, the website produced Wii versions of some of the games on the site, for the Wii internet browser. When played on the computer, they use the mouse only.


title: Homestar Runner

text: On April 10, 2008, a new episodic game called "Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People" (abbreviated as "SBCG4AP") was announced for the Wii's WiiWare service and Microsoft Windows, developed by Telltale Games in partnership with Videlectrix. The first episode, "Homestar Ruiner", premiered on August 11, 2008, worldwide for Windows on Telltale Games' website and in North America on Nintendo's WiiWare service on August 11, 2008. It was also released in Europe and Australia the following Friday (August 15, 2008). The second episode, "Strong Badia the Free", was released on September 15 on the WiiWare service in North America and on the Telltale Games' website, and in the PAL region on October 3. The third episode, "Baddest of the Bands", was released on Telltale Games' website and the WiiWare service in North America on October 27, and to the PAL region on November 21. The fourth episode, "Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective", was released on Telltale Games' website and WiiWare in North America on November 17, and in the PAL region on December 5. The fifth and final episode, "8-Bit is Enough", was released to North America on December 15 and in the PAL region on January 2, 2009. In 2010, it was decided that Telltale games would release "SBCG4AP" for the Mac operating system after a vote on the Telltale Games website.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Strong Bad appears as one of the computer-controlled opponents in Telltale's "Poker Night at the Inventory", using the same model from SBCG4AP. Players can unlock in-game card sets and table designs based on Homestar Runner. Additionally, Strong Bad will occasionally bet Dangeresque Too's sunglasses in place of in-game cash; defeating him after doing so will unlock the glasses as an equippable cosmetic item for the Demoman in "Team Fortress 2". The game was released for PC and Mac on November 22, 2010.


title: Homestar Runner

text: "Trogdor!! The Board Game" is a board game made by The Brothers Chaps in collaboration with James Ernest. The campaign was put on Kickstarter on Tuesday, July 17, 2018, with a goal of $75,000, which was surpassed in the first few hours. The campaign ended on Wednesday, August 15, 2018, with a total of $1,421,903 (nearly 20 times the goal) and 23,338 backers. Extra copies are sold in the website's store.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Trogdor!! is described as a cooperative puzzle area control game in which the players work together to burninate all of the game tiles, thatched-roof cottages, and peasants. Every player controls Trogdor, assuming the role of one of the twelve "Keepers of Trogdor". Each Keeper has unique powers and items, both decided by cards. The game is for one to six players, and play time is 30 minutes with variable levels of difficulty the players can set. The recommended age is 14+. It comes with a mini-game titled "Stack 'Em To The Heavens" in which you stack the meeples in different ways. An album of songs, "Trogdor!! The Board Game Rulebook EP", was made to explain the rules of the game.


title: Homestar Runner

text: An email worm named Lacon, which featured Homestar Runner characters, was created and distributed by someone going by the name of DimenZion in 2003. It affected 32-bit Windows computers on the 10th of each month, emailing copies of itself to contacts in the computer's address book, and also adding various .exe files to the hard drive. Its final payload showed a Homestar Runner Flash animation called "The System is Down" in a browser window.


title: Homestar Runner

text: The Brothers Chaps have partnered up with rock band They Might Be Giants and supplied animation for a music video of their song "Experimental Film". The creators of "Homestar Runner" spent time with the band and wrote songs that have been released on the website as "Puppet Jam", a spin-off of "Puppet Stuff", where Puppet Homestar sings with TMBG. TMBG also wrote the music for Strong Bad Email #99, "different town", and the band wrote and vocalized the intro song of the 200th Strong Bad Email. Another group, The Skate Party, helped The Brothers Chaps create "The Cheat Theme Song". The band Y-O-U helped with the Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits CD, as well as songs on the strongbad_email.exe DVDs. The Brothers Chaps also employed the services of Paul and Storm of the a cappella band Da Vinci's Notebook to create a theme song for the Old-Timey version of The Cheat, called "Ballad of The Sneak"; the duo later wrote the theme tune for the "Stinkoman 20X6" game. Matt Chapman provided guest vocals as Strong Bad on The Aquabats' "Pink Pants!" from their 2011 album, "Hi-Five Soup!". Strong Bad's voice also appears on Shellac's "Genuine Lulabelle" off the album "Excellent Italian Greyhound" from 2007.


title: Homestar Runner

text: Discussing how he and his sibling decide which projects to work on, Mike Chapman said, "We learned how to politely say no to things that were going to affect our lives negatively. If it's going to be fun, if we're going to enjoy doing it, and if the end project is going to be something we want to have happen, we say yes."


title: Homestar Runner

text: In 2003, the site received several million hits a month and almost a thousand emails a day. According to Matt Chapman, the site did no advertising, but grew on word of mouth and endorsements. "Certain bands, like fairly popular bands and stuff would link us on their site and, you know we were Shockwave site of the day a couple of times over the years." "Homestar Runner" popularity, coupled with its positive critical response, has led to the website receiving widespread coverage. "Homestar Runner" has been featured in "Wired", "National Review", "Entertainment Weekly", "Total Gamer", G4, and NPR's "All Things Considered".


title: Homestar Runner

text: A review published in "National Review" characterized the site's humor as having "the innocence of slapstick with sharp satire of American popular culture" — humor that "tends to be cultural, not political."


title: Homestar Runner

text: The site-generated music has enjoyed surprising popularity, such that two songs, "Trogdor" by the character Strong Bad and "Because, It's Midnite" by Limozeen, have been included in the successful "Guitar Hero II" and "" video games, respectively. Their inclusion in the games is reportedly because Harmonix founder Alex Rigopulos is a professed fan of "Homestar Runner".


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: It is the second oldest autonomous university in the country and is considered as one of the most prestigious universities in the world by various international metrics. It is usually ranked amongst the world's top 20 institutions of higher learning.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU is ranked 19th in the world according to the 2023 QS World University Rankings, and has also been ranked 1st globally amongst young universities by the QS World University Rankings since 2015.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The university is organised into several colleges and schools, including the College of Engineering, College of Science, Nanyang Business School, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Graduate College, National Institute of Education, and S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. NTU is also home to several Research Centres of Excellence such as the Earth Observatory of Singapore and Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering. NTU's main campus covers of land, making it the largest university campus in Singapore.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The primary campus grounds are located in the western part of Singapore, along 50 Nanyang Avenue. It also has two other campuses in Singapore's healthcare and start-up districts, Novena and one-north respectively. As a comprehensive and large university, it has 34,384 enrolled students and 7,613 faculty and staff as of 2021.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 1955, prior to Singapore's independence from the British, Nanyang University was established south of the current Nanyang Technological University campus, with the centre of the present Yunnan Garden as its heart. Its administration building currently houses the Chinese Heritage Centre, a national monument.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Although NTU occupies the grounds of the former Nanyang University (NU), and has a similar name, it is not a direct continuation of that institution. In 1980, the Government of Singapore merged Nanyang University with the University of Singapore to form the present-day National University of Singapore (NUS). This was a source of significant discontent amongst NU students and alumni, because NU had been a Chinese-medium university, whereas the newly merged NUS was (and is) an English-medium university.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: As NTU subsequently grew into a full university, various efforts were made to have it claim the Nanyang University mantle. In 1996, the alumni rolls of Nanyang University were transferred from NUS to NTU. In 1998, the prominent local calligrapher and poet Pan Shou, who had been the first vice-chancellor of Nanyang University, called for NTU to be renamed Nanyang University, as a way to "quieten the hearts of many" NU alumni. In 2003, this idea received further support from NTU president Su Guaning, during an interview with the Chinese-language paper "Lianhe Zaobao". One reason offered for the renaming was that, by the mid-2000s, NTU no longer had a narrow focus on technical subjects, but had become a full university including studies in the humanities.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 1980, Nanyang University merged with the University of Singapore to form the current National University of Singapore. In complement, Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI), a tertiary institution affiliated to the National University of Singapore, was formed to take over Nanyang University's campus in 1981.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI) was set up on 1 August 1981 with a charter to train three-quarters of Singapore’s engineers. When NTI started in 1982, it had a total student population of 582 in three engineering disciplines – civil and structural, electrical and electronic, and mechanical and production engineering. By 1990, the institute’s undergraduate student population had grown to 6,832. The first two graduate students were admitted in 1986.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Three engineering schools were added, and the School of Accountancy from the National University of Singapore was transferred to NTI in 1987. A school of applied science was also started. In 1990, the government announced that the Institute of Education would be merged with the College of Physical Education to form the National Institute of Education and that it would be part of the new NTU upon its establishment in 1991.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 1991, NTI merged with the National Institute of Education (NIE) (founded in 1950) to form the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The alumni rolls of the former Nanyang University were transferred to NTU in 1996. Historically, Nanyang Technological University admitted students jointly with the affiliated National University of Singapore and charged the same fees. Students made only one application and they would be accepted by either university. This arrangement ended in 2004 as both universities began to distinguish themselves with an end of its official affiliation. Currently, students apply separately to both universities. NTU became autonomous in 2006 and stands as one of the two largest public universities in Singapore today.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU is currently a collaborative member of Singapore International Graduate Award for PhD applicants worldwide, which comprises Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR), the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 2013, there was a debate over academic freedom in Singapore when Cherian George, an outspoken academic at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and a government critic, did not get tenured. Although George had been recommended for tenure by the Wee Kim Wee School, his application was turned down by a university-level committee which included representatives from the Government of Singapore. Despite a petition against the tenure decision by students at the Wee Kim Wee School, George's appeal against the tenure decision was subsequently rejected by the university.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 2021, some applications for on-campus hostel accommodations in NTU were rejected due to COVID-19 isolation protocols. The university claimed that the rejections were due to a shortage of housing facilities, which at full capacity was still unable to house every applicant, as rooms were oversubscribed. Such rejections resulted in concerns, especially among international students, as it resulted in many returning second-year students enrolled in for 2020 to 2021 not being granted campus accommodation despite the university's much-publicised policy of guaranteeing all incoming students with a minimum of two years of on-campus accommodation. NTU eventually reversed their decision on 2 July 2021, prioritising on-campus accommodations for international students that resided on campus at the time, students under scholarship programmes with guaranteed housing, and all Year 1 and 2 students under the guaranteed hall stay policy.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU has been listed as one of the World's Most Beautiful Universities, featuring the ADM building in the report.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: It has also been listed in "The 10 most beautiful universities in East Asia", featuring the Learning Hub building.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: During NTI period between 1981 and 1982, the main campus layout including the building complex, the so-called North Spine, has been designed by a world-renowned Japanese architect, who is also 1987 Pritzker Prize winner, Kenzō Tange. The North Spine has been officially opened in 1986. The ADM building, featured in "Travel + Lesiure" report, has been designed by a young Singaporean architect Lee Cheng Wee.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The main campus of Nanyang Technological University is the Yunnan Garden Campus () which is situated adjacent to the town of Jurong West. It is the largest university campus on the island of Singapore, housing Singapore's largest on-campus residence infrastructure including 24 halls of residence for undergraduates and two graduate halls.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The campus grounds were originally donated by the Singapore Hokkien Association to Nanyang University. In 1981, the Nanyang University grounds were granted to the Nanyang Technological Institute, a newly formed English-medium engineering college. With the formation of the NTU through NTI's merger with the National Institute of Education (NIE), the grounds were then presented to the university.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The former Nanyang University administration building was restored into the Chinese Heritage Centre and was gazetted as a national monument in 1998 – now overlooking the Yunnan Garden. As of 2019, the Yunnan Garden is undergoing major renovations that will be completed in 2021. However some of it has been partially opened to the public in early 2020 The Nanyang University Memorial and original Nanyang University Arch were also declared national monuments of Singapore in 1998. The NTU Art & Heritage Museum is an approved public museum under the National Heritage Board’s Approved Museum Scheme; benefactors who donate artworks and artefacts to NTU enjoy double tax deductions. There is a small lake between the Chinese Heritage Centre and Hall of Residence 4 called Nanyang Lake. Only members of NTU Anglers' Club permit holder, the fishing club at NTU, are allowed to fish in this lake.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: A third campus, Novena Campus, is situated close to LKCMedicine’s partner teaching hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital in downtown Novena for medical teaching and research at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. The new 20-storey Clinical Sciences Building was completed in 2016. The CSB is home to LKCMedicine researchers, with the laboratories interconnected through collaborative spaces.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU has 23 Halls of Residence for undergraduates, each with a capacity of between 500 and 659 residents. They accommodate 14,000 local and international students, with every freshman guaranteed a hostel room. All halls are co-ed by floor or wing and offer single and double occupancy rooms. Double rooms are shared by residents of the same gender.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Every hall has communal facilities like lounges, air-conditioned reading rooms, pantries and laundry rooms with washing machines and dryers. Presently, freshmen students will be guaranteed a room for two years.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Transportation to and around NTU is provided by means of campus shuttle buses. The Campus Loop Red and Blue services circle the campus, while the Campus Rider service connects the campus to the Pioneer MRT station.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU is organised into several colleges and schools, each corresponding to different fields of study. The founding colleges include the College of Engineering, Nanyang Business School, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, and the National Institute of Education, which have been part of NTU since its inception in 1991.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: More recently, NTU has established additional schools for the Biological Sciences (2001), Humanities and Social Sciences (2004), Physical & Mathematical Sciences (2005), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (2007), and Art, Design and Media (2009). In 2013, NTU and Imperial College London jointly established a new medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, which is based in the Novena campus along 11 Mandalay Road. In October 2016, the university announced that Humanities and Social Sciences would be expanded into two separate schools, namely the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Nanyang Business School (NBS) is the largest business school in Singapore with over 6,800 undergraduates and postgraduates. It is also the No.1 business school in Singapore and 3rd in the Asia-Pacific region according to the Financial Times. For 13 consecutive years since 2004, the Nanyang MBA has been ranked the best in Singapore according to The Economist. NBS has more than 160 professors from more than 20 countries, proficient in 30 languages holding doctorates from the most renowned universities in the world. This makes NBS one of the largest business schools in the world in terms of faculty strength.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NBS also houses the 165-square meter Centre for Applied Financial Education, the largest finance lab in Singapore. The new lab is equipped with 60 dedicated Thomson Reuters Eikon terminals with Datastream, along with 24 Bloomberg terminals that will allow business school students to access all kinds of real-time financial, economic and business news information.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The College of Engineering is NTU's largest subdivision. It has been ranked among the world’s top 5 schools of engineering and technology by QS World University Rankings, and claimed to be the world's largest engineering college, with a student population of more than 10,500 undergraduates and 3,500 graduates. It consists of six schools (Chemical and Biomedical, Civil and Environmental, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Electronic, Materials Science, Mechanical and Aerospace) focused on technology and innovation.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The college offers a rich array of multidisciplinary programmes and specialisations in traditional engineering disciplines and beyond. In addition to the 12 single degree programmes, the college also offers double degrees, double majors and integrated programmes as well as the only aerospace engineering programme in Singapore.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Today, the college consists of three schools and is home to about 150 faculty members, 340 research staff, 110 administrative and technical staff, 4,000 undergraduate and 750 graduate students.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 2010, NTU announced the formation of a pro-tem governing board to guide the establishment of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a collaboration with Imperial College London. The medical college was established in 2013. Prior to its opening in 2013, the school received record donations of S$400 million, including S$150 million from the Lee Foundation. The School’s primary clinical partner is the National Healthcare Group.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU's Graduate College was formed on 1 August 2018 and is in charge of graduate programmes in NTU. One such graduate programme is the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme (IGP), which leverages on professors from multiple schools or colleges in NTU to undertake interdisciplinary research and to act as advisors for IGP PhD students. Another graduate programme is the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), which leverages on partnering industry companies to undertake industrial research and to act as advisors for IPP PhD students.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The National Institute of Education (NIE), occupying in the western part of NTU's Yunnan Garden campus, is Singapore's main teaching college and is run in close collaboration with Singapore's Ministry of Education. Full-time teachers in Singapore's public schools are required to complete a post-graduate diploma course at NIE, sponsored by Singapore's Ministry of Education. NIE is also internationally acclaimed and provides educational consultancy to countries from Indonesia to UAE.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), named after Singapore's former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, offers graduate programmes in international relations and is an autonomous graduate institution of NTU. The school has the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies—long recognised as a world authority on strategic studies and terrorism. RSIS was ranked second among university-affiliated think tanks in Asia in the 2011 Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Currently, there are more than 100 student organisations in NTU. These include Constituent Clubs, Non-Constituent Clubs, Academic Clubs, Cultural Club, Welfare Society, Sports Club, Arts Club and clubs for various religion and interests. Many students also take part in sports, recreational games and performing arts activities within the residential hall communities.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU was ranked 11th in the world and 3rd in Asia in the 2020 QS World University Rankings. NTU also came in overall 1st in the world in the ranking of young universities for five consecutive years in the QS Top 50 Under 50 rankings from 2015 to 2019. In 2011, NTU became the first university in Asia to receive the maximum five stars under the QS Stars evaluation system, and the only one in Singapore to date.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In 2017, NTU's Engineering and Technology was ranked 4th in the world and 1st in Asia by the QS World University Rankings by Broad Subject Area – Engineering and Technology 2017. NTU also has a research citation that is among the top four in the world, with its research output being ranked among the top three universities globally in Engineering by Essential Science Indicators of Thomson Reuters. In the 2017 QS World University Rankings by Broad Subject Area, NTU is ranked 22nd in the world for Social Sciences and Management for three consecutive years. Social Sciences and Management includes the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Business School and School of Social Sciences. In the field of Natural Sciences, NTU's College of Science is ranked 17th in the world, a drop of 2 places from the previous year, while Arts & Humanities (consisting of the School of Humanities and School of Art, Design and Media) is ranked 51st globally, a drop of 6 places from the previous year.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: In the 2017 QS World University Rankings by subjects published, NTU had 19 subjects in the world's top 50, with two subjects in the global top 10. It also came in first in Asia for Materials Science and Electronic Engineering.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU is ranked 4th in Asia in the Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2017, a drop of 2 places from the previous year. In 2017, NTU rose to 52nd position worldwide in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings with strong scores in all the categories measured, particularly for research, citations, international outlook as well as industry income and innovation. As a result, NTU rocketed a total of 122 places since 2011 in the THE rankings. NTU is also ranked 3rd best among the global young universities under 50 years old, a drop of 1 place from the previous year.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: Independently, the 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy that ranks universities' research performance and places a high weightage on the number of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals won by a university’s alumni and faculty placed NTU 115th worldwide and 2nd in Singapore. NTU president Bertil Andersson had voiced out in 2015 that the ARWU ranking methodology is inherently biased against young universities like NTU. Nevertheless, in the same ranking, ARWU places NTU's engineering faculty at No.2 in the world.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: NTU's Nanyang Business School is Singapore's top business school, having ranked 24th worldwide in the 2017 Financial Times Global MBA Rankings. For the 13th straight year, Nanyang Business School has been ranked the best in Singapore by The Economist. Also, NBS is placed 10th worldwide in the Financial Times' (FT) rankings of the world’s top 100 Executive MBA (EMBA) programmes. Accounting research at NBS is rated 7th in the world and remained No. 1 in Asia by the Brigham Young University (BYU) Accounting Research Rankings released in April 2014. NTU Tan Hun Tong is currently the world's top accounting researcher for the third year running while Clive Lennox is ranked 7th in the world and 2nd in Asia. Notably, Vijay Sethi was voted the world's best business professor as the sole recipient of the prestigious Business Professor of the Year award from The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in March 2013, beating top business professors from Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School and London Business School.


title: Nanyang Technological University

text: The S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies has been ranked second among university-affiliated think-tanks in Asia and 22nd internationally.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jane Jacobs ("née" Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance – in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through an area of Manhattan that later became known as SoHo, as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: As a woman and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning, Jacobs endured scorn from established figures. Routinely, she was described first as a housewife, as she did not have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; as a result, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism. However, the influence of her concepts eventually was acknowledged by highly respected professionals such as Richard Florida and Robert Lucas.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs was born Jane Isabel Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Bess Robison Butzner, a former teacher and nurse and John Decker Butzner, a physician. They were a Protestant family in a heavily Roman Catholic town. Her brother, John Decker Butzner, Jr., served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After graduation from Scranton High School, she worked for a year as the unpaid assistant to the women's page editor at the "Scranton Tribune".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 1935, during the Great Depression, she moved to New York City with her sister Betty. Jane Butzner took an immediate liking to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, which deviated some from the city's grid structure. The sisters soon moved there from Brooklyn.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: During her early years in Manhattan, Jacobs held a variety of jobs working as a stenographer and freelance writer, writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she later said, "gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like." Her first job was for a trade magazine, as a secretary, then an editor. She sold articles to the "Sunday Herald Tribune", "Cue" magazine, and "Vogue".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to pursue study across her wide-ranging interests, she said:


title: Jane Jacobs

text: For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high-school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: After attending Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, Butzner found a job at "Iron Age" magazine. Her 1943 article on economic decline in Scranton was well publicized and led the Murray Corporation of America to locate a warplane factory there. Encouraged by this success, Butzner petitioned the War Production Board to support more operations in Scranton. Experiencing job discrimination at "Iron Age", she also advocated for equal pay for women and for the right of workers to unionize.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for "Amerika", a publication of the U.S. State Department in the Russian language. While working there she met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman. They married in 1944. Together they had a daughter, Burgin, and two sons, James and Ned. They bought a three-story building at 555 Hudson Street. Jane continued to write for "Amerika" after the war, while Robert left Grumman and resumed work as an architect.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The Jacobses rejected the rapidly growing suburbs as "parasitic", choosing to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house, in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area, and created a garden in the backyard.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Working for the State Department during the McCarthy era, Jacobs received a questionnaire about her political beliefs and loyalties. Jacobs was anti-communist and had left the Federal Workers Union because of its apparent communist sympathies. Nevertheless, she was pro-union and purportedly appreciated the writing of Saul Alinsky; therefore she was under suspicion. On 25 March 1952, Jacobs delivered her response to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer, she said:


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe...


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs left "Amerika" in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, D.C. She then found a well-paying job at "Architectural Forum", published by Henry Luce of Time Inc. She was hired as an associate editor. After early success in that position, Jacobs began to take assignments on urban planning and "urban blight". In 1954, she was assigned to cover a development in Philadelphia designed by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project, reacting against its lack of concern for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that "development" seemed to end community life on the street. When Jacobs returned to the offices of "Architectural Forum", she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came to the "Architectural Forum" offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of "Architectural Forum", Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University. She addressed leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford), speaking on the topic of East Harlem. She urged this audience to "respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order." Contrary to her expectations, the talk was received with enthusiasm, but it also marked her as a threat to established urban planners, real estate owners, and developers. "Architectural Forum" printed the speech that year, along with photographs of East Harlem.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: After reading her Harvard speech, William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article for "Fortune magazine". The resulting piece, "Downtown Is for People", appeared in a 1958 issue of "Fortune", and marked her first public criticism of Robert Moses. Her criticism of the Lincoln Center was not popular with supporters of urban renewal at "Architectural Forum" and "Fortune". C.D. Jackson, the publisher of "Fortune", was outraged and over the telephone, demanded of Whyte: "Who is this crazy dame?"


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The "Fortune" article brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation had moved aggressively into urban topics, with a recent award to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studies of urban aesthetics that would culminate in the publication of Kevin A. Lynch's "Image of the City". In May 1958, Gilpatric invited Jacobs to begin serving as a reviewer for grant proposals. Later that year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Jacobs to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the U.S. (From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the foundation's Humanities Division sponsored an "Urban Design Studies" research program, of which Jacobs was the best known grantee.) Gilpatric encouraged Jacobs to "explor[e] the field of urban design to look for ideas and actions which may improve thinking on how the design of cities might better serve urban life, including cultural and humane value." Affiliating with The New School (then called The New School for Social Research), she spent three years conducting research and writing drafts. In 1961, Random House published the result: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" remains one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning. She coined the terms "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street", which were adopted professionally in urban design, sociology, and many other fields. Jacobs painted a devastating picture of the profession of city planning, labeling it a pseudoscience. This angered the male-dominated urban planning profession. Jacobs was criticized with ad hominem attacks, being called a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline. One planner dismissed Jacobs's book as "bitter coffee-house rambling". Robert Moses, sent a copy, called it "intemperate and also libelous... Sell this junk to someone else."


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Later, her book was criticized from the left for leaving out race and openly endorsing gentrification, which Jacobs referred to as "unslumming".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 1962, she resigned her position at "Architectural Forum" to become a full-time author and concentrate on raising her children. In other political activities she became an opponent of the Vietnam War, marched on the Pentagon in October 1967, and criticized the construction of the World Trade Center as a disaster for Manhattan's waterfront.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: During the 1950s and 1960s, her home neighborhood of Greenwich Village was being transformed by city and state efforts to build housing (see, for example, Jacobs's 1961 fight to build the West Village Houses in lieu of large apartment houses), private developers, the expansion of New York University, and by the urban renewal plans of Robert Moses. Moses' plan, funded as "slum clearance" by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, also called for several blocks to be razed and replaced with upscale high-rises. The plan forced 132 families out of their homes and displaced 1,000 small businessesthe result was Washington Square Village.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: As part of his efforts to revitalize the area, Moses had proposed the extension of Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park in 1935. In the face of community opposition, Moses had shelved the project, but revived the idea in the 1950s. Moses argued that the Fifth Avenue extension would improve the flow of traffic through the neighborhood and provide access to the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which would connect the Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge with the Holland Tunnel.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In response, local activist Shirley Hayes created the "Committee to Save Washington Square Park", a coalition of dozens of local neighborhood groups that opposed the roadway extension. Raymond S. Rubinow eventually took over the organization, changing its name to the "Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic". Jacobs had joined the committee under Hayes, but she took a more prominent role under Rubinow, reaching out to media outlets such as "The Village Voice", which provided more sympathetic coverage than "The New York Times". The committee gained the support of Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lewis Mumford, Charles Abrams, and William H. Whyte, as well as Carmine De Sapio, a Greenwich Village resident and influential Democratic leader. De Sapio's involvement proved decisive. On 25 June 1958, the city closed Washington Square Park to traffic, and the joint committee held a ribbon tying (not cutting) ceremony.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Plans for LOMEX expressway continued despite growing community opposition in areas such as Little Italy. In the 1960s, Jacobs chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway. "The New York Times" was sympathetic to Moses, while "The Village Voice" covered community rallies and advocated against the expressway. Jacobs continued to fight the expressway when plans resurfaced in 1962, 1965, and 1968, and she became a local hero for her opposition to the project. She was arrested by a plainclothes police officer on April 10, 1968, at a public hearing during which the crowd had charged the stage and destroyed the stenographer's notes. She was accused of inciting a riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. After months of trials conducted in New York City (to which Jacobs commuted from Toronto), her charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "" devoted an hour of the eight-part, seventeen-and-a-half-hour series to the battle between Moses and Jacobs. Robert Caro's biography of Moses, "The Power Broker", gives only passing mention to this event, however, despite Jacobs's strong influence on Caro. In 2017, Caro told an interviewer about the difficulty in cutting more than 300,000 words from his initial manuscript: "The section that I wrote on Jane Jacobs disappeared. To this day, when someone says: 'There's hardly a mention of Jane Jacobs,' I think, 'But I wrote a lot about her.' Every time I'm asked about that, I have this sick feeling."


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Soon after her arrest in 1968, Jacobs moved to Toronto, eventually settling at 69 Albany Avenue in The Annex from 1971 until her death in 2006. She decided to leave the U.S. in part because she opposed the Vietnam War, she worried about the fate of her two draft-age sons, and she did not want to continue fighting the New York City government. She and her husband chose Toronto because it was pleasant and offered employment opportunities, and they moved to an area of Toronto that included so many Americans avoiding the draft that it was called the "American ghetto".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She quickly became a leading figure in her new city and helped stop the proposed Spadina Expressway. A frequent theme of her work was to ask whether cities were being built for people or for cars. She was arrested twice during demonstrations. She also had considerable influence on the regeneration of the St. Lawrence neighborhood, a housing project regarded as a major success. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and later, she told writer James Howard Kunstler that dual citizenship was not possible at the time, implying that her U.S. citizenship was lost.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 1980, she offered a more urban perspective on Quebec's sovereignty in her book, "The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Separation". Jacobs was an advocate of a Province of Toronto to separate the city proper from Ontario. Jacobs said, "Cities, to thrive in the twenty-first century, must separate themselves politically from their surrounding areas."


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She was selected to be an officer of the Order of Canada in 1996 for her seminal writings and thought-provoking commentaries on urban development. The community and urban sociology section of the American Sociological Association awarded her its Outstanding Lifetime Contribution award in 2002. In 1997, the city government of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled, "Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter", which led to a book by the same name. At the end of the conference, the Jane Jacobs Prize was created. It includes an annual stipend of $5,000 for three years to be given to "celebrate Toronto's original, unsung heroes – by seeking out citizens who are engaged in activities that contribute to the city's vitality".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs never shied away from expressing her political support for specific candidates. She opposed the 1997 amalgamation of the cities of Metro Toronto, fearing that individual neighborhoods would have less power with the new structure. She backed an ecologist, Tooker Gomberg, who lost Toronto's 2000 mayoralty race, and she was an adviser to David Miller's successful mayoral campaign in 2003, at a time when he was seen as a longshot. During the mayoral campaign, Jacobs helped lobby against the construction of a bridge to join the city waterfront to Toronto City Centre Airport (TCCA). Following the election, the Toronto city council's earlier decision to approve the bridge was reversed and bridge construction project was stopped. TCCA did upgrade the ferry service and the airport was still in operation as of 2019. In lieu of the bridge, a pedestrian tunnel broke ground in March 2012. The tunnel opened on 30 July 2015.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs also was active in a campaign against a plan of Royal St. George's College (an established school very close to the Jacobs residence in Toronto's Annex district) to reconfigure its facilities. Jacobs suggested not only that the redesign be stopped but that the school be forced from the neighborhood entirely. Although Toronto council initially rejected the school's plans, the decision later was reversed – and the project was given the go-ahead by the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) when opponents failed to produce credible witnesses and tried to withdraw from the case during the hearing.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She also had an influence on Vancouver's urban planning. Jacobs has been called "the mother of Vancouverism", referring to that city's use of her "density done well" philosophy.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs died in Toronto Western Hospital aged 89, on 25 April 2006, apparently of a stroke. She was survived by a brother, James Butzner (d. 2009); a daughter, Burgin Jacobs, her sons, James and Ned of Vancouver, and by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Upon her death her family's statement noted: "What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs is credited, along with Lewis Mumford, with inspiring the New Urbanist movement. She has been characterized as a major influence on decentralist and radical centrist thought. She discussed her legacy in an interview with "Reason magazine".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: While Jacobs saw her greatest legacy to be her contributions to economic theory, it is in the realm of urban planning that she has had her most extensive effect. Her observations about the ways in which cities function revolutionized the urban planning profession and discredited many accepted planning models that had dominated mid-century planning. The influential Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, known for his work on urban studies, acknowledged that Jane Jacobs (1960s) had been prescient in attacking Moses for "replacing well-functioning neighborhoods with Le Corbusier-inspired towers". Glaeser agreed that these housing projects proved to be Moses' greatest failures, "Moses spent millions and evicted tens of thousands to create buildings that became centers of crime, poverty, and despair."


title: Jane Jacobs

text: She also was famous for introducing concepts such as the "Ballet of the Sidewalk" and "Eyes on the Street", a reference to what would later be known as natural surveillance. The concept had a huge influence on planners and architects such as Oscar Newman, who prepared the idea through a series of studies that would culminate in his defensible space theory. The work of Jacobs and Newman would go on to affect American housing policy through the HOPE VI Program, an effort by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the high-rise public housing projects so reviled by Jacobs and to replace them with low-rise, mixed-income housing.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Throughout her life, Jacobs fought to alter the way in which city development was approached. By arguing that cities were living beings and ecosystems, she advocated ideas such as "mixed use" development and bottom-up planning. Furthermore, her harsh criticisms of "slum clearing" and "high-rise housing" projects were instrumental in discrediting these once universally supported planning practices.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs is remembered as being an advocate for the mindful development of cities, and for leaving "a legacy of empowerment for citizens to trust their common sense and become advocates for their place".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Despite the fact that Jacobs mainly focused on New York City, her arguments have been identified as universal. For instance, her opposition against the demolition of urban neighborhoods for projects of urban renewal had "special resonance" in Melbourne, Australia. In Melbourne in the 1960s, resident associations fought against large-scale high-rise housing projects of the Housing Commission of Victoria, which they argued had little regard for the impact on local communities.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs fought an uphill battle against dominant trends of planning. Despite the United States remaining very much a suburban nation, the work of Jacobs has contributed to city living being rehabilitated and revitalized. Because of her ideas, today, many distressed urban neighborhoods are more likely to be gentrified than cleared for redevelopment.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Samuel R. Delany's book "Times Square Red, Times Square Blue" relies heavily on "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in its analysis of the nature of social relations within the realm of urban studies.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: After the death of Jacobs in April 2006, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a Jane Jacobs Day, held on June 28, 2006. The City of Toronto proclaimed her birthday the following year, May 4, 2007, as Jane Jacobs Day.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In connection with Jane Jacobs Day in Toronto, two dozen free neighborhood walks in the city were offered that weekend (5 May 2007) as an active memorial to Jacobs, and they were dubbed Jane's Walks. Later, a Jane's Walk event was held in New York on September 29–30, 2007. In 2008, the event spread to eight cities and towns throughout Canada, and by 2016, Jane's Walks were taking place in 212 cities in 36 countries, on six continents. The interpretive walks typically apply ideas Jacobs identified or espoused to local areas, which are explored on foot and sometimes by bicycle. The walks normally take place in early May, on or close to her May 4 birth anniversary. Walks are organized and led by local volunteers, coordinated by a headquarters office in Toronto. There are more than 200 walks offered in Toronto, alone, in 2016, taking place on May 6, 7, and 8.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 2016, to mark the hundredth birth anniversary of Jane Jacobs, a Toronto gallery staged "Jane at Home", an exhibition running from April 29-May 8. Curated by Jane's son, Jim Jacobs, it offered glimpses of her home life, where she also worked. Her Toronto living room was represented, based on the one at her Albany Avenue house in The Annex, where she often spoke with noted thinkers and political leaders including Marshall McLuhan, Paul Martin, and the Queen of the Netherlands. On display were her typewriter, original manuscripts, rediscovered photographs demonstrating her distinctive styles, and personal mementos. The exhibit included furniture from previous homes in New York (her dining room is set up) and from Scranton, Pennsylvania.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In 2007, the Municipal Art Society of New York partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to host an exhibit focusing on "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," which opened at the society in September that year. The exhibit aimed to educate the public on her writings and activism and used tools to encourage new generations to become active in issues involving their own neighborhoods. An accompanying exhibit publication included essays and articles by such architecture critics, artists, activists, and journalists as Malcolm Gladwell, Reverend Billy, Robert Neuwirth, Tom Wolfe, Thomas de Monchaux, and William McDonough. Many of these contributors participated in a series of panel discussions on "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: As a tribute to Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had awarded grants to Jacobs in the 1950s and 1960s, announced on February 9, 2007, the creation of the Jane Jacobs Medal, "to recognize individuals who have made a significant contribution to thinking about urban design, specifically in New York City". Recipients include:


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The Canadian Urban Institute offers an award to honor her, the Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award, to recognize a person "who has had significant impact on the health of their region consistent with Jane Jacob's belief that successful cities foster a place-based, community-centered approach." The 2011 winner was Eberhard Zeidler, while his daughter, Margie Zeidler, won the 2015 award. In 2012, Anne Golden took the prize "for her long-standing leadership in public policy, her academic work and her varied leadership experience in business, not-for-profit and government sectors." William (Bill) Teron accepted the 2013 award "for his influential career in public policy and passionate advocacy for quality design and commitment to development in the Ottawa area." In 2014, Jack Diamond was recognized for his "contribution to improving the built form and advocacy for cities and the future of the Greater Toronto Area."


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In April 2014, "Spacing" was appointed the stewards of the Jane Jacobs Prize. "Spacing", winners of the prize in 2010, has continued to provide the award with a new life and new ways of promoting (and finding) the winners.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs is the subject of the 2017 documentary film "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City", which depicts her victories over Robert Moses and her philosophy of urban design.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The planners and developers she fought against to preserve the West Village were among those who initially criticized her ideas. Robert Moses has generally been identified as her arch-rival during this period. Since then, Jacobs's ideas have been analysed many times, often in regard to the outcomes that their influences have produced.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In places such as the West Village, the factors that she argued would maintain economic and cultural diversity have led instead to gentrification and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Her family's conversion of an old candy shop into a home is an example of the gentrifying trend that would continue under the influence of Jacobs's ideas.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Gentrification also was caused, however, by "the completely unexpected influx of affluent residents back into the inner city". The extent to which her ideas facilitated this phenomenon was at the time unimaginable. For example, she advocated the preservation of older buildings specifically because their lack of economic value made them affordable for poor people. In this respect, she saw them as "guarantors of social diversity". That many of these older structures have increased in economic value solely due to their age was implausible in 1961. Issues of gentrification have dominated criticism of Jane Jacobs's planning ideas.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Economist Tyler Cowen has criticized her ideas for not addressing problems of scale or infrastructure, and suggests that economists disagree with some of her approaches to development. For example, although her ideas of planning were praised at times as "universal", they are now thought inapplicable when a city grows from one million to ten million (as has happened many times in developing nations). Such arguments suggest that her ideas apply only to cities with similar issues to those of New York, where Jacobs developed many of them.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is her single-most influential book and, possibly, the most influential book on urban planning and cities. Published in 1961, this book was widely read by both planning professionals and the general public. The book is a strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s, which, she claimed, destroyed communities and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces. In the book, she celebrates the diversity and complexity of old mixed-use neighborhoods while lamenting the monotony and sterility of modern planning. Jacobs advocated the abolition of zoning laws and restoration of free markets in land, which would result in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and she frequently cited New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Robert Caro has cited it as the strongest influence on "The Power Broker", his Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Moses, although Caro does not mention Jacobs by name in the book despite Jacobs's battles with Moses over his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Caro reportedly cut a chapter about Jacobs due to his book's length.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Beyond the practical lessons in city design and planning that "Death and Life" offers, the theoretical underpinnings of the work challenge the modern development mindset. Jane Jacobs defends her positions with common sense and anecdotes.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The thesis of this book is that cities are the primary drivers of economic development. Her main argument is that explosive economic growth derives from urban import replacement. Import replacement is the process of producing goods locally that formerly were imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s. Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased production is subsequently exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in "Reason Magazine", Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement. Critics erroneously claim that her ideas parrot the idea of import substitution advanced earlier by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank. Import substitution was a national economic theory implying that if a nation substituted its imports with national production, the nation would become wealthier, whereas Jacob's idea is entirely about cities and could be called urban import substitution. However, even this would lead to confusion since in practice, import substitution in India and Latin America were government subsidized and mandated, whereas Jacobs's concept of import replacement is a free market process of discovery and division of labor within a city.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: In the second part of the book, Jacobs argues that cities preceded agriculture. She argues that in cities trade in wild animals and grains allowed for the initial division of labor necessary for the discovery of husbandry and agriculture; these discoveries then moved out of the city due to land competition. It is commonly taught that agriculture preceded cities. This notion was promoted originally by archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe and in recent times, by Charles Keith Maisels The apparent opposition between the traditional history and Jacobs' rests in differing definition of 'city', 'civilization', or 'urban'. Traditional history and archeology define 'urban' or 'civilization' as Synoecismas a literate, socially stratified, monolithic political community, whereas, as one can see from "The Economy of Cities" or from "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", Jacobs defined the city purely along the lines of geographically dense trade giving way to entrepreneurial discovery and subsequent improvements in the division of labor. Without the requirements of literacy, permanent and monumental building, or the signs of specialized civil and armed forces, 'cities' can be accurately interpreted as existing thousands of years before when Childe and Maisels place them.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "The Question of Separatism" incorporated and expanded Jacobs's presentation of the 1979 Massey Lectures, entitled "Canadian Cities and Sovereignty-Association". It was published in 1980 and reprinted in 2011 with a previously-unpublished 2005 interview with Robin Philpot on the subject in which she evokes the relative overlooking of that book among her usual readership. This was the first time Jacobs was requested to discuss it in an interview. Columnist Richard Gwyn advanced that while not openly criticizing her, English-speaking Canadians readers thought she did not understand how Canadian politics worked and that she was not being helpful in a time of distress for national unity (the 1980 referendum was just defeated by a vote of 60%). "The Question of Separatism" was also not mentioned in the bibliography of her 2006 obituary in "The Globe and Mail".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs's book advances the view that Quebec's eventual independence is best for Montreal, Toronto, the rest of Canada, and the world; and that such independence can be achieved peacefully. As precedent, she cites Norway's secession from Sweden and how it enriched both nations. The origins of the contemporary secessionist-movement in the Quiet Revolution are examined, along with Canada's historical reliance on natural resources and foreign-owned manufacturing for its own economic development. Jacobs asserts that such an approach is colonial and hence backward, citing by example, Canada buying its skis and furniture from Norway or Norwegian-owned factories in Canada, the latter procedure being a product of Canadian tariffs designed specifically to foster such factories. The relevant public views of René Lévesque, Claude Ryan, and then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau are also critically analyzed, an example being their failure to recognize that two respective, independent currencies are essential to the success of an independent Quebec and a smaller resultant Canada, an issue that is central to her book. Jacobs stresses the need for Montreal to continue developing its leadership of Québécois culture, but that ultimately, such a need can never be fulfilled by Montreal's increasing tendencies toward regional-city status, tendencies foretelling economic, political, and cultural subservience to English-speaking Toronto. Such an outcome, Jacobs believed, would in the long run doom Quebec's independence as much as it would hinder Canada's own future. She concludes with her observation that the popular equating of political secession with political and economic failure is the result of the Enlightenment, which perceived nature as a force for "standardization, uniformity, universality, and immutability." Since then, naturalists and their readers have gradually realized that nature is a force for diversity, and that, "diversity itself is of the essence of excellence." The right kind of secession, Jacobs states, can lead to the right kind of diversity, and Quebec and Canada are capable of both, and must achieve both, to survive.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" attempts to do for economics what "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" did for modern urban planning, although it has not received the same critical attention. Beginning with a concise treatment of classical economics, this book challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of the greatest economists. Classical (and Neo-classical) economists consider the nation-state to be the main player in macroeconomics. Jacobs argues that it is not the nation-state, rather it is the city that is the true player in this worldwide game. She restates the idea of import replacement from her earlier book "The Economy of Cities", while speculating on the further ramifications of considering the city first and the nation second, or not at all.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Along with the previous books focused on economics, Jacobs proposes an array of types of regional economies (stylized facts) which can help to understand their different challenges, and potential for development. One can start at the bottom end of the spectrum with the 'backward' region, which are economies who have lost their competitive advantages and are losing population or becoming dependent on "largesse" transfers from wealthier areas. Next are the 'supply regions', which are usually known as natural resource extraction towns, and may be very wealthy during their heyday, but often suffer a decline into backwardness if the resource has run-out or has been substituted on outside markets. Similar to this is the 'transplant region', a fundamental aspect of Jacobs economic theory. Transplant economies are usually manufacturing plants who have been moved from the location where the product was invented. The reason for the transplant is to save land, labour, fiscal, and transportation costs. Transplant regions are usually found along main transportation routes, where there is a large labour pool of available labour. Backward regions, Supply regions, and Transplant regions make up the most vulnerable types of economies to outside shocks and competition from low-cost production zones.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The Jacobs spectrum of regions also includes types of cities which rely on classical principles of central-location. Jacobs discusses 'Entrepôt cities', which are economies based on the accumulation and warehousing of export goods, usually at a maritime port location. Next are 'Hub cities', or regional capitals, which are central locations for private markets and public services in a given geography.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Finally, Jacobs presents the qualities of growing metropolitan areas. Jacobs defines the metropolis as a city that grows beyond its political borders. She terms the core city as the 'Import-Replacing' city. She terms the suburban sprawl of the metropolis as the 'City-Region'. Economic literature sometimes uses the term "Jacobs Agglomeration" for these growing and innovative cities. CA Ramsay has proposed the term Forward Cities, as an echo to the opposing principle of 'Backward' economies.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: According to Jacobs, economies are constantly evolving and may move in and out of any of these categories. However, for an export-based economy such as a supply region, or a transplant town, to develop into a Forward city, the economy must engage in what she terms new-work. This implies a diversification of the economy. Jacobs strongly encourages breakaway entrepreneurship and local investment capital to do this. The modus operandi may be in import-replacing, in world-first innovation, or the adoption of production which is new to the community.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs also insists on the benefits of having a city-currency, which acts as a positive feedback mechanism, to help drive local innovation and import-replacement. It also protects from outside demand shocks.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics" moves outside of the city, studying the moral underpinnings of work. As with her other work, she used an observational approach. This book is written as a Platonic dialogue. It appears that she (as described by characters in her book) took newspaper clippings of moral judgments related to work, collected and sorted them to find that they fit two patterns of moral behavior that were mutually exclusive. She calls these two patterns "Moral Syndrome A", or commercial moral syndrome, and "Moral Syndrome B", or guardian moral syndrome. She claims that the commercial moral syndrome is applicable to business owners, scientists, farmers, and traders. Similarly, she claims that the guardian moral syndrome is applicable to government, charities, hunter-gatherers, and religious institutions. She also claims that these Moral Syndromes are fixed, and do not fluctuate over time.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: It is important to stress that Jane Jacobs is providing a theory about the morality of work, and not all moral ideas. Moral ideas that are not included in her system are applicable to both syndromes.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jane Jacobs goes on to describe what happens when these two moral syndromes are mixed, showing the work underpinnings of the Mafia and communism, and what happens when New York subway police are paid bonuses here – reinterpreted slightly as a part of the larger analysis.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: "The Nature of Economies", a dialog between friends concerning the premise: "human beings exist wholly within nature as part of the natural order in every respect" (p. "ix"), argues that the same principles underlie both ecosystems and economies: "development and co-development through differentiation and their combinations; expansion through diverse, multiple uses of energy; and self-maintenance through self-refueling" (p. 82). Jacobs also comments on the nature of economic and biological diversity and its role in the development and growth of the two kinds of systems.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Jacobs's characters discuss the four methods by which "dynamically stable systems" may evade collapse: "bifurcations; positive-feedback loops; negative-feedback controls; and emergency adaptations" (p. 86). Their conversations also cover the "double nature of fitness for survival" (traits to avoid destroying one's own habitat as well as success in competition to feed and breed, p. 119), and unpredictability including the butterfly effect characterized in terms of multiplicity of variables as well as disproportional response to cause, and self-organization where "a system can be making itself up as it goes along" (p. 137).


title: Jane Jacobs

text: The book is infused with many real-world economic and biological examples, which help keep the book "down to earth" and comprehensible, if dense. Concepts are furnished with both economic and biological examples, showing their coherence in both worlds.


title: Jane Jacobs

text: One particularly interesting insight is the creation of "something from nothing" – an economy from nowhere. In the biological world, free energy is given through sunlight, but in the economic world human creativity and natural resources supply this free energy, or at least starter energy. Another interesting insight is the creation of economic diversity through the combination of different technologies, for example the typewriter and television as inputs and outputs of a computer system: this can lead to the creation of "new species of work".


title: Jane Jacobs

text: Published in 2004 by Random House, "Dark Age Ahead" posits Jacobs's argument that "North American" civilization shows signs of a spiral decline comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire. Her discussion focuses on "five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm", which can be summarized as the nuclear family and community; quality in education; free thought in science; representational government and responsible taxes; and corporate and professional accountability. As the title of this book suggests, Jacobs's outlook is far more pessimistic than that of her previous works. However, in the conclusion she admits: "At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true." While Jacobs idealized U.S. democracy, "Dark Age Ahead" echoes the skepticism and disappointment that led to her emigration to Canada in 1968. Later, she would indicate that North American cultures, among others, were grounded in a "plantation mentality" that was culturally and ecologically unsustainable.


title: Stackdriver

text: Google Stackdriver is a freemium, credit card required, cloud computing systems management service offered by Google. It provides performance and diagnostics data (in the form of monitoring, logging, tracing, error reporting, and alerting) to public cloud users. Stackdriver is a multi-cloud solution, providing support for both Google Cloud and AWS cloud environments.


title: Stackdriver

text: Stackdriver the company was created in 2012 by founders Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri. The company's goal was to provide consistent monitoring across cloud computing's multiple service layers, using a single SaaS solution.


title: Stackdriver

text: Stackdriver secured US$5 million funding from Bain Capital Ventures in July 2012. A beta version of the product became publicly available on April 30, 2013.


title: Stackdriver

text: In May 2014, the Stackdriver company was acquired by Google. An expanded version of the product (adding support for logs analysis, hybrid cloud support, and deep integration with Google Cloud) was rebranded as Google Stackdriver and was launched to general availability in October, 2016.


title: Stackdriver

text: Stackdriver's focus is improving the performance and availability of large, complex applications running in the public cloud. It provides metrics detailing every layer of the 'stack' in the form of charts and graphs. It supports multi-cloud environments, and provides a single information panel into users' cloud services. It provides views into the logs that are generated, and allows users to generate metrics from those logs. It allows users to receive alerts when metrics breach normal levels.


title: Alkene

text: Alkene is often used as synonym of olefin, that is, any hydrocarbon containing one or more double bonds. Two general types of monoalkenes are distinguished: terminal and internal. Also called α-olefins, terminal alkenes are more useful.


title: Alkene

text: However, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) recommends using the name "alkene" only for acyclic hydrocarbons with just one double bond; alkadiene, alkatriene, etc., or polyene for acyclic hydrocarbons with two or more double bonds; cycloalkene, cycloalkadiene, etc. for cyclic ones; and "olefin" for the general class – cyclic or acyclic, with one or more double bonds.